France
and
the Americas
Other Titles in ABC-CLIO’s
Transatlantic Relations Series
Britain and the Americas, by Wil...
63 downloads
3578 Views
13MB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
France
and
the Americas
Other Titles in ABC-CLIO’s
Transatlantic Relations Series
Britain and the Americas, by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl FORTHCOMING: Africa and the Americas, by Richard M. Juang, Kim Searcy, and Noelle Searcy Germany and the Americas, by Thomas Adam Iberia and the Americas, by J. Michael Francis Ireland and the Americas, by Philip Coleman, Jason King, and Jim Byrne
France
and
the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME I EDITED BY
Bill Marshall Professor of Modern French Studies, University of Glasgow assisted by Cristina Johnston
Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor
Santa Barbara, California
Denver, Colorado
Oxford, England
Copyright © 2005 by Bill Marshall All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data France and the Americas : culture, politics, and history / edited by Bill Marshall assisted by Cristina Johnston. p. cm.— (Transatlantic relations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85109-411-3 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 1-85109-416-4 (ebook) 1. America—Relations—France—Encyclopedias. 2. France—Relations—America—Encyclopedias. 3. America—History—Encyclopedias. 4. France—History—Encyclopedias. 5. North America—History—Encyclopedias. 6. Latin America—History—Encyclopedias. 7. South America—History—Encyclopedias. 8. America—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 9. Framce—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. I. Marshall, Bill, 1957– II. Johnston, Cristina. III. Series. E18.75.F73 2005 303.48'21812044—dc22 200500096
08
07
06
05
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an e-Book. Visit abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ . Manufactured in the United States of America
for Maria
CONTENTS Advisory Board, xvii Series Editor’s Preface, xix Editor’s Preface, xxi Topic Finder, xxiii Chronology of France and the Americas, xxxi Introductory Essays, 1 The French Atlantic, 3 France and Canada, 9 France and the Caribbean, 17 France and Latin America, 27 France and the United States, 37
France and the Americas, 47 Art Deco, 91 Art Nouveau, 92 Artaud, Antonin (1896–1948), 94 Atget, Eugène (1857–1927), 95 Atlanticism, 96 Audubon, John James (1785–1851), 98 Aury, Louis-Michel (1788–1821), 99 Auster, Paul (1947–), 100 Automobiles, 101 Avant-Gardes, 104 Aviation, 106 Aznavour, Charles (Charles Aznavourian) (1924–), 108
Acadia, 49 Adam, Paul (1860–1920), 55 Adams, Henry Brooks (1838–1918), 56 Adams, John (1735–1826), 57 AIDS, 59 Alberta, 61 Alexis, Jacques-Stephen (1922–1961), 62 Allen, Woody (Allen Stewart Konigsberg) (1935–), 63 American Civil War, 64 American Revolution, 69 Annaud, Jean-Jacques (1943–), 74 Anti-Americanism, 74 Antislavery Movements, 77 Aquin, Hubert (1929–1977), 80 Arcand, Denys (1941–), 81 Architecture, 82 Argentina, 86 Aron, Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand (1905–1983), 90
Baker, Josephine (Freda Josephine McDonald) (1906–1975), 111 Baldwin, James (1924–1987), 114 Ballooning, 115 Bardot, Brigitte (1934–), 118 Barnes, Djuna (1892–1982), 119 VII
VIII
CONTENTS
Barney, Nat(h)alie Clifford (1876–1972), 121 Barrin de La Galissonière, Roland-Michel, Marquis (1693–1756), 122 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980), 123 Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste (1834–1904), 124 Basques, 125 Bataille, Georges (1897–1962), 128 Baton Rouge, 128 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre (1821–1867), 130 Baudrillard, Jean (1929–), 131 Bazin, André (1918–1958), 133 Beach, Sylvia (1887–1962), 134 Beau Dommage, 135 Beauchemin, Yves (1941–), 136 Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–1986), 137 Bécaud, Gilbert (François Silly) (1927–2001), 140 Bedaux, Charles Eugène (1886–1944), 141 Beguine, 142 Beineix, Jean-Jacques (1946–), 143 Benezet, Anthony (1713–1784), 144 Benoît, Jean (1922–), 145 Bernabé, Jean (1942–), 147 Bernanos, Georges (1888–1948), 147 Besson, Luc (1959–), 149 Bianciotti, Hector (1930–), 150 Bienville, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de (1680–1767), 151 Bigelow, John (1817–1911), 152 Binoche, Juliette (1964–), 153 Blais, Marie-Claire (1939–), 155 Blum-Byrnes Agreement, 156 Bluteau, Lothaire (1957–), 156 Boileau-Narcejac, 157 Bolívar, Simón (1783–1830), 158 Bombardier, 160 Bombardier, Denise (1941–), 161 Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson (1785–1879), 162 Bonaparte, Jérôme (1784–1860), 163 Bonaparte, Josephine Tascher de la Pageier de Beauharnais (1763–1814), 164 Bonaparte, Napoléon (1769–1821), 165 Bordeaux, 166 Borduas, Paul-Emile (1905–1960), 169 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), 170 Bossu, Jean-Bernard (1720–1792), 172 Bouchard, Lucien (1938–), 173 Bouchard, Michel Marc (1958–), 174
Bougainville, Louis Antoine de (1729–1811), 175 Boukman, Daniel (Daniel Blérald) (1936–), 176 Boulle, Pierre (1912–1994), 177 Bourassa, Robert (1933–1996), 178 Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002), 179 Bourgeois, Louise (1911–), 180 Bourget, Paul (1852–1935), 181 Boyer, Charles (1897–1978), 182 Boyer, Jean-Pierre (1776–1850), 183 Brault, Michel (1928–), 184 Brazil, 185 Brel, Jacques (1929–1978), 188 Bresdin, Rodolphe (1822–1885), 189 Breton, André (1896–1966), 190 Brittany, 192 Brossard, Nicole (1943–), 194 Brûlé, Etienne (ca. 1592–1633), 195 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo (1939–), 196 Bugnet, Georges (1879–1981), 197 Bujold, Geneviève (1942–), 198 Burroughs, William S. (1914–1997), 199 Butor, Michel (1926–), 201 Cabet, Etienne (1788–1856), 203 Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe (1658–1730), 204 Cahiers du cinéma, 205 Caillois, Roger (1913–1978), 206 Cajuns, 208 Camus, Albert (1913–1960), 209 Capucine (Germaine Lefebvre) (1931–1990), 211 Carle, Gilles (1928–), 212 Carlson, Carolyn (1943–), 213 Carmen, 214 Caron, Leslie (1931–), 216 Carpentier, Alejo (1904–1980), 217 Carrefour, 219 Cartier, Jacques (1491–1557), 219 Cartier-Bresson, Henri (1908–2004), 222 Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926), 224 Cather, Willa (1873–1947), 225 Catholic Church, 227 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894–1961), 230 Céloron de Blainville, Pierre-Joseph (1693–1759), 231 Cendrars, Blaise (Frédéric-Louis Sauser) (1887–1961), 232
CONTENTS Certeau, Michel de (1925–1986), 233 Césaire, Aimé (1913–), 234 Chabrol, Claude (1930–), 235 Challe, Robert (1659–1720), 236 Chamoiseau, Patrick (1953–), 237 Champlain, Samuel de (ca. 1570–1635), 238 Chanute, Octave (1832–1910), 241 Charlebois, Robert (1944–), 243 Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de (1682–1761), 244 Charnay, Claude-Joseph-Désiré (1828–1915), 245 Charrière, Henri (1906–1973), 246 Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de, Vicomte (1768–1848), 247 Chauvet, Marie (1916–1973), 248 Cherbourg, 250 Chevalier, Maurice (1888–1972), 251 Chicago, 252 Chile, 253 Chirac, Jacques (1932–), 255 Chopin, Kate (Katherine O’Flaherty) (1850–1904), 257 Choquette, Robert (1905–1991), 259 Christophe, Henri (1767–1820), 260 Cinema, 1895–1945, 261 Cinema, 1945 to the Present, 265 Cirque du Soleil, 268 Citroën (Automobiles Citroën), 270 Clair, René (René-Lucien Chomette) (1898–1981), 271 Claudel, Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie (1868–1955), 272 Coca-Cola Company, 273 Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963), 274 Coffee, 276 Cohen, Gustave David (1879–1958), 279 Colbert, Claudette (Lily Claudette Chauchion) (1903–1996), 280 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619–1683), 282 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette) (1873–1954), 282 Comic Strips, 284 Compagnie d’Occident, 289 Compagnie du Sénégal, 290 Computing Technology, 291 Concorde, 292 Condé, Maryse (1937–), 294 Confiant, Raphaël (1951–), 295 Constant, Paule (1944–), 296
IX
Constantine, Eddie (1917–1993), 298 Copi (Raoul Damonte) (1939–1987), 299 Cortázar, Julio (1914–1984), 300 Cosmetics, 301 Costa-Gavras (Constantinos Gavras) (1933–), 304 Cotton, 305 Counterculture, 308 Coureurs de bois, 310 Cournand, André (1895–1988), 312 Courrier des Etats-Unis, Le (1828–1939), 314 Couturier, Marie-Alain, O. P. (1897–1954), 315 Créolité, 316 Crèvecoeur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de (1735–1813), 317 Crime Fiction, 318 Crozat, Antoine (1655–1738), 323 Cuban Revolution, 324 Cuisine, 326 cummings, e.e. (1894–1962), 331 Cyberculture, 332 Cyrano de Bergerac, 336 Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé (1787–1851), 339 Dalio, Marcel (Israel Moshe Blauschild) (1899–1983), 340 Damas, Léon-Gontran (1912–1978), 341 Dance, 342 Dangerous Liaisons, 345 Danticat, Edwidge (1967–), 346 Darío, Rubén (1867–1916), 348 Darrieux, Danielle (1917–), 349 Dassin, Jules (1911–), 350 Davis, Miles (1926–1991), 351 Deane, Silas (1737–1789), 352 Debray, Régis (1940–), 354 Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar (1834–1917), 355 Deleuze, Gilles (1925–1995), 356 Delsarte, François (1811–1871), 358 Demy, Jacques (1931–1990), 359 Deneuve, Catherine (1943–), 360 Denim, 361 Depardieu, Gérard (1948–), 363 Depestre, René (1926–), 364 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 365 Des Rosiers, Joël (1951–), 366 Desjardins, Richard (1948–), 367
X
CONTENTS
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques (1758–1806), 368 Detroit, 371 Devil’s Island, 372 Deyglun, Henry (1903–1971), 374 Dion, Céline (1968–), 375 Disneyland Paris, 377 Djian, Philippe (1949–), 381 Dorziat, Gabrielle (Gabrielle Sigrist) (1880–1979), 382 Dos Passos, John (1896–1970), 383 Doubrovsky, Serge (1928–), 385 Dreyfus Case, 386 Dubos, René Jules (1901–1982), 388 Dubuffet, Jean (1901–1985), 389 Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968), 390 Ducharme, Réjean, 391 Dufresne, Diane (1944–), 392 Dufy, Raoul (1877–1953), 393 Duhamel, Georges (1884–1966), 394 Duhamel, Marcel (1900–1977), 396 Duluth, 397 Dumas, Alexandre (1802–1870), 398 Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet (1890–1959), 399 DuPont Family, 400 Durtain, Luc (André Nepveu) (1881–1959), 402 Duvergier de Hauranne, Ernest (1843–1877), 403 Duvivier, Julien (1896–1967), 404 Dylan, Bob (1941–), 405 Ecole de Brive, L’, 409 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890–1969), 412 Elf-Aquitaine (TotalFinaElf ), 413 Elvis Gratton, 414 Ernst, Max (1891–1976), 415 Erté (Romain De Tirtoff ) (1892–1990), 417 Escomel, Gloria (1941–), 418 Etienne, Franck (1936–), 418 Etienne, Gérard (1936–), 420 Evangeline, 421 Evans, Walker (1903–1975), 422 Expo 67, 423 Exposition Coloniale (1931), 425 Exposition universelle (1900), 427 Fanon, Frantz (1925–1961), 429 Fashion, 431 Feminisms, 434
Filles du Roy, 439 Film Noir, 440 Fini, Leonor (1908–1996), 441 Firmin, Anténor (1850–1911), 443 Fishing, 444 Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896–1940), 447 Flanner, Janet (1892–1978), 448 Florence, Hercules (Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence) (1804–1879), 450 Florey, Robert (1900–1979), 450 Florida, 452 Folch-Ribas, Jacques (1928–), 455 Fonda, Jane (1937–), 456 Ford Motor Company, 457 Foreign Policy, 1776–1945, 458 Foreign Policy, 1945–Present, 464 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984), 468 France Telecom, 469 Francofolies, Les, 470 François I, King of France, 472 Francophonie, La, 473 Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790), 474 Fréchette, Louis (1839–1908), 476 French and Indian War, 477 French Revolution, 482 Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de (1622–1698), 488 Fry, Varian (1907–1967), 489 Fuentes, Carlos (1928–), 490 Fur Trade, 492 Gagnon, Clarence Alphonse (1881–1942), 497 Gainsbourg, Serge (Lucien Ginsburg) (1928–1991), 498 Gallant, Mavis (1922–), 499 García Márquez, Gabriel (1928–), 501 Garou (Pierre Garand) (1972–), 502 Gary, Romain (Roman Kacew) (1914–1980), 503 Gasnier, Louis J. (1878–1963), 504 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 505 Gauguin, (Eugène Henry) Paul (1848–1903), 507 Gaulle, General Charles André-Marie-Joseph de (1890–1970), 509 Gay Movement, 511 Genêt, Edmond-Charles (1763–1834), 514 Genet, Jean (1910–1986), 515
CONTENTS Girard, François (1963–), 516 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry (1926–), 517 Gleizes, Albert (1881–1953), 519 Glissant, Edouard (1928–), 521 Godard, Jean-Luc (1930–), 523 Godbout, Jacques (1933–), 525 Gonçalves de Magalhães, Domingos José (1811–1882), 526 Goodis, David (1917–1967), 527 Grandbois, Alain (1900–1975), 528 Grappelli, Stéphane (1908–1997), 529 Gratiant, Gilbert (1895–1985), 530 Green, Julien Hartridge (1900–1998), 531 Grenada, 532 Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des (1618–1696), 534 Guadeloupe, 535 Guattari, Félix (1930–1992), 540 Guérin, Daniel (1904–1988), 541 Guiana, 542 Guillemin, Roger (1924–), 545 Guy-Blaché, Alice (1873–1968), 546 Hagège, Claude (1936–), 549 Hahn, Reynaldo (1874–1947), 550 Haiti, 551 Hassam, Frederick Childe (1859–1935), 557 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864), 558 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961), 560 Hébert, Anne (1916–2560), 561 Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961), 562 Hémon, Louis (1880–1913), 564 Hennepin, Father Louis (1626–?; exact date of death unknown, sometime after 1701), 564 Heredia, José Maria de (1842–1905), 566 Héroux, Denis (1940–), 567 Himes, Chester (1909–1984), 568 Hip-Hop Music and Culture, 570 Hippolyte, Hector (1894–1948), 571 Hocquenghem, Guy (1946–1988), 572 Hollywood’s French Caribbean, 573 Hollywood’s Paris, 575 Hollywood’s Quebec, 577 Houdon, Jean-Antoine (1741–1828), 579 Hugo, Victor-Marie (1802–1885), 580 Huguenots, 582 Huidobro, Vicente (1893–1948), 583 Hunchback of Notre-Dame/Notre-Dame de Paris, 584
XI
Hurons, 586 Huston, Nancy (1953–), 588 Hydro-Quebec, 589 Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne Sieur d’ (1661–1706), 593 Illinois Country, 594 Indian Wars, 597 Indiana, 598 Inspector Clouseau, 600 Iowa, 601 Iraq War (2003–present), 602 Jacob, Suzanne (Suzanne Amos) (1943–), 609 Jazz, 611 James, Henry (1843–1916), 610 Jean, Raymond (1925–), 615 Jeanmaire, Zizi (Renée) (1924–), 616 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826), 617 Jesuits, 620 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre (1953–), 623 Joan of Arc, 624 Jodorowsky, Alejandro (1929–), 625 Joliet (Jolliet), Louis (1645–1700), 627 Jones, John Paul (1747–1792), 628 Josephson, Matthew (1899–1978), 630 Jourdan, Louis (Louis Gendre) (1919–), 631 Jouvet, Louis (1887–1951), 632 Julien, Pauline (1928–1998), 633 Juneau, Laurent Solomon (1793–1856), 634 Jutra, Claude (1930–1986), 636 Kaplan, Nelly (1934–), 639 Kassav’, 640 Kattan, Naïm (1928–), 641 Kelly, Gene (Eugene Curran Kelly) (1912–1996), 642 Kentucky, 645 Kerouac, Jack (Jean Louis Kerouac) (1922–1969), 647 Kerry, John (1943–), 648 Klein, William (1928–), 649 Kokis, Sergio (1944–), 650 La Condamine, Charles-Marie de (1701–1744), 653 La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de, Sieur (1683–1765), 654 La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de (1741–1788), 655
XII
CONTENTS
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, FrançoisAlexandre-Frédéric de, Duc (1747–1827), 656 La Rochelle, 657 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur (1643–1687), 660 Labat, Jean-Baptiste (1664–1738), 661 Labro, Philippe (1936–), 662 Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981), 663 Lachaise, Gaston (1882–1935), 664 Lafayette, Marquis de (1757–1834), 666 Laferrière, Dany (1953–), 668 Laforgue, Jules (1860–1887), 669 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de (1666–1715), 670 Lake Champlain, 671 Lalemant, Jérôme (1593–1665), 674 Lam, Wilfredo (or Wifredo) (1902–1982), 676 Lambert, Christophe (1957–), 677 Lamothe, Arthur (1928–), 677 Lanctôt, Micheline (1947–), 679 Lang, Jack (1939–), 680 Language, 681 Lanois, Daniel (1951–), 689 Lara, Christian (1939–), 690 Laroche, Maximilien (1937–), 691 Lassalle, Eugène (1859–1929), 692 Laure, Carole (1948–), 693 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse) (1846–1870), 694 Laval, François de Montmorency (1623–1708), 695 Le Bris, Michel (1944–), 696 Le Clézio, Jean Marie Gustave (1940–), 697 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard JeanneretGris) (1887–1965), 698 Le Franc, Marie (1879–1964), 699 Le Havre, 700 Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques (ca. 1533–1588), 701 Lebel, Jean-Jacques (1936–), 703 Leclerc, Charles-Victor-Emmanuel, General (1772–1802), 704 Leclerc, Félix (1914–1988), 705 Leclercq, Chrétien (?–ca. 1698), 706 Lefebvre, Jean Pierre (1941–), 707 Legrand, Michel (1932–), 708 Leiris, Michel (1901–1990), 710 L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles (1755–1825), 711
Lepage, Robert (1957–), 712 Lesueur, Charles Alexandre (1778–1846), 713 Lettres d’une Péruvienne, 714 Lévesque, René (1922–1987), 715 Lévis, François Gaston de, Duc (1720–1787), 717 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–), 718 Levy, Raoul J. (1922–1966), 719 Leyrac, Monique (Monique Tremblay) (1928–), 720 Liberalism, 721 Lispector, Clarice (1920–1977), 723 Literary Relations, 724 Loewy, Raymond (1893–1986), 730 Loopy De Loop, 731 L’Oréal, 732 Lorimier, Louis (1748–1812), 732 Losey, Joseph (1909–1984), 733 Louisbourg, 734 Louisiana, 738 Louisiana Purchase, 743 Louis-Philippe, King of France (1773–1850), 745 Lucky Luke, 746 Lyonnaise des Eaux (Lyonnaise des EauxDumez), 747 Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–1998), 748 Madame Bovary (1857), 749 Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone) (1958–), 750 Maigret, 751 Maillet, Antonine (1929–), 752 Maine, 753 Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de (1612–1676), 755 Malaquais, Jean (Vladimir Malacki) (1908–1998), 755 Maldoror, Sarah (1939–), 757 Malle, Louis (1932–1995), 758 Mallet, Marilú (1944–), 759 Malraux, André (1901–1976), 760 Mance, Jeanne (1606–1673), 761 Manitoba, 763 Marbois, François, Marquis de BarbéMarbois (1745–1837), 767 Marceau, Sophie (Sophie Maupu) (1966–), 768 Maria Chapdelaine, 768 Maritain, Jacques (1883–1973), 771
CONTENTS Marker, Chris (Christian François BoucheVilleneuve) (1921–), 772 Marquette, Jacques (1637–1675), 773 Marshall, Bill (G. William Marshall) (1919–1994), 774 Marshall Plan, The, 775 Martinique, 778 Masson, André (1896–1987), 781 Mathieu, Mireille (1946–), 782 Matisse, Henri (1869–1954), 783 Mattelart, Armand (1936–), 785 Maurois, André (Emile Herzog) (1885–1967), 786 Maximin, Daniel (1947–), 787 McDonald’s, 788 McKay, Claude (1889–1948), 788 Melville, Jean-Pierre (Jean-Pierre Grunbach) (1917–1973), 791 Mendès France, Pierre (1907–1982), 792 Ménil, René (1907–), 793 Mérimée, Prosper (1803–1870), 794 Merrill, Stuart Fitz Randolph (1863–1915), 796 Métis, 797 Mexico, 800 Michaux, Henri (1899–1984), 803 Michelin (Compagnie Générale des Etablissements Michelin), 804 Michigan, 805 Miller, Henry Valentine (1891–1980), 807 Mineral Water, 808 Minnesota, 810 Miranda, Francisco de (1750–1816), 812 Miron, Gaston (1928–1996), 813 Misérables, Les, 814 Mississippi, 816 Mississippi River, 817 Missouri, 819 Mitterrand, François (1916–1996), 819 Mobile, 822 Modernization, 823 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622–1673), 827 Mons, Pierre Dugua de (1560–1628), 829 Montagnais, 830 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–1592), 831 Montand, Yves (Ivo Livi) (1921–1991), 832 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de MontcalmGrozon, Marquis de (1712–1759), 834 Montigny, Louvigny de (1876–1955), 835
XIII
Montreal, 836 Morand, Paul (1888–1976), 840 Morgan, Michèle (Simone Roussel) (1920–), 840 Morin, Edgar (1921–), 841 Music (Classical), 843 Music (Folk), 847 Music (Pop), 850 Nantes, 853 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 855 Nelligan, Emile (1879–1941), 858 Neruda, Pablo (Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Bosoalto) (1904–1973), 859 New Brunswick, 860 New France, 863 New Orleans, 866 Newfoundland, 872 Niagara Falls, 874 Nicot, Jean (ca. 1525–1600), 876 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore (1765–1833), 877 9/11: Cultural Perspectives, 878 9/11: Political Perspectives, 880 Noble Savage, 883 Norman, Jessye (1945–), 885 Nougaro, Claude (1929–2004), 886 Nova Scotia, 887 Nuclear Technology, 891 Ocampo, Victoria (1890–1979), 895 Ohio, 896 Ollivier, Emile (1940–), 897 Ontario, 898 Ottawa, 900 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809), 903 Painting, 906 Palcy, Euzhan (1957–), 910 Panama Canal, 911 Parent, Mimi (1924–), 914 Parkman, Francis (1823–1893), 916 Paz, Octavio (1914–1998), 917 Péan, Stanley (1966–), 918 Peck, Raoul (1953–), 919 Pepe Le Pew, 920 Pépin, Ernest (1950–), 921 Perec, Georges (1936–1982), 922 Péret, Benjamin (1899–1959), 923 Perrault, Pierre (1927–1999), 925
XIV
CONTENTS
Perrot, Nicolas (ca. 1644–1717), 926 Petrucciani, Michel (1962–1999), 927 Peugeot—PSA Peugeot Citroën SA, 928 Photography, 929 Piazzolla, Astor Pantaleón (1921–1992), 932 Pineau, Gisèle (1956–), 933 Piracy and Privateers, 934 Placoly, Vincent (1946–1992), 936 Plamondon, Luc (1942–), 938 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849), 939 Pompidou, Georges (1911–1974), 940 Pontiac (ca. 1720–1769), 941 Pool, Léa (1950–), 943 Pornography, 944 Porter, Cole (1891–1964), 946 Positif, 947 Poulin, Jacques (1937–), 948 Poullet, Hector (1938–), 949 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885–1972), 950 Primitivism, 952 Project FAMOUS, 954 Provost, Joseph (1847–1918), 956 Quebec, 959 Quebec Act, 964 Quebec, Battle of, 966 Quebec City, 969 Quiet Revolution, 972 Radisson, Pierre-Esprit (ca. 1636–1710), 975 Ray, Man (Emmanuel Radnitsky) (1897–1976), 976 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François (1713–1796), 978 Reeves, Hubert (1932–), 979 Reichenbach, François (1922–1993), 980 Reinhardt, Django (1910–1953), 981 Remakes, 982 Reno, Jean (1948–), 984 Renoir, Jean (1894–1979), 985 Republicanism, 986 Resnais, Alain (1922–), 992 Revel, Jean-François (1924–), 993 Revue du monde noir, La, 994 Ribaut, Jean (ca. 1520–1565), 995 Richard, Nelly (1948–), 996 Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de, (1585–1642), 997 Riel, Louis (1844–1885), 998 Rivet, Paul (1876–1958), 1000
Roberval, Jean-François de la Roque, Seigneur de (1500–1561), 1001 Robin, Régine (1939–), 1002 Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de (1725–1807), 1003 Rochefort, 1004 Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917), 1005 Romains, Jules (1885–1972), 1007 Ronfard, Jean-Pierre (1929–2003), 1008 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1882–1945), 1009 Rosay, Françoise (Françoise Bandy de Nadèche) (1891–1974), 1011 Rouch, Jean (1917–2004), 1012 Roumain, Jacques (1907–1945), 1014 Roy, Gabrielle (1909–1983), 1015 Rubber, 1016 Ruiz, Raúl (1941–), 1019 Sábato, Ernesto (1911–), 1021 Saer, Juan Jose (1937–), 1022 Saint Lawrence River, 1023 Saint Louis, 1027 Saint Lucia, 1028 Saint Martin, 1029 Saint Phalle, Niki de (Catherine Marie-Agnès de Saint Phalle) (1930–2002), 1030 Saint-Amand, Edris (1918–2004), 1031 Saint-Denis, Louis Juchereau de (1684–1744), 1032 Sainte-Hélène, Marie-André Regnard Duplessis de (1687–1760), 1033 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de (1900–1944), 1034 Saint-John Perse (Alexis Léger) (1887–1975), 1035 Saint-Malo, 1036 Saint-Mémin, Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de (1770–1852), 1038 Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, 1039 Sand, George (Aurore Dupin) (1804–1876), 1041 Santo Domingo, 1042 Sarduy, Severo (1937–1993), 1045 Sargent, John Singer (1854–1925), 1046 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980), 1047 Saskatchewan, 1050 Schoelcher, Victor (1804–1893), 1051 Schuessele, Christian (1824–1879), 1052 Schwarz-Bart, André (1928–), 1053 Schwarz-Bart, Simone (1938–), 1054 Scorza, Manuel (1928–1983), 1056
CONTENTS Sculpture, 1057 Seberg, Jean (1938–1979), 1061 Segalen, Victor (1878–1919), 1062 Serge, Victor (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) (1890–1947), 1064 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques (1924–), 1065 Shuman, Mort (1936–1991), 1066 Siegfried, André (1875–1959), 1067 Sign Language, 1068 Signoret, Simone (Simone Kaminker) (1921–1985), 1070 Simon, Simone (1911–2005), 1071 Simone, Nina (Eunice Waymon) (1933–2003), 1072 Simoneau, Yves (1957–), 1073 Slavery, 1075 Sodexho, 1079 Solanas, Fernando (1936–), 1080 Soupault, Philippe (1897–1990), 1081 Space Technology, 1082 Sport, 1083 Stanton, Theodore Weld (1851–1925), 1089 Statue of Liberty, The, 1090 Steamboats, 1092 Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), 1093 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), 1095 Sudbury, 1096 Suez Company (Compagnie de Suez/Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez), 1097 Sugar, 1098 Supervielle, Jules (1884–1960), 1100 Surrealism, 1101 Swaim, Bob (1943–), 1104 Tadoussac, 1107 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de (1754–1838), 1108 Talon, Jean (1625–1694), 1109 Tanguy, Yves (1900–1955), 1110 Tanner, Henry Ossawa (1859–1937), 1111 Tavernier, Bertrand (1941–), 1112 Tel Quel, 1113 Television, 1115 Tertre, Jean-Baptiste du (1610–1687), 1118 Texas, 1119 Theater, 1121 Theory, 1126 Thériault, Yves (1915–1983), 1130 Thurber, James (1894–1961), 1131 Timber, 1132
XV
Tobacco, 1134 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–1859), 1137 Toklas, Alice B. (1877–1967), 1140 Tourism, 1141 Tourneur, Jacques (1904–1977), 1146 Tourneur, Maurice (Maurice Thomas) (1876–1961), 1147 Toussaint L’Ouverture, François (1742–1803), 1148 Travel Writing, 1151 Treaty of Paris (1763), 1154 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 1155 Tremblay, Lise (1957–), 1156 Tremblay, Michel (1942–), 1157 Tremblay, Rémi (1847–1926), 1158 Trenet, Charles (1913–2001), 1159 Trinidad, 1160 Tristan, Flora (1803–1844), 1161 Tropiques, 1163 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott (1919–21164), 1164 Truffaut, François (1932–1984), 1165 Twain, Mark (1835–1910), 1167 Ursulines, 1169 Utopias, 1170 Vadim, Roger (1928–21174), 1173 Vallières, Pierre (1938–1998), 1174 Van Peebles, Melvin (1932–), 1175 Varèse, Edgar (1883–1965), 1176 Vattemare, Nicolas-Marie Alexandre (1796–1864), 1178 Veber, Francis (1937–), 1179 Venezuela, 1180 La Vérendrye Family, 1182 Vermont, 1183 Verne, Jules (1828–1905), 1184 Verrazzano, Giovanni da (ca. 1485 to death unknown), 1186 Vian, Boris (1920–1959), 1187 Viatte, Auguste (1901–1993), 1188 Vielé-Griffin, Francis (Egbert Ludovicus Vielé) (1864–1937), 1189 Vietnam War, 1190 Vigneault, Gilles (1928–), 1192 Vigny, Alfred de (1797–1863), 1193 Villechaize, Hervé (1943–1993), 1195 Vivendi Universal, 1196 Vodun, 1196 Voisine, Roch (1963–), 1197
XVI
CONTENTS
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de (1674–1778), 1198 Warner-Vieyra, Myriam (1939–), 1201 Washington, George (1732–1799), 1202 Westerns, 1205 Whaling, 1208 Wharton, Edith (1862–1936), 1210 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill (1834–1903), 1211 White, Edmund (1940–), 1213 Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983), 1214 Williams, William Carlos (1883–1963), 1215
Wilson, Lambert (1958–), 1216 Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924), 1217 Wine, 1219 Wisconsin, 1224 World War I, 1225 World War II, 1228 Wright, Richard (1908–1960), 1234 Yourcenar, Marguerite (Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour) (1903–1987), 1237 Zobel, Joseph (1915–), 1239 Zola, Emile (1840–1902), 1240
Index, 1243 About the Editor, 1297
ADVISORY BOARD Professor Michael Burns, Mount Holyoke College Professor Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool Dr. Yves Laberge, Laval University Professor Jocelyn L’tourneau, Laval University
XVII
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE The transatlantic relationship has been one of the most dynamic of modern times. Since the great age of exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the encounters between the Old World and the New have determined the course of history, culture, and politics for billions of people. The destinies of Europe, Africa, North and South America, and all the islands in between have been intertwined to the extent that none of these areas can be said to exist in isolation. Out of these interconnections comes the concept of the “Atlantic world,” which Alan Karras describes in his introductory essay to Britain and the Americas in this series: “By looking at the Atlantic world as a single unit, rather than relying upon more traditional national (such as Britain) or regional (such as North or South America) units of analyses, scholars have more nearly been able to recreate the experiences of those who lived in the past.” This perspective attempts to redefine and respond to expanding (one might say globalizing) pressures and new ways of perceiving interconnections—not only those rooted in history (“the past”) but also those that are ongoing. Just one result of this conceptual redefinition has been the emergence of transatlantic studies as an area of inquiry in its own right, growing from the soil of separate area studies, whether European, North American, African, Caribbean, or Latin American. Students and scholars working in transatlantic studies have embarked on a new course of scholarship that places the transatlantic dynamic at its heart. In this spirit, the Transatlantic Relations Series is devoted to transcending, or at least challenging, the boundaries of nation/region as well as discipline: we are concerned in this series not only with history but also with culture and politics, race and economics, gender and migration; not only with the distant past but also with this morning. The aim, in a phrase, is to explore the myriad connections and interconnections of the Atlantic world. However, although the Atlantic world concept challenges the isolation of smaller, national perspectives, nations do continue to exist, with boundaries both physical and conceptual. Thus this series acknowledges the intractability of the national and the regional while consistently focusing on the transcending movements—the connections and interconnections—that go beyond the national and the regional. Our mode of operation has been to build an approach to the Atlantic world through attention to the separate vectors between the nations and regions on both sides of the Atlantic. We do this by offering the six titles XIX
XX
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
within the series so far commissioned, devoted respectively to Africa, Britain, France, Germany, Iberia, and Ireland in their engagements with the Americas. In each case, the transatlantic exchanges are those of all kinds: cultural, political, and historical, from the moment of the first contact to the present day. With this organizing principle in mind, the object is to offer an accessible, precisely focused means of entry into the various portals of the Atlantic world. Finally, a word about this series’ origins: in 1995, Professor Terry Rodenberg of Central Missouri State University invited scholars and teachers from eighteen universities on both sides of the Atlantic to establish an educational and scholarly institution devoted to encouraging a transatlantic perspective. The result was the founding of the Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies (MCTS), located in the Dutch city whose name, through its eponymous treaty, resonates with transnational associations. Since its foundation, MCTS has continued to bring together students and scholars from a host of worldwide locations to explore the intricate web of Atlantic connections across all disciplines. It has been a dynamic encounter between cultures and people striving to transcend the limitations of separate area and disciplinary studies. I am pleased to acknowledge the extent to which the Transatlantic Relations Series grows out of the discussions and approaches articulated at MCTS. Therefore, although the separate titles in the series carry their own dedications, the series as a whole is dedicated with great respect to Terry Rodenberg and the students and scholars at Maastricht. Will Kaufman University of Central Lancashire Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies
EDITOR’S PREFACE Although the relationship between Britain and especially North America has been widely absorbed into narratives and even hagiographies involving joint endeavor, common language, and rather unequal (but not wholly so) cultural exchange, the French relationship with the Americas has a more elusive and even counterfactual ring to it. What if the British had not prevailed at Quebec in 1759? What if Napoléon had not sold Louisiana? Then the history of the New World and indeed the whole planet would have been very different. In this perspective, the fact there is no French “United States” to counterbalance or even overtake the French mother country serves only to point out that what remains is, literally, remnants. Those islands and pockets, confetti indeed of French language or even “Frenchness,” would thus all share the status of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence fishing outpost where French rule continued when France lost its North American empire. And although this work, like all encyclopedias, aims to be an enduring monument of scholarship and research whose use-value will last for decades, it cannot ignore its own timeliness: namely, the events of 2002–2003 when the dispute over intervention in Iraq temporarily at least overwhelmed all descriptions of the FrenchAmerican relationship, reigniting in some circles a mutual phobia that has existed below or above the surface at various points within modernity. This (geo)political disagreement, coupled with the determination of French cultural elites to conduct a robust defense against globalized Anglo-American mass culture, contributed to the tendency to see “France” and “America” as antithetical entities. And yet, the length, fullness, and very existence of this encyclopedia testify to how distorted this viewpoint is, on both sides of the Atlantic. The nonsovereignty of Quebec leads many, not least in university French departments in the United States, often even in its northeastern region, but also of course in France, to forget that there is a French-speaking nation in North America. And although the territories in the Americas in which French rule holds sway are limited in number, the fact remains that French transatlantic exchanges have and continue to be endless, to the point that the two sides can be seen as completely intertwined. Any game of spotting omissions in this enormous work is complicit with this reality. The entries fall into different types or genres that express the depth and diversity of the French Atlantic. It was, for example, the French who opened up the North American continent to European settlement, and it was the American and French Revolutions that founded the politics of the modern era. There is the history of XXI
XXII
EDITOR’S PREFACE
commodities and material practices and their consequences for everyday life. And there is the vast domain of cultural and intellectual exchanges, in both high and popular terms, which testify to a process of transformation as influences and movements—jazz is one example, cinema and cultural theory are others—cross from one side to another and then return, defamiliarized and strange, sometimes misunderstood and misrepresented, to be engaged with anew. These are the emphases of Ana Lucia Araujo’s and Jacques Portes’s introductory pieces on France and Latin America and France and the United States, to which we can add an extra twist, namely those itineraries that pass through or even bypass the hexagon (metropolitan France), such as those of Haitians or Latin Americans in Montreal or Jewish and other immigrants to France, who then left for a third and perhaps fourth country across the ocean. But although transatlantic studies challenges and indeed shatters national boundaries, it of course establishes new ones in turn. Parameters, new ones, are laid down. The Atlantic must be crossed, so an itinerary such as Dakar to Paris is not covered here. There is the gray area of francophone Belgium and Switzerland, covered here in part. The eastward, Asian, and Pacific trajectory of French influence has to be written out. These necessary exclusions require that we guard against the potential ethnocentrism of our approach, in which we talk about the West. The volumes therefore make clear (especially in Michael Dash’s introductory essay on France and the Caribbean) that the French Atlantic is also an African Atlantic, reinscribing the African diaspora firmly within this supremely “western” space, and reminding all readers of French Atlantic culture of that history of racialized terror. And although Frédéric Bastien’s essay on France and Canada justifiably emphasizes the centrality of Quebec, it and a host of other entries speak eloquently of the distinctiveness of the French relations with the native peoples of North America. It is clear, then, that these volumes offer not only diversions and facts that are comforting in a manner akin to that supremely British pastime of trainspotting. They are also a contribution to an ongoing debate about nationhood and university disciplines that transatlantic studies seeks to enrich and that the French-American dimension illustrates in a particularly intense manner. It is these conceptual ambitions that I seek to develop in my opening essay on the French Atlantic. Thank you to Will Kaufman for inspiring the project and to Simon Mason at ABCCLIO for his efficiency and forbearance. I would also like to express my gratitude to the British Academy for financial support and especially to my research assistant Cristina Johnston, who has been exemplary in her patience, commitment, and stamina. Bill Marshall, Glasgow, June 2004
TOPIC FINDER
ART AND CULTURE Adam, Paul Adams, Henry Brooks Alexis, Jacques-Stephen Allen, Woody Annaud, Jean-Jacques Aquin, Hubert Arcand, Denys Architecture Art Deco Art Nouveau Artaud, Antonin Atget, Eugène Auster, Paul Avant-Gardes Aznavour, Charles Baker, Josephine Baldwin, James Bardot, Brigitte Barnes, Djuna Barney, Nat(h)alie Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste Bataille, Georges Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre Bazin, André Beach, Sylvia Beau Dommage Beauchemin, Yves
Beauvoir, Simone de Bécaud, Gilbert Beguine Beineix, Jean-Jacques Benoît, Jean Bernabé, Jean Bernanos, Georges Besson, Luc Bianciotti, Hector Binoche, Juliette Blais, Marie-Claire Bluteau, Lothaire Boileau-Narcejac Bombardier, Denise Borduas, Paul-Emile Borges, Jorge Luis Bouchard, Michel Marc Boukman, Daniel Boulle, Pierre Bourgeois, Louise Bourget, Paul Boyer, Charles Brault, Michel Brel, Jacques Bresdin, Rodolphe Breton, André Brossard, Nicole Bryce Echenique, Alfredo XXIII
Bugnet, Georges Bujold, Geneviève Burroughs, William S. Butor, Michel Cahiers du cinéma Camus, Albert Capucine Carle, Gilles Carlson, Carolyn Carmen Caron, Leslie Carpentier, Alejo Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cassatt, Mary Cather, Willa Céline, Louis-Ferdinand Cendrars, Blaise Césaire, Aimé Chabrol, Claude Challe, Robert Chamoiseau, Patrick Charlebois, Robert Charnay, Claude-JosephDésiré Charrière, Henri Chateaubriand, FrançoisAuguste René de, Vicomte
XXIV
TOPIC FINDER
Chauvet, Marie Chevalier, Maurice Chopin, Kate Choquette, Robert Cinema, 1895–1945 Cinema, 1945 to the Present Cirque du Soleil Clair, René Claudel, Paul Cocteau, Jean Colbert, Claudette Colette Comic Strips Condé, Maryse Confiant, Raphaël Constant, Paule Constantine, Eddie Copi Cortázar, Julio Costa-Gavras Counterculture Courrier des Etats-Unis Couturier, Marie-Alain Crime Fiction cummings, e.e. Cyrano de Bergerac Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé Dalio, Marcel Damas, Léon-Gontran Dance Dangerous Liaisons Danticat, Edwidge Darío, Rubén Darrieux, Danielle Dassin, Jules Davis, Miles Degas, Edgar Delsarte, François Demy, Jacques Deneuve, Catherine
Depardieu, Gérard Depestre, René Des Rosiers, Joël Desjardins, Richard Deyglun, Henry Dion, Céline Djian, Philippe Dorziat, Gabrielle Dos Passos, John Dubuffet, Jean Duchamp, Marcel Ducharme, Réjean Dufresne, Diane Dufy, Raoul Duhamel, Georges Duhamel, Marcel Dumas, Alexandre Durtain, Luc Duvivier, Julien Dylan, Bob Ecole de Brive, L’ Elvis Gratton Ernst, Max Escomel, Gloria Etienne, Franck Etienne, Gérard Evangeline Evans, Walker Expo 67 Exposition coloniale (1931) Exposition universelle (1900) Film Noir Fini, Leonor Firmin, Anténor Fitzgerald, F. Scott Flanner, Janet Florence, Hercules Florey, Robert Folch-Ribas, Jacques Fonda, Jane
Francofolies, Les Fuentes, Carlos Gagnon, Clarence Gainsbourg, Serge Gallant, Mavis García Márquez, Gabriel Garou Gary, Romain Gasnier, Louis J. Gauguin, Paul Genêt, Edmond-Charles Genet, Jean Girard, François Gleizes, Albert Glissant, Edouard Godard, Jean-Luc Godbout, Jacques Gonçalves de Magalhães, Domingos José Goodis, David Grandbois, Alain Grappelli, Stéphane Gratiant, Gilbert Green, Julien Guy-Blaché, Alice Hahn, Reynaldo Hassam, Frederick Childe Hawthorne, Nathaniel H. D. Hébert, Anne Hemingway, Ernest Hémon, Louis Heredia, José Maria de Héroux, Denis Himes, Chester Hip-Hop Hippolyte, Hector Hocquenghem, Guy Hollywood’s French Caribbean Hollywood’s Paris
TOPIC FINDER
Hollywood’s Quebec Houdon, Jean-Antoine Hugo, Victor-Marie Huidobro, Vicente Hunchback of NotreDame Huston, Nancy Inspector Clouseau Jacob, Suzanne James, Henry Jazz Jean, Raymond Jeanmaire, Zizi Jeunet, Jean-Pierre Jodorowsky, Alejandro Josephson, Matthew Jourdan, Louis Jouvet, Louis Julien, Pauline Jutra, Claude Kaplan, Nelly Kassav’ Kattan, Naïm Kelly, Gene Kerouac, Jack Klein, William Kokis, Sergio Labro, Philippe Lachaise, Gaston Lafferière, Dany Laforgue, Jules Lam, Wilfredo Lambert, Christophe Lamothe, Arthur Lanctôt, Micheline Lanois, Daniel Lara, Christian Laroche, Maximilien Lassalle, Eugène Laure, Carole Lautréamont, Comte de Le Bris, Michel
Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Corbusier Le Franc, Marie Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques Lebel, Jean-Jacques Leclerc, Félix Lefebvre, Jean Pierre Legrand, Michel L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles Lepage, Robert Lesueur, Charles Alexandre Lettres d’une Péruvienne Levy, Raoul J. Leyrac, Monique Lispector, Clarice Literary Relations Loewy, Raymond Loopy De Loop Losey, Joseph Lucky Luke Madame Bovary Madonna Maigret Maillet, Antonine Malaquais, Jean Maldoror, Sarah Malle, Louis Mallet, Marilú Malraux, André Marceau, Sophie Maria Chapdelaine Marker, Chris Marshall, Bill Masson, André Mathieu, Mireille Matisse, Henri Maurois, André Maximin, Daniel McKay, Claude
XXV
Melville, Jean-Pierre Ménil, René Mérimée, Prosper Merrill, Stuart Michaux, Henri Miller, Henry Miron, Gaston Misérables, Les Molière Montand, Yves Montigny, Louvigny de Morgan, Michèle Morin, Edgar Music (Classical) Music (Folk) Music (Pop) Nelligan, Emile Neruda, Pablo Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore 9/11: Cultural Perspectives Norman, Jessye Nougaro, Claude Ocampo, Victoria Ollivier, Emile Painting Palcy, Euzhan Parent, Mimi Paz, Octavio Péan, Stanley Peck, Raoul Pepe Le Pew Pépin, Ernest Perec, Georges Péret, Benjamin Perrault, Pierre Petrucciani, Michel Photography Piazzolla, Astor Pineau, Gisèle Placoly, Vincent
XXVI
TOPIC FINDER
Plamondon, Luc Poe, Edgar Allan Pool, Léa Pornography Porter, Cole Positif Poulin, Jacques Poullet, Hector Pound, Ezra Ray, Man Reichenbach, François Reinhardt, Django Remakes Reno, Jean Renoir, Jean Resnais, Alain Revue du monde noir Richard, Nelly Robin, Régine Rodin, Auguste Romains, Jules Ronfard, Jean-Pierre Rosay, Françoise Rouch, Jean Roumain, Jacques Roy, Gabrielle Ruiz, Raúl Sábato, Ernesto Saer, Juan Jose Saint-Amand, Edris Saint-Mémin, Charles Saint Phalle, Niki de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de Saint-John Perse Sand, George Sargent, John Schuessele, Christian Schwarz-Bart, André Schwarz-Bart, Simone Scorza, Manuel Sculpture
Seberg, Jean Segalen, Victor Serge, Victor Servan-Schreiber, JeanJacques Shuman, Mort Signoret, Simone Simon, Simone Simone, Nina Simoneau, Yves Solanas, Fernando Soupault, Philippe Stanton, Theodore Statue of Liberty Stein, Gertrude Stevens, Wallace Supervielle, Jules Swaim, Bob Tanguy, Yves Tanner, Henry Tavernier, Bertrand Television Theater Thériault, Yves Thurber, James Toklas, Alice B. Tourneur, Jacques Tourneur, Maurice Travel Writing Tremblay, Lise Tremblay, Michel Tremblay, Rémi Trenet, Charles Tropiques Truffaut, François Twain, Mark Vadim, Roger Vallières, Pierre Van Peebles, Melvin Varèse, Edgar Vattemare, Alexandre Veber, Francis
Verne, Jules Vian, Boris Vielé-Griffin, Francis Vigneault, Gilles Vigny, Alfred de Villechaize, Hervé Voisine, Roch Voltaire, François Warner-Vieyra, Myriam Westerns Wharton, Edith Whistler, James White, Edmund Williams, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Wilson, Lambert Wright, Richard Yourcenar, Marguerite Zobel, Joseph Zola, Emile BUSINESS ACTIVITIES Aury, Louis-Michel Automobiles Aviation Ballooning Bedaux, Charles Eugène Blum-Byrnes Agreement Bombardier Carrefour Chanute, Octave Citroën Compagnie d’Occident Concorde Cotton Coureurs de bois Denim DuPont Family Elf-Aquitaine Fishing Ford Motor Company
TOPIC FINDER
France Telecom Fur Trade GATT Hydro-Quebec L’Oréal Lyonnaise des Eaux McDonald’s Michelin Mineral Water Nicot, Jean Peugeot Piracy and Privateers Rubber Suez Company Sugar Timber Tobacco Tourism Vivendi Universal Whaling Wine DIPLOMATIC AND RELATED AFFAIRS Cuban Revolution Deane, Silas Dreyfus Case Foreign Policy, 1776–1945 Foreign Policy, 1945–Present Fry, Varian Marbois, François, Marquis de BarbéMarbois Marshall Plan, The Morand, Paul Paine, Thomas Quebec Act EDUCATION Benezet, Anthony
EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT Basques Bienville, Jean-Baptiste, sieur de Bossu, Jean-Bernard Bougainville, Louis Antoine de Brûlé, Etienne Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cajuns Cartier, Jacques Céloron Blainville de, Pierre-Joseph Champlain, Samuel de Charlevoix, PierreFrançois-Xavier de Colbert, Jean-Baptiste Crèvecoeur, MichelGuillaume-Jean de Crozat, Antoine Filles du Roy Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des Hennepin, Father Louis Hurons Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’ Joliet, Louis Juneau, Laurent Solomon La Condamine, CharlesMarie de La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste La Pérouse, JeanFrançois de Galaup, Comte de La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur Lorimier, Louis Louisiana Purchase
XXVII
Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de Mance, Jeanne Marquette, Jacques Métis Mons, Pierre Dugua de Montagnais Parkman, Francis Pontiac Radisson, Pierre-Esprit Ribaut, Jean Roberval, JeanFrançois de la Roque, Seigneur de Saint-Denis, Louis Juchereau de Talon, Jean Verrazzano, Giovanni da FASHION Cosmetics Erté Fashion FOOD AND DRINK Coca-Cola Company Coffee Cuisine LANGUAGE Créolité Francophonie, La Hagège, Claude Language Sign Language Viatte, Auguste MEDICAL AIDS Cournand, André Guillemin, Roger
XXVIII
TOPIC FINDER
MILITARY American Civil War American Revolution Barrin de La Galissonière, Roland-Michel, Marquis Bonaparte, Jérôme Bonaparte, Joséphine Bonaparte, Napoléon Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson French and Indian War Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de Indian Wars Iraq War Jones, John Paul Lafayette, Marquis de Lahontan, Louis-Armand, Baron de Leclerc, Charles-Victor Lévis, François Montcalm, Marquis de NATO Quebec, Battle of Rochambeau, JeanBaptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Treaty of Paris (1763) Treaty of Utrecht (1713) Vietnam War World War I World War II PLACES Acadia Alberta Argentina Baton Rouge Bordeaux Brazil Brittany Cherbourg
Chicago Chile Detroit Devil’s Island Disneyland Paris Duluth Florida Grenada Guadeloupe Guiana Haiti Illinois Country Indiana Iowa Kentucky La Rochelle Lake Champlain Le Havre Louisbourg Louisiana Maine Manitoba Martinique Mexico Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Mississippi River Missouri Mobile Montreal Nantes New Brunswick New France New Orleans Newfoundland Niagara Falls Nova Scotia Ohio Ontario Ottawa Panama Canal Quebec
Quebec City Rochefort Saint Lawrence River Saint Louis Saint Lucia Saint Martin Saint-Malo Saint-Pierre et Miquelon Santo Domingo Saskatchewan Sudbury Tadoussac Texas Trinidad Venezuela Vermont Wisconsin POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONCEPTS 9/11: Political Perspectives Anti-Americanism Atlanticism Feminisms French Revolution Gay Movement Liberalism Modernization Noble Savage Primitivism Quiet Revolution Republicanism POLITICAL FIGURES Adams, John Bolívar, Simón Bouchard, Lucien Bourassa, Robert Boyer, Jean-Pierre Chirac, Jacques Christophe, Henri Dessalines, Jean-Jacques
TOPIC FINDER
Eisenhower, Dwight D. François I, King of France Franklin, Benjamin Fréchette, Louis Gaulle, General Charles de Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry Jefferson, Thomas Kerry, John Lang, Jack Lévesque, René Louis-Philippe, King Mendès France, Pierre Miranda, Francisco de Mitterrand, François Pompidou, Georges Riel, Louis Roosevelt, Franklin D. Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Tristan, Flora Trudeau, Pierre Elliott Washington, George Wilson, Woodrow RELIGION Catholic Church Huguenots Jesuits Joan of Arc Labat, Jean-Baptiste Lalemant, Jérôme Laval, François de Montmorency Leclercq, Chrétien
Perrot, Nicolas Provost, Joseph Raynal, Abbé Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de Sainte-Hélène, MarieAndré Tertre, Jean-Baptiste du Ursulines Vodun SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Audubon, John James Computer Technology Cyberculture Dubos, René Nuclear Technology Project FAMOUS Reeves, Hubert Space Technology Steamboats SLAVERY Antislavery Movements Bigelow, John Compagnie du Sénégal Schoelcher, Victor Slavery Toussaint L’Ouverture, François SPORT Sport
XXIX
THEORY Aron, Raymond Barthes, Roland Baudrillard, Jean Bourdieu, Pierre Cabet, Etienne Caillois, Roger Certeau, Michel de Cohen, Gustave Debray, Régis Deleuze, Gilles Derrida, Jacques Doubrovsky, Serge Duvergier de Hauranne, Ernest Fanon, Frantz Foucault, Michel Guattari, Félix Guérin, Daniel Lacan, Jacques Leiris, Michel Lévi-Strauss, Claude Lyotard, JeanFrançois Maritain, Jacques Mattelart, Armand Montaigne, Michel de Revel, Jean-François Rivet, Paul Sarduy, Severo Siegfried, André Tel Quel Theory Tocqueville, Alexis de Utopias
CHRONOLOGY OF FRANCE AND THE AMERICAS 1493
1502
On his second voyage, Christopher Columbus sights both the main islands (Martinique and Guadeloupe) of the French Antilles but establishes no colonies because the Carib Indians still inhabit the islands. Christopher Columbus lands at Carbet on the Caribbean side of Martinique on June 15.
1524
Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing for France, sights land around the Carolinas, discovers the Hudson River, and reaches Nova Scotia (“Arcadia”) before returning to France.
1534
Jacques Cartier explores from the Strait of Belle Isle south to Gaspé Bay.
1535
Cartier, on his second voyage, sails up the Saint Lawrence River to Stadacona, a Huron Indian village at present-day Quebec City, and then to Hochelaga at present-day Montreal.
1541
On Cartier’s final voyage, to what is now Quebec, he finds fool’s gold and quartz that he thinks are gold and diamonds.
1562
1564
French Huguenots settle in Florida, awakening the Spanish to defend their territory. French and Spanish begin an intermittent fight that ends only in 1580 when Gilberto Gil loses a naval battle and the French withdraw from Florida.
1595
Sir Walter Raleigh publishes The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, generating the legend of El Dorado and attracting explorers from Spain and England and then France.
Early American, European, Arab, and other Seventeenth African slavers begin providing slaves to Century the Americas after the indigenous populations proved unadaptable. French collection stations on Africa’s west coast included Goree, Senegal; El Mina, Ghana; and Ouidah, Benin. Nearly two centuries of experience as slave centers help to establish them as commercial communities. 1604
Jean Ribaut brings 150 Huguenots to Port Royal, North Carolina.
XXXI
First French settlement on the North Atlantic coast at Neutral Island in Maine. Later the settlement moves to Acadia. First French expedition to Guiana.
XXXII
CHRONOLOGY
OF
FRANCE AND THE AMERICAS
1605
Samuel de Champlain sails south to Cape Cod while garrisoning Quebec and developing the fur trade.
1608
Founding of Quebec City and of the colony of New France.
1626
Rouen Commercial Company sends twenty-six French settlers to establish the village of Sinnamary, who then join with additional settlers on an island later named Cayenne.
1635
French Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc arrives in Martinique. Because of the wealth their sugar plantations generate, the West Indian islands are desired by both Britain and France. Martinique and Guadeloupe remain French, but the other French islands, Dominica, St. Lucia, and Tobago, are lost by France in the Napoleonic wars.
1636
King Louis XIII permits the introduction of slaves to the French West Indies.
1642
Foundation of Montreal.
1673
1685
LaSalle reaches Matagorda Bay on the Gulf of Mexico, builds Fort Saint Louis, and begins the land trek back to Canada. His men murder him in 1687. Establishment of Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s “Black Code” that, in sixty articles, officially governs the lives of slaves until 1848.
1689
War with Britain begins. Each war has an American and a European name: first, King William’s War, or the War of the League of Augsburg, 1689–1697; second, Queen Anne’s War, or the War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–1714; and third, King George’s War, or the War of Austrian Succession, 1740– 1748. The culmination was the Seven Years’ War, or the French and Indian War, 1756–1763, which ended much of France’s first empire.
1697
The Treaty of Ryswick cedes the western third of the island of Hispaniola to France, which names its new colony Saint-Domingue (Santo Domingo).
1699
Foundation of the royal colony of Louisiana.
French explorers reach Sault Saint Marie, Michigan, and claim the interior of North America for Louis XIV.
1701
Cadillac founds Detroit.
1702
The French build a fort at Mobile (present-day Alabama).
Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette and trader Louis Joliet explore from Lake Michigan south down the Mississippi River to the Arkansas River. Hearing that the Spanish control the lower Mississippi, they turn back.
1712
Control of Louisiana is ceded to financier Antoine Crozat.
1714
At the end of Queen Anne’s War, the British gain Nova Scotia and its important fishing grounds.
1717
Louisiana comes under the control of the Compagnie d’Occident.
1718
First French land grant at Baton Rouge. Foundation of New Orleans.
1719
The first African slaves arrive in Louisiana.
1663–1763 Guiana switches from French to English to Dutch to French control and mostly stagnates. In 1664 the French take Guiana from the Dutch; in 1667 they lose it to the English; in 1676 they take it back. 1671
LaSalle establishes Fort Crevecoeur on the Illinois River; French Huguenots settle in Charles Town, Carolina.
1674
Martinique officially annexed by the king of France.
1678
Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, and Father Louis Hennepin pass Niagara Falls on an exploration from Canada to the American interior.
CHRONOLOGY 1720
Foundation of the fortress of Louisbourg on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island (present-day Nova Scotia).
1731
Louisiana reverts to royal colony status.
1755
Deportation by the British of the French population of Acadia.
1756–1763 French and Indian War. Initial French success at Fort Necessity (near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) turns to defeat as the British take Louisbourg in 1758; Quebec in 1759; Montreal in 1760; and Martinique, Grenada, and the other French Caribbean islands in 1762. 1762–1848 Martinique is occupied several times by the British. France and Britain fight over the island until 1815, when it is restored to France. 1763
The Treaty of Paris gives Canada, Cape Breton, and Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Britain and the rest to Spain. France retains Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. Also France gives Britain much of the Caribbean, but Britain returns the islands. France is finished as a major player in the New World.
1763–1765 Louis XV wants to reestablish an empire in the aftermath of his defeats by Britain. His best opportunity is in Guiana, the largest landmass left of the empire. He also needs to control the area; to preclude slave rebellions, he sends 14,000 white French settlers to Kourou on the coast. Ten thousand of them die within two years, and the survivors move to the Iles du Salut (Salvation Islands), which have a less malarial climate.
OF
FRANCE AND THE AMERICAS
1791
XXXIII
Louis XVI attempts to flee with his family to Austria. France and Austria go to war for a time in 1792. A slave rebellion erupts in Haiti, Santo Domingo, led by Daniel Boukman.
1792–1815 Napoleonic wars grip Europe and the empires. 1793
Louis XVI and his queen are tried and executed. Slavery is abolished in Santo Domingo.
1795
The first French political prisoners arrive in Guiana.
1798
An army of slaves, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, defeats a British invasion force in Haiti.
1799
Napoléon returns to France, leaving his armies behind, and becomes First Consul.
1800
In the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoléon compels Spain to return much of Louisiana to France.
First Decade of the Nineteenth Century
The transatlantic slave trade is outlawed. France is among the nations whose navies patrol off west Africa. France also establishes bases and trading posts on the coast.
1802
Napoléon is named Life Consul. Consul Victor Hueues reestablishes slavery in the colonies. Napoléon sends French troops to Santo Domingo to restore slavery. The French capture Toussaint L’Ouverture. Slave revolt in Guadeloupe.
1774
The Quebec Act grants the French Canadians certain linguistic and religious privileges.
1776
American Declaration of Independence.
1783
End of American Revolutionary War.
An army of former slaves, led by Dessalines, defeats French forces in Haiti. L’Ouverture dies in captivity.
1789
The French Revolution begins, destroying the monarch and the monarchy and instituting the First Republic.
The Louisiana Purchase: Napoléon sells French lands west of the Appalachians to the United States.
1803
XXXIV
1804
CHRONOLOGY
OF
FRANCE AND THE AMERICAS of the West Indies and Réunion. Former slaves in Guiana leave plantations to become subsistence farmers. Former slaves also have the right to vote. Because slave revolts begin in Martinique and Guadeloupe before the decree is known there, the governors of these colonies free the slaves on their own authority. Loss of slaves leads the plantation owners to bring in contract workers from India, but labor problems persist in the sugar industry throughout the nineteenth century.
Dessalines proclaims Haiti’s independence. Fired by the example of the French Revolution, the black slaves revolted, massacred the French landowners, and proclaimed the world’s first black republic. Napoléon crowns himself emperor of the French.
1807–1815 The British and the Portuguese occupy French Guiana. 1812
Conflict between Canada and the United States. Louisiana becomes the eighteenth U.S. state.
1815
The Battle of Waterloo marks final defeat of Napoléon and confirms the restoration of the monarchy in France made the previous year. Dominica, Saint Lucia, and Tobago are lost by France in the Napoleonic wars, which also made Britain master of the seas. Restored French control of Guiana comes with calls for the abolition of slavery.
1817
Slave trade becomes illegal in France.
1830
The July Revolution replaces Charles X with the Duc d’Orleans, Louis-Philippe.
1848–1851 France experiments with Chinese plantation labor in Guiana. The effort fails, and the Chinese become shopkeepers in Cayenne; the plantations revert to jungle. 1849
Upper and Lower Canada are joined into one united province.
1851
A coup d’état by Louis-Napoléon establishes Second Empire.
1861
Napoléon III suggests Maximilian to Mexico as its emperor.
1863
A Mexican delegation offers Maximilian and Charlotte the crown in October. Maximilian accepts only if a national plebiscite indicates it to be the wish of the people.
1865
The American Civil War ends. The United States pressures France to observe the Monroe Doctrine and leave Mexico.
1866
Napoléon III withdraws French troops from Mexico. Maximilian is unwilling to abandon his supporters. Charlotte sails to Europe to seek help but finds none. Mexican republican forces slowly take control.
1867
After a seventy-two-day siege at Queretaro, republican forces take Maximilian and execute him and two of his generals.
1837–1838 The Patriots’ Rebellion in Upper and Lower Canada is severely repressed in the latter (Quebec). 1838
France recognizes Haitian independence in exchange for a large financial indemnity.
1848
Agitation for electoral reform in 1847 and 1848 culminates in the abdication of Louis-Philippe in favor of his grandson. The French prefer another republic. They elect Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis, as president of the Second Republic. A wave of revolutionary fervor in Europe leads to France freeing 262,564 slaves, most in the plantation colonies
Canadian confederation. 1870s
Establishment of the Third Republic in France.
CHRONOLOGY 1870
OF
Paris Commune.
1876
Ferdinand de Lesseps is chosen by the Geographical Society of Paris to head La Société Civile Internationale du Canal Interocéanique du Darien. French navy lieutenant Wyse examines the Isthmus of Panama for a suitable route for the canal.
Early 1880s Interest revives in expansion as the French mission, the way for France to reenter the world. Movement leaders include Leon Gambetta and Jules Ferry. Advocates assume that France, to maintain its image and influence, requires either continental or overseas power. The Jeune Ecole of the 1880s prefigures Alfred Thayer Mahan’s argument that naval power equals world power. This nationalism drives the subsequent French push for empire from the 1880s until after empire’s end in the 1960s. 1883
Transport of convicts to Guiana resumes.
1884
More than 19,000 men work on the Panama Canal, the maximum number the French employ at any one time.
1885
Execution of the Manitoban rebel Métis leader Louis Riel.
1886
Dedication of Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.
1888
Work begins on the lock canal in Panama. Gustave Eiffel is to construct the canal locks.
1894
The “new” Panama Canal Company, the Compagnie Nouvelle de Canal de Panama, is organized. Liquidation of the isthmian canal company is complete. The “Panama Affair” involves prosecu-
XXXV
tion of company officials. Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son, Charles, receive but never serve five-year sentences for fraud and maladministration. Ferdinand dies at age eighty-nine on December 7.
The Franco-Prussian War produces another French defeat, and France is cautious about coming into conflict with other colonial powers for the next decade. The decline of the French navy enables the British navy to maintain its dominance of the seas throughout the 1880s.
1871
FRANCE AND THE AMERICAS
The ministry for the colonies is established. Devil’s Island, Guiana, originally a leper colony, becomes the home of political prisoners. 1896
Wilfrid Laurier becomes the first French-Canadian prime minister of Canada.
1902
Mt. Pelée erupts, destroying SaintPierre, Martinique, and killing 30,000 people in three minutes. Fort-de-France becomes the capital.
1904
France sells its interest in the Panama Canal to the United States for approximately $40 million. The United States begins a ten-year construction project that costs approximately $387 million.
1905
Separation of church and state in France.
1914–1918 The first U.S. troops arrive in France in 1917 as part of World War I effort. 1915–1930 Haiti is occupied by U.S. Marines. 1919
The Treaty of Versailles ends World War I. Visit of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to Paris.
1938
After the French national assembly decides to phase out the penal colony, the final transport of prisoners to Guiana occurs.
1939
World War II begins.
1940
Fall of France to the Axis powers. Marshal Pétain signs the armistice, establishing an unoccupied zone with capital at Vichy. General Charles de Gaulle in London calls for resistance to continue.
1944
On D day, June 6, American, British, and Canadian forces invade France at Normandy, supported by the French Resistance. Paris is liberated.
XXXVI
CHRONOLOGY
OF
FRANCE AND THE AMERICAS
1945
World War II ends.
1964
Kourou space center opens.
1946
The Fourth Republic begins in France.
1967
Martinique acquires the status of a French department. Four deputies and two senators represent it.
President de Gaulle visits Quebec and cries “Vive le Québec libre” from the balcony of Montreal city hall.
1968
The United States announces the Marshall Plan to aid European recovery from World War II.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau becomes prime minister of Canada for the first time.
1969
De Gaulle resigns and is succeeded by Georges Pompidou.
Creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
1974
Election in France of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
1947
1949
DDT spraying begins in Guiana. Along with public health measures begun in the 1940s, it helps to decrease mortality rates for malaria, yellow fever, leprosy, and infant mortality. 1957–1971 François Duvalier becomes president of Haiti. 1958
Colonial war in Algeria and an army revolt bring down the Fourth Republic in France. General de Gaulle returns to power and establishes the Fifth Republic.
1960
Beginning of the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec.
1961
Opening of the Maison du Québec in Paris.
1962
Martinique and Guadeloupe become regions of France. 1976
Late 1970s Large numbers of Haitians immigrate and into to French Guiana and to Quebec. the1980s 1980
The referendum on sovereignty in Quebec ends in a 59.2 percent “no” vote.
1981
Election in France of a Socialist president, François Mitterrand.
1992
Opening of Disneyland Paris.
1995
Jacques Chirac is elected president of France.
France establishes a space agency with a mandate to find a new rocket site to replace the one in Hammaguir, Algeria. The site is French Guiana. The Quebec energy minister René Lévesque nationalizes Hydro-Quebec.
The separatist Parti Québécois gains power in Quebec under premier René Lévesque.
The sovereignty referendum in Quebec ends with another “no” vote, but with a narrower margin of 50.6 percent. 2003
The French government opposes the U.S. intervention in Iraq.
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
THE FRENCH ATLANTIC Bill Marshall
How might the French Atlantic work as a concept, and what received opinions does it challenge? Two books may serve as points of departure. The first and less well known is a diatribe by Guy Hocquenghem from 1979 entitled La Beauté du métis: Réflexions d’un francophobe (Paris: Ramsay). Hocquenghem, who has an entry in these volumes, is best known as one of the founders of the modern gay movement in France, and as the author of the first work of what we would now call gay or even queer theory, Le Désir homosexuel of 1972. By the late 1970s, however, Hocquenghem’s preoccupations had widened to a wider critique of modernity, and in particular of that form of political and cultural modernity ushered in by 1789, namely the modern state and nationalism. La Beauté du métis is an extended critique of what he terms “le système france” (sic). He has a taste for provocation, as will become clear. For Hocquenghem, France is “a country without encounters or hybridity [métissage]”(9). In France, the most closed country in the world, you grow up a captive. Nowhere is this more true than in the horrors wrought within the French family. French misogyny and homophobia are in part explained by this fear of contagion. The centralizing, totalizing, and bureaucratized links in France between power, art, and society, with the eye of surveillance that is Paris policing the center-periphery relation, mean that its core concept goes unquestioned, so that “france” (sic) is to the French what God is to Muslims, indescribable and unrepresentable because it is the foundation of all representations and permits no critical heterogeneity. In contrast, other nations find it easier to handle culture and difference. Whereas Britain and Spain (and also Portugal) were overtaken in size and power by their former colonies, france (sic) remained resolutely at the center of the French-speaking world, so that for the French, the British or Hispanic “cultural oceans” are incomprehensible because decentered, and French history is no more than the recrimination felt toward these less deserving nations that have stolen first place. The French nation is thus immobilized in its cultural unification, which erases from its regions 3
4
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
both their past and future (that of possible métissage), has an extremely uneasy relationship with the “popular,” and where culture has become a compulsory public service, with any countercultural forms aspiring to state power one day. Indeed, whereas in other nations the state is the impatiently tolerated form of political domination, in France it is perceived as the apogee of civilization, the goal of every cultural expression. In contrast to the seductions, voyages, and initiations of other literatures, French novels are in vitro, part of a literature of doctors and administrators devoid of generous sensations, built around authors rather than characters, the aim being the completion of a national cultural task. Needless to say, the policing—by the Académie Française, but this extends outward—and fetishization of the language itself play a major role in this process. Unlike in other languages, “sub”-languages and variations are not encouraged and fail to create any new vectors of meaning and identity. The simplification in Hocquenghem’s polemic is almost cartoonlike. Written in 1979, La Beauté du métis anticipates in its preoccupations some of the key political and intellectual events of the following decade, with the emergence of the Front national or works by other intellectuals such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov on similar issues of difference and modernity. Certainly, as with many radical critics of nationhood, Hocquenghem is sometimes complicit with what he sees as the nation’s suppression of its own hybridity and heterogeneity. (In other words, those who criticize nations for writing out their immigrant and minority dimension create a self-fulfilling prophecy.) The context of 1979, on the threshold of the hegemony of economic liberalism in the West in the 1980s and the accelerated globalization of the 1990s, prevents his formulating or balancing his points in the light of the downside of those developments, namely, the risk of international market forces suppressing diversity. However, before returning to these points I would like to move, more briefly, to a second book that can serve as a starting point. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993) has been very influential in the field of postcolonial studies. It basically attempts to do two things. One is to reinscribe the black African experience of slavery and diaspora into accounts of Western modernity; the other is to challenge black nationalism and Afrocentrism from the point of view of cultural hybridity. The intercultural and transnational formation of the black Atlantic demonstrates that it is engagement with others, with difference, that constitutes what we term cultural or national identities. For this argument Gilroy deploys the ship as his central organizing symbol, seen as “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion,” a new chronotope in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of a certain historical mapping of time and space. The middle passage is thus one of a circulation of ideas, of key cultural and political artifacts, be they jazz or W. E. B. Du Bois’s take on European nationalism and romanticism. The image of the ship and of the Atlantic passage begin to propose that mobility of identity aspired to by Hocquenghem and described by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life in 1980: A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense articulated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. (University of California Press 1984, 117)
THE FRENCH ATLANTIC
5
Confronting these texts by Hocquenghem and Gilroy forces the question, What might happen, what might be enabled, by thinking of Frenchness as diasporic and mobile? This suggestion goes against the grain somewhat, but in fact there are ample reasons for doing so. If we concentrate for the moment on North America, it was of course the French who opened up the continent for European settlement and development, largely because of their control of the entry to the two main river systems. But a less well-known history than the rise and fall of New France must also be attended to. Again the received wisdom is that France, with its large peasant population, has not been a country of emigration and has not produced large settler societies (with the exception of Algeria). However, the 1990 U.S. census showed that there were 13 million Americans of French descent, making them the fifth-largest ethnic group after the British, Germans, Irish, Africans, and Italians. In Massachusetts they are the second-largest such group. Patterns of French migration to or within North America have historically taken three forms: • •
•
Huguenots after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, who tended to settle in the English-speaking colonies; those fleeing the political upheavals of the nineteenth century and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (for example, 20,000 French immigrants arrived in the United States in 1851, and there were French-language newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston; there was even an entirely French company of Union troops, the Lafayette guards, during the Civil War; and in total it is estimated that 353,000 French people emigrated to America between 1820 and 1900, 751,000 between 1820 and 1978); massive emigration, nearly 1 million people, from Quebec in the late nineteenth century to the factories and mills of New England.
The reality of this French diaspora underlines all the more the impact on the landscape and culture of the continent. Some examples: Paul Revere was the son of a Huguenot goldsmith whose real name was Rivoire. One theory of the origin of the term “Dixie” to describe the South comes from the early nineteenth-century practice in New Orleans of issuing bilingual banknotes, with $10 bills being referred to by anglophones as “dixies.” Place-names are probably too well known to invoke here, but they include the Ozarks (“Aux Arcs”) in Arkansas. John James Audubon, the ornithologist, artist, and naturalist who gives his name to the Audubon Society, was born in Haiti in 1785, the illegitimate son of a French merchant, planter, and slave trader and a local Creole woman. He emigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen. Jack Kerouac, born in Lovell, Massachusetts, in 1922, had Québécois parents and did not speak English until he went to school at the age of five. Whole websites in Quebec are devoted to the genealogy of Madonna, whose mother, Louise Fortin, famously dead of breast cancer when the future singer was five, also came from FrenchCanadian stock and whose ancestry can be traced back ten generations to Julien Fortin, who in 1619 married a Marie Lavye at Notre-Dame-de-Vair in what is now the Sarthe. Delving a bit deeper, other itineraries hint at what a transnational category like the French Atlantic can mean, and what a purely hexagonal or France-centered approach can
6
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
obfuscate. Louis Hémon (1880–1913) was born in Brest and rebelled against his academic and Catholic family, turning up as a farm laborer in 1911 in rural Quebec. His novel Maria Chapdelaine provided for French readers one of the founding myths of French Canada, and for French Canadians it has become a site of some ideological struggle. Summing up shifting states of Franco-Quebec relations, there are three film versions, French, British, and Franco-Québécois, with the latest version seeking, for example, to emphasize mythical, magical, and poetic continuities between Brittany and the native peoples. Sergio Kokis, who was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1944 and studied psychology at Strasbourg in the 1960s, emigrated to Montreal in 1970, and has published approximately a novel a year since Le Pavillon des miroirs in 1994. These authors fall outside any mappings of literature confined to the nation-state or centered on Paris. Kokis is but one example of a completely underresearched dimension, namely, that of overlapping Atlantics, such as the interaction of French and Hispanic or Lusitanian cultures in the New World without which, for example, the city of New Orleans or the cultivation of coffee would not have taken the forms recognized today. It would be unwise to propose an overarching theoretical summary of what as diverse a reality as the French Atlantic is and can be. However, it is possible to suggest what some of its specificities and characteristics may be. The first is that of the relations with native peoples in New France before the British Conquest of 1759 (and thus before the particularly catastrophic examples of French republican colonialism a century later). There is much evidence to show that on the whole the French encounter with the native peoples of North America was characterized by the greater degree, in some periods at least, of suppleness and cooperation as opposed to the expansion and extermination that tended to mark the Anglo-Saxon encounter. This was by and large due to the sparser nature of settlement, but also to the reliance on the native peoples for the undertaking of the principal economic task of the colony, namely, the fur trade. Wars with the Iroquois, for example, were usually part of a wider chess game of alliances in the North American continent between competing European powers. The Jesuits, although some met a famous martyrdom in the seventeenth century, were often successful, through their notoriously syncretizing techniques, in their conversions of native communities. A second point is about cultural transformation. As Paul Gilroy writes about the black experience, some figures may begin as, say, French (or Breton, or Norman . . .) and are then changed into something else which evades those specific labels and with them all fixed notions of nationality and national identity. Whether their experience of exile is enforced or chosen, temporary or permanent, these intellectuals and activists, writers, speakers, poets and artists repeatedly articulate a desire to escape the restrictive bonds of ethnicity, national identification, and sometimes even “race” itself. (19)
In the case of Quebec, by 1759 cultural identity had profoundly changed. One of the mythical—and supremely gendered—figures within the construction of Quebec cultural identity is that of the Coureurs de bois, nomadically escaping the restrictions of the ancien régime, trading and trapping furs, commingling with the native peoples. Indeed, these processes went as far as the creation of a new “race” of people, the Métis of Manitoba, Catholic and French speaking. Revisionist Quebec historian Laurier L. Lapierre argues
THE FRENCH ATLANTIC
7
cogently that by 1759 the canadiens already formed a distinct culture, a reality intensified by the departure from the colony of the French elite personnel (with the exception of the clergy). The overlap with the British Atlantic is crucial for an understanding of the later development of Quebec, as in its parliamentary institutions or the architecture and urban space of Montreal. The third characteristic of the French Atlantic is that of the complete unsettling of the center/periphery relationship that for Hocquenghem bedevils French culture. It also unsettles the similar binary established between “French” and “francophone.” The nondecolonization of the center that these terms imply in fact perpetuates the power relationships and produces the absurd notion that France is not a francophone country. The emphasis on passages and journeys, and historically the ship, means that the only conceivable “centers,” in the sense of loci of departures and arrivals, are the ports, with Brest, Nantes, and La Rochelle displacing Paris. Fourthly, the French Atlantic is also of course a black Atlantic. The role of the slave trade and its place in a wider transatlantic commodity system, the plantation cultures of the French Caribbean and their historical legacy in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, are well known. But just as “the Black Atlantic” propelled the African diaspora into the heart of accounts of Western modernity, so too does “the French Atlantic” render unavoidable and inevitable an engagement with that racialized terror when discussing any aspect of French modernity. The interactions of the African and French Atlantics accompany many entries in these volumes, from the author of The Three Musketeers to World War I, in itself a crucial historical and cultural rediscovery of France by the United States in which the experience of black GIs in a nonsegregated if colonial Republic impelled a further series of cultural transformations and exchanges. This point about race and imperialism points to two important political dimensions to the French Atlantic. The first is that of the complementary but also competing political and cultural modernities of the American and French Revolutions. Political and intellectual developments in eighteenth-century France had a massive impact on the next century’s revolutions in Haiti and Latin America. That relationship also goes to the heart of a second political point, that of the crisis of French universalism that the French Atlantic represents, be it when Toussaint L’Ouverture takes the republican discourse a little too literally in the years before 1803, or when the contemporary republic struggles to come to terms with questions of difference raised by the large Moslem population, the AIDS epidemic, or feminist agendas. It is thus important to emphasize that the French Atlantic is never a one-way street. It forces an engagement with debates around postwar modernization in Europe, the profound impact of the Marshall Plan, changed business practices, and the rise of consumer capitalism. At the same time, however, it sidesteps the cultural imperialism argument—vocal in France, for example, when Disneyland Paris opened in 1992—which posits a confrontation between two “whole,” nonporous cultures. In turn, the French Atlantic also upsets the binaries and identities built around Americanness itself, in particular forcing the rediscovery and reassessment of the multilingual history and reality of the United States. There is a concept that is at the heart of this crucial, renewed Frenchness as diaspora. In the chapter “Postulats de la linguistique” of A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze
8
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
and Félix Guattari suggest ways in which French may indeed be “francophonized.” Within their ontology of particles, flows, and codings, “minor” languages and cultures are to be understood in terms not of numbers but of the relationship between becoming and the process of territorialization and deterritorialization. Minor cultures refuse and question fixity and positions of mastery. Quebec French is minor in relationship to the vast North American anglophone majority, but also in relation to standard French. Individual utterances always imply collective assemblages. “Minor” and “major” attitudes can be adopted toward any language or culture. Quebec French can fall back on Oedipal and masculinized reterritorializations. But metropolitan French and its variants may also be made to undermine “major” culture’s pretensions to the natural, normal, and universal. For Deleuze and Guattari, a “language” in the singular does not exist except as a certain unstable play of variants and constants. The French Atlantic could conceivably, then, contribute to a process whereby “French” would be destabilized, in which seeds of becoming, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, could trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority. In 1979 Guy Hocquenghem wrote that he longed for “a france in pieces” (32), given over to multiple identities. Significantly, however, the concept of “France” here remains and has not been subsumed in another culture. The French Atlantic does not deconstruct France out of existence; on the contrary it proposes that Frenchness is more important than ever: not in the comfortable or threatened assertions of cultural nationalism, but as a diverse and creative force inhabiting spaces between cultures, shaping interactions, turning up unexpectedly, challenging assumptions. I would like to end by quoting from a text that is truly “French Atlantic” but that bypasses France itself. It is part of the preface that Edouard Glissant wrote to the 1999 Paris Gallimard edition of L’Homme rapaillé, the classic collection of poems by the Quebec nationalist writer Gaston Miron. Recounting in very free direct discourse a journey made to Quebec and to Miron, Glissant recounts the winter rural scene (“here space both joins up with you and takes you out of yourself, here the tornadoes are born and build up that will hit the spaces of the Americas”) before zooming back to Montreal, where Miron suggests that his poor, maligned French language, Quebec French to boot, is “a splendid streetwalker that mocks standardized unlingualism” (13–14). Glissant is astonished that here the French language, so long for him associated with domination and arrogance, is turned by the poet into a pathetic, suffering thing, and he likens it to a Caribbean Creole emerging and seeking the light of day. With Miron, Glissant expresses his determination to whip up their threatened languages and declaim throughout the world with both anguish and “stubborn hope” that they too—along with all tongues that are Creole or uprooted [dessouchées]—will be part of, will share and participate in, French and Frenchness.
FRANCE AND CANADA Frédéric Bastien
Relations between France and Canada have varied greatly over the 400-year period since first colonization. They have in general been marked by an asymmetrical relationship, characterized by nostalgia on the part of the French Canadians and relative indifference on the part of the French. Franco-Canadian relations are thus articulated in relation to Quebec above all else. France has developed a direct and privileged relation with its former colony because of this central factor, and the survival in collective memory of General de Gaulle’s “vive le Québec libre” of 1967. (See GAULLE, GENERAL CHARLES DE; QUEBEC.) In the beginning, however, France took a later interest in the New World than England, Portugal, and Spain. It was only in 1534 that Jacques Cartier sailed up the Saint Lawrence River, forty-two years after Columbus’s “discovery.” Cartier made three voyages, getting as far as present-day Montreal, but they failed to arouse in France a project for exploiting these new territories. And not until 1608 did the French show any more interest, when Samuel de Champlain established a trading post for furs. The fur trade, and not colonization per se, was the key motivation. Although some settlers arrived, it was on a very small scale. Nevertheless Louis XIV tried to expand the colony and make it prosper, sending women and trying to develop timber and agricultural resources. (See CARTIER, JACQUES; CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL DE; FUR TRADE; MONTREAL; SAINT LAWRENCE RIVER; TIMBER.) These early efforts failed and France fell back on its traditional indifference toward the colony, an attitude cruelly exposed by the wars with Britain, which in North America confronted New France from its base of thirteen colonies. Although France committed few resources to it, the war in America was unpopular, and conducted with little enthusiasm by French elites. Voltaire wrote that he was like the general public, who loved peace more than they loved Canada and thought France could be perfectly happy without Quebec. 9
10
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
In 1763, after the end of the French and Indian War, Louis XV signed the Treaty of Paris, which ceded French North America and its 60,000 inhabitants to Great Britain. France was left with some Caribbean islands and in the North Atlantic the outcrops of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. The colonial elites went back to France, leaving the rest of the population, mainly peasants and clergy, to their own devices, provoking among the (French) Canadians a sense of abandonment, finding themselves completely cut off from the “mother country.” In its turn France quickly forgot about them. Nearly sixty years after the Conquest, Tocqueville was astonished to discover that the (French) Canadians had not forgotten the language of their ancestors, and that French remained the language of the Saint Lawrence valley. He was deeply touched by the warm welcome he received as a “Frenchman from old France,” but his account of his journey aroused no interest in France itself. (See FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR; LANGUAGE; SAINT-PIERRE ET MIQUELON; TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE; TREATY OF PARIS [1763]). A similar nonreaction occurred in 1839. The French writer Alfred de Vigny was in London, visiting the House of Lords, at the very moment when the Durham report was being debated. Lord Durham, governor-general of Canada, advocated the forced assimilation of the French Canadians after the armed rebellions of 1837–1838. Vigny tried to whip up public opinion in France, but to general indifference. In fact, it was only in 1855 that the first official contacts between France and Quebec took place, when the Emperor Napoléon III sent the warship La Capricieuse to Quebec City, to a warm reception from the population. The first institutional contacts began a few years later. In 1881 Quebec premier Adolphe Chapleau made a six-month visit to France and on his return created the post of agent general in Paris, appointing Senator Hector Fabre, who occupied the position for nearly thirty years and also became the representative of Canada. The renewed interest at the official level was confirmed by the visits of Quebec premier Honoré Mercier and the first francophone prime minister of Canada, Wilfrid Laurier, who were welcomed with some emotion in France in, respectively, 1891 and 1897, although little followed from them in the short and medium term. It was not until 1927 that France and Canada officially established diplomatic relations. In spite of this and Canada’s participation as an ally of France in two world wars, the links remained distant both diplomatically and in the attitudes of the two populations. This does not mean that no one in France took an interest in Canada. Many in nationalist and catholic milieus, especially after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, began to look upon (French) Canada in a positive light compared to France, for families remained large and religious observance strong. Charles de Gaulle was born into this kind of milieu in 1890, and from adolescence took an interest in the French Canadians. This took on a historical and political dimension when on August 1, 1940, he appealed to them from London to help save France. The problem, however, was that the French Canadians were at first sympathetic to Marshal Pétain’s regime, while anglophone Canada immediately adopted the British position and supported de Gaulle. Nevertheless, the Québécois were hostile to the policy of collaboration and leaned toward Gaullism the more the Vichy regime’s collusion with Nazism became apparent. During his visit to Canada in 1944, de
FRANCE AND CANADA
11
Gaulle was acclaimed equally in English and French Canada. (See CATHOLIC CHURCH; WORLD WAR II.) In the aftermath of the war, France and Canada kept up cordial diplomatic relations, but they were in fact largely devoid of substance. Despite the fact that certain great French artists such as Charles Trenet and Charles Aznavour enjoyed some of their first successes in Quebec, and even if French Canadians were often imbued with French culture, and thinkers such as Emmanuel Mounier had many followers there, the links between the two communities remained minimal. (See MUSIC [POP].) Things did not change until a further visit from Charles de Gaulle in 1960, which had important long-term consequences. Besides visiting Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, de Gaulle also visited Quebec City, where he met the province’s leading politicians. De Gaulle retained from this visit the conviction that there was indeed a “Quebec problem,” and that it had two facets. Firstly, the relation between French and English Canada was not that of equals. The francophones endured the situation of being a colonized people within Canada. Secondly, the French president also observed a malaise between the French and the French Canadians, and in particular that the latter still felt a strong resentment about being abandoned by the former colonial power. Feeling some guilt about this, de Gaulle wanted France to come to the aid of French Canada, whose identity was threatened. Moreover, in this period of decolonization he was seeking new ways for France to maintain its world influence in political, military, and cultural domains. Since France had not been able to hold on to its empire, it could nonetheless renew close relations with those “cousins” who were also seeking links. It was obvious that a stronger French presence in Quebec could only help to maintain France’s status in the world. The link is clear between the end of the French colonial empire and the relaunch of official Franco-Quebec relations. This explains the interest taken by de Gaulle, and the timing of his policy decisions on the matter, toward the end of the Algerian war. In the early 1960s, de Gaulle asked his culture minister André Malraux to take charge of relations with Quebec. Malraux was probably chosen because the general was not sure where to begin, and thought culture was the most likely candidate. On the Quebec side, the new government of Jean Lesage, elected in 1960, was very keen to renew relations with France, and in particular to set up Quebec’s own diplomatic representation in Paris. André Malraux was favorable to this idea as he wanted to set up a “Maison du Québec” in Paris that would serve as a kind of shopwindow for Quebec in France. The project came to fruition in 1961 and the French authorities spared no effort or expense. The Maison du Québec was opened on October 4, 1961, by Malraux and Lesage, and its wide coverage in the media was unprecedented for a Quebec news story in France. In 1965, the Maison du Québec became the “Délégation générale du Québec en France” and gained near-embassy status, dealing directly with the French government without passing through the federal Canadian government. Three years later, de Gaulle instructed the French consulate in Quebec City to take responsibility for relations with the Quebec government and to bypass the embassy in Ottawa. These two institutions, the Délégation and the consulate, thus came to embody the direct and privileged relations that existed between the province and the French Republic.
12
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
De Gaulle made many other concrete and also symbolic gestures in favor of Quebec. Premier Jean Lesage was received in Paris in 1961 with the honors and ceremony due to a head of state. De Gaulle’s toast contained the familiar bombast: “You are Quebec, you are the French Canadians.” De Gaulle’s strategy was to undo the cold war politics of two opposing blocs, and thus to carve out for France a great role in international relations. Helping the French Canadians in their self-emancipation was one of his ways of making France’s presence felt in the world. He also noted to his minister Alain Peyrefitte that the French population of Canada was in danger of losing its identity, and that France had to come to its aid. For its part, Quebec wished to build a modern state and to assert its French-speaking identity within Canada, as well as its internal competencies in matters of education and culture that were put forth onto the international scene, such as the creation of foreign delegations including the Maison du Québec in Paris. In all these respects, cooperation with France was welcomed. The interests of the two governments thus converged. The next cooperative gesture took the form of an exhibition of French technology in Montreal in 1963, where the minister of culture was again present. Malraux’s eight-day visit garnered much publicity in Quebec, and prefigured that of de Gaulle four years later. Malraux emphasized the importance of French-Quebec relations wherever he went: “Canadians? I don’t know who they are, I haven’t met any. I only know French Canadians. France feels remorse only toward them.” However, de Gaulle wanted to go further than a special relationship with Quebec, as he made clear in a note written in 1963, in which he expressed the wish to avoid “drowning” relations with the province in something concerning “the two Canadas.” “What is more,” he argued, “French Canada will become a state in its own right, and we have to act with that prospect in mind.” De Gaulle was thus without question in favor of Quebec’s independence before his famous 1967 visit. His views on English Canada in this scenario were that it should avoid being absorbed by the United States and in general try to keep its distance. His vision was at least coherent, seeking to resist the polarization of the world into two blocs, emphasizing a fear of the omnipotence of the United States and a reinforcement of the American bloc if such an absorption of Canada occurred following the independence of Quebec. So beyond the political emancipation of the Québécois, de Gaulle hoped for a close alliance between the two Canadas in order to limit American influence. This was the message he conveyed to the Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson on his visit to France in 1964, while holding back from hinting at the possibility of a sovereign Quebec. The famous “Vive le Québec libre,” de Gaulle’s final utterance from the balcony of Montreal city hall on July 24, 1967, was thus a faithful reflection of his outlook. However, the form it took was rather improvised. The president had hesitated about going to Quebec at the time of Expo 67, but went ahead on the insistence of Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau and of Robert Bordaz, director of the French pavilion. De Gaulle nonetheless insisted on starting his visit in Quebec City rather than Ottawa, the federal capital. Indeed his ar-
FRANCE AND CANADA
13
rival by sea meant that this was where he had to set foot first, at l’Anse-au-Foulon. His speeches on that day emphasized the need for the Québécois to decide their own destiny. None of this, however, prefigured what was to come in Montreal, first of all because it had not been planned for de Gaulle to speak from the balcony. He had arrived at the city hall and was greeting the excited crowd. His request to address them was enabled by the fact that a technician from the French public service television channel SRC had placed a microphone on the balcony despite the explicit instructions of mayor Drapeau. This allowed the president to launch into his improvised but deeply felt and rather coherent speech. The event marked a turning point in relations between France and both Canada and Quebec. For even if Quebec’s leaders at the time were not seeking independence, they were very much in favor of further cooperation between the French and the Québécois. This cooperation began under de Gaulle but was greatly amplified in the years that followed. The first exchanges were in the domain of public administration. From the 1960s onward, places were reserved for Quebec among the cohort of foreign students at the Ecole nationale d’administration. In 1968, Quebec founded its own school of this kind, the Ecole nationale d’administration publique, partly on the French model. Similarly, the Québécois were attempting at the time to set up their own system of national insurance. In 1964, premier Jean Lesage’s meeting with François Bloch Lainé, the chairman of the Caisse de dépôt, which administered French savings, convinced him to imitate France in this domain. A few months later his government set up the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. At the same time, the two governments increased the number of grants available to enable their nationals to study in the other country, and also organized many short courses for professional training. Here the creation of the Office franco-québécois pour la jeunesse (OFQJ) and the associations France-Québec and Québec-France were crucial. The first was inspired by a Franco-German office for youth set up in 1962, which aimed to bring together the younger generation of French and Germans. Through short courses and other exchanges, the OFQJ brought some 100,000 young people across the Atlantic over a period of thirty-five years. The second was the focal point for everyone in France interested in Quebec and wishing to organize joint activities. The equivalent association was set up in Quebec in 1971. Besides these three entities, cooperation in research was also one of the main axes of the France-Quebec relationship. In 1983 a magazine was set up, Médecine science, which was a direct result of this, followed in 1988 by the Revue des sciences de l’eau. Further links were created between the Centre de recherche industrielle in Quebec and the Agence nationale de valorisation de la recherche, as well as between Quebec CEGEP (pre-university high schools) and the French IUT (Instituts universitaires techniques). University research in biotechnology was also jointly conducted by the Pasteur and Armand Frappier Institutes, McGill, Sherbrooke, Laval, and Compiègne universities, and the Institut national pour la recherche agronomique. These joint research operations went hand in hand with massive increases in student exchanges, reaching thousands per year by 2004.
14
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
The two governments also cooperated in the cultural domain, over and beyond the many artists and writers who have enjoyed transatlantic success. The Québécois had long held French culture in great affection. As well as Aznavour and Trenet, radio had broadcast French songs and in turn Quebec artists and singers dreamed of and aimed for success in France. This came to Félix Leclerc in the 1950s and Robert Charlebois in the early 1970s. Among the first Quebec writers to be recognized in France were Anne Hébert and Marie-Claire Blais. (See LITERARY RELATIONS.) At the time of the first intergovernmental cultural cooperation, the Québécois were in fact much more influenced by American culture than at any time since World War II. Cultural exchanges were thus meant to reinforce the francophone character of Quebec. In the late 1970s, a new TV channel, TVFQ99, was set up to broadcast to Quebec a selection of programs from France. In 1987, this was extended to the whole of la francophonie and marked the beginning of TV5. (See FRANCOPHONIE, LA; TELEVISION.) While all this was going on, relations between France and Canada were more hard going. In cultural, scientific, or other domains, relations between Ottawa and Paris remained distant and rarely gave rise to anything concrete. This was even the case for economic relations, which never surpassed those set up between France and Quebec, despite several attempts by the Canadian government. This failure has to do with the limits of Canadian bilingualism. More than ever, linguistic dualism is about a francophone Quebec faced with nine anglophone provinces. The federal Canadian government has failed to extend the use of French to the rest of the country. As far as cooperation with France is concerned, this constitutes a major obstacle for Ottawa, which can never be more francophone than Quebec and cannot, according to the Canadian constitution, encroach upon the jurisdiction of the Quebec government in matters of education and culture. In this way Quebec is still France’s privileged partner, and this dominates Franco-Canadian relations, in which direct links between France and Quebec, begun by de Gaulle, proliferate despite the opposition of the central Canadian government. The first issue at stake is Quebec’s position in the international institutions set up by French-speaking nations. In 1968, at de Gaulle’s insistence, Quebec was invited by Gabon to take part in a conference of education ministers from francophone countries in Libreville. The Canadian government was thus completely excluded on the grounds that education was a provincial responsibility. When a similar conference was held the following year, Canada and Quebec agreed on a formula allowing both levels of government to take part. The question was far from being settled, however. In 1970 francophone countries organized a meeting at Niamey in Niger that aimed to set up an Agency for Cultural and Technical Co-operation (ACCT). Canada was invited, and so the question was what place Quebec would have in the new institution, since it was demanding participation distinct from that of Canada. Ottawa was set against this idea and campaigned intensively on the diplomatic front to get the other francophone countries on its side. President Georges Pompidou of France considered that France was setting up the institutions of la francophonie for Quebec, and thus it was absurd to associate with Ottawa and by doing so exclude Quebec. Paris did its utmost to allow Quebec to participate in its own right, and so
FRANCE AND CANADA
15
Quebec gained the status of “participating government,” which allowed it to join the ACCT directly. This was just the first occasion on which France supported Quebec to the hilt against the claims of the Ottawa government. La francophonie continued to develop and soon a summit was organized, at which Ottawa refused any autonomous participation by Quebec. France in turn refused to join any summit without Quebec. The position under presidents Valèry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand was thus the same as under de Gaulle and Pompidou: no francophonie without Quebec. Ottawa thus had to temper its position, and at the first francophone summit in Paris in 1986 Quebec had its own statute of participating government. France and Canada also collided around the question of Quebec sovereignty. Although presidents after de Gaulle did not call for independence, they nonetheless established warm relations with the Parti Québécois (PQ), assuring them of France’s support if a referendum delivered a “yes” vote. In November 1976, the PQ won power in Quebec for the first time, promising a referendum on independence. President Giscard d’Estaing of France was a centrist politician relying on Gaullist votes for a majority in parliament. Although in 1967 Giscard had described de Gaulle’s trip to Quebec as “a solitary exercise of power,” he now unexpectedly changed his tune and swung behind the PQ. The reason was that Jacques Chirac, then leader of the Gaullist RPR Party, had been accusing Giscard of abandoning de Gaulle’s legacy at a time when the PQ’s election victory seemed to have proven him right. Giscard needed to show he was not straying too far from the Gaullist line on the matter. This was all the easier to do as Giscard’s personal relations with Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau were very bad. Both men tried to present themselves as modern, flamboyant, and media savvy, and their resemblance to each other in fact increased their rivalry. (See CHIRAC, JACQUES; GISCARD D’ESTAING, VALÉRY; LÉVESQUE, RENÉ; MITTERRAND, FRANÇOIS; POMPIDOU, GEORGES; TRUDEAU, PIERRE ELLIOTT.) Despite the opposition of the federal Canadian government, in 1977 Giscard invited premier René Lévesque to Paris and gave a public assurance of France’s “understanding and support on the road you decide to take.” This clearly meant that if the “yes” vote won in the 1980 referendum on sovereignty, France would back Quebec. The scenario was repeated in 1995, even though Jacques Chirac, now president, had distanced himself from the Parti Québécois because it had applied to join the Socialist International in order to cozy up to François Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste. However, Chirac had now to deal with another PQ election victory and sovereignty referendum. In January 1995, Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau met presidential candidate Chirac in Paris. Chirac’s standing in the polls had slipped and some of his allies in the RPR Party had withdrawn their backing. Among those who continued to support him on the right wing of Gaullism were precisely those who were in favor of Quebec independence. Chirac thus swung behind the PQ, declaring that France must stand shoulder to shoulder with Quebec. The Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien was furious, declaring that Chirac had as much chance of becoming president as Quebec had of becoming sovereign. While this poisoned relations between the two men at the time, they were later reconciled. After
16
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
becoming president, Chirac laid it on further a few days before the October 1995 referendum, repeating publicly that France would support Quebec if the “yes” vote won, and was even ready to take this unilateral position merely hours after the result. In summary, then, although successive French presidents have never gone as far as de Gaulle, they have all followed in his footsteps, because factors such as existing cooperation between the two countries and the importance of the Quebec question in French internal politics have been so strong. France will not abandon its special relationship with Quebec, and Quebec is happy with that. It seems inevitable therefore that relations between France and Canada will be dominated by the France-Quebec relationship, which for Paris is more advantageous and more substantial. Whenever France has to choose between Canada and Quebec, Quebec will always win out.
FRANCE AND THE CARIBBEAN Michael Dash
The term “Francophone Caribbean” refers principally to those parts of the Caribbean— Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guiana—left in the aftermath of France’s overseas empire in the Americas. The history of this empire goes back to the mid-seventeenth century, when Spanish domination of the Caribbean began to be contested by the other major European powers. By the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV in 1674, France had acquired Martinique (1631), Guadeloupe (1635), and between 1646 and 1650 a dozen or so other islands, which included Dominica, Saint Lucia, Marie Galante, Grenada, and Tobago. The mainland territory of Guiana was added in 1643, and the western third of Hispaniola, called Saint Domingue, in 1697. (See GRENADA; GUADELOUPE; GUIANA; HAITI; MARTINIQUE; SANTO DOMINGO.) These early colonies, or “vieilles colonies” as they came to be known, were the fruits of France’s first experience of overseas expansion. The relationship between metropole and colony was based on trade, whereby the conquered territories provided commodities not available in Europe. Sugar became the dominant crop in the exploitation of the Caribbean colonies. With the right climate and terrain, the Caribbean colonies were perfect for sugar production. What they lacked was a massive, cheap labor force, which was drawn from slaves imported from Africa. On the brutal reality of the buying, transporting, and exploiting of human cargo, an economy was founded in which the monoculture of sugar dominated all economic activity in the colony, creating a dependence on France for manufactured goods and establishing in the colonies a hierarchical society based on race and color. (See SLAVERY; SUGAR.) Plantation slavery in the Caribbean islands brought great wealth to the French planters, who became a local white Creole elite called “bekes.” The plantation system produced a rigidly stratified society based on color: a small white plantocracy at the top, followed by poor whites (“petits blancs”) who, lacking in economic power, relied on race to distinguish themselves from mixed blood “métis,” freed slaves, and finally the slaves who 17
18
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
composed the majority of the population. In the colonies there also existed a number of escaped slaves, or “marrons,” who were numerous in those colonies where the terrain, for instance the mountains of Saint-Domingue or the jungles of Guiana, permitted the establishment of separate communities. Guiana in particular, with its dense tropical rain forest and deserved reputation as the white man’s grave because of malaria and yellow fever, allowed slaves to escape into the unexplored interior, where they attempted to reconstitute their African past. The French Revolution in 1789 had inevitable repercussions for France’s overseas colonies. Not only was the relationship of the colonies to the metropolitan government a contentious one, the future of slavery was of chief concern. Dramatic repercussions were evident in Saint-Domingue, which was in turmoil by 1791. The British, taking advantage of the unstable situation, captured a number of French possessions in the Caribbean. Even though the French retook Martinique and Guadeloupe and narrowly averted losing SaintDomingue, the economies of the Caribbean colonies continued to be adversely affected by insurrection, British attacks, and the disruption of the slave trade. The rise of Napoléon and the restoration of slavery in the Caribbean would lead to the shrinking of French possessions in the New World to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the only outpost of French rule in South America, Guiana. The last full-blown effort to assemble a colonial empire in the Caribbean was attempted by Napoléon, who envisaged a kind of French-dominated Caribbean Sea extending from Louisiana in the North to Guiana in the South with Saint-Domingue as the center of this imperial network. However, this vision was jeopardized by Napoléon’s military expansionism in Europe and his attempt to restore slavery in the Caribbean, already abolished earlier by the revolution. His incapacity to put down the revolt in SaintDomingue obliged him to sell Louisiana in 1803, and by 1804 the French had been driven out of Saint-Domingue, and Martinique and Guadeloupe had been occupied by the British. By the end of the Napoleonic wars and the time of the Restoration in 1814, France was left a much reduced imperial power. The revolution in Saint-Domingue affected more than just France’s imperial designs on the Americas; instead of channeling slave discontent into fleeing into the mountains, forests, or, in the case of SaintDomingue, into the sparsely populated Spanish side of the island, it also created the new alternative of ideologically driven armed revolt. (See BONAPARTE, NAPOLÉON; LOUISIANA PURCHASE.) The ideal of universal human rights of the French Revolution was a particular threat to slave societies, and its effect on the Caribbean illustrates the complexity of the metropolitan-colonial relationship. In Saint-Domingue each class, whether the white colonists, the wealthy nonwhite class of freedmen, or the large black slave population, was affected in different ways by the radical changes taking place in France. While seeking greater autonomy for the colony, the white Creoles wanted the system of white supremacy and the institution of slavery to be maintained. The wealthy nonwhites saw the opportunity to demand racial equality in Saint-Domingue by asserting that the Rights of Man applied to them too. The uprising of the slaves in 1791 was as much motivated by the changes taking place in the metropole as by the divided nature of white rule in Saint-
FRANCE AND THE CARIBBEAN
19
Domingue itself. Consequently, the French Revolution undermined the institution of white supremacy, severely transforming slave society in all the Caribbean colonies, creating new leadership in Saint-Domingue, and permitting the ex-slaves to develop military skills that would eventually be used to permanently secure their freedom from France. The revolutionary gains of the first decade were consolidated under Toussaint L’Ouverture, who became governor for life of the French colony. As much as anything else, the clash between Toussaint and Napoléon would lead to the latter’s fatal decision to restore slavery in Haiti and the massive resistance that led to Haitian independence in 1804. (See ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENTS; FRENCH REVOLUTION; REPUBLICANISM; TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, FRANÇOIS.) The escalating radicalism of the Haitian Revolution called into question the legitimacy of the colonial endeavor and led to the newly independent state’s immediate isolation. In France’s other Caribbean colonies the ascendancy of the radical Jacobin Party in France meant that there was pressure to assimilate these colonies into France and extend full citizenship to their inhabitants. The universalizing dynamic of Jacobinism came to an abrupt halt with the reassertion of the old colonial patriarchy by Napoléon, who was successful in reestablishing slavery in these colonies by 1802. The nineteenth century saw declining fortunes for the French Caribbean colonies. The disruption of the sugar trade during the Napoleonic wars led to the development of beet sugar in France. By 1848 slavery was abolished in the French colonies as abolitionists led by Victor Schoelcher prevailed over the planters who had fought for its retention. Emancipation came with citizenship and the right to vote but not capital or land. This meant that the hierarchy of plantation society was little changed as French planters retained economic control, the métis developed into a new professional class, and the majority of the population remained in a situation that differed little from slavery. The demographic and cultural complexity of the colonies was intensified with the importation of Indian labor in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Guiana, because of its sinister reputation, was proposed as a place for deportation, and a prison colony, or “bagne,” was developed there at this time. Given the piecemeal and even haphazard acquisition of the French colonies in the Caribbean, it is difficult to speak of a coherent colonial policy. Dictated by rivalry with European powers, colonial expansion was based on the assumption that colonies were meant exclusively for economic profit and political prestige. They could also solve problems in the metropole like finding a home for the landless and the jobless or, as in the case of Guiana, providing a solution for ridding France of undesirables by deportation. The moral mandate that justified colonization in the Caribbean as elsewhere was a presumed white and Western superiority over inferior and backward colonized peoples. In this regard the French differed little from the British in a race-based policy of colonial exploitation. The nineteenth century, however, meant a change in colonial policy for France, which made it very different from that of the British. The emphasis placed on centralization of power in Paris and administrative standardization led the French to conceive of a policy destined to remove all differences between colonies and the metropole. It was an ambitious plan aimed at heading off any attempt at autonomy in the colonies by transforming overseas territories and their inhabitants into carbon copies of France and its people.
20
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
Under the policy of assimilation, French colonialism projected itself as more humanitarian and modernizing than racist and exploitative. The act of emancipation in 1848 was projected as the ultimate gesture of generosity of the French Republic to its colonial subjects. Its colonial policies would not therefore be marked by the exploitative practices of the monarchy. Benign and paternalist, this policy meant a shift from a biological to a cultural racism. The assumption was that the colonized were not inherently inferior but had fallen behind in the evolution of modern society. They could become modern and progressive once they had shed their own supposedly inferior culture and embraced French values. Built on the previous short-lived experience of Jacobin universalism, abolition launched the idea of France’s “mission civilisatrice” that was aimed, in theory at least, at incorporating the former slaves into the French Republican family. A policy that set out not to dominate and exploit but to liberate and enlighten was seen as particularly necessary. It responded both to the need to break with the old France of royalists and reactionaries as well as to the apparent willingness of the majority of French Caribbean people to subscribe to this myth, embodied in the figure of the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher. Also, having lost Haiti and having abandoned its imperial designs on the Caribbean, France would reinforce its colonial links by ostracizing Haiti as a land of black barbarity and by fostering an assimilationist policy in its Caribbean colonies, which would attempt to erase the past of plantation slavery and racial exploitation. By the end of the nineteenth century there was even early talk by colonial politicians of departmentalization of Martinique and Guadeloupe. The outbreak of war in 1914 further cemented the bond with France, as conscription laws were extended to the Caribbean colonies allowing them to give the ultimate sacrifice for “la mère-patrie.” Through the institution of secular education from the 1920s on, the glories of French civilization were offered as a safe exit from the rigors of the cane fields. The celebration of the tercentenary of French settlement in the Caribbean was as a result the occasion for a display of unbridled francophilia. The successful implementation of assimilation meant both the neutralizing of Haiti and the institution of a policy that meant the denial of both cultural difference and historical experience. While it promised equality and integration, assimilation certainly did not permit recognition or reciprocity. It consequently left hybrid plantation-derived Caribbean societies with an inability to assert themselves as different. At the same time, it condemned them to legitimizing French cultural superiority. This identity crisis was further complicated by the increasing economic and political dependence of the Caribbean colonies on France and in the twentieth century the choice of departmentalization, which arguably signified the most complete form of colonization possible. The reduction of France’s empire in the Americas did not signal the end of its influence on Atlantic culture in the Caribbean nor the end of the region’s impact on the metropole. Indeed, the specter of the Haitian Revolution and its potential threat to the imperial enterprise haunted the French even as they extended their empire in other parts of the world in the nineteenth century. Far from being a gulf that separated former colonies from the metropole, France’s Caribbean relations survive in terms of what the former colonizing power chooses to remember and forget of its past involvement with the region. These
FRANCE AND THE CARIBBEAN
21
relations also survive in terms of what France’s former colonies choose not to forget about a past that preceded the revolutionary idealism of 1789. The awkward embrace of France by its former Caribbean colonies is apparent in the popular choice of departmentalization in 1946, which has become a source of bitter recrimination in contemporary writing. Even Haiti, which violently threw out the French, projects its French past as a buffer against U.S. imperialist domination. During the American occupation in the 1920s, the radicals of the nationalist movement of the time defined Haiti’s cultural peculiarity in terms of its Afro-Latin heritage, even if to this day the indemnity paid to French planters to secure France’s recognition of its former colony never ceases to rankle. The new phase of French Caribbean colonialism in the nineteenth century, haunted as it was by the image of Haiti, would constitute a special imaginary space, which resulted in the absorption, feminization, and eventual effacement of the “old colonies.” For instance, one would be hard put to find any systematic representation of France’s Caribbean colonies in French writing. Such a lack contrasts with France’s fixation with the Orient and exists despite the length of the French relationship with these colonies and their economic importance to the metropole. This pattern of avoidance and omission of the concrete realities of France’s Caribbean past is reflected as such in the mimetic image of the “petite patrie” used to describe Martinique and Guadeloupe in the early twentieth century, as it is in the image of Satanism that succeeded the loss of Saint-Domingue. Documentary realism was reserved for describing the social and economic situation of the metropole and an exoticist aesthetic would dominate the representation of the Caribbean in French literature. The silencing of the reality of the French Caribbean is apparent in the romantic period, where neither the leaders nor the specific events of the Haitian Revolution, nor the unsuccessful resistance movement led by Louis Delgres, served as sources of inspiration for the romantics. This literary disengagement from the region is apparent in the novel Bug-Jargal (1820) by Victor Hugo (1802–1885), which deals with the Haitian Revolution. This vivid chronicle is purportedly historical fiction detailing the dramatic events at the turn of the century in Saint-Domingue, but it does not specify a single figure in the Haitian Revolution, choosing instead to feature local color and stereotyped racial figures. Reducing one of the major events of the nineteenth century to idealizing a noble generic black protagonist and vilifying perfidious mulattoes leads to a dehistoricization of the Caribbean. The grand spectacle of nature effaces human reality in Hugo’s novel. Alphonse de Lamartine’s (1790–1869) first play, Toussaint Louverture, is no less abstract and moralizing in its depiction of an unreal landscape of tigers and snow rampant with romantic sentimentalism. The romance of the tropics and the longing for a simpler, more pastoral world are strongly echoed later by Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904). His Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), written during his visit to Martinique in the 1880s, is largely a panegyric to “beautiful fruit-colored populations” who precariously inhabit this exotic space. Even someone like Hearn, who seemed genuinely interested in Martinican life, is not immune to the condescending exotic image of the Caribbean colony that became firmly established in the French literary imagination by the end of the nineteenth century. (See HUGO, VICTOR.)
22
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
As far as Martinique and Guadeloupe are concerned, French universalism in the Caribbean was reduced to the welcoming passive face of the Creole woman, which became the stock in trade for an exotic literature that marked a process of absorption and assimilation of the old colonies. The complicity of the writers from the colonies in this process has often been remarked on. For instance, the figure of the French Caribbean doudou, the alluring, compliant female face of the colonies, moved from a metropolitan myth to one that was adopted by local writers. This theme conveyed an image of total dependency on the metropole and a longing for absolute domination. Constituting the Antilles as a zone of pleasure and self-denial, black and colored French Caribbean writers such as Oruno Lara (1879–1924), Daniel Thaly (1879–1949), and Gilbert de Chambertrand (1890–1984) produced a poetry that evoked an infantilized, submissive tropical world. It is this love for the metropole, not fully requited up to this point, that would find its consummation in the granting of departmental status to the Caribbean colonies in 1946. The ideal of revolutionary universalism had a different trajectory in Haiti, where from the outset the extreme application of the ideal of the rights of man had led to the defeat of Napoléon’s troops and Haitian independence. French universalism meant for France’s colonies the right to be French, and the emphasis was put on the generosity of the French in offering universal values to their grateful subjects. In Haiti, however, revolutionary universalism was linked to human rights and equality, and was immune from cultural and historical differences. Consequently, the idea of the French as the guardians of universalism was as absurd as the idea of a Haitian-derived universalism. Consequently, universalist thought was appropriated in Haiti in the nineteenth century by essayists who were both refuting the charges—made by Haiti’s detractors—of Haitian exceptionalism and racial difference and attempting to redefine within Haiti concepts of race and nation. The most notable of these essayists was Anténor Firmin, who in his monumental De L’Egalité des races humaines argued for the ideal of a unitary oneness of all humankind in contrast to the conception of biological difference promoted by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882). If this early work argued that an “invisible chain” linked all humankind in “a common circle,” Firmin’s last published essays, The Letters from St. Thomas, sought to defetishize racial and national determinism at home. Written in exile, these letters explore the idea of universalist thought as a way of understanding global interconnectedness and cosmopolitan modernity that was well ahead of its time. In the early twentieth century France’s interests in the Caribbean were slowly being eroded by the emerging influence of the United States. In Haiti one of the more fiercely argued debates at the turn of the century was whether Haiti should espouse Latin or Anglo-Saxon values. Old European influences, it was argued, should yield to new American ideas of technological progress and shift away from outmoded ideas of classical culture. With the completion of the Panama Canal, naval control of the northern Caribbean was secured in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, and Haiti occupied it in 1915. Increasingly, French universalism was attacked by leftist intellectuals from Martinique and Guadeloupe in France for its intolerance of the cultural difference of others and for promoting its own specificity as universal values. There were also intellectual tensions within
FRANCE AND THE CARIBBEAN
23
France between Republican universalism on one hand and nationalist particularism on the other. The extremes of the latter view were articulated by Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) and Charles Maurras (1868–1952), and its implications were not lost on intellectuals from the French colonies. Nor was the anticolonial impulse of the surrealists in the 1930s, when they attacked not only the economic exploitation of the colonial system but the literary exploitation of the exotic image of greater France. French universalism was unmasked as legitimizing oppression by the influential but short-lived French Caribbean student movement Légitime Défense (1932), which had been inspired by the surrealist movement. The very title of their journal indicated their attachment to André Breton, whose movement offered the students a way of making the case for decolonization based on the importance of the idea of difference. In so doing they were the first to break so vocally with the trend in the old colonies to seek greater integration with the metropole. If the surrealists fed anticolonial thought in a radical vanguard in the French Caribbean colonies, Haitian nationalism in the 1920s reacted to the U.S. occupation of the country by asserting Haitian racial and cultural difference with the help of the ideas of Barrès and Maurras. In 1928 the Haitian intellectual Jean Price-Mars published his Ainsi Parla l’Oncle, which accused the Haitian elite of “bovarysme collectif ” by betraying their nation because of too great an attachment to European cosmopolitan values. The only way to correct this unfortunate dependence on Europe was for the Haitian elite to pay more attention to the authentic values of Haiti, which were identified in the culture, language, and religion of the peasantry. French universalism was now exposed as empty rhetoric, and those who adhered to it in Haiti and the French colonies were seen as traitors to their people. This anticolonial trust also found support among French thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who, in his 1948 essay “Orphée noir,” pointed to the need for a reaction against European universal values through the “anti-racist racism” of négritude. The evolution of the concept of national specificity in the Caribbean would take different paths in the French Caribbean colonies as opposed to Haiti. The fate of the idea of nationalist particularism in the colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe would rest with Aimé Césaire, whose Cahier d’un retour au pays natal signaled both his return to Martinique, where he dominated political life for decades to come, and his particular view of universal values. Two of the founding figures of négritude, Césaire and Léopold Senghor (1906–2001), seemed particularly preoccupied with the idea of universal values. The whole problematic of négritude was predicated on French racial theories. The end of Césaire’s epic poem pleads, for instance, that the native land’s “noire vibration” be linked to “le nombril même du monde.” In this regard these two poets were very different from the earlier Légitime Défense group and from the other often overlooked founding figure, Léon Damas of French Guiana. (See CÉSAIRE, AIMÉ; SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL.) The defeat of France in 1940 and the control of the French Caribbean by a pro-Vichy military regime created a disillusion with Vichy France that led to what Frantz Fanon reported as “an extraordinary sight” of French West Indians refusing “to take their hats off while the Marseillaise was being played.” This turning away from the “mère patrie” meant the emergence of an interest among intellectuals in racial and regional identity. Such a
24
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
shift can be seen in the pages of the magazine Tropiques and ultimately in the political success of Aimé Césaire in Martinique. The latter’s emergence should be seen in the context of the hardship of the war years, which also meant a nostalgic attachment to pre-Vichy France and to the charismatic figure of General de Gaulle to whom the assimilationist longings of the pre-war years were attached after the end of the Vichy regime. By the end of the war in 1945 the cult of Schoelcherism was transferred to de Gaulle, and the clamor for integration into the transcontinental family of greater France intensified. Aimé Césaire saw departmentalization in 1946, ironically, as a way of decolonizing the French Caribbean colonies. It was felt that if Schoelcher had brought liberty, it would be de Gaulle’s mission to continue the spirit of 1848 and bestow equality and fraternity on France’s adopted children. By the 1950s the French departments began their transition from an agricultural-based economy to a consumer-oriented society with mounting unemployment. If the postwar period led to the denial of difference for the French departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana, in Haiti the impact of anti-American-inspired nationalist thought and of anticolonial surrealist ideas meant that the question of cultural identity would be negotiated differently there. Haiti held interest for the surrealists not only because of a fascination with the mysteries of the voodoo religion, but also because the Haitian Revolution was seen as a major challenge to European imperial expansion. Displacement due to World War II brought Pierre Mabille (1904–1952) in 1940 to Haiti, where in 1941 he helped found the Bureau d’Ethnologie with Haitian intellectuals Jean Price-Mars and Jacques Roumain and the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux (1902–1963). In 1945, Mabille, who had been appointed French cultural attaché, invited André Breton to give a series of lectures that coincided with an exhibition of the work of the Cuban surrealist Wilfredo Lam and Haitian intuitive artists. Even though it was never his intention, Breton’s speeches, with their insistence on the surrealist promotion of absolute freedom, revived the drive force of the revolutionary universalism of 1804 and fanned a popular revolt against the then president of Haiti. Both Mabille and Breton were declared personae non gratae and expelled from Haiti. A few months later the Haitian president himself was driven into exile. (See SURREALISM; WORLD WAR II.) The political impact on Haiti of these interventions by surrealists who had taken refuge from the war outside of Europe is interesting in itself. Their legacy might, however, be seen as even longer lasting when viewed from the perspective of their approach to Haitian culture. What one finds in the surrealist accounts of Haitian culture in the 1940s is an acute sensitivity to its staggering complexity and a refusal either to exoticize it or to appropriate it. Haitian culture emerges in the writing of Pierre Mabille in the 1940s as unfathomable, ever changing, both familiar and strange. This attitude to Haitian culture, which located it in the West while attempting to recognize its difference, acted as a shaping force at the time on Haitian intellectuals such as Jacques-Stephen Alexis and René Depestre. It is no coincidence that they were among the foremost of their generation to criticize the négritude movement with its sweeping, monolithic ideas of race as well as to promote a Marxist critique of the atemporal, exotic image of Haitian culture as stranded outside of history. Their interest in what they called the “marvelous realism” of Haitian
FRANCE AND THE CARIBBEAN
25
culture shows their debt to the surrealists as well as their idea of a cultural dynamic in Haitian identity politics that inevitably made them targets of the totalizing racial ideology of the Duvalier dictatorship in the 1960s, which found its inspiration in European fascism and the racial mystification of négritude. The reaction against the racial constructs of négritude, which began to be seen by such radical thinkers as the Martinican Frantz Fanon as increasingly allied with the French state and neocolonial politics, was also fed in the French departments by the legacy of ideas left by the surrealists during their passage through the Caribbean. In the context of decolonization and postcolonial thought, Edouard Glissant in the late 1950s posed a series of questions as to the nature of cultural interaction and the right of cultures to resist global assimilation through recognition of their opacity. French-based intellectuals such as Milan Kundera (b. 1929) have made the literary links between French Caribbean writers such as René Depestre and the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau. Despite these sophisticated attempts by Glissant and the later créolité movement, which remained enormously indebted to him intellectually, to rethink the polarizing binaries of colonialism, Martinique in particular continued under Césaire’s guidance to remain staunchly loyal to France. The enthusiastic local reaction to visits by André Malraux in 1958 and by de Gaulle himself in 1960 and 1964 clearly illustrates the continuation of the relationship. In the case of the latter, the rapturous reception he received drove him to exclaim “Mon Dieu, comme vous êtes français!” (See CHAMOISEAU, PATRICK; DEPESTRE, RENÉ; GLISSANT, EDOUARD.) No French president has had as strong a loyalty in the Caribbean departments as de Gaulle. An earlier enthusiasm for being French has been arguably replaced by a fear of being abandoned by the French. With the erosion of the departments’ productive base, their dependence on the French welfare state has become a matter of glum pragmatism. Discontent with departmentalization is now as evident among the white Creole elite as it is among the colored bourgeoisie and the lower classes. Traditional business interests resent the penetration of metropolitan capital with the spread of Monoprix and Prisunics. Local administrators and teachers are unhappy with the recruitment of French teachers and administrators for posts in the Caribbean, whereas many qualified West Indians are obliged to seek jobs in France. The decline of the economy and resulting unemployment has created a restless and resentful lower class. The current creole revivalism in the Caribbean Overseas Departments is an effort to preserve a threatened cultural heritage. Much current French Caribbean writing is preoccupied with memory and autobiography and the articulation of a local particularity. However, without a sustaining productive base in the departments, revitalized creole forms and local practices are always open to exoticization and commodification by the tourist trade. The debate over the place of the French Caribbean departments in an increasingly globalized world and in a Europeanized France is acute at the present time. Such concerns have driven the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau to entitle a recent essay, in which not only is Martinique considered occupied territory but local particularity is directly attacked by the invasive presence of French television and supermarket chains, Ecrire en pays dominé (1997). Fear of cultural annihilation and the visible bétonisation of the island
26
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
departments have renewed interest in independentist politicians as is signaled by the political success of Alfred Marie-Jeanne’s (b. 1936) nationalist movement in Martinique. Through the cultural politics of la francophonie, France has attempted to use the Caribbean departments as a base for anchoring the French presence in the region. The financing of various cultural missions in the Caribbean region and the reinforcing of links with French colonies that had been lost two centuries ago (such as Haiti, Dominica, and Saint Lucia) have created a significant enough cultural presence for French to become one of the official languages of the Organization of American States. Furthermore, these territories are key points in France’s international technological, military, and commercial expansion. The airports and harbors of the Caribbean departments have been significantly modernized and France’s exploration of outer space, a key element in its promotion of itself as a world power, is based at Kourou in French Guiana. (See CRÉOLITÉ; FRANCOPHONIE, LA; LANGUAGE.) Nevertheless, French presence is restricted not only because of American hegemony in the region but also by the fact that its departments are embedded in a region that is heterogeneous and dominated by Hispanophone and anglophone states. Furthermore, the Caribbean region is made up of a number of regional organizations of which France is not a member, which leads to the further institutional isolation of the overseas departments from networks such as the Caribbean common market, or CARICOM; the Caribbean Development Bank; and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, or OECS, to which Martinique and Guadeloupe geographically belong. The anomalous nature of France’s Caribbean departments in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world harks back to that centralizing, universalist thrust in French history that minimized the importance of ethnic diversity and historical difference. France imagines it can ignore the specific nature of the Caribbean since its culture is universal. The future will determine whether what have been called the confetti of empire will continue to accept the status quo or whether what exists at present at the level of cultural nationalism can be turned into a politics of self-assertion.
FRANCE AND LATIN AMERICA Ana Lucia Araujo
Cultural relations between France and Latin America go back to the colonial era and can be divided into three distinct periods. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, economic exchanges predominated, and these must be understood in the context of the rivalry between England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain over the trade in raw materials. At the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, the nature of France’s relations with the Americas was one of French cultural expansion. For nearly 500 years of cultural and economic interaction, the different countries of Latin America were often a place of refuge or asylum for French people during political crises at home. For example, in 1815 after the fall of Napoléon, many of his supporters settled in Brazil, and in the 1850s those faithful to the republican cause took refuge in Rio de Janeiro. In the twentieth century, many Latin Americans resided in Paris to partake of its cultural and artistic effervescence, but also to escape the dictatorships that afflicted their continent. Although many Latin American exiles went back to their country of origin between the late 1970s and early 1980s, a good many remained in France, forming one of its most important cultural minorities. From as early as 1504, France maintained a constant presence on the Brazilian coast. Paulmier de Gonneville’s expedition of that year covered the Santa Catarina region and probably also that of Porto Seguro as far as Bahia. Between 1516 and 1526, Christophe Jacques’s two expeditions marked the beginning of the French presence in Brazil itself. In 1555, the Catholic navigator Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon wished to found a French colony there that would be a refuge for French Protestants. The colony was established in Guanabara Bay at Rio de Janeiro and named France Antarctique. The settlers included not only Protestants but also Catholics like André Thevet who published, after his return to France in 1557, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amérique et de plusieurs terres et isles découvertes de notre temps. Several chapters of his Cosmographie universelle, published in 1575, are also devoted to Brazil. However, the colony of France 27
28
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
Antarctique was often shaken by crises arising from religious differences. This and the threat of a war of religion in France prompted Admiral de Coligny (1519–1572) to recruit other settlers in Protestant Geneva. These new settlers, who arrived in Rio in 1556, included Jean de Léry, who published in 1578 the first edition of his Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil autrement nommée Amérique, one of the first detailed descriptions of the indigenous Tupinamba people. The Portuguese, led by Mem de Sá, took advantage of the crises in the colony, entering Guanabara Bay on January 26, 1560, and defeating the French forces, Villegagnon having already returned to France. Despite this setback, France continued trading Brazil wood with the natives, who were resisting Portuguese authority. In 1597 the French, commanded by Captain Jean Guérand and with the help of the Tupinamba, tried to set up a new colony in the Maranhão region, which they named France Equinoxiale. In 1612, the colony in turn founded a town, Saint-Louis du Maragnan (the present-day São Luis) on Maranhão Island in northern Brazil. But in 1615 the Portuguese once more defeated the French. The last attempt to establish a French colony in the Maranhão, in 1631 with the help of the Dutch West India Company, was also a failure. (See BRAZIL; CATHOLIC CHURCH.) French colonization of the Caribbean also goes back to the sixteenth century, a period when privateers and buccaneers were a constant presence. From Tortuga, French privateers occupied Grande-Terre, later Saint-Domingue. It was only in 1697 that Spain recognized French sovereignty over the western part of the island. It was not just the French economy that was affected by the system of sugar plantations and slave labor set up there and in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Foodstuffs from Latin America, including the potato, maize, chocolate, tobacco, and fruits such as the pineapple, also changed French eating habits. And although sugar cane, bananas, and coffee are not indigenous to the Americas, it was in Latin America that their cultivation really took off. Coffee production was widespread in the Caribbean and was introduced to Brazil only in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Brazil became one of the biggest world producers of coffee along with Cuba, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Mexico, and these different varieties were widely consumed in France. At the beginning of that century the consumption of eau-de-vie in France was largely replaced by rum, in a transatlantic system of exchange centering on Bordeaux. In an opposite movement, Chilean wine production and its international prestige are largely due to the cultivation of grape varieties from the Bordeaux region. (See BORDEAUX; COFFEE; CUISINE; GUADELOUPE; MARTINIQUE; SANTO DOMINGO; SUGAR; TOBACCO.) Latin American flora also played a role in European pharmaceutical practices. Examples of such plants include quinquina or quina-quina root, used by the inhabitants of Peru to treat malaria. It was introduced to France at the end of the seventeenth century, its powder diluted in wine or administered in the form of pills. In 1820, the discovery of quinine sulfate by Pelletier and Canventou marked quinquina’s entry into modern medicine. Ipeca, of Brazilian origin, belongs to the same botanical family as quinquina. Also introduced to France at the end of the seventeenth century, it was produced on an industrial scale in the early nineteenth. The botanical richness of Latin America played a crucial role in the development of phytochemistry and the use of plants in the manufacture of med-
FRANCE AND LATIN AMERICA
29
icine and cosmetics. Among the trees and fruits used in French cosmetic manufacture are the guava, for its leaves, fruit, and roots have astringent properties, and the papaya, rich in vitamin A. After the declarations of independence in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, Latin America opened up more and more to Europe. For this early nineteenth-century period, the French in Latin America can be divided into two groups: those immigrants who settled there to improve their lot, and the travelers, artists, and scientists who stayed for a fixed period and then returned to France. French immigration to Latin America, which was particularly visible in cities such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City, encouraged new food and dress habits, and new literary and artistic influences. As early as the first half of the nineteenth century, elites in Latin America had adopted the habit of speaking and writing in French, and also slavishly imitating Parisian fashion. The influence of French culture was intensified in Brazil after 1808, when the Portuguese court fled to Rio de Janeiro in the wake of Napoléon’s armies. To develop the city’s cultural and artistic life (in 1815 it became the capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarve), King D. João I commanded a French artistic mission that arrived in Brazil in 1816 and founded the Fine Arts Academy as well as an art gallery. French influence in Latin American art and architecture was thus reinforced. Many French craftsmen came to work in photography, lithography, and sculpture, and as goldsmiths. French influence in Rio became very tangible. Many nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts describe Ouvidor Street, which became the symbol of the profound Frenchness of Brazil’s customs and fashion. As Armelle Enders points out, the street was where Rio’s aristocracy could not only dress and eat à la française, but also read and think in French. In the nineteenth century, the presence of French artists in Latin America contributed to the development of the first artistic institutions and also encouraged Latin American artists in their turn to go to Europe and to frequent art schools and academies there. In 1818 in Cuba, the School of Art was founded by former pupils of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), including the former Bonapartist Jean-Baptiste Vermay (1784–1832). In 1832, the school became the Academy of Fine Arts of Havana, sending its first interns to Paris in 1840. At the end of the eighteenth century, Mexican sculptors—such as Emmanuel Tolsa (1757–1816), in charge of the decoration of Mexico City’s cathedral—studied in Spain under French artists. Alexandre-Jean Noël (1752–1834) was one of the few French artists to spend time in Mexico in the eighteenth century. He went there on a scientific expedition in 1768, from which he brought back to France several drawings of Mexican flora and fauna. In 1863, Napoléon III launched his Mexican adventure, the aim of which was to impose Archduke Maximilian of Austria as emperor of Mexico. This of course inspired Manet’s famous painting The Execution of Maximilian. Mexican architecture was also influenced by France. The French architect, water colorist, and etcher Henry-Jean-Emile Bénard (1844–1929) headed the construction of the Legislature in Mexico City, which was decorated by the French sculptors André-Joseph Allar (1845–1926) and LaurentHonoré Marqueste (1848–1920). (See PAINTING; SCULPTURE.)
30
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
Fewer in number than in Brazil, some French artists nevertheless visited Argentina in the nineteenth century, including Raymond Quinsac de Monvoisin (1794–1870), who painted portraits and social scenes there before going to Chile in 1842. After visiting Buenos Aires, Adolphe d’Hastrel de Révedoy (1805–1875) published his Album de vues et costumes (1823), and Jean-Léon Pallière (1823–1887) his Album de mæurs argentines (1858). It is, however, French sculpture that took pride of place in Argentina. The architect Prosper Catelin (1764–1842) created the facade of Buenos Aires cathedral in 1823. The building of several public monuments was entrusted to French architects and sculptors such as Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), for the memorial to Sarmiento in 1900, and Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929), for the equestrian statue of General Alvear in 1913. The monuments to the tribune Del Valle are due to Emile-Edmond Peyot (1850–1932), the statue of president Pellegrini to Jules Coutan (1848–1939), and Doubt, in the Plaza San Martín in Buenos Aires, to Henri-Louis Cordier (1853–1925). Raymond Monvoisin lived in Chile from 1842 to 1854, founding the Academy of Fine Arts of Santiago. François Brunet de Baines (1799–1855) founded the city’s first school of architecture. Auguste François taught sculpture in Chile for twenty years. French sculpture is visible in several monuments in Santiago, including Don José de San Martín «el Emancipador» by Louis-Joseph Daumas (1801–1887) and the statue of General Carrera by Augustin-Alexandre Dumont (1801–1884). Few French painters went to Peru. In 1867, the French sculptor Guillaume (a pupil of Lebas and Cugnot) won the competition to build in Lima the monument to the Peruvian naval victory over the Spanish in 1866. However, several Peruvian artists, such as Ignacio Merino, Carlos Baca-Flor, and Alberto Valenzuela Llanos, went to France as part of their artistic training. Many of the French artists who went to Latin America at the beginning of the nineteenth century were motivated by the search for different forms of the exotic, a process that had begun in the previous century with romantic and orientalist images. This quest for the exotic produced, on the one hand, the publication of illustrated travel writings and, on the other, the creation of paintings of tropical subjects dominated by primitivist ideas. Before going to Tahiti, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) visited Martinique, which inspired paintings such as Eve exotique (1890), depicting a tropical America, referring to the idea of an earthly paradise where men and women live free, naked, and in harmony with nature. Louis Réau attests that Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) was a soldier during the Mexican expedition in 1863, from where he brought back material for the tropical subjects of his paintings. Although the truth about this journey remains uncertain, it is likely that Rousseau drew much of his inspiration from representations of the tropical forests and lush vegetation of Latin America. The many French travelers, artists, scientists, and naturalists who visited Latin America during the nineteenth century included Ferdinand Denis (1798–1890), FrançoisAuguste Biard (1799–1882), Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848), Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), Edouard Manet (1832–1883), Joachim Lebreton (1760–1819), Charles Ribeyrolles (1812–1860), Auguste de Saint-Hilaire (1779–1853), and Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). Back in Europe, several of them published travel accounts, in book form or
FRANCE AND LATIN AMERICA
31
in popular illustrated magazines such as Le Tour du monde or the Revue des deux mondes, that brought out the history, landscape, fauna, flora, and people of different Latin American countries. This interest on the part of travelers in the exotic lands of Latin America fit into the literary romanticism of the time, one of whose features was the quest for the origins of humanity, which were supposedly to be found in the virgin forests of South America, the ruins of Aztec and Mayan temples, or even in the palaces of the Near East. Once in Latin America, French travelers had two kinds of exotic fantasy. Some wished to find a lost civilization among the pre-Colombian ruins. Others identified the American exotic with a type of primitivism, and so sought out Amerindians untouched by white European contact. But by the nineteenth century a large proportion of the Amerindian population had been decimated, and most communities living near the towns had long had contact with white people. French travelers and artists such as Biard and Manet were astonished and even sometimes disappointed to encounter in Brazil so many slaves of African origin. In order to meet Amerindians, travelers had to journey to the interior, a tall order in an era of limited transportation. Several engravings illustrating this travel literature, such as those to be found in Jean-Baptiste Debret’s Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil (1834–1839), tend to present an idealized image of the Brazilian Amerindian that bore little relation to reality. François-Auguste Biard, who lived for a few months with the Amazon Indians, produced extremely detailed ethnographic portraits of different tribes. But several travelers, including Biard, insisted with certainty on the moral, physical, and mental superiority of the Europeans over the indigenous population, as well as over the mestizos and those of African descent. Their vision thus became a kind of taxonomy, with the white European at the top of the pyramid and these latter groups at the bottom. Latin American music made its debut in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tango, whose origin lay in a mix of African and Spanish rhythms, came to France via Argentinean bands and dance troupes. Initially, tango was the music of the gauchos and of Italian immigrants from the poorer districts of Buenos Aires. Its nostalgic music and sensual and dramatic dance steps soon propelled it into the salons of the welloff classes and then across the Atlantic. Its enthusiastic reception in France was evinced by the success there after 1927 of the songwriter Carlos Gardel (1890–1935). Gardel was in fact born in Toulouse and emigrated to Argentina at the age of two. His tragic death in a plane crash contributed to his mythical status. He was famous not only for his interpretations of classic tango such as “A Media Luz” and “El Día que me quieras,” but also for starring in several films shot in France. Tango lives on in France thanks to the later generation of songwriters such as Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992), who linked it to jazz. (See ARGENTINA.) Brazilian rhythms were the inspiration for Félix Mayol (1872–1941), who wrote the song “La Mattchiche,” which became the anthem of the Belle Epoque. Brazilian music’s influence in France began to be felt from 1919. Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) discovered its rhythms after living in Brazil as secretary to the playwright Paul Claudel (1868–1955), who served as a diplomat in Rio in 1916. Other composers, such as Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) and Michel Philippot (1925–1996), were also influenced by Brazilian
32
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
music. The samba was introduced to France by Paul Misraki (1908–1998) and his colleague Ray Ventura (1908–1978). Misraki, of Jewish origin, went into exile in South America and then Hollywood during the Nazi occupation of France. His hits inspired by Latin American rhythms include “On ne badine pas avec l’amour” (1942) and “Si Eva se hubiese vestido” (1943). The bossa nova, close to samba and jazz, arrived in France via the films Orfeu Negro (1959) and Bandeirantes (1960), both directed by Marcel Camus (1912–1982). Orfeu Negro, which won the Palme d’or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is a reinterpretation of the Orpheus myth by the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes. The soundtrack, by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa, was a huge hit in Europe and the United States, opening doors for other artists such as João Gilberto. In 1966 Claude Lelouch’s film Un Homme et une femme, which won the Palme d’or and two Oscars, also featured the bossa nova. The success of one of the songs on the soundtrack, “Samba de Benção,” brought the Brazilian composer Baden Powell (1937–2000) his first gold disc in Paris. In the years that followed, the bossa nova continued to influence French musicians such as Pierre Barouh, Georges Moustaki, Claude Nougaro, and Michel Fugain. This interest in Brazilian music coincided with the early years of the military dictatorship, when several Latin American musicians chose exile in France. In the 1980s, the vogue for “world music” helped Latin American music to become better known in France and indeed Europe. French singers such as Julien Clerc, Michel Jonasz, Jill Caplan, Kaoma, and Bernard Lavilliers were inspired not by the samba or bossa nova but by the music of Bahia represented by João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Maria Bethãnia. In 1989 the French group Kaoma sang a track that had been a hit in Bolivia and thus launched the lambada, whose origin can be traced to northern Brazil in the 1930s, from where much later it traveled to other Brazilian states such as São Paulo and Bahia. Thanks to a sexy dance, and music incorporating elements of calypso, salsa, beguine, and merengue, Kaoma made the lambada fashionable throughout Europe. Caribbean rhythms, often blending Latin and Hispanic styles, have also been influential in twentieth-century France, first via the American singer Josephine Baker and her Revue nègre from 1925. At the end of that decade, Paris discovered the West Indian beguine, a rhythm from Martinique blended with Cuban conga and New Orleans jazz, in the Cabane bambou at the Bal nègre in the rue Blomet. The star of the beguine was the Martinican Stellio (Alexandre Fructueux, 1885–1939). Other musicians and singers such as Don Marino Barreto and Rita Montaner disseminated the bolero, the rumba, and the cha cha. Later, Henri Salvador, Ray Ventura, and Edith Piaf (1915–1963) were instrumental in creating a wide public for Caribbean music, Piaf recording the song “Que nadie sepa mi sufrir” under the title “La Foule.” At the end of the 1970s, salsa invaded Paris thanks to Eddie Palmieri, Azuquita, Willy Colon, Oscar d’Leon, and Celia Cruz. In the 1980s, merengue, calypso, bolero, and cumbia reappeared thanks to Malavoi, Kali, and Ralp Tamar. In the 1990s, zouk, a new form based on Caribbean tradition, was promoted by groups such as Zouk Machine and Kassav’. (See BAKER, JOSEPHINE; BEGUINE.) In the early twentieth century, many representatives of artistic modernism from Latin America resided in Paris. Between 1920 and 1922 the Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral
FRANCE AND LATIN AMERICA
33
(1886–1988) studied with E. Renard, André Lhote, and Fernand Léger at the Académie Julian. Antia Malfatti (1889–1964) went there in 1923 on a Brazilian government grant, and Di Cavalcanti studied at the Académie Ranson between 1923 and 1925. In Paris in 1926 the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949), a pioneer of the movement known as constructive universalism, founded the Cercle et Carré group with Michel Seuphor. The Mexican muralists Diego Rivera (1886–1957), David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974), and José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) lived in Paris in the first two decades of the century. The influence of Gauguin, Seurat, Cézanne, and Picasso is visible in Rivera’s frescoes for the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City, in which he depicted scenes from ordinary Mexican life and from Aztec culture. Until the mid-1990s, however, it was the Argentines who formed the main Latin American community in France. Paris became the city in which figures such as theater directors and producers Jorge Lavelli and Alfredo Arias; filmmakers Hugo Santiago, Edgardo Cozarinsky, and Nelly Kaplan; and painters and sculptors Roberto Matta, Jesús Soto, and Antonio Seguí settled and worked. The architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965), who visited Rio de Janeiro in 1929, was an important influence on modern Brazilian architecture, notably on the work of Oscar Niemeyer, one of the creators of the new national capital Brasilia. The building of the Ministry of Education and Health, based on a draft by Le Corbusier, was achieved by Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa. The Brazilians, however, reinterpreted his concepts, introducing new elements such as the curved line. (See ARCHITECTURE.) Public spaces and architecture in France have in turn been marked by Latin American artists. Julio Silva created the pink marble sculpture in the cour carrée of the Forum des Halles in Paris, and Pablo Reinoso the bronze sculpture of a giant dragonfly in Poitiers. The Maison de la Culture in Le Havre was designed by Niemeyer, the Opera Bastille in Paris by the Uruguayan Carlos Ott, and the Finance Ministry at Bercy by the Chilean Borja Huidobro in collaboration with Paul Chemetov. Latin American literature bases itself on an emancipation from Spanish and Portuguese traditions. During the nineteenth century, writers there looked to British and North American poetry, and to French romantic and then naturalist writing. The rise of modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century emphasized the need for developing the national specificity of Latin American art and literature while at the same time its profile in France was enhanced. These literary relations thus developed through a network of individual contacts. Many writers, such as Octavio Paz (1914–1998), Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), and the poet Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), traveled from Latin America to France, while in the opposite direction came figures such as Blaise Cendrars (1867–1961), André Breton (1896–1966), and Antonin Artaud (1896–1948). However, this fascination for Latin America in the twentieth century was not far removed from the exoticism that went before. French writers sought in Latin American literature what they could not find in their own, namely, the specificity of the Amerindian, the quest for autonomy from Europe, and the questioning of the social, economic, and especially cultural order, with its insistence on cosmopolitanism and métissage. (See LITERARY RELATIONS.)
34
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
All this was particularly true of the surrealist movement. Blaise Cendrars, whose “simultaneism” is in some ways a forerunner and who influenced the surrealists, met in Paris two representatives of Brazilian modernism, Oswald de Andrade (the author of Manifeste Anthropophage, the “Cannibals’ Manifesto” of 1928) and Tarsila do Amaral. He also went to Brazil, where he was struck by its hybrid mix of European, Amerindian, and African cultures. Antonin Artaud, who was involved in the early surrealist movement, traveled to Vera Cruz in Mexico in 1936. His visit became an opportunity to criticize France, and to discover the dreams and cruel rituals of Amerindian culture over and beyond the standard European romanticization. In 1938, André Breton was invited to lecture in Mexico, where he met Trotsky, Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. The work of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) had an enormous influence in France, articulated in writings by Bioy Casares, Ernesto Sábato, and Julio Cortázar. From the mid-1960s Latin American writers achieved a wide readership among a French public seeking diversity more than exoticism. These names included Carlos Fuentes, Juan Carlos Onetti, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, José Danoso, Miguel Angel Asturias, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, and Jorge Amado. In the domains of philosophy, theory, and politics, the late nineteenth-century positivism of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) found fertile ground in Brazil. French positivism inspired many Brazilian political movements and events, such as the overthrow of the monarchy and proclamation of the Republic in 1889, as well as the “order and progress” slogan in the national flag. In the late 1920s, French historians, anthropologists, and sociologists saw in the study of Latin American societies an opportunity to develop notions of civilization that were less ethnocentric and more suited to diversity. Brazil was at the heart of the work of sociologist Roger Bastide (1898–1974) and the geographer Pierre Monbeig, and of the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The young Lévi-Strauss studied law and then in 1931 obtained his agrégation in philosophy. His ethnological career dates from 1934, when he was invited to teach sociology at the University of São Paulo. He stayed in Brazil until 1939, studying Amerindian populations including the Nambikwara, Caduveo, and Bororo tribes. This period is the source for one of his major works, Tristes tropiques, published in Paris in 1955, in which he explains the symbolic organization and ways of life of several Amerindian tribes in Mato Grosso state. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was the turn of French politics to be influenced by Latin America. The ideals of the 1959 Cuban Revolution inspired a whole generation of the French Left who admired Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The election of the Marxist Salvador Allende as president of Chile in 1970 had the same effect. As dictatorial regimes emerged in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru in the 1960s and 1970s, and after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état against Allende in Chile in 1973, France not only supported dissidents but welcomed to its shores hundreds of political exiles. Many—such as the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, president of Brazil from 1994 to 2002—came to occupy high office in Latin American politics when they returned home. The Latin American presence in France is also tangible in the higher education sector, with the existence of research institutes and centers such as the
FRANCE AND LATIN AMERICA
35
Institut des hautes études d’Amérique latine (IHEAL), and of scholarly publications. New technologies such as cable and satellite television (for example, the francophone TV5 is widely broadcast in Latin America), as well as the Internet, mean that Franco–Latin American relations are set to become closer than ever.
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES Jacques Portes
The relations between France and the United States have always been complicated, combining fascination and misgivings. Since 2002 and the war in Iraq, a new strain has occurred: French diplomats and citizens have looked at the United States as an arrogant bully, and the Bush administration has expressed its will to punish such an irritating ally in a symbolic way: “French fries” disappeared for a while from a few Washington restaurants, contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq were denied to French firms, and personal meetings between George W. Bush (b. 1946) and Jacques Chirac were avoided. Such tensions had occurred many times before: in 1835, Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) spoke of war with France to obtain his due after the sinking of American ships during the French Revolution, and his move was resented in Paris as bad taste; Woodrow Wilson came to Paris in 1919 with his own peace plan and could not be understood by Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), who was looking only for revenge; Charles de Gaulle had difficult relations with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973); the invasion of France by American movies was met with uproar in 1946 as in 1993. (See CHIRAC, JACQUES; GAULLE, GENERAL CHARLES DE; IRAQ WAR.) In fact these two countries have been more often at odds than in harmony, but they have never been at war. On the contrary, they have been allies frequently from 1778 to World War II. Since then and until 2001, the United States had attracted more French tourists than any other country, and the French way of life had been largely Americanized, but this does not mean that both countries have understood each other well. (See FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1945; FOREIGN POLICY, 1945–PRESENT.) At the same time France gave the United States one of its icons, the Statue of Liberty, and sold Louisiana cheaply to it, which doubled its territory at the time: generous moves from a close friend. France and America have been in competition for their democratic principles, but few French immigrants went to the United States, and those who did were scattered in a few 37
38
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
big towns such as New York or San Francisco, and they never constituted an ethnic group that could become a link between both countries. Scholars have argued that France and America became sister republics, but as they fought each other for universal ideas, they were necessary rivals. In fact misgivings began with the Franco-American alliance during the War of Independence: American commentators have minimized the impact of the French force and stressed the role of American patriots helped by a few exceptional individuals like the Marquis de Lafayette; on the contrary, French historians have explained that without the decisive victory of Yorktown, independence would have been long in coming. In 1800, the young American Republic was eager to abrogate the perpetual alliance signed in 1778, and to be free of any French threat. (See REPUBLICANISM.) For the same reason, when Thomas Jefferson—a real francophile—learned of the French repossession of Louisiana, he decided to buy it to avoid a French presence in New Orleans. But before the Louisiana Purchase, the revolution came in both countries, and historians have demonstrated that revolutionary ideas traveled well between Europe and America, as a transatlantic trend to upheaval. (See AMERICAN REVOLUTION; FRENCH REVOLUTION.) The American Revolution was first: as such it was a model for some Frenchmen before 1789. For example, Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–1793) went to the United States in 1788 and was impressed by the constitution of Pennsylvania and the bill of rights of Virginia, and he praised them when he returned. Many French revolutionary clubs followed suit by translating and studying the American documents. Nevertheless, the 1789 French “Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen” is autonomous and not inspired by American texts, and the 1791 constitution, which kept the king, is largely inspired by England and not by the United States. The French Revolution with all its consequences claimed to be unique and could not admit to owing something to a country as provincial as the United States: Brissot was condemned and executed in 1792, as a Girondin partisan of federalism who had brought back this dreadful idea from the American Constitution. The United States could not be a model for the French Montagnards, only a place of exile for a few of them who escaped the guillotine by fleeing to America, like Edmond Genêt or later Maurice de Talleyrand: they did not want to stay even when the French political situation became more hospitable to them, although some preferred to do so, like Genêt, who got married in America. In the young republic, the French Revolution was acclaimed in its first months: Thomas Jefferson had been very close to the young and liberal French aristocrats who were at the forefront of the upheaval, but such enthusiasm was short lived, and horror came when France, under the radical Jacobin rule (1793–1794) led by Maximilien Robespierre, was governed by authentic “terrorists,” and religion came under attack. In 1798, under President Adams, the Alien and Sedition Acts were implemented against French subversion at a time of quasi war between the two countries: it was no longer welcome for an American to present himself as a “sans-culotte.”
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES
39
The ascent of Napoléon Bonaparte did not bring better sentiments. For a man who had dreamed of being a new Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.E.), America was an unknown and uninspiring wilderness. The sale of all the territory of Louisiana—much more than Americans would have dreamed of—was logical: Napoléon has never had any plan toward America (Louisiana was seen briefly as a granary for Santo Domingo, and nothing more). And as Napoléon was denounced as a tyrant regularly by the British press, Americans had similar views and considered him a menace to democracy. The American and French Revolutions quickly diverged, and even the hope of establishing strong commercial links did not materialize as the United States kept its usual trading partnership with Great Britain. The traditional friendship between France and the United States was the only link to last, and this memory was revived by necessity when the American military intervened to help defeat German invaders on French soil in 1917 and 1944, but without much depth. To many French people—especially those who could read about or travel to America—Americans were seen as rude and devoid of any sophistication. The few French people who migrated to America were attracted only by the immensity of the continent and its resources and, as Chateaubriand wrote, they could express some regret: “France owned lately in North America a vast empire from Labrador to Florida, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the more far away lakes of Upper Canada.” For similar reasons, Indians were praised, but as a mythical people: François de Chateaubriand visited North America briefly, and his novel Atala (1801) had a deep impact on French opinion. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Native Americans were looked upon as “bons sauvages” and related through some mysterious ways to the Roman republic: pictures of Indian chiefs were assimilated to those of Caesar (c. 102–44 B.C.E.) or Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.). In 1845, when George Catlin (1796–1872) presented his “Indian Gallery” in Paris with authentic Indians in full regalia, he was met with sympathy but no surprise, as these clichés were already present. Later in the century, with better knowledge, this strange perception evolved, but the French kept a keen interest in Indian people, who represented for them an image of the ancient natural order, recently destroyed by brutal American materialism. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which came for the first time to Paris in 1889, was a very popular event, especially due to the presence of “real” Indians, even if some editorialists contended that they were never given an opportunity to win. But when French visitors came to the United States, they were discouraged by the terrible situation of the native peoples and stopped making comparisons between these unfortunates and the heroes of antiquity. Nevertheless, the California gold rush provoked enthusiasm in France, and thousands of people sailed to this promised land. They formed a colony in San Francisco, with its own hospital and school system, and the first mayor of Los Angeles was a Frenchman. After the Civil War and the first intercontinental railroad, they were overwhelmed by the American invasion, but the French quarter of San Francisco was still visible when World War I occurred: quite a few of these Frenchmen were still citizens of their old country and went back to fight for their native land. (See AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; WORLD WAR I.)
40
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
During most of the century, France and the United States were neither hostile nor especially close. When the tensions of the revolutionary era subsided, no political reason jeopardized the traditional friendship, but no opportunity came to try its strength. As the French regime had a chaotic evolution, some observers looked at America as an example of stability and wondered how such a “young” country could succeed with the same constitution. At each revolution, the American model was considered, but its adaptation failed dramatically when in 1848 Napoléon III destroyed the Second Republic, which was closest to the American system. The Civil War transformed the United States deeply. France, like Britain, was hesitant toward such an evolution. Napoléon III leaned toward the more aristocratic and rural confederation, but French radicals praised the abolition of slavery. Finally, Lincoln imposed his broader vision: the Union had to be respected. Proof of this new strength was given in 1865, when Washington signaled its opposition to French influence in Mexico: Napoléon III (1808–1873) could not impose Maximilian as emperor of Mexico. American pressure was strong enough and the end of the empire condemned this absurd adventure, but the United States affirmed it would not accept any French presence in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of the traditional friendship between the two countries. In 1869, French Republicans praised the American political regime briefly, but only as a tool against the Second Empire. Once in power they opted for a British-oriented parliamentary system, which gave way to the Third Republic. The gift of Miss Liberty was the only result of that short period of love: conceived in the 1860s, it was completed only in 1886, when the “sister republics” had chosen two different paths. At the beginning of the twentieth century, France and the United States were two important nations and they respected each other. French public opinion appreciated the shift from a provincial country to a modern one, with the first skyscrapers and a triumphant capitalism, but it did not have to fear such a success as America did not intervene in European affairs. The war against Spain was an astounding shock, but President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), a sincere francophile, made it clear he had no intention to go further toward Martinique and Guadeloupe. French politicians, journalists, and authors were confident that their country could play its world role without any American interference; they were also convinced of the superiority of their culture: Americans’ prowess was impressive, but the French had the power of the mind. Such reasoning was comforted by American reverence toward Europe: the best artists, the top orchestras, the most favored painters were acclaimed in the United States, and the rich tycoons could buy medieval castles in France or in Britain. French people were proud of this transatlantic pecking order and were unable to understand the real transformation of popular culture going on in the United States at that time. When the Wild West Show came to Paris, in 1889 and 1905, the spectators were enthusiastic, but reviews in the press did not know what to think: was the show a circus like Barnum, or imperialistic propaganda? They did miss the specificity of a show, which had attracted more spectators in America and in Europe than any other event before (30 million in thirty years).
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES
41
Cinema was invented at nearly the same time in both countries: December 1895 in Paris and April 1896 in New York City. At the beginning, movie industries followed more or less the same pattern, but rapidly the size of the American market attracted French firms such as Lumière or Pathé: the difference grew when nickelodeons opened in the United States, as there was no equivalent in Europe. In 1914, there existed 10,000 theaters in the United States, 400 in New York, but only 189 in Paris and a few hundred elsewhere. (See CINEMA, 1895–1945.) At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States and France did not play in the same league, but this stability in their relationship could not survive World War I. Throughout the twentieth century, France’s power and influence declined more or less rapidly, and the United States became by steps dominant: it was not easy to manage. World War I changed everything in the relation between the two countries. First, the whole system of international finance had been turned upside down: the United States had been in debt to Britain and France; it now became largely a creditor, and in 1915 Morgan Bank rescued these two countries from bankruptcy. From 1920, the dollar began its ascent to the role of world currency. France could not compete but could not accept such domination either. The dispute about the reimbursement of loans in the 1920s was very sharp: Americans, sticking to the rules of the book, required a complete payment, but some French people refused this on the grounds of war losses. Common understanding was at its lowest point. Second, the Sammies (as American troops in France were then called) were welcomed, and General Pershing (1860–1948) ritually evoked Lafayette, but French chiefs of staff were not convinced by the value of these American soldiers who had never fought in a large war. They liked the trucks and tanks they came with, but they were equipped with French guns and cannons. In 1919 when he arrived in Belgium and France on his way to the Versailles Conference, President Wilson was acclaimed by enthusiastic crowds as the symbol of American freedom and victory: that is why in nearly every town there is a Wilson Street or Avenue. But the atmosphere of the conference was not so buoyant: Wilson came with a plan and fixed the order of the debates, because he was alone in not seeking revenge or punishment on Germany. Such a position could not be accepted by Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France at the time, whose goal was to make Germans pay for what they had destroyed while being protected from their aggressive tendencies. Finally a compromise was reached, which was far from Wilson’s intentions, but he succeeded in imposing the principle of the League of Nations; in 1920, when the Senate of the United States refused to ratify the treaty, French officials had the verification of the “noble candor” of a president they never understood. Financial and diplomatic problems between France and the United States in the 1920s were discussed in the press and at the Quai d’Orsay and State Department. In 1928, such discussions led to the Briand-Kellog Treaty (Aristide Briand [1862–1932] and Frank Kellog [1852–1943]), a Franco-American initiative to ban war forever and everywhere, which was followed by dozens of nations. A century and a half after their first
42
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
alliance, the two countries gave an example to the world; of course, this treaty could not work as no nation could accept such constraint, but it was a testimony of the peace-loving nature of the people. During the war, thousands of African American soldiers discovered France. Like all American soldiers, they had no right to mix with French people; being in a segregated army they were not free to move alone. Nevertheless quite a few of them grew aware of the freedom they found in French towns and found it difficult to go back to their country. Some of them returned to France after the war to experience life in a free country: most of them were musicians, painters, and writers who gathered on the “Black Bank” of Paris. Josephine Baker’s wild dances were acclaimed as deliciously scandalous. A few white writers such as Henry Miller joined them, fleeing America’s conservatism in the 1920s. (See DANCE; LITERARY RELATIONS.) During the same period, many French people discovered American movies on the silver screen: in 1926, Hollywood movies represented three-quarters of all films exhibited in theaters. For the first time in 1928, the French government tried to set quotas against such an American invasion. The result was not perfect, but such a move was repeated later in the century. Strong competition in the movie industry began between France and the United States at that time: again French measures tried to give some protection to producers but neglected exhibitors and distributors who needed new films for their theaters. Paul Claudel, then French ambassador to the United States, was vigilant about films that were not fair to his country: they could be banned or cut. The success of the French Communist Party was important for the renewal of antiAmericanism in France. Before World War I this opinion came from the rightists, who resented American vulgarity and its “unjust” rise to power; then the leftists denounced the United States as the icon of capitalism. The glamour of the 1920s with the prohibition of alcohol, misunderstood by everybody in France, continued to fuel anti-American opinion. At the same time, many French people were impressed by the economic success of the United States, and by the strength of the dollar, in spite of the usual misgivings. The Great Depression gave many arguments to leftist critique: the fall of the American economy was due to an excess of speculation, what they viewed as typical lack of balance. It was easy to say so in 1930, as France was affected by the Depression only two years later. The New Deal sounded like an interesting solution to the crisis to some French Socialists’ ears, but the government of Léon Blum (1872–1950) did not last long enough to try any form of adaptation to the French context. On the way to World War II, France and the United States could not meet, as the American Congress was eager to respect neutrality laws, even if President Roosevelt was deeply shocked by the fall of France, which could not use the American P-38 planes it had been able to buy. The American advice to Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) to restrain their thrust to conquer did not bear fruit. (See WORLD WAR II.) The defeat of France, and the Vichy regime, put pressure on Washington: President Roosevelt kept his close adviser, Admiral Leahy (1875–1959), as ambassador in Vichy until 1942, thus infuriating General de Gaulle and Free France, then established in Lon-
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES
43
don. Later, American officials were eager to replace de Gaulle, whom they did not trust, with someone else. Roosevelt indeed never understood a man who had never been elected by the people and who acted like a “diva.” Tensions lasted throughout the war, and the Free French efforts to improve the situation in the United States were hampered by divisions among their small group, as some exiles feared de Gaulle and his ideas. Many intellectuals and artists had settled in New York and Los Angeles, glad to be able to work in a free country: poet Saint-John Perse, movie director Jean Renoir, and film star Jean Gabin (1904–1976) spent the war in America and, in spite of mixed results for their careers, were very happy there. After D day, the U.S. government tried to establish its own authority in liberated France, and de Gaulle had to rush to his native land to avoid such a move and be recognized as a legitimate leader before the elections: he succeeded in November 1944, but did not forget this chaotic period. In spite of this deep antagonism, French people were liberated by American soldiers, discovering with envy their way of life as they distributed chocolate, chewing gum, and cigarettes to a population who had been deprived and starving during the previous four years. Thousands of young women married attractive and healthy GIs; sympathy toward America was intense even in the bombed cities: there was no resentment, as Vichy had hoped before its fall. Such a hopeful situation did not last long, as Reconstruction was long and painful. Moreover the Communist Party gathered nearly a third of the vote during the first election to constitute the National Assembly: it admired Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) and the USSR’s triumph in the war, denouncing American imperialism altogether. Arguments of the anti-American, anti-imperialism sort were more popular than the Communist Party, as many Frenchmen, mostly rightists, resented the decline of their country: France was indeed no longer able to impose its will, or even be independent. De Gaulle kept on trying to resist such a situation. This type of sentiment nourished a strong anti-Americanism, which appeared clearly in 1948 during the controversy about the economic agreement signed by Léon Blum and James Byrnes (1879–1972) two years before: movie producers in France claimed that it opened the gates to Hollywood mass production, and they gathered in the process Communists and also moderate actors and directors. After a few months, the parliament voted a law to protect and strengthen the French movie industry and the situation improved. Such a controversy recurred in 1981 and 1993. (See ANTIAMERICANISM.) During the 1940s and the 1950s, many French people were favorable to the United States: some crossed the Atlantic Ocean with productivity missions organized by the Marshall Plan, and France was the first beneficiary in Europe of the plan’s funds, as one of the battlegrounds of the cold war. For example the American government financed 75 percent of the French war effort in Indochina, which it saw after 1950 as a typical antiCommunist contest. Others discovered jazz music with the same passion as they did novels by John Steinbeck (1902–1968) and William Faulkner (1897–1962). A large political center was pro-American: the MRP (Mouvement Républicain et Populaire) and part of the Socialist Party. The CIA gave discrete subsidies to some of these
44
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
groups and provoked the scission of the largest Communist union to create Force Ouvrière, which became completely independent in the 1960s. French visitors who stayed in the United States were astounded to discover shopping malls, suburbs with similar houses, and little gardens: a way of life that would take ten or fifteen years to come to France. Students were amazed by the way American universities functioned with their dormitories and social life evolving around fraternities. At the end of the 1950s, the French discovered the music coming from America— Elvis Presley (1935–1977), Johnny Lee Hooker (1917–2001), and Ray Charles (1930–2004)—and the first rockers, as Johnny Halliday (b. 1943) Richard Anthony (b. 1938), and others chose American names, translated the hit songs, and sang them in French. A few years later, the Beatles revolution came to Europe and the United States, as the Liverpool “fabulous four” brought a pretty new sound and look. The French artists did not invent anything; they were only copiers without novelty and never made it in the United States, in spite of a few failed attempts. (See MUSIC [POP].) There was a popular fascination for America, in spite of the strength of a political anti-Americanism. General de Gaulle came back to power in 1958 with the intention of restoring French “grandeur”: he resented any American intervention in the Algeria war and would have liked a common leadership for NATO. He could not get it and decided in 1966 to withdraw France from NATO’s military command. On the other hand, he vetoed Great Britain’s joining the Common Market, as he could not understand its special relationship with the United States. Always willing to promote a French international role, President de Gaulle knew perfectly his due to the United States as he knew the two countries were on the same side: in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, the French president was the first to give his support to John F. Kennedy (1917–1963). (See GAULLE, GENERAL CHARLES DE; NATO.) The Vietnam War as amplified by President Johnson was another cause of tension, as de Gaulle’s proposal of a peace conference had been rejected and as American officials suspected him of being pro-Communist. In May 1968, the French student mobilization focused on the opposition to the war, as they saw it as deeply immoral and as an example of the imperial thrust of the United States. Anti-Americanism found plenty of arguments in this situation and was dominant intellectually, but had few links to the American movement against the war. (See VIETNAM WAR.) The legacy of de Gaulle’s national position and of the Vietnam War was long in disappearing. This was a time when few students took American studies in French universities, because they were unwilling to study anything American, except for a focus on blacks or Indians, presented as victims of “Amerika.” Gaullist ideas have been commonly adopted on the Right as on the Left: the United States had to be held at bay in international matters and sometimes to be resisted. Every French politician has adopted such an attitude at one time or another. During the same period, cultural exchanges were intense, as American society gave examples of dissent and a sort of upheaval that was popular in Europe, through tours by Bob Dylan and other singers. In the United States, new directors, such as Martin Scorsese
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES
45
(b. 1942) or Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939), were inspired by the French New Wave and worked to be recognized themselves as “auteurs.” A mark of this reverence can be seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which Steven Spielberg (b. 1947) asked François Truffaut to play a role. Young teens who lived a while in the United States were enchanted, as everything seemed to be organized for them at school and on the playgrounds. On the political level, things were more complicated: the American system was very difficult to understand for French observers. The impeachment of President Richard Nixon (1913–1994) (himself a great admirer of de Gaulle) was seen as extravagant, as his faults were only peccadilloes; his replacement by a non-elected Gerald Ford (b. 1913) was not viewed more favorably. Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) and Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) were so deeply American that they seemed alien in France, where most people were ill at ease with a newborn Christian or with a Hollywood actor. For some, such men had no credentials to become presidents. The French press was especially strident toward Reagan, who was depicted as bellicose and dangerous. On their side, officials in Washington were puzzled by the election of François Mitterrand in France, especially as he invited Communist Party members to his government: could such a man be a trusted ally? The French president had to prove his opposition to the deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles in Europe and to give some information about a Soviet spy ring to be accepted; it was easy to do as he was not at all revolutionary. New ideas came again from America in the mid-1980s: the rejection of Keynesianism and the adoption of monetarism in the United States were copied in France, in 1986 when the right came back to power, and made their way into the European Union as an apparent solution to a growing unemployment and a bulging deficit. France, like the United States, changed a lot in the 1990s as both countries followed parallel paths toward globalization and witnessed the disappearance of the Communist empire. Traditional anti-Americanism had fewer and fewer adepts as American dominance could be seen briefly as benevolent: the first Gulf War in 1990 was largely supported in France, and remaining resistance came only from leftists and pacifists. Bill Clinton (b. 1946) was peaceful and did not trouble the international scene, but unlike his predecessors he was interested more in Asia than in Europe as a new continent for American commercial ambitions. American culture was widespread in France, due to the Internet revolution and the acceleration of data and information. At the same time, the United States became the first destination for French tourists, before Italy or Egypt. Most of these people prefer American nature to the cities, except for New York City, which always fascinates. (See CYBERCULTURE; TOURISM.) Traditional resistance reappeared in 1993, when the last GATT negotiations threatened the French system of protection for the motion picture industry: anti-American sentiment was strong, as many people in the industry, as well as politicians, were concerned. A first result that became more apparent was to accuse the United States of being responsible for the brutality of globalization, as first proponent of the dogma of the free market; the success of the French association ATTAC comes directly from such reasoning.
46
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
Another aspect came from the strangeness of America, which was confirmed by the arrival of George W. Bush at the White House. During the Clinton years, the failure of the health care reform, along with the leaning toward international commerce, drove the United States and France apart. American glamour still attracted many people, but they did not want to live there: they did not understand the American cult of the death penalty and were repulsed by the availability of firearms in commercial centers, which even Clinton seemed to support. Affirmative action was not understood in France and was perceived as diametrically opposed to the French goal of the integration of immigrants. Now, unlike in the past, many European directors and actors choose to shoot one movie in Hollywood, but many of them prefer to return home after such an experience. In spite of this prevalent opinion, French firms invested in the United States in order to profit from a large and rich market; luxury items were popular, as the success of Perrier and Vuitton showed, and so were finance and media firms such as Vivendi, even if the last ultimately failed. Some Americans investigated health benefits of drinking red wine and having lighter meals, as the French do. And for years, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was a star in many American universities. (See FASHION; THEORY.) A sort of balance between the two countries emerged at the end of the 1990s: less passion than before but with many fruitful exchanges. The shock of September 11, 2001, was tremendous in America. And there was nearly unanimous French support toward the wounded United States, as the chief editor of Le Monde affirmed: “We are all Americans.” This warm response corrected the bad impression left by the 2000 election and people forgot the first, offensive moves of President Bush before 9/11 that had antagonized the Europeans: the relaxation of air pollution quotas, subsidies to American farmers, and protective measures for the steel producers. (See 9/11: CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES; 9/11: POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES.) But George W. Bush spoiled this opportunity, especially after the war in Afghanistan, which was more or less approved of in France. The unilateralist choice and the project of the Iraq War, based on shaky grounds, met the opposition of the French government and public opinion, as well as the opposition of many Europeans. A “reborn” antiAmericanism could develop, mixing old and new themes with passion; the distinction is rarely made between American people and the Bush administration, as tensions between the two countries become stronger than ever. Acrimony and misgivings have been dominant in official encounters and in the press: France and the United States have been following diverging roads, accentuated by the events of 2002–2003. Happily, personal exchanges are still warm and pleasant, and such a chaotic but traditional friendship cannot die.
France
and
the Americas
A ACADIA
on popular memory and oral traditions to maintain a distinct linguistic and cultural identity. The geographical boundaries of Acadie were never clearly mapped. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing on behalf of François I, the French king, was the first European to map the coast between Florida and Cape Breton Island. He gave the name of Acadia to an ill-defined area in the vicinity of North Carolina, Virginia, or Maryland. Cartographers moved the name northward, where it eventually came to be associated with northern Maine and Canada’s Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Exploration, trade with the indigenous population, and cod fishing in the summer months continued through the 1500s. In 1598 a year-round French colony was established on Sable Island. In 1604, a fresh attempt to create a permanent settlement was made by Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Mons. The Sieur de Mons set sail from France accompanied by traders and explorers, including Samuel de Champlain. They made their base on Saint Croix Island, part of present-day Maine. They moved the following year to Port Royal (on the Annapolis Basin, NS). Severe winters, illness, and skirmishes with Anglo-American settlers
The anglicized version of Acadie, the first French colony in North America until 1713, covered an area similar to Canada’s three present-day Maritime Provinces— Nova Scotia (NS), New Brunswick (NB), and Prince Edward Island (PEI)—as well as the northern coast of Maine (ME). Although Acadia no longer exists geographically, a francophone population still lives in the region and retains a strong Acadian cultural identity. Beginning in 1755 and lasting eight years, most Acadians were deported to Anglo-American colonies, France, and Great Britain after they refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. The Acadians lived in exile until 1763, a period immortalized by Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline (1847). A minority of Acadians hid in remote woodland to escape deportation and returned to their former region, as did a small proportion of those deported between 1755 and 1762. During the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s, many Acadians migrated to the Spanish colony of Louisiana, where they eventually came to be known as “Cadiens” (Cajuns). Their presence gave some areas of Louisiana a strong French character. Wherever today’s Acadian populations live, they draw
49
50
ACADIA
Man and woman of the Acadian country in America, in native attire, doing dance of French origin at the American National Folk Festival, Philadelphia, 1944. (Library of Congress)
and the revocation of the Sieur de Mons monopoly on the fur trade led the French to abandon the colony in 1607–1608. The French returned in 1610, but a military expedition from Virginia destroyed the post in 1613. French commercial and furtrading interest subsequently shifted to the Saint Lawrence River. In 1629 William Alexander, a Scottish merchant, colonized Acadia, which in his Latin charter was called Nova Scotia, or New Scotland. The Treaty of SaintGermain-en-Laye in 1632 returned the territory to France, but the rival and overlapping French and British claims to the unbounded region were already in place.
In 1632, 300 immigrants led by Isaac Razilly arrived at LaHave, Nova Scotia, to begin a new French colony. When Razilly died suddenly in 1635, Charles Menou d’Aulnay moved the colony to Port Royal (Annapolis Royal, NS), which henceforth became the heart of Acadie. The move to Port Royal marked the start of a period of repopulation and redevelopment supported by Cardinal Richelieu. However, plans to strengthen the colony further were hampered by internal disputes, and in 1654 a successful attack from British forces in New England compounded Acadia’s problems. Acadia was returned to France in 1667 by the Treaty of Breda, yet the threat from British colonies and French impotence in the face of aggression were clear. Nevertheless, the period after 1632 forged a distinctive Acadian physical and cultural landscape in isolation from both New France and New England. Significantly, one-third of Acadian immigrants came from Poitou in France, sharing a common regional dialect, which led Acadian French along its own distinct path. Unlike other European colonists who cleared wooded uplands, Acadians reclaimed fertile salt marshes from tidal zones. They developed a system of coastal and riverine dykes called aboiteaux that allowed freshwater to drain from marshland without allowing tidal saltwater onto it. The desalination process of the marshes took two to three years. It was a system that also kept the Acadians from land conflict with the indigenous Micmac (also spelled Mi’kmaq) and Maliseet populations. Despite these developments, the fledgling colony, numbering 400 people by 1670, continued to be endangered on three fronts. French colonial policy remained ineffective; neighboring British colonies were expanding rapidly
ACADIA
(Massachusetts boasted 50,000 inhabitants by 1670); and its borders were still undefined. Proven vulnerable to attack, notably in 1690 and 1704, Acadia passed again, and definitively, into British control in 1713 by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht. Yet the British were no more successful than the French had been in colonizing the region. Paradoxically, British colonial rule had a relatively positive impact upon the Acadians, bringing a period of peace that fostered the growth of an Acadian identity and language influenced by contact with British forces and the Micmac. In the stable political climate, Acadian communities flourished, and the birth rate rapidly increased. However, the departure of the French elite and the disappearance of any institutions of formal education led to a gradual loss of literacy among Acadians. A pawn in the colonial game, Acadian leaders could do little more than adopt a policy of neutrality, promising British leaders that they would not fight in a war with France. Outside Acadia, the battle to control North America was intensifying, as both France and Britain protected their colonial interests though the construction of a number of forts. There were many skirmishes between the rival powers, and in 1745 the French stronghold at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island was captured by troops from New England with British naval support. Yet Louisbourg was restored to France under the terms of the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The peace established in 1748 was short-lived, and pressure intensified in the region throughout the early 1750s. The Acadian position of neutrality no longer satisfied the British administration in Nova Scotia. In 1755 the Nova Scotia Council, led by acting gover-
51
nor Charles Lawrence, demanded the Acadians swear an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British Crown. The Acadians refused, and in July the council ordered their deportation. An estimated 12,000 to 13,000 people were removed. The process lasted until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. The Acadians were primarily sent to British colonies in North America but also to Britain, France, and the Caribbean. The experience entailed a large loss of life for the dispossessed Acadians, both at sea and later, in hostile settings. Many historical accounts leave the Acadian story here, with the Acadian population in exile. However, the history of Acadia and its people continued, generating an even stronger Acadian identity after the tragedies that began in 1755. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended French colonial rule in North America, but a French-speaking population remained in the continent, causing concern for the British authorities. Following the treaty, Acadians were allowed to return to the Maritime Provinces, provided they finally swore an oath of allegiance. Some Acadians did return to the former Acadia, others migrated to Quebec, many remained in the regions to which they had been deported, and large contingents settled in Louisiana. The estimated 3,000 Acadians who returned to their homeland were unable to return to their lands, which had been distributed to British colonists. They headed instead for some of the most remote areas of the Maritime Provinces, a trend encouraged by the British authorities, to avoid conflict with British settlers. Consequently, there emerged a new geography of Acadia. The British authorities inevitably erased much of the French presence from the map, renaming and reorganizing
52
ACADIA
Acadia in 1757. (www.Acadian-Cajun.com)
places, territories, and institutions. They set up a colony on Saint John’s Island (later Prince Edward Island) in 1769 and created New Brunswick out of Nova Scotia in 1784. A number of anti-Catholic and antifrancophone laws and policies harmed the Acadians. Catholics were prevented from owning land in Nova Scotia until 1783, from voting until 1789 in Nova Scotia (until 1810 in the other two Maritime Provinces), and from sitting in the legislature until 1830. From 1760 to 1860, the survival of Acadian communities in the Maritime Provinces was seriously threatened by the territorial and institutional dominance of the anglophone communities, which ensured that Acadians played no significant role in the political life of the Maritime Provinces before 1850. Acadian communities were scattered and isolated, making the development of Acadian insti-
tutions difficult. There were no formal Acadian schools before 1820, leaving villages dependent on an education provided by parish priests, who were not necessarily francophone. As a result, access to schools varied, and rates of literacy dropped significantly, forcing Acadian communities to rely increasingly on songs and tales to maintain their traditional identity. A significant development, however, was the opening of the Collège Saint-Joseph in Memramcook, New Brunswick, in 1854, a higher education institution teaching in French that created an educated, middleclass, Acadian elite. In 1864, Nova Scotia abandoned its tolerance of francophone schools, introducing a law that made English the only language of instruction in the province. Although a Canadian Confederation was formed in 1867, it became apparent that the new constitution did not
ACADIA
protect the rights of francophone or Catholic minorities, when in 1871 New Brunswick also made English the only language of instruction, followed closely by Prince Edward Island in 1877. Despite these discriminatory measures from the anglophone majority and the geographical isolation that hampered the creation of a network of Acadian institutions, the Acadian population of the Maritime Provinces had reached 87,000 by 1871. The period from 1880 to 1914, called the “Acadian Renaissance,” witnessed the consolidation of Acadian institutions and the development of an Acadian national agenda as the pupils of the Collège SaintJoseph took up positions in public life. In 1881 the first of a series of Acadian national conventions was held in Memramcook to address issues like education, religion, agriculture, emigration, and the press. A second convention was held in 1884 at Miscouche, Prince Edward Island, where an Acadian flag and anthem were chosen. Occasional conventions were held in Acadia during the next 100 years. Throughout this period, Acadians became more involved in the political life of the Maritime Provinces, taking up elected positions in provincial and national governments. Acadian schools and colleges were established, including the Université Sainte-Anne along Saint Mary’s Bay, Nova Scotia, in the 1890s. The majority of Acadian parishes came to have a francophone priest, and in 1912 the appointment of an Acadian bishop was secured. While Acadian attention was focused by their political and religious leaders on promoting national institutions, the stability of the Acadian population was challenged by external economic factors, which led to emigration to the United States and to the shake-up of
53
traditional Acadian family models as more women entered the workplace. The early twentieth century was a paradoxical period for Acadian communities. Despite political and social advances for Acadians, the threat of assimilation increased as larger numbers of both the anglophone and francophone populations of the Maritime Provinces moved to richer provinces and as many young men were lost in two world wars. Despite the continued threats from assimilation and economic migration, the period since 1950 has produced significant political, economic, and cultural advances for the Maritime Acadians. However, the experiences of Acadians differ according to the proportion of anglophones and francophones in each province. In the twentieth century New Brunswick became a principal home of Acadians. In 1996 Acadians represented only 3.8 percent of the Nova Scotia population and 4.9 percent of the population on Prince Edward Island, whereas in New Brunswick Acadians (some 240,000 people) made up 33 percent of the population and, as a result, have made the most significant advances there. In 1960 Louis Robichaud was voted the first Acadian premier of New Brunswick, bringing in an era of political change to the province. In 1963 the Université de Moncton, an Acadian university, was created, and education underwent reform, including the introduction of separate francophone and anglophone junior ministers for education. In 1969 New Brunswick went a step further, becoming Canada’s only officially bilingual province, recognizing the status of Acadians in New Brunswick and offering them legal protection. The political advances were paralleled by flourishing Acadian literature, theater,
54
ACADIA
painting, sculpture, music, and cinema. This cultural revival began with the publication of Antonine Maillet’s first novel, Pointe-aux-coques, in 1958, a novel concerned with identity, loss, and the threat posed by migration for the survival of Acadian culture. After 1960 there was an explosion of Acadian literature, marking a definitive transition from the traditional oral culture to a literary culture, a transition facilitated by the opening of an Acadian publishing house, Les Editions d’Acadie, at the beginning of the 1970s. These changes marked a shift away from artistic dependence on Quebec and Paris, with works published by Acadian poets, playwrights, and novelists Raymond LeBlanc, Guy Arsenault, Herménégilde Chiasson, Jacques Savoie, and Claude LeBouthillier, among others. Acadian music was also celebrated beyond its own borders during the 1970s with the popularity of traditional group 1755 and songwriters such as Edith Butler. These cultural and political developments encouraged some Acadians to consider the creation of a separate Acadian province as promoted by the Parti Acadien (1972– 1982), an idea that received only limited support from the majority of Acadians. Although Acadians in New Brunswick have both federal and provincial legislation to protect their rights, until the 1980s Acadians in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island have relied solely on federal protection, making it more difficult for them to achieve their political aims. For example, Nova Scotia had to wait until 1981 for the introduction of a law recognizing the status of francophone schools in the province and the introduction of a curriculum that actually included Acadian history and culture. On Prince Edward Is-
land the same law came into effect in 1981, but with the proviso that there be enough francophone presence to warrant it. However, in January 2000 a historic ruling from the Canadian Supreme Court forced the government of Prince Edward Island to build French schools in two Acadian communities, a verdict that offers hope to many Acadian communities across the Maritime Provinces. In these two Maritime Provinces some advances have been made, but lack of access to French schools, high levels of assimilation, and loss of French as the first language have put in doubt the survival of a francophone Acadian community there. Nevertheless, the concept of Acadia and an Acadian cultural heritage persists. In the 1990s Acadia was recognized as an important part of the Canadian cultural landscape and a valuable commodity for promoting tourism to the Maritimes as traditional industries die out. Acadian culture received international recognition with Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-charrette (Pélagie: The Return to Acadie), which received the Prix Goncourt in 1979, and Acadia placed itself firmly on the francophone map in 1999 by hosting the eighth Sommet de la francophonie in Moncton, New Brunswick. In 1994, the first Acadian World Congress, recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as an event in its decade of cultural development, was held in Moncton to celebrate the Acadian diaspora. A second congress was held in Louisiana in 1999, and a third in 2004 in Nova Scotia, events that highlight and celebrate the role of Acadia and Acadians throughout the French Atlantic. Kathryn Gannon
ADAM, PAUL See also: Cajuns; Champlain, Samuel de; Evangeline; François I, King of France; French and Indian War; Louisbourg; Maillet, Antonine; Maine; New Brunswick; New France; Nova Scotia; Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de; Verrazzano, Giovanni da. References Brun, Régis. Acadia Past and Present. Moncton, NB: Centre d’études acadiennes, 1999. Daigle, Jean, ed. Acadia of the Maritimes: Thematic Studies from the Beginning to the Present. Moncton, NB: Chaire d’études acadiennes, 1995. Ross, Sally, and Alphonse Deveau. The Acadians of Nova Scotia Past and Present. Halifax: Nimbus, 1992. Runte, Hans R. Writing Acadia: The Emergence of Acadian Literature, 1970–1990. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.
ADAM, PAUL (1860–1920) Frenchman of letters, little known today but one of the key writers of the belle époque period (1890–1914). Novelist, essayist, and a prolific journalist, Paul Adam wrote several best-sellers and was highly thought of by critics. His place in intellectual history is due to his wanderings in the politics of his time and his interest in the Americas. As a young dandy and a member of the symbolist avant-garde, Adam was a supporter of the right-wing General Georges Boulanger along with fellow writer Maurice Barrès, and then he proclaimed that he was an anarchist. After flirting briefly with utopian Socialism and taking a restrained pro-Dreyfus stance, he then became interested in “Latinité” and ended up as a nationalist. Throughout, his major preoccupation was what he considered to be the decadence of France. The search for reme-
55
dies to this problem was the catalyst for his ideological itinerary. It was in this context that in the 1900s, Adam turned more and more frequently to the American continent. His analyses and judgments, which more often than not reflected his concerns about the future of France, blew hot and cold on the subject. Nonetheless, his analyses were supported by extensive reading and also firsthand experience. He visited the United States and Cuba in 1904 and Brazil in 1912. Adam envied what he called “les Yankees” for their taste for risk and for their society that valued action; in contrast, the Latins were said to get bogged down in endless ideological arguments. He attributed the economic power of the United States to this dynamism and to its cutting-edge technology, which he admired greatly. Adam criticized Latin countries’ excessive individualism, but he was enthusiastic about the sense of solidarity that for him explained the vitality of American capitalism, seen as a system in which workers and bosses work for a common good. He was also favorably impressed by the “Yankee’s” probity and the progressive attitude toward girls’ education. However, the Americans were not immune to his criticism, for there are ironic passages on their bad taste and their prudishness, which he attributed to Protestantism. Adam above all calls into question democracy and universal suffrage as exemplified by the United States, for its system allows the ignorant majority to dominate and to neglect the rights of minorities. Latin America also plays an important role in Adam’s writing, mainly to do with his deep-seated germanophobia. While Germany’s domination of Europe was
56
ADAMS, HENRY BROOKS
increasing, Adam saw the only salvation for France to lie in the renewal and defense of “Latinité.” He thus preached the unity of Latin countries, forming in 1916 the League of Latin Intellectual Fraternity, an organization whose aim was to develop alliances and exchanges between intellectuals and politicians of different Latin countries, including those of Latin America. Adam thus looked positively on the continent of South America, seeing it as a new incarnation of Greco-Roman culture and the continuation of its ideals. Needless to say, this interpretation ignores the native peoples. Latin America has, however, a negative side, a consequence of excessive Latin individualism that encourages endless rivalries and opens the door to dictatorship. Isabelle Genest See also: Avant-Gardes; Brazil; Dreyfus Case; World War I. References Duncan, J. Ann. Les Romans de Paul Adam: Du Symbolisme littéraire au symbolisme cabalistique. Bern: Peter Lang, 1977. Parinet, Elizabeth. “Paul Adam: Littérature et politique.” Mémoire de D.E.A., Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 1981.
ADAMS, HENRY BROOKS (1838–1918) American editor, journalist, historian, novelist, and author of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, an examination of the ideological unity of thirteenth-century French culture through its religious (specifically cathedral) architecture (published first privately in 1904, then in 1913), and of its companion volume, The Education of Henry Adams: A Study of Twentieth Century Multiplicity, an autobiographical meditation on the accel-
erating multiplicity (chaos) of his own age (winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1919). Born into Boston’s patrician ruling class, Adams was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams, both U.S. presidents. In 1899 (following earlier visits to France) Adams inaugurated a yearly ritual of sojourns in Paris and travels in France that was to last (with the exception of 1912 when he was recovering from a stroke) until 1914. Following an assistant professorship in medieval history at Harvard (1870–1877), Adams grappled with the traditional antiquarianism and party political agendas of fellow historians to formulate an independent, authoritative “science of history” grounded on scientific principles. He rejected Charles Darwin’s doctrine of evolution and Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian geology (a theory of geological action of uniform intensity over immense periods of time), on which natural selection was premised, as less than credible for natural and social change over historical time. Sweeping aside Darwin’s followers, who had transformed Darwinian natural selection into optimistic, progressive “evolutionary” doctrines conducive to human progress and perfectibility, Adams ultimately embraced the “catastrophist” geology of his friends Clarence King and J. D. Whitney (Yale professor of geology). Catastrophism (whereby changes in the earth’s history were often the result of intense outbursts of geological energy) underwrote Adams’s later commitment to the energy physics of Lord Kelvin. Kelvin’s heat-engine model (which Adams transformed into an analytical tool for understanding historical change) demonstrated that physical changes were driven by energy transforma-
ADAMS, JOHN
tions from greater intensity (reconceived by Adams as “unity”) to lesser intensity (reconceived by Adams as “multiplicity”). In 1895 Adams focused attention on the works of Thomas Aquinas and the architecture of the cathedrals of Normandy, including Amiens, Chartres, and the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. Regarding the production of such architecture as the ultimate expressions of his historical ideal of a culture’s “unity” and unified energies, he conceived of human history as a “force” that could be measured down to his own time by its motion from a fixed point in the past. In Chartres (to which he appended the working subtitle: “A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity”), Adams’s fixed point was supplied by the Catholic French culture of 1150–1250 (embodying the quintessential historical period of unified human energies in a unified universe) and symbolized for Adams by the powerful unifying force of the Virgin Mary. In the Education, he fixed his own period as that of humankind’s greatest “multiplicity.” Vividly describing his repeated visits to the Hall of Dynamos at the Paris Exposition in 1900, Adams identified the centrifugal power of the dynamo as symbolic of the dissipated, chaotic energies of modern multiplicity. Using these two fixed points, he hoped to measure historical processes from medieval unity to modern multiplicity. In his A Letter to American Teachers of History (1910), Adams’s final pessimistic pronouncement contended that man as a form of energy was susceptible to the same inevitable decay and ultimate dissipation as the Second Law of Thermodynamics predicted for the energy of the universe. Ian N. Higginson
57
See also: Adams, John; Architecture. References Harbert, Earl, and William Decker, eds. Henry Adams and the Need to Know. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2005. Samuels, Ernest. Henry Adams. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1989.
ADAMS, JOHN (1735–1826) Second U.S. president (1797–1801) and a remarkable figure in the creation of the United States. Adams had a number of links with France and during his own administration prevented war with revolutionary France. Adams was born on October 30, 1735, in Braintree, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard before becoming a lawyer. His law career brought him into contact with Boston’s political elite, with whom he discussed the plight of the colonies. He became a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and while in Philadelphia played a key role in drafting the Declaration of Independence. Adams then began a diplomatic career as commissioner to France (1778) before becoming minister to the Netherlands, where he secured recognition of American independence and negotiated a loan and treaty of amity and commerce. Adams played a key role in securing, in the Treaty of Paris of September 3, 1783, favorable terms from the British for ending the Revolutionary War. In 1785 he was appointed first U.S. minister to Britain but was unable to substantially improve Anglo-American relations. After three years in London, Adams resigned, intending to return to Massachusetts. However, in the first election under
58
ADAMS, JOHN
John Adams, second president of the United States of America. (Library of Congress)
the Constitution, Adams’s national standing saw him elected as the first vice president behind George Washington. The role was frustrating for a man of Adams’s intellect, but that did not stop his performing it with courage and integrity, especially in casting the deciding vote in the Senate, often in support of the federal government. Although nominally a Federalist, Adams tried to remain aloof from the burgeoning party political system of the mid1790s, which proved a fruitful tactic in the 1796 election, in which Adams prevailed over Thomas Jefferson. During the early part of Adams’s administration, relations with France worsened, as the French Directory refused to accept a U.S. delegation and began a campaign to disrupt U.S. maritime trade, resulting in the sinking or capture of 300 ships. Although the Re-
publicans called for a more belligerent response, Adams recommended defensive preparations in funding a U.S. Navy. Tension with France continued as the U.S. ship Constellation and the French ship L’Insurgente battled on February 9, 1799. While demonstrating to France that the United States had assembled a significant naval force, Adams averted a declaration of war by concluding a treaty with France on September 30, 1800. Domestically, Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), which imposed harsh penalties on those who criticized government and was in turn criticized by opponents for being too authoritarian. Although Adams had helped the Federalists to a congressional election victory in 1798 by disclosing that French negotiators, named only as “X, Y, and Z,” had demanded a bribe, he was unable to retain his own office when he was defeated by Jefferson in the 1800 election. In later years Adams reaffirmed an interest in the arts and sciences, having established the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1779, which was inspired by the French Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. Adams would live to see his adored son, John Quincy Adams, become president in 1824 before he died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the same day as Jefferson: July 4, 1826. J. Simon Rofe See also: Jefferson, Thomas; Washington, George. References Ellis, Joseph J. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York: Knopf, 2000. McCullough, David. John Adams. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.
AIDS
AIDS “A cancer that would only touch homosexuals, no, that would be too good to be true!” When, around 1981, Hervé Guibert told Michel Foucault about the American discovery of a “gay cancer,” Foucault could only laugh. His reaction is emblematic of how the French gay community responded to the news, accusing American puritanism of being responsible for it. Indeed, after years of fighting for sexual freedom, the French gay community generally refused to acknowledge the possible veracity of such a “rumor.” The news of acquired immune deficiency syndreme (AIDS) put an end to what Frédéric Martel, in Le Rose et le noir, calls a time of “insouciance.” France and the United States played central roles in the discovery of the virus. In 1981, Willy Rozenbaum connected one of his patients to cases reported in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control of a rare type of cancer—Kaposi’s sarcoma—seen in homosexuals. With Jacques Leibowitch, he founded what would be called the “French work group on AIDS” in charge of finding information on a so-called gay cancer. They were in the process of discovering the virus. The team at the Pasteur Institute, headed by Luc Montagnier, was the first to isolate human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)—which they initially dubbed LAV—and published a paper on it in Science in May 1983. A few months later, a team led by Robert Gallo at the National Health Institute in Maryland also laid claim to the discovery, and a dispute developed, with millions of dollars at stake over blood test patents. In March 1987 French prime minister Jacques Chirac and U.S. president Ronald Reagan settled the debate, declaring both men
59
codiscoverers. In later years Gallo and Montagnier continued to work closely together in the fight against the epidemic. The scientific French-American relations concerning the virus, although not without rivalry, served a common goal: to understand what medicine was needed to fight what some described as a “holocaust” of the gay community. Throughout the pandemic, and to this day, American strategies have inspired the French and vice versa. In 1984 AIDES was founded by Daniel Defert, Michel Foucault’s longtime partner, after the philosopher’s death. Its goal was to inform the gay community of the virus and promote safer sex, but its creation was criticized by a number of militants for gay rights such as Guy Hocquenghem, who is known to have said: “Tobacco gives cancer, we all know it. Have we stopped smoking? Sex gives diseases. We should stop making love?” After the establishment of the U.S. organization AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) in 1987, its French equivalent, ACTUP Paris, was created in 1989. When Michel Foucault died in 1984, the cause of his death was not clearly named, although it became common knowledge. It was revealed in Guibert’s novel A L’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (1990), which shows Foucault, under the name of Muzil, as a man who died from AIDS. Guibert’s AIDS trilogy—A L’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life), Le Protocole compassionnel (The Compassion Protocol ) (1991), and L’Homme au chapeau rouge (The Man in the Red Hat) (1992)—as well as his diary Cytomegalovirus (1992), are literary chef d’oeuvres that have occupied an important place in social discourse around
60
AIDS
First ladies summit and scientific symposium on AIDS/HIV with professors Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier. Professors Gallo and Montagnier before the conference in front of the Palace of Congresses. (Henri Tullio/Corbis)
AIDS. Although Guibert himself was neither a gay nor an AIDS activist (something for which he was reproached), his writings are at the forefront of a public discourse on the syndrome, the health care system and hospitalization, and their effects on a person’s life. A large number of writers and artists in France and the United States (as well as throughout the world) have represented the experience of HIV-positive individuals. Indeed, circulation between France and the United States took place not only by means of scientific research into AIDS but also through cultural transfers linked to the acts of mourning that it generated (the AIDS memorial quilt, for instance) and to the artistic productions connected to it. For instance, the novels and testimonials of Paul Monette, Gilles Barbedette, David Woj-
narowicz, and Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhe; the plays of Tony Kushner and Larry Kramer; the films of Cyril Collard, Derek Jarman, and Mike Figgis; and the art of Pierre et Gilles and Keith Haring have all served to render the drama of AIDS visible on both sides of the ocean and hence encourage activism. The tragedy of AIDS has had an important impact on another aspect of cultural circulation: American queer studies appeared on the French intellectual scene in the early 1990s, thanks primarily to the work of Didier Eribon. He organized the first gay and lesbian studies conference at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1997, in which speakers from the United States and Canada participated. Conference papers were collected and published in one of the first volumes on the question
ALBERTA
to appear in France: Les Etudes gays et lesbiennes (Gay and Lesbian Studies) (1998). Eribon has also published a number of books on gay studies, among them Réflexions sur la question gay (Reflections on the Gay Question) (1999) and Papiers d’identité (Identity Papers) (2000). He is one of the most important advocates in France of what the Americans call “gay and lesbian studies.” Martine Delvaux See also: Foucault, Michel; Gay Movement; Hocquenghem, Guy; Theory. References Bass, Thomas A. “Luc Montagnier on Gallo and the AIDS Virus: ‘We Both Contributed.’” The Scientist 7, no. 24: 11. Chambers, Ross. AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Eribon, Didier. Réflexions sur la question gay. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Martel, Frédéric. Le Rose et le noir: Les homosexuels en France depuis 1968. Paris: Seuil, 1996. Murphy, Timothy F., and Suzanne Poirier. Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language and Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
ALBERTA French explorers and fur traders arrived in present-day Alberta in the mid-eighteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the French-speaking Métis people (part French-Canadian, part native) predominated in the region, but this population became a minority after the arrival of large numbers of English-speaking settlers in the 1880s. French-language community organizations nevertheless ensured the survival of francophone culture in the province through French-language education, radio and television programming,
61
publishing, and theater. In the 2001 census, 2 percent of Alberta’s population of 2,900,000 declared French as their first language, with the largest groups in the northern communities of Grande Prairie and Bonnyville. After the British conquest of North America in 1760, Scots and Americans took over the fur trade, but FrenchCanadian voyageurs (canoemen) remained its labor base. Their Métis descendants worked as guides and interpreters, hunted buffalo, and developed the Red River cart to carry freight on the prairies. By the midnineteenth century, French was the main language of Fort Edmonton, the largest fur-trading post on the North Saskatchewan River. In the 1840s, Catholic priests from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate arrived to found missions at Saint Albert, Lac Sainte Anne, and other centers. The most famous of these men was Father Albert Lacombe (1827–1916), who worked with the Métis, Cree, and Blackfoot for over fifty years and wrote dictionaries and grammars of native languages. Members of the Sisters of Assumption, the Sisters of Sainte-Croix, and the Filles de Jésus worked as teachers, and women from the nursing orders of the Grey Nuns, the Sisters of Charity, and Our Lady of Evron established hospitals and nursing homes. Despite the work of prêtres-colonisateurs (colonizer-priests) designated by the Catholic Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to encourage French immigration from Quebec and New England, only small numbers of settlers arrived. Some pre–World War I immigration from Belgium and France included former French army officers and members of the aristocracy who raised cattle and
62
ALEXIS, JACQUES STEPHEN
established in 1909 to train priests, and now trains French teachers as the Faculté Saint-Jean of the University of Alberta. The Association Canadienne-Française de l’Alberta (ACFA) was established in 1925. It publishes a French-language weekly, Le Franco, and in 1949 obtained a license to operate a radio station. Francophone culture continues to thrive in Alberta, with added diversity owing to more recent immigration from French-speaking areas of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Katherine Durnin
Map of Alberta. In the 2001 census, 2 percent of Alberta's population of 2,900,000 declared French as their first language, with the largest groups in the northern communities of Grande Prairie and Bonnyville. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
horses on ranches south of Calgary. The best-known French immigrant from this era was Georges Bugnet, novelist, poet, and journalist. French companies present in the early twentieth century included the Revillion Fur Company, and West Canadian Collieries, which operated coal mines in southwestern Alberta. The Northwest Territories Act of 1875 made French and English the official languages of government, the courts, and education, but in 1892 these provisions were amended in favor of English only. It was not until 1982, with the passage of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that French-language schooling above the primary school level was again allowed, and the first French school boards were set up in 1993. The Juniorat Saint-Jean was
See also: Bugnet, Georges; Catholic Church; Fur Trade; Language; Métis; World War I. References Lacombe, Danyèle. The Franco-Albertan Community. Edmonton: ACFA Foundation, 1996. Smith, Donald B. “A History of FrenchSpeaking Albertans.” Peoples of Alberta: Portraits of Cultural Diversity. Ed. Howard Palmer and Tamara Palmer. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1985: 84–108.
ALEXIS, JACQUES-STEPHEN (1922–1961) Haitian writer and political figure, born into a family at the forefront of Haitian cultural and political life. Alexis began his education in the Collège Stanislas in Paris and returned to complete his baccalaureate in Port-au-Prince. During his subsequent studies at the Haitian Faculty of Medicine, his political and literary passions began to emerge. He worked on the reviews Cahiers d’Haïti (Haiti Notebooks) and Le Caducée (The Caduceus) before joining René Depestre’s militant La Ruche (The Hive) group in 1945. The launch of the journal coincided
ALLEN,WOODY
with the arrival in Haiti of Aimé Césaire, André Breton, and Wilfredo Lam, whose presence inspired a special edition on surrealism. Haiti’s political and cultural ferment culminated in the general strike of January 1946 and did lead to the downfall of President Elie Lescot, but ultimately failed to install the democratic Socialist government envisioned by the La Ruche group. At the end of that year, Alexis and Depestre left to continue their studies at the Sorbonne, not realizing that for both it was the beginning of a long exile from Haiti. Exile allowed Alexis to distill his own vision of Haiti’s future, one that, like Jacques Roumain’s, was never narrowly nationalist or indigenist, but sought to valorize popular tradition and also place the country in a Marxist global context. It is in Compère Général Soleil (1955) that this vision is most persuasively proposed; the mix of Marxism and surrealism, coupled with the memory of the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, climaxes in a stirring call for change in Haiti and the world in general. At the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne in 1956, Alexis presented his enduring, influential theories of Haitian “réalisme merveilleux/magical realism,” which essentially developed Roumain’s ideas of popular culture while insisting that the particularities of Haiti could not be easily assimilated into a more general “black” or African aesthetic. These arguments fed into 1957’s Les Arbres musiciens, which presents Haitian popular culture under threat from Americanization and the Catholic Church–led “Campagne anti-superstitieuse.” L’Espace d’un cillement (1959) marks a movement away from rural Haiti to the urban world of Port-au-Prince and its cast of prostitutes and pimps, and
63
U.S. Marines literally screwing the country. His final published work, Romancero aux étoiles (1960), is a collection of short stories that reflects his preoccupations with resistance and Haitian self-affirmation. A patriot and militant to the end, Alexis was killed by president François Duvalier’s forces as he attempted to return to Haiti in 1961 to lead an insurrection against the dictatorship. Alexis was never universally popular with his contemporaries, yet his work remains a testament to his unquestionably committed, poetic, politically engaged sensibility. Martin Munro See also: Breton, André; Césaire, Aimé; Depestre, René; Haiti; Lam, Wilfredo; Roumain, Jacques; Surrealism. References Dash, J. Michael. Literature and Ideology in Haiti, 1915–1961. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981. Depestre, René. Bonjour at adieu à la négritude. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980. Souffrant, Claude. Une Négritude socialiste: Religion et développement chez Jacques Roumain, J. S. Alexis, et L. Hughes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1978.
ALLEN,WOODY (ALLEN STEWART KONIGSBERG) (1935–) American film director and actor, born in Brooklyn. Allen appears to many as the quintessential New York actor-director, with films such as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) portraying the ironies and anguishes of middle-class life in his home city. Nonetheless, Allen’s films follow stylistically in the footsteps of the French New Wave and are peppered with references to French life and
64
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
culture, a reflection of the fact that for the last decade he has made a point of spending late December in Paris. The admiration is reciprocated as Allen’s works fare exceptionally well in France, and there is rarely a week when his films are not playing in at least one Paris cinema. Allen began his career in the 1950s writing jokes for newspapers and television shows and then went on to performing as a stand-up comedian before live and TV audiences. The 1960s saw his career as a cinema actor take off with Peter Sellers’s What’s New, Pussycat? (1965) for which he wrote the script. His directing debut was Take the Money and Run (1969), followed by a host of light, almost slapstick, comedies before his more introverted films from the mid-1970s. The 1970s and 1980s, during which Allen starred with Diane Keaton and then Mia Farrow (both partners in his personal life), is seen as his most successful period. He has now made well over thirty films. Of these, Annie Hall won three Oscars, Hannah and her Sisters won one, and Manhattan and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) both received the César (French Oscar) for best foreign film. Several of Allen’s productions have key scenes shot in Paris (e.g., What’s New, Pussycat?, Love and Death [1975], Everybody Says I Love You [1996]) or use Paris as a leitmotif to which the characters dream of escaping. Spoofs of intellectualizing in works such as Deconstructing Harry (1997) lead to quips on Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, or Gustave Flaubert. In 1987 Allen appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear, a short modern-day satire that got limited release. More important is the influence Godard has had on Allen’s productions, specifically the disjunctive documentary-style cinéma vérité that frames Annie Hall,
Manhattan, and Husbands and Wives (1992). The punch line to Hollywood Ending (2002) is Allen’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to French cinema: second-rate director Val Waxman makes a comeback while concealing his onset of blindness, resulting in a shambles that flops in the United States, only for Americans to be told that the French love it! Woody Allen rejects much of the Hollywood studio system and follows the influence of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Godard, and François Truffaut, making him the most European of popular American filmmakers. Laurence F. Grove See also: Beauvoir, Simone de; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Godard, Jean-Luc; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Truffaut, François. References Fox, Julien. Woody: Movies from Manhattan. London: Batsford, 1996. Fredon, Jean-Michel. Conversations avec Woody Allen. Paris: Plon, 2000.
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR In 1861, eleven Southern states, which called themselves the Confederate States of America, sought independence from the United States. However, newly elected president Abraham Lincoln did not recognize the legitimacy of the Confederate government. Instead, Lincoln’s administration referred to the Confederacy as states temporarily in “rebellion.” Furthermore, Lincoln’s administration did everything in its power to bring the “rebels” back into the Union. But Confederate president Jefferson Davis and other Southern leaders refused to give up their cause without a fight. Outnumbered and outgunned, Davis soon realized that European aid was crucial for
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Confederate survival, and he sent agents to Great Britain and France to ask for help. The South was greatly outmatched by the North. A recent massive wave of immigration (1850–1860) had given the North a much greater population than the South. Most of the Irish, German, and Chinese immigrants settled in the North because they could get jobs in the factories. For the most part, the South did not need their services, because the South’s agrarian economy relied on slave labor. It has been estimated that about 70 percent of the U.S. population was concentrated in the North at the outbreak of the war. This afforded the North a much greater supply of soldiers. Also, almost all of the nation’s manufacturing capacity was in the North. It has been estimated that only about 14 percent of the nation’s factories were in the South in 1860. Therefore, war materials, which could be readily churned out in the North, were difficult to come by in the South. The North held most of the mineral deposits that were necessary for making weapons. The North also boasted more than twice the South’s railroad mileage. Even though the use of railroads in war was somewhat limited by where the tracks were laid, they did prove extremely helpful in the transporting of troops and supplies. The North also had most of the telegraph wire, which gave them an advantage in planning and directing military operations. Finally, the North controlled almost all the naval ships. Because of this, the North implemented the Anaconda Plan, which was a blockade of Southern ports aimed at choking the South economically, militarily, and diplomatically. Understanding their limitations, Confederates knew that they had to end the war as quickly as possible. In order to do
65
this, Confederate leaders determined to make very aggressive attacks on U.S. forts and the Union capital. Victories on the battlefields, it was thought, would convince the North to let the South go or at least convince Europe to intervene in the conflict in favor of the Southern cause. In general, the first year of the war went well for the Confederacy. The Battle of First Bull Run (July 1861) resulted in a Confederate victory. The Union responded with the Peninsula Campaign, but all attempts to capture the Confederate capital failed. In addition, Confederate forces were on the offensive in the East and in the West. These events on the battlefields prompted Britain and France to start pushing for mediation. They felt that the war had gone on long enough and that it was time to end it by giving the South what it wanted—independence. The Confederacy was aware that Europe needed cotton, and it used it as a bargaining chip. Both British and French leaders favored the dissolution of the United States because they saw it as a way to slow down rapid U.S. growth, which threatened their superiority as world powers. Furthermore, by late 1861, the Union blockade of Southern ports began to take a toll on both British and French business interests, and the economic woes produced a rise in popular support for European intervention in the conflict. Even Canadian public opinion was decidedly anti-Northern. Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward, however, counteracted attempts at intervention by pointing out to the British and French that they imported Northern wheat in great quantities and that it could be withheld if diplomatic relations worsened. Both Britain and France were forced to recognize that, even though they were
66
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
dependent on the South’s cotton, they were even more dependent on the North’s wheat. Gambling on pro-secessionist opinion abroad, Davis sent James Mason to Britain and John Slidell to France with orders to seek official recognition of the South’s independence. Traveling together, the envoys attempted to run the blockade. They traveled to Havana, Cuba, and then boarded the British vessel Trent, only to be intercepted by the USS San Jacinto under Captain Charles Wilkes. The Americans forcefully boarded the British ship and took Mason and Slidell as their prisoners. The Trent Affair, as it came to be called, was the most serious diplomatic crisis of the American Civil War. Although the Trent was not damaged and the Union allowed the ship to go on its way, British national honor was severely bruised. And although the British really did not want war with the Americans, they adamantly held to the position that they could not allow their flag to be insulted in that way. In preparation for war, Britain quickly sent thousands of troops to Canada, got its navy ready, and demanded a release of the two prisoners and a formal apology. To make matters worse for the Americans, France declared its support of the British stand. Faced with impending war, the North backed down, and the crisis was resolved peacefully with the release of the two prisoners and a formal apology. The Confederate ministers, therefore, proceeded unencumbered to their assigned destinations. The Battle of Antietam (September 1862), the bloodiest one-day battle of the war, was a product of a Confederate attempt to capture Washington, D.C. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, however,
Union forces repulsed the attacking army, which was led by Robert E. Lee. News of the Confederate retreat resulted in greater caution in Britain. After Antietam, Britain began to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. This frustrated French Emperor Napoléon III, who longed for a permanently divided North and South, but he felt that he could not act without British support. However, future Confederate victories could make intervention a possibility once again. Since the firing on the Union Fort Sumter by Confederate forces, which began the war, European powers had been extremely curious about the war. It was the first major industrialized war, and several countries sent official observers to report on the new methods of fighting, which were necessitated by new technologies. These foreign volunteers joined both Union and Confederate armies and took part in the war. Other European visitors took on a more detached role as mere observers. For example, France very carefully monitored the progress of the war. In the summer of 1861, Henri Mercier, French minister to the United States, arranged a visit by the emperor’s cousin, Prince Napoléon. The prince toured both the North and South and reported back home on his observations. One year later, Mercier secured permission from Seward to visit Richmond, Virginia. At the capital, Mercier interviewed Confederate secretary of state Judah Benjamin, who assured the minister that the South would win the war. Mercier remained unconvinced, but he was quite impressed with Benjamin’s resolve to continue the fight. In any case, of great concern to Mercier were the large amounts of cotton and tobacco that abounded in the South but would never reach France because of the federal blockade.
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Besides these observers, thousands of other Frenchmen took part in the war. Many French immigrants had been attracted by the promise of a new life in the United States, and French immigration had risen steadily in the early 1800s. According to census reports, between 1850 and 1860, over 100,000 French immigrants arrived in North America. The French settled in various parts of the United States, but many headed for Louisiana. When the Civil War broke out, many Frenchmen joined in the fighting. French Zouave units, in both the Union and Confederate armies, distinguished themselves in battle. The Zouave units dressed in very distinctive uniforms, similar to the garb of French soldiers in Algiers. They wore striped or red baggy trousers, bright waistcoats, cropped jackets with braided trim, fez-style hats, and sashes tied around the waists. The most famous of these units were the Louisiana Tigers of the Confederate Army and the New York Fire Zouaves of the Union. Several French officers also deserve mention. French-born Camille Armand Jules Marie, Prince of Polignac, served as a Confederate officer. Polignac, a veteran of the Crimean War, was a staff officer for another famous French Confederate, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. In the final year of the war, Polignac sailed to France to try to secure support for the Southern cause. Beauregard served as the staff officer of Winfield Scott during the MexicanAmerican War. During the Civil War, he commanded the attack on Fort Sumter, fought at First Bull Run, and assisted in the defense of Richmond in 1864. Basically, there was no theater of the war in which Beauregard did not fight. Another notable Frenchman who fought for the Union
67
cause was Prince Jérôme Bonaparte. Besides fighting courageously, Bonaparte left an accurate record of watercolor pictures of daily life in the Union Army. Meanwhile, as the war was raging in North America, three European nations sought to occupy Mexico. In defiance of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which declared that any further European colonization of the Americas would be regarded as cause for war, Spain, Britain, and France took control of Mexico under the guise of debt collection. The Union issued a formal protest against the invasion and accused the Europeans of planning to establish a monarchy. Before long, Northern diplomatic pressure, constant squabbles among the three countries, and French minister Dubois de Saligny’s announcement that France supported a Mexican monarchy convinced Spain and Britain to withdraw. French emperor Napoléon III, however, ordered his troops to remain. Determined to return France to the glory years it experienced under his uncle Napoléon I, Napoléon III had successfully intervened against Russia in the Crimean War, defeated the Austrians in Italy, conquered Algeria, acquired Nice and Savoy from Piedmont, established French Indochina, and begun the construction of the Suez Canal. Not surprisingly, to Napoléon, a French Latin American empire seemed both possible and extremely attractive. Napoléon believed that Mexican stability would attract European capital, increase European trade, supply European textile mills with cotton, and end U.S. involvement in Mexico. The first step was to remove the sitting Mexican president, Benito Juárez. On May 5, 1862, however, Juárez’s army defeated a French expeditionary force near Puebla. More determined than ever,
68
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Napoléon sent reinforcements and captured the Mexican capital on June 7, 1863. Confirming American suspicions, Napoléon then established Archduke Maximilian of Austria as emperor of Mexico. Having acquired a foothold in Mexico, Napoléon sought to solidify the conquest by proposing joint British and French intervention in the American war. In late 1862, Napoléon asked Britain and Russia to join France in a three-power intervention aimed at securing a six-month armistice in the United States. However, neither Britain nor Russia was willing to risk angering the North with such a move. In the early part of 1863, Napoléon once again tried to bring an end to the war. After the North’s defeat at Fredericksburg, Napoléon offered mediation directly to Washington. The Lincoln administration refused the offer. What is more, the U.S. Congress was so appalled by the emperor’s offer that it overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring that any future attempt at mediation by any country would be regarded as an unfriendly act. The three-day Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863), the bloodiest battle of the war, was yet again an attempt by the Confederacy to capture the Union capital. Robert E. Lee led his men in what turned out to be the last major battle of the war. But, once again, Lee’s forces were halted, and his retreat signaled the end of any hope of European intervention. British popular opinion shifted toward a pro-North stance after Union victories began to mount and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued. The proclamation, which freed the slaves in rebelling states, served as a diplomatic weapon. It infused the war with a moral element by elevating the struggle to that of a fight against human bondage.
Aware of its implications, Lincoln wrote several letters addressed to abolitionist organizations in Britain in an attempt to appeal to the working person’s sense of Christian heroism and to stir up positive reactions for his new policy. It worked. Huge rallies occurred all over Britain in support of the proclamation. Henry Adams, U.S. minister in England, wrote that, in his estimation, the proclamation had done more for the North’s cause than past victories on the battlefields. Ultimately, the approval of Britain’s middle class for the North restricted the British governing class from siding with the then unpopular slaveholding South. As the Confederacy felt its chances of European intervention or recognition slipping away, it resorted to certain acts of desperation. For example, by 1864, Davis ordered Confederate agents to station themselves in Canada and try to drum up support for the Confederate cause there. Their main charge, however, was to use Canada as a base of operations from which to launch anti-Lincoln propaganda in an effort to prevent his reelection in 1864. Unable to sway the election, the Confederate agents then turned their attention to acts of sabotage in retaliation for Northern victories on the field. For example, as General William T. Sherman marched through Atlanta, Georgia, Confederate agents attempted to burn New York City by setting fire to hotels and other public places on November 25, 1864. Napoléon believed that a permanently divided North and South would ensure his hold on Mexico, because a free South would gladly endure a French-held Mexico in gratitude for French support of Southern independence. Unfortunately for the South, however, as British interest in inter-
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
vention waned, the Union threatened war against France in response to any interference. To complicate things even more for Napoléon, his advisers were increasingly reminding him that he could not afford to wage war against the Union Army at a time when Prussia was exhibiting an aggressive attitude toward France. (Their fears were apparently not unfounded: the FrancoPrussian War broke out in 1870.) Consequently, Napoléon was checked. He would not act without British support, and possibly fearing an enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine by the United States, France pulled its troops from Mexico as the American Civil War drew to a close. Without the hope of European support, the Confederacy was left to fend for itself. Consequently, the Union was preserved. Rolando Avila See also: Antislavery Movements; Cotton; Louisiana; Mexico; Slavery; Tobacco. References Blumenthal, Henry. France and the United States: Their Diplomatic Relations, 1789–1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970. Carroll, Daniel B. Henri Mercier and the American Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Case, Lynn M., and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. Echard, William E. Napoleon III and the Concert of Europe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Hanna, Alfred J., and Kathyrn Abby Hanna. Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971. West, W. Reed. Contemporary French Opinion and the American Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical Science, 1924. Winks, Robin W. Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960.
69
AMERICAN REVOLUTION The enormous financial and military effort of the French and Indian War (1754– 1763) gave Great Britain absolute dominion over all North American territory east of the Mississippi. After the Royal Proclamation (October 7, 1763) that temporarily set their western border at the Allegheny Mountains, British land in North America was reorganized into nineteen provinces. East Florida and West Florida, containing 5,000 Spanish-speaking inhabitants, were added to the older provinces of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia (including the Island of Saint John, later Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton Island), Newfoundland (including the Labrador coast, Iles-de-la-Madeleine, and Anticosti Island), and Rupert’s Land (Hudson Bay). To this area, which contained 1,628,700 English-speaking inhabitants, the province of Quebec was also added. In 1760, 63,100 francophones lived in Quebec. The British provinces were limited to the west by the Indian Territory. This extended from the Proclamation Line, which ran along the Allegheny mountain chain, to the limits of the Spanish territory. The Indian Territory, containing approximately 25,000 inhabitants, was not placed under any provincial legislation, only the sovereignty of the Crown. There remained, then, off the coast of Central America, the French islands and the British islands, the latter inhabited by 41,000 Europeans and 365,000 Africans (1760). The Treaty of Paris (February 10, 1763) removed the French, the common enemy of the British Crown and its American colonists, from North American soil.
70
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
As a result, the need for mutual assistance was gone, and Great Britain as well as the American provinces were free to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of their own interests. Eventually, these interests conflicted. Starting in 1763 especially, the British parliament began to imagine new solutions that would reverse the negative trends of increasing administrative inefficiency and a chaotic financial situation. The public national debt of £137 million was only grazed by tax revenues of £8 million, which was just a little more than the £5 million to be paid in debt interest. The French and Indian War alone was estimated to have cost £160 million. The reorganization of the British administration had to begin from the very sector that seemed to present the most inefficiencies, the most resistance, and at the same time the most possibility for immediate economic return, that is, the entire colonial system, whose trading made up 68 percent of British public revenue. In this system the old American provinces stood out for the gap between their wealth and the modest contribution they offered to the Crown’s coffers. The British parliament maintained, and not without reason, that it had paid all the costs of the French and Indian War. It had defended the interests of the American provincials, who not only paid ten times less in taxes than the inhabitants of Great Britain but also did not give military aid or even a financial contribution in return. The reorganization of the colonial system took various forms. Subordination of the provinces to the British parliament was confirmed; the entire body of laws regulating their economic and political activity, until then not applied, was put into force; and the principle that the provinces were to pay for their own administration and de-
fense was reinforced. This policy was handled in a contradictory and inconsistent manner (between 1760 and 1775 Great Britain changed government eight times) but enjoyed nearly unanimous consent in Great Britain, at least until the outbreak of the War of American Independence (1775–1783). This war was also described by the revolutionaries as the American Revolution, and by their rivals, loyalists in America, as the War of the Rebellion. Considering its nature, historians should better call it the North American Civil War. The new British colonial policy immediately clashed with the expectations of the provinces’ elite, who were moving in exactly the opposite direction. At the very moment in which merchants and land speculators believed that they had their way clear to the west and the north and the provincial parliaments believed that they no longer needed British assistance, London blocked their expansion, taking the place of the French. The metropolitan government imposed the payment of taxes, levies, and duties that until then they had largely avoided and prevented the unlimited use of provincial currency. In addition, London did not recognize the powers of the provincial parliaments; did not withdraw its regular troops, leaving them to the orders of a unified military command; and in the end, with the Quebec Act (June 22, 1774), handed a good part of the West over to Quebec “papists.” These measures, which for a century and a half had aroused nothing more than the occasional protest, instantly became intolerable. A quick glance at the events of the twelve years that passed between 1763 and the battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775), representing the beginning of the war, shows, however, how the crisis in the rela-
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tions between Great Britain and the future United States accelerated. This acceleration led to a civil war that both sides believed to be avoidable up until the last moment. The 1763 Royal Proclamation was followed by the Stamp Act (March 22, 1765), which obliged the provinces to purchase a revenue stamp for documents, newspapers, almanacs, playing cards, and dice. This taxation, of little importance in itself, was interpreted by American opponents within the context of a series of new financial obligations imposed by the British parliament from the day after the French and Indian War. Rioting in the streets or symbolic demonstrations such as the so-called Boston Massacre (with three dead) (March 5, 1770) or the Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773) led on the one hand to the unilateral convocation of the Continental Congress (June 17, 1774), in which the representatives of twelve colonies or provinces out of nineteen participated, and to the Declaration of Independence (April 4, 1776), signed by fifty-six delegates representing thirteen provinces. On the other hand, they led to the Quebec Act, which reproposed, with amendments, the broad lines of the Royal Proclamation of only a decade or so earlier. The American Revolution had been sought by an elite that, above and beyond the law and in accordance with a new political project, had violently replaced the previous elite. Those involved at the time, from both sides, were far less certain of the inevitability of victory for the forces of the revolution than were historians following 1783. The war dragged on for a long time. In 1775 the British captured Fort Ticonderoga (May 10), but they could not defeat American resistance at Bunker Hill (June 7), a defeat that cost Thomas Gage
71
(1721–1787) his command. William Howe (1729–1814) replaced Gage, and the Continental Congress appointed George Washington (1732–1799) commander in chief of the Continental Army (June 15). American troops conquered Montreal (November 13) but were routed at Quebec (December 30–31), where they had met not only with the British army but also with the hostility or the indifference of the French Canadians. In 1776 Howe abandoned Boston for Nova Scotia (March 17), regrouped, and reconquered New York (August 22–25) and the entire province by the end of the year. By employing guerrilla tactics, Washington won stunning victories at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey (December 26, 1776, and January 3, 1777). In the South, the British fleet did not succeed in conquering Charleston, South Carolina (June 28). In 1777, following the battles of Brandywine (September 11) and Germantown (October 4), Howe entered Philadelphia. However, at Saratoga, New York, General John Burgoyne (1722–1792) surrendered his 5,700-man army to Horatio Gates (c. 1728–1806) (October 17). In 1778, reassured by the turn of events in North America, France signed an agreement with the Continental Congress (February 6), and the British replaced Howe with Henry Clinton (c. 1738–1795). Clinton abandoned Philadelphia and headed toward New York, but he barely avoided defeat at Monmouth, New Jersey (June 28). In the South, the British fleet conquered Savannah, Georgia (December 29). In 1779 war operations concentrated around New York, while the Americans waged guerrilla warfare in the west against the British and the Indian nations, who mostly fought on the British side. In 1780 the British fleet took
72
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Charleston (May 12), and Gates was defeated at Camden, South Carolina (August 16). After Gates was replaced by Nathanael Greene (1742–1786), at Yorktown, Virginia, General Charles Cornwallis, marquis Cornwallis (1738–1805), surrendered his 7,000 men to a joint French-American force led by Washington and Jean-Baptiste Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau (1725– 1807) (October 19). For all practical purposes, that was the end of the American Revolution. All in all, by using guerrilla warfare tactics, the American revolutionaries were able to prolong the war long enough to cause French intervention and the internationalization of the war itself. This in turn caused the breakdown of the British front, that, although in favor of the war at the beginning, progressively lost its unanimity and yielded in the face of the military defeats suffered beginning in early 1781. In fact, only France’s intervention on the side of the revolutionaries determined the final outcome of the war. France first supplied the Americans with logistical support and then prevented Great Britain from using its military superiority to the fullest. Therefore, with its direct intervention, France altered the balance of power in the decisive battle of Yorktown. The American Revolution ended with the Treaty of Paris (September 3, 1783) and the independence of thirteen of the nineteen provinces or colonies that existed on North American soil when the hostilities began. Not all the provinces took part in the revolution with the same conviction, nor did the contemporaries fight with one side or the other simply according to social class, religion, or length of residence. There were merchants, planters, New Englanders, Virginians, Catholics, and Quakers among
the revolutionaries as well as among the Loyalists (also called Tories), that is, those who actively sided with the British. It is a fact, however, that the revolution was predominantly led by a political bloc consisting of southern planters and land speculators from the center-south provinces. The Loyalists were numerous in all the provinces, approximately one-third of the population, and formed the majority in Georgia and South Carolina. Many, perhaps 60,000, fought alongside the British against the revolutionaries. During the war or immediately after its end, approximately 80,000 Americans (perhaps up to 100,000) left the United States. It is estimated that they represented 20 percent of those who espoused the Loyalist cause without showing it publicly and who remained in the country after the end of the war. Furthermore, as is the case during all revolutions, there were even more who tried not to side with either group. The 12,000 (1776) residents of Newfoundland, despite the Irish origins of many of them, were not at all tempted to fight alongside the distant American revolutionaries. Neither were the 1,000–2,000 inhabitants of the Island of Saint John, a large portion of whom were of Scottish origin. The position of the 20,000 inhabitants of Nova Scotia was more complex. Many of them had arrived in the province from New England in the last fifteen years, and others were immigrants who had arrived mostly from the British Isles and from German-speaking countries. Nova Scotia was not without revolutionary sympathies, but a combination of factors gave the Loyalists the upper hand. On the one hand there were the substantial subsidies for immigration granted by the British government, especially between 1749 and 1763,
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
which, together with the importance of Halifax as a Royal Navy military base, gave the province a certain economic prosperity. On the other side there was the multiethnic composition of the region (English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Germans) and the negative reaction of the population to the continuous raids by American privateers. Lastly, there was the political-religious plan proposed by a radical evangelical clergyman originally from New England, Henry Alline (1748–1784). According to Alline, whose preaching took root in the Great Awakening, Nova Scotia was nothing but the new Massachusetts, that with its revolution had abandoned the righteous path of God. The success of Alline’s plan and of the resulting movement, known as the New Light, made Nova Scotians feel like a people with a unique history, a distinct identity, and a special destiny. It was their sense of superiority, therefore, that caused them not to espouse the rebel cause. Excluded from the North American continent but favored by the terms of the Treaty of Paris-Versailles, France had immediately started to prepare for another conflict with Great Britain. The French rebuilt their navy, took advantage of trade with the West Indies, and wove a network of diplomatic relations that would heighten the isolation of the enemy country. The American Revolution did not take French officials by surprise. Indeed, several of them had expected it during the French and Indian War. Their intervention alongside the rebels in 1778 was the logical consequence of the anti-British policy operating in France at the time. What did not take place, however, was the French armed intervention on Quebec soil that many French-Canadians were nostalgically awaiting. (Only eighteen years had passed since
73
the British conquest of Quebec.) According to the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes (1717– 1787), a possible annexation or conquest of Canada would have given the American revolutionaries too much strength, with dangerous consequences for the future of international order. Keeping an area of friction, such as the Canadian frontier, on the contrary, would have weakened Great Britain as much as it would have the United States, all in France’s interest. The Treaty of Paris was favorable to France as well as to the United States. France kept Saint Lucia and Tobago for itself and reclaimed its former possessions in India, Senegal, and Gorée (later Chad) in Africa. It also maintained fishing rights in the North Atlantic. Great Britain took back its islands in the West Indies and, like France, obtained fishing rights in the North Atlantic but ceded Minorca, East Florida, and West Florida to Spain. The latter had entered the war only on June 21, 1781. Luca Codignola See also: Catholic Church; Fishing; Florida; French and Indian War; Mississippi River; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Quebec; Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de; Saint Lawrence River; Treaty of Paris (1763). References Christie, Ian R. Wars and Revolutions: Britain, 1760–1815. London: Edwin Arnold, 1982. Ferling, John E. A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Garner Thomas, Peter David. Revolution in America: Britain and the Colonies, 1763–1776. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992. Lawson, Philip Graeme. The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.
74
ANNAUD, JEAN-JACQUES
ANNAUD, JEAN-JACQUES (1943–) French film director, equally well known in Europe and the United States, born in Juvisy, outside Paris. In 1962 at the Ecole de Vaugirard in Paris, Annaud passed his BTS (a qualification as a technician in the film industry) and made his first short film, Les Sept Péchés capitaux du cinéaste/The Filmmaker’s Seven Deadly Sins. Receiving his diploma from the prestigious French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), he began a career in film ads at the age of twenty-three. His first feature film, La Victoire en chantant (also known as Noirs et blancs en couleurs/Black and White in Color, 1977), was a satire of colonialism that won the Oscar for best foreign film, although it was not a commercial success. His 1978 film on the milieu of football in provincial France, Coup de tête/Hothead, produced with Patrick Dewaere and Jean Bouise, did slightly better at the box office. Annaud won Césars for best film and best director for Quest for Fire (1981), the story of three members of a primitive tribe. After this success came The Name of the Rose (1986), an adaptation of Umberto Eco’s novel starring Sean Connery, and an innovative animal film, The Bear (1988), which won a César for best director and France’s Prix National du Cinéma. In 1991 the producer Claude Berri entrusted him with the adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s novel L’Amant (The Lover), the story of a passionate affair between a teenager and a wealthy Chinese businessman, in a production starring Jane March. Annaud shot a 3-D IMAX film, Wings of Courage, recounting the adventures of the pilot Henri Guillaumat who crashed in the Andes, which was first shown at the Poitiers
Futuroscope in 1996. His other project that year was a film that took a clear political line against Chinese rule in Tibet. Seven Years in Tibet, starring David Thewlis and Brad Pitt, was the story of Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, who escaped from British troops during World War II, crossed the Himalayas, and ended up as tutor to the young Dalai Lama. Annaud’s next films continued in this vein of spectacular intentional films made in English: Enemy at the Gates (2000), about the siege of Stalingrad, starring Ed Harris and Jude Law; and Two Brothers (2004), starring Guy Pearce and JeanJacques Dreyfus as two brothers lost, captured, and sold in the jungles of Cambodia. Annaud is the president of the French Hollywood Circle, which brings together around 100 French film professionals working in Los Angeles. Annaud lives in that city and pursues his career choice to make films for the United States and, indeed, world market. Jérôme Ceccon See also: Aviation; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Sport; World War II. References Bonnal, Nicolas. Jean-Jacques Annaud: Un cinéaste sans frontières. Paris: Maule, 2001. Boorman, John, and Walter Donohue. Filmmakers on Film-making. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
ANTI-AMERICANISM Cultural anti-Americanism has been a feature of French discourse since at least the eighteenth century. As rhetoric, it long predates the political anti-Americanism of more recent history. Because of this wellestablished antipathy, modern French intellectuals inherited a cultural argument that they used to back up their political
ANTI-AMERICANISM
positions—attacking in particular the “simplicity,” “arrogance,” “Puritanism,” “artificiality,” and “greed” of American civilization. Seeing these terms today, it is obvious how little the anti-American critique has changed. Of course, disliking the United States is hardly uniquely French. American power has generated resentment worldwide. In addition, the historical links between the two nations and the universalist pretensions of their dual revolutions are certain to create some competitive hostility. But French anti-Americanism has characteristics that differ from mere resentment of American power or dislike of American policy. Quite apart from any political concerns, anti-American writing has repeatedly played a central role in constructions of French identity. Tied to the French narrative of glory, decline, and decadence, critiques of America and Americanism have marked modern French history. As the United States emerged as the new colossus in the late nineteenth century, the first traces of this broad-based anti-Americanism surfaced, and intellectuals of all stripes, from reactionary to radical, began to see in America and “Americanization” the greatest threat to civilization. This sentiment was codified in the years after World War I, when it combined with political and economic concerns to make for the powerful mélange that is French anti-Americanism. The story is rich with irony. To begin with, France and the United States are the world’s oldest allies—and business and diplomatic relations have usually been excellent. In addition, the general population of France continuously demonstrates an astonishing ambivalence toward the United States. Opinion polls summarize these sentiments nicely—they tell us the United
75
States is both the most hated and most beloved country among the French. Although political anti-Americanism has, via the Communist Party, appealed to a segment of the populace, cultural antiAmericanism has typically been an elite taste. Although it has occasionally translated into mass movements, its most dedicated proponents usually contrast American vulgarity to French civilization, thus legitimizing certain traditional cultural notions. It is also clear, as historian Richard Kuisel has noted, that American cultural successes seem specifically marked to undermine France’s most beloved traditions— McDonald’s versus the bistro, Hollywood versus cinema, belligerence versus diplomacy, the supermarket versus the village épicier, and so on. From this it seems a large and resilient strain of romanticism continues to inform French anti-Americanism. This romantic anti-Americanism long predates America the superpower. For Charles Baudelaire, America stood for all of the evils of soulless capitalist society. In his writing many of the most durable themes already appeared—America’s inhumanity, its childishness, and its voracious appetite for destruction of all that is “authentic.” The fear, too, that the United States would “have us all Americanized” is Baudelaire’s. For other commentators the threat was primarily religious—Protestant “Anglo-Saxon” America reverting to type— making a religion of work and conformity. Still others, notably Edouard Drumont and his cohort, saw the United States as symbolic of the chaotic freedom brought about by the leveling of class and order— identifying Jews as the sorcerer’s apprentice of American capitalism. Although Drumont’s specific link between America and Jews was later forgotten, others made use of
76
ANTI-AMERICANISM
it in different forms—from extreme right collaborationists in the 1940s to extreme left “anti-globalists” and “anti-Zionists” today. Indeed, anti-Semitism is a present, and frequently ignored, subtext of much anti-American writing. The interwar era added nuance to the story, as France’s “debt” to the United States was translated into a much more tangible debt—and loan repayment became a contentious issue. France had a number of pro-American reformers (most famously André Tardieu), but the era is better remembered by anti-American screeds such as Jean-Louis Chastanet’s L’Oncle Shylock ou l’impérialisme américain à la conquête du monde/Uncle Shylock or American Imperialism Conquering the World and Lucien Romier’s Qui sera le maître, Europe ou Amérique?/Who Will Be Master, Europe or America? (1928). Most famous of all was Georges Duhamel’s runaway best-seller Scènes de la vie future/ America the Menace (1930), an unrelenting and very influential attack that spares no insult. Despite the book’s absurd excesses, it remains an enlightening glimpse into “America” as French dystopia. After the crash of the stock exchange in 1929, anti-Americanism became a virtual school of French thought—one with an enormous elite following. This ideological approach defined itself against America— often equating the United States with the Soviet Union (both failures of “mass” society) and, later, Nazi Germany. Because of the protean nature of anti-Americanism, its appeal, while coinciding with the rise of the extreme right, touched a wide variety of French thinkers—everyone from Robert Brasillach to Georges Bataille. Some of the most prominent include the jeune droite and “nonconformist” generation—spiritu-
ally minded ex-followers of the monarchist Charles Maurras made homeless by the confusing events of the 1930s. They included Emmanuel Mounier and his journal Esprit followers, Georges Bernanos, Denis de Rougemont, and many others. A book, The American Cancer, written by two jeune droite militants, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, summed up the alarm with which this generation viewed the threat from across the Atlantic. The collapse of the American economy was interpreted as a moral judgment on the corruption of American liberalism, capitalism, and civilization in general. The American cancer, Aron and Dandieu argued, was, for all its political content, ultimately a “spiritual epidemic.” It has been noted that, for many of the hardy anti-Americans, Nazi Germany seemed relatively benign in comparison. A surprising number of these writers maintained their anti-American mood throughout World War II, some in the service of Vichy or collaboration, and gleefully joined in the America bashing of the marxisant postwar. Thus, in a very practical way, antiAmericanism showed how extremes meet. In the postwar period, anti-Americanism has had two popular faces—Gaullist and Marxist. Although both are heir to the earlier traditions, the cultural nationalism of Charles de Gaulle and his descendants revives the chauvinistic anti-Americanism of an earlier generation. The anti-American posturing of Jean-Paul Sartre may have greater appeal, but it was finally thinner and less committed to a hostile rejection of American civilization. Aspects of the antiAmerican cultural critique appear in the statements of Sartre as well, but the political anti-Americanism of the cold war carried less of this baggage. Marxists had to be careful when criticizing America for its
ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENTS
mass society, lowbrow culture, or universal, if dull, prosperity. The very public Franco-American split preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave this old argument new life. Policy differences aside, the revival of visceral antiAmericanism in France is curious unless we take into account the deep cultural roots of this hostility. The U.S. manner of proceeding with war seemed to confirm old essentialist notions about the deeply flawed American character. Malleable and resilient as ever, the complex language of antiAmericanism now unites Gaullist politicians and Green Party activists. Seth Armus See also: American Revolution; Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre; Bernanos, Georges; Cuisine; Duhamel, Georges; French Revolution; Gaulle, General Charles de; Liberalism; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Theory; World War I; World War II. References Armus, Seth. “The Eternal Enemy: Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit and French antiAmericanism.” French Historical Studies 24, no. 2 (spring 2001). Colombani, Jean-Marie, and Walter Wells. Dangerous De-Liaisons: What’s Really behind the War between France and the U.S. Melville House, 2004. Kuisel, Richard. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Lacorne, Denis, et al. The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: Changing French Perceptions of America from the Revolution to the Present Day. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990. Mathy, Jean-Philippe. Extrême Occident: French Intellectuals and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Portes, Jacques. Fascination and Misgivings: The United States in French Opinion, 1870–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Strauss, David. Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.
77
ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENTS Slavery, as discussed here, refers to a profitable trade that lasted over 400 years, involving millions of Africans transported against their will as commodities across the Atlantic. This “respectable trade,” which in many cases left those citizens involved in the trading process (both on the African and European side) vastly enriched, was not accepted by all. Indeed, opposition was expressed on both sides of the Atlantic, where people articulated in numerous ways their rejection of this dehumanization and forced migration. The first kind of opposition came from the slaves themselves, who rejected this practice through various forms of resistance. Slave rebellions took place on land in Africa, on the slave ships, and in the New World. Some were individual actions, such as jumping overboard or starving to death, in which the captured preferred to take their own lives rather than be subjected to slavery. Suicides continued to be a common practice among the slaves in the New World. There, they also developed new strategies to fight against their condition. Such strategies involved working slowly or breaking tools and equipment, thus playing into the stereotypical view— quickly adopted by colonists—that black people were lazy and clumsy. Some rebellions were group actions strategically organized. One of the most famous onboard rebellions was that on the Snow Ann on April 14, 1750, in which the captured Africans successfully managed to gain control of the ship, steering it back to Cape Lopez, where they regained their freedom, leaving onshore a handful of surviving crew members. However, such onboard rebellions were rare and
78
ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENTS
usually occurred only when land was within sight. Organized group rebellions were more common once in the New World, particularly among the maroon community. Maroons (from the Spanish word cimarrones, used to describe fugitive slaves) were runaway slaves organized in communities and present throughout the Caribbean and South America. The first significant maroon rebellion was led by Jean Leblanc (from Angola) and Pèdre (from Cabo Verde) and took place in 1656 in Guadeloupe. The fighting went on for fifteen days but ended in the massacre of the rebels. There were two important wars by maroons in Jamaica (1725–1740 and 1795–1796). Following the first war, a treaty was signed, and the maroons were granted some lands in Jamaica; ironically, to enjoy these newly acquired privileges, they were also expected to become slave catchers. Maroon communities existed in most places where slavery was practiced. Their most common practice was to set fire to plantations or colonial habitations, poison slave owners, and encourage other slaves to join them. However, the most successful revolt against slavery is without a doubt that led by Daniel Boukman in 1791 and then Toussaint L’Ouverture against the French in Saint Domingue. The suppression of slavery and the destruction of French colonial society were supported by antislavery ideas in Europe, influenced by both the American Revolution (1776–1783) and the French Revolution (1789). These factors led to a vote to abolish slavery in the French Antilles on February 4, 1794. However, the decree was discarded only eight years later, on May 20, 1802, by Napoléon I. Napoléon sent his
troops, led by Captain Lacrosse and seconded by the Guadeloupean Magloire Pelage, to reinstate slavery on Guadeloupe. The troops met resistance from an army led by black officers such as Joseph Ignace and Louis Deldres, who fought to the death rather than return to enslavement. Slavery was reestablished in Guadeloupe on July 17, 1802. A parallel movement took place in Haiti during that period. Toussaint’s army, subsequently led by Dessalines, triumphed against the French army and forced the abolition of slavery in 1804, making Haiti the first black free nation in the Caribbean. One of the oldest images of the antislavery movement in Europe dates back to the seventeenth century when two priests, the Frenchman Epiphane de Moirans and the Spaniard Francisco Jose de Jaca, were judged in 1681 by the Spanish Ecclesiastic Tribunal for condemning slavery and promising damnation to slave masters if they did not free their slaves. Despite the acceptance of slavery by this Spanish tribunal, religion played an important role in the fight against slavery; indeed, the antislavery movement in Europe was mostly influenced by nonconformist believers, such as the Quakers in the United States, who were the first to attack slavery and refused to possess slaves. In Britain, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce founded the first antislavery organization in Europe, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, in 1787. The group was supported by the prime minister at the time—William Pitt. It organized a number of petitions against the slave trade, and people at all levels of society happily attached their names to these petitions. Abolitionists produced literature
ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENTS
with statistical data and drawings to inform the public of the conditions under which the slave trade was taking place. Stories were recorded from escaped or freed slaves. One of the most famous stories is the autobiography written by Equiano in 1789: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavo Vassa the African. In France a similar movement, the Société des Amis des Noirs, founded in 1788 by the priest Baptiste-Henri Grégoire and Jacques Pierre Brissot, advocated the abolition of the slave trade. In France those associated with the fight against slavery included philosophers of the Enlightenment, who were influenced by the Quaker belief that the light of God’s truth is at work in every individual, regardless of sex or ethnicity. Although these philosophers condemned the slave trade, many of them did not hold the same view of slavery. However, they were responsible for bringing the debate to the wider public in their work, an example of which can be found in Voltaire’s Candide (chap. 19, 1759). Until the first decade of the nineteenth century, most of these organizations advocated the abolition of the slave trade rather than the end of slavery. Although Denmark was the first European country to abolish the slave trade in 1802, the British tend to be noted as those at the forefront of the anti–slave trade movement. Indeed in 1807 Wilberforce had managed to obtain legislation against the transportation of slaves to Britain, and by 1808 it was forbidden to transport slaves from Africa to the United States. However the campaigning of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade did not end there. The slave trade became illegal in France in 1817, following the Congress of Vienna, where participants
79
were asked to sign an agreement against the slave trade. France endorsed the decision in the Paris Treaty on November 20, 1815. In 1831, the British Royal Navy was granted the right to stop and search boats suspected of breaking the law; the illegal traders were fined £100 per slave. However, the triangular trade continued in France until 1847, the date when the last slave ship left Le Havre. In England, new movements arose for the abolition of slavery by 1820, the year the Anti-Slavery Society was founded. The slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831–1832 led to the abolition of slavery by the British in 1833. In France the abolitionist movement led by Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Gatine, François Auguste Perrinon, and Victor Schoelcher, to name a few, ended with the abolition of slavery in French colonies in 1848. Although in France the abolition of slavery is often associated with the name of Victor Schoelcher, it is fair to say that the industrial revolution, the development of sugar beet farming, and the various slave rebellions are some of the key factors that contributed to making the institution of slavery uneconomical. Marie-Annick Gournet See also: American Revolution; French Revolution; Guadeloupe; Le Havre; Santo Domingo; Schoelcher, Victor; Slavery; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François; Voltaire, François. References Dorigny, Marcel, and Bernard Gainot, eds. Les Abolitions de l’esclavage. Paris: Edition Unesco, 1995. Klein, Herbert. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Walvin, James, and David Eltis, eds. The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origin and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.
80
AQUIN, HUBERT
AQUIN, HUBERT (1929–1977) French Canadian novelist, filmmaker, political writer, activist, publisher, and earlier a journalist and producer for both radio and television, Hubert Aquin played an important role in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s in Quebec and is considered to be one of the major literary figures of the period. Aquin is remembered for his innovative novels, inspired by James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and the French “new novelists,” among others. He was also a participant in the early debates on Quebec nationalism and became known as one of the first proponents of the separatist option. Born in a modest middle-class setting, Aquin received a classical education from the Jesuits at the prestigious Collège Sainte-Marie in Montreal. He later attended the University of Montreal and was awarded scholarships for study in France. Aquin lived in Paris from 1951 to 1954, first as a postgraduate student and then as a journalist, and returned frequently in the 1950s and 1960s, while working for Radio-Canada and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). In terms of his fiction, his links with Switzerland are even more significant: the plot of Aquin’s first major novel, Prochain Episode/Next Episode (1965), is set against the backdrop of Lausanne and Lake Geneva. Aquin lived in Switzerland for a few months and unsuccessfully applied for permanent residency there in 1966. He established contacts with a number of French and Swiss writers; he notably collaborated with French critic Roland Barthes on an NFB film project. Aquin joined the Rassemblement pour l’Indépendance Nationale (RIN), a left-wing separatist organization, in 1960. He developed his views on the issue of na-
tionalism in a 1962 essay, “The Cultural Fatigue of French Canada,” written in response to an article by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the journalist and future Canadian prime minister. When the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), a group of political radicals, started a terror campaign in 1963 in favor of separation, Aquin himself evolved toward a revolutionary position. In 1964, he dramatically announced his intention to join the underground; however, it is unclear whether he had any links with a terrorist cell. Aquin was promptly arrested on minor criminal charges, which were eventually dismissed on psychiatric grounds. In his later years, Aquin shifted his interests toward literature. Prochain Episode is largely autobiographical: Aquin’s experience in the separatist movement and his subsequent arrest are transposed into a complex story of murder and international espionage. Despite its unconventional focus on narrative technique, the book became an instant success in Quebec and established Aquin’s reputation as a novelist. Prochain Episode was eventually published in France in 1966; however, Aquin never received the same level of attention in France as he did in Quebec. Aquin went on to write three additional novels: Trou de mémoire/Memory Gap (1968), L’Antiphonaire/The Antiphonary (1969), and Neige noire/Black Snow (1974). Aquin battled with depression, suicidal thoughts, and addiction to various drugs for most of his life; in fact, such themes were already present in some of his earliest literary writings. He eventually committed suicide in 1977, after months of careful preparation. Jean-Christian Pleau
ARCAND, DENYS See also: Barthes, Roland; Jesuits; Quebec; Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. References Jameson, Fredric. “Euphorias of Substitution: Hubert Aquin and the Political Novel in Quebec.” Yale French Studies 65 (1983): 214–223. Sheppard, Gordon. Ha! A Self-Murder Mystery Presented as a Docudrama. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
ARCAND, DENYS (1941–) Québécois film director and scriptwriter. Born in 1941 in Deschambeault, Quebec, Arcand’s first cinematic efforts were a collaborative student film, Seul ou avec d’autres/Alone or with Others (1962), and then three short documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), which delved into the history of Quebec and the exploration of the North American continent: Champlain (1964), Les Montréalistes/The Montrealists (1965), and La Route de l’ouest/The Road West (1965). The second film plays on the contrast between the religious origin of the foundation of Montreal and its later commercial and military role, emphasized by a sequence featuring a modern-day fashion shoot in the Jeanne Mance museum. Arcand’s challenge to NFB orthodoxies and the technocratizing confidence of the Quiet Revolution was expressed in the controversy around his 1970 feature-length documentary On est au coton, a scathing judgment of the textile industry whose screening was banned for seven years. Aspects of that film were reworked into his 1975 fictional feature, Gina. Critical social commentary aided by the contrastive invocation of history characterized much of Arcand’s subsequent documentary and fictional output after
81
1970. The 1981 documentary Le Confort et l’indifférence/Comfort and Indifference, on the previous year’s referendum campaign for sovereignty in Quebec, uses the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli to analyze the way in which Pierre Trudeau outmaneuvered the nationalist camp and how, as the title indicates, the comforts of consumer society—and fear of their loss—had finally vanquished the dreams of a collective social and national project. These arguments are developed in fictional form in Le Déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986), a portrayal of a group of well-off academics spending a weekend in the country who gossip about sex and their own privileged gratifications. The title ironically and ambiguously points to the thesis of one member of the group that the prioritizing of individual rather than collective happiness leads to the decline of empires, as happened in Rome. Although his 1970s films had known some success, Le Déclin was Arcand’s great breakthrough on the international market, achieving far and away the biggest boxoffice success in France until then for any Quebec film. The follow-up, Jésus de Montréal (Jesus of Montreal, 1989), picked up the Jury Prize at Cannes and seemed to establish him as the embodiment of financially viable and indeed profitable auteur cinema. The film reworked the Christian myth via a group of contemporary actors asked to conceive and perform a new version of the passion play taking place in the park overlooking the city. Once again, Arcand combined very local preoccupations—the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution, the dramatic secularization of Quebec society since the 1960s—with issues of global relevance. In the 1990s, this judicious combination seemed to have been
82
ARCHITECTURE
lost: Love and Human Remains (1993), based on an English Canadian play, and Stardom (2000), on the international fashion industry, focus too much on the global, whereas his film of that decade in French, Joyeux Calvaire/Poverty and Other Delights (1996), about two Montreal down-andouts, dwells on the very local. However, Arcand made a triumphant return in 2003 with Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), which revisits the characters of Le Déclin eighteen years later, combining political insights about 9/11, globalized capitalism, and the Quebec health service with an emotional narrative of terminal illness and a father-son relationship. It won prizes at Cannes for best script and actress (Marie-Josée Croze) and the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Bill Marshall See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Mance, Jeanne; Montreal; 9/11: Cultural Perspectives; 9/11: Political Perspectives; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. References Coulombe, Michel. Denys Arcand: La Vraie nature du cinéaste. Montreal: Boréal, 1993. Loiselle, André, and Brian McIlroy, eds. Auteur/Provocateur: The Films of Denys Arcand. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1995. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Weinmann, Heinz. Cinéma de l’imaginaire Québécois: De La Petite Aurore à Jésus de Montréal. Montreal: l’Hexagone, 1990.
ARCHITECTURE As far as the built environment is concerned, the exchange of ideas and forms (from city plans to decorative details) between France and the Americas is a topic of daunting magnitude. French architects,
planners, and landscape designers have had significant impacts upon Latin American cities. For instance, in Rio de Janeiro, seventeenth-century military engineer Michel de l’Escolle helped create the city’s regular street grid; Parisian exiles founded the first school of fine arts in the Americas, in 1816; and Le Corbusier served as consultant for the Ministry of Education, a landmark of South American modernism. In Buenos Aires, garden designers Edouard André, Charles Thays, and Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier (who also worked in Cuba) and architect Joseph Bouvard shaped the city’s open and arterial space from 1860 to 1930; René Sergent, a Parisian society architect, built elegant and palatial town houses, including the present Museum of Decorative Arts and the residence of the U.S. ambassador. The architectural connection between Franch and Latin America is rather sporadic, however, and this chronological account focuses on France’s impact on Canada and on its bilateral exchanges with the United States. French military engineers planned colonial cities (Mobile, 1711; Detroit, 1764; Saint Louis, 1780) with the kind of gridiron street pattern used for the medieval bastides (fortified towns). In addition to those in the province of Quebec, buildings by French settlers still exist, albeit much restored, in Louisiana and in Mississippi valley outposts (Sainte Geneviève, Missouri; Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Fort de Chartres, Illinois). Two legacies were particularly enduring. The first affected the vernacular design of rural houses. Generally originating in Normandy, French influences migrated through Acadia and the West Indies prior to reaching the Gulf coast. Common features were tall-hipped roofs (sometimes flared) with dormers and
ARCHITECTURE
casement windows, but construction techniques varied according to local availability of materials. Climatic variations affected form too; in particular, Louisiana plantation homes gained a Caribbean-inspired circumferential gallery. The second legacy can be seen in buildings for Catholic orders and charitable and educational institutions, ranging from the delicate Ursuline Convent (1745–1753), the oldest vestige of the French presence in New Orleans, to a series of stern and monumental hospitals and convents in gray stone in Quebec City and Montreal. Around 1800, Franco-American intellectual kinship and military cooperation, the young republic’s need for foreign expertise to build its institutions and memorialize its revolution, and a worldwide politically and economically motivated exodus of Frenchmen explain the popularity of French planning and design in the United States. Shaped during his diplomatic tenure in Paris, Thomas Jefferson’s aesthetic francophilia expressed a rejection of British influence and a philosophical belief in the didactic powers of built form. His “academic village” for the University of Virginia (1817–1826) reflects Enlightenment concerns over behavior and disease control. Jefferson also helped launch the enduring love of Parisian hôtels particuliers (grand private houses)—their design, appointments, and related lifestyles—among American elites. Joseph-Jacques Ramée’s 1813 plan for Union College in Schenectady, New York, was the earliest model for rural and suburban university campuses, a formula presently adopted in France. Like Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1792 plan for Washington, it fashioned the existing setting into great swaths of rolling lawns: this clear-cut
83
dialogue between natural and man-made landscapes became a distinctive trait of American urbanism. Other major and extant contributions by French émigrés are Jean-Charles Mangin’s delicate New York city hall (in association with John McComb Jr.) and, in Baltimore, Maximilien Godefroy’s purist First Unitarian Church and the chapel for Saint Mary’s Seminary, the first neo-Gothic structure in the United States. A new and more durable surge of French influence lasted from the Second Empire to the belle époque. Its impact on built form operated within a fashion rationale: everything French, from furnishing to clothing, carried an aura of sophistication, mixed with the slightly risqué. France was all too happy to sustain its economy with luxury exports, to which women, whose influence on domestic design was on the rise, were particularly attracted. All around the world (and especially in New York City), stone facades, wrought iron balconies, and parquet floors helped the newly rich fulfill their ambitions in their homes and the museums and libraries they patronized. Reasons for the transfer and adaptation to North America of the so-called Second Empire style are not yet clear. A form of “Mansard roof ” marked many residential districts in North America around 1860. In the public sphere, the extension of the layout of the Palais du Louvre to house museum galleries and ministries led to the adoption of its compartmentalized and highly three-dimensional wall surfaces and prominent crested rooflines by banker William Corcoran for his private gallery in Washington; by the municipality of Boston for its city hall; and by Alfred B. Mullett, the supervising architect of the
84
ARCHITECTURE
U.S. Treasury, in a series of post–Civil War federal buildings, examples of which survive in Washington (the Old Executive Building next to the White House) and Saint Louis. In government buildings, the simplified decor and smoothened stonework betray more mechanized construction techniques and the desire to express a “good government” ethic. Montreal’s central post office (demolished) and City Hall, as well as the Assemblée Nationale in Quebec City, are also grandiose public buildings influenced by the new Louvre. By the late 1860s, the Ecole des BeauxArts in Paris had acquired an unrivaled reputation. Its competitive curriculum taught superior draftsmanship and authentic historical detailing, as well as how to conceptualize programs quickly and logically, devise interior decoration, and work jointly with painters and sculptors. The Ecole attracted architecture students from Europe and the Americas, and some of its French graduates crossed the Atlantic temporarily or permanently. The professional and artistic dominance of this diaspora became a source of great pride for conservative French critics. By far, the largest foreign contingent came from the United States. Designing for the powerful and wealthy, many of its members set up practice in New York City, where French ideas were filtered and dispatched all the way to Canada. Although England and Scotland held a strong grip on taste and institutions, influential Canadian architects—Montrealers JeanOmer Marchand, William S. Maxwell, and Ernest Cormier and Toronto’s John Lyle— received Parisian training. The Beaux-Arts era coalesced the neoclassical search for order and the eclectic mind-set of the Second Empire. Town
houses (in Montreal’s Golden Square Mile and Washington’s Embassy Row) and country estates (in Long Island and Newport) emulated hôtels particuliers and châteaux. Ecole alumni popularized the formula of the upscale “French flat” and played a key role in philanthropic housing reform. Stimulated by the World’s Fairs in Chicago (1893) and Saint Louis (1904), the City Beautiful movement was strongly indebted to French urban design exemplars, especially Baron Haussmann’s Paris; it helped produce the seminal McMillan Plan of 1902, which restored and expanded L’Enfant’s vision for Washington, which had also influenced Haussmann. One among several globe-trotting BeauxArts-trained urbanistes (urban planners), Jacques Gréber put the final touch on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1917 and helped restructure downtown Ottawa. The Ecole taught compositional methods, in plan and elevation, applicable to buildings as stylistically diverse as the neoromanesque libraries of Henry Hobson Richardson (who studied there during the Second Empire) and the U.S. and Canadian Supreme Courts. French-inspired styles ranged from cerebral Neo-Grec to quaint and suburban “French provincial,” from ebullient Beaux-Arts baroque (in the spirit of Paris’s Petit Palais) to restrained Louis XVI. Canada’s château style originated in the late 1880s in the work of New York architect Bruce Price for the Canadian Pacific Railway, such as Quebec City’s Château Frontenac Hotel. A tribute to the country’s national origins, it blended influences from Loire valley chateaux and Scottish baronial homes and came to symbolize Canadian officialdom.
ARCHITECTURE
Generally larger and more specialized than in Europe, North American architectural offices achieved a modernity essentially based on technological and programmatic advances. Coupled with impeccable craftsmanship and crisp, overscaled detailing, the amalgamation of historicism and pragmatism produced masterworks such as New York’s Grand Central Terminal (1907–1913). Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright forged a new “organic” identity that influenced Scandinavian, Dutch, and German architects but had little direct impact in France. Between the two world wars, Parisian art deco was one of the sources for jazz and streamlined moderne, as evidenced in the Chrysler Building in Manhattan and the Eaton Restaurant in Montreal. Architecture, and skyscrapers in particular, came to be regarded in Europe as the most original and successful artistic contribution that the United States had made. Additionally, both Americans and Canadians produced awe-inspiring and distinctly North American World War I memorials on French soil, in ChateauThierry and near Arras, respectively. After 1920, influences went in both directions, as the French began promoting the notion that U.S. cost efficiency, productivity, and superior hygiene could complement their presumably innate artistry. This idea was the leitmotif of Gréber’s influential book, L’Architecture aux Etats Unis (“The Architecture of the United States,” 1920). North American architecture inspired both attraction (for its boldness) and repulsion (for its materialism), a love-hate relationship clearly expressed in Paul Morand’s New York (1930) and Le Corbusier’s Quand Les Cathédrales étaient blanches/When Cathedrals Were White
85
(1937). Among a handful of high-rise structures built in the 1930s, the Hôpital Beaujon in Clichy (1931–1935) and the residential towers of the Quartier des Gratte-ciel in Villeurbanne (1932–1934) have clear American antecedents. Another American import was the landscaped highway, and the Autoroute de l’Ouest was France’s superb response to the Westchester and Bronx River Parkways. In the three decades following World War II, the United States held the same role of international artistic and architectural “fertilizer” that France had assumed around 1900. The aesthetic of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier was given a North American twist by the likes of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The two typologies that had structured the fabric of most North American cities since the late nineteenth century, the tall office building and the middle-class single-family home, started shaping the French urban and suburban landscape. La Défense was begun in 1958: its skyscrapers were originally intended to have all the same height and bulk, but economics and corporate competition ended dictating a more Americanized skyline. The French saw the acquisition of an automobile as a first step toward matching North America’s standard of living. Carrefour, which now operates in South America, opened its first hypermarché (hypermarket) in the Paris suburbs in 1963. Two years later, the mass builder Levitt launched its first neoAmerican subdivision near Versailles. Subsequently, the formula of the nouveau village—an affordable and comfortable tract house in a parklike setting—was exploited by the California-based developer Kaufman and Broad, which has become a powerhouse in the Paris region.
86
ARGENTINA
Since the 1970s, design for high-end corporations, mass retail, and entertainment has become as global as these sectors of the world economy. In the new town of Marne-la-Vallée, Disneyland Paris, whose theme hotels were designed by the likes of Robert Stern and Michael Graves, adjoins the clone of a U.S. megamall and a Frenchified upscale outlet center with a Ralph Lauren store. Bouygues, a major construction and media concern, selected Kevin Roche for its neobaroque headquarters near Versailles, and France’s first pay channel, Canal Plus, entrusted Richard Meier, famed for his use of white enamel panels, to build its flagship studio and office structure in Paris. Christian de Portzamparc, France’s sole recipient of the Pritzker Prize (the Nobel Prize of architecture) designed the LVMH Tower on New York City’s Fifty-Seventh Street, a symbol of France’s enduring desire to dominate the market for luxury goods. Since the Beaux-Arts era, North American museums have been much more userfriendly and have had larger public spaces than their European counterparts. This superiority was certainly one reason French president François Mitterrand gave the commission for the Grand Louvre to Chinese American designer I. M. Pei, on the strength of his prior addition to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. These exchanges do not entail stylistic uniformization and consensus. In particular, many French architects and critics despise what they consider as the sterile and socially irresponsible gimmicks of North American postmodernism and new urbanism. History tells us, however, that transatlantic cross-fertilization between different design sensibilities has produced architecture at once beautiful and livable. Isabelle Gournay
See also: Acadia; Argentina; Art Deco; Brazil; Carrefour; Chicago; Detroit; Disneyland Paris; Illinois Country; Jefferson, Thomas; Le Corbusier; L’Enfant, Pierre Charles; Louisiana; Mississippi; Mitterrand, François; Mobile; Montreal; Quebec; Quebec City; Saint Louis; Television; Ursulines; World War I; World War II. References Bacon, Mardges. Ernest Flagg: Beaux-Arts Architect and Urban Reformer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Cohen, Jean-Louis. Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893–1960. Montreal: Flammarion, 1995. Gournay, Isabelle. “France Discovers America, 1917–1939 (French Writings on American Architecture).” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1989. Special Jacques Gréber issue. Urban History Review, Toronto 29 (March 2001).
ARGENTINA Franco-Argentine relations date back to the colonial era. Until the late eighteenth century, these relations were predominantly economic and coincided with French interests in the River Plate region. After the 1789 French Revolution, France’s cultural influence in the area became increasingly important, and close relations between the two countries continued throughout the twentieth century, with immigrants moving from both sides of the Atlantic. French immigrants arrived in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (most of them settled in Buenos Aires, Misiones, and Tucumán); numerous French intellectuals, artists, and literati have traveled to or resided in Buenos Aires since 1800, and countless Argentines visited or lived in Paris over a period of time, either in order to escape dictatorships or simply to relish its cultural affluence.
ARGENTINA
During the years 1776–1816, Argentina was part of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate under Spanish rule. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the French Revolution aroused great interest in the River Plate region. In 1810, during the French occupation of Spain (1808–1813), a rebellion against the Spanish Crown broke out in Buenos Aires, and six years later the forerunner of modern Argentina, the United Provinces of the River Plate, were formed. The provinces declared independence and in 1829 became known as the Argentine Confederation. Enlightenment ideas (from the French Revolution) and British imperial designs in Latin America overlapped with nineteenthcentury romanticism and ideas about modernization to influence Argentine independence. The major task of the men of the Generation of 1837, which consisted of young intellectuals such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888), Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851), Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), and Bartolomé Mitre (1821–1906), also known as the Unitarians, was to make Argentina a modern nation; in doing so, they borrowed heavily from France and especially from the romantic ideas of Victor Hugo (1802–1885). Sarmiento became one of the most influential thinkers of nineteenth-century Latin America. His book Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) is a passionate denunciation of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s (1793–1877) dictatorship and a fundamental text on the notion of “Argentineness.” In Facundo, Sarmiento argues that the Argentines have searched for and found their model of civilization in Europe, especially in the “ideal” France that they have learned to love in books. In 1846, Sarmiento traveled to Paris to support the
87
Map of Argentina. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
Franco-British blockade of the harbor of Buenos Aires, which was caused by Rosas’s interference in French and British commercial interests in the region. Sarmiento sought foreign intervention, which, he believed, could lead to Rosas’s demise. However, Britain and France decided to declare the blockade illegal, and Sarmiento now had to turn to the head of the French opposition, Adolfe Thiers (1797–1877), who embraced his cause in parliamentary speeches, evoking French colonial ambitions in the area. Facundo was thus placed in the French political arena in a way that conceptually served French colonial designs, notwithstanding that Sarmiento’s opposition of civilization to barbarism never sought to project the “civilized” European colonialism against Latin American “barbarism”; instead, it was meant to target
88
ARGENTINA
the barbarism of the Argentine Federalists led by Rosas. By the end of the nineteenth century, France had had a huge cultural impact on Argentina, principally on its literature and architecture. Latin American “modernismo” is a movement inspired by French Parnassianism and symbolism, which emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. Among the “modernista” poets are Rubén Darío (1867–1916), a Nicaraguan who lived in Chile and Argentina and traveled frequently to Paris, and Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), who was considered the national bard of Argentina. One of the most celebrated authors of the time was Paul Groussac (1848–1929), a Frenchman from Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, who moved to Buenos Aires in 1866 and stayed there until his death. The writers of the “Centenario” (1910 was the centennial of Argentine independence) introduced the notion of the dominant work, with which they strove to give racial, cultural, and linguistic unity to the Argentines. The first book that was canonized was José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (two volumes, written in 1872 and 1879), which Lugones and the academic scholar Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957) compared to the French epic “Chanson de Roland” of the eleventh century. In 1926, Ricardo Güiraldes (1886– 1927) published his influential novel Don Segundo Sombra. Güiraldes came from a family of wealthy landowners and spent part of his childhood in Europe and part in the pampa. In 1910, he went for the first time to Paris, a city that he kept visiting throughout his life (he finally died there), and whose bohemian lifestyle he very much enjoyed. Güiraldes’s novel holds the
tensions between his Europeanized way of life and his life in the Argentine pampa. The French avant-garde and modernism were introduced in Argentina in the 1920s by the so-called Florida group, also referred to as the Martín Fierro group, which was identified with the literary magazines Proa and Martín Fierro. Its members included Jorge Luis Borges, Norah Lange (1906–1972), Leopoldo Marechal (1900– 1970), and Oliveiro Girondo (1891– 1967). Among the most influential francophile Argentines is Victoria Ocampo, who was born in Buenos Aires, spent her childhood in Paris, and studied at the Sorbonne. In 1931, Ocampo founded the cultural magazine Sur, which featured the writings of influential figures in literature, history, philosophy, and the arts from Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Its contributors included Le Corbusier, Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle (1893–1945), Jacques Lacan, JeanPaul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Roger Caillois, to mention but a few. Argentine authors included Borges, Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993), Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914– 1999), and Julio Cortázar. Caillois, who fled to Buenos Aires to avoid the Nazis during the German occupation of France (1940–1944) after he met Ocampo in Paris, launched his own journal, Lettres françaises (1941), in which the first translations of Borges into a foreign language appeared. Back in Paris, Caillois, as an editor at Gallimard, published Paul Verdevoye’s and Nestor Ibarra’s translation of Borges’s Fictions in the series “La Croix du Sud,” where he introduced the work of many important Latin American authors. In 1953, Caillois published Labyrinthes, a collection he formulated by combining
ARGENTINA
some of Borges’s fictions and essays and for which he also wrote a preface. Many translations of Borges into other languages derived from Caillois’s publications. It was not until 1962 that these books were translated into English, a fact that confirmed that Borges’s international status was initiated by his French translations. Borges, in turn, has had a great influence on twentiethcentury French letters, inspiring, among others, philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Lacan. Cortázar, Argentina’s most famous writer after Borges, was also closely related to France; Cortázar resided in Paris as a political exile for several years, and some of his most celebrated works are set in the French capital, including his 1963 novel Hopscotch (chapters one through thirtysix); in 1981, he published his book Paris: Essence of an Image. Among Argentina’s prominent contemporary writers, Alexandra Pizarnik (1936–1972), Manuel Puig (1932–1990), and Luisa Valenzuela (b. 1938) lived in Paris. Xul Solar (1887–1963), one of the most imaginative painters and sculptors from Argentina (also writer and inventor of imaginary languages), traveled to and stayed in Paris, Tours, and Marseilles during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In 1924, his work was exhibited in Paris as part of a show of Latin American artists, and his second major exhibition took place a year before he died in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, also in Paris (1962). If the French capital was crucial for Solar’s international recognition, the Argentine capital was a source of inspiration
89
for the French American dadaist/surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp, who lived in the city in the period 1918–1919. Tango has been a strong link between the Argentine and the French capitals. Born in the slums of Buenos Aires, the dance was made both respectable and fashionable in Paris in the 1920s. The most famous tango salon in Paris has been the Trottoirs de Buenos Aires (Rue des Lombards, Châtelet), whose name was inspired by a tango composed by Cortázar and Edgardo Contón and recorded by Tata Cedrón (1980). The salon, which was created in 1981 by a group of Argentine artists, writers, and musicians residing in France, soon became the place where Argentine exiles hung out. The Trottoirs de Buenos Aires held the concerts of tango legends such as the Sexteto Mayor, the Sexteto Tango, Astor Piazzolla, Osvaldo Pugliese (1905–1995), Los Dinzel, Raúl Funes (b. 1942), and Rubén Juárez (b. 1947). As in the case of Borges’s work, France spread tango into other countries, turning it into a universal patrimony. Buenos Aires, allegedly the “Paris of South America,” has turned French architecture into its own patrimony. The city’s boulevards; its lavish mansions and spacious parks; and the neighborhoods of El Centro, La Recoleta, and Belgrano evoke the French capital. The squares of Palermo and Belgrano replicate those in Paris; the Vatican Embassy on Avenida Alvear mirrors the Jacquemart-André Museum in the French city; and the Palacio San Martín in Calle Arenales is a construction inspired by French architecture of the eighteenth century. Similarly, the Galerías Pacífico are copies of the Bon Marché galleries in Paris, and the Centro Naval on Córdoba Avenue
90
ARON, RAYMOND-CLAUDE-FERDINAND
and the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo y Arte Oriental constitute spectacular examples of French architecture. The list is endless and so are the Franco-Argentine cultural exchanges from both sides of the Atlantic. Eleni Kefala See also: Architecture; Baudrillard, Jean; Borges, Jorge Luis; Caillois, Roger; Camus, Albert; Dance; Darío, Rubén; Deleuze, Gilles; Duchamp, Marcel; Foucault, Michel; French Revolution; Guattari, Félix; Lacan, Jacques; Le Corbusier; Literary Relations; Lyotard, Jean-François; Ocampo, Victoria; Piazzolla, Astor; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Surrealism. References Bethell, Leslie, ed. Argentina since Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Ferrer, Horacio. The Golden Age of Tango. Buenos Aires: Manrique Zago Ediciones, 1998. Goodrich, Diana Sorensen. Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Shumway, Nicolas. The Invention of Argentina. Oxford: University of California Press, 1991.
ARON, RAYMOND-CLAUDEFERDINAND (1905–1983) Sociologist, philosopher, and journalist, Raymond Aron was one of the most distinguished intellectuals of his generation. Educated at the elite Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, he spent three years in Germany (1930–1933), where he absorbed the ideas of Edmund Husserl and Max Weber, which shaped his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of history (1938). He spent the war years in London, as editor of the Gaullist review La France libre. In postwar Paris, he helped to found Jean-Paul Sartre’s monthly review Les Temps modernes and
worked with Camus’s newspaper, Combat, before joining the conservative daily, Le Figaro, for which he wrote regular editorials from 1947 to 1977. In parallel, he developed his career as a sociologist, gaining academic honors with a chair at the Sorbonne (1955) and later at the prestigious Collège de France. He gained international recognition with his polemical attacks on Marxism, especially in L’Opium des intellectuels (The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1955), and with his popular presentations of sociology, especially Main Currents in Sociological Thought (1960), which were widely translated. For much of his career, he was publicly at odds with the dominant left-wing radicalism that emerged in France after World War II under the influence of his friend and contemporary JeanPaul Sartre. He was an adviser to Charles de Gaulle during his period of opposition under the Fourth Republic and at the height of the cold war was active in antiCommunist movements. He took sides energetically with the Western bloc, attacking Soviet totalitarianism and the failures of the planned economy while defending the social benefits of Western democratic institutions and industrial organization. Stung by de Gaulle’s criticisms of Israel in the 1967 war, he began to engage publicly with issues of his Jewish identity, which he had mainly regarded as a private loyalty. He criticized the revolutionary illusions of the student insurgents in May 1968, but, distancing himself from Gaullist nationalism, he embraced a more cosmopolitan vision of liberal democracy. He associated himself with the modernizing conservatism of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and supported a rapprochement with U.S. political and economic models. Adopting the stance of a “committed observer,” he proposed a ratio-
ART DECO
nalist approach to political and social issues, which was informed by the French liberal tradition in the spirit of Tocqueville, but also drew on British and U.S. social and economic theory, which he was able to read in English. After a lifetime spent in the corridors of power but outside the mainstream of French intellectual consensus, Aron was belatedly reconciled with Sartre and acclaimed by the intellectual elite on the publication of his Memoirs (1983) shortly before his death. Michael Kelly See also: Camus, Albert; Gaulle, General Charles de; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Theory; Tocqueville, Alexis de; World War II. References Colquhoun, Robert. Raymond Aron. 2 vols. London: Sage, 1986. Mahoney, Daniel J. The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron. Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992.
ART DECO Name given to a decorative and architectural style that spread into every aspect of modern life between 1919 and 1939. Also known as “the moderne” in tribute to its French origins, art deco’s geometrical designs, accompanied by playful ornamentation such as sunbursts and stylized fountains, contrasted both with the organic, naturalistic curves of art nouveau and the seriousness of the modernist style associated with Le Corbusier. The eclecticism of art deco meant that it happily raided elements from ancient Egypt, preColumbian America, Africa, the Far East, and the artistic avant-garde such as cubism, but in manners appropriate to the new age of speed, commerce, and consumerism and its new materials such as bakelite. This
91
break with the past—despite the intriguing subsistence of the old alongside the new— was made all the more real by the terrible world war that had just ended. The style’s main launchpad was the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels, held in Paris in 1925, whose aim was to restore France’s competitive edge in the production of luxury goods. Cartier jewelry, liners such as the Normandie, but also textiles, graphic design, and typography became exemplars of art deco. Thanks to traveling exhibits, émigrés, and the interest shown by department stores, the style was disseminated throughout the world, including the United States, which did not take part in the 1925 exhibition but whose Department of Commerce report had pointed out the advantages for any nation capable of harnessing the style in “terms appropriate to modern living conditions and modern taste” (quoted in Benton 2003). The American architect and designer Eugene Schoen (1880–1957) is an example of this successful transplantation of art deco style to America. By the 1930s and the Depression, art deco in the United States was adapting to mass production rather than the luxury end of the market and also was developing specifically American characteristics, such as its emphasis on streamlining and the proliferation of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago. Icons of American life, such as the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, the Rockefeller Center, Miami Beach, and even the Wurlitzer jukebox, all bear the marks of art deco. In addition, Hollywood did much to disseminate the style in the art direction and set design for films such as Cecil B. de Mille’s Cleopatra (1934), Grand Hotel (1932), or the AstaireRogers musicals.
92
ART NOUVEAU
Elsewhere in the Americas, in Canada art deco flourished, particularly in Montreal, where an architect such as Ernest Cormier (1885–1980), who had trained in Paris, created the central building of the Université de Montréal, as well as the Canadian Supreme Court edifice in Ottawa. In Latin America, art deco’s combination of modernity and the (indigenous, national) past meant it could be put to use, as in the dictator Getúlio Vargas’s Brazil, to mask a politics of reaction. The most famous examples of the style in Rio de Janeiro are the Central Station and the statue of Christ the Redeemer (conceived and in part sculpted by the Polish-French artist Paul Landowski). The privations and common purpose of World War II and its aftermath saw the triumph of modernism. The challenge to it after the upheavals of the 1960s has, however, seen a rediscovery and reevaluation of the art deco style. Bill Marshall See also: Architecture; Art Nouveau; Erté; Loewy, Raymond; World War I; World War II. References Benton, Charlotte, et al., eds. Art Deco, 1919–1939. London: V&A Publications, 2003. Cohen-Rose, Sandra. Northern Deco: Art Deco Architecture in Montreal. Montreal: Corona Publishers, 1996.
ART NOUVEAU Art nouveau describes a movement in the visual arts extending from Europe to North America and dominant between 1890 and 1910, characterized by organic, naturalistic forms open to a wide range of interpretations, from complex fluid arabesques to simple geometric explorations and progressions.
During this extraordinarily fertile and creative period, few areas of architecture and the decorative arts remained untouched. Indeed, the language of Art nouveau proved remarkably versatile, with architects and designers exploring its potential through the design of objects as diverse as apartment blocks and lamps, book covers and posters, ironmongery and furniture. The movement marked the end of one century and heralded the new, the label “art nouveau” coming into use at the time. At the height of the belle époque, a period noted for economic prosperity and the prominence of the middle classes, art nouveau built a bridge between the past and tradition on the one hand and growing industrialization, production, and imminent change on the other. With the rise of the new industrial classes, a new breed of patron emerged, embracing the new style and supporting its development and dissemination. The turbulence of the period and the tensions between rich and poor, conservative and radical, can be traced in the diversity of artifacts produced, from the bespoke to the mass produced. Although seen as evoking the spirit of the age and embraced by many as a form of personal and national expression, art nouveau also provoked extraordinary criticism. It was particularly pilloried as an excess of ornament and decoration without functional substance. Early centers of design and production flourished in Nancy, France, Brussels, and Munich, but within many countries in Europe similar movements of designers and craftsmen were evolving, often exploring national and regional identity, distinct in name and output yet recognizable as part of the wider art nouveau family: in Britain,
ART NOUVEAU
the arts and crafts movement led by William Morris and the merchandise of the Liberty department store in London; in Austria, the secessionists of the Wiener Werkstätte; in Spain, the modernista; in Germany, the jugendstil movement. Basing their work around notions of regional identity, Catalan architects such as Antonio Gaudí i Cornet (1852–1926), Josef Maria Jujol (1879–1949), and Luis Domenech e Montaner (1850–1923) sought to use the narrative opportunities of art nouveau as a catalyst for artistic and political discussion and expression while reinterpreting Catalan themes and history as sources in their designs. The 1900 Paris Exposition became the showplace for the art nouveau style and for the prosperity and creative strength of France itself, evident through the architecture of key pavilions and many of the goods and works of art displayed. The Metro stations and street furniture of Hector-Germain Guimard (1867–1942), commissioned to deal with the anticipated congestion the exhibition would create, have become the most lasting evidence of the exposition. Guimard’s innovative solution involved a modular range of wrought iron and glass components that could be combined to create many alternatives. His synthesis of industrial production techniques and lightweight forms, sinuous and curvaceous, produced an effective and aesthetically challenging solution. Elsewhere, shared preoccupations and mutual interests led to creative alliances and collaborations, and the growing number of design journals and new reproduction techniques led to the wider dissemination of the style across and beyond Europe. Art nouveau developed a parallel yet independent strand in the United States,
93
Poster announcing the Cincinnati Fall Festival show. Here a woman is shown wearing art nouveau jewelry. (Library of Congress)
conscious of the European work but not restricted by it, innovative and autonomous. The glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) became known for the technical virtuosity and fluidity of his glassware including Favrile ware, whose surface sheen and iridescence amplified its curving lines. His collaboration with Greene and Greene (architects) produced some of the few notable art nouveau homes on the Pacific coast. Chicago architect Louis H. Sullivan (1856–1924) experimented with both the functional and decorative opportunities the skyscraper presented. The Carson, Pirie, Scott, and Co. store, completed in 1904, displayed a complexity of ornament seldom matched in design or realization.
94
ARTAUD, ANTONIN
The onset of World War I marked the end of art nouveau. The radical changes that ensued as a result of that war, in particular the desire to look to the future, meant that it was not until the 1960s that a resurgence in interest in art nouveau and a reappraisal of its effect and legacy led to a renewed appetite for the style. Sally Stewart See also: Architecture; Exposition universelle (1900); Painting; World War I. References Duncan, Alastair. Art Nouveau. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Escritt, Stephen. Art Nouveau. London: Phaidon, 2000. Greenhalgh, Paul, ed. Art Nouveau 1890–1914. London: V&A Publications, 2000.
ARTAUD, ANTONIN (1896–1948) French actor, dramatist, essayist, poet, and scriptwriter. Artaud was an important rallying figure for 1960s and 1970s avant-garde theater on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as for the influential group of young French intellectuals of that period who were loosely gathered around the journal Tel Quel (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Julie Kristeva). Born in Marseilles on September 4, 1896, he arrived in Paris in the early 1920s, where he began working in theater and initiated a correspondence with NRF’s editor, Jacques Rivière. The Correspondance— published in 1924—played a pivotal role in Artaud’s intellectual development: it marked his abandonment of a poetry indebted to symbolism in favor of a writing focused on minute descriptions of what he referred to as his “sickness,” his experience
of his own thoughts as void. Through an obsessive reflection on his condition, Artaud would, until his death, give in with increasing vehemence to the idea of speech as alien to the uttering subject. In the early 1930s, Artaud wrote the texts making up Le Théâtre et son double (The Theater and Its Double, 1938). In them he rejected classical theater because theater—just as much as speech—inevitably draws from a preexisting and organized cultural field and is thus unable to offer unmediated relations to things. Like his efforts to lay the groundwork for an impossible theater of efficient signs (“the theater of cruelty”), his earlier adherence to surrealism, or his attempts with cinema in the late 1920s, Artaud’s trip to Mexico in 1936 was a way for him to address his “powerlessness.” He left Paris in January, reportedly to study a burgeoning social movement aiming at a return to a preconquest civilization. He returned to Paris eleven months later. In the various lectures he delivered during his sojourn and in the articles he published in local newspapers, he spoke and wrote about Europe’s petrified culture, devoid of spiritual necessity: for him, culture had become a mere varnish instead of providing the way to some originary truth. He also expressed his concern about the European contamination of Mexican youth, perceptible in their predominant understanding of revolution in Marxist terms, as well as in the domain of the arts. Although he dismissed most Mexican art of the period, he wrote at length on Maria Izquierdo, seeing in her paintings an authentically Indian inspiration and a struggle with the influences of European art. In Mexico, Artaud sought the keys to a profound cultural revolution that would provide a new foundation for
ATGET, EUGÈNE
human beings. However, in the middle of August 1936, disappointed by what he had found in Mexico City, Artaud ventured into the Sierra Tarahumara in search of a lost tradition that would allow human beings to recover an original, organic way of communicating with the world. In 1946, Artaud was released from the last of the mental institutions where he had been confined for the previous nine years. Until his death in Ivry-sur-Seine on March 4, 1948, he violently and incessantly returned to his incapacity to manifest, not an utterance, but something that would amount to a true creation of life. Vittorio Trionfi See also: Avant-Gardes; Derrida, Jacques; Mexico; Tel Quel; Theater; Theory. References Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. Ed. Susan Sontag. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Cardoza y Aragón, Luis. “Pourquoi le Mexique?” Europe (1984): 667-668. Derrida, Jacques. “La Parole Soufflée.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
ATGET, EUGÈNE (1857–1927) Photographer (born in Libourne in 1857 and active 1898–1927) of Paris’ streets, parks, and countryside. A former actor of indifferent success, Atget turned to a small career as an artisanphotographer, taking stock images of Paris and its environs for local historians and artists. Among the clients for his “documents pour artistes” were the Musée Carnavalet, the painter Georges Braque, and the surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray. Atget’s subject matter was rather unremarkable and by no means original. His images of Paris streets followed a tradi-
95
tion of photographic survey that had included the work of Charles Marville (active in the 1850s) while Atget’s extensive catalogue of “petits métiers”—portraits of other artisans and street sellers—continued a practice of illustrating vernacular Paris street culture that had been established by Edmé Bouchardon in the eighteenth century and Carle Vernet in the 1820s. However, Atget’s major significance was in the art world (particularly centered in New York), largely due to a reappraisal of his work in the 1930s and after. It was Man Ray who arranged for several photographs to be published in the review La Révolution surréaliste during 1925 and 1926, bringing the work to a new aesthetically interested audience, although they were uncredited, possibly at Atget’s request. At this time he attracted the interest of Man Ray’s assistant, Berenice Abbott, an American émigré photographer staying in Paris. When Atget died in Paris in 1927, Abbott arranged to take a substantial amount of his work (approximately 5,000 negatives) to the United States to form the Abbott/Levy Collection (with Julien Levy). The international recognition of Atget’s work is largely due to the efforts of Abbott who, over the next thirty years, vigorously promoted Atget’s work at the same time as her own photography echoed its rich form and plebeian subject matter. Atget’s work immediately attracted interest from the photographers Walker Evans and Ansel Adams and the writers Walter Benjamin and Pierre MacOrlan, and it was through the writing of all of them that Atget came to the attention of the broader artistic community. The Museum of Modern Art in New York eventually purchased the Abbott/Levy collection in 1968 and by the late 1980s had staged four full-scale solo
96
ATLANTICISM
thetic sensibility of Atget’s work, something all the more striking in that it hides the quiet and unassuming career that the photographer himself pursued. Sally Stewart See also: Evans, Walker; Photography; Ray, Man; Surrealism. References Harris, David. Eugène Atget: Unknown Paris. New York: New Press, 2003. Szarkowski, John, Maria Morris Hambourg, and Eugène Atget. The Work of Atget. New York/Boston: Museum of Modern Art, 1981–1985.
ATLANTICISM Eugène Atget photograph of street musicians. (Library of Congress)
exhibitions, with accompanying monographs, under the head stewardship of John Szarkowski. These exhibitions firmly consolidated a place for Atget in the photography canon that reflected the influence his work had already had on American photographic practice, particularly the genre of documentary and reportage. The influences of Atget’s pictorial style—lustrous and velvety black-andwhite images of vernacular spaces—can be seen in the work of Abbott, Evans, and Adams and also in the work of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and Edward Weston. All have, at one time or another, mimicked both Atget’s melancholic style and his subject matter. The influence of these photographers in turn demonstrates the huge overall impact of the style and aes-
A concept of Western European–North American cultural similarity and policy cooperation that existed fitfully from the early twentieth century. U.S.-British relations were most important to this concept, but U.S.-French relations also determined its fate. Emerging most strongly after each world war, Atlanticism by the twenty-first century appeared in decline. In the World War I era U.S. and British elites led by President Woodrow Wilson and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey envisioned a dissemination of AngloSaxon ideals that could foster not only a liberal empire but also universal peace. France in the 1930s also sought Atlantic integration as the only insurance for French security against Germany. But various factors discredited Atlanticism at the time, including its racist implications, Wilson’s collapse, transatlantic breakdowns over the League of Nations and war reparations, and the Depression.
ATLANTICISM
Nazism sparked Atlanticism’s revival, signaled in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. The concept enjoyed its heyday during and after World War II. Especially with the rise of the cold war, Atlanticist writers and journalists, including Walter Lippmann, Clarence Streit, Jacques Godechot, Edward Murrow, and R. R. Palmer, argued that Americans and Europeans shared a Western heritage and democratic values of protection of citizens against the state. These values were confirmed, not challenged, by the American and French Revolutions. Atlanticism provided the philosophical foundation for the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Britain sought to deepen its “special relationship” with the United States, while conservatives of the French Fourth Republic embraced Atlantic cooperation and U.S. aid. The cooperative impulse alternately declined and rose until the 1980s. The Berlin crisis of 1961 helped foster a Franco-German rapprochement. FrancoAmerican relations were strained by developments in Egypt, Algeria, and Vietnam. The formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958 (renamed in 1992 as the European Union) created a potential rival to close relations spanning the Atlantic. Under President Charles de Gaulle, France cultivated itself as leader of a European confederation not subject to Anglo-American leadership. De Gaulle blocked Britain’s attempt to make the EEC a transatlantic free trade zone and also removed France from NATO’s military structure in 1966. Gaullism, West German establishment of direct relations with East Germany, and the “realpolitik” of U.S. president Richard Nixon limited Atlanticist alignment in the 1970s.
97
In the 1980s, however, U.S. president Ronald Reagan, French president François Mitterrand, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher cooperated over both installation of U.S. missiles in Europe and encouragement of reforms in the Soviet Union. The end of the cold war was celebrated as the vindication of Atlanticist beliefs and doctrines. But in the post–cold war era the prospects of Atlanticism again dimmed. In 1995 U.S. president Bill Clinton reluctantly organized military intervention in the war-torn Balkans, when European nations failed to prevent ethnic conflicts in the region. In 2003 the United States under President George Bush led an invasion, joined in by British prime minister Tony Blair, of Iraq, whose dictator Saddam Hussein was under UN investigation for developing weapons of mass destruction. U.S. and British actions received heavy criticism by French president Jacques Chirac and other leaders as a show of disregard for UN authority. The Iraqi invasion challenged Atlanticist assumptions of an Atlantic community and of U.S. consultation of Europe in determining U.S. positions on global matters. Timothy M. Roberts See also: American Revolution; Chirac, Jacques; Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; French Revolution; Gaulle, General Charles de; Iraq War; Marshall Plan, The; Mitterrand, François; NATO; Wilson, Woodrow; World War I; World War II. References Fry, Michael. Illusions of Security: North Atlantic Diplomacy, 1918–1922. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Hodge, Carl. Atlanticism for a New Century: The Rise, Triumph, and Decline of NATO. New York: Prentice Hall, 2004.
98
AUDUBON, JOHN JAMES
John James Audubon. The name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over due to the ongoing pursuits of the Audubon Society. (Library of Congress)
AUDUBON, JOHN JAMES (1785–1851) Ornithologist, born in Santo Domingo (now Haiti) in 1785. John James Audubon was the illegitimate son of Jean Audubon, a French sea captain and plantation owner, and Jeanne Rabine, a chambermaid. Jeanne died in a slave uprising shortly after John’s birth. He was raised by his stepmother and father in the French countryside around Nantes. It was here that he developed a love of wildlife, especially birds, and of sketching and drawing. In 1803, aged eighteen, Audubon was sent to Pennsylvania, partly in order to
avoid conscription in Napoléon’s army. He lived on and managed the family-owned estate at Mill Grove, near Philadelphia, where he hunted, studied, and drew birds. It is here that he met Lucy Bakewell, whom he married in 1808. While at Mill Grove, he conducted the first known bird-banding experiment in North America, tying strings around the legs of eastern phoebes; he learned that the birds returned to the very same nesting sites each year. Audubon spent more than a decade in business, eventually traveling down the Ohio River to western Kentucky where he set up a dry-goods store. He continued to draw birds as a hobby, amassing an impres-
AURY, LOUIS-MICHEL
sive portfolio during this time. While in Kentucky, Lucy gave birth to two sons, Victor Gifford and John Woodhouse, as well as a daughter who died in infancy. Audubon was quite successful in business for a while, but hard times hit, and in 1819 he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy. At age thirty-five, with no other prospects, Audubon set off on his epic quest to depict America’s avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist’s materials, and a young assistant. This venture became The Birds of America, 435 hand-colored engravings published in double elephant folios (1828–1838), followed by a smaller, octavo-sized, version. While initiating the engraving process for The Birds of America, through Robert Havell Jr. of London, Audubon lived in Europe (1827–1829). In Edinburgh, London, and Paris, he was elected to learned and scientific honorary societies, and his work was acclaimed in superlatives. He developed a noble and royal patronage and a host of subscribers. In 1840, he undertook publication of The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. By the time Audubon and his four assistants embarked on their journey up the Missouri River in 1843 to collect information on and images of western mammals, he had drawn sixty-one species. One hundred and fifty hand-colored lithographs were published in both an imperial folio size (1845–1848) and a smaller octavo edition (1846–1853). Audubon spent his last years in senility and died in 1851 at age sixty-five, with plates for the Quadrupeds, but not all of the text, completed. He is buried in the Trinity Cemetery at 155th Street and Broadway in New York City. Although Audubon had no role in the organization that bears his name, today the
99
name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over due to the ongoing pursuits of the Audubon Society. Martin Fowlie See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Haiti; Nantes; Ohio; Santo Domingo; Slavery. References Audubon, John James, and Francis Hobart Herrick. Delineations of American Scenery and Character. New York: G. A. Baker, 1926. Mason, Miriam Evangeline. John Audubon, Boy Naturalist. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
AURY, LOUIS-MICHEL (1788–1821) Early nineteenth-century privateer in the Americas, born in the outskirts of Paris. Commodore Aury fought the Spanish in Florida, Texas, Colombia, Central America, and the West Indies. Despite being victimized by U.S. policies and sentiment, Aury at times worked for Americans in a capitalistic capacity. Surviving battles and the treachery of Simón Bolívar, the Lafitte brothers, and the U.S. government, Aury maintained an unwavering commitment to his republican ideals, only to die an innocent early death. Aury served the Napoleonic navy as a sailmaker and helmsman in the West Indies. For unclear reasons, he began serving aboard a privateer vessel preying on Spanish and British shipping. Being successful, Aury purchased a vessel in New Orleans in 1810. The vessel was confiscated, and Aury was forced to leave but renewed his privateering operations. In a letter to his sister, he railed against the United States and described himself as having a few sins. In 1811 Aury’s vessels entered Savannah,
100
AUSTER, PAUL
Georgia, to refit. An anti-French mob burned his two ships, leaving him stranded. The French consulate in Baltimore directed him to the fight in South America against Spain, where Aury’s skills raised him to the rank of commodore in the Cartagenian (Colombian) navy. The privateering contract enriched him, and he employed a trusted Frenchman, who was a member of the Association, a coalition of American businessmen in New Orleans, to dispose of his bounty and handle his finances. Disagreements with Simón Bolívar dissolved his command, but not before Aury personally led a coup and rescued 2,000 starving, besieged Cartagenians. In 1816, exiled in Haiti, Aury contracted with the Mexican shadow government to transport an invasion force from Galveston Island in Spanish Texas to Mexico to overthrow the Spanish. En route, Aury learned that the rebel Mexican government had disbanded. The Association, which had a financial interest in Mexico, ordered the invasion continued. Despite working for his antagonists, the New Orleans Association, comprising New Orleans Americans who had constantly treated him badly, and though he chafed at having to work for them, Aury successfully raided Spanish shipping and smuggled the captured cargo to the United States. Mexican officials with the Association’s invasion force arrived at Galveston and declared Aury the first Mexican governor of Texas. Aury transported them to Mexico and returning, found his camp had been confiscated by the Lafittes, who had been spying on Aury for the Spanish. Defeated, Aury set sail for Florida. Amelia Island had recently been captured from Spain by U.S. mercenaries who needed supplies. Aury arrived and rescued
the beleaguered privateers. Resuming the privateering business under the Mexican flag, he sold a half a million dollars of cargo in the United States When racism on Amelia Island, Florida, in 1817–1818 divided American whites and Aury’s black sailors, Aury settled the dispute with a show of force. Aury was ousted when the United States declared Amelia Island an illegal country and invaded it. Leaving in 1818, Aury took part on Central American revolutions where he successfully assisted in removing Spain. While on a vacation on his private island, Aury was thrown from a horse and died from complications on August 30, 1821. Gary E. McKee See also: Bolívar, Simón; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Florida; Haiti; Mexico; New Orleans; Piracy and Privateers; Republicanism; Texas. References Dabney, Lancaster E. “Louis Aury: First Governor of Texas.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (October 1938): 112–116. Faye, Stanley. “Commodore Aury.” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 24, no. 3 (July 1941): 612–691.
AUSTER, PAUL (1947–) U.S. author, born in New Jersey to an upper-middle-class Jewish family. Auster began his writing career translating French literature. In college, his grandiose plans to become a young writer in Paris failed, and although he earned two degrees from Columbia University, he quit in 1967, remained in Paris four more years, spent some time on an oil rig, and returned to New York in 1974. Several unpublished manuscripts from that period are recalled in his memoir, Hand to Mouth: A Chroni-
AUTOMOBILES
cle of Early Failure, along with unproduced plays and a board game, Action Baseball. Auster went on to write the films Smoke (1995) and Blue in the Face (1995), and published numerous essays, short stories, novellas, and memoirs. In The New York Trilogy (1987), which comprises City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986), he wrote about death, homelessness, and poverty. His translations are included in A Tomb for Anatole (1983), by Stéphane Mallarmé, The Notebooks of Joseph Jourbet, Translations (1997), and The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (1984). Auster’s major works include In the Country of Last Things (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), Leviathan (1992), Mr. Vertigo (1994), The Book of Illusions (2003), and Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970–1979 (1988). The essays critique both known and relatively unknown writers such as Franz Kafka, Salman Rushdie, and André du Bouchet. They show compassion for the dispossessed and celebrate European values and artists, particularly Mallarmé and Marcel Proust, whose works Auster has translated into English. Proust most influences Auster’s writing in The Invention of Solitude (1988), where he writes: “The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object”—referring, in this “Book of Memory,” both to the world in general and to articles from his father’s memory left in his house, which become reflections of Auster’s own history. The most striking characteristics of Auster’s works are the dual strains, in equal parts, of French and American culture on writing and the imaginary, with special emphasis on his love of baseball. He writes extensively about art, culture, and literature
101
in The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews and the Red Notebook (1997). Auster lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two children. He is published worldwide and remains a FrancoAmerican phenomenon. Erna Cooper See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Sport. References Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. New York: Penguin, 1982; rpt. 1988. ———. Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.
AUTOMOBILES In accounts of Franco-American relations, the automobile operates both as an indicator of divergent national identities and histories and as a vehicle of evolving transatlantic relations. Although it was German engineers who first developed the internal combustion engine and adapted it for use in operative vehicles, the French automobile industry made pioneering progress in the period before World War I. There was evidence already of transatlantic exchange in this period, as engineer Louis Joseph Chevrolet moved to North America to be employed by William Crapo Dunant in 1910, but the French industry rejected working practices already associated with its North American counterpart, and an attempt in 1913 to introduce chronométrage, a diluted version of Taylorism, was met with industrial unrest. During this period, American motorists, such as Edith Wharton (A Motor-Flight through France, 1908), toured France and published accounts of their travels, but after 1918 the U.S. car industry steadily gained dominance as the automobile—and in particular affordable
102
AUTOMOBILES
models such as the Ford Model T—became instrumental in processes of democratization and more general demographic change. In 1925, the United States produced 3 million vehicles, France 125,000. European francophone travelers in the interwar United States were invariably impressed by the products of American automotive engineering, but having observed working practices in car factories in Detroit, Dr. Louis Destouches published a long and highly critical report on the practical implications of Fordism (and thinly fictionalized these working practices in the North American section of Voyage au bout de la nuit, a novel published in 1934 under his pseudonym Louis-Ferdinand Céline). According to Ilya Ehrenburg, in The Life of the Automobile (1929), André Citroën, the principal French automobile entrepreneur in the interwar period, sought to combine American styling with European austerity. Despite economic handicaps, he actively attempted to reassert the predominance of the French industry, undertaking a series of croisières (car rallies) that would eventually contribute to the bankrupting of his company and its nationalization. The trans-African and transAsian croisières noire and jaune were even complemented by a less prominent Canadian journey. Funded by the French-born business management specialist (and future intermediary between Vichy and Berlin) Charles Eugène Bedaux, and using the same Citroën-Kégresse half-track vehicles (autochenilles), this group attempted to cross the Rockies in 1934. With the development of a French equivalent of the Model T disrupted in 1939 by the outbreak of war, production on the main contender for this role, the Citroën 2CV, could only begin on a very modest scale and with
the sparse materials available in a carefully planned postwar economy ten years later. Although the Pons Plan privileged manufacturers who concentrated on commercial vehicles and smaller private cars, the 2CV by this time looked outmoded in relation to American cars (slowly permeating national consciousness, especially through their representation in popular culture). With critics of social changes in postwar France seeing modernization as a byproduct of progressive Americanization, the American automobile came to represent a certain self-confidence and even arrogance. With the U.S. automobile industry having overtaken the technology of its French counterpart in the period following World War I, by the 1950s the gap between the two was increasingly marked: the French effort to achieve affordable motorization in a climate of initial austerity contrasted with the peak of U.S. automobile size and fantastic styling. The car came to symbolize what for many French was the hubris of postwar American culture. In an extreme outburst of anti-Americanism, for instance, the Communist poet Louis Aragon was angered by the replacement with a new Ford car of a missing sculpture from a square that honored Victor Hugo. The American car operated as a more ambivalent marker in a series of postwar French films. In works such as Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961), and Jacques Dhéry’s La Belle Américaine (1961), the vehicle suggests a range of meanings, from the outlandish to the fantastic, while indicating both the material benefits and potential pitfalls of U.S. capitalism. In U.S. cinema, the 2CV is perhaps the most common automotive marker of Frenchness. In productions such as Ameri-
AUTOMOBILES
can Graffiti (Lucas, 1973), For Your Eyes Only (Glen, 1981), and Indecent Proposal (Lyne, 1992), the car reflects meanings ranging from bohemian difference to artisanal persistence. When actual 2CVs crossed North America in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the widespread phenomenon of long-distance journeys in the unlikely vehicle, its reception was less enthusiastic. Compared to other more powerful American vehicles, the 2CV could not compete (except in extreme circumstances, such as on black ice). Although the car’s technology, modern by South American standards, had served to accentuate the pre-industrial conditions of certain South American cultures (Henri Lochon, En 2CV chez les primitifs de la Sierra mexicaine, 1956), it had the opposite effect in the United States, where the technology was more advanced and it was greeted with incredulity. Such humiliation over appearance was compounded by the vehicle’s inability, once in the United States, to reach the minimum speed limit on major roads, and this threat to French modernity of an all-engulfing American hypermodernity was given concrete form in the image of Jean-Claude Baudot and Jacques Séguéla’s 2CV in La Terre en rond (1960) awaiting customs clearance in Rio de Janeiro, dwarfed in a crowd of large and elegant American vehicles. Although these 2CV travelers resist, on the whole, any explicit anti-Americanism, their accounts nevertheless reveal an implicit international competitiveness, especially when their vehicles are dismissed and they are told that even a Jeep would fail to go where they dare to venture. The 2CV tends, however, to outstrip the generalpurpose vehicle, by now symbolic of the American presence in postwar France.
103
During Cornet and Lochon’s attempt in Bolivia to take the 2CV to over 5,000 meters, the accompanying American vehicle was forced to give up, whereas their French vehicle, emptied of luggage and stripped of doors and fenders, manages the climb. Similarly, as Guy Viau and his fellow travelers prepare to cross the Sahara (Le Tour d’Afrique en 2CV de quatre jeunes Français, 1956) they meet two sneering Chevrolet drivers. The 2CVs manage the journey with several minor breakdowns, whereas the American vehicle suffers a major breakdown, and its driver and passenger nearly die of dehydration. Faced with American mechanical hubris, French simplicity becomes a virtue. These examples are associated with clear commercial antagonisms: U.S. consumers, little concerned with issues of fuel efficiency, were disappointed with the relative quality of most European products. The U.S. market responded to foreign imports of small cars with a series of changes in legislation: an increase in the minimum speed limit ensured that a fully laden 2CV would never be able to reach this speed; compulsory crash tests made the import of French vehicles even more difficult. Even for the engine of the epitome of French new technology, the Citroën DS, American engine oil was unsuitable and damaged seals so badly that the cars invariably broke down. In considerations of FrancoAmerican relations, the car continues to be a vehicle of national identities and of the tensions between them: during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, for instance, there were widespread media reports of virulent anti-French sentiment in the United States being directed toward Frenchmanufactured vehicles. Charles Forsdick
104
AVANT-GARDES See also: Anti-Americanism; Bedaux, Charles Eugène; Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Citroën; Demy, Jacques; Detroit; Ford Motor Company; Iraq War; Wharton, Edith; World War I; World War II. References Loubet, Jean-Louis. Histoire de l’automobile française. Paris: Seuil, 2001. Moustacchi, Alfred, and Jean-Jacques Payan. L’Automobile: avenir d’un centenaire. Paris: Flammarion, 1999. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1995. Wollen, Peter, and Joe Kerr, eds. Autopia. London: Reaktion, 2002.
AVANT-GARDES “Avant-garde” was originally a French military term meaning “advance guard,” but it is used widely within the art world to refer to a practice that is in advance of its time and portends what is, or what might be, possible. As the editors of the 1998 anthology Modernism describe it, the avantgarde is both a “historical moment” in the early twentieth century “when certain practitioners sought to liquidate the boundaries between art and life” and “a transformative power affecting all other practices and theories.” (Kolocotroni et al., p. xviii). The avant-garde as an aesthetic and cosmopolitan trend emerged in the 1910s, stimulating writers, artists, and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic to explore the possibilities of art as a revolutionary experience. Encompassing various movements, manifestos and “isms,” the avant-garde was at its high point in the mid-1910s and 1920s and then had a renaissance in France and the United States following World War II. As the two primary centers for modern art in the early twentieth century, New
York City and Paris were central nodes for the international avant-garde, but London, Zurich, and Berlin all played important roles in its development. It is generally accepted that the avant-garde emerged with the International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show) in Manhattan in early 1913, sponsored by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. The mixed-media exhibits represented a sweeping away of traditional art forms and hostility toward the past, and the European émigrés Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia found in Manhattan an exciting cosmopolitanism not evident in Europe until later in the 1910s. The spirit of artistic adventure in the new bohemia of Greenwich Village, exemplified by the most famous of the exhibits, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), inspired a spirit of nonconformity and widespread disdain for orthodox aesthetics. The public response was a mixture of curiosity, bewilderment, and declamation. Despite negative reviews, artists acclaimed the Armory Show a major creative success, but not until dadaism was given its name in Switzerland in 1916 did they collectively consider the role of the avant-garde in American and European cultural life. The cosmopolitan fertility of Zurich was the perfect place to devise art that could give reign to “free expression” and attack the foundations of decadent bourgeois culture. The experiments of Richard Huelsenbeck, the artist Hans Arp, and the poets Hugo Ball and Tzara (as well as Picabia, who joined the group in 1918) have usually been viewed as nihilistic examples of what Hans Richter has called “anti-art,” in contrast to the bourgeois reverence for “Art.” In their fracturing of narrative and poetic form and disdain for knowledge,
AVANT-GARDES
morality, social progress, law, and science, dadaist anti art represented an assault on all the cherished values of Western culture. As Tzara proclaimed in 1918 in the most famous of his seven dada manifestos, “Dadaist Disgust”: “Every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada; protest with the fists of one’s whole being in destructive action.” By 1920 the branch of dadaism based in Berlin had become explicitly political in its support of Communism as “the destruction of everything that has gone bourgeois,” while the Zurich dadaists moved to Paris to join the surrealists under the leadership of André Breton. Surrealism was much more engaged with the creative potential of dreams and fantasy, and in the Manifeste du surréalisme (First Surrealist Manifesto, 1924), Breton declared his interest in “psychic automatism” as the true function of thought, free from “any control exercised by reason” and “exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Surrealism shared with dada a disdain for rationalism and conventional ethics, but Tzara disliked Breton’s emphasis on mysticism and “the omnipotence of the dream,” the word-association games he developed from psychoanalysis, and the automatic writing experiments he shared with Philippe Soupault. The desire to “recognize value . . . wherever it exists” distanced the surrealists from the nihilistic currents of dadaist aesthetics and propelled art in “the direction of human liberation” (Breton, p. 26), leading Tzara to break with them in 1921. Surrealism was at its high point in the mid-1920s, attracting artists from both sides of the Atlantic, including the photographer, artist, and filmmaker Man Ray from the United States, Salvador Dalí and
105
Luis Buñuel from Spain, and the French poet Paul Eluard and composer Erik Satie, but the movement had splintered by the early 1930s, with many, including Breton and Louis Aragon, shifting away from autonomous art toward an active engagement with Communism. The history of the avant-garde cannot be traced easily through the development of specific movements. There was too much cross-pollination of ideas and techniques, and some practitioners do not easily fit into one or other “ism,” with Man Ray producing some of his best work in the 1930s (such as A l’Heure de l’Observatoire—Les Amoureux, 1932–1934) and others such as Louis Guglielmi working toward a personal vision of social surrealism (evidenced in paintings such as Phoenix, 1935, which places a picture of Lenin within the rubble of modernity). Other influential figures moved between groupings, such as the American art guru and collector Peggy Guggenheim, who was instrumental in exhibiting experimental art from the 1920s (including Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, and Constantin Brancusi) through midcentury, when she championed the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. The experimental filmmaking of Alain Resnais in L’Année dernière á Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) and the nouveau roman of Alain RobbeGrillet carried forward the spirit of the French avant-garde into the 1960s, while the visual experimentation of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren, the musical minimalism of John Cage, the dissident writing of William Burroughs, and the Fluxus movement fed into the American counterculture of the mid- to late 1960s. By the 1980s the transatlantic avantgarde had been thoroughly institutionalized,
106
AVIATION
perhaps beginning as early as 1929 with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. With the increasing corporate control of cultural production and exhibition (such as the Saatchi Gallery in London) and with the avant-garde seen now as the “official” face of modernism, it has lost much of its potential to irritate, annoy, and stimulate, as Gertrude Stein described its goals in 1926. But the vitality of outsider art, the relative newness of digital art forms, and the radicalization of aesthetic practices linked to protests about the global economy suggest that the spirit of an international avant-garde should certainly not be consigned to history. Martin Halliwell See also: Breton, André; Burroughs, William S.; Duchamp, Marcel; Music (Classical); Painting; Photography; Ray, Man; Sculpture; Soupault, Philippe; Stein, Gertrude; Surrealism; Theory; World War II. References Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Crunden, Robert M. American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Lewis, Helena. Dada Turns Red: The Politics of Surrealism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Tashjian, Dickran. A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920–1950. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
AVIATION The French aviation industry—considered as the whole range of technological, industrial, commercial, and transportation activities related to flight—has traditionally been a site of interaction between France and the United States. Such interaction has mostly assumed the form of competition— essentially over technology and industry— but since the replacement in the 1950s and 1960s of transatlantic liners by jet airplanes as the conveyors of travelers between eastern and western shores of the Atlantic, aviation has redefined the parameters of physical human exchange between France and the United States. The mid-twentiethcentury heyday of the great transatlantic liners such as the SS United States, the Normandie, and the France and their competition for the Blue Riband Trophy rewarding the fastest crossing of the (North) Atlantic has given rise to much cultural chronicling; similarly, the contemporary crossings between Europe and the United States by Airbus and Concorde (or by Boeing 747) reflect complex sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural relations across the French Atlantic. Military aviation has also been a field in which the United States and France have interacted—mostly along classic lines of competition—with American companies fighting French companies such as Dassault and Aérospatiale for lucrative markets throughout the world. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Atlantic was often the locus of elements of the heroic age of aviation as American, British, and French pilots applied the improvements to flight technology gained during World War I to the conquest of new and ever longer routes and more frequent and faster crossings of the South and North
AVIATION
Atlantic. In 1927 a French Bréguet plane made the first crossing of the South Atlantic, and during the 1930s the exploits of Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet (made legendary by the writer and flyer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) in opening up new routes to and over South America caught the public imagination. In 1933 another Bréguet took the record for the longest nonstop crossing—4,500 miles—of the North Atlantic and the French Atlantic. The aviator Costes was as well known as Lindbergh. The story of Concorde remains perhaps the most emblematic case study of aviation in the French Atlantic, combining as it does real technological, political, and commercial rivalries and the intangible cultural shrinkage of the North Atlantic reduced to a few hours’ travel for the elites of Europe and the United States. From the launch of the Franco-British program in 1962 to the insistence of Air France and British Airways on prolonging Concorde’s service as far into the twenty-first century as possible, Europe’s supersonic transport plane has been a potent symbol of the ties that bind France and the United States. However, other symbolic airplanes reveal some of the complexities of the permanent “air lift” between Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris and the no less emblematically named JFK airport in New York City. Contemporary (mass) air travel across the Atlantic is dominated by the Boeing 747 and by the Airbus, two long-haul commercial jetliners whose development and exploitation reflect differing approaches to aviation and air transportation. In the post–World War II era, advances in jet technology made separately on both sides of the Atlantic led to the development and
107
production of military jets and gradually to civilian jetliners capable of drastically shortening the distance separating Europe and the United States. The passenger planes that ushered in the age of more convenient transatlantic travel were the romantically named Caravelle (Air France) and Constellation (BOAC) and Boeing’s 707. The Boeing 707 first carried passengers in 1958, and the Caravelle was part of the Air France fleet from 1959 until 1981, thus sharing airspace with the jumbo 747s that entered service in 1970 and the Airbus (1974). Technological and industrial rivalry in aviation between France and the United States until the 1960s was replaced by competition between the United States and Europe from the 1970s on, as the costs of research and development forced the concentration of European aerospace companies, initially on a national level but increasingly internationally. A number of French aviation firms merged in 1970 to create the Société nationale de l’industrie aéronautique et spatiale (SNIAS), which was renamed Aérospatiale in 1984 and alongside Dassault formed the basis of France’s expertise in aerospace. Aérospatiale undertakes civil and military activities, but Dassault—as the producer of the famous Mirage family of fighters and fighterbombers—specializes in military aviation. France’s strength in aviation, and particularly in military aircraft such as the Mirage, combined with the importance of arms sales to the French military-industrial complex, has often brought France into competition with the United States over lucrative military contracts in sensitive areas of the world. The bilateral collaboration of the Franco-British Concorde project led to the multilateral cooperation of Airbus, in
108
AZNAVOUR, CHARLES
which France, Britain, Germany, and others merged the expertise of their aviation industries to produce a series of civil jetliners capable of competing with U.S. aircraft for the prime transatlantic routes and short- and medium-haul services within Europe and the United States. Airbus Industrie is now Boeing’s major rival, selling the same number of planes annually worldwide. However, although such a parity of industrial and technological expertise might suggest a new modus vivendi over flights between the two sides of the Atlantic, U.S. economic liberalism still finds much to quarrel with in French approaches to aviation. Much of the expansion of the popularity of flight in the latter part of the twentieth century took place as a result of the U.S. government’s Airline Deregulation Act (1978), which allowed new airline companies to propose new services both over long- and short-haul routes, such as Freddie Laker’s “Skytrain” North Atlantic line. This deregulation threatened the dominant position of national carriers such as Air France, accustomed to near monopolies on prestigious international routes, and introduced competition (for example, from Air Inter) on domestic routes. In the 1990s, U.S. economic neoliberalism continued to challenge French industrial and business practices in the form of European Commission rulings on government subsidies to state companies. The Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF), Renault, and Air France were criticized for the financial support they received from the French state. Air France is now apparently destined for privatization, thus removing another element of difference between different ways of flying across the Atlantic. Hugh Dauncey
See also: Concorde; Gaulle, General Charles de; Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de; World War I; World War II. References Carlier, Claude. Dassault aviation: 50 ans d’aventure aéronautique, 1945–1995. Paris: Chêne, 1996. ———. Chronologie aérospatiale, politique, militaire 1945–1995. Paris: Economica, 1997. Chadeau, Emmanuel, ed. Airbus: Un Succès industriel européen. Paris: Rive droite, 1995.
AZNAVOUR, CHARLES (CHARLES AZNAVOURIAN) (1924–) Singer, born in Paris in 1924. For many the epitome of the French romantic singer, Aznavour has enjoyed a long career touring France and the world. His appearance on the cover of the U.S. magazine Billboard (1996), unusual for a French artist, confirms the extent to which Aznavour, often regarded as the French Sinatra, has become an international star. Following tours of North America at the end of the 1940s with the songwriter Pierre Roche, Aznavour returned to Paris, where he performed at the Alhambra and Olympia musical halls during the mid1950s. His initial success in the United States may partly be attributed to his appearance in François Truffaut’s successful 1960 film Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player). Furthermore, his appearance at Carnegie Hall (1963), the prestigious New York concert hall, led to a world tour in 1966 that included Canada as well as Latin America, where his Spanish version of “Avec” (With, 1964) was a huge hit. Although audiences enjoyed the exoticism of the French language as well as Aznavour’s French accent, he nonetheless made a con-
AZNAVOUR, CHARLES
scious effort to sing many of his songs in the languages of the countries where he toured. The 1970s saw several of Aznavour’s songs translated into English and covered by North American artists, including Ray Charles (“La Mamma” [For Mama]), Fred Astaire (“Les Plaisirs démodés” [The Old Fashioned Way]), and Bing Crosby (“Hier encore” [Yesterday When I Was Young]). Aznavour also wrote “Sailor Boys” [Les Marins, 1974] for Liza Minnelli, whom he had introduced to Paris as a young performer. Aznavour’s 1970 U.S. tour featured several West Coast universities that had seen a surge in political activism. Indeed, his songwriting showed a greater interest in social questions during the 1970s, with titles such as “Le Temps des loups” (“Time of the Wolves,” 1970), which dealt with violence, and “Comme ils disent” (“As They Say,” 1971), which contributed to breaking taboos around homosexuality.
109
At the turn of the millennium, Aznavour decided at the age of seventy-five to stop touring, but to celebrate his eightieth birthday in 2004, he performed a series of concerts at the Palais des Congrès in Paris, as well as undertaking a European tour. In 2000 he produced the musical Lautrec about the life of the French artist, which ran in London before transferring to Broadway. In 2001 Aznavour, who is of Armenian descent, played the role of a film director in Ararat. The film, directed by the Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, commemorates the Turkish massacre of Armenians (1915–1916). Chris Tinker See also: Music (Pop); Truffaut, François. References Hawkins, Peter. “Charles Aznavour: A Sentimental Realist.” Chanson: The French Singer-Songwriter from Aristide Bruant to the Present Day. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Reval, Annie, and Bernard Reval. Aznavour: Le roi de cæur. Paris: France-Empire, 2000.
B BAKER, JOSEPHINE (FREDA JOSEPHINE MCDONALD) (1906–1975) American dance artiste. At the height of her success in interwar Paris, Josephine Baker was a millionaire at the age of just twenty-four. Dubbed in the French press as La Bakaire, her roles on stage in La Revue nègre/The Negro Revue (1925) and La Folie du jour/The Day’s Madness (1926) and in film in La Sirène des tropiques/The Siren of the Tropics (Nalpas/ Etiévant, 1927), Zou Zou (Marc Allégret, 1934), and Princesse Tam Tam (Gréville, 1935) made Baker one of the most publicly visible figures in French cultural life until her death in Paris in 1975, where she was given a full state funeral. Baker was variously figured as the incarnation of Charles Baudelaire’s Jeanne Duval, the danseuse de bananes/the banana dancer and la petite Tonkinoise/the Tonkin girl who brought the Charleston and the Blackbottom to France, all performed against the backdrop of interwar France that was just entering its colonial golden age. Born in 1906 to an impoverished family in the racially troubled city of Saint Louis, Baker received little formal education and was married at thirteen. She seemed destined for a life of poverty and
drudgery in common with other African American women of her social class and education. However, a talent for performance at an early age took Baker into the potentially more lucrative world of the black musical revue, where she quickly recognized that she could use the performative value of the black female body to escape from domestic service and menial labor. Considered too dark for the traditional sexual appeal of the “high yallers” and the “sepia lovelies” in the chorus line, Baker attracted attention with her comic talent in a series of blackface comedy roles and soon became well known for her traditional “pickanniny” routines Shuffle Along (1923) and Chocolate Dandies (1924) in Harlem and on Broadway. Baker first traveled to France as part of the Revue nègre brought over from the United States by entrepreneur Caroline Dudley Reagan, who had discovered Baker at the end of a Broadway chorus line sticking out “like an exclamation point” (Haney, p. 44). Along with twenty-five musicians and dancers, the clarinetist Sidney Bechet among them, Baker arrived in Paris in 1925, where the Revue was quickly transformed from traditional American vaudeville with tap dancing and gospel spirituals to a more modern spectacle of
111
112
BAKER, JOSEPHINE
Josephine Baker was the star attraction in the 1920s at the Folies Bergères in Paris. (Bettmann/Corbis)
black Americanism. Seeking a new angle for the show, the producers André Daven and Jacques Charles of the Revue were advised by the artist Fernand Léger, “Give them Negroes. Only the Negroes can excite Paris!” after he had attended the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. Léger’s advice recognized the new aesthetic appeal of l’art nègre that had just begun to permeate both high and popular culture in modernist Paris and would soon become known as négrophilie, a wave of cultural primitivism that reached its apogee in 1925–1927. Josephine Baker’s role in the Revue nègre as part of the Danse sauvage framed her as the iconic figure of negrophile primitivism. The opening night of the Revue nègre was sold out, due in part to advance pub-
licity by Paul Colin, who produced a set of striking black, white, and red lithographs for the Revue depicting Baker virtually naked in a series of poses. Colin wanted to represent the “soul of Harlem,” and his sketches drew upon both typical American black vaudeville imagery of the saxophone, blues notes, and jazz band as well as the highly racialized aspects of Baker’s unclothed black female body. The posters created a new visual language of primitivism that articulated the double appeal of Baker and the Revue nègre, a coalescence of the imagined antiquity of l’art nègre with its apparently untutored sensual energy and the modernity of American popular culture, both of which became inextricably linked to a particular vocabulary of modernist primitivism. Published in 1926 in a collection called Le Tumulte noir, Colin’s prints are a fusion of cubism, fauvism, and an American jazz aesthetic that constructed a visual grammar of race and sexuality around the representation of the female black body. The imagery was at once new in its modernist cultural juxtaposition and yet historically embedded in much older colonial discourses of Otherness. Significantly, Baker’s allure in the Revue nègre was one that crossed both high and popular culture. As such, it can be read as a particularly decisive modernist event, comparable to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets russes, in which Nijinsky danced in Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) at the same theater. Her appearance on the stage of the Théâtre ChampsElysées in the Danse sauvage caused a palpable stir among the eclectic audience, made up of members of the Académie Française, journalists, fashion designers, artists, and intellectuals. Baker performed the danse bare-breasted in a scanty cos-
BAKER, JOSEPHINE
tume of feathers and beads with collars around her wrists and ankles—echoes of slavery mediated as primitive music hall adornment. Her partner was Joe Alex, a dancer from Martinique, who was sufficiently dark-skinned and “African looking” to present a favorable aesthetic contrast with Baker’s lighter, African American skin tones and fashionably cropped and lacquered hair. The highly erotic dance was a “savage” pas de deux offering the audience a display of modern primitivism that appealed to both the avant-garde set in its self-consciously mediated spectacle of Otherness but also had a more popular appeal as a rehearsal of the authentic, primitive Africanness located in France’s colonial territories. In this way, the danse consolidated the colonial ideologies of a spectacle of absolute Otherness that implicitly invoked the Self ’s mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) encountering the uncontrollable libidinous energies of the African Other. Baker’s role in the danse was reproduced several times over the next few years, each time with a new and more modern variant on the costumes. The feathers finally metamorphosed into a skirt of soft, plush bananas and then later into one of phallic metal spikes that only nominally resembled the iconically savage fruit that had come to stand for a primitivized world outside of Europe. In 1985 the Paris Metro ran an advertising campaign using an image of a young black woman dressed only in a skirt made of a fringe of yellow Metro tickets. From a distance the tickets resemble playfully phallic bananas that are depicted in motion against her glossy, darkened skin. The woman’s hair is plastered down in a brilliantined Eton crop, and her face is dis-
113
torted by a caricatured wide, thick-lipped smile. The Metro poster is a take on one of the many images of Josephine Baker that appeared around Paris in the 1920s. The metro advertisement, framed by the caption “Tickets Folies 2ème Voiture le Plus Célèbre Spectacle de Paris,” is a reminder that Josephine Baker was one of the most celebrated “exotic” spectacles, both on and off the music hall stage. Although she subsequently reinvented herself as a grande chanteuse (great singer), distancing herself from her earlier primitive roles, it is the image of Baker half naked, dancing frenetically in a suggestively phallic girdle of bananas, that has persisted in French popular cultural memory. Baker went on to have a long career in entertainment and worked as a member of the French Resistance, for which she was awarded the Légion d’honneur and the Croix de guerre. However, it is her erotic danse sauvage that continues to resonate in French cultural memory, and the inclusion of her image in François Mitterrand’s 1988 election video testifies to the endurance of her place in modern French culture. Carole Sweeney See also: Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre; Dance; Jazz; Mitterrand, François; Primitivism; Saint Louis; World War II. References Ezra, Elizabeth. The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2000. Gates, Henry Louis, and Karen C. C. Dalton. “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (1998): 903–934. Haney, Lynn. Naked at the Feast: A Biography of Josephine Baker. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. London: Turnaround, 1992.
114
BALDWIN, JAMES O’Connor, Patrick, and Bryan Hammond, eds. Josephine Baker. London: Bullfinch, 1988. Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
BALDWIN, JAMES (1924–1987) Novelist, essayist, playwright, and political activist, James Baldwin is one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. His life is marked by a movement between France and the United States, by a consciously developed transatlantic “doubleness” that presents in binational terms the many other dualities that can be found in his biography. Born in Harlem, New York, Baldwin was brought up by his mother and stepfather, a Baptist minister, both recent African American migrants from the South. A nervous and brilliantly articulate child, Baldwin channeled his passionate personality into an extraordinary early career as a boy preacher before losing his faith, exploring a developing homosexuality, and devoting his attention to writing. Managing to publish a few essays and a short story and also to secure the vague patronage of established writer Richard Wright, Baldwin set off in 1948 for Paris (as Wright had done the year before), having received a small writing fellowship. Baldwin’s period on the Left Bank was in many ways indicative of a wider phenomenon: many African American artists, musicians, and writers had come to Paris in an attempt to escape the systematic racism of the United States. Baldwin was, however, no darling of the existentialists, rejected the doctrines of “committed litera-
ture,” and had little interest in the poetic declarations of francophone négritude. Upon the publication of essays like “Equal in Paris” and “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (published in Notes of a Native Son, 1955) and his first two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni’s Room (1956), it was in the United States, not France, that Baldwin’s star began to grow. Remaining relatively obscure in Paris, Baldwin returned to the United States in 1957, desperate to engage actively with the major political problem—the nonexistent civil rights of American blacks—in his native land rather than fruitlessly chatter about the major problem—the anticolonial revolution in Algeria—in his country of adoption. Meanwhile, Baldwin’s writing reached a peak with the monumental novel Another Country (1962). If the first novel had been an all-black (and relatively straight) American epic, and the second an all-white, gay European tragedy with Jamesian overtones, the third depicted a world of ceaseless fluctuation between black and white, between homo- and heterosexuality, and between France and the United States. Rufus, Vivaldo, Yves, and the rest of Baldwin’s Balzacian cast of French and American characters illustrate their creator’s reluctance to remain in one position, and they inhabit a narrative whose explosive and often painful energy results from precisely this tension. Interestingly, Another Country, as much as Baldwin’s alliances with Malcolm X and other militants, helped to generate an enormous Federal Bureau of Investigation dossier on Baldwin. Moving to the Provençal village of Saint-Paul de Vence in 1972, Baldwin spent the remaining years of his life commuting between France and the United
BALLOONING
States, continuing to write. He was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1986 and died in Saint-Paul de Vence in 1987. Andrew Asibong See also: Gay Movement; Literary Relations; Wright, Richard. References Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. ———. Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank. New York: Scribner, 1995.
BALLOONING Although the hot air balloon, invented in 1783 by the Montgolfier brothers and shortly followed by the invention of a hydrogen-filled balloon, is associated with Anglo-French relations or, more specifically, Anglo-French rivalry, the connections between France and the United States concerning balloons are numerous. If 1783 is the year in which the balloon was invented, for Americans it is also significant as the year in which the peace treaty ending the American Revolution was signed. Benjamin Franklin is of course known as the diplomat who negotiated this treaty, but he was also a keen scientist, whose experiments into electricity led not only to the development of lightning rods but also to a complete reevaluation of the nature of electricity itself. Franklin, therefore, enthusiastically joined the Parisians to witness the launch of the first aerostat that the capital had seen, a hydrogen balloon designed by Mr. Charles and Mr. Robert that took off from Paris on August 27. A member of the Royal Society of London, Franklin sent copious reports to the society’s chairman, Sir Joseph Banks, detailing
115
the experiments that had taken Paris by storm and listing suggested uses of the vehicle as a means of preserving game in the cool regions of the sky, of collecting ice, or even as a form of sightseeing offering a bird’s-eye view over the surrounding area. Following the first manned balloon flight on November 20, 1783, he developed the latter suggestion more seriously, prophetically imagining the use of balloons to observe enemy movements during a siege or even for communications between a besieged town and the outside world. Moreover, like many of his contemporaries, Franklin also imagined the horrors of a war waged from the sky by means of balloons and held out hope that the new invention might be able to convince rulers of the folly of war. Yet if Franklin dreamed of peace, he could not resist expressing a certain “mocking” surprise that the British were not involved in the development of flight and in a letter to Sir Joseph goes as far as identifying himself with the French when he talks about the national characteristics necessary to develop the invention. Franklin’s theory that the balloon would one day be used in warfare was put into practice in the Napoleonic era, when a military school of aeronautics was formed at Meudon. Used successfully for observations during the battle of Fleurus and on other occasions, the military school was closed in the early nineteenth century when Napoléon lost interest in balloons, and was not reestablished until the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris in 1870, when balloons enabled important people and posts to escape from the encircled capital. Before this, however, the American Civil War had already proved the usefulness of a balloon corps for observation. Under the command of Professor Thaddeus Lowe,
116
BALLOONING
A hot air balloon similar to the one in which the French political leader Léon Gambetta escaped from Paris in order to organize the resistance to the invading Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War is seen being inflated in the Place Saint-Pierre (ca. 1870). (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
information gathered from the balloons was sent to general headquarters via telegraph, which provided the Union generals with up-to-date information on enemy movements before, during, and after battles and enabled the soldiers to fire cannons accu-
rately on targets that could not be physically seen from the ground. The Confederates also attempted to establish a balloon corps, first with a Montgolfier balloon and later with a hydrogen balloon constructed from multicolored patches of silk, the dif-
BALLOONING
ferent colors and patchwork effect leading to the legend that it had been made from the material of silk dresses donated by the ladies of the Confederacy. Jules Verne set the beginning of his novel, L’Ile mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island, 1874), in the besieged city of Richmond, from which the principal characters who are prisoners of war escape by means of a balloon. The balloon is carried by a hurricane for five days and travels an amazing distance of 6,000 to 7,000 miles before finally coming down just short of the mysterious island. The balloon corps operational during the Civil War had had to cope with storms, but the inspiration for the longdistance balloon journey that awaits Verne’s characters also came from his more recent acquaintance with the adventures of balloonists attempting to leave Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. In one incident the balloon was in danger of being blown out to sea, but the balloonists just managed to land on Belle Ile, and in another the balloon traveled more than 900 miles in fifteen hours to land in Norway. In Verne’s text, the balloonists end up on an island that is not marked on any map, which they significantly baptize l’Ile Lincoln. L’Ile mystérieuse is not the only Vernian text to incorporate a balloon into its narrative. Indeed, his first successful novel, Cinq Semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1863), is, as its title suggests, centered around the adventures linked to a long balloon journey that takes the central characters, Dr. Samuel Fergusson, Dick Kennedy, and Fergusson’s loyal servant Joe, over central Africa to discover the source of the Nile River and map previously uncharted territory. Although Verne’s inspiration for this story came from diverse sources, it is beyond doubt that Edgar
117
Allan Poe’s works, including The Balloon Hoax (1850) and The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (1835), heavily influenced his writing. In the year following the publication of Cinq Semaines en ballon, Verne published a critical essay on Poe in which, although he openly admired the American’s approach to fiction, he criticized the way in which the bounds of scientific credibility became mixed up with the bounds of the fantastic. Unlike Poe, Verne prided himself on the scientific realism of his work, and if he was inspired by the American author, he also set himself apart from him, defining his work as being all the better for not being a hoax. Often cited as one of the founding figures of science fiction whose works were translated into many languages, Verne had an influence on world literature that is without question. Among the authors that Verne’s science fiction may have influenced is Mark Twain. The similarities between Tom Sawyer Abroad (in which Tom, Huck, and Jim accidentally get taken up in a balloon and cross the Atlantic for a series of adventures, published in 1894) and Cinq Semaines en ballon are too close to be pure coincidence. Kate Turner See also: American Civil War; Aviation; Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Franklin, Benjamin; Poe, Edgar Allan; Twain, Mark; Verne, Jules. References Evans, Charles M. The War of the Aeronauts: The History of Ballooning in the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000. Lopez, Claude-Anne. Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Mckeithan, D. M. “Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad and Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon.” Studies in English 28 (1949): 257–271.
118
BARDOT, BRIGITTE
BARDOT, BRIGITTE (1934–) French actress, born in Paris in 1934. Together with Betty Grable (1916– 1973), Lana Turner (1921–1995), and Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), Brigitte Bardot was one of the most beautiful and photogenic blondes ever to have graced the silver screen. However, whereas her American counterparts were sophisticated Hollywood studio creations destined for mass consumption, her naturalness and her unpredictability made her a unique and atypical movie star. Bardot was born into a middle-class family. As a child, she trained as a ballet dancer and studied theater. She acted in her first films as a teenager in the early 1950s, but it was her work as a model that first generated interest and allowed her to ensure a fan base in Italy and Britain. In 1956, she starred in her first important feature film, Et Dieu créa la femme (And God
Created Woman), directed by her first husband Roger Vadim. The film quickly became the symbol of a new youth culture. She embodied overt sexuality lacking artifice. It was less her acting skills than her astonishing physique that made her famous on both sides on the Atlantic: nude scenes and the portrayal of a natural and uncomplicated female sexuality marked the first controversy of a career that would include many. Her famous pout, her hairdos, and her impeccable sense of style turned her into a major fashion icon, influencing other female movie stars such as Julie Christie (b. 1941) and Jane Fonda (b. 1937). Bardot’s film career then took off but spanned only two decades. Although not a great dramatic actress, she gave credible performances in Vie privée (Malle, 1962) and Le Mépris (Godard, 1963), by far her best works. Her vitality and natural spon-
Brigitte Bardot leading a campaign against the culling of baby seals. (Brozeck Miroslaw/Corbis Sygma)
BARNES, DJUNA
taneity worked better in comedies such as in Viva Maria! (Malle, 1965). Her costars included some of the major French actors of the time, such as Jean Gabin (1904– 1976), Annie Girardot (b. 1931), Jeanne Moreau (b. 1928), and Michel Piccoli (b. 1925), to name but a few. Bardot gave up acting in 1973 to dedicate herself to animal welfare (a rather unappreciated cause in France). In the late 1970s, she launched a violent attack against seal hunting in Canada. Many Canadians felt that her campaign (“Canadiens assassins”) was an expression of culture bashing, repositioning issues of Canadian national identity in terms of colonialism. In addition to her sculptural beauty, Bardot’s private life attracted much attention from fans and the media alike. Her marriages to Roger Vadim, actor Jacques Charrier (b. 1936, the father of her only child, Nicolas), and millionaire Gunter Sachs (from whom she separated after two months); her three suicide attempts; and her often provocative statements all generated passion and fueled “Bardot-mania” (“bardolâtrie”) that would never really abandon her. Indeed, even when out of the spotlight, controversy still followed her. Her marriage to Bernard Dormale, a Front National sympathizer, upset many. So too did her two autobiographical books, Initiales B. B. and Un Cri dans le silence, which were seen by many to contain regrettably politically incorrect comments on immigrants and homosexuals and which further damaged the credibility of her fight for animal welfare. Florian Grandena See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Fonda, Jane; Godard, Jean-Luc; Malle, Louis; Vadim, Roger.
119
References de Beauvoir, Simone Ortner. “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome.” Les Ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. Paris: Gallimard, 1970: 363–376. French, Sean. Bardot. London: Pavillion Press, 1996. Nadeau, C. “B. B. and the Beasts: Brigitte Bardot and the Canadian Seal Controversy.” Screen 37, no. 3 (autumn 1996): 240–250.
BARNES, DJUNA (1892–1982) American expatriate writer, poet, journalist, playwright, illustrator, and portrait painter, born at Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, New York, in 1892. Barnes was a well-known figure between the wars in the literary scenes of New York, London, Berlin, and Paris, where she lived for nearly fifteen years. Although she never received a formal education in her youth, after her unconventional parents divorced, Barnes studied art at the Pratt Institute and the Arts Students League of New York. While living in Greenwich Village, she became a successful and financially independent journalist and a self-styled, self-fashioned woman, avantgarde and bisexual, renowned for her caustic wit, she lived a cultivated bohemian life in the company of other artists, photographers, and writers such as Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams. She wrote several one-act plays that were produced by the Provincetown Players (1919–1920) and was an original member of the Theater Guild. At times using the pseudonym “Lydia Steptoe,” she also began writing illustrated stories, articles, and
120
BARNES, DJUNA
theatrical reviews for New York newspapers and magazines. Between 1913 and 1931, Barnes supported herself financially as a journalist by writing for mass periodicals and daily newspapers, although she thought of her popular journalism as “rubbish.” Barnes’s reputation as a writer, however, was established by the publication of The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), a collection of poetry and drawings; A Book, a second collection of stories and drawings (1923); Ryder (1928), a semiautobiographical novel written in Chaucerian style tracing family trauma (it was published in expurgated form in the United States after the illustrations were deemed too risqué and objections were made to passages suggesting religious irreverence or referring to bodily functions); and Ladies Almanac, a privately published, highly spirited satire of Natalie Barney’s expatriate, lesbian literary salon in Paris (1928) that was also banned by U.S. Customs. Sent to Paris on a journalist assignment by McCalls magazine in 1921, Barnes joined other American expatriate writers and artists who had taken up residence there, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. She was especially close friends with Mina Loy and Natalie Barney. In Paris, Barnes met and began a passionate love affair with Thelma Wood, a silverpoint artist who was later fictionalized as the elusive Robin Vote in Barnes’s internationally known, experimental work, Nightwood (1936). Another semiautobiographical story, the novel is set mostly in Paris, and follows the disastrous relationships between Robin Vote, an American expatriate and bisexual woman, and those who are inexorably drawn to her, only to lose her. Shaped by Barnes during her stay
at Peggy Guggenheim’s Hayford Hall in southwestern England in 1932 following the breakup of her relationship to Thelma Wood, Nightwood—thought to be a profound meditation on women’s relationships—is now considered a twentiethcentury classic. At the outbreak of World War II and following treatment for alcoholism, Barnes returned to New York. In 1941 she moved into a small apartment at Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, where she lived a very private life until her death in 1982. During her years there, Barnes published a few poems and a “bestiary” called Creatures in an Alphabet. In those years she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959) and published one more major work, The Antiphon (1958), a verse drama in the style of Jacobean dramatists that staged the conflict between a daughter and her mother over incestuous family relationships. In a letter, one of Barnes’s brothers claimed that The Antiphon was written in a spirit of revenge against her family (Herring, pp. 280–281), but Djuna Barnes insisted that instead she was looking for justice. Jodey Castricano See also: Barney, Nat(h)alie Clifford; Duchamp, Marcel; Literary Relations; Pound, Ezra Loomis; Stein, Gertrude; Williams, William Carlos; World War II. References Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Herring, Phillip. Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. New York: Viking, 1995. O’Neal, Hank. “Life Is Painful, Nasty and Short . . . in My Case It Has Only Been Painful and Nasty.” Djuna Barnes, 1978–1981: An Informal Memoir. New York: Paragon House, 1990.
BARNEY, NAT(H)ALIE CLIFFORD
BARNEY, NAT(H)ALIE CLIFFORD (1876–1972) American writer Natalie Clifford Barney was born to a wealthy and socially distinguished family and is probably best remembered for living her life on a grand scale and being a prominent salonist of early twentieth-century expatriate Paris. Her parents came from wealthy Ohio families, and her mother Alice, an accomplished painter who studied in Paris with James Whistler, encouraged her daughter’s interest in literature and the arts. Having been sent to a French boarding school at the age of eleven, Barney returned to the United States in 1889 and from then on frequently visited France before settling there permanently in 1902. In 1909, Barney moved to 20, rue Jacob on the Parisian Left Bank, where she was soon hosting her famous Friday salons, which continued for almost sixty years. This artistic community included a wide range of cultural celebrities such as Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Colette, James Joyce (1882–1941), Paul Valéry (1871–1945), Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, André Gide (1869– 1951), Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Truman Capote (1924–1984), and Françoise Sagan (b. 1935). Famously nicknamed “The Amazon” by poet Rémy de Gourmont, Natalie Barney lived as she chose and gracefully rebelled against Victorian mores and conventions, refusing to wear corsets, smoking cigarettes, and openly celebrating her love of women. She conducted affairs with such figures as the courtesan Liane de Pougy, poet Renée Vivien, painter Romaine Brooks, and Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly Wilde. Her scandalous rive gauche (Left
121
Bank) lifestyle is depicted in literary works by the likes of Radclyffe Hall (1880– 1943), Ezra Pound, and Djuna Barnes, who portray her as the rather thinly disguised heroine who defies society and tradition. Natalie Barney published twelve books, all but one and a half written and published in French: The One Who Is Legion, or A. D.’s After-Life, her only novel, was written and published in English in 1930, and Poems and Poèmes: Autres Alliances, written half in English, half in French, was published simultaneously in Paris and New York in 1920. Barney’s oeuvre includes poetry, fiction, drama, memoirs, and collections of pensées (thoughts), and it resists the societal norm, expressing her revolutionary and progressive attitudes toward life, sex, and womanhood. Her first book, Quelques Portraits—sonnets de femmes (1900), contains French love poems written to former and current lovers, whereas Actes et entr’actes (1910) is a strongly feminist collection of verse plays and poems. Barney published three collections of pensées: Eparpillements (1910), Pensées d’une Amazone (1920), and Nouvelles Pensées de l’Amazone (1939). Her most accessible book is probably Aventures de l’esprit (1929), a series of portraits of writers such as Stein, Colette, Barnes, and Marcel Proust (1871–1922). Barney’s last book Traits et portraits (1963), containing literary sketches as well as essays, was published when she was eighty-seven. Although her publications spanned more than six decades and both sides of the Atlantic, Barney’s literary achievement is overshadowed by her prominent social position among French and American artists and intellectuals. She died in Paris in 1972. Sandra Kaiser
122
BARRIN
DE
LA GALISSONIÈRE, ROLAND-MICHEL, MARQUIS
See also: Barnes, Djuna; Beach, Sylvia; Cocteau, Jean; Colette; Literary Relations; Pound, Ezra Loomis; Stein, Gertrude; Toklas, Alice B.; Whistler, James. References Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. London: Virago Press, 1987. Rodriguez, Suzanne. Wild Heart, A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney’s Journey from Victorian America to the Literary Salons of Paris. New York: Ecco, 2002. Weiss, Andrea. Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
BARRIN DE LA GALISSONIÈRE, ROLANDMICHEL, MARQUIS (1693–1756) Born in Rochefort, France, La Galissonière became a midshipman in Rochefort in 1710. His life was spent mainly as a naval officer. In the years 1710–1746 he went through several promotions. Though mostly stationed at Rochefort, he served in various capacities in a number of locations, including several along the Atlantic coast—Ile Royale, Canada (later Cape Breton Island), the West Indies, the Mediterranean, and along the coasts of Spain, Africa, and Brazil. On May 1, 1747, he was appointed commandant general in New France. His position entitled him to all the duties and powers of a governorgeneral of New France, as well as the latter’s salary, but he could not be appointed to that position because there already was a governor-general, Jacques-Pierre de Taffanel de La Jonquière, Marquis (1685– 1752). The latter had been taken prisoner by the British during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). The minister of the navy, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux,
comte de Maurepas (1701–1781), who had supported La Galissonière’s appointment, appreciated the fact that he immediately accepted the post that he had not sought. In fact, he had just refused an offer for a similar post in Saint-Domingue. La Galissonière arrived in Quebec on September 19, 1747, and stayed for two years. His mandate was characterized by the increasingly expansionist policy of the British continental provinces. With little support in terms of money and manpower on the part of the French Ministry of the Navy, which was responsible for the French colonies, he implemented a self-sufficient defensive strategy. He continued to rely on a system of alliances with the aboriginal nations; tried to keep the Americans at bay through the building of a line of fortified posts along the Ohio valley; and curbed the traditional profit-seeking attitude of the French officers toward their appointments as commanders in the western forts, which was often disadvantageous to the aboriginal peoples, who then turned to the British. Meanwhile, he tried to boost the demography of New France by favoring the arrival of new settlers and supporting the development of agriculture, livestock breeding, and industrial activities such as the Quebec shipyards and the Saint-Maurice ironworks (Forges Saint-Maurice) near Trois-Rivières. La Galissonière left Quebec for good on September 24, 1749, and North America a few weeks later, when he sailed from Louisbourg headed for France on or shortly before October 21, 1749. After his return to France, which La Galissonière welcomed, he was appointed a member of the joint British-French North American boundary committee (1749) and later saw naval action in the early stages of the French and Indian War (1754–1763).
BARTHES, ROLAND
Before the official declaration of war, his capture of the British island of Minorca (June 29, 1756) was the military highlight of his career, although that episode in particular must be attributed more due to the British commander’s lack of initiative than to the boldness of La Galissonière’s own strategy. La Galissonière died in Montereau, France, in 1756. Luca Codignola See also: French and Indian War; Louisbourg; New France; Ohio; Quebec; Rochefort; Santo Domingo. References Groulx, Lionel-Adolphe. Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, 1693–1756. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Pritchard, James S. Louis XIV’s Navy 1748–1762: A Study of Organization and Administration. Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987.
BARTHES, ROLAND (1915–1980) French cultural theorist, semiotician, and essayist, Roland Barthes has had a considerable impact across the Atlantic, especially in the United States, Canada, and Brazil. The writers Susan Sontag and Paul de Man have been particularly influenced by his writing. Throughout his career Barthes made regular visits to the United States, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, speaking at conferences (for example, on the avant-garde in New York in 1967) and publishing his famous article “The Death of the Author” in the avant-garde magazine Aspen in the same year. His writings on American cultural phenomena are numerous: from Billy Graham (b. 1918), Charlie Chaplin (1889– 1977), and Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man” (1957) exhibition in Mythologies
123
(1957)—an acerbic collection of skits on contemporary media culture of the 1950s (with a faint hint of anti-Americanism typical of 1950s France)—to his appreciation of Bernard Buffet’s paintings of New York, written on his own return from New York in 1959. He was also a close friend of the Cuban novelist Severo Sarduy, and Barthes’s influence can be seen in the latter’s writing. But perhaps his most important and lasting impact on the transatlantic dialogue between France and the United States is his role in the avant-garde journal Tel Quel. Barthes participated in the vogue for American modern art (and poetry) in France led by Telquelian Marcelin Pleynet in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Pleynet helped to sensitize a (hitherto suspicious) French audience to the work of artists such as Robert Motherwell and Cy Twombly, and to minimal art. Barthes wrote important pieces on Saul Steinberg (in 1976) and on Cy Twombly. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Modern Art for a retrospective on Twombly in 1979, Barthes’s piece, “The Wisdom of Art,” presents Twombly essentially as a symbolist, although, as Marjorie Wellish argues (1997, 209), “Europe, not America, remained more hospitable to art nurtured in the legacy of symbolism.” Though not specifically on Atlantic matters, Barthes’s catalog essay illustrates the visual and writerly links between American modernism and French poststructuralism. In addition to writing on pop art and Andy Warhol in this late 1970s period, Barthes was also well acquainted with photographer Richard Avedon, writing about his portraits as well as Robert Mapplethorpe’s in his famous Camera Lucida (1980). Andy Stafford
124
BARTHOLDI, FRÉDÉRIC-AUGUSTE See also: Painting; Photography; Sarduy, Severo; Tel Quel; Theory. References Knight, Diana, ed. Critical Essays on Roland Barthes. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000. Sontag, Susan, ed. A Barthes Reader. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Wellish, Marjorie. “The Art of Being Sparse, Porous, Scattered.” Writing the Image after Roland Barthes. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997: 201–216.
BARTHOLDI, FRÉDÉRICAUGUSTE (1834–1904) French sculptor, born in Colmar. Bartholdi’s most famous work is his colossal Liberty Enlightening the World, better known now as the Statue of Liberty, installed in New York City harbor in 1886. A believer in the Republic, and a man of great ambitions, entrepreneurial skills, and energy, Bartholdi made the most of his modest talents by committing himself to patriotic, sometimes colossal public monuments. Besides the Statue of Liberty, which was as much a fund-raising diplomatic achievement as a technological sculptural innovation, Bartholdi created the colossal stone sculpture The Lion of Belfort (1880) to commemorate the bravery of his fellow Alsatians during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), in which he himself had served in the National Guard. Commissioned by the French government in gratitude for American support during the Franco-Prussian War, Bartholdi’s Lafayette Arriving in America was unveiled in 1876 in New York City’s Union Square. The idea of a monument to liberty, French-American friendship, and the centennial of U.S. independence was first conceived, according to Bartholdi, by the Republican Edouard de Laboulaye in 1865.
Nevertheless, in the 1860s, Bartholdi concentrated on the design of a colossal statue of an Egyptian fellah (peasant) woman that he hoped would serve as a lighthouse at the Suez Canal. Egypt Bringing Light to Asia was doubtlessly inspired by his own youthful voyage to Egypt in 1855–1856, during which he made several drawings of fellah women at the banks of the Nile and also 105 quite beautiful calotypes, not only of immense stone ruins like the Colossi of Memnos but also of empty, atmospheric landscapes. Bartholdi returned to Egypt in 1869, only months before the inauguration of the Suez Canal, to sell his lighthouse to the Egyptian leader Ismaïl Pasha, but he turned it down. Only after the FrancoPrussian War did Bartholdi shift his attention to Laboulaye’s American project. Despite Bartholdi’s later public protests to the contrary, the American statue was an adaptation of the earlier Suez Canal lighthouse. Bartholdi repeatedly traveled to the United States, first in 1871 to seek support for the plan and also to identify the best location. It was Bartholdi who selected Bedloe’s Island in New York harbor. To promote his projects, he returned to the United States in 1876–1877, 1885, 1886, and again in 1893. The Statue of Liberty was erected in the outskirts of Paris between 1880 and 1884, where it became a tourist attraction; it was dismantled and transported to New York City in 1885 and officially unveiled on Bedloe’s Island in 1886. Typically determined to exploit every opportunity, Bartholdi in 1887 proposed yet another public sculpture commemorating French-American friendship to the newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer, who had decisively contributed to fund-raising efforts in the United States. Simply inverting the model provided by the success of
BASQUES
125
New York Public Library. Liberty: The FrenchAmerican Statue in Art and History. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
BASQUES
Statue of Liberty, sculpture of lion, and inset portrait of sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. (Library of Congress)
the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi asked Pulitzer to launch a subscription for a statue of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette to serve as a gift from the United States to France in honor of the centennial of France’s revolution. Despite Pulitzer’s unwillingness to pay the full cost, the sculptor ultimately made two versions, one now standing in Paris’s Place des Etats-Unis (1895) and another placed at 114th Street and Morningside Drive in New York City (1900). Bartholdi died in Paris on October 4, 1904. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby See also: Lafayette, Marquis de; Photography; Republicanism; Sculpture; Statue of Liberty, The; Washington, George. References Betz, Jacques. Bartholdi. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1954.
The Basques of France and Spain have long been regarded as the “mystery people” of Europe. Although much debated, the origin of their ancestors is unknown; and their language, Euskera, is non-IndoEuropean and linguistically unusual. The discovery of certain distinctive biological features has also fostered a view of the Basques as unique among European populations. They have the highest rate of type O blood and the lowest frequency of type B blood in Europe. They also have the highest rate of Rh negative factor in the world. Although attempts have been made to link modern Basques to Stone Age ancestors in southwestern France and northwestern Spain, more conservative estimates trace the Basques’ presence in the area from 5000 to 3000 B.C. Straddling the western Pyrenees, “the Basque country” (Euskal Herria, in Basque) consists of three provinces in France and four in Spain. Created by the Statutes of Autonomy passed in 1979 in Spain, the Basque Autonomous Community includes the provinces of Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia, and Araba. The fourth Spanish Basque province, Nafarroa, has its own autonomous statutes. In France, the provinces of Lapurdi, Behe Nafarroa, and Xiberoa have a population of some 263,000 people. The total population of the Basque country is just under 3 million. In the sixteenth century, the colonization of the Americas involved Basque expertise in maritime activities, including shipbuilding and navigation, as well as
126
BASQUES
colonial administration. Pioneers in the Atlantic whaling industry, Basques fished off Labrador and the Grand Banks of Newfoundland from as early as 1550 until the late seventeenth century. Basques were also extensively involved in cod fishing in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, an area dominated by French and Spanish Basque enterprise for roughly half of the sixteenth century. Their influence extended to trade in furs, beluga, whalebone, and walrus. Both Basques and Bretons regularly visited Cape Breton to trade furs and to fish. English explorers and entrepreneurs challenged the commercial dominance of the Basques in the period 1585 to 1603. Many Basque ships were targeted by English privateers. One of the most famous was the French Basque vessel, the Catherine de Saint Vincent, with its cargo of oil, fish, and furs. The sister of Henry IV, Catherine (Princess of Bourbon), threatened reprisals against English ships trading with Basque ports if the ship and its goods were not released intact. Many factors underpinned Basque emigration to New World destinations. French and Spanish colonialism drew Basques into trade, the military, and the church. Several other factors encouraged their diaspora across the Atlantic over the centuries: the Basque system of inheritance that allows only one heir; the economic, social, and political upheaval caused by the Napoleonic and Carlist Wars and the Spanish civil war; and limited economic opportunities at home for a largely rural Basque population. From the 1830s until the start of the twentieth century, the French Basque provinces lost a substantial portion of their population to New World destinations, notably to Uruguay and Argentina. Emigra-
tion to the United States also proved an attractive option for Basques who were economically and/or politically oppressed and seeking new opportunities abroad. Most sought their fortunes in the California gold rush of the 1850s. Initially supplying the mining communities of the American West, Basques entered the sheep- and cattle-raising industry in California, Arizona, western Nevada, and Wyoming. Some turned to dairy farming. From the 1850s, San Francisco served as the main port of entry for French Basques. One of the first Basque hotels there served as an important social and business center for those involved in the livestock industry. By 1900, there were some 120,000 French Basques in California. In Southern California, Basques in the livestock trade often worked alongside French emigrants from Béarn. Thus began a process of chain migration linking the American West to the pays basque (Basque country). That process included the secondary migration of many Basques to different parts of the New World, as well as their return migration to the homeland, for economic, political, and social reasons and for varying lengths of time. During the Spanish civil war (1936– 1939), the French Basque country sheltered Basques opposed to Franco and was an embarkation point for exiles seeking a safe haven in the Americas. In 1937, the Basque government went into exile after the bombing of Bilbao. In 1941, the headquarters of the Basque government in exile were moved to New York by its president, Jose Antonio de Aguirre. He lived in New York until 1946 and taught at Columbia University. During the Nazi occupation of France and the French Basque country (1940– 1944), many Basques were involved in un-
BASQUES
derground resistance networks that enabled Allied intelligence and military personnel, as well as thousands of refugees, to escape into Spain. Basques in the Americas have affirmed and maintained their ethnic identity through a range of social, educational, and cultural avenues. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Basque boardinghouses and hotels were key sources of information and mutual aid and helped Basques adapt to their new sociocultural and economic surroundings. As their needs changed, many Basque Americans sought to renew or to create cultural ties with their homeland and Basque heritage, largely through the creation of Basque centers or clubs, the first of which were formed in New York and Los Angeles at the start of the twentieth century. These organizations underpin Basque diaspora identity and seek to preserve Basque traditions and heritage. They do so through commensality at dinners and festivals and through collective participation and instruction in Basque dance, music, language, cooking, and sports (such as handball, pelota, and jai alai). In 2003, there were thirty-seven officially registered Basque centers in the United States, with thirteen in California. A further six centers are located in Mexico and Central America. In South America, most of the centers are found in Uruguay (nine) and in Argentina (eighty-four). The three officially registered Basque centers in France are located in Paris, Bordeaux, and Jurançon, near the French Basque country. In 1973–1974, the North American Association of Basque Organizations (NABO) was formed in an attempt to increase communication and collaboration between French and Spanish Basque
127
Americans. In 2003, NABO was composed of thirty-three Basque centers across the United States. According to the U.S. census of 2000, 57,793 people claimed Basque ancestry, of whom 20,868 lived in California. Among the most prominent contemporary members of the French Basque American community, the Laxalt family of Nevada traces its roots to the province of Xiberoa. Paul Laxalt was governor of Nevada from 1967 until 1971 and then served as a U.S. senator (1974–1987). Robert Laxalt (1923–2001) is widely regarded as the literary spokesman of Basque Americans and was a founder of the University of Nevada Press, which has a Basque book series. Although the majority of Basque Americans avoid involvement in the politics of the Basque country itself, the Basque Autonomous Government in Spain fosters close ties between the Basque homeland and Basque communities throughout the world. It provides financial support for Basque cultural activities and, among other initiatives, funds programs for diaspora youth, potential leaders of the global Basque community. Sandra Ott See also: Argentina; Brittany; Fishing; Fur Trade; Language; Mexico; Newfoundland; Piracy and Privateers; Saint Lawrence River; Whaling; World War II. References Douglass, William, and Jon Bilbao. Amerikanuak: Basques in the New World. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1975. MacClancy, Jeremy. “Biological Basques, Sociologically Speaking.” Social and Biological Aspects of Ethnicity. Ed. Malcolm Chapman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993: 92–129. Totoricagüena, Gloria. Identity, Culture, and Politics in the Basque Diaspora. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004.
128
BATAILLE, GEORGES
BATAILLE, GEORGES (1897–1962) One of the most influential French thinkers of the twentieth century. Bataille was associated with the surrealists, was influential in returning Friedrich Nietzsche and G. W. F. Hegel to prominence in France, and was the author of pornographic novels, books on art, and texts of nihilistic mysticism and “sacred sociology.” His most significant theory is that of “the accursed share,” in which waste, loss, eroticism, expenditure (dépense), and transgression take priority over accumulation, reproductive sex, saving, rationality, and the law. This theory pits “archaic” customs against capitalism, using practices present in pre-Columbian America, as well as among the peoples of the northwest of North America, to oppose the world of capitalist rationality. Bataille refers to Marcel Mauss’s theorization of the potlatch, where one group seeks to outbid the other, either in giving or destroying their own materials. The concept of property that underpins liberal capitalism is absent here and is challenged, and the endless recycling of gift and countergift offers a new way, for Bataille, of conceptualizing a world not limited to capitalist economics. This theory is further developed through an analysis of the role of sacrifice in Aztec society. The person to be sacrificed is “the accursed share”—that which must be sacrificed so that the rest may live. Both practices show an awareness of a “general economy” of waste and destruction, which is how he sees the universe fundamentally operating, despite modern society’s qualms about what cannot be rationalized and subject to the restricted form of the economy.
Bataille was not afraid to romanticize these earlier societies. As early as 1928, he noted the high level of civilization enjoyed throughout pre-Columbian America and also asserted that sacrifice did not hinder the development of that civilization but gave those societies their specific character, as well as a better sense of death and how humanity related to the world. He also clearly distinguished between the recognizably (to European eyes) advanced Maya, the violent sacred underpinning of the Aztec world, and the hierarchical bureaucracy of the Inca. He did not, however, recommend a return to sacrifice but a reassessment of the distribution of wealth. Writing The Accursed Share just after World War II, Bataille suggested the Marshall Plan be extended and establish a principle of the gift, in order to diminish the possibility of war (because war is the outcome of having an unspent surplus). So although the modern United States was a paradigm, for Bataille, of the wrong sort of economy, its strength and growth meant that it must expend, both for its own good and that of everyone else. Paul Hegarty See also: Marshall Plan, The; Painting; Pornography; Theory; World War II. References Hegarty, Paul. Georges Bataille. London: Sage, 2000. Richman, Michèle. Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
BATON ROUGE Capital of Louisiana, named by French explorers in 1699. In 1682, René Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, claimed for France all the lands
BATON ROUGE
129
The Battle of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, August 4, 1862. (Library of Congress)
drained by the Mississippi River and its tributaries, calling it “Louisiana” in honor of Louis XIV. In 1699, an exploration party under the command of Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, stopped on the east bank of the Mississippi River at the first high ground—approximately 100 miles from the coast and 175 miles up the river—where they found a vertical pole stained with animal blood that served as the boundary marker for two Indian tribes. They named the place Baton Rouge, “red stick.” After receiving a land grant in 1718, Bernard Diron Dartaguette was the first to settle the area, but his small plantation failed by 1727. As a town, Baton Rouge dates from 1763, when, following their victory in the French and Indian War, the British established a military outpost under the name Fort New Richmond. Spain conquered the town in 1779 and renamed it
Fort San Carlos and the area West Florida. When by the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 Napoléon Bonaparte compelled Spain to return much of Louisiana to France and then in 1803 sold it to the United States, West Florida was not included. U.S. settlers forced the issue by seizing Fort San Carlos in 1810 and raising the flag of the “West Florida Republic,” which was quickly replaced by the U.S. flag. In 1812, when Louisiana became the eighteenth state, West Florida was included within it, and the town reverted to the name Baton Rouge. Until 1846 when it became the capital of Louisiana, Baton Rouge was known for little except for being the home of Zachary Taylor, elected president of the United States in 1848, and for a visit in 1825 from Gilbert, marquis de Lafayette. During the American Civil War, Louisiana was a secessionist state, and
130
BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES-PIERRE
Baton Rouge, by then a thriving river port, was occupied by Union forces in August 1862. Baton Rouge recovered slowly from the Civil War, its prosperity returning only with the decision in 1909 by Standard Oil (now Exxon) to construct a refinery. That began the petrochemical boom that, along with the deep-water port and the governmental operations attendant upon its status as state capital, sustained the city economically. Baton Rouge also became prominent in higher education. The Louisiana Seminary of Learning was established at Pineville in 1860, with William T. Sherman its first superintendent; it moved to Baton Rouge in 1869 and in 1877 was renamed Louisiana State University. Southern University, founded in 1879 at New Orleans to provide an undergraduate education for blacks and now the largest predominantly black university in the United States, moved in 1914 to Scotlandville, which was later incorporated into Baton Rouge. This combination of education, government, and industry has made the greater Baton Rouge area, which by the 2000 census had a population of 706,000, the most dynamic region in Louisiana. Benjamin F. Martin See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; French and Indian War; Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Lafayette, Marquis de; Louisiana; Mississippi River. References Carleton, Mark T. River Capital: An Illustrated History of Baton Rouge. Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor Publications, 1981. Davis, Edwin A. Louisiana: The Pelican State. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Meyers, Rose. A History of Baton Rouge: 1699–1812. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.
BAUDELAIRE, CHARLESPIERRE (1821–1867) French poet and translator, born in Paris, the son of François Baudelaire and his young wife Caroline Dufaÿs. Caroline became a widow at the age of twenty-seven, when Baudelaire was only five. She then married General Aupick. At the age of twenty-one, Baudelaire received his father’s inheritance, which he spent on clothes, books, expensive furniture, opium, and hashish. In 1841, in order to separate the young man from bad company, Aupick sent him under supervision to India, but he never arrived—a storm at sea forced his return to Paris. He told friends—even in letters—about his experience in Calcutta. Even though he did not go beyond the Mauritian islands, he often referred to India as a factual occurrence in his life, and as such, a permanent influence on his poetry. General Aupick was far from accepting the youngster’s bohemian life or his relationship with Jeanne Duval, whom Baudelaire met in 1842 and who became his lifetime mistress. By that time, the prestigious Hotel Pimodan in Ile Saint-Louis was young Baudelaire’s address. After he had spent almost half his inheritance, in 1844 his family appointed a financial supervisor. His anguished letters show his difficulties in living on allowances. Most of the time he had creditors pursuing him. Despite these problems, Baudelaire worked hard as a literary and art critic and wrote poetry. His closest friends were artists and writers: Claude Monet, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore de Banville, Charles Asselineau, Félix Nadar, Théophile Gautier, Jean Courbet. In 1845 Baudelaire attempted suicide. Some believe the gesture was meant solely to move his mother.
BAUDRILLARD, JEAN
Nothing changed: he continued to be shackled by his debts. In 1857 Baudelaire published the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal/The Flowers of Evil, the most important European book of poetry of its time. In 1868 his Prose Poems proved to be even more innovative: his themes included time passing in split seconds, prostitution, and the ugly side of life. Undoubtedly, he was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, whose writings he translated into French. It is rather difficult to determine Poe’s exact influence on Baudelaire’s poetry, however, because many of Baudelaire’s poems were already written when he first read the American writer’s works. Baudelaire himself acknowledges having been directly influenced by Poe when he wrote Le Flambeau vivant/The Living Flame for Les Fleurs du mal. He first published in 1852, in the Paris Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe: Sa Vie et ses ouvrages (Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works). During 1852 and 1853 Baudelaire translated several texts by Poe, which he published in various newspapers: Histoires extraordinaires, in 1857 Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires, and in 1865 Histoires grotesques et sérieuses. Translation constituted the poet’s only stable source of income. His admiration for the American writer was immense. He even mentioned their physical resemblance. For Baudelaire, Poe was a complete author: critic, poet, and novelist. For Baudelaire, prosecution for Les Fleurs du mal for obscenity was a great sorrow. In 1867 Baudelaire died in his mother’s arms in a bedroom the walls of which were covered with works by his friend Edouard Manet. Raimunda Bedasee
131
See also: Literary Relations; Painting; Poe, Edgar Allan. Reference Marchi, Dudley M. “Baudelaire’s America— Contrary Affinities.” Yearbook of General and Comparative Literature, vol. 47: 37–52.
BAUDRILLARD, JEAN (1929–) It is hard to match Baudrillard’s influence in the world of contemporary culture and in the critique of that culture. He has been analyzing postmodernism since the early 1970s (although he rarely uses the word), has written highly controversial texts on war and terrorism, and brought the banal phenomena of today into the realm of theoretical discourse. Despite numerous visits to the United States in the early 1980s, Baudrillard’s main connection to that country is through his texts, perhaps most notably in America (1988). To comment on contemporary politics and culture requires acknowledgement of America’s centrality to the (globalized) world, and even though many European theorists did not pay substantial attention to the American role until the 1990s, Baudrillard has long maintained that the world we live in is driven and realized by America and phenomena that emanate from it. There are two standard ways of defining the American role, and Baudrillard does neither: for him, it is not a question either of political hegemony or of some sort of neocolonialism based on commercialized cultural exports. They are of course relevant but are secondary to the dominant state we are in: simulation. According to Baudrillard, humans have always lived in a world of simulacra, but unlike Plato, his theory places no perfect
132
BAUDRILLARD, JEAN
form behind the things of this world that we perceive—there are only ever simulacra, or copies without an original. The modern world goes from simulacra based on production, where there is a gap between signifier and signified, such that meaning is produced (this occurs in tandem with capitalism), to full simulation, where there are only simulacra. Baudrillard also terms this condition “hyperreality,” where there is an increased insistence on reality, which hastens its disappearance and the spread of simulation and the virtual. This is a historical, if necessarily ungrounded argument, based on the change in capitalism that flowed from the crash of 1929—consumer society and credit have to fill in the gaps. Speculative capitalism has to lose any link to real production, and finally, the crises of capitalism are seen to alter rather than remove capitalism. The effects of the Depression spread out from America, now clearly the economic capital of the world. The next key “moment” is the development of the mass media, and they find their complete form in America (this completion is still ongoing). The cold war replaces “real war,” and Baudrillard writes of the spread of deterrence to all levels of culture such that nothing really happens anymore—even though something always seems to be happening. The end of the cold war confirms America’s dominance, but not in the sense of victory—rather it is the dominance of a model that America itself has been caught up in—that is, simulation (there is no end of history, only the “illusion of the end”). Baudrillard is fascinated by celebrity but tends to analyze individuals (like Michael Jackson or Madonna) or individual events (Bill Clinton “not having sex”), rather than constructing a model for celebrity culture. Similarly, he does refer to
Hollywood, Disneyland, the strangeness (as he sees it) of California—but, in the case of Disneyland, for example, it is to argue that Disneyland covers up the fact of the unrealness of the rest of America. War, and America’s role in it, whether during or after the cold war, is central to Baudrillard’s presentation of the “world today”: instead of emphasizing that reality is real because of its violence, war brings a further level of simulation. Vietnam, as the first televised war, undermined the realness of what was going on precisely as it was brought to the viewer in his or her home. It was a war that had no existence outside simulation, but— and this point is vital—it is still dangerous to be in or near one of these wars, possibly even more so, because the ends and actions of simulated war are less predictable and have less to do with concrete gains. The first Gulf War represented a heightening of the irreality of war for Baudrillard—it was a war that was not even happening as it was caught up in models of itself, the virtual reality of new technology, endless TV coverage, and the absence of much fighting. The Iraq War has only reiterated much of what Baudrillard said then. More controversial still was Baudrillard’s essay on the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Since the 1970s, this building had caught his attention— capitalism was exemplified in the Manhattan skyline, and that skyline was dominated by a symbol of dualistic monopoly. Furthermore, as he wrote in 2000, the World Trade Center expressed the drift into hyperreality of that same system. The September 11 attack on the building was an attack on the global system, but it also represented the violence of the global itself, turned back on itself. Baudrillard went on to say that “we” (presumably the
BAZIN, ANDRÉ
West) felt some sort of pleasure at the collapse, happy for “us” to be attacked. The towers then committed suicide, their collapse the only possible response to the extremity of the hijackers’ suicides and murders. His point here is that the attack was a “symbolic exchange”—something that eludes rational calculation, and as he sees it, the “suicide” of the buildings is a reply rather than a weakness. He is on firmer ground when talking of Western or rather, in this case, American complicity at a practical level. Apart from conspiracy theories and the preventability of September 11, there is still the question of the perpetrators being based and trained in America, using American planes—illustrating for Baudrillard that the global is only ever attacking itself. More recently still (but before the second Gulf War), Baudrillard described the attack as a sort of credit card, allowing increased American violence in its “war on terrorism.” Like the essay on the September 11 attacks, America has also proved an awkward text, with its superficial reading of America as cinematic, shallow, idiotic, with its culture on the verge of becoming the desert that surrounds it. However, it has also been criticized for its praise of America, with its claim that America is a “realized utopia,” a place of opportunity, cultural invention, and racial harmony. More interestingly, Baudrillard claims that America is the only truly modern society (and much of the book can be seen as a critique of French and European society) or a “primitive society of the future” (America, p. 7). Either way, it is to be seen as something different from Europe, and its banality or shedding of irony are markers of where culture is going (although the irony of ironic American comedy going global eludes him here).
133
His largest claim is that America is utopia: its founders believed that unlike other utopias, this one not only could exist, it already did, so America has always lived, as a result, as it if were utopia already. Baudrillard’s point is not that it really is one but that it is one that has been made real, and it is all we will ever get as utopia—that is not an ideal society in reality but more the belief in it. Anyone who does not see it that way will be removed from positions of influence, and anyone who falls outside (like the ill or the homeless) will be forcibly excluded. The book as a whole tends to easy generalization, but its claims about utopia are nuanced and innovative. Paul Hegarty See also: Disneyland Paris; Iraq War; Madonna; 9/11: Political Perspectives; Theory; Television; Utopias; Vietnam War. References Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1988. ———. The Spirit of Terrorism. London: Verso, 2002. Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.
BAZIN, ANDRÉ (1918–1958) France’s most influential film critic, celebrated for the importance he attributes to mise-en-scène (the way in which the world “out there” is framed and staged for the camera) and for his strong advocacy of a realist cinema. To the dialectical and ideological use of montage by directors such as the Russian Marxist Sergei Eisenstein and to the stylization of the German expressionists, Bazin opposed a respect, deriving from his Catholic version of phenomenology, for the “world as it is,” leading him to extol the
134
BEACH, SYLVIA
openness—some might even say the messiness—of a Jean Renoir or a Roberto Rossellini as the quintessence of cinema. This in turn, along with his abiding interest in genre, meant that he more than any previous French or indeed European critic championed Hollywood cinema at its best. His first book dealt with Orson Welles, and the essays posthumously grouped as What Is Cinema? (1958–1962) address the Western or the film noir as eruditely and enthusiastically as they do the Italian neorealists or French auteurs such as Marcel Carné and Robert Bresson. Bazin’s work can thus be understood as an important part of the postwar fascination with American culture. Cahiers du cinéma, which Bazin cofounded in 1951, was to continue this advocacy in a manner that profoundly influenced the future development of French cinema. Bazin’s approach was less self-consciously auteurist than theirs (perhaps because, unlike the leading Cahiers writers, he never went on to direct films himself ), placing more stress on cinema as process of production. The hitherto lowly cultural status of the Hollywood “dream factory” was for Bazin no obstacle to the access it provided to the essence of things as they are, in which respect it could be seen as the true heir to the poetic realism of the prewar French cinema. Keith Reader See also: Cahiers du cinéma; Catholic Church; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Film Noir. Referenece Andrew, Dudley. André Bazin. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
BEACH, SYLVIA (1887–1962) The daughter of a New England Presbyterian minister, Sylvia Beach settled in Paris
during World War I. In November 1919, together with her friend and partner, Adrienne Monnier, she set up a bookshop and lending library, Shakespeare and Company, which specialized in English and American books. In 1922, the shop moved to 12, rue de l’Odéon, across the street from Monnier’s establishment, La Maison des Amis des Livres (The House of the Friends of Books). Shakespeare and Company soon became the favorite meeting place of American expatriates and French writers. Some of the early visitors included André Gide, André Maurois, Ezra Pound, and the American poet Robert McAlmon. During the 1920s, Gertrude Stein also became a regular visitor, alongside wellknown French authors such as Paul Valéry. Shakespeare and Company contributed to establishing the European reputation of American writers, among them Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sylvia Beach famously financed the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) at a time when the mainstream publishers rejected the book on account of its alleged pornography. Joyce’s letters to Beach, published in 1987, bear witness to the invaluable role that Shakespeare and Company played for two decades in facilitating the intellectual exchanges between European and American writers. Only months after Joyce’s untimely death in 1941, Beach had to remove all the books in the shop to the fourth floor of the building and paint out the sign, following the visit of a German officer who ordered the shop to be closed and threatened to confiscate the entire stock. As described in Beach’s compelling memoirs, the occupation ended with the arrival of American troops in 1944, when Hemingway himself “liberated” the book-
BEAU DOMMAGE
shop and helped disperse snipers from the rooftop of Monnier’s flat. Shakespeare and Company reopened on the Left Bank only in 1951, with a new name, Le Mistral, and under the management of another East Coast American bibliophile, George Whitman. With Sylvia Beach’s agreement, Whitman resurrected the original name of the bookshop in 1964 and continued to provide shelter and support to struggling writers, who could live free of charge in the store and make use of its library. The first, censored, edition of Beach’s memoirs came out in 1959, when the editors cut sections of her manuscript that dealt with “controversial” matters, such as the author’s relationship with Adrienne Monnier. The same year, Beach played a significant part in the organization of the exhibition on American writers in Paris during the 1920s, which was held at the Centre Culturel Américain in Paris. A revised version of the same exhibition (“Paris of the Twenties: An Exhibition of Souvenirs of British, French, and American Writers at Shakespeare and Company”) was hosted by the USIS (United States Information Service) gallery in London the following year. To this day, Sylvia Beach has remained one of the most prominent Americans in Paris, whose autobiographical work charts the evolution of famous anglophone writers (such as Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot) and provides a vivid account of the interaction between the French and American cultural traditions from the early 1920s to the end of World War II. Ramona Fotiade See also: Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Hemingway, Ernest; Literary Relations; Pound, Ezra Loomis; Stein, Gertrude; World War I; World War II.
135
References Banta, Melissa, and Oscar A. Silverman, eds. James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921–1940. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. London: Faber and Faber, 1960.
BEAU DOMMAGE Quebec pop-folk music band. Beau Dommage gained fame in the mid-1970s with melancholy ballads set in Montreal. Mixing the West Coast sound of melodic pop-folk with poetic lyrics and vocal harmonies, they became a successful and cross-generational band. Beau Dommage was founded in 1972 by three Montreal university students, Pierre Huet (lyrics), Robert Léger (keyboards and flute), and Michel Rivard (guitar, vocals, lyrics, and composition). To this initial core were added Pierre Bertrand (guitar, bass, and voice; he replaced Huet in 1973), followed by Marie-Michèle Desrosiers (keyboards, vocals) and Réal Desrosiers (drums). In 1975, Michel Hinton (keyboards) succeeded Léger. Influenced by the pop melodies of the Beatles and the West Coast sound of the late 1960s, Beau Dommage generally played pop-folk with an emphasis on acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies. The three singers often took turns for the lead or sang in chorus. They were received by the Quebec media and public as “true” Québécois artists who had managed to establish the first crossover between poetic lyrics in French and an Anglo-American pop style. Nearly all the artists wrote lyrics or composed melodies, but Michel Rivard did most of the songwriting.
136
BEAUCHEMIN,YVES
Beau Dommage’s songs are “realist” insofar as they are usually set in identifiable Montreal locales. They make reference to local districts (“Chinatown,” 1974) and well-known streets (Rue Saint-Paul rhymes with “Le Blues d’la métropole,” 1975). Their songs tend to describe the daily lives of recently uprooted city dwellers, setting compositions in a minor key to convey melancholy. Alluding to the illusory attraction of urban living for country folk, their song “La Complainte du phoque en Alaska” (1974) was an instant hit, which the “father” of Quebec popular music, Félix Leclerc, also recorded in an unprecedented gesture of encouragement. Touring in France in the mid-1970s, Beau Dommage won the Best Foreign Act award for their second album in 1976 (Où est passée la noce?/Where Did the Wedding Go? ). They produced four albums in the space of five years, but in 1978 the band split up after several members decided to try to lead solo careers. To mark their tenth anniversary, in 1984, the band reformed for two concerts in Quebec City and Montreal (later issued as two live recordings) and were awarded a Félix Leclerc prize by the Quebec recording association for their œuvre. In 1992, the band once again reformed, this time to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Montreal, and appeared at Montreal’s Francofolies festival. The rapturous response of their fans gave Beau Dommage the impetus to record a new album, which was released in 1994 and sold an incredible 200,000 copies in four weeks. Touring in Quebec in 1995, they sold over 50,000 tickets, which showed their loyal audience’s support and their continuing commercial viability. This
was followed in 1999 by the reissuance of a compilation album. Barbara Lebrun See also: Charlebois, Robert; Francofolies, Les; Leclerc, Félix; Montreal; Music (Folk); Music (Pop); Vigneault, Gilles. References Baillargeon, Richard, and Christian Côté. Une Histoire de la musique populaire au Québec, Destination Ragou. Montreal: Triptyque, 1991. Thérien, Robert, and Isabelle d’Amours. Dictionnaire de la musique populaire au Québec (1955–1992). Quebec: IQRC, 1992.
BEAUCHEMIN,YVES (1941–) Québécois author, born in RouynNoranda, Quebec, in 1941. In 1946, Beauchemin’s parents decided to move to the small village of Clova. To occupy his time, Beauchemin would read for hours stories that took him to different worlds and made him appreciate writing his French essays at school. He then went to the University of Montreal, where he completed a degree in French and art history in 1965. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1983, he first taught literature at the Universities of Quebec and Montreal, wrote a humorous column for the magazine Sept-jours for three years, and then worked as musical adviser and researcher for Télé-Québec. Throughout this period, he continued to read his favorite classical authors, including Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Marcel Proust, and Jules Romains. His passion for reading led him to begin writing. He had already tried to write a novel by the time he was twelve years old, and later on he wrote a few short stories. Having published several short sto-
BEAUVOIR, SIMONE
ries in magazines in the second half of the 1960s, he finally made a name for himself with his novel L’Enfirouapé (a Québécois word meaning to be manipulated or “had”) in 1974, which won him the Prix FranceQuébec the following year. In 1981, his second novel Le Matou (The Alley Cat) brought him success, not only in Quebec but in France and many other countries as the novel was translated into seventeen languages. After receiving the Grand Prix Littéraire du Journal de Montréal and Prix de la Ville de Montréal in 1981, the book won the Prix du Livre de l’Eté in Cannes a year later. Ten years later, the same novel won the Grand Prix Littéraire des Lycéens d’Ilede-France, voted for by secondary school students. In 1985, the adaptation of this novel for the cinema and television also became a great success. Beauchemin’s third novel, Juliette Pomerleau/Juliette, published in 1983, was also acclaimed in Quebec and in France, bringing him more prizes: the Prix du Grand Public du Salon du Livre de Montréal (1989), the Prix Jean-Giono (1990), the Prix des Lectrices de Elle (1990), and a nomination for the Prix Goncourt in 1989. A TV adaptation of Juliette Pomerleau was shown in Quebec in 1999. His fourth novel, Les Emois d’un marchand de café/The Emotions of a Coffee Seller, was first published in Paris in 1999 before being released in Montreal a year later. Beauchemin’s other works include the novel Le Deuxième Violon (The Second Fiddle, 1996); a diary, Du Sommet d’un arbre/From the Top of a Tree (1986); and four novels for children, Une Histoire à japper/A Story That Yelps (1991), Antoine et Alfred (1992), Alfred Sauve Antoine/Alfred Saves Antoine (1996), and Alfred et la lune
DE
137
cassée/Alfred and the Broken Moon (1997). His novels are appreciated in France for their refreshing, humorous, and moving stories and characters. Beauchemin also wrote the libretto for the opera Le Prix in 1992, which was composed by Jacques Hétu. In April 1993, he became a member of the Académie des Lettres du Québec. In 2000, the University of Bordeaux organized a conference on his work. Beauchemin is a passionate defender of the French language in Quebec and a member of both the Quebec writers’ union and the Regroupement pour les droits politiques du Québec, a group for political rights in Quebec. Marion Bernard See also: Language; Quebec; Romains, Jules. Reference Piccione, Marie-Lyne, ed. Rencontre autour d’Yves Beauchemin: Actes du colloque de Bordeaux, centre d’études canadiennes, Université Michel Montaigne Bordeaux III. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001.
BEAUVOIR, SIMONE (1908–1986)
DE
French novelist, philosopher, and political activist. Simone de Beauvoir is best known as the author of the groundbreaking existentialist analysis of a woman’s social construction, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949). Despite often being overshadowed by the celebrity of her longtime companion Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s work is gaining increasing recognition, and she is now considered to be one of the most complex and original thinkers of her generation. She is linked to the Americas primarily through her travel and research in the United States
138
BEAUVOIR, SIMONE
DE
Existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908– 1986) was well known for her feminist work The Second Sex (1949). She studied at the Sorbonne with existentialist philosopher Sartre, later joining him as a professor in the 1940s. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
during the late 1940s and early 1950s, a connection strengthened by her personal relationship with the American writer Nelson Algren. Born in Paris in 1908, Beauvoir grew up the eldest of two daughters in an uppermiddle-class French family; she documents this childhood with sociological precision in the first volume of her acclaimed autobiography, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée/Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958). A student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she came second (Sartre was first) in the agrégation of her year. Soon after becoming a high school philosophy teacher, she began to write essays and fiction exploring existentialist questions of freedom, anguish, and moral responsibility, issues that became increasingly pressing as World War II approached. She published her first novel,
L’Invitée/She Came to Stay, during the occupation in 1943, a roman-à-clef that yoked a philosophical exploration of the “Other” to the experiments in sexual liberty she and Sartre had undertaken since their meeting, all through the careful dissection of a contemporary Parisian ménage à trois. Emerging with Sartre at the end of the war as a star of the new French vogue for existentialism, Beauvoir continued to write novels, plays, philosophical tracts, and articles, eventually winning the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for her novel Les Mandarins/The Mandarins. From the 1950s onward Beauvoir became increasingly preoccupied with international politics, turning her work toward critical explorations of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalist consumerism. Beauvoir had been fascinated by the United States long before her first visit to the country for a series of lectures in 1947: not only were her literary influences frequently American (William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway), but she also saw the United States as a country full of potential for the true realization of existentialist freedom and individuality. Her increasing ambivalence toward the United States, however, and her disgust at its economic inequalities, its worship of capitalism, and its antiblack racism is documented both in the third volume of her autobiography and in the analysis of her 1947 visit, published as L’Amérique au jour le jour (America Day by Day, 1948). A classic “French intellectual in America” text, it nevertheless reflects Beauvoir’s fondness for the more personal aspects of her American experience. Treated with suspicion by the American authorities (Beauvoir would have to wait several months before being granted another visa), the text remains a vital and vibrant foreigner’s analysis of a
BEAUVOIR, SIMONE
fascinating postwar United States in transition, a puzzling and contradictory country on its way to becoming the most powerful nation on Earth. The relationships she established with individual Americans during this trip ensured that the United States remained a central part of Beauvoir’s life over the next decade. The writer Richard Wright and his wife became close friends of Beauvoir in both the United States and later France, Wright teaching Beauvoir much about racial oppression and its pertinence to her inquiries into the female condition in Le Deuxième Sexe. Even more important was the figure of Nelson Algren, a writer she met in Chicago and with whom she began an intellectual and romantic partnership that lasted for several years. Despite returning to France (and to Sartre), Beauvoir’s relationship with Algren resulted in her existence being painfully divided between Paris and Chicago, both literally (she and Algren traveled back and forth between the two continents several times in order to maintain some semblance of continuity) and emotionally: Sartre may have been her intellectual partner for life, but with Algren, Beauvoir found her first truly passionate relationship with a man. Fantasizing about an eradicated Atlantic, Beauvoir allowed Algren and the United States to seep into her everyday existence in Paris, translating Algren’s work for the journal she had set up with Sartre after the war, Les Temps modernes, and writing Algren the long, passionate letters (in English) documenting her life in Paris that would be published in 1999. This “doubleness” by which Beauvoir’s life and work became characterized is reflected in the novel Les Mandarins, not only in the details of the psychiatrist heroine Anne’s competing relationships with a Frenchman and an
DE
139
American, but at the very level of the book’s structure, torn as it is between two different subjectivities, that of Anne and that of Henri, her husband’s (Camus-inspired) friend. Although Beauvoir’s ultimate fidelity to her pact with Sartre precluded a final commitment to Algren and hastened the end of that particular Franco-American relationship, her increasingly active political and intellectual life perpetuated her connection to the Americas. Invited with Sartre in 1960 to visit postrevolutionary Cuba, she met with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and gave several lectures to Cubans on the politics of existentialism and on the situation of women, performing a similar role in Brazil some months later. Also around this time, she and Sartre developed a relationship with the Martinican militant psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, and by signing the “Manifeste des 121,” she made concrete her public opposition to French action in Algeria. Despite having written on “the woman question” as early as 1949 in Le Deuxième Sexe, Beauvoir did not officially embrace the feminist movement to the point of active militant action until the late 1960s, when she played a major role in the foundation of the women’s liberation movement. Le Deuxième Sexe, however, a work maligned as pornographic by the likes of François Mauriac and misogynistic by many subsequent commentators, can be considered as her legacy to feminist thought. Ironically, the work is the cornerstone not of the bodycentered “French feminism” that would gain academic popularity in the early 1970s, but rather of an overwhelmingly Anglo-American corpus of radically nonessentialist feminist texts far more preoccupied, as was Beauvoir, with the dismantling of purely discursive “feminine truths.”
140
BÉCAUD, GILBERT
Completing her four-part autobiography in the 1970s, Beauvoir spent the latter part of her life with her adopted daughter Sylvie le Bon and died in Paris in 1986. Andrew Asibong See also: Dos Passos, John; Fanon, Frantz; Feminisms; Hemingway, Ernest; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Theory; World War II; Wright, Richard. References Bair, Deirdre. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1990. Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Moi, Toril. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.
BÉCAUD, GILBERT (FRANÇOIS SILLY) (1927–2001) French singer, born in 1927 in Toulon; died in 2001 in Paris. During the 1950s, Bécaud became one of the most successful French music hall singers, whose influence both as a composer and as a performer extended well beyond France. Working over the years with various lyricists, especially Louis Amade, Pierre Delanoë, and Maurice Vidalin, he was behind some of the most successful hit songs on both sides of the Atlantic. A classically trained pianist, Bécaud accompanied the singer Jacques Pills on a tour of North and South America during 1950–1951. Changing his name from François Silly to Gilbert Bécaud, he returned to France to pursue his own career as a singer. Initially billed in France as a vedette américaine (American star), Bécaud ap-
peared in 1954 at the newly opened Olympia music hall. His energetic performances, which earned him the nickname “Monsieur 100,000 volts,” appealed to French and North American youth audiences alike. At the end of the 1950s, France saw the arrival of North American rock ’n’ roll and its French equivalent, la chanson yéyé. Responding to new trends in popular music, Bécaud began to compose for the younger singers of the yéyé generation such as Richard Anthony and Hervé Vilar. Across the Atlantic, Bécaud and his work achieved success, especially in Canada and in the United States. In 1961 he composed the music for Gilles Vigneault’s song “Natashquan,” whose text evoked the fishing village where the Québécois singer-songwriter had spent his childhood. Bécaud’s English version of “Et maintenant” (“What Now, My Love,” 1961) was a huge hit for Frank Sinatra, with whom he was often compared. In 1966 Bécaud performed a live television concert that was screened in the United States. He also cowrote the hugely successful “Je t’appartiens” (“I Belong to You,” 1955), recorded in English toward the end of the 1960s as “Let It Be Me” by big names in North America such as James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Everly brothers, Nina Simone, and Sonny and Cher. Bécaud’s songs were also covered by Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Elvis Presley, and Barbra Streisand, to name but a few. Bécaud collaborated with Neil Diamond on two of his greatest hits, “Love on the Rocks” (“L’Amour est morte,” 1981) and “September Morn” (“C’est en septembre,” 1977). His marriage to an American in 1976 further strengthened his links with the United States,
BEDAUX, CHARLES EUGÈNE
where he realized his ambition of writing and staging a musical. Collaborating with the English librettist Julian More, Bécaud produced Madame Roza (1986), based on the novel La Vie devant soi (The Life before Us) by Romain Gary. The show was performed initially in Baltimore and Los Angeles and also ran for a short period on Broadway, before transferring to Paris. Chris Tinker See also: Dylan, Bob; Gary, Romain; Music (Pop); Vigneault, Gilles. References Looseley, David. Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Reval, Annie, and Bernard Reval. Gilbert Bécaud: Mes jardins secrets. Paris: FranceEmpire, 2001.
BEDAUX, CHARLES EUGÈNE (1886–1944) Charles E. Bedaux was one of the most innovative and colorful persons among the founders of professional management consulting. He invented the “Bedaux system” and made it popular as a productivity strategy among the world’s business leaders. He built the first global network of consulting companies and became one of the highestearning citizens in the United States. Macroeconomic projects that he developed led indirectly to his still contentious death. Parisian by birth, as a young man Bedaux migrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen. He developed a method to measure professional labor. The basic principle of the system is that all human labor can be measured in time; adjusted for speed, effort, and efficiency; and augmented by a rest factor to allow for re-
141
covery from fatigue. The compound measurement results in an objective standard, the “B.” Every qualified worker can perform 60 B’s per hour as a normal performance and up to 80 B/h as an optimum performance. In combination with the time standards, an incentive system was introduced, wherein 60 B/h performance stands for the guaranteed base salary, and a linear premium is paid to the worker for performances over 60 B/h, up to a maximum of 331/3 percent of the base salary at 80 B/h. This was called the “Bedaux system.” Because the system forced both management and workers to focus on methods and performance, it often led to breakthrough performance leaps. Bedaux established his first management consulting firm in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1916. Another in New York followed in 1921. In 1926 the British Bedaux Company was formed. International Bedaux was established in 1928 with head offices in Amsterdam. Other Bedaux companies opened all over Europe, Africa, Australia, and the East. Some of the leading management consulting firms of today have their roots with Bedaux. Bedaux bought the Château de Candé in Monts, Indre-et-Loir, France, where he lived with his second American wife Fern Lombard and from where he undertook his countless business trips around the globe. It was in this castle that Charles and Fern Bedaux in 1937 hosted the wedding of the Duke of Windsor—the former King Edward VIII of England—and Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Restless, adventurous, and not publicity shy, Bedaux undertook various expeditions. The best known is the “Champagne Safari,” a 1,500-mile expedition through
142
BEGUINE
the northern mountains of British Columbia in 1934. On the geographical map today one can still find Mount Bedaux and Fern Lake. In 1995 the Canadian director George Ungar, using twelve reels of original film material, produced a documentary, The Champagne Safari, about this adventure, which had to be abandoned because of the conditions. The first film reference to Bedaux came in Modern Times, produced, directed, written, and filmed by Charlie Chaplin between 1932 and 1936. In the movie, Charlie plays the poor Tramp, victimized by an industry run amok. The machines that battered Charlotte, his gamine (played by his wife Paulette Goddard), had been set into motion by the febrile brain of Mr. Beddoes, Charlie’s caricature of Charles Bedaux. Bedaux got mixed up with business dealings for both the Allied forces and the Germans before and at the beginning of World War II. He was flown to Florida for interrogations by the Department of Justice and died there in February 1944. The official cause of his death was suicide. Controversy continued after his death. In 1945 the New Yorker magazine devoted a series of three articles to him under the title “Annals of Collaboration.” At the same time, the Charles de Gaulle government in France, after detailed scrutiny, posthumously granted Bedaux the Légion d’honneur. Jurrian te Gussinklo Ohmann See also: Gaulle, General Charles de; World War II. References Christy, Jim. The Price of Power: A Biography of Charles Eugène Bedaux. New York: Doubleday, 1984. Goddard, John. “Bedaux’s Crossing.” Canadian Geographic 115, no. 5 (September–October 1995): 64–70.
BEGUINE The word beguine is said to come from the English word “begin,” which bandleaders used to mark the start of the music. Although the French and English spellings vary (biguine in French and beguine in English), the variation is mainly due to phonological transfer. Biguine in French is pronounced the same as begin, whereas beguine is an English pronunciation of the word biguine. Beguine is a generic term used to define a certain type of music born from the fusion of French ballroom music and that of the African population of Martinique and Guadeloupe. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were three distinctive types of beguines in the Caribbean: biguine de salon, or chamber beguine; biguine de bal, or ballroom beguine; and biguine de rue, or street beguine. Chamber beguine was much closer to the French musical tradition and included instruments such as piano, violin, and cello. Ballroom beguine used a wider range of instruments and combined music, songs, and dance. Street beguine was particularly prevalent among the lower classes and very popular during carnival time. The satirical lyrics served as political and social commentaries. In street beguine, the song and quality of the voice played a particularly important role. The diversity of beguines also reflects their evolution and the diverse backgrounds of listeners and musicians. Chamber beguine was very much the arena of whites and mulattoes. Beguine involving songs and dance, more widespread among the black population, was condemned by the church as satanic music. After the 1902 eruption of the Montagne Pelée volcano and the submergence of Saint Pierre
BEINEIX, JEAN-JACQUES
under the sea, beguine was banned in Martinique. The church attributed the catastrophe to those songs. Beguine was supplanted by the polka—enjoyed predominantly by the white and mulatto population in Martinique and Guadeloupe—but did not disappear. Opportunities for beguine musicians in the Antilles were very limited. It was only in the 1930s, thanks to musicians such as clarinet player Alexandre Stellio (1885–1939), who took their music to Paris, that beguine started to gain wider recognition. Beguine won popularity in France through le Bal Nègre or le Bal Blomet, a dance hall at 33, rue Blomet in Paris. When Stellio arrived from Martinique in May 1929, he and other musicians from the Caribbean—including violonist Ernest Léardée, the trombonist Archange St. Hilaire, pianist, bassist, cellist Vic Torcals, and drummer and vocalist Orphelien—formed the Orchestre Antillais du Bal Blomet, which stayed in residence at the Bal Nègre for under a year. Beguine music and dance became a symbol of the French Caribbean. The musical instrumentation was very similar to that of New Orleans orchestras, and instruments included clarinet, trumpet, and drum chest, piano, violin, saxophone, guitar, and bass. As beguine evolved, so did the rhythm and the variety of instruments played. Beguine quickly became popular outside the Caribbean, even in AngloSaxon countries. It owes part of its popularity to Cole Porter’s 1935 song “Begin the Beguine,” which became an international hit in 1938, even though the music itself was not a beguine but a bolero. Beguine remained popular until the 1970s and was progressively supplanted by another fusion
143
of musical styles also born in the French Caribbean: zouk. Marie-Annick Gournet See also: Dance; Guadeloupe; Martinique; Porter, Cole. References Berrian, Brenda. Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Song, Music, and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Rosemain, Jacqueline. La Musique dans la société antillaise (1635–1902). Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988.
BEINEIX, JEAN-JACQUES (1946–) A prominent French filmmaker, most often associated with the new cinéma du look generation (alongside Léos Carax and Luc Besson), Beineix was born in Paris in 1946 and started his career as an assistant to mainstream directors, such as Claude Zidi, René Clément, and Claude Berri. He first acquired an international reputation following the controversial release of Diva (1980). Severely criticized in France for its aesthetic emphasis on image at the expense of content, Diva was successfully distributed in the United States and went on to gain belated recognition at home, with massive box-office sales and the attribution of four Césars in 1982. Having decried the perceived superficiality of Beineix’s approach in relation to the realist narrative tradition, the French press gradually started to identify his distinctive visual style with the postmodern offensive of a new school of cinema, informed both by the Hollywood film industry and the nouvelle vague/New Wave. An adaptation of a crime series by Delacorta, Diva reaffirmed the New Wave cinéastes’ admiration for American thrillers
144
BENEZET, ANTHONY
and the iconoclastic use of established genres as a springboard for the auteur’s personal experimentation. Beineix’s use of filters and saturated colors (which anticipated Besson’s Le Grand Bleu/The Big Blue, 1988) and his refined treatment of sound and mise-en-scène at the expense of narrative became a trademark of the cinéma du look. In alternating between the story of a young postman’s pirate recording of an opera singer and the police investigation of a vice ring that centers on a prostitute’s taped confession, Diva foregrounded the postmodern blend of high-brow and popular cultural references. Beineix’s caricature of the villains and the recurrent use of highly stylized derelict or fashionable interiors prompted comparisons with comic strips and advertising. In turn, Beineix’s spell in advertising in the mid-1980s provoked debates concerning the visual aesthetics of the cinéma du look. In 1982, commercial failure and critical rejection at Cannes marked Beineix’s transition from independent filmmaking to big-budget production with La Lune dans le caniveauThe Moon in the Gutter, an adaptation of David Goodis’s American thriller. However, Beineix’s third adaptation of a thriller, 37°2' le Matin (Betty Blue, 1986), based on a novel by Philippe Djian, became an instant public and critical success, consecrating the young charismatic couple of Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hughes Anglade in a sensual and picaresque voyage of self-discovery reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou. The reflexive mood of Beineix’s road movie starring Yves Montand, IP5 (1992), which came after the largely ignored release of his lyrical exploration of the circus in Roselyne and the Lions (1988), made little impact and re-
mained defined by the lead actor’s tragic death at the end of the shooting. A series of excellent documentaries, The Children of Romania (1992), Otaku (1993), and the moving account of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s death in the television production, Locked in Syndrome (1997), passed almost unnoticed. More recently, Mortal Transfer (2001) and the TV documentary, Loft Paradoxe (2002), failed to persuade the critics and left the general audience divided over Beineix’s evolution, despite his successful running of an independent production company, Cargo Films. Ramona Fotiade See also: Besson, Luc; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Crime Fiction; Djian, Philippe; Godard, Jean-Luc; Montand, Yves. References Powrie, Phil. French Cinema in the 1980s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ———. Jean-Jacques Beineix. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2001.
BENEZET, ANTHONY (1713–1784) Educator and social reformer. A French Huguenot by birth, Benezet immigrated to Philadelphia as a young man. He is best known for his abolitionist writings and his commitment to providing educational opportunities for women, German and French immigrants, and African Americans. Benezet was born into an affluent mercantile family in Saint Quentin, Picardy. After his father’s estate was confiscated in 1715, the family moved to Rotterdam, then to London, and ultimately, in 1731, to Philadelphia. Anthony Benezet was nat-
BENOÎT, JEAN
uralized as a citizen of Pennsylvania in 1735 and married Quaker minister Joyce Marriott in 1736; neither of their children survived infancy. Benezet’s pedagogical career began with stints at the Germantown Academy (1739–1742) and the Philadelphia English School (1742–1754). As an educator, Benezet promoted gentle discipline, rigorous teacher training, and the extension of educational opportunities to youth of both genders and all races and ethnicities. In 1754, Benezet helped found a Quaker school for girls; in 1767, he founded a school for poor girls, where he taught until 1782. He befriended the Acadian refugees from Nova Scotia who arrived in Philadelphia from 1755 onward, raised funds for their maintenance and lodgings, and in 1762 sponsored some of the Acadian children’s application to attend school in Philadelphia. Benezet began teaching black children and adults in his home around 1750 and encouraged the Philadelphia Quaker Meeting to open the Africans’ School in 1770; he remained associated with the institution until his death. In 1778, Benezet published three textbooks that reflected his interest in broad elementary education. Meanwhile, Benezet became increasingly active in the movement to abolish slavery. In 1754, he helped persuade the Philadelphia Meeting to condemn slaveholding. In succeeding years, Benezet published a series of pamphlets in which he urged a transatlantic audience to rethink its assumption of African inferiority. A Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes (1762) and A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies (1766) were followed by Benezet’s most
145
important work, Some Historical Account of Guinea (1772). Benezet was the first abolitionist writer to make extensive use of slave traders’ records and journals to argue against the slave trade; his history had a profound impact on Thomas Clarkson and John Wesley in Britain and on JacquesPierre Brissot, Abbé Raynal, and the Marquis de Lafayette in France. Olaudah Equiano drew on Benezet’s research in his autobiography. Benezet was a founding member of the first antislavery society in North America in 1775 and worked for the passage of Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law in 1780. Benezet’s writings also left a mark on his native country, where they helped inspire the formation of the abolitionist organization Les Amis des noirs a few years after his death. Darcy R. Fryer See also: Acadia; Antislavery Movements; Huguenots; Lafayette, Marquis de; Nova Scotia; Raynal, Guillaume-ThomasFrançois; Slavery. References Brookes, George S. Friend Anthony Benezet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937. Jackson, Maurice. “The Social and Intellectual Origins of Anthony Benezet’s Antislavery Radicalism.” Pennsylvania History 66, supplement (1999): 86–112. Kashatus, William C. “A Reappraisal of Anthony Benezet’s Activities in Educational Reform, 1754–1784.” Quaker History 78, no. 1 (spring 1989): 24–36.
BENOÎT, JEAN (1922–) Québécois artist, performer, designer, and sculptor. Benoît joined the surrealist movement in 1959 and continues to produce surrealist art (despite the movement’s official end
146
BENOÎT, JEAN
in 1969) from Paris. He exhibited with the Paris surrealist group in 1959 and 1965, and his first solo exhibition was in the Galerie 1900–2000 in Paris in 1996. Prior to his arrival in Paris in 1948, Benoît studied under the artist Alfred Pellan (1906–1988) at the Ecole des BeauxArts in Montreal, and in 1948 he was a founding member of the avant-garde group, the Prisme d’yeux. That year he also married fellow student artist Mimi Parent (b. 1924) and together they left Montreal to continue their careers in Paris. Benoît’s work is greatly influenced by Oceanic art, anthropology, and the libertine writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), especially Sade’s notorious novel, 120 Days of Sodom. Benoît’s first major surrealist intervention in Paris in 1959, a performance entitled Exécution du Testament du Marquis de Sade, spoke to these influences. It launched both his membership in André Breton’s surrealist group as well as the international surrealist exhibition dedicated to Eros. For the performance in the apartment of surrealist poet Joyce Mansour on the night of December 2, 1959 (the 145th anniversary of Sade’s death), Benoît designed a fantastic costume, performed a striptease to the recorded sounds of city noise, and ended the event by branding his own chest with the name SADE. The purpose of his Testament was to protest, to declaim Sade’s right to an atheistic burial. For the 1965 L’Ecart absolu international surrealist exhibition at the Galerie de l’Oeil in Paris, he continued his theater of effect with an eponymous performance and lavish costume dedicated to the renowned nineteenth-century necrophiliac Sergent Bertrand. His sculpture Le Bouledogue de
Maldoror, also shown in 1965, was a lifesized bulldog, made of a patchwork of leather gloves, with glass spikes down its spine and a mirror underneath its stocky legs to expose its angry phallus. In more recent years, Benoît has also produced luxuriously illustrated, handwritten love letters and “scrolls,” often decorated with phallic drawings, wine labels, and feathers. It is not surprising that the artist took pride of place in Annie Le Brun’s 1989 exhibition, Petits et grands théâtres du marquis de Sade. In the 1970s and 1980s he made a series of macabre sculptures (from 30 to 80 centimeters in height), usually in leather, of decayed skulls, ghoulish creatures, and erotically intertwined couples (Adam and Eve, 1984). Other works include wooden walking sticks carved with creatures that evoke medieval decoration in their fantastic bestiality and engorged genitalia; luxury, carved leather cases for rare book editions (André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Champs magnétiques, 1972–1973); and jewelry that seems to pay homage to Sadean heroines, including a choker made of leather with a fang-toothed, red-eyed bat as the centerpiece (1992). In his art, Benoît fuses performance, art, and craft, continuing the surrealists’ engagement with design and fashion and exploiting the pornographic imagination. Alyce Mahon See also: Breton, André; Montreal; Painting; Parent, Mimi; Pornography; Sculpture; Soupault, Philippe; Surrealism. References Le Brun, Annie. Jean Benoît. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Galerie 1900–2000, 1996. Petits et grands théâtres du marquis de Sade. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Paris Art Center, 1989.
BERNANOS, GEORGES
BERNABÉ, JEAN (1942–) One of the most recognized linguists of the Caribbean and a fervent defender of the Creole language. Born in 1942 in Lorrain, Martinique, Bernabé is mostly known for his work promoting the recognition of the Creole spoken in the Lesser Antilles. His belief is that Creole, as a language, will be put at risk if it becomes less and less used for speech and writing. Therefore in March 1975, he set up the Groupe d’etude et de recherche en espace créolophone et francophone (GEREC-F), whose primary aim is to promote research into and activities supporting the development of the Creole language and the study of Caribbean civilization. The GEREC-F is now a well-established and respected organization with a membership drawn from scholars all over the world. It has lobbied for the creation of the “CAPES Créole” (the equivalent of a bachelor of education degree in Creole language and civilization), which was offered as a postgrad teaching diploma for the first time in 2002. GEREC-F has a range of publications, some of which are produced bimonthly, including Espace créole, which publishes a range of theoretical articles; Mofwaz, which features articles presenting a pedagogical approach to the linguistic situation in the French-speaking Caribbean islands; Textes, Etudes et Documents, which focuses on literary discourses and the diglossic situation in the Caribbean; and Guide Capes, which presents a series of texts that can be used to study for the “CAPES Créole.” These publications have been published mostly by Ibis Rouge, one of the few successful Caribbean-based publishing companies. Bernabé is also known as an advocate of the créolité movement because of
147
his contribution to Eloge de la créolité, coauthored with Raphaël Confiant (another active member of the GEREC-F) and Patrick Chamoiseau. Bernabé’s doctoral thesis, entitled Fondal-Natal: Grammaire basilectale approchée des créoles guadeloupéens et martiniquais/Fondal-Natal: A close basilectal grammar of Creole in Guadeloupe and Martinique and published in 1983 by L’Harmattan, the year of the viva (voce examination) for his doctorate, is the first work in a long list of publications on Creole vocabulary and grammar. Bernabé has been working at the Schoelcher University campus in Martinique since 1973, fulfilling various key administrative and pedagogical roles, including that of deputy vice chancellor in charge of research and international cooperation. He is currently professor of Creole regional culture and language and coordinator of the research group GEREC-F. Marie-Annick Gournet See also: Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël; Créolité; Language; Martinique. References Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Raphaël Confiant. Lettres créoles. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Gallagher, Mary. “Whence and Whither the French Caribbean ‘Créolité’ Movement?” ASCALF Bulletin 9 (1994): 3–18.
BERNANOS, GEORGES (1888–1948) One of France’s greatest Catholic novelists, and a cultural critic of enormous talent, Bernanos was also a determined antiAmerican, part of a broad group of 1930s intellectuals who blamed American “modernity” for the collapse of civilization. Bernanos’s disdain for the United States
148
BERNANOS, GEORGES
followed him throughout his many political transformations—moving easily across the spectrum from left to right. However, unlike most of the Catholic intelligentsia, Bernanos stood firmly against Nazism and for Free France. During his wartime exile in Brazil, he broadcast (via the BBC) scathing attacks on Vichy and penned patriotic defenses of French Jewry. Yet only a few years earlier, he had supported Francisco Franco and had written one of the most poisonous books of the interwar period, La Grande Peur des bien-pensants (1931), a truly bizarre tribute to his “genius mentor” Edouard Drumont, France’s most accomplished anti-Semite. Bernanos’s overall legacy remains controversial and complicated. Georges Bernanos’s encounters with the New World were all (save his Brazilian exile) theoretical. He never visited the United States, yet that country informed much of his life’s work. He was born in Paris in 1888 into a reactionary Catholic family—his father read La Libre Parole to the family at breakfast—and matured into a promising Action Française (AF) militant, trusted with running one of their newspapers shortly after World War I. Literary fame and a very public break with AF came after the publication of his novel Sous le soleil de Satan (Under Satan’s Sun, 1926) and later his enormously successful Journal d’un curé de campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest, 1936). These books were deeply religious meditations, attacking both the secular world and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. They gave few signs of Bernanos’s political obsessions. Those interests came to light in La Grande Peur des bien-pensants, in which he celebrated Drumont as a “magical” figure and adopted the terms of Drumont’s antiAmericanism. Bernanos spoke contemptu-
ously of the United States as the place of Jewish triumph. Although this book suggested the beginning of a career as a professional antiSemite, Georges Bernanos had nothing further to say on the subject. Something fundamental changed after he visited Spain in 1936. The book he wrote on his return, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938), was a thorough rejection of rightwing Catholic politics. Outraged by what he had seen passing for “Christian civilization” in Franco’s Spain, Bernanos never again supported any political movement, and when World War II broke out, Bernanos threw himself into the cause of resistance. His anti-Americanism, however, became more and more explicit. Even during World War II, in his “Lettre aux Roosevelt,” a chapter in Lettre aux Anglais (1942)—ostensibly a plea for American assistance—he thoroughly condemned American values. Bernanos devoted his short postwar career (he died in 1948) to an active campaign against America and Americanism. One of his last books, La France contre les robots (1947), went so far as to adopt the “Americans are Nazis” formula that was widespread among the cold war far left. Although sometimes consistent with the extremes of left and right, Bernanos’s politics, therefore, ultimately defy classification. Seth Armus See also: Anti-Americanism; Brazil; Catholic Church; World War I; World War II. References Griffiths, Richard. The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914. New York: Ungar, 1965. Speaight, Robert. Georges Bernanos: A Study of the Man and the Writer. New York: Liveright, 1974.
BESSON, LUC
BESSON, LUC (1959–) French film director, born in Paris in 1959. Much of Besson’s early life was spent traveling the globe with his scuba-divinginstructor parents. At the age of seventeen an injury left Besson unable to dive, and he returned to Paris and embarked upon a filmmaking career. However, as later films, notably Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue, 1988) and Atlantis (1991), reveal, his early passion for the sea was to have a profound impact upon his cinematic work. Besson served his apprenticeship working in advertising and music videos and as an assistant director. At the age of twentythree he shot his first full-length feature, Le Dernier Combat/The Last Battle (1983), a violent but witty reworking of the science fiction genre. The critical success of this film meant that Gaumont, the distribution and production company, made available a large budget and two leading French stars (Isabelle Adjani and Christophe Lambert) for his next feature, Subway (1985). Unlike Le Dernier Combat, this film was disliked by the vast majority of French critics but was a huge popular success. Indeed, it set the pattern for the reception of Besson’s work from that point on. Besson’s work has typically been described in terms of the so-called cinéma du look, a style of filmmaking that emerged in France in the 1980s and was exemplified by the films of directors such as Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix, and Léos Carax. Although clear distinctions can be made between the films of these directors, what they do share is an emphasis on visual style, an exploration of the alienation of youthful protagonists, and references to other cultural forms, notably advertising, music videos, and American genre cinema. The critical response to these concerns was
149
to condemn the films as “superficial,” “populist,” and, from time to time, “too American.” This hostility, of course, speaks volumes about French constructions of cultural agendas and “national” cinemas. Besson’s response revealed his own contempt for the critical establishment. Both Le Grand Bleu and Nikita (1990) continued his exploration of the themes and stylistic traits that had distinguished his earlier work, albeit via very different genres and narratives. Le Grand Bleu opened the Cannes film festival in 1988 and was panned by hostile critics. Nevertheless, it became a huge audience hit and remains one of the most popular French films of the last fifty years. Nikita also proved a critical failure but a popular success and received the questionable accolade of a Hollywood remake, The Assassin (a.k.a. Point of No Return), directed by John Badham in 1993, as well as a spin-off syndicated TV series made in Canada, La Femme Nikita (1997–2001). This transatlantic connection is indeed central to Besson’s career and filmography. His sixth and seventh features, Léon (1994) and Le Cinquième Elément (The Fifth Element, 1997), were entirely French productions, yet distribution rights were sold to American companies, and both were shot in English, featured British and American actors, and were set in a version of New York. Both films became major international successes. Although Besson’s most recent film as a director, Jeanne d’Arc (1999), suggests a new interest in specifically French historical concerns, its visual and narrative style continues the reworking of Hollywood cinematic techniques that identified his earlier films. Moreover, his work as a scriptwriter and/or producer, notably
150
BIANCIOTTI, HECTOR
on popular hits such as Taxi (Gérard Pirès, 1998), Taxi 2 (Gérard Krawczyk, 2000), and Yamakasi: Le Samouraï des temps modernes (Ariel Zeitoun, 2001), reveals a continuing attempt to rejuvenate popular French cinema through a refusal to abide by the constraints of traditionally “French” cinema and an exploitation of the tropes of both French and American popular culture. Lucy Mazdon See also: Beineix, Jean-Jacques; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Joan of Arc; Lambert, Christophe; Remakes. Reference Hayward, Susan. Luc Besson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
BIANCIOTTI, HECTOR (1930–) Writer, born in 1930 near the Argentinean city of Córdoba. Hector Bianciotti is the son of Italian immigrants from the Piedmont region who settled in the Pampas. As a child, he was forced to learn Spanish, since his parents, eager for their children to be as integrated as possible, forbade them from using Italian. He started his education at the religious (Salesian order) Villa del Rosario and at the age of twelve entered the seminary, where he took an interest in literature and music. Realizing at eighteen that the priesthood was not his vocation, he eventually moved to Buenos Aires, where he encountered the fear evoked by the regime of Juan Perón. At this point, helped by a friend who was also a police informer, he left Argentina for Europe and arrived in Rome, where he lived in poverty. He spent four years in Spain and then settled in France in 1961. Bianciotti found work as a reader for the Gallimard publishing house and, in
1969, started to publish articles in La Quinzaine littéraire. These French-language articles led him to a post at the Nouvel Observateur as a journalist writing on literature. During this period, he wrote four novels in Spanish, which were then translated into French: Les Desertos dorados (Les Déserts dorés/The Golden Deserts, 1967), Detrás del rostro que nos mira (Celle qui voyage la nuit/She Who Travels at Night, 1969), Ritual (Ce Moment qui s’achève/This Moment That Ends, 1972), and La Busca del jardín (Le Traité des saisons/A Treatise on Seasons, 1977). Bianciotti’s 1982 collection of short stories, El Amor no es amado (L’Amour n’est pas aimé/Love Is Not Loved), includes a tale originally written in French. It was in 1985, after his naturalization as a French citizen in 1981, that he abandoned Spanish and adopted the French language, publishing the prize-winning novel, Sans la miséricorde du Christ/Without Christ’s Mercy. In 1989, he left Gallimard and joined the publishers Grasset as a reader. He then became a literary critic for Le Monde des livres. Bianciotti reflected on his youth in Argentina in his novel Ce que la nuit raconte au jour/What Night Tells the Day (1992). Other notable works include Le Pas si lent de l’amour/Love’s Slow Step (1995), Comme la trace de l’oiseau dans l’air/Like a Bird’s Trace in the Air (1999), and Une Passion en toutes lettres/A Great Passion (2001). Bianciotti, an admirer of the work of Paul Valéry, was elected to the Académie Française in 1996. His literary works excel in their description of their heroes’ crises of conscience, offering subtle and detailed psychological analysis. He often takes his own life as the inspiration for his stories, as, for instance, in Ce que la nuit raconte, in which he describes the simple life of his parents, his fascination with an old aunt,
BIENVILLE, JEAN-BAPTISTE LE MOYNE, SIEUR
DE
151
and his adolescent first loves, without forgetting his love of music that became a passion. His writing is reminiscent of that of Marcel Proust and other writers he admires, such as Paul Claudel or Marcel Jouhandeau. Jérôme Ceccon See also: Argentina. References Gasquet, Axel. “Hector Bianciotti.” L’Intelligentsia du bout du monde: les écrivains argentins à Paris. Paris: Editions Kimé, “Détours littéraires,” 2002. Weiss, Jason. The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. New York: Routledge, 2003.
BIENVILLE, JEAN-BAPTISTE LE MOYNE, SIEUR DE (1680–1767) A vital participant in the colonization of French Louisiana at the end of the seventeenth and during the first half of the eighteenth century. Born in Montreal in 1680, Bienville was one of fourteen children. He joined the French navy as a young boy and was severely wounded aboard the Pélican off the coast of New England. His brother Pierre, sieur d’Iberville, then took him to France, where d’Iberville received orders to command an exploration and establishment of a colony in America. Bienville, who was younger by nineteen years, accompanied his brother to the New World. Before d’Iberville returned to France in May 1699, he appointed Bienville king’s lieutenant, making him second in command to their brother François Marie, sieur de Sauvolle, who was in charge of the new colony. In September 1701, d’Iberville instructed Bienville to move supplies and
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne Bienville. (Library of Congress)
men from Fort Maurepas to Massacre Island, now known as Dauphin Island, in Mobile Bay. He traveled up the Mobile River approximately 38 miles, making notes and sketches. Upon seeing Bienville’s notes, d’Iberville commanded him to establish a fort there, named Fort Louis de la Louisiane. The fort’s construction was completed in March 1702. At twenty-two years old, Bienville became governor of the new colony. The new fort faced many challenges, including diminishing food and supplies and a movement against Bienville led by the commissaire of the colony and its vicargeneral. Jean-Baptiste Martin Dartaguiette arrived in 1708 to investigate and report on the accusations of fraud and incompetence against Bienville and his family. His report was inconclusive, and Bienville and the commissaire both remained in power, with
152
BIGELOW, JOHN
Dartaguiette as mediator. Extensive flooding and decomposing of Fort Louis’s buildings forced Bienville to relocate the fort’s settlement downriver in 1711, where Mobile is located today. In September 1712, Antoine Crozat leased the colony from a financially struggling France and appointed Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac as governor, demoting Bienville to lieutenant governor. Crozat returned the colony to France in 1717, and John Law then leased it. Bienville received the Cross of Saint Louis from L’Epinay, the new governor, who left the position the next year in the face of insubordination by Bienville’s followers. In 1718, Bienville was once again named governor and established the city of New Orleans, which became the headquarters of the colony in 1720 upon Law’s dismissal by France. Bienville himself was removed from office in 1724 due to accusations of illegal trade but in 1733 was returned to the governorship by France’s Minister of Marine Jérôme Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain. This was to be his last stint as governor. He led two major unsuccessful campaigns against the Chickasaw tribes because they were allied with both the British and the Natchez tribe, both of which harassed the new colony. These attempts to destroy them ended his political career in the Louisiana colony, and in 1743 he departed to live the rest of his life in France. He died in March 1767 and was buried in Montmartre with full military honors. Amber Wingfield See also: Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe; Crozat, Antoine; Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’; Louisiana; Mobile; New Orleans; Saint Louis. Reference Thomason, Michael, ed. Mobile: The New History of Alabama’s First City. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001.
BIGELOW, JOHN (1817–1911) American journalist, lawyer, statesman, and editor, John Bigelow contributed greatly to the preservation of the freedom and unity of the United States. A fervent defender of antislavery and free trade, he was very influential both in American public opinion and abroad. His diplomatic efforts in France did much to prevent the French from siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Bigelow was born in Malden, New York, on November 25, 1817. He graduated from Union College in 1835 and practiced law in New York for several years after passing the bar exam in 1838. From 1848 to 1861 he shared with William Cullen Bryant the ownership and editorship of the New York Evening Post. His antislavery and free trade editorials were especially vigorous. Abraham Lincoln appointed him consul at Paris in 1861, after which Bigelow progressed to chargé d’affaires, envoy extraordinary, and minister plenipotentiary to the court of Napoléon III in 1864. While consul, Bigelow wrote Les Etats-Unis d’Amérique (The United States of America) in 1863 to counteract the apparent desire of the French people for dissolution of the American Union, by showing them the relative importance of the commerce of the Northern and Southern states. This work was much credited with preventing French recognition of the Confederacy. During that same year Bigelow discovered that a French shipbuilder, with the connivance of Napoléon III, was constructing two formidable ironclads and two corvettes for the use of the Confederacy; Bigelow devoted his energies to thwarting this scheme and succeeded in preventing
BINOCHE, JULIETTE
John Bigelow's diplomatic efforts in France did much to prevent the French from siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War. (Library of Congress)
the delivery of all but one of these vessels to the Confederate agents. His book France and the Confederate Navy (1888) gives an account of this episode. In 1865–1866, it devolved upon Bigelow, as minister to France, to represent his government in its delicate negotiations concerning the French occupation of Mexico, and he discharged this difficult task with credit. From 1875 to 1877, he served as secretary of state of New York, where he was instrumental in the development of the New York Public Library and was a staunch proponent of the development of the Panama Canal. Bigelow was a prolific writer, and his many works included books of travel, pop-
153
ular biography, and historical or political discussion. However, his main literary achievements were the editions, between 1868 and 1888, of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and autobiographical writings, which Bigelow annotated heavily, and of the complete works of Franklin, in ten octavo volumes (1887–1889). These editions were based in part upon the editor’s personal investigations of manuscript sources found in France and elsewhere and supplanted the well-known, long serviceable, but less accurate edition of Jared Sparks (1836–1840). Bigelow was a close friend of Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York State and the Democratic candidate who ran against Rutherford B. Hayes for the U.S. presidential election of 1876. Bigelow became his literary executor, editing his speeches and other political writings, publishing a biography in 1895, and editing a two-volume collection of Tilden’s letters and literary memorials (1908). Claudia Wolosin See also: American Civil War; Antislavery Movements; Franklin, Benjamin; Mexico; Panama Canal; Slavery. References Bigelow, John. Retrospections of an Active Life. New York: Baker and Taylor, 1909–1913. Clapp, Margaret Antoinette. Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow. Boston: Little, Brown, 1947.
BINOCHE, JULIETTE (1964–) French actress, born in Paris in 1964, who began her career in theater and television in France. Binoche’s early cinematic work includes auteur films such as Jean-Luc
154
BINOCHE, JULIETTE
Godard’s Je vous salue Marie! (Hail Mary, 1984) and André Téchiné’s Rendez-vous (1985). She came to prominence in France with her roles in Léos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood, 1986) and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Lovers on the Bridge, 1991) and went on to become one of the most prominent actors of her generation. Her leading role in Le Hussard sur le toit (The Horseman on the Roof, Rappeneau, 1995), a key French “heritage” film of the 1990s and France’s most expensive film to date, bears witness to her important status in the national cinematic culture and her burgeoning international appeal. Roles in later costume dramas, Diane Kurys’s Les Enfants du siècle (The Children of the Century, 1999) and Patrice Leconte’s La Veuve de Saint-Pierre (The Widow of Saint-Pierre, 2000), suggest Binoche continues to be a star capable of carrying big-budget movies mobilized to boost both domestic boxoffice revenues and the prestige of French cinema overseas. Binoche began to develop a European career from the late 1980s, notably in Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Louis Malle’s Damage (1992), and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue, 1993). Her physical appearance has always been central to her star persona. Her rather delicate, gamine beauty is reminiscent of actresses of the French New Wave, but in these European or international coproductions it became something non-French but always fragile and “other.” This is particularly striking in Damage, where Binoche’s appearance forms a marked contrast to Miranda Richardson’s much more strained physical features. Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, has described
Binoche as “almost ethereal in her beauty and innocence,” and it is arguably this perception of her appearance and performance style that has tended to inform many of her film roles. Binoche’s major break in Hollywood came with Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient in 1996. She played Hana, the Canadian nurse who tends to Ralph Fienne’s Count Almasy and whose own memories act as a counterpoint to his own tragic recollections. To the great surprise of much of the media, Binoche won an Oscar for best supporting actress for the role. Perhaps due to Binoche’s relative obscurity in the United States at that point, it had been widely accepted that Lauren Bacall would win the award for her role in The Mirror Has Two Faces (Streisand, 1996). Binoche went on to further international success in Lasse Hallström’s Anglo-American coproduction Chocolat (2000), based on the best-selling novel by Joanne Harris. By 2002 Binoche had become the highest-paid actress in France, and although she has turned down a number of parts in Hollywood in favor of French or European films, her international presence has been confirmed by the work described and indeed by her role as the “face” of the Lancôme perfume “Poème” from 1995 to 2000. Lucy Mazdon See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Cosmetics; Godard, Jean-Luc; Malle, Louis. References Austin, Guy. Stars in Modern French Film. London/New York: Arnold, 2003. Vincendeau, Ginette. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Continuum, 2000.
BLAIS, MARIE-CLAIRE
BLAIS, MARIE-CLAIRE (1939–) Marie-Claire Blais is one of a small number of Québécois authors to have a significant international readership, due partly to the fact that she has spent extended periods in France and the United States. Born in Quebec City to a working-class family, Blais did not complete her convent school education because she needed to earn money, but subsequently attended night classes at Laval University. She began writing at an early age and completed her first novel when she was seventeen. La Belle Bête (Mad Shadows, 1959) was well received by critics, as were Tête blanche (1960), and Le Jour est noir (The Day Is Dark, 1961). In 1961, Blais received a Canada Council Grant, which enabled her to undertake a year’s study in Paris. Here, at the encouragement of the U.S. critic Edmund Wilson, she applied for a bursary from the Guggenheim Foundation and, in 1963, left Quebec again for Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1964 until 1969, she lived in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, with her lover, the artist Mary Meigs, and Meigs’s long-term partner, the political activist Barbara Deming. During this time, Blais wrote her most famous work, the darkly humorous Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, 1965). The novel, which charts a period in the life of a family in 1940s rural Quebec, made the writer an international star but was the object of a backlash two years later, when certain critics erroneously interpreted it as a realist and therefore unflattering portrayal of francophone Quebec society. Since living with Meigs in Brittany in the early 1970s, Blais has divided her time between Key West in Florida, Montreal,
155
and Quebec’s eastern townships. A prolific and highly successful author, she has written novels, short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, and an autobiographical travelogue on her experiences in the United States, Parcours d’un écrivain: Notes américaines (American Notebooks: A Writer’s Journey, 1993). The carnivalesque Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel is a playful yet satirical reworking of the novel of the land, a mainstay of Québécois literature from the middle of the nineteenth century until the emergence of social realism in the 1940s that celebrated the French-Canadian nationalist tenets of agriculturalism, Catholicism, and the revenge of the cradles—a high birth rate. Like Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska (1970), the novel constitutes part of Quebec’s feminine nationalist canon, since it carries out a subversion of the values rejected during the Quiet Revolution by those who embraced a modern vision of a secular, independent Quebec. From the mid-1960s onward, Blais’s work has increasingly engaged with the theme of homosexuality—both female and male—as in Le Loup (The Wolf, 1972), Les Nuits de l’Underground (Nights in the Underground: An Exploration of Love, 1978), and the quasi-autobiographical trilogy, Les Manuscrits de Pauline Archange (The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange, 1968–1970). Blais’s current trilogy, which includes Soifs (These Festive Nights, 1995) and Dans la foudre et la lumière (Thunder and Light, 2001), continues an experimentation with language that is typical of the writer. Ceri Morgan See also: Brittany; Gay Movement; Hébert, Anne; Quebec; Quiet Revolution.
156
BLUM-BYRNES AGREEMENT References Green, Mary Jean. Marie-Claire Blais. New York: Twayne, 1995. Oore, Irène, and Oriel C. L. MaLennan, eds. Marie-Claire Blais: An Annotated Bibliography. Oakville, ON: ECW, 1998.
BLUM-BYRNES AGREEMENT The Blum-Byrnes Agreement was first initiated to allow a complete penetration of U.S. imports (including films) into the postwar French market. However, it had a counterproductive effect, paradoxically contributing to the creation of a protectionist and defensive system of film production. During World War II, French screens were almost uniquely dedicated to French film productions. Other national cinemas were very rarely shown: the only feature films available for release were pre-1940 foreign films as well as more recent American ones that had been imported and distributed in France with no release authorization. By the end of the war, French film professionals feared an invasion of foreign films that would directly threaten the industry and asked for the establishment of quotas. Film producers proposed the following regulation: of thirteen films on general release, eight had to be French. Instead, the Blum-Byrnes Agreement (named for the signatories: Léon Blum, one of France’s leading veteran statesmen, and U.S. secretary of state James Francis Byrnes) came into force on May 28, 1946: the treaty proposed canceling a $2 billion debt against a $500 million loan and a complete opening of the French market to U.S. exports. As far as cinema was concerned, this meant guaranteed complete access for American films to French
screens. Under this treaty, the French film industry was also offered a four-year protection plan in order to regain the strength that it had lost during the war and the occupation. However, only four weeks out of every four months were exclusively dedicated to French feature films. Filmmakers, together with producers and many famous actors of the time, publicly and vehemently protested against the agreement, denouncing unfair and uncontrollable American domination. They set up the Comité de défense du cinéma français (Committee for the Defense of French Film) in December 1947, which proposed the idea that, as an art, cinema could not be bound by the laws of the market and mere commercial considerations but needed strict state regulation (an intense and still very pertinent debate now best known as the exception culturelle). The committee contributed to the creation of a temporary special fund on September 23, 1948, that imposed a new tax on entries. This fund became the main financing body of French cinema five years later, and since 1959 it has been the backbone of French film production. Florian Grandena See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; World War II. References Crisp, Colin. The Classic French Cinema: 1930–1960. London: Indiana University Press, 1993. Regourd, Serge. L’Exception culturelle. Paris: PUF, 2002.
BLUTEAU, LOTHAIRE (1957–) Born in Montreal on April 14, 1957, actor Lothaire Bluteau is widely known in Quebec because of his leading role in Denys
BOILEAU-NARCEJAC
Arcand’s celebrated film Jésus de Montréal (Jesus of Montreal, 1989), and he became known outside Canada for his participation in Black Robe (1991). Much like JeanPierre Léaud, another introspective actor, Bluteau’s acting style is usually characterized by minimalism. Bluteau began his acting career in Montreal with small parts in Brigitte Sauriol’s films (Bleu Brume/Blue Mist in 1982; Rien qu’un jeu/Just a Game in the following year) and onstage with the help of Paul Buissonneau at his Théâtre de Quat’Sous in Montreal. After many minor roles onscreen, Lothaire Bluteau was first recognized by critics for the part of an insane but gentle young man in Yves Simoneau’s Les Fous de Bassan (In the Shadow of the Wind, 1987), based on a novel by Anne Hébert. Director Denys Arcand often said he already had Bluteau in mind as he began writing the script for his film Jésus de Montréal, and he admitted that the project could not have materialized without the actor. Bluteau personifies with great intensity a rebellious young actor in search of truth, who plays the role of Jesus in an annual passion play in Montreal and progressively identifies with him. For many, Bluteau gained worldwide celebrity with another spiritual role when he played Father Laforgue in Black Robe (1991), an international coproduction directed by the Australian Bruce Beresford. Here, he is a “Black Robe,” the Algonquin Indians’ nickname for one of the French Jesuit missionaries who went to New France. The script of Black Robe was written by novelist Brian Moore, who in fact based it on the seventeenth-century chronicle The Jesuit Relations. Back in Quebec, Bluteau played the leading role in Robert Lepage’s first feature
157
film, Le Confessionnal (The Confessional, 1995). (Bluteau and Lepage had both acted in Jésus de Montréal.) Here, Bluteau plays a young man from Quebec City, Pierre Lamontagne, who is seeking to discover his roots and his true identity. Since then, Bluteau has acted more outside Quebec, establishing a successful international career, mainly in the United States and Britain. He appeared in I Shot Andy Warhol (Harron, 1996), Bent (Mathias, 1997), Other Voices, Other Rooms (Rocksavage, 1995), Senso unico (Bhattacharya, 1999), Solitude (Schlaht, 2001), Dead Heat (produced in Germany, Malone, 2002), and Disappearances (Craven, 2004), and he played a villain in the third season of 24 (2004), starring his fellow Canadian Kiefer Sutherland. Yves Laberge See also: Arcand, Denys; Catholic Church; Jesuits; Lepage, Robert; Montreal; New France; Quebec. References Coulombe, Michel. Denys Arcand: La vraie nature du cinéaste. Entretiens. Montreal: Boréal, 1993. Coulombe, Michel, and Marcel Jean, eds. Dictionnaire du cinéma québécois. 3rd ed. Montreal: Boréal, 1999.
BOILEAU-NARCEJAC Boileau-Narcejac were two writers who constituted one author. This tandem created an original current in French crime fiction: they were much translated, and many of their novels were filmed, most noteworthy among them D’Entre les morts (The Living and the Dead, 1954; retitled Sueurs froides), which became Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Pierre Louis Boileau (1906–1989) began writing crime fiction in the 1930s
158
BOLÍVAR, SIMÓN
and published his first full-length crime novel, La Pierre qui tremble (The Trembling Stone), in 1934. Pierre Robert Ayraud (1908–1998) embarked on a career as a high school teacher of literature and philosophy; he began to experiment with the detective genre as a school exercise, went on to compose pastiches of famous authors, and published his first crime novel, L’Assassin de minuit (The Midnight Assassin), in 1946, using the pen name “Thomas Narcejac” to keep his two activities separate. He also cowrote with another author under the pseudonym John Silver Lee, and he published an essay “Esthétique du roman policier” (Aesthetics of the Detective Novel) in 1947. Boileau and Narcejac read each other’s work and corresponded before they met in 1948. Their first joint work, L’Ombre et la proie (The Shadow of the Prey), was serialized in 1951, and they continued writing crime novels, stories, and films, as well as plays for radio and television, until 1989. Theorists and pasticheurs of crime fiction, their joint aim as authors was to create a distinctive French approach that fell between the translations of detective puzzles typical of the old established Le Masque collection and the hard-boiled American novels that were beginning to appear in the Série noire. In their work, “Whodunit?” is less important than what in fact was (or is being, or will be) done. Their novels are built of layers of intrigue, psychological tension, and implacable situations in which victims, often would-be assassins, figure more than detectives, and the awaited crime comes from an unexpected angle. In Maléfices (Evil Spells, 1961), the narrator believes his mistress is attempting
to kill his wife, but in fact the attempts on her life are stage-managed by the wife herself to persuade her husband back to her. When the mistress dies in an accident, the narrator believes himself responsible. The final scene shows the wife happy to have her husband back just as he is going to give himself up to the police. Carte Vermeil (1979) is set in an old folks’ home on the Riviera. The narrator, Michel Herboise, falls in love with Lucile, a new inmate. Thinking her to be responsible for the deaths of her former husband, her present husband, and another resident who had surprised her embracing Herboise, he believes himself an accessory to the murders. However, it turns out that the husband’s death was an accident and the other two were killed by one of the nurses on behalf of relatives impatient to inherit. The last chapter reveals that Herboise is her next victim. Stephen F. Noreiko See also: Crime Fiction; Film Noir. References Boileau-Narcejac. Tandem ou 35 ans de suspense. Paris: Denoël, 1986. ———. Le Roman policier. Paris: PUF, 1988. Colin, Jean-Paul. Boileau-Narcejac: Le Parcours d’une oeuvre. Paris: Encrage, 1999.
BOLÍVAR, SIMÓN (1783–1830) The Libertador (Liberator), one of the most important figures of the Latin American independentist movements, born in Caracas in present-day Venezuela. He drew his inspiration, as did many others at the time, from French republican ideals.
BOLÍVAR, SIMÓN
Bolívar lived in Europe for only a few years, from 1799 to 1807, mainly in Bilbao, Madrid, Paris, and Rome, but also in Bordeaux and Vienna. During this period he stayed in Paris on three occasions: for the first two months of 1802, from April 1804 to April 1805, and finally from April to November 1806. The first stay, although brief, left its mark on the young Bolívar. It was at the time of the Treaty of Amiens, which brought an end to a decade of war, and Paris was jubilant. Upon his return to Spain, he wrote to his friend Alexandre Dehollain: “Should I tell you what happened to me in Paris? It is certainly a place where one can amuse oneself endlessly without ever becoming bored. I did not know sadness during my stay in this delicious capital. . . . I can say that Spain seemed to me a country of savages, when I compared it to France; thus, you can be sure that, if I come to live in Europe, it will not be anywhere but Paris.” In 1802, Bolívar married a Spanish woman, Teresa del Toro, and left for Caracas, but his wife died a few months later, in January 1803. At the end of the year, the young widower returned to Europe. During his second stay in Paris, Bolívar met Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bompland, two scientists who had settled there after their voyages of exploration in the Americas, particularly to Venezuela. Bolívar lived in the rue Vivienne, near the Palais Royal, in the very heart of the capital, and he frequented the salons. He also witnessed Napoléon’s coronation, and although Bolívar had previously admired the clever strategist and consul of the republic, his enthronement was a disappointment. He even considered
159
Napoléon’s decision to take the crown as “despotic” or “tyrannical.” Later, he saw Napoléon again, in Milan, while accompanied by his mentor Simón Rodríguez. It was in Paris that Bolívar acquired his political education. He was an avid reader of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also of Montesquieu, René Descartes, Socrates, Niccolò Machiavelli, Miguel Cervantes, John Milton, Plutarch, and John Locke, all of whom he referred to in his correspondence. Evidence of his immersion in the political life of the period can be found in the fact that, like numerous famous Americans of the period, Bolívar became a Freemason. While in Paris in November 1805, he was awarded the grade of companion by the Saint Alexander lodge in Scotland. Upon his return to Venezuela in 1807 after a trip to the United States, Bolívar began his struggle for the independence of the Spanish colonies of the Americas. His participation was first political in nature, but he very quickly excelled as a military leader. After a decade of war, Bolívar succeeded in liberating several Latin American countries from Spanish control. In 1819, he suggested the union of Venezuela, Nueva Granada (present-day Colombia), and Ecuador in a single nation: the Republic of Gran Colombia. The independence movement continued southward until 1824, with the liberation of Peru and the creation of Bolivia. However, internal divisions finally brought the dreams of a Hispano-American union to an end. Bolívar died in Santa Marta, Colombia, on December 17, 1830. Pablo Aiquel See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Republicanism; Venezuela; Voltaire, François.
160
BOMBARDIER References Falcón, Briceño, et al. Bolívar en France. Caracas: Comité Ejecutivo des Bicentenario de Simón Bolívar, 1984. Frank, Waldo David. Birth of a World: Bolívar in Terms of His Peoples. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. Trend, J.B. Bolívar and the Independence of Spanish America. Bolivarian Society of Venezuela, 1951.
BOMBARDIER Montreal-based aerospace and rail equipment group and the world’s third-largest aircraft maker. Bombardier’s revenues for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2004, were $15.4 billion, and its shares are traded on the Toronto, Brussels, and Frankfurt stock exchanges. The company employs over 64,000 employees and operates on five continents, with a high concentration of activity in North America and Europe. More than 95 percent of its revenues are derived from markets outside Canada. The company’s origins were modest. It was founded as L’Auto-Neige Bombardier Limitée in 1942 in rural Quebec by J.Armand Bombardier, to manufacture tracked vehicles for transportation on snow-covered terrain. As a result, Bombardier is now commonly called the father of snowmobiling. In 1974 the company diversified into the transit equipment industry, with a contract to build rolling stock for the Montreal subway system. And in December 1986 its acquisition of Canadair, the leading Canadian aircraft manufacturer, took it into aerospace. Another notable move into this sector came in October 1989, when the company bought Short Brothers, the Northern Ireland manufacturer of civil and military aircraft that was founded in 1901
and is famous for receiving the first aircraft production contract in history from the Wright brothers in 1909. The 1990s saw expansion by multiple additional acquisitions in rail and aerospace, such as the assets and operations of Learjet Corporation, builder of the famous Learjet business aircraft. Diversification continued, too: in 1990 the subsidiary Bombardier Real Estate was created, with responsibility for the management of Bombardier’s real estate assets. Shorts Missile Systems was founded in 1993, a 50-50 joint venture company between Short Brothers and Thomson-CSF of France, to make very short-range surface-to-air defense systems. The start of the new millennium established Bombardier as the industry leader in all activities related to the production of rail vehicles, when it acquired DaimlerChrysler Rail Systems. However, the company’s fortunes began to turn down in 2003, signaled by the appointment as chief executive officer of Paul Tellier, who initiated a radical program of divestiture because of the downturn in the aircraft manufacturing industry. In 2004–2005, Bombardier was still under pressure, not just because it is responsible for the biggest-ever transportation supply contract, worth $7.9 billion for the London Underground, but as a result of widespread stress in the global aviation sector. At the start of 2004, the company also restructured its lagging rail division, Bombardier Transportation, as the last major piece in Tellier’s campaign to revive the company that had included management changes, paring down Bombardier Aerospace and Bombardier Capital, the financing arm, and selling its recreational products segment. Time will tell whether Tellier has done enough. Mark Vernon
BOMBARDIER, DENISE See also: Aviation; Montreal; Quebec. References Macdonald, Larry. The Bombardier Story: Planes, Trains, and Snowmobiles. London: John Wiley and Sons, 2003. Webb, M. Armand Bombardier, Inventor of the Snowmobile. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1991.
BOMBARDIER, DENISE (1941–) Denise Bombardier is a familiar figure on Canadian television and has been a recognizable voice on the airwaves of Radio Canada for four decades. A multitalented person, she has hosted countless programs on culture, public affairs, health, and politics and has interviewed hundreds of personalities on radio and television. From the 1960s onward, she traveled often to Paris, where she was foreign correspondent for Radio Canada. After gaining her masters in political science at the University of Montreal in 1971 (with Les “cent jours” du gouvernement Sauvé/The 100 Days of the Sauvé Government), Bombardier defended her Ph.D. in sociology at the Sorbonne in 1974. As a journalist, she is a polemicist who writes provocative essays on contemporary French civilization from a North American perspective. Her first book, on French public television, was titled La Voix de la France: Essai sur la France vue à travers sa télévision (The Voice of France: Essay on France Seen through Its Television, 1975). She also wrote a book on Quebec that was published in France just before the first sovereignty referendum: Dossier Québec (1980). In the 1980s, Bombardier began publishing novels with Les Editions du Seuil in France. They include an autobiographical
161
novel about her childhood and teenage years, Une Enfance à l’eau bénite (A Holy Water Childhood, 1985), which remains her most famous work, but also more or less autobiographical novels about a passionate female character, such as Tremblement de coeur (Heart Murmur, 1990), Nos Hommes (Our Men, 1995), Aimez-moi les uns les autres (Love Me Everyone, 1999), and Ouf! (2002). Bombardier’s novels greatly contributed to her fame outside Quebec. She was a guest on the very select French TV show Apostrophes during the 1980s and later on Bouillon de culture, both hosted by Bernard Pivot. Bombardier has also written a corrosive essay about the social representation of the “Other,” entitled Lettre ouverte aux Français qui se croient le nombril du monde (Open Letter to the French Who Think They Are the Center of the World, 2000). In addition to her extensive publications on French culture, she wrote a critical essay on human values in contemporary Quebec titled Propos d’une moraliste (A Moralist’s Remarks, 2003). During her career, Bombardier was occasionally a freelance journalist for various magazines such as L’Express, Le Point, Télérama, and Géo in France; in Quebec, she sometimes served as columnist for the newspaper Le Devoir and for the most popular magazines such as Châtelaine and L’Actualité. She also appeared on television in Switzerland on the Radio Suisse Romande, and she was a producer and host for a TV show titled A Boulets rouges, which aired on a cultural network, La Cinq, in France. Bombardier remains the model of a journalist who can succeed at many levels in more than one country. She even had a small part in Michel Brault’s film, Entre la mer et l’eau douce (Between Sweet and Salt
162
BONAPARTE, ELIZABETH PATTERSON
Water, 1967). She was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in France in 1993. Similarly, she became Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec in 2000. Yves Laberge See also: Brault, Michel; Quebec; Television. Reference Maisonneuve, Pierre. Denise Bombardier: Tête froide, coeur tendre. Ottawa: Novalis, 1998.
BONAPARTE, ELIZABETH PATTERSON (1785–1879) “The belle of Baltimore,” “Betsy” was born to William Patterson, a wealthy merchant, and Dorcus Spear Patterson in Baltimore and was educated at home and at a local French school. Considered one of the most beautiful women in the United States and known for her wit and willfulness, Betsy’s marriage secured her place in history. Napoléon’s youngest brother, Jérôme, landed in New York in 1802 and traveled to Baltimore, where he met Betsy. According to private letters, the attraction was immediate and mutual. Baltimore County issued the couple a marriage license on October 29, 1803. Hoping to forestall the marriage, the Patterson family sent Betsy to Virginia. She returned a few weeks later; newspapers published notice of the impending nuptials in November. At the request of the Pattersons, Alexander J. Dallas (later secretary of the U.S. treasury) drew up a marriage contract, and the wedding, officiated by John Carroll, the bishop of Baltimore, took place on December 24, 1803. The bride was eighteen and the groom twenty. Shortly before the nuptials, the French consul, Louis A. Pichon, wrote to William Patterson to inform him that although such a marriage was legal in the
United States, French marriage law required parental consent for those under the age of twenty-five. As the Bonapartes toured the East Coast (newspapers described Betsy’s revealing clothing and the couple’s habit of receiving visitors while in bed), Napoléon published notice that “Miss Patterson” was not welcome in France. The Patterson family dispatched Betsy’s brother Robert to meet with Napoléon. U.S. secretary of state James Madison and U.S. minister to France William Livingston explored diplomatic solutions. Jérôme and Betsy departed for France later that year, determined to win Napoléon’s approval. Once in Europe, the couple found all French ports closed to her. Jérôme proceeded to France and a pregnant Betsy to England. Napoléon would not yield. After Pope Pius VII refused to annul the marriage, the emperor used his legal and secular power to annul the union. Jérôme Napoléon Bonaparte was born in England on July 7, 1805. Betsy and her son returned to Baltimore in September 1805. At Napoléon’s behest, Jérôme married Princess Catherine of Württemberg in August 1807. In return for leaving Europe, Napoléon granted Betsy a 60,000-franc yearly allowance, which she received until his exile. Newspapers chronicled Betsy’s plight while she lived in Washington and Baltimore from 1805 to 1815. Unrest in France moved her to legally end her marriage; in 1813, the Maryland state legislature granted her petition for divorce. After Napoléon abdicated, Betsy returned to Europe, where she lived until her father’s death in 1834; she never remarried. Betsy died in a Baltimore boardinghouse on April 4, 1879.
BONAPARTE, JÉRÔME
The Patterson-Bonaparte romance captivated the imagination of the American republic. For contemporaries, this moral, cautionary tale was an omen for those with aristocratic ambitions. During the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, the story became fodder for romance novels. Cynthia D. Earman See also: Bonaparte, Jérôme; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Catholic Church. References Dider, Eugene L. The Life and Letters of Madame Bonaparte. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879. Langdon, Harper I. “The Career of a Baltimore Girl.” The Ladies’ Home Journal 12, no. 7 (June 1895): 11.
BONAPARTE, JÉRÔME (1784–1860) The youngest of eight surviving children was born to Maria Letizia (Ramolino) Buonaparte in Ajaccio, Corsica, a few weeks before the death of her husband Carlo Buonaparte. From 1794 to 1795, Jérôme lived in Marseilles, and in 1797 he enrolled in the College of Juilly. With the 1800 ascension of Napoléon to First Consul, Jérôme moved to the Tuileries Palace, where he enjoyed court life. Following a duel, Napoléon sent Jérôme to sea with the French navy. The youngest Bonaparte sailed first to Egypt and then to Santo Domingo, where he earned a promotion to ensign. For his second tour, the young officer sailed to the Antilles. Promoted to lieutenant, Jérôme took command of his first ship in 1802. In Saint Lucia, he contracted yellow fever and was ordered back to France. Trying to evade capture by the British, Jérôme landed in New York in 1802. He
163
was considered handsome, headstrong, and spoiled, and reports of his dalliances preceded him as he toured the East Coast. In Baltimore, Jérôme met and became enamored of Elizabeth “Betsy” Patterson. Over the objections of the French consul, the couple married. Outraged by his brother’s insolence at marrying without permission, Napoléon insisted that Jérôme return alone to France. Despite Napoléon’s public refusal to acknowledge the marriage, Jérôme and his pregnant wife left for France in 1805. Napoléon’s officers refused to allow Betsy to land, and as she retreated to England, Jérôme proceeded alone to meet with his brother. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte gave birth to a son, Jérôme Napoléon, on July 7, 1805. Napoléon refused to yield and had the Patterson-Bonaparte marriage dissolved; Jérôme returned to the navy, where he rose to the rank of capitaine de vaisseau after negotiating the release of 231 captives from the Barbary pirates. As commander of the Veteran, Jérôme’s next tour took him past the Cape of Good Hope and also to Martinique. Jérôme distinguished himself during this cruise by capturing eighty enemy ships and losing only five men, and he was promoted to rear admiral, named prince of the empire, and awarded the Légion d’honneur. Even though Jérôme’s naval service was over, his military career continued. Napoléon appointed Jérôme a brigadier general and placed him in command of the Army of the Allies. In August 1807 Jérôme married Princess Catherine of Württemberg (1783–1835) at Napoléon’s behest, and Napoléon appointed Jérôme king of Westphalia. Jérôme and Catherine had two children: Mathilde Bonaparte (1820– 1904) and Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte (1822–1891). Jérôme ruled
164
BONAPARTE, JOSEPHINE TASCHER
DE LA
Westphalia for six years. He returned to France in 1815 and commanded troops at Quatre-Bras and Waterloo, where Napoléon was finally defeated that same year. When the exile of the Bonapartes ended in 1847, Jérôme returned to France. As president of France, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte appointed Jérôme governor des Invalides in 1849. Jérôme Bonaparte died in 1860 in Paris and was interred at the Hôtel des Invalides. Cynthia D. Earman See also: Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Martinique; Piracy and Privateers; Saint Lucia; Santo Domingo. References Aronson, Theo. The Golden Bees: The Story of the Bonapartes. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1964. Lamar, Glenn J. “The Military and Political Career of Jerome Bonaparte, 1800–1815.” Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1994.
BONAPARTE, JOSEPHINE TASCHER DE LA PAGEIER DE BEAUHARNAIS (1763–1814) Marie-Joseph-Rose, “Empress Josephine,” “La Américaine,” was born to JosephGaspard and Rose-Claire (des Vergers de Sannois) Tascher de la Pageier in Martinique. Raised in genteel poverty, “Rose” (as she was known until her marriage to Napoléon) attended convent school on the island. In 1779, Rose and her father set off for France. Désirée Renaudin, Rose’s aunt, hoping to secure her own fortune, arranged a marriage between Rose and Alexandre de Beauharnais. This marriage of convenience begot two children: Eugène-Rose (1781– 1824) and Hortense Eugènie (1783–
PAGEIER
DE
BEAUHARNAIS
1837). The couple separated in 1785. During the Reign of Terror, both Rose and Beauharnais were imprisoned; Beauharnais was executed and Rose released. The newly widowed Rose survived on loans, credit, and the generosity of lovers, including Generals Lazare Hoche and Paul Barras. Napoléon Bonaparte first encountered Rose Beauharnais in the salons of Paris. The widow’s sweetness and charm captivated him. The young, rough Corsican did not at first impress her, but eventually his passion overrode her reservations, and when he proposed, Rose accepted. They married in a civil ceremony on March 9, 1796. Neither family approved of the marriage. Napoléon was dismayed to discover that his new wife brought more debts than funds to the union. Over the ensuing years, the couple became closer; Napoléon ascribed his military successes to Josephine and treated her children as his own. Tension arose when she failed to produce an heir, and rumors of affairs, encouraged by Napoléon’s brothers and sisters, surrounded her. Nevertheless, Napoléon and Josephine reaffirmed their marriage vows in a religious ceremony prior to their coronation as emperor and empress of France on December 2, 1804. Josephine took an active interest in gardens and flowers. In 1804 she appointed the artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté “Painter to Josephine, Empress of the French.” Redouté’s watercolors hung on the walls of Malmaison, Josephine’s house outside of Paris, and Redouté’s books, Jardin de Malmaison (Malmaison Garden), Les Liliacées, and Les Roses (Roses) immortalize the blossoms that Josephine cultivated. Napoléon’s siblings continued to press for a divorce. Following the conception of
BONAPARTE, NAPOLÉON
165
two sons, Léon Denuelle (1806–1881) and Alexandre-Florian, Comte Walewski (1810–1868) with two different mistresses, Napoléon followed through on his threat to divorce Josephine. In 1809, Napoléon’s civil and ecclesiastical courts dissolved the marriage, and Josephine retired to Malmaison. On May 27, 1814, Josephine died from complications of a cold. Cynthia D. Earman See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; French Revolution; Martinique. References Bruce, Evangeline. Napoléon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage. New York: Scribner, 1995. Erickson, Carolly. Josephine: A Life of the Empress. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Stuart, Andrea. The Rose of Martinique: A Life of Napoléon’s Josephine. London: Macmillan, 2003.
BONAPARTE, NAPOLÉON (1769–1821) Revolutionary First Consul and, from 1804 to 1815, first emperor of the French. Bonaparte possessed a variegated genius and had a phenomenal career as ruler, military leader, legal reformer, artistic director, and scientific patron of France. His military successes allowed him to impose the reforms of the French Revolution, to greater or lesser degree, on much of the rest of Europe, and military necessity forced other nations (notably Prussia and, briefly, the United States) to adopt military and other policies thought to be fit for the international environment he made. From his accession to the First Consulship in 1799 to his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, his foreign policy as leader of one of Eu-
As emperor after 1804, Napoléon initiated an embargo policy intended to strangle the British economy. The worst sufferer, however, was the United States. (Library of Congress)
rope’s—and thus the world’s—two greatest powers had a significant and lasting effect upon the United States. Prominent Americans such as Thomas Jefferson held out hope that Bonaparte, as First Consul, would adopt a pro-American foreign policy, which would have been especially welcome in the wake of the 1798–1800 undeclared quasi war between the United States and France. In this hope, francophiles were to be disappointed. Most prominent of those Napoleonic initiatives regarding the United States was his decision in 1803 to sell the Louisiana Territory to the fledgling North American nation. In response to a request for a far more circumscribed land sale, Bonaparte offered an area including much of today’s
166
BORDEAUX
western United States, plus part of what is now Canada, for $15 million. It was the greatest land sale in history, and it cemented Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party in the affections of Jefferson’s countrymen. Bonaparte had intended to reestablish France’s Caribbean empire after the loss of Haiti, but the evident impracticability of doing so led him to sell his mainland empire for what he could get rather than see Britain capture it by force. As emperor after 1804, Napoléon, still preoccupied by his life-and-death struggle with Great Britain and increasingly dominant on the continent of Europe, initiated an embargo policy intended to strangle the British economy. The worst sufferer, however, was the United States. In response to the British Orders in Council of 1806, France adopted the Berlin and Milan Decrees of 1806 and 1807, which banned British ships from continental ports and announced that any ship that submitted to British search or regulation would be seized by the French navy. In sum, American ships had been banned from all territory controlled by France and Britain. President Jefferson’s response was his feckless embargo, the most unpopular measure by far of his administration. Adopted by Congress in 1807 and strengthened thereafter, this policy said that the United States would trade with no foreign nation. It brought little positive response from the major powers, and difficulty in enforcing it led to severe sectional strains on the new U.S. Constitution. The British had no real alternative to draconian naval policy, and Napoléon’s contempt for the United States was such that he at one point referred to the American flag as “starspangled bunting.” In fact, however, the great preponderance of U.S. foreign trade
at the time was with Britain, so the embargo could be seen as practically aiding the French. In 1810, Nathaniel Macon’s Bill Number 2 became U.S. policy. Revoking the embargo, it pledged to reimpose it against one of the major powers as soon as the other lifted its anti-American policies. Napoléon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 and his armies’ defeat in Iberia freed British forces for operations in the New World during the War of 1812. For that reason alone, some Americans lamented at least the timing of his defeats. Kevin Gutzman See also: Foreign Policy, 1776–1945; French Revolution; Haiti; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana Purchase. References Perkins, Bradford. The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations. Vol. I: The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
BORDEAUX In the eighteenth century Bordeaux was France’s most prosperous Atlantic port. Though the city had a long history as the administrative and judicial capital of Guienne, home to a royal intendant and to a provincial parlement (parliament), its economy was increasingly dominated by trade, especially with the Caribbean. Contemporaries described the years before the French Revolution as a golden age, when ships lined the quays along the Garonne and merchants rivaled established legal families as the leaders of urban society. Huge prof-
BORDEAUX
its were made from the West Indies, from trade with Martinique, Guadeloupe, and especially Saint-Domingue, where Bordeaux men went as colonists and whence Bordeaux ships brought back rich cargoes of coffee, indigo, and rum. Colonial produce was reexported throughout continental Europe as Bordeaux became rich on an entrepôt trade that complemented the city’s other main staple, the sale of fine wines from its hinterland in the Médoc. In the course of the century the balance of this trade changed dramatically, and the city’s prosperity became dangerously dependent on the Antilles. Though wine exports tripled in value, their part in Bordeaux’s trade fell to under 30 percent, and the city’s links to its rural hinterland were weakened. And if Bordeaux never became as reliant on the slave trade as its great Atlantic rival, Nantes, slave ships made up an increasing percentage of the city’s commercial activity, with some of Bordeaux’s most prominent merchants pursuing the triangular trade with West Africa and the Caribbean or the American South. Black servants and freed slaves were a common sight around the port, adding to Bordeaux’s claims to be a cosmopolitan city, a melting pot of different cultures. Bordeaux’s commercial wealth was there for all to see. During the eighteenth century, trade grew at a rate of more than 4 percent annually, far outstripping the French economy as a whole. The tonnage of the ships sailing from the port more than doubled in the years between 1720 and 1789, and the value of their cargoes increased twentyfold. It was a period of high investment and conspicuous consumption, with rich négociants reinvesting the profits of trade in handsome suburbs and lavish town houses. Bordeaux took pride in its
167
status as a regional capital and, particularly while Tourny occupied the post of intendant from 1743 to 1758, was endowed with elegant boulevards and gracious public buildings. Its provincial academy, the musée where lawyers and merchants congregated, and its active cultural and theatrical life all helped turn it into one of the focal points of the French Enlightenment. Bordeaux was also a major draw for immigrants throughout the century, attracting the young and ambitious from across the Southwest; it was perceived as a place where fortunes were made, a city open to all men of talent, where foreigners settled freely and Protestants and Jews were integrated into the urban elite. For the rural poor, too, Bordeaux offered work and opportunity; they found jobs on merchant vessels, as porters or stevedores along the waterfront, or as laborers on the city’s many building sites. Many came from the immediate hinterland, from the Agenais and Périgord, but others were lured from further afield, with large numbers from the foothills of the Pyrenees and from the Limousin. The population rose from around 66,000 at the time of Tourny’s census in 1747 to over 100,000 by 1790. Bordeaux’s future, it seemed, was secure, thanks to the city’s privileged relations with the West Indies and especially with Saint-Domingue, which, on the eve of the French Revolution, accounted for three-quarters of the city’s colonial trade. The revolution spelled disaster for Bordeaux’s commercial prosperity, though this effect had less to do with its ideology than with the long years of war that it unleashed. The merchant community largely welcomed the revolution in 1789, which opposed privilege and opened careers to talent. The majority of the deputies
168
BORDEAUX
Bordeaux sent to the National Assembly were progressives who favored civil equality and the rights of man. Many went further, indeed, supporting the creation of the republic in 1792. Thereafter, however, things went badly wrong for the Bordelais. Their most prominent deputies distrusted the extreme radicalism of the Jacobins and the Paris sections. They provided many of the Girondin leaders like Marguerite-Elie Guadet and Pierre Vergniaud—the term Girondin was taken from the name of Bordeaux’s department, the Gironde—who would be overthrown in the violent Jacobin coup of June 1793 and then tried and executed. The city’s reputation was tarnished by the federalist revolt against the convention during the months that followed, which cast doubt on the loyalty of the merchant community. The Terror also hit the city’s merchants hard. More than 200 were arrested; many suffered heavy fines, and fifteen were among those guillotined on the Place de la République in the center of Bordeaux. More serious still for the Atlantic trade were the effects of the revolutionary wars, especially after hostilities began with Britain, the greatest naval power in Europe, in the spring of 1793. Bordeaux’s merchants and shipowners had been able to continue trading during the early years of the revolution, but now their very livelihood was at stake. For Britain, this was a war about wealth and colonies as much as about military power on the European continent, and the wealth of France’s West Indian islands evoked covetousness and envy. Bordeaux’s merchant community did not foresee the disaster that awaited them. They had, after all, survived a series of maritime conflicts during the eighteenth century and had evolved their own strategies
to counter the threat. But this war was different, lasting for twenty years and attacking basic commercial freedoms. The revolutionaries themselves imposed strict controls on the movement of shipping. Imported goods were requisitioned by the state and paid for in devalued paper currency. French vessels suffered attacks on the long and hazardous journey back from the Antilles; their cargoes were plundered and the ships seized. A naval blockade was imposed that prevented neutral shipping from trading in French ports and destroyed the entrepôt trade. Insurance rates spiraled, and shipowners were forced to take desperate risks, with the consequence that many respectable trading firms were forced out of business. For others, often younger men willing to arm their vessels and accept the risk of loss, the war provided the opportunity to make a quick fortune out of smuggling and privateering. But that could not compensate for the huge decline in legitimate trade. Ships and docks lay idle, unemployment rose, and Bordeaux’s population started to fall. There was a partial recovery after the fall of the radical Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre in 1794, but Bordeaux’s golden age was over. From 1795 some foreign, and especially U.S., ships returned to the Garonne with colonial imports, but the momentum experienced in the later eighteenth century was not recovered. The prosperity of the port was undermined by the abolition of the slave trade and even more by the loss of Saint-Domingue, which became an independent state, Haiti, in 1804. And though Napoléon tried to restore slavery, Atlantic trade enjoyed only a partial recovery. Bordeaux’s position, in particular, was fatally weakened. SaintDomingue, the key to its fortune, was lost
BORDUAS, PAUL-EMILE
forever; Britain had taken control of the trade in colonial produce with northern Europe; and Le Havre, closer to Paris and to the textile industry of Normandy, was better placed to exploit the new commercial opportunities in the United States. Nineteenth-century Bordeaux was condemned to long decades of commercial and demographic decline in a France whose economic epicenter had swung violently away from the Atlantic seaboard. Alan Forrest See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Coffee; French Revolution; Guadeloupe; Haiti; Le Havre; Martinique; Nantes; Piracy and Privateers; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Wine. References Butel, Paul. The Atlantic. Seas in History. London: Routledge, 1999. Forrest, Alan. The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–1799. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pariset, François-Georges, ed. Bordeaux au dixhuitième siècle. Bordeaux: Fédération historique du sud-ouest, 1968.
BORDUAS, PAUL-EMILE (1905–1960) Québécois painter and writer, born in Saint-Hilaire in 1905. Together with the painter Ozias Leduc, Borduas worked on numerous projects decorating churches throughout Quebec and later in France and the United States. In was on Leduc’s advice that Borduas enrolled at the Montreal Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1923. It was again on Leduc’s advice that he went to finish his training as a religious painter in Paris where, in 1928, he attended the Ateliers d’Art Sacré. When the economic crisis of the 1930s forced the Catholic Church to suspend its
169
restoration work, Borduas held a number of teaching posts in primary schools. The number of paintings he produced during this period was thus limited. It was his post at the School of Furniture in 1937 that gave his career a new lease on life. In 1939, he collaborated with John Lyman on the creation of the Contemporary Arts Society, whose aim was to encourage exhibitions of contemporary art. In the years that followed, Borduas played a role in many exhibitions, including his own first one-man show, Peintures surrealistes (Surrealist Paintings), in 1942. Borduas challenged the standardization and conformism that hindered his students’ personal and artistic development. He brought together a number of students for discussions of art and the future of society, and together they laid the foundations for the Quebec automatist movement. In 1945, they developed a plan for an exhibition to be held in a working-class area. Held in 1946, the exhibition brought together works by Borduas, Marcel Barbeau, Roger Fauteux, Pierre Gauvreau, Jean-Paul Mousseau, and Jean-Paul Riopelle. It was the first automatist exhibition and outraged bourgeois critics. In 1947, Borduas wrote a manifesto, Refus global (Global Refusal ), which shook Quebec conservatism in its period of “grande noirceur” (great darkness) and denounced the joint control, not to say censorship, exercised by the Union nationale and the clergy on the population of Quebec. This text, in demonstrating an audacity previously unseen, invited the collective to recognize that God does not exist and to embrace modernity. It constituted a plea for freedom of expression and creation, as well as for freedom of choice.
170
BORGES, JORGE LUIS
The publication of Refus global provoked a scandal, and Quebec would have to wait more than a decade for the profound change it called for to take place. In this way, Borduas turned out to have been a visionary, since he felt that he had been born too early, in a country that was too young. The importance of Refus global for the cultural evolution of Quebec, even in Borduas’s life, cannot be denied. Because the critics were particularly virulent toward him, he had to take on almost singlehandedly the burden of the manifesto, although it had been signed by fifteen other artists. He lost his post at the Ecole du meuble. Hurt, he wrote Projections délibérantes (Deliberating Projections), an autobiographical pamphlet in which he explains his actions and makes his own defense. However, the press at the time paid no attention to it, and Borduas lived through the darkest years of his life, as is reflected in his work. His departure for the United States in 1953 brought a certain depth to his painting. In 1955, he exiled himself in France, where he remained until his death in Paris in 1960. It was only posthumously that he gained recognition and that his status was confirmed by a number of exhibitions throughout the world. In 1977, the Quebec government created the Prix Paul-Emile Borduas, which is awarded for contributions to the field of the visual arts. Sonia Lebel See also: Catholic Church; Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet; Painting; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Surrealism. References Gagnon, François-Marc. Paul-Emile Borduas. Ottawa: Galerie nationale du Canada, 1976.
———. Paul-Emile Borduas (1905–1960): Biographie critique et analyse de l’æuvre. Montreal: Fides, 1978. Robert, Guy. Borduas. Montreal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1972.
BORGES, JORGE LUIS (1899–1986) Argentine essayist, storyteller, and poet with a profound influence on major twentieth-century writers and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Borges was born in Buenos Aires, where he experienced a sheltered childhood, developing at an early age interests in philosophy and literature. He spent part of his youth in Geneva during World War I, where he completed his schooling, and in Spain, where he started to write avantgarde poetry. When he returned from Europe, his writing sought to reflect the transformations of urban life in Buenos Aires, and he abandoned both Latin American regionalist writing and Spanish avant-garde ultraísmo (ultraism). From the 1930s onward Borges wrote short stories and essays whose blend of metaphysical, aesthetic, and mystical questions would give his work its particular flavor. His most memorable stories are published in works such as Ficciones (Fictions, 1944) and El Aleph (1949), although he continued to publish until the time of his death. He was completely blind for the last thirty years of his life. Against a background in which Latin American writing was still conceptualized in terms of its passive reflection or total rejection of European culture, Borges claimed for Latin Americans the task of appropriating European culture and refash-
BORGES, JORGE LUIS
ioning it “with irreverence.” It is in this encounter between different times, spaces, and cultures that Borges’s writing finds its true expression and where it germinated many contemporary ideas about culture, ideas about literary influence and authorship, originality, and textuality that have become central to French-identified cultural theories. Thus, in one story an imaginary French symbolist, Pierre Menard, becomes the “author” of Don Quixote, not by rewriting the great work but simply by reading it 300 years later. In another, the universe is represented as a library of infinite design, inhabited by librarians whose life is governed by an endless search for the “catalogue of catalogues.” Borges has been appropriated by many as a postmodern avant-la-lettre and has influenced numerous major French thinkers from Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes to Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. He also set trends for innumerable Latin American writers, replacing land with the labyrinth as the foundation for reflections on cultural identity. Borges did not think much of Paris and had a particular dislike for the modishness of French literary culture. Nevertheless, much of Borges’s popularity outside Latin America is due to the French, who were the first to translate and circulate his works. Furthermore, his thought itself is also strongly influenced by Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine, among others, influences that are felt in his preoccupation with dreams, mythology, and language. Yet, as the story about Pierre Menard demonstrates, the notion of influence is for Borges something of a misnomer. Even the copy becomes a singular event that cannot be reduced to original intentions and that
171
Jorge Luis Borges. 1962. Much of Borges's popularity outside Latin America is due to the French, who were the first to translate and circulate his works. (Library of Congress)
transcends literary-historical monumentalization. As for encyclopedias, along with mirrors and atlases, their foundations are as much rhetorical as factual. Rory O’Bryen See also: Argentina; Avant-Gardes; Barthes, Roland; Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre; Baudrillard, Jean; Derrida, Jacques; Foucault, Michel; Literary Relations; Theory; World War I. References Bloom, Harold, ed. Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Sarlo, Beatriz. Borges: A Writer on the Edge. London: Verso, 1993.
172
BOSSU, JEAN-BERNARD
BOSSU, JEAN-BERNARD (1720–1792) French sailor and explorer, born in a village southwest of Dijon in 1720. Bossu’s career as an officer in the French navy took him on three different occasions to the French colony of Louisiana. The account of his first two journeys (1751–1757 and 1757–1762), to the Mississippi valley and to what now is Alabama, was published in Paris in 1768 with the title Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes occidentales; Contenant une Rélation des differens Peuples qui habitent les environs du grand Fleuve Saint-Louis, appellé vulgairement le Mississipi; leur Religion; leur gouvernement; leurs mæurs, leurs guerres et leur commerce, and was translated into English in 1771. Bossu was a keen observer, and his description of eighteenth-century New Orleans is particularly acute. He speaks of the diverse population of the city, made up of Europeans, Indians, Africans, and half bloods of European and native descent. He describes the American-born offspring of French settlers as “brave, tall, well-built,” with a natural inclination toward the arts and sciences, adding that it was the usual practice to send the sons to France for further education. Bossu goes on to mention the increasing use of slave labor to clear the land in order to grow indigo, tobacco, rice, corn, and sugarcane and describes the life of the planter aristocracy as one affording the opportunity for hunting, fishing, and other pleasures of life. One of Bossu’s own hunting expeditions nearly ended tragically, when he was awakened one night by a 20-foot alligator that was attempting to drag away his sleeping bag, to which he had incautiously attached his catch of cat-
fish. He mentions that the Acolapissas and the Washas (Ouachitas) north of New Orleans wrestled alligators for sport and describes their technique of jamming a piece of hardwood or iron bar into the mouth of the alligator. A particularly interesting letter in Bossu’s collection is related to ways to conserve and prolong life in America. He mentions a dish consisting of “dried and smoked game, roasted or boiled with corn ground in a hardwood mortar,” called chili, which he describes as very tasty and healthful. Bossu goes on to advise a life of moderation, stating that “voluptuousness and intemperance in eating and drinking” have proved to be deadly to settlers (Bossu 1962). He suggests that settlers should allow themselves time to get accustomed to the climate, avoiding fruit and liquor until their bodies adjust. In addition, he advocates periodic bleeding to prevent apoplexy and the occasional use of “gentle laxatives.” Bossu comments on the excellent health of the natives of Louisiana and concludes that it is because of their work and exercise that they are not plagued with gout, kidney stones, and other ailments to which the European settlers in Louisiana were prone. Susan Castillo See also: Cuisine; Louisiana; Mississippi River; New Orleans; Slavery; Tobacco. References Bossu, Jean-Bernard. Travels in the Interior of North America, 1751–1762. Trans. and ed. S. Feiler. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. Sayre, Gordon M. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Texts. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1997.
BOUCHARD, LUCIEN
BOUCHARD, LUCIEN (1938–) Lawyer, diplomat, politician, and administrator, born in Saint-Coeur-de-Marie (LacSaint-Jean) on December 22, 1938. Lucien Bouchard is one of the few Canadian politicians to have had a double career, holding the highest positions at both the federal and provincial levels. He was also leader of the opposition of the Canadian parliament (1993–1996) and premier of Quebec from 1996 to 2001. Bouchard lived in Paris while he was Canada’s ambassador to France from July 1985 to March 1988. While in Paris, he represented Canada at the first Sommet de la francophonie (1986) and presided over the International Preparation Committee for the second francophone summit, which was to take place in Quebec City in September 1987. Bouchard truly believed in la francophonie and felt attached to France; he also called Switzerland “a magnificent country.” Just before ending his term as ambassador, Bouchard was made secretary of state for Canada by the prime minister, Brian Mulroney, on March 31, 1988; he was elected a member of the Canadian parliament for Lac-Saint-Jean on June 20, 1988, and later became minister of the environment in Ottawa. But Bouchard’s long career culminated when he founded a new political party, the Bloc Québécois, in July 1990. Only three years later, that young party became the official opposition on the federal scene in Ottawa, even though all its voters and deputies were exclusively from Quebec. Although he had tried to obtain a fair place for Quebec in the federal government during the 1980s, Bouchard’s move toward separatism was a reaction toward English Canada’s refusal to recognize Que-
173
bec as a distinct society within Canada after the constitutional crisis of 1990 (the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord). Bouchard often said that the time for discussion between federal and provincial deputies over the status of Quebec was over; it was time for a definitive separation. His book A Visage découvert (1992; translated as On the Record, 1994) gives the clearest account of the Quebec separatist movement. In 1995, Bouchard nearly led his supporters to victory in a Quebec referendum for independence that gave 49 percent to the “yes” campaign. As premier of Quebec following Jacques Parizeau’s resignation, he went back to France on a regular basis to meet French politicians and allies, such as President Jacques Chirac. At the 1997 Sommet de la francophonie in Hanoi (Vietnam), Bouchard caused a commotion when he asked all members of the Organisation internationale de la francophonie to respect human rights (he was singling out certain African countries). Chirac tried to limit these comments by saying that all African nations had to progress toward democracy at their own pace. Bouchard’s resignation as premier was partly provoked by hard-line nationalists in the Parti Québécois. He was succeeded by Bernard Landry. In 2002 the French government made Bouchard a Commandeur de l’Ordre de la Légion d’honneur. Yves Laberge See also: Chirac, Jacques; Francophonie, La; Ottawa; Quebec; Quebec City. References Maillard, Rémi, ed. Lucien Bouchard mot à mot. Montreal: Stanké, 1996. Vastel, Michel. Lucien Bouchard: En attendant la suite. Outremont: Lanctôt, 1996.
174
BOUCHARD, MICHEL MARC
BOUCHARD, MICHEL MARC (1958–) Québécois playwright, born in 1958 in Lac Saint-Jean, a region that would later feature prominently in his writing. Michel Marc Bouchard wrote and mounted his first play at only fourteen years of age. Later, while studying tourism at CEGEP (between high school and university in the Quebec system), he authored and produced two more plays, an experience that eventually led him to enroll in theater at the University of Ottawa. Subsequently, Bouchard became very involved as an actor, author, and producer with several Ottawa theater companies. From 1988 to 1990 he was artistic director of the Théâtre du Trillium, also in Ottawa, and from 1994 to 1995 he held the position of writer in residence at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal. Bouchard’s intimate knowledge of stagecraft complemented a fast-growing body of original writing. His first published work, La Contre-nature de Chrysippe Tanguay, écologiste (Chrysippe Tanguay, the Unnatural Ecologist, 1984), relates the story of a gay couple, Louis and Jean, who wish to adopt a child. Louis is an actor playing the role of Chrysippe, and this play within a play is used to expose the profound psychological struggles he faces in terms of gender and sexuality. This play forms part of the Tanguay series, in which the author uses mythology to explore the affective dimensions of human relationships. Beginning with Dans les bras de Morphée Tanguay (In the Arms of Morphée Tanguay, unpublished), this cycle also includes La Poupée de Pélopia (Pelopia’s Doll, 1985), a play about a woman who confronts her father with his crime of incest, and Les Muses orphelines (The Orphan
Muses, 1989), which tells the story of three siblings abandoned as children by their mother, who come together to rectify the “truth” about their past. The theme of the adult revisiting a painful childhood occurs repeatedly in Bouchard’s work, as witnessed by L’Histoire de l’oie (Teeka’s Tale, 1991), an internationally acclaimed children’s play denouncing physical abuse, and Le Chemin des Passesdangereuses (Down Dangerous Passes Road, 1998), an eerie story of fate about three brothers reunited for a wedding who find themselves, after a deadly car accident, at the very place their father “accidentally” met his death. Bouchard’s most famous play remains Les Feluettes (Lilies, 1987). Set in a prison in 1952, the play relates the story of Simon, an inmate wrongly imprisoned for the murder of Vallier who sequesters Bilodeau, now a bishop, and forces him to witness events from their youth as played out by other prisoners. The inmate actors take us back to 1912, revealing the love between Simon and Vallier, expressed through the roles they play in the parish priest’s production of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Les Feluettes experiments with layers of theater and language to express identity, fidelity, and courage. A screen version, produced by Toronto filmmaker John Greyson, has also met with critical success and opened the door to a larger audience, both in English Canada and in the United States. Bouchard’s audience extends to Europe as well, where the French adaptation of Les Muses orphelines (1994) showed the international appeal of “local” theater. His other published plays include Rock pour un faux bourdon (Rock for a Faux Bourdon, 1987), Les Grandes Chaleurs (Heatwave,
BOUGAINVILLE, LOUIS ANTOINE
DE
175
1993), Le Voyage du couronnement (The Coronation Journey, 1995), Les Papillons de nuit (The Night Butterflies, 1999), Sous le regard des mouches (Under the Gaze of Flies, 2000), and Les Manuscrits du déluge (Written on Water, 2003), as well as a number of one-act plays, including Du haut de ses vingt ans (Looking Down from Twenty, 1987) and Le Jade et l’ébène (Jade and Ebony, 1997). Shawn Huffman See also: Gay Movement; Theater. Reference Godin, Jean Cléo, and Dominique Lafon. Dramaturgies québécoises des années quatrevingt: Michel Marc Bouchard, Normand Chaurette, René-Daniel Dubois, Marie Laberge. Montreal: Leméac, 1999.
BOUGAINVILLE, LOUIS ANTOINE DE (1729–1811) French travel writer. Although Louis Antoine de Bougainville is known primarily for his scientific expedition to the South Pacific, from which he brought back the flower (bougainvillea) that bears his name, his American journals offer fascinating insights into the politics and military policies of New France in the eighteenth century. Bougainville’s early education was in law, but later he went on to become a distinguished mathematician (with two books on integral calculus) and soldier. During the French and Indian War (1754–1763), he went to Canada as an aide to General Louis Joseph de Montcalm, commanding troops at the siege of Quebec in 1759. Bougainville’s American journals offer intriguing insights into the reactions of a French philosopher confronted by Menominee captives, whom he describes as “man
French travel writer Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Bougainville’s American journals offer fascinating insights into the politics and military policies of New France in the eighteenth century. (Library of Congress)
in conditions closest to nature” and depicts as physically robust and eloquent of speech. He is particularly impressed by the natives’ facility in finding and following tracks in the forest. He attributes it to their capacity to read the inclination of the sun, the inclination of trees and leaves, and what he regards as a “perfection of the instinct,” adding that the natives are capable of determining “the number that have passed, whether they are Indians or Europeans, if the tracks are fresh or old, if they are healthy or sick people” (Castillo and Schweitzer, p. 455). Bougainville was disillusioned by profligacy and lack of discipline among French soldiers, which he viewed as the consequence of excessively high salaries; he expresses the fear that the climate of insubordination and indolence existing among the troops in New France may spread
176
BOUKMAN, DANIEL
across the Atlantic to the mother country. He describes the prevalence of money changing at ruinous rates in Quebec (comparing it to the extortionate practices of the moneylenders on the rue Quimcampoix in Paris) along with widespread hunger caused by disastrous wheat harvests. Bougainville’s American journals are often elegiac in tone, contrasting the simpler life of the colony’s earlier years with the climate of greed, avarice, and economic speculation existing in 1758. He died in 1811. Susan Castillo See also: French and Indian War; Montcalm, Louis Joseph de; New France. References de Bougainville, Louis Antoine. Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760. Ed. and trans. E. P. Hamilton. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. Castillo, Susan, and Ivy Schweitzer. The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Okon, Luzian. “Nature” and “Civilisation” dans le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville de Denis Diderot. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1980. Pagden, Anthony. “The Savage Critic: Some European Images of the Primitive.” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 32–45.
BOUKMAN, DANIEL (DANIEL BLÉRALD) (1936–) Prominent Martinican playwright who, following in the footsteps of Frantz Fanon, abandoned the Caribbean to settle in Algeria, taking up antiracist and political liberation issues across the Atlantic and as far away as Palestine. His best-known play, Les Négriers (The Slave Ships, 1971), likened the contemporary exilic relocation of black West Indians to France to the slave trade. Other plays
have taken up the themes of racism, money, and power, such as Ventres pleins, ventres creux (Full Bellies, Empty Bellies, 1971) and Orphée nègre (Negro Orpheus), a dramatic poem, which was not only a Marxist critique of négritude parodying Sartre’s 1947 essay “Orphée noir,” but was also, according to Bridget Jones, a “savage and explicit” attack on Aimé Césaire. This connection is significant because Boukman was clearly influenced by Césaire’s turn toward drama in the late 1960s. Boukman was no stranger to polemic in these plays or in his life. He had refused to fight for France in Algeria in 1961, deserting and changing his name to Boukman in respect of the heroic historical figure who died fighting to liberate Haiti from slavery in 1791. Thus, Boukman established his Atlantic credentials: a Caribbean with an antislavery hero’s name writing theater to denounce racism and exploitation on both sides of the Atlantic, in France and in the Caribbean. Indeed, Les Négriers was first performed in Paris, and the Mauritanian avant-garde filmmaker, Med Hondo, made the screen version, West Indies (1979). Boukman’s main aim was to denounce the “genocide by substitution” taking place in the French Caribbean, whereby blacks are shipped to work in low-paid jobs in France and replaced by white French settlers and administrative workers from France. He takes no prisoners in his satirical broadsides against Charles de Gaulle, Léopold Senghor (then president of Senegal), Gaston Monnerville, and even Edouard Glissant. Inspired by the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation, Boukman wrote a homage and critique of the situation in 1976, Et jusqu’à la dernière pulsation de nos veines . . . (And Until the Last Throbbing
BOULLE, PIERRE
of Our Veins . . .), attacking the Jordanian army for the 1970 massacre as much as praising Jews fighting on the side of Palestinians. More recently, he has shifted his focus back to considering the role of the Creole langauge in the Caribbean. Andy Stafford See also: Antislavery Movements; Césaire, Aimé; Fanon, Frantz; Gaulle, General Charles de; Glissant, Edouard; Language; Martinique; Slavery. References Boukman, Daniel. Les Négriers. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1978 [1971]. Jones, Bridget. “Theater and Resistance?” An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique. Ed. Sam Haigh. Oxford: Berg, 1999.
BOULLE, PIERRE (1912–1994) A contemporary mainstream author, Pierre Boulle’s best-remembered works are without a doubt Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes, both of which were made into full-length feature films. Boulle blended his personal experiences into fictitious worlds where the human condition was often depicted in a way that was both pessimistic and absurd. Boulle was born in Avignon and studied electrical engineering at the Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité in Paris. After working in France as an engineer, he moved to Malaysia in 1938 and worked as an overseer in a rubber plantation near Kuala Lumpur. At the outbreak of World War II, Boulle joined the army in Indochina. When German troops occupied France, he joined the Free French Mission in Singapore. During that time he served as a secret agent under the name Peter John Rule and
177
helped the resistance movement in China, Burma, and Indochina. In 1943, Boulle was captured by the Vichy French loyalists on the Mekong River and sentenced to a life of hard labor. He escaped in 1944 from imprisonment in Saigon and served until the end of the war in British Special Forces. Before returning to France and becoming a writer, Boulle continued his work at the plantation in Malaysia; he also spent some time in Cameroon. He had started to keep a diary in prison, and in 1950 Boulle published his first novel, William Conrad. A very mainstream writer, Boulle turned his six years in Southeast Asia in World War II into a major work, The Bridge over the River Kwai. The novel was awarded the Prix Sainte-Beuve in France in 1952 and was made into a full-length motion picture in 1957. It won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Boulle combined in his works a captivating story with a pessimistic view of human endeavors and absurdities. Another of his novels, Planet of the Apes (1963), which was made into a film in 1968 and has since inspired several film adaptations, is an ironic tale about the relationship between men and animals. It transferred the basic relationship between the Japanese soldiers and Allied prisoners—the repression of a weaker group by a stronger and its moral effect on both sides—into the distant future. Boulle depicted a world where humankind had lost its position as the dominant species and apes ruled over human savages. Other books by Boulle include Face of a Hero (1953), The Executioner (1954), Not the Glory (1955), The Test (1955), and A Noble Profession (1960). Among Boulle’s later works are The Photographer (1967), in which an Algerian war veteran sees an
178
BOURASSA, ROBERT
opportunity to take the ultimate photograph when he discovers that his friend wants to murder the president; The Whale of the Victoria Cross (1983), a story of naval warfare and marine mammals; and Because It Is Absurd (on Earth as in Heaven), a collection of short stories. L’Ilon (1990) was a story about his childhood. The last book he wrote was entitled A Nous Deux, Satan! (1992). Boulle was made an officier de la Légion d’honneur and a recipient of the Croix de guerre and the Medal of the Resistance. He died in Paris on January 30, 1994. Claudia Wolosin See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Rubber; World War II. References Culture SF. “Pierre Boulle.” http://www.culture-sf.com/biblios/ boulle.php (cited February 20, 2004). Frackman Becker, Lucille. Pierre Boulle. New York: Twayne, 1996.
BOURASSA, ROBERT (1933–1996) Premier of Quebec from 1970 to 1976 (two terms) and again from 1985 until 1994 (two terms). A strong believer in federalism, Bourassa was the youngest politician to occupy the position of premier when he became head of the Quebec government in March 1970. After his reelection in October 1973, Bourassa passed the much contested Bill 22 in July 1974, a law that made bilingualism official in a province where bilingualism was already the key problem and the cause of social conflicts between the dominant anglophone minor-
ity and the francophone majority. At the end of its second term, his Liberal Party was accused of corruption and was beaten by René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois by a large majority. After his defeat in November 1976, Bourassa temporarily retired from politics and went to Europe for a year, where he became a visiting scholar at the Institut des affaires européennes in Brussels and at the Institut européen d’administration des affaires in Fontainebleau, France. Between 1978 and 1982, he was also visiting professor in international relations for many universities in the United States (the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, Yale University, the University of Southern California at Los Angeles) and Quebec (Université Laval, Université du Québec à Montréal). Although Pierre Trudeau openly disdained Robert Bourassa, the latter helped Trudeau in the “no” campaign for the 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Presented as a resourceful, renewed man, Bourassa was reelected again for two terms as premier of Quebec, from 1985 to 1994. During that period, when asked about the possibility of giving French citizenship automatically to all Québécois, Bourassa simply answered that France could take the first step of not asking for visas for tourists from Canada. It was the time when France temporarily required non–European Union visitors to obtain visas because of problems related to immigration and terrorism. Robert Bourassa shared with President François Mitterrand a vision of Quebec as a part of Canada. As premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa made relatively few official trips to France, in 1974, 1989, and 1991. President Mitterrand came twice to Quebec in 1987, and
BOURDIEU, PIERRE
Prime Minister Jacques Chirac came the same year to sign a fiscal agreement. Bourassa is also remembered as the premier who was prepared to accept Canadian federalism at any cost, even during the Meech Lake negotiations about the place of Quebec in the Canadian federation, as shown in Jacques Godbout’s documentary, Le Mouton noir (1992). A best-selling book in two volumes about Bourassa’s attitudes was released in Quebec in 1994 by journalist Jean-François Lisée. Bourassa had to fight cancer and left politics in 1994. Among many distinctions, Bourassa received an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University and the Légion d’honneur from France (posthumously, in 1997). Yves Laberge See also: Chirac, Jacques; Godbout, Jacques; Language; Lévesque, René; Mitterrand, François; Quebec; Quebec City. References Comeau, Paul-André. “Son exil bruxellois: Les répercussions sur ses hypothèses constitutionnelles.” Robert Bourassa: Un bâtisseur tranquille. Ed. Guy Lachapelle, Valéry Colas, and Robert Comeau. SainteFoy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003. Lisée, Jean-François. Robert Bourassa et les Québécois. Montreal: Boréal, 1994. Poirier, Georges. “Robert Bourassa en France.” France-Québec 72 (March–April 1989): 13.
BOURDIEU, PIERRE (1930–2002) French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is probably the best known among foreign contemporary social scientists in U.S. universities. In 1982, Bourdieu was elected as professor at the prestigious Collège de France, where Emile Durkheim was chair of sociology almost a century before. Bourdieu wrote about a wide variety of sociological topics and especially on social
179
theory, the sociology of culture, and fine arts; he created sociological concepts such as “symbolic capital,” “doxa,” “field,” and “habitus.” Bourdieu’s numerous works have influenced scholars not only in the social sciences but also in literary theory and cultural studies. Along with Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, Bourdieu was recognized as a leading intellectual in France, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, and became famous in Anglo-Saxon countries by the 1980s as his books began to be translated into English. Academics in cultural studies recognized in Bourdieu’s thoughts a theoretical framework that could be used to understand power, class, and processes of domination. The relationship among class, culture, and taste in individuals is best exemplified in one of Bourdieu’s most respected books, Distinction (1979, published in English in 1990). Oddly, as Bourdieu’s reputation declined in France in the mid-1990s, U.S. scholars began adopting his early theoretical frameworks during the same period, even though Bourdieu was always opposed to the U.S. sociological tradition and often rejected ethnomethodology. Selections from Bourdieu’s writings are often included in anthologies and readers on cultural studies published by U.S. scholars. But a skeptical Bourdieu found too much theoretical discussion and not enough data analysis in cultural studies. Bourdieu’s works have also been used in Canadian universities (mostly in Quebec) and in Latin American countries such as Brazil. A sometimes controversial and often provocative figure, Bourdieu was much criticized in France by the mid-1990s because of his attacks on French journalists, whom he considered as “reproducing the
180
BOURGEOIS, LOUISE
dominant system and its ideology” without being fully aware of the process in which they participated (quoted in a documentary by Pierre Carles, La Sociologie est un sport de combat/Sociology Is a Combat Sport, 2001). Bourdieu was also opposed to the neoliberalist globalization trend and even sent a video message of support to protestors during demonstrations against the World Summit held in Quebec City on April 4, 2001. Yves Laberge See also: Baudrillard, Jean; Foucault, Michel; Theory. References Lane, Jeremy F. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Swartz, David. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
BOURGEOIS, LOUISE (1911–) Louise Bourgeois is considered a leader in twentieth-century sculpture. Her works have been greatly influenced by the surrealists, and her dominant themes include her childhood, her relationship with her parents, sexuality, betrayal, guilt, and power. Bourgeois was born on December 25, 1911, in Paris, the second daughter of Joséphine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. She first experienced the artistic world while helping her parents restore tapestries in their studio. Bourgeois drew designs for the damaged areas of the tapestries, while her mother toned down the more elaborate designs for the conservative American art collectors who purchased them. These early experiences introduced Bourgeois to cutting, sewing, and, most important, creating.
After high school, Bourgeois enrolled in the Sorbonne to study geometry but soon decided to dedicate herself to art. She attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for a short period of time and also studied at the Ecole du Louvre, the Académie Julian, and the Atelier Fernand Léger. Bourgeois considered Léger to be her best teacher; it was Léger who suggested that she devote herself to sculpture. In 1938, Bourgeois married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and emigrated to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1951. Bourgeois and Goldwater had three sons: Michel, JeanLouis, and Alain. Upon her arrival in New York, Bourgeois enrolled in the Art Student League, studied painting in Vaclav Vytlacil’s studio for two years, and also began to produce engravings. Her first participation in a group show took place at the Brooklyn Museum. In June 1945, Bourgeois had her first solo show, “Paintings by Louise,” at the Bertha Shaefer Gallery, which included her paintings Natural History, Mr. Follett, and Connecticutiana. Two years later, she had her second solo show at the Norlyst Gallery, where she exhibited Conversation Piece, Jeffersonian Court House, and Roof Song, among others. In 1949, Bourgeois debuted her sculptures at a show held by the Peridot Gallery. Among the works included in this first show were Portrait of C. Y., Woman in the Shape of a Shuttle, and The Blind Leading the Blind. She held two other shows at the Peridot Gallery in the 1950s, which included the pieces Sleeping Figure, Spring, and Forêt/Garden at Night. Although she is a highly prolific artist, Louise Bourgeois did not receive full international recognition until 1978, when she
BOURGET, PAUL
created her first public commission, Facets to the Sun, for the Norris Cotton Federal Building in Manchester, New Hampshire. Also in 1978, Bourgeois showed her Confrontation piece, which was combined with the performance piece A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts. This performance piece parodied fashion shows by showing latex dresses covered in breasts. The main symbolism in Bourgeois’s work originates in her childhood and her sexuality’s role in her early family life as the means through which she could understand and re-create that history. Her work also depends on public interaction, despite its highly personal nature. For example, in Maman 1999, three 30-foot-high towers provide meeting areas, while a 35-foothigh spider, representing her mother’s role as protector, looks on. Stephanie Longo See also: Painting; Sculpture. References Bernadac, Marie-Laure. Louise Bourgeois. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. Wye, Deborah, and Carol Smith. The Prints of Louise Bourgeois. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994.
BOURGET, PAUL (1852–1935) Conservative novelist, essayist, and poet, whose 1895 Outre-mer (Notes sur l’Amérique) praised the dynamism and the religious and ethnic eclecticism of the United States. Born in Amiens (Somme) on September 2, 1852, Bourget began his literary career writing for the magazines La Revue des Deux Mondes, La Nouvelle Revue, and L’Illustration and for various newspapers. When he turned to novels, his studies of
181
medicine as well as the humanities led him to reject the prevailing scientific determinism that characterized naturalist writers like Emile Zola and critics like Ernest Renan. In Le Disciple (1889), Bourget manifested this assertion of free will and his conservative attitudes through a plot in which moral values overcome deterministic materialism. Acclaimed as the defender of traditional virtues, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1894. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1901 and thereafter produced a series of novels depicting the corrupting influence of modern life, most notably in L’Etape (1902), about social mobility, Un Divorce (1904), about marriage, and L’Emigré (1907), about the decline of the aristocracy. Conservative but never reactionary, he is best described as bien pensant, “right thinking,” like the bourgeois, moralistic politics of his friend Raymond Poincaré. When Bourget died in Paris on December 25, 1935, his writings filled ninety volumes. Bourget published Outre-mer after an eight-month (August 1893–March 1894) trip to the United States, during which he traveled as far north as Boston, as far west as Chicago, and as far south as Florida. He claimed his intention was to discover the “American soul” and his method to observe behavior. He was especially interested in how the forces of democracy, science, and race were shaping the United States. Inevitably, he became a cataloger of superficial particulars, but from them he deduced certain generalizations. He recognized that although Americans were sometimes philistine and unsophisticated, there was enormous creative energy beneath the rude exterior. He praised public schools and universities and especially coeducation but criticized the tendency to make learning
182
BOYER, CHARLES
overly utilitarian. He declared the United States vigorous while describing France as increasingly decadent. Two years later, the famously francophobe Mark Twain wrote a witty, tendentious reply, “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us,” published in his How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897), unfairly accusing Bourget of having been overly critical and questioning the capacity of anyone from France to judge Americans. In fact, few French visitors have ever written more positively about the United States. Benjamin F. Martin See also: Twain, Mark; Zola, Emile. References Bowman, Edgar M. The Early Novels of Paul Bourget. New York: Carranza and Company, 1925. Feuillerat, Albert. Paul Bourget. Paris: Plon, 1937. Singer, Armand E. Paul Bourget. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
BOYER, CHARLES (1897–1978) French screen actor, born in Figeac in the Lot département (equivalent of county), whose international career spanned five decades. Despite his French origins, Charles Boyer was a Hollywood star of the classic era. He studied drama at the Conservatoire in Paris, making his stage and screen debut in 1920 in the silent era of film. Having worked on multilanguage versions of films in France and Germany, Boyer was soon invited by MGM to join the small community of French filmmakers reunited in Hollywood to make French-language versions of American films. This early stage in Boyer’s career (1929–1939) was character-
ized by constant transatlantic travel between the United States and Europe. Despite marrying British actress Pat Patterson in 1934 and settling in Hollywood, Boyer initially struggled to find interesting work in the United States, while France offered him leading roles and originals (Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Epervier (The Hawk); La Bataille (The Battle), both 1933; Fritz Lang’s Liliom or L’Herbier’s Le Bonheur (Happiness), both 1934; Anatole Litvak’s Mayerling, 1936, opposite Danielle Darrieux). Ending his contract with MGM, Boyer chose independent producer Walter Wanger in the hopes of getting more substantial roles, which indeed materialized with Private Worlds (La Cava), opposite French-born Hollywood star Claudette Colbert; Break of Hearts (Moeller), with Katharine Hepburn; and Shanghai (Flood), with Loretta Young, all in 1935. These productions established Boyer as a powerful romantic lead, seducing his screen partners as much as female audiences. From then on, Boyer became the ultimate Latin lover, the talking Valentino with a smooth, soothing voice that would turn any woman’s head in an instant (Marlene Dietrich in Boleslwaki’s The Garden of Allah and Hathaway’s I Loved a Soldier, both in 1936; Greta Garbo in Brown’s Conquest and Claudette Colbert in Litvak’s Tovarich, both 1937, to name but a few). With his dark good looks, sophistication, and acting range, Boyer could be more than just a Frenchman, like Maurice Chevalier was before him. He was often a “European,” Russian, Polish, German, and so on, or sometimes an Arab or oriental, but always exotic. Yet Boyer always remained faithful to France and French cinema, crossing the Atlantic regularly up to 1939, when World War II forced him to choose for a while between the two coun-
BOYER, JEAN-PIERRE
tries and the two cinemas. During the war years, Boyer set up the French Research Foundation, helping many compatriots in exile, for which he won a special Oscar in 1942. The Boyers were indeed central to the expatriate, exile, and refugee community in Hollywood, both on a social and professional level. This close-knit community often worked together, as evidenced in the cast and crew lists, and Boyer was a regular feature on these lists. The star also carried on playing romantic leads until the end of the 1940s (All This and Heaven Too, Litvak, 1940, opposite Bette Davis; Gaslight, Cukor, 1944, and Arch of Triumph, Milestone, 1948, both opposite Ingrid Bergman). Boyer’s transatlantic career remained as prolific and successful until the mid-1970s, maturing well on the screen. After his son committed suicide in 1965, Boyer himself ended his life shortly after his wife’s death, reinforcing the myth of the ultimate romantic. Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Chevalier, Maurice; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Colbert, Claudette; Darrieux, Danielle; World War II. References Chassagnard, Guy. Charles Boyer Acteur: Un Enfant de Figeac. Figeac: Guy Chassagnard et Segnat Editions, 1999. Swindell, Larry. Charles Boyer: The Reluctant Lover. New York: Doubleday, 1983.
BOYER, JEAN-PIERRE (1776–1850) Haitian politician, born a free mulatto on February 28, 1776, in Port-au-Prince, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. After independence in 1804, Boyer was president of Haiti from 1818 to 1843,
183
when he was forced into exile, first to Jamaica and then to Paris, where he had received his early education and where he was also to die on July 9, 1850. The assassination in 1806 of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emperor of Haiti (1804–1806), led to civil war (1807–1820) between the black kingdom in the North, governed by Henri Christophe, and the mulatto republic of the South, led by Alexandre Sabès Pétion (1770–1818). Following Pétion’s death in 1818, Boyer, his successor, succeeded in unifying the country and establishing a period of relative political stability, the latter badly shaken by the revolt in 1791 of black slaves against their French overlords. Prior to the 1820s, when Boyer took up the cudgel, emigration schemes to transport emancipated slaves from the United States to Haiti, largely supported by the abolitionists Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) and William Wilberforce (1759–1833), had met with little success. Boyer believed that the valuable agricultural expertise gained by slaves on U.S. plantations could help reestablish Haiti’s formerly strong agricultural base and thus a strong economy and therefore was receptive to overtures from advocates of emigration within the United States. On April 30, 1824, in a letter designed to encourage prospective emigrants, Boyer responded reassuringly to Loring D. Dewey, the general agent of the Society for African Colonization, who sought clarifications on the defraying of emigrants’ travel expenses, the distribution and stocking of land, education, and tolerance of different religions and laws. Although Boyer would not permit the society to establish a colony within Haiti with its own laws and courts, comparable to one of the states of the United
184
BRAULT, MICHEL
States yet answerable to a central government, he did promise land, religious tolerance, and citizenship to all who set foot on Haitian soil. Boyer’s support for the emigration scheme was given in the form of a considerable weight of coffee, the proceeds of which, when sold, would help finance the voyages from the United States to Haiti. His emigration drive of the 1820s, to a country that for many symbolized black liberation and equality, failed, however, when many emigrants, faced with insurmountable difficulties arising from linguistic, cultural, and religious differences, chose to return to the United States as early as the late 1820s. Boyer’s questionable foreign policies brought further financial setbacks to Haiti in 1825, when a settlement of 150 million francs with France, designed to buy French recognition of Haitian independence, proved to be financially devastating. His 1826 Rural Code of Haiti, a draconian vagrancy bill that sought to limit free movement and thus freedom of enterprise among rural laborers, served only to hold him further in disfavor. Jean-Pierre Boyer’s presidency, marked both by an evident material and monetary gap between the rural blacks and the mulattoes of the towns and a stagnant economy, finally led to a rebellion in 1843 in which he was ousted. Janette McLeman-Carnie See also: Antislavery Movements; Christophe, Henri; Coffee; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; Haiti; Santo Domingo; Slavery. References Dixon, Chris. African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
BRAULT, MICHEL (1928–) Québécois cinematographer and film director. Born in Montreal in 1928, Brault is a pivotal figure in the emergence and the history of Quebec cinema, as much if not more for his role as cinematographer and as codirector than for his own directorial output. Coming to cinema from photography, he was part of a wave of francophone technicians who entered the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) after it moved to Montreal in the mid-1950s. Associated at an early stage with the direct cinema tendency that eschewed the authoritative, neutral, and script-led NFB documentary orthodoxy, in 1958 he codirected with Gilles Groulx an influential short documentary, Les Raquetteurs (The Snowshoers), about a snowshoe festival in the Quebec provincial town of Sherbrooke. One enthusiastic viewer of the film was the French documentary director Jean Rouch, whom Brault met at a seminar in California on the ethnographic filmmaker Robert Flaherty in 1959. On his invitation, Brault worked as cinematographer on the cinémavérité film Rouch directed in Paris in 1961 with Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un été/ Chronicle of a Summer. Brault went on to work in the 1960s with other documentary filmmakers in France, including William Klein (Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther, 1969; Festival panafricain d’Alger/Algiers Panafrican Festival, 1970). In Quebec, Brault’s work is associated with the development of direct cinema in the service of the emerging cultural assertiveness and exploration of the new cinema of the 1960s, most notably in his work with Pierre Perrault, with whom he codirected Pour la suite du monde/Moontrap (1963). This film, with its subtle media-
BRAZIL
tions between filmmakers and rural inhabitants, its fabulating reenactments of old traditions, and its breathtaking cinematography of the Saint Lawrence, nonetheless leaves itself open to the accusation of traditionalism. Brault’s 1967 fictional feature, Entre la mer et l’eau douce, with its portrait of a rural arriviste finding musical success in Montreal, to an extent revisits the territory of the earlier film, providing a more nuanced ethnic and modernizing portrayal of Quebec society. While Brault continued to make contributions to some of the most significant Quebec films of the 1970s and 1980s as a cinematographer, he also enjoyed directorial success with Les Ordres (1974), which won the director’s prize at Cannes. The film successfully adapts the direct cinema tradition, putting it in hybrid, fictionalized form as it follows the fates of individuals caught up in mass arrests following the Canadian federal government’s invocation of the War Measures Act during the October crisis of 1970. This political and social dimension to Brault’s filmmaking also appeared in subtle ways in films made initially for television from the late 1980s. Les Noces de papier (1989), released theatrically after its acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival of 1990 but suffering from its simultaneous release with the similarly themed Hollywood production Green Card (Peter Weir, 1990), stars Geneviève Bujold as an academic who agrees to an arranged marriage with a Latin American refugee. Shabbat Shalom (1994) also explores the ethnic diversity of Quebec identity in relation to Jewish minorities. Brault returned to Quebec history with Quand je serai parti . . . vous vivrez encore (1999), set in 1838 at the time of the Patriots’ Revolt against colonial rule. Bill Marshall
185
See also: Bujold, Geneviève; Jutra, Claude; Klein, William; Morin, Edgar; Perrault, Pierre; Quebec; Rouch, Jean; Saint Lawrence River. Reference Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
BRAZIL The French have had contact with Brazil for almost as long as the Portuguese. After the failure of French attempts to establish settlements (1555–1560, 1612–1615), known in Luso-Brazilian historiography as “the French invasions,” Portuguese Brazil remained relatively closed and unknown to the French. However, this situation began changing in the years preceding Brazil’s declaration of independence (1822). Especially over the next century, the influence of French culture and ideology in Brazil was enormous, out of all proportion to French influence in economic relations (where Britain dominated) or to the tiny scale of actual French immigration when measured against the traditional components of the population (Indian, African, Portuguese, and especially people descended from all three) or against the new immigration (from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan). French cultural hegemony was increasingly challenged by assertions of Brazilian distinctiveness. Brazil in turn influenced major twentieth-century French artists and intellectuals, though the modern French popular stereotype of Brazil is of a quasi Eden dominated by carnival, mulatto women, and soccer. Following the first Portuguese sighting and exploration of mainland South America (1500–1502), French ships were soon regularly loading up along the coast with
186
BRAZIL
Map of Brazil. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
brazilwood (pau-brasil ), a source of red dye in great demand among European textile manufacturers, for example, in Rouen. Then the monarchy became interested in Brazil: the 1550 entry of Henri II and Catherine de Medici into Rouen featured a mock Tupinambá village and about fifty Indians. In November 1555, Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, leading 600 men in two ships, took control of the bay known as Guanabara to the Indians and as Rio de Janeiro to the Portuguese, who had earlier been ousted from there by the Tamoio, a federation of Tupinambá tribes. The French expedition was sponsored by Henri II and, like the unsuccessful venture in Florida, by Gaspard de Coligny, admiral of France. The aims probably included establishing effective occupation of a potentially lucrative territory, protecting French commerce, and perhaps—though this is disputed—founding a potential refuge for Huguenots persecuted in France. The French settled on an island at the mouth of the bay, where they built Fort Coligny. The
Tupinambá sold them slaves, captured from enemy tribes such as the Maracajá Temimino. The French decimated their Tupinambá allies with imported diseases. Villegagnon, who later became antiProtestant but at this stage had Lutheran and perhaps even Calvinist sympathies, had problems enforcing his code of sexual conduct on the Norman interpreters, whom he found living among the Indians. He (or possibly Coligny) invited Calvin to send moral reinforcements: fourteen Calvinists from Geneva, including Jean de Léry, were among the ninety or so people to arrive in March 1557, including five young women. However, the relation between Villegagnon and the Calvinists soon deteriorated because of theological disagreements about the Eucharist. In October Villegagnon banished the dissenters from Coligny Island. They took refuge among the Tupinambá until January 1558, when some, including Léry, embarked on a famine-ridden voyage to France, whereas five preferred to return to Villegagnon, only for him to drown three of them for refusing to recant. In 1560 twelve ships sent by the Portuguese governor-general captured Fort Coligny. “Antarctic France,” as it was called, was over. It lived on in memory thanks to the conflicting, partly eyewitness accounts of Léry and André Thevet, through whose mediation readers ranging from Montaigne to Lévi-Strauss encountered the Tupinambá. The next French colonial attempt in Brazil was “Equinoxial France” (1612– 1615), founded in the Bay of Maranhão by Daniel de la Ravardière and the Razilly brothers, accompanied by some Capuchin missionaries. The settlement, Saint-Louisdu-Maragnon, to the north of Portuguese possessions, was handed over to the Por-
BRAZIL
tuguese. Later incursions were made by Jean-François Duclerc (1710) and René Duguay-Trouin (1711), the latter managing to capture and ransom Rio de Janeiro. In 1767 Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s voyage round the world took him along the coast of Brazil: he eyed Rio jealously, expressing nostalgia for the days of Villegagnon. French eyewitness reports of the interior remained rare, but in 1745 Charles-Marie de La Condamine reported back to the Académie des sciences on the nine years he had spent there with other astronomers measuring degrees of latitide and longitude. French relative ignorance about Brazilian Indians helped foster the pre-romantic ideal of the noble savage, as in the utopian novel by Bernardin de SaintPierre, L’Amazone, written between 1800 and 1803. Ideology associated with the French Revolution reached Brazil in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it reinforced various attempts to achieve liberation from the Portuguese. After the emancipation of slaves in French colonies (1848), there was a campaign in France against slavery in Brazil until its abolition (1888). Progressive, republican Brazilian intellectuals often quoted Victor Hugo on democracy and Auguste Comte on positivism, which played a part in the formation of a national, multiethnic, specifically Brazilian identity in the writings of Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909) and others. Also in a spirit of science and progress, the French study of nature in Brazil intensified when several naturalists and geographers visited, among them the botanist Augustin César Prouvençal de Saint-Hilaire, whose six years of trekking on the back of a mule started in 1816. Jules Verne set a geographical novel in Brazil: Jangada, huit cents lieues sur
187
l’Amazonie (1881). Some of the naturalists painted what they saw, such as the selfeducated Hercule Florence (who arrived in 1825) or Charles de Clarac (b. 1777), responsible for a famous engraving, Forêt vierge du Brésil. Foremost among these French painters was Jean-Baptiste Debret: the lithographs in his album Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil (1834–1839) were based on his sketches and watercolors. More fleetingly, the visit that Edouard Manet made to Rio and its carnival, in 1849 when he was seventeen, had an impact on his art. In 1818 a delegation of French artists arrived with a view to founding an Académie des Beaux-Arts, which was inaugurated in 1826. The French studied Brazilian culture as well as nature: the naturalist Ferdinand Denis, the founder of Brazilian and Portuguese studies in France, published a literary history of Brazil (1825). Throughout the belle époque, the elite of Rio prized Paris (which many Brazilian intellectuals visited), French culture, language, and even fashion, despite the climate. A French lycée was established in 1916, and in 1934 the University of São Paulo was founded by a French mission headed by Georges Dumas. Its first teachers included the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who until 1938 conducted fieldwork—among the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib—upon which he drew for decades to come; the celebrated historian Fernand Braudel; and the sociologists Paul Arbousse Bastide and Roger Bastide, who spent much of his life in Brazil. French cultural hegemony was resisted, however. Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta, a rare female émigrée from Brazil and the author of many works, including Le Brésil (1871), denounced European
188
BREL, JACQUES
ethnocentrism, although she loved France. The early twentieth-century writer Monteiro Lobato was more straightforwardly francophobic. The modernist reportage on Paris of António de Alcântara Machado (1901–1935) reversed the usual ethnographic perspective. Brazilian modernism often had an assertively nationalist dimension, culminating in a 1922 São Paulo exhibition of painting, sculpture, and music (including works by the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos). The relation between Brazilian and French modernism was often reciprocal. The poet Blaise Cendrars stayed in Brazil in 1924, 1926, and 1927–1928, interacting with avant-garde poets such as Oswald de Andrade. The Brazilian influence on Cendrars’s poetry was long-lasting, though largely within the framework of the traditional French construction of the Americas as exotic. Cendrars lured to Brazil his friend Le Corbusier, who gave lectures at Rio and influenced architects such as Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. The composer Darius Milhaud, having been Paul Claudel’s secretary in Rio for the diplomatic mission in 1917, incorporated Brazilian popular music into his Bæuf sur le toit (1920). Brazil had a profound effect not only on modernists but also on the novelist Georges Bernanos, who lived there from 1937 to 1945, and on the philosopher and sociolologist Roger Caillois, who first entered the country in 1939. Neil Kenny See also: Architecture; Bernanos, Georges; Caillois, Roger; Cendrars, Blaise; Claudel, Paul; Florida; French Revolution; Huguenots; La Condamine, Charles-Marie de; Le Corbusier; LéviStrauss, Claude; Montaigne, Michel de; Music (Classical); Noble Savage; Verne, Jules.
References Carelli, Mario. Cultures croisées: Histoire des échanges culturels entre la France et le Brésil de la découverte aux temps modernes. Paris: Nathan, 1993. Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne. Trans. R. Morris. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. McGrath, John. “Polemic and History in French Brazil, 1555–1560.” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 2 (summer 1996): 385–397. Needell, Jeffrey D. A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-theCentury Rio de Janeiro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
BREL, JACQUES (1929–1978) Belgian-born singer-songerwriter, born in 1929 in Brussels. Brel epitomizes the golden age of French chanson, or song, in the 1950s and 1960s. Although he was well received during his U.S. tours, particularly in his concerts at the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York in 1964 and in 1967, he reached a wider audience in the United States through English-language adaptations of his songs. It was while on Broadway in 1967 that Brel saw the musical about the life of Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha, written by Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh, and Joe Darion. In 1968 Brel brought his own version of this musical, L’Homme de la Mancha, to Brussels, playing the lead role. Around the same time, Brel himself became the subject of a North American tribute musical, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (1968). For Eric Blau and Mort Shuman, a personal friend of Brel, the musical fulfilled their ambition to translate and bring Brel’s
BRESDIN, RODOLPHE
songs to a U.S. audience using theater. Initially staged at the Village Gate in New York in 1968, the revue still retains a cult following and continues to this day to run in small theaters and cabarets throughout the English-speaking world. Brel’s songs, interspersed with fragments of his own commentary, presented the main concerns of his work. Although Brel dealt largely with universal themes such as love and death, the musical has a more contemporary edge while still remaining largely faithful to the spirit of Brel’s originals. Eric Blau turned his scenario into a screenplay for Denis Héroux’s 1975 film version of the musical, which was shot in the south of France. Brel lent his support to the film and appeared in it, performing one of his best-known songs, “Ne me quitte pas” (If You Go Away, 1959). Although Héroux’s film also attempts to express the personal and social themes of Brel’s work and nostalgically evokes the world of the French cabaret, it is nonetheless geared toward a contemporary North American audience and may be compared to the fantasy/hippie musicals of the 1970s. Brel’s songs have since been covered in many countries by many non-Frenchspeaking artists. One of the most successful and popular English-language cover versions of Brel to date is “Seasons in the Sun,” whose original title was “Le Moribond” (The Dying Man, 1961). A huge chart hit in 1974 for the Canadian singer Terry Jacks, the somewhat sugary English lyrics and vocal delivery unfortunately retain little of the acerbic wit of Brel’s original version. Brel died in 1978 in Paris. Chris Tinker See also: Héroux, Denis; Music (Pop); Shuman, Mort.
189
References Blau, Eric. Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971. Todd, Olivier. Jacques Brel, une vie. Paris: 10/18, 2001.
BRESDIN, RODOLPHE (1822–1885) French artist who created magical prints that were admired for their rich detail. Two lithographs, La Comédie de la mort (1854) and Le Bon Samaritain (1861), are perhaps his most famous works. However, for most of his life Bresdin lived in poverty and was well known only among a small circle of intellectuals and artists. Part of his fame was based on his curious lifestyle, which served as a model for the tragic, solitary artist in Jules Champfleury’s novel Chien-Caillou (1845). The title derived from a corrupted form of Chingachgook, the Indian chief and hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1926). Bresdin admired the American Indian and romanticized the New World in letters to his friends, in which he described a “new country where one might gain one’s freedom through hard work” (quoted in Van Gelder, p. 11). Fantasies about America’s virgin forests may have inspired the densely overgrown landscape settings in many of his works. Unfortunately for Bresdin, when he was finally able to go to America—leaving Le Havre for Canada in 1873—he did not find financial or artistic success. Not much is known about this trip, and much of what has been written is fantasy—including the notion that Bresdin’s winning design for a U.S. banknote helped to pay for the artist, his wife, and six children to travel across
190
BRETON, ANDRÉ
Etching by Rodolphe Bresdin, 1822–1885, “Flight into Egypt.” Bresdin's magical prints were admired for their rich detail. (Library of Congress)
the Atlantic. All that remains from the trip are a few designs he made while in Montreal for journals that were never actually published. He returned to Paris in 1877. Bresdin was born in Montrelais, France, on August 13, 1822, the son of a tanner. In 1861 twelve of his etchings were published in the Revue Fantaisiste. Other contributors included Charles Baudelaire, Théodore de Banville, Alphonse Daudet, Théophile Gautier, and Champfleury. In the same journal, Banville wrote a glowing review of Bresdin’s contributions to the Salon of 1861, especially praising Le Bon Samaritain. Bresdin spent a fair amount of time in the south of France. One legend suggests that he walked from Paris to Toulouse (sometime around 1848 or 1851). Shortly after his Parisian success of 1861, he moved back to Bordeaux and lived on the rue Fosse-aux-lions (Lion’s
den), sometimes even signing his prints with this name. It was there that he was visited by Odilon Redon (1840–1916), who became his student. In 1863 Bresdin’s works were exhibited in the office of the newspaper La Gironde. In 1864 he became a member of the Société des amis des arts de Bordeaux and exhibited his works with that group. Bresdin married in 1865, but by 1870 he had become ill with rheumatism and eye trouble and spent time in the Hôpital Necker. However, his illness did not seem to prevent him from participating in the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871. Bresdin died of congestion in Sèvres on January 11, 1885. Leslie Stewart Curtis See also: Bordeaux; Le Havre; Montreal; Painting. References Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Rodolphe Bresdin (1822–1885), Robinson graveur. Catalogue by Maxime Préaud. Catalogue of exhibition held May 30 to August 27, 2000. Redon, Odilon. “Rodolphe Bresdin, dessins sur pierre, eux-fortes, dessins originaux.” La Gironde, January 10, 1869. Van Gelder, Dirk. Rodolphe Bresdin: Monographie en trois parties. Catalogue raisonné de l’æuvre gravée. 2 vols. The Hague/Paris: M. Nijhoff/Le Chêne, 1976.
BRETON, ANDRÉ (1896–1966) The leader of the surrealist movement and one of the most influential writers of the French avant-garde, André Breton was born in Tichenbray (Orne) and spent his childhood on the Brittany coast. His first poems, among them a sonnet dedicated to Paul Valéry, were published in 1914. Breton had started studying medicine the previous year, and during World War I he
BRETON, ANDRÉ
served in the neurological ward in Nantes and then in 1917 was posted to the psychiatric centre at Saint-Dizier, where his early interest in Freudian psychoanalysis led to the discovery of the artistic potential of methods used in the observation and treatment of mental illness. Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom he corresponded during the war, introduced Breton to Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon in Adrienne Monnier’s Parisian bookshop. Breton’s debut volume Mont de piété (Pawnshop, 1919) came out the same year as the inaugural issue of Littérature, the magazine he founded with Soupault and Aragon, which became affiliated with the dada movement, before the official break with Tristan Tzara in 1922. The publication of the first Surrealist Manifesto and the launch of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste in 1924 marked the birth of the new movement and defined its ideology, as well as its distinctive exploration of the unconscious through “automatic” techniques (inspired by Breton’s experience with psychiatric and psychoanalytical methods). Les Champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields, 1920), the first example of “automatic” writing, produced by Breton in collaboration with Soupault, provided the basis for a wide range of language-based and visual experiments aimed at uncovering the “true functioning of thought,” “in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation” (as stated in the manifesto’s definition of surrealism). For almost two decades, until the outbreak of World War II and his exile to New York, Breton’s works outlined the major concepts of surrealism and shaped the evolution of the movement. From the early formulation of the idea of “convulsive beauty” in Nadja (1928) to the political debates and purges
191
of the mid-1920s leading up to the Second Surrealist Manifesto (1930), from the dialectical interpretation of dream and reality in Les Vases communicants (Communicating Vessels, 1932) to the theory of objective chance and “mad love” in L’Amour fou (1937), Breton remained the catalyst and driving force behind the transformations that earned surrealism its unparalleled prestige among competing avant-garde trends and ultimately established its international reputation. In 1938, Breton traveled to Mexico and met Leon Trotsky, with whom he wrote the manifesto entitled Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant (For an Independent Revolutionary Art). Breton had joined the Communist Party in 1927 but broke with it in 1935 during the Congress
André Breton was the leader of the surrealist movement and one of the most influential writers of the French avant-garde. (Library of Congress)
192
BRITTANY
for the Defense of Culture. During World War II, Breton left occupied Paris and was initially hosted in Marseilles by the American Emergency Rescue Committee, alongside Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Benjamin Péret. His exile in New York occasioned the surrealist exhibition of 1942 (First Papers of Surrealism) and the launch of the magazine VVV, in which Breton published Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else. Breton returned to Paris in 1946 with his wife Elisa, whom he had met in New York and who inspired his last meditation on love, dreams, and objective chance, Arcane 17 (first published in 1944 in the United States). Ramona Fotiade See also: Brittany; Ernst, Max; Masson, André; Mexico; Nantes; Painting; Péret, Benjamin; Sculpture; Surrealism; Theory; World War I; World War II. References Balakian, Ana, and Rudolf E. Kuenzli. André Breton. London: Willis Locker and Owen, 1998. Polizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. London: Bloomsbury, 1995.
BRITTANY The interaction of the land and the sea has profoundly affected the historic development of Brittany. The Atlantic has provided the Bretons with wealth, work, and adventure, but it has also formed the entry points for hostile invasions and epidemics. The Romans named the peninsula “Armorica,” meaning the land facing the sea. Its coastline was the site of Julius Caesar’s most famous naval battle, against the Veneti in 56 B.C. Following Roman occupation, the peninsula’s Celtic cultures and
languages were reaffirmed by groups of Celts fleeing southward across the English Channel from Saxon (or possibly Irish) invasions of the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries. These same groups contributed significantly to the spread of Christianity throughout the region. During the Middle Ages, Brittany’s coastal position provided it with a privileged position on trade routes and also allowed it to preserve a substantial diplomatic and political autonomy from the more powerful French monarchy. Genoese galleys sailed to the region in 1293, thus establishing maritime trade links from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and Breton ships began to sail regularly to the Mediterranean in the mid-fifteenth century. In the fifteenth century, its shipbuilders made use of the carvel nail (enabling the use of flush rather than overlapping planks of wood) to develop a new type of oceangoing vessel, the threemasted caravel, which became a common and successful design across Europe. Breton rulers cultivated connections with the English kings and attempted to stay neutral during the Hundred Years’ War (1337– 1453). At the same time, however, the region’s easy maritime access allowed Vikings to sack Nantes in 843 and 853 and to terrorize neighboring towns. Brittany was formally annexed to the French Crown in 1532. In the succeeding decades, however, it developed into a fairsized maritime power, retaining a degree of autonomy from the French state. Specialist forms of shipbuilding developed: it seems probable that the use of portholes was pioneered by Bretons in 1531. Fishing evolved into a substantial occupation along the coastal towns. Even within Brittany, industries such as rope making and sailmaking
BRITTANY
provided employment for rural dwellers. Commercial and trade links with England were vital for the region’s economy: butter, salt, paper, and linen were exported from Brittany, and herring, tin, lead, and wool were imported. This happy semi-independence ended in the seventeenth century, as the French state imposed increasingly high trade tariffs. The Atlantic was no longer an open highway for Breton vessels. Instead, as the French state developed aggressive, imperialist policies in the eighteenth century, the Breton seascape was militarized and regulated. Ships from Nantes sailed to Africa and the West Indies, participating in the slave trade. New ports were built: Lorient, on the southern coast, was the base for French expeditions to the East. Brest, on the western tip of the peninsula, was one of the French navy’s most important ports. Although the cod-fishing port of SaintMalo, to the north, was not developed by the French state to the same extent, it was the site for one of Sébastien Vauban’s most impressive coastal fortifications. At various points during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Breton piracy was encouraged by the French state. Along the coast, adult males were conscripted to serve in a coastal militia, and peasants were required to perform corvées (labor services) to build defenses and communications. Although the sea certainly provided employment for many Bretons, its presence was never simply advantageous: in 1733, 1741, and 1757–1758, oceangoing ships carried typhus epidemics to Brittany. This heavy state intervention had dramatic effects on Breton society. Firstly, it created advanced cities of French-speaking bureaucrats, merchants, and naval officials in areas in which the Breton language had
193
previously been dominant. Secondly, these new policies significantly distorted the Breton economy, ruining the old trade across the English Channel and forcing Breton manufacturing into a dependency on French state policies. As older industries declined, more people left the Breton countryside, initiating a tradition of emigration and travel and—eventually—creating a worldwide Breton “diaspora.” Breton merchants were divided in their assessment of state policies. On the eve of the French Revolution, some called for the free market and growing competition and others for protection for Breton manufacturers against British imports. The sociocultural gap between the French-speaking ports and the Bretonspeaking villages, now largely concentrated in the west of the region, grew in the nineteenth century, when a romantic revival rediscovered the Breton peasantry as exotic and primitive creatures, possible links to a dimly understood ancient Celtic past. Novels such as Pierre Loti’s astonishingly successful Le Pêcheur d’Islande (The Icelandic Fisherman), published in 1886, popularized similar images of Breton primitivism, simplicity, and religiosity. Some of the region’s northern ports, such as Dinan, developed as tourist sites. However, in the industrial port of Brest, Fernand Pelloutier devised the militant creed of anarchosyndicalism. During World War II, Brittany’s unique geographic position was once again of vital importance. German U-boats operated from Brest and Saint-Nazaire, and following the liberation in 1944, a pocket of German soldiers held out for months near Saint-Nazaire. It was also in this period that a significant number of Americans were first present in Brittany, working with
194
BROSSARD, NICOLE
the Departmental Committees of Liberation. The tensions between the U.S. forces and the French authorities are neatly evoked in Louis Guilloux’s narrative O.K., Joe (1976). Much of the ports of Brest and Saint-Nazaire was destroyed in 1944, and many of their inhabitants were housed in temporary prefabricated houses while the towns and their suburbs were rebuilt. Today, Brittany remains a naval and maritime region. Approximately half of all French fishermen and fishing boats are based in the region. Saint-Nazaire survives as a world center of commercial shipbuilding and Brest as a major naval port. As a tourist center, Brittany is the third most popular destination in France, beaten only by Paris and the Mediterranean coast, and attracts significant numbers from Germany, the Netherlands, and even Eastern Europe. The distinctive characteristics of the Breton coastline—sunny, but also windy and “fresh”—feature prominently in tourist literature, differentiating this “Celtic” region from its urban and Mediterranean rivals. Recently the image of the ocean as a healing, nurturing presence has been exploited by new centers of “thalassotherapy,” which offer maritime spa treatments. There are approximately fifty such centers in France: one-third of them, including the largest, are located in Brittany. The region’s uneasy relationship with the ocean continues. At the western tip of Brittany, the Rail d’Ouessant is one of the busiest sealanes in the world, with approximately 140 ships passing through it each day. As a result, the region has been the victim of six major oil slicks from oil tankers sinking near its coastline since 1970. The latest of these was the Erika, which sank to the south of the Rail d’Ouessant in Decem-
ber 1999. In 2000, tourist visits to the whole of Brittany, including inland regions and the northern coastline, which were completely untouched by the oil slick, declined by approximately 30 to 40 percent. Sharif Gemie See also: Fishing; French Revolution; Language; Nantes; Saint-Malo; Slavery; Tourism; World War II. References Cassard, Jean-Christophe. Les Bretons et la mer au Moyen Age: Des origines au milieu du XIVe siècle. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1998. Josse, Charles. “Quel avenir pour la pêche bretonne?” Ar Men 117 (December 2000): 2–13. Nières, Claude. “Rivalités France-Angleterre vue de Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle.” La Révolution française. Ed. Robert Chagny. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2002: 21–34. Stoll, Stéphanie. “Le spectaculaire réveil de Saint-Nazaire.” Ar Men 118 (February 2001): 2–15.
BROSSARD, NICOLE (1943–) Québécois writer, born in Montreal. Nicole Brossard is one of Quebec’s leading proponents of l’écriture au féminin (writing in the feminine), a radical writing practice that draws on so-called French feminism as well as on feminist traditions from the United States. As its name suggests, l’écriture au féminin is informed by l’écriture féminine (feminine writing), associated primarily with the post-Lacanian feminists Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. However, it also retains an emphasis on the experiential realities of being a woman and on the material female body, as found in the work of U.S. feminists Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly. Brossard began her writing career as an avant-garde practitioner and cofounded
BRÛLÉ, ETIENNE
the literary journal La Barre du jour in 1965. From 1974, however, she began to write as a feminist and lesbian, a shift that she attributes to having become a mother and falling in love with another woman at the same time. The mother-daughter relationship and lesbian desire are central to L’Amèr, ou le chapitre effrité: fiction théorique (These Our Mothers; or, The Disintegrating Chapter: Fiction Theory, 1977) and are key themes within the writer’s oeuvre. Brossard has written poetry, theory, fiction, autobiography, and autofiction, as well as drama and cinema to a lesser extent. In conjunction with Luce Guilbeault and Margaret Wescott, Brossard made the film Quelques Féministes américaines (Some American Feminists, 1977), and she collaborated on the canonical Québécois feminist play, La Nef des sorcières (A Clash of Symbols, 1976). Besides her seminal collection of essays, La Lettre aérienne (The Aerial Letter, 1985), Brossard is best known for her poetry—notably Mécanique jongleuse (Daydream Mechanics, 1973), Amantes (Lovhers, 1980), and Musée de l’os et de l’eau (Museum of Bone and Water, 1999) and fiction. Her intertextual and theoretically informed novels, such as French Kiss (1974), and Picture Theory (1982), disrupt traditional literary conventions and are considered challenging to readers, although the publication of the feminist-postmodern, Le Désert mauve (Mauve Desert, 1987), and its sister text, Baroque d’aube (Baroque at Dawn, 1995), saw Brossard’s fiction become more accessible. Brossard is one of a number of Québécois women writers to engage in intellectual and creative dialogue with anglophone feminists in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, as well as in the United States. A cofounder of the bilingual feminist journal
195
Tessera, she has also collaborated with the Vancouver-based writer Daphne Marlatt. Important themes in Brossard’s work include the coming together of writing and the female body, the subversion of masculinist discourse, women’s oppression, the city—especially the writer’s native Montreal—North America, translation, feminine collaboration, and technology. Particularly important is the metaphor of the hologram, with the holographic woman functioning as a utopian figure who, of necessity, is imaginary within patriarchy but who nevertheless offers the potential for challenging the oppressive roles this position assigns to women. Brossard’s work has been translated into English, Spanish, and German, confirming her status as a major feminist writer of our times. Ceri Morgan See also: Feminisms; Gay Movement; Montreal; Theory. References Knutson, Susan. Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2000. Parker, Alice A. Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.
BRÛLÉ, ETIENNE (C. 1592–1633) Etienne Brûlé traveled with Samuel de Champlain on the voyage to Canada in 1608, a voyage that is remembered for the founding of Quebec, and subsequently explored vast expanses of the North American landscape. He was the first European to visit and explore four of the five Great Lakes, he carried out much exploration in the Quebec area, and he visited Pennsylvania and Maine.
196
BRYCE ECHENIQUE, ALFREDO
Born near Paris around 1592, Brûlé was a young man at the time of the 1608 voyage. He was taken as a servant to Champlain and was chosen to take part in an exchange with the local Huron people. As a result of the exchange, Brûlé lived among the Huron tribe, learning their language, their customs, and their way of life. Brûlé took to the Huron life very quickly and shocked his fellow Frenchmen, including Champlain, when he visited them some months after the initial exchange. During his time with the Huron people, Brûlé undertook a great deal of exploration of the area surrounding Quebec and further afield. He returned to the French colony in July 1618, where he was used as an interpreter. While living with the Huron people, Brûlé quickly became assimilated into their way of life, so much so that when Champlain saw him for the first time after he had been living with them, he described his appearance and manner as sauvage (savage), exactly like the indigenous people. Jesuit missionaries also found his way of life unacceptable. When Quebec was taken by English forces in 1629, Brûlé was denounced by some as a traitor, and when his fellow colonists returned to France, he decided to retire and live among the Huron tribe. However, events conspired against him, and he was killed by his Huron hosts in 1633. Brûlé’s accomplishments are many. He traveled from Quebec to Lake Huron by way of the Ottawa River. He visited not only Lake Huron but also Lake Superior, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario. He followed the course of the Susquehanna River to its junction with the sea and thus traversed large areas of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maine. Most important, he was the first
European to accomplish these feats in almost all cases. However, he did not write a narrative of his experiences, and thus details about his life and his deeds have to be pieced together from a number of different accounts, some unfavorable to his way of life. Jo Edwards See also: Champlain, Samuel de; Hurons; Maine; Quebec. References Bishop, Morris. White Men Came to the Saint Lawrence: The French and the Land They Found. Montreal: McGill University Press, 1961. Cranston, James Herbert. Etienne Brûlé: Immortal Scoundrel. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969. Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America. Vol. 1, Pioneers of France in the New World. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965.
BRYCE ECHENIQUE, ALFREDO (1939–) Of the numerous Latin American authors who have lived in France, with his burlesque and autobiographical style, Bryce Echenique was among the first to demystify Paris, which had been considered to be the El Dorado of artists. Born in Lima, Peru, on February 19, 1939, Bryce Echenique lived in France from 1964 to 1984, first and mainly in Paris and then for the final three years in Montpellier; since 1984, he has lived in Spain. The son of a bourgeois family, grandson of the president of the Republic, and a descendant of the last viceroy, with a father of British origin and a mother who descended from the local Spanish nobility, Bryce Echenique left Lima after studying law. It was in France that he became a writer.
BUGNET, GEORGES
A master of the “entertainment narrative,” Bryce Echenique had an international success with his first novel, Un Mundo para Julius (Un Monde pour Julius, 1970). Three of his works were set exclusively in France. The first, La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña (Vie exagérée de Martin Romaña, 1981), recounts the tribulations of a Peruvian in Paris. The second, Reo de nocturnidad (Noctambulisme aggravé, 1997), is set in Montpellier and features a university professor, like Bryce Echenique himself, as the central character. The third book, a collection of short stories, is titled Guía triste de París (Guide triste de Paris, 1999). In Peru, Bryce Echenique had been raised very strictly by his father, a banker, who enrolled him in an English-language school (No me esperen en abril [Ne m’attendez pas en avril ], 1995), made him study law, and intended to send him to Cambridge University. However, the young Bryce Echenique wanted to become a writer and was able to rely on the support of his mother, a francophile and such a fan of Marcel Proust that she baptized her son Alfredo Marcelo. This influence was crucial. Even if Bryce Echenique mocks in his novels the figure of his mother, who would later take him to visit Proust’s grave, Julius has a child as a central character and develops a number of Proustian themes. The demystification of Paris and of France distinguish Bryce Echenique from other great Peruvian writers, such as the poet Cesar Vallejos and the author Mario Vargas Llosa, who for their part followed the path taken by the poet Rubén Darío (“France is the country of our dreams”). It is no coincidence that Darío was the subject of their university theses.
197
Bryce Echenique’s disillusioned take on France and Paris is not only literary. In Guide triste de Paris, which has a deeply South American tone, he criticizes and is amused by the barricades of May 1968, an event that he witnessed firsthand. Pablo Aiquel See also: Darío, Rubén; Literary Relations. Reference Weiss, Jason. The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. New York: Routledge, 2003.
BUGNET, GEORGES (1879–1981) French-born writer. Early academic promise, followed by study at the University of Dijon, suggested a career in universities, but Bugnet abandoned his studies to take up a career in journalism (at the newspaper La Croix de Haute Savoie). Soon after his marriage (1904) he emigrated to Canada, where, filled with enthusiasm for life in the wilderness, he settled in Alberta to experience the extreme hardship of subsistence farming in a remote part of the province. In his early forties he returned to writing during a particularly hard winter after twenty years of unremitting physical labor on his holding. Bugnet’s two best-known works, Nipsya (1924) and the much more pessimistic La Forêt (The Forest, 1934), use his experience of life in Alberta. Nipsya is a beautiful Métisse, half Cree, half Irish, raised by her Cree grandmother, who attracts the interest of three men: Mahigan, a Cree; her Métis cousin Vital Lajeunesse, more French than Cree; and the young Scot Monsieur Alec, owner of the local trading post. Nipsya’s hesitation among the three suitors is set against the rising of Louis
198
BUJOLD, GENEVIÈVE
Riel, of which Vital is a leader. The tragedy of the rising is minimized because the story is seen through the eyes of Nipsya, who is far removed from the actual fighting. Bugnet concentrates on the journey of Nipsya from adherence to the Cree traditions of her grandmother to acceptance of Christianity to please the ardently Catholic Vital (who reflects Bugnet’s own views). Despite his admiration and sympathy for the Crees, Bugnet believed that the only way forward for them was to accept the civilization represented by Monsieur Alec and the Catholicism urged at length by Vital. The book, as we have it today, is less didactic than in its original version. Constance Woodrow translated it into English to some critical acclaim, making the book more readable by eliminating some speeches of Vital. Bugnet readily admitted that the result was an improvement. La Forêt is the story of Roger and Louise, a young French couple who, like the Bugnets, settle in a remote part of Alberta and for three years wage a losing battle against the encircling forest. Louise in particular grows to hate the implacable Nature that surrounds them, and as their marriage is increasingly threatened after the death of their child, the couple abandon the struggle and withdraw to the city. Bugnet’s other works are Le Lys de sang (The Lily of Blood, 1923, subsequently rewritten), in which a hero based on the author escapes in his imagination from the Canadian winter to Africa; Siraf (1934), a philosophical dialogue between the spirit of the forest and a man from this world; and Les Voix de la solitude (The Voices of Solitude, 1938), a collection of short texts. In later life, Bugnet was active in francophone journalism in Alberta and a distinguished horticulturalist. Bugnet is little
known outside western Canada despite the early success of the English translation of Nipsya. His two major novels repay reading for the beauty of much of his writing and the insights that he offers into Albertan history experienced firsthand (La Forêt) or through the reminiscences of eyewitnesses (Nipsya). Bugnet died in Saint Albert, Alberta, in 1981. Peter Noble See also: Alberta; Catholic Church; Métis; Riel, Louis. References Carpenter, David C. “Georges Bugnet: An Introduction.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 1, no. 4 (1972): 72–78. Papen, Jean. Georges Bugnet: Homme de lettres canadien. Saint Boniface, Man.: Edition des Plaines, 1985.
BUJOLD, GENEVIÈVE (1942–) Québécois film actress. The Quebec film industry that emerged in the early 1960s typically produced celebrities, in the sense of familiar, televisual figures more appropriate to the cinema of a small country, rather than stars. Geneviève Bujold was the first to acquire a career outside these boundaries, gaining a place in the French star system in the 1960s but then becoming an important figure in films associated with the more independent end of American cinema. In Quebec, the narrative of Bujold’s star persona begins with her as a typical Quiet Revolution figure, the daughter of a Montreal bus driver, educated like most of her generation at convent school but then rebelling against this in the form of 1960s autonomy and individualism. Early experience hosting a TV pop music show and appearing onstage and in short National Film
BURROUGHS,WILLIAM S.
Board productions was followed by her “discovery,” as legend has it, by Alain Resnais’s mother while Bujold was part of a visiting theatrical troupe in France. Resnais cast her opposite Yves Montand in his meditation on memory and the Spanish civil war, La Guerre est finie (The War Is Over, 1966). She followed this with French films directed by Philippe de Broca (Le Roi de coeur [King of Hearts], 1966) and Louis Malle (Le Voleur [The Thief of Paris], 1967), before returning to Quebec to star as the waitress who breaks off a relationship with the central character in Michel Brault’s Entre la mer et l’eau douce (Between Sweet and Salt Water, 1967). This period also marks the beginning of her collaboration with her English-Canadian husband Paul Almond, who directed her in Isabel (1968), The Act of the Heart (1970), and Journey (1972). Bujold’s American breakthrough began with her Oscar nomination for Anne of the Thousand Days (Charles Jarrot, 1969) opposite Richard Burton, and although she continued to make films in France (and with Almond), and her status enabled the financing of Kamouraska (Claude Jutra, 1973), the failure of the latter film meant that most of her films in the next two decades were American, usually in genre cinema (Earthquake, Robson, 1974; Obsession, de Palma, 1976; Coma, Crichton, 1978; opposite Clint Eastwood in Tightrope, Tuggle, 1984). The mature Bujold’s combination of authority, anticonformism, and vulnerability, along with her subtle and enigmatic performances, meant that she was again favored by more noncommercial directors, notably Alan Rudolph (Choose Me, 1984; Trouble in Mind, 1985; The Moderns, 1988), and, returning to Canada, David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers, 1988).
199
The return to Quebec cinema and to Michel Brault, began with Les Noces de papier (1989), in which she plays an academic who enters into a marriage of convenience with a Latin American refugee. Brault also directed her in Mon Amie Max (1994) as a mother seeking her son. Although Bujold’s roles became more secondary in the latter half of the 1990s, fans can only speculate as to what might have been had she not abandoned the role of Captain Janeway after the first day of filming the TV series Star Trek Voyager in 1994. (Her scenes are available on DVD.) Bujold is both a Quebec nationalist and an international figure, especially within Quebec itself. Although her origins tended not to play a significant role in her American work, save as an extra patina of sophistication more associated with Frenchness than with Quebecness, she remains an interesting example of the malleability and mobility of star construction, depending on age, audience, and which national cinema is being embodied. Bill Marshall See also: Brault, Michel; Jutra, Claude; Lévesque, René; Malle, Louis; Montand, Yves; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Resnais, Alain. Reference Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
BURROUGHS,WILLIAM S. (1914–1997) American writer. Even in a century of experimental art, Burroughs’s writing stands out as extreme, in terms of both content and form. His
200
BURROUGHS,WILLIAM S.
controversial books include the autobiographical Junky (1953, originally Junkie) and Queer (1987, but written at the same time as Junky), but it is Naked Lunch (1959) that took stream-of-consciousness writing into new realms with its graphic and fantastical take on modern society. His texts offer a nihilistic and withering critique of a nihilistic, power-crazed society. Burroughs’s time in Tangier (in 1954 and on and off until 1964) was pivotal. There he filled his room with what would later become novels, in between consuming large amounts of whatever drugs were available. From there, he went to Paris, where the famous “Beat Hotel” (9, rue Gîtle-Coeur) reunited an entire generation of more or less stateless writers. It is at this point that Burroughs actually became a writer, in the sense of being taken seriously and also on his own terms. Allen Ginsberg brought Naked Lunch to Maurice Girodias, the proprietor of Olympia Press (known for its pornography but also home to Samuel Beckett’s novels and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita), who suggested it be taken away and edited properly. After editing, the Olympia Press published the first edition of Naked Lunch. Burroughs saw his literary reputation soar on the back of that novel and the ensuing prosecution for obscenity in the United States. He also received a particularly French confirmation of this status, when his being a writer helped him get off a drugs charge in Paris in 1958. Burroughs’s work owes more to France than the superficial biographical connection—the style and the misanthropic satire flow from the writing of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Jean Genet. He also, curiously, claimed Marcel Proust as an inspiration, writing
William Burroughs at his typewriter in Paris, 1962. (Bettmann/Corbis)
that they shared a profound interest in character and what happened to people. In what is generally seen as a key moment in the “postmodernizing” of literature, he actually used other people’s texts, along with newspaper cuttings and a host of other documents, in his “cut-ups,” which formed the basis for entire novels through the 1960s and featured strongly in later works. This technique of “citation” is supposed to reveal true, hidden messages from within texts and works as a sort of magical form of intertextuality (or, perhaps, a form of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ultimate book). Burroughs took the idea from Brion Gysin, with whom he wrote The Third Mind (1978) as a vehicle for the new technique, which was also highly visual, drawing attention to “the word” itself. He imagined
BUTOR, MICHEL
language as a virus, something that was dangerous psychologically and at the biological level, and saw his writing as a way out, some sort of cure. Paul Hegarty See also: Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Genet, Jean; Literary Relations. References Burroughs, William. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: Arcade, 1993. Sobieszek, Robert A. Ports of Entry: Willam S. Burroughs and the Arts. London/New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996.
BUTOR, MICHEL (1926–) French novelist, essayist, critic, and author of travel literature. Butor gained prominence with two early novels, L’Emploi du temps (1956) and La Modification (1957), as a result of which he is customarily associated with the nouveau roman movement. His early novels were written, however, against a background of traveling and working outside France, and it was contact with the United States in the 1960s (and subsequent periods spent traveling or working there) that triggered a series of erudite works experimenting with genre and combining travel writing with elements of fiction and essayism. A member of a generation of young French people attracted to postwar North America as a result of the country’s potential for cultural and economic renewal, Butor first traveled there in 1960 to work as a visiting professor at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. He held a series of subsequent posts—at the University of Buffalo (1962–1963), Northwestern University (1965), the University of New Mexico (1969–1970 and 1973–1974), and the University of Montreal (1992)—and ad-
201
dressed his experiences in a series of texts, including Où/Where (Le Génie du lieu/ Spirit of the Place, 2; 1971) and Improvisations sur Michel Butor (1993). The United States in the 1960s was a source of major culture shock. Struck by phenomena such as supermarkets, freeways, and regular domestic air travel, Butor developed a poetics of space and place to account for his journeys around the continent. The principal example of this is Mobile (1962), a typographically experimental and generically indeterminate text dedicated to Jackson Pollock. With a persistently nonlinear structure, Mobile is a provisional, fragmented account of a journey through the fifty-two states of the United States whose structure is essentially alphabetical (although doubly disorientating for anglophone readers because the author uses toponyms in French). Mixing perspectives— historical and contemporary, individual and collective—and incorporating transcribed texts from signs, catalogs, and prospectuses, Mobile juxtaposes geographically distinct places in a text that is also a work of satirical social commentary. He focuses especially on racial tension, the plight of Native Americans, and, in references to an imaginary theme park called “Freedomland,” a sense of the stage management of history. With its combination of celebration, admiration, and critique, Mobile reflects the ambivalent attitude of 1960s French intellectuals toward the United States; ultimately, however, it rejects any clear-cut division between the two countries and emphasizes elements of their shared (revolutionary) histories as well as the European roots of many of the social issues that underpin the text. Racial disharmony is also addressed in the second major text inspired by Butor’s
202
BUTOR, MICHEL
American experiences, 6,810,000 Litres d’eau par seconde: Etude stéréophonique (6,810,000 Liters a Second: A Stereophonic Study, 1965). This account of Niagara Falls, combining history, myth, and the imagined reactions of contemporary tourists, is made up of a pattern of different voices—including two different descriptions of the falls by François-René de Chateaubriand—that create a polyphonous effect. A major contribution to French representations of Niagara, it contrasts the romantic view of the falls with a more decadent contemporary version of the tourist site, reduced to a honeymooners’ resort. The text describes a journey from spring to winter and is an account of fading love, disintegrating dialogues, and
the fallibility of memory. These two major texts and the shorter fragments on North American subjects published subsequently (including Transit, 1992, with its passages on British Columbia and northwest Canada) reveal Butor’s intense engagement with North American geography, history, and culture, as well as his sustained endeavor to explore, challenge, and reinvent understandings of North America in the French imagination. Charles Forsdick See also: Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de, Vicomte; Mobile; Niagara Falls. References Calle-Gruber, Mireille, ed. Butor et l’Amérique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. Spencer, Michael. Michel Butor. New York: Twayne, 1974.
C CABET, ETIENNE (1788–1856) Etienne Cabet was born in 1788 to a Dijon, France, cooper family. Educated as a lawyer, in 1831 he joined the Chamber of Deputies by election; but dejected by King Louis-Philippe’s lack of interest in equality and his regime’s habit of condescension, Cabet lasted only a couple of years in office. Accused of sedition because of articles and editorials he had written and overseen as editor of the newspaper Le Populaire (the shareholders of which included its audience, artisans, from Paris and Lyon mainly), Cabet avoided detention by fleeing to England in 1834. There—awaiting his amnesty, which came in 1839—Cabet wrote a history of the 1789 revolution; he had already produced a poison-pen account of the revolution of 1830. While across the English Channel, he also became immersed in the work of Robert Owen, the Communist founder of the factory reform movement in New Lanark, Scotland. In Voyage in Icaria (1840), applying what he had learned, Cabet presented his own vision of an ideal cooperative society. Voyage in Icaria recommends a classless and cashless world, in which all production and distribution of goods and services are ruled jointly by government and the family
for the benefit of each and every member. The text (before turning to designs for housing and suggestions for diet) argues that such a system of mutual give-and-take, administered by vote, would ensure the abolition of poverty. It casts private enterprise as its principal villain (not the institution of Christianity, as in Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516)—as the fount of greed, or competition, and the antithesis of art. Unlike Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, however, Cabet rejects violence as a means of change. Instead he urges a kind of exile, or refusal to participate in capitalism. Yet like them Cabet did not advise a return to an artisanal and agricultural world. Despite his fascination with scriptural Christianity (see his Le Vrai Christianisme suivant JésusChrist [1846]) and wariness of mechanization, he understood that industry had arrived to stay. Cabet’s ideas met with success, encouraging a following of “Icarians” that would number in the hundreds of thousands. In 1848 a fraction of them, ready to surrender theory for practice, seeking peace and quiet, departed Europe to establish a camp in Fanin, Texas. In the United States, they soon endured challenges of one kind and another, including a contract swindle that forced a retreat to New Orleans, Louisiana.
203
204
CADILLAC, ANTOINE LAUMET
DE LA
Cabet himself arrived in 1849 and decided to move the colony to Nauvoo, Illinois, a place established by Mormons. Despite dissension from within, there a version of “Icaria” existed until shortly after Cabet’s death in St Louis in 1856. Elsewhere, in Cheltenham and Corning, villages in Iowa, variants of this community survived longer, but feebly. Because of the advance of industrial and financial capitalism, repression, and their avoidance of conflict—a form of escapism according to Cabet’s critics—none of these societies remained at the turn of the century. Their contradictory emphasis on hierarchy (Cabet had a tendency to be authoritarian) also made them fail. Johan Åhr See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; French Revolution; Illinois Country; Iowa; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; New Orleans; Texas; Utopias. References Johnson, Christoper H. Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–1851. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974. Sutton, Robert P. Les Icariens: The Utopian Dream in Europe and America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
CADILLAC, ANTOINE LAUMET DE LA MOTHE (1658–1730) Founder of the French trading outpost Fort Pontchartrain du De Troit in 1701, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac began his long career in New France in 1683 as a simple soldier in the Port Royal garrison. He soon advanced in rank and status and in 1694 was appointed commandant of Michilimackinac, where he remained until
MOTHE
1697. There his mission consisted of consolidating the ties between New France and native tribes in the Great Lakes region. Relations deteriorated, however, as the natives began to increase trade with the British. Cadillac also took advantage of his position to engage in illegal trafficking. Following his mission at Michilimackinac, Cadillac returned to France, where he presented his plans for a settlement that would keep the British and their native allies out of the Great Lakes. On July 24, 1701, Cadillac arrived with about 100 men at the site that would become Detroit. When he was recalled to France in 1710, Detroit’s native population numbered in the thousands, but it was home to only a handful of French Canadians. Cadillac’s next appointment was in 1711 as governor of Louisiana, where he remained until 1716, at which time he was deposed, tried, and sentenced to the Bastille. Restored to favor in 1718, he obtained a decree in 1722 allowing him to regain possession of his Detroit property which he in turn sold to the Canadian Jacques Baudry de la Marche. The proceeds of the sale allowed him to acquire the office of governor of Castelsarrasin in his native province of Gascony, where he died October 16, 1730. In 1902, Henry Martin Leland and General Motors created the prestigious Cadillac automobile, which bears Cadillac’s name and coat of arms in honor of Detroit’s founder. Maureen Waters See also: Automobiles; Detroit; Louisiana; New France. References Brown, Henry D. Cadillac and the Founding of Detroit. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976.
CAHIERS Dunnigan, Brian Leigh. Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001.
CAHIERS
DU CINÉMA One of the key journals, along with Positif, in the burgeoning writing about film in postwar France. Founded in 1951, Cahiers du cinéma (cahiers means “notebooks”) has exerted an important influence to the present day. French cinema in the years of postliberation Reconstruction had been dominated by what was known as the tradition de qualité—often adaptations of literary works directed by such figures as Claude Autant-Lara and René Clément, relying heavily on star actors and adhering to a closely written script. Cahiers mercilessly lampooned these films and championed the Hollywood cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, which had of course been inaccessible in France under the occupation and threatened to flood the national market thereafter. A character in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Resistance drama L’Armée des ombres (Army in the Shadows, 1969) speaks of how the French will know that they are free when it becomes possible to see Gone with the Wind (Fleming, 1939). Cahiers can in one sense be said to have treated Hollywood films much as European art films had always been treated—as texts with an author/auteur in the person of the director. Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Billy Wilder benefited from the same kind of serious critical appraisal that the likes of F. W. Murnau and Jean Renoir had always received. This was particularly marked in the case of Hitchcock, fre-
DU
CINÉMA
205
quently dismissed as a talented prankster until Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer drew attention to the importance of philosophical and theological themes, such as the transference of guilt, in his work. Chabrol and Rohmer, of course, went on to distinguished careers as directors, and that is likewise true of other Cahiers writers such as Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut, all of whose work in varying degrees bears the imprint of the Cahiers embrace of auteurism and the lowbudget style of Hollywood B-movie making. Myth has it that these five key figures first met at Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque on the Left Bank of Paris, where it was possible to spend entire afternoons and evenings watching vintage Hollywood (and other) films. The ciné-club movement, fostered by André Bazin, a cofounder of Cahiers, was also propitious terrain for the development of an informed film culture, in which the journal’s part was crucial. All this changed dramatically in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising, which saw Cahiers take a strongly, and often forbiddingly, politicized stance. The political practice of Maoism, in alliance with the cultural theories of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, led the journal to turn its back on the broad range of filmmakers and readings that had characterized it before and to embrace an often sectarian hagiography in which the post-1968 films of Godard or the political aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht all but displaced any consideration of Hollywood or other popular cinema. The collapse of revolutionary hopes and the journal’s dwindling circulation caused this line to be abandoned in the early 1970s, since which time the journal has catered to an educated cinephile readership
206
CAILLOIS, ROGER
and remains the most widely read film journal in France and one of the most important in the world. Keith Reader See also: Bazin, André; Chabrol, Claude; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Godard, Jean-Luc; Lacan, Jacques; Melville, JeanPierre; Positif; Truffaut, François; World War II. References Forbes, Jill. The Cinema in France: After the New Wave. London: BFI/Macmillan, 1992. Hillier, Jim, ed. Cahiers du cinéma: Four Volumes of Translated Essays. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985–2000.
CAILLOIS, ROGER (1913–1978) French poet and essayist. Roger Caillois began his literary career on the margins of the surrealist movement between 1932 and 1934. Following a fundamental disagreement with André Breton concerning what he regarded as the idealistic implications of the movement, Caillois distanced himself from it. A brilliant student of Marcel Mauss and Georges Dumézil at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1933), agrégé (postgraduate diploma) in grammar (1936), Caillois drew close to Georges Bataille and founded the Collège de Sociologie (1937– 1939) with him and Michel Leiris. Their aim was to study the social phenomena of the sacred. The myth and the sacred, and the attraction and repulsion provoked by the latter, became Caillois’s favored areas of research. Caillois attempted to understand the origin and the motivations behind the construction of human myths. In La Mante religieuse (The Praying Mantis, 1934), he took as his point of departure a meditation
on the sexual mores of the mantis, developing a thesis highlighting the continuity of a biological link between nutrition and sexuality that exists in both the animal and in the human worlds. His aim was to underline how the instinctive behavior of the mantis (with the female of the species eating the male after the sexual act) engenders in humans the development of myths around the notion of fatal female powers of seduction. It was, for him, proof that the origin of some myths lies in the material universe. It was also during the Collège de Sociologie years that Caillois published the essay L’Homme et le sacré (Man and the Sacred, 1939), in which he developed his analyses of the polarity of the sacred. His writings from this period also show his conviction that the sacred alone could serve to bind together human communities, a belief that was to lead him to study the function of myth in literature and in society. By bringing his meditations into the political domain, he tried to demonstrate that new myths capable of replacing the old ones could allow for a renewal of European societies, which were visibly in crisis. The analyses and ideas formulated during this period would not often be understood and would often be labeled as cryptofascist (see the elitism and the Nietzschean tone in Le Vent d’hiver (Winter Wind, 1937). More recently, however, critics have suggested that the texts from the Collège de Sociologie period should be read as a left-wing response to the nationalsocialist utilization of myth and rituals and of the communitarian energy that results from them. On the eve of World War II, Caillois was invited to Argentina by Victoria Ocampo. He was introduced to South
CAILLOIS, ROGER
American literary circles and met Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and several other great writers. Upon his return to France in 1945, he played the role of gobetween by publishing their work in the La Croix de Sud collection, which he launched and directed for Gallimard. The war and his stay in Argentina brought about many changes in Caillois’s political and intellectual position. From this period onward, he sought, above all, to offer an ethical contribution, a proposal to reelaborate civic values that had been erased by Hitlerism, the war, and the defeat in 1940. With the support of Ocampo, he created the review Lettres françaises in Buenos Aires in order to maintain contact between French writers throughout the world. When Caillois returned to France in 1945, he joined the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, where he became director of the journal Diogène. His career as a senior civil servant enabled him to combine his broad cultural interests and his love of travel. Four main directions characterize Caillois’s thought. The first concerns his aesthetic position. Caillois refused literary idealism (Procès intellectuel de l’art/Art on Intellectual Trial, 1934). He demanded, in the literary domain as in any other, strict rules (Les Impostures de la poésie/The Impostures of Poetry, 1944). He defended the encyclopedic poetry of Saint-John Perse (Poétique de Saint-John Perse/Poetics of Saint-John Perse, 1954), which excludes no information from the real. He admires the “magic” element found in Latin American literature, which seems, to him, to stem from the depths of the earth and to allow for access to a “natural” fantastic. In the postwar years, Caillois developed a rigorous meditation on poetics and
207
aesthetics (Vocabulaire esthétique/Aesthetic Vocabulary, 1946; Babel, 1948; Art poétique/Art of Poetry, 1958; Esthétique généralisée/General Aesthetics, 1965), returned with renewed attention to the fantastic (Au Coeur du fantastique/To the Heart of the Fantastic, 1965), and wrote tales (Ponce-Pilate/Pontius Pilate, 1961, and Guide du XVème arrondissement à l’usage des fantômes/A Ghost’s Guide to the 15th District of Paris, 1977). The second direction taken by his research led him to classify, organize, and rationally explain the multiple correspondences that, in his view, wove together the strands of a universe seen as unitary. The isomorphisms and secret analogies of an exclusively material (and thus antiromantic) nature, which connected the different realms, remained constantly at the heart of his investigations. He had deciphered them in his essay on the praying mantis and continued to reveal them in Méduse et Cie, (Medusa and Co., 1960) and in Le Mimétisme animal (Animal Mimetism, 1963). To study the causes and the functioning of their recurrent manifestations, Caillois relied on Dimitri Mendeleev’s periodic table (Cases d’un échiquier, 1970) and appealed for the establishment of “diagonal sciences” that alone would be able to question what he called, in the development of his meditations, “adventurous coherences” (Cohérences aventureuses, 1976) and “hidden recurrences” (Récurrences dérobées, 1978). His third orientation led him, as sociologist and ethnologist, to examine the phenomena that demonstrate the human need for vertigo, the upheaval of the senses, or ecstasy. The appendix to L’Homme et le sacré, dealing as it did with sex, games, war, and their relationship as much with
208
CAJUNS
debauchery as with the sacred, had prepared the sociological analyses he developed in Les Jeux et les hommes (Man, Play and Games, 1958), a work in which Caillois finds “vertigo” to be one of the fundamental categories that help to classify play activity. Further meditations on the same subject were collected in Instincts et sociétés (1964) and in Bellone ou la pente de la guerre (1963). Caillois’s stay in Argentina gave him another subject for moral and poetic meditation. His discovery of the arid and deserted expanses of the American continent led him to reflect on the relationship between nature and civilization (Patagonie/ Patagonia, 1942; Espace américain/American Space, 1949). In relation to these works and based on the contents of his intellectual autobiography (Le Fleuve Alphée/ The River Alph, 1978), a “moralist” Caillois has been spoken of, meditating on questions of virtue, civilization, and human effort in order to escape the decline that cyclically strikes humanity. It was in the continuation of these reflections that Caillois finally turned his output toward the form of the prose poem centered on the observation of minerals. Caillois dedicated several collections to this topic (Pierres/ Stones, 1966; L’Ecriture des pierres/The Writing of Stones, 1970; Pierres réfléchies/ Reflected Stones, 1975; Trois Leçons des ténèbres/Three Lessons from Darkness, 1978), all to critical acclaim. Agnese Silvestri See also: Argentina; Bataille, Georges; Borges, Jorge Luis; Breton, André; Leiris, Michel; Neruda; Pablo; Ocampo, Victoria; Surrealism; Theory; World War II. References Felgine, Odile. Roger Caillois. Paris: Stock, 1994.
Jenny, Laurent, ed. Roger Caillois: La pensée aventurée. Luçon: Editions Belin, 1992. Massonnet, Stéphane. Les Labyrinthes de l’imaginaire dans l’æuvre de Roger Caillois. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998.
CAJUNS Acadians who settled in Louisiana and their descendants. Cajun is the English version of Cadien, shortened from Acadien. The British began deporting Acadians who refused to swear allegiance to the throne in 1755, and the resulting upheaval is known as the grand dérangement (Great Upheaval or Expulsion). Acadians relocated to Louisiana as early as 1757, with a major influx occurring in 1785. Cajun country, or Acadiana, consists of an upright triangular area in southern Louisiana, home to approximately 400,000 Cajuns, according to the 1990 census. Accounts of Cajuns’ isolation from outside influences (supposedly the cause of their cultural resilience) have been exaggerated, for they have absorbed elements from Native American, Spanish, German, African, and Anglo-American cultures. Though French has been disappearing as a day-to-day language, it remains important in music, which (like dancing and cuisine) is one of the most recognizable aspects of Cajun culture and identity for Cajuns and non-Cajuns alike. Misconceptions about Cajuns can be found as early as Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847). Often thought to be characterized by strong kinship ties, an attachment to their Catholic religion (in spite of anticlerical tendencies), and their skill for navigating swampy areas in canoelike pirogues, Acadians quickly adapted to their new en-
CAMUS, ALBERT
vironment and forged a new agricultural lifestyle on the prairies and bayous. Although negative stereotypes have held that Cajuns are an uneducated rural folk, Acadiana has undergone considerable urbanization and industrialization, particularly with the incursion of the oil industry, which provided new jobs until the mid1980s. Other often-cited aspects of Cajun culture include a cohesive collective spirit, a distinctive folk architecture, and a rich folklore and folk practices. During the surge of international interest in the Cajuns in the 1970s and 1980s, Cajun music, dancing, and cuisine became more popular outside of Acadiana. Most frequently associated with black Louisianans, zydeco has both influenced and been influenced by Cajun music. Likewise, Cajun French has exchanged elements with Afro-Louisiana Creole (along with other languages). After 1922, speaking French in school was outlawed and punished in Louisiana. Though Cajuns had retained French as their mother tongue until that point, this official assault took its toll as parents began to discourage speaking French, and a distinctively Cajun English increasingly became the primary vehicle for Cajun identity. An attempt to reverse this process occurred in 1968 with the founding of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), which favored standard French over the Cajun vernacular and thus has not recovered from its elitist reputation. This renewed interest in French coincided with a Cajun pride movement that began as early as the 1960s and intensified in the 1980s, when many repudiated negative labels and stereotypes held by Anglo-Americans. As part of this reaffirmation of Cajun identity, a number
209
of writers began to forge a literary French heavily inflected with the Cajun vernacular in the 1970s, with poetry as their privileged genre. This literary renaissance has fostered and been fostered by cultural links with other regions of the Acadian diaspora, which have provided educational and publishing opportunities. Jarrod Hayes See also: Acadia; Catholic Church; Dance; Evangeline; Francophonie, La; Fur Trade; Language; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Mississippi River; New Orleans; Slavery. References Ancelet, Barry Jean, Jay D. Edwards, and Glen Pitre. Cajun Country. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Bernard, Shane K. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Brasseaux, Carl A. The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Stivale, Charles J. Disenchanting Les Bons temps: Identity and Authenticity in Cajun Music and Dance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
CAMUS, ALBERT (1913–1960) Born in Mondori, Algeria, of French and Spanish parents, Camus was shaped by his early experiences and sense of place. A sensual engagement with life (sun and sea, love and sports) coexisted with deep alienation (arising from early poverty, tuberculosis, being French in an Arab nation, and later being a provincial in France). During World War II, Camus edited Combat, the leading paper of the Resistance forces. In novels such as L’Etranger (The Stranger, 1942), La Peste (The Plague, 1947), and La Chute (The Fall, 1956); plays such as
210
CAMUS, ALBERT
Caligula (1945); and in philosophical essays such as Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942) and L’Homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951), Camus recognized the contingent and absurd nature of the human condition. Against despair, he argued for a passionate commitment to the world, tinged with moral responsibility. Camus appeared as a voice of restraint, opposing the execution of French collaborators with the Nazis and refusing, contrary to most of his fellow intellectuals, to sanction the violence of Algerian rebels against French colonial rule. Camus always felt most comfortable understanding issues in concrete terms rather than as abstractions. Although he preferred not to be labeled an existentialist, Camus’s philosophical concerns placed him in that camp, along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Camus’s greater literary gifts, appealing personality, and humanistic orientation won him a large audience in the United States after World War II. He visited the United States briefly in 1946, dismissing Americans as unduly cheerful and hence unable to deal adequately with the complexities of life, despite Camus’s deep identification with American writers such as Herman Melville and James M. Cain, both of whom stressed a tragic sensibility. Camus actually modeled his L’Etranger on Cain’s clipped prose style. At Columbia University, Camus lectured on “The Human Crisis,” stressing individual and collective responsibility for evil in the world. Camus called for a revolt against the inhumanity of torture and totalitarianism, while avoiding selfrighteousness. Camus’s moderation and commitment struck a positive note with an emerging sense among American intellectuals of a strenuous anti-Communist liber-
alism. Dwight Macdonald’s brooding essay, “The Root Is Man” (1946), arose out of his conversations with Camus. Both Macdonald and Camus rejected rigid ideologies of the right and left in favor of an almost anarchistic sense of moral commitment to humane values. Camus’s work was also influential in postwar Latin America, and in 1949 he did a lecture tour of Brazil and Chile via Argentina, where the exiled Catalan producer Margarita Xirgu’s production of his play Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding) had been banned by the Peronist government. Camus’s short story “La Pierre qui pousse” (“The Growing Stone”) in the collection L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom, 1957) features a French engineer, alienated from European society, faced with the class and racial hierarchies and religious sensibilities of a Brazilian village. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Camus’s influence in the United States spread. Writers and intellectuals wanted to engage with Camus, hence Hayden Carruth’s novel After the Stranger (1965) and Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall (1964). Camus’s novel, L’Etranger, with its accessible prose, was commonly assigned for translation in high school and college French courses. After this initial introduction to Camus, many young Americans who were in the process of becoming involved in the emerging civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s looked to Camus for guidance. Tom Hayden, a leader of the antiwar movement, also respected Camus’s counsel to practice revolt in moderation. In looking back on his more radical actions, Hayden regretted that he had not followed Camus’s strictures more closely. Camus’s reputation in the United States faded in the 1980s, as Rea-
CAPUCINE
211
CAPUCINE (GERMAINE LEFEBVRE) (1931–1990)
Albert Camus, Nobel Prize winner. 1957. (Library of Congress)
gan conservatism and postmodernism pushed aside liberal humanism. In recent years, however, publication of new monographs suggest renewed attention to Camus. George Cotkin See also: Beauvoir, Simone de; Sartre, JeanPaul; Theory; World War II. References Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Lottman, Herbert R. Albert Camus: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1979. Todd, Olivier. Albert Camus: A Life. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Born in Toulon, France, Capucine was a 1950s fashion model and Hollywood star of the early to mid-1960s. Although Capucine appeared in a few French movies in the late 1940s, it was only in the late 1950s, after having worked as a model for French couturier Hubert de Givenchy, that her film career took off. Bearing some resemblance to two other famous Givenchy muses and inspirations, Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy, Capucine embodied the beauty ideal of the 1960s, and in her films she epitomized cosmopolitan chic and glamour. Her androgynously slim physique; classic facial features dominated by large, melancholy eyes and high cheekbones; and cool, aristocratic demeanor all contributed to a striking and vaguely exotic presence onscreen. As an actress, however, she was often perceived as lacking in emotional warmth and possessing a limited range of expression. In Hollywood from 1958, her studio Columbia launched her in the costume biopic Song without End (Cukor/Vidor, 1960), in which she played a princess opposite Dirk Bogarde’s Franz Liszt. In the following years Capucine acted alongside established Hollywood stars such as John Wayne (North to Alaska, Hathaway, 1960) and William Holden (The Lion, Cardiff, 1962; The 7th Dawn, Gilbert, 1964), but none of these films significantly advanced her career. Indeed, most of her roles tended to be largely decorative and rarely gave her the opportunity to prove her acting abilities. Even in her best-remembered film, the comedy The Pink Panther (Edwards, 1963), her nominal status as the film’s leading lady is overshadowed by the performances of most of her costars. Her arguably most
212
CARLE, GILLES
interesting role was in Edward Dmytryk’s Walk on the Wild Side (1962), a bizarre melodrama set in New Orleans and now considered a camp classic, in which she played a depressive sculptress pursued by a lesbian brothel madam (Barbara Stanwyck) and a sadistic drifter (Laurence Harvey). Although her appearance as an upper-class nymphomaniac in the Woody Allen– scripted What’s New, Pussycat? (Donner, 1965) cemented Capucine’s place in the pantheon of swinging sixties icons, few of her other films during the decade have stood the test of time, even though her performance in the Italian portmanteau production Le Fate (Bolognini/Monicelli, 1966), in which she parodied her established screen persona, proved that she could be an able comedienne when given the chance. By the late 1960s, Capucine had relocated to Europe, where Federico Fellini cast her in Satyricon (1969), her last major film appearance of note. From the 1970s onward, her screen roles became increasingly sporadic and consisted mainly of supporting characters and cameo parts in French, Italian, and multinational European productions; TV series; and two sequels to The Pink Panther in the early 1980s, The Trail of the Pink Panther (Edwards, 1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (Edwards, 1983). After suffering from manic depression for most of her life, Capucine committed suicide in 1990 by throwing herself out of the window of her eighth-floor apartment in Lausanne. Tim Bergfelder See also: Allen, Woody; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Fashion; Inspector Clouseau; New Orleans. References Barrios, Richard. Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall. London: Routledge, 2003.
Hadleigh, Boze. Hollywood Lesbians. New York: Barricade Books, 1994. Liaut, Jean-Noël. Hubert de Givenchy: Entre vies et légendes. Paris: Grasset, 2000. Palmer, Alexandra. Couture and Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2001.
CARLE, GILLES (1928–) Québécois film director. Born in 1928, in Maniwaki near an Algonquin reservation and partly of native descent, Carle had an upbringing that included the plural and hybrid elements of Quebec culture: Catholicism, American popular culture such as country and western via the radio, and the multiculturalism of the Abitibi region, recently opened up for internal “colonization” and immigration from abroad. Indeed, in his prolific output of fifteen features, notably in those films he scripted himself, Carle tended to take ideas and run with them, skimming a multitude of surfaces. His place in Quebec film history is assured first of all by his role in the emergence of a Quebec popular cinema in the 1960s. An early interest in poetry led to filmmaking and entry into the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada. In 1965 Carle surreptitiously turned an NFB documentary project on snow clearing in Montreal into a fictional feature, a comedy about a quintessential Québécois “little man,” La Vie heureuse de Léopold Z. (The Merry World of Leopold Z.). Taking advantage of the relaxation of censorship and increased resources for the private sector, he followed with Le Viol d’une jeune fille douce (In Trouble in the U.S., 1968), which set a pattern for most of his subsequent features in its baroque and satirical portrait of Quebec
CARLSON, CAROLYN
identity and mores, but in typical 1960s fashion centered on male heterosexual desire and the spectacle of female bodies, a new “popular-erotic” in Quebec cinema. It is this which prevents his 1969 film Red from fulfilling its promise of investigating the native dimension of Quebec identity. In this vein and supported by the production company he founded with Pierre Lamy in 1971, Carle made several highly successful films in the 1970s, five with his then partner Carole Laure. Two of these, La Mort d’un bûcheron (The Death of a Lumberjack, 1973) and Fantastica (1980), along with the macho countercultural comedy Les Mâles (The Men, 1970) and La Vraie Nature de Bernadette (The True Nature of Bernadette, 1972), which explores the reversibility and ambiguity of Catholic notions of sainthood and the contemporary vogue for a “return to nature,” figure among the top twenty box-office successes for Québécois films in France. This success has been explained by Carle’s presentational skills, his assiduous promotion in person of his films in France, his niche marketing of himself to certain sections of the French media as a “left-wing” director, and his courtship of the ciné-club network and its journals Cinéma and Revue du cinéma, which sought to distinguish themselves from Positif and Cahiers du cinéma, which ignored Carle altogether. Carle’s fame in France meant he was an appropriate choice for two lavish FrancoQuébécois coproductions of the early 1980s based on literary best-sellers. Les Plouffe (The Plouffe Family, 1981), based on the novel by Roger Lemelin about a working-class family in Quebec City on the eve of World War II, was an effective piece of cinematic storytelling and spectacle, with accents adjusted and references to
213
the hexagon (and a fleeting appearance by French actress Stéphane Audran) added for the French audience. Maria Chapdelaine (1983), based on the novel by Frenchman Louis Hémon set in rural Quebec at the beginning of the century, again starred Carole Laure in the lead role. Since then Carle has made several documentaries and also fictional features (such as La Postière/The Postmistress, 1992) starring his wife Chloé Sainte-Marie but has failed to repeat his successes of the 1970s and early 1980s. Bill Marshall See also: Cahiers du cinéma; Catholic Church; Hémon, Louis; Laure, Carole; Maria Chapdelaine; Positif; Quebec; World War II. References Coulombe, Michel. Gilles Carle: Le chemin secret du cinéma. Montreal: Liber, 1995. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Prédal, René. “La Vie heureuse, ou la vraie nature de Gilles Carle.” L’Aventure du cinéma québécois en France. Ed. Michel Larouche. Montreal: XYZ, 1996.
CARLSON, CAROLYN (1943–) Appointed director, star dancer, and head of an experimental dance group at the Paris Opera in 1974, Carolyn Carlson became the first modern American dancer to reign at the opera, defying a centuries-old tradition. Born in Fresno, California, to parents of Finnish origin, Carlson began her dance career with studies at the University of Utah and the San Francisco School of Ballet. She toured six years with Alwin Nikolais, modern dance multimedia pioneer, and served as his emblem figure between 1964 and 1971. While she was a member of the Nikolais company, she received the
214
CARMEN
Meilleur Danseur award at the International Dance Festival in Paris in 1968. After moving to Paris in 1971, she briefly joined the company of Anne Béranger, with whom she performed until 1973, and there Carlson created her first choreographies: Rituel pour un rêve mort (Ritual for a Dead Dream), Aux quatre coins (To the Four Corners), and Verfangen. During this period she worked with the Mudra School run by Maurice Béjart in Brussels, as well as the London School of Contemporary Dance. In 1974, she met Rolf Lieberman, director of the Paris Opera, and was appointed as the first modern choreographer in residence at the opera, with duties to perform modern dance and to head the Group of Theater Research for the Paris Opera House (GRTOP). From 1974 to 1980, Carlson held the title of etoile-chorégraphe (star choreographer) of the opera and collaborated with lighting designer John Davis on a series of unique works for GRTOP that she has termed “visual poetry.” Such works as X-Land, a solo for dancer Paolo Bortaluzzi based on improvisation, featured new aesthetic and plastic qualities for dance by portraying in static poses the development of everyday gestures. Other works, such as L’Or des fous, created less than a year after Carlson’s arrival, contained elements blended from American modern dance, including acoustic effects, the human voice communicating inarticulate sounds and stammering, and movement. Carlson herself appeared as a dancer, making use of stark, enigmatic movements to evoke a white-masked, estranged heroine, unaware of her fellow dancers’ goings-on. Carlson performed at the Teatro Danza La Fenice in Venice between 1980 and 1984, choreographing such works as
Chalk Work to music by Wakevitch and Blue Lady to music by René Aubry, a work that blended choreography with a religious serenity and has been performed in forty countries. Believing that choreography is not limited to steps, Carlson has never stopped revolutionizing her dance. From 1985 to 1991 she returned to Paris, creating at the Théâtre de la Ville such works as Shamrock, set to music by Gabriel Yared, and Steppe and Going Home, set to music by Aubry, and collaborating with Robert Wilson on the jazz opera Cosmopolitan Greeting. In 1994, Carlson and Pierre Barnier formed L’Atelier de Paris Carolyn Carlson in the Cartoucherie near the Bois de Vincennes. Spiritual Warriors, a collection of solo works, was choreographed and performed by Carlson and contemporaries at the L’Atelier in 2000. She simultaneously served as director of dance for the Venice Biennale from 1999 to 2002 and has received the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (2000), preceded by that of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres (1985) by the French government. In 2002, she received the Médaille de Vermeil de la Ville de Paris. Pamela Gay-White See also: Dance; Jazz; Music (Classical). References Bremser, Martha. “Carolyn Carlson.” Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. Veronica Turnbull. London: Gale, 1999: 55–58. Macaire, Alain. Interview with Carolyn Carlson. Paris: Théâtre de la Ville, 1986. Schneider, Katja. “Carolyn Carlson.” Ballettanz. (September 2002): 200.
CARMEN An opera (1875) by Georges Bizet (based on a 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée)
CARMEN
215
Bizet's Carmen proved an attractive subject for adaptation by American filmmakers. Here is a motion picture scene from 1921 of Pola Negri in “Gypsy Blood.” (Library of Congress)
that has been frequently adapted by American filmmakers. It proved particularly popular in the silent era, with six adaptations: later film and TV versions married Bizet’s tunes to contemporary American styles. In its tale of the fatal love of a bourgeois soldier from the north of Spain (which in turn implied its close neighbor France) for a Gypsy woman from the oriental South, Bizet’s Carmen popularized the fascination expressed by the French romantics for Spanish exoticism and primi-
tivism. In the burgeoning film industry of the early twentieth century, Carmen fitted the need for familiar stories and also the desire to attract more upmarket audiences into the cinema. U.S. film companies seized the opportunity to make some of the best-known versions of Carmen in silent film. Since the opera remained in copyright, however, filmmakers usually cited Mérimée’s novella as the main source in order to avoid legal problems, even while drawing on Bizet for plot, character, and accompanying music. Most notable among
216
CARON, LESLIE
the early American film versions is Cecil B. DeMille’s Carmen (1915), which used an opera star (Geraldine Farrar) rather than a film star to give the film greater highbrow impact. Other versions included Raoul Walsh’s Carmen (1915), which came out at the same time as the DeMille (with film vamp Theda Bara in the title role); Charlie Chaplin’s parody of DeMille in Burlesque on Carmen (1916); Walsh’s second attempt at the story with The Loves of Carmen (1927, with Dolores del Río); and a Max Sennett comedy, The Campus Carmen (Goulding, 1928). Even Disney made a version in 1930, Chile con Carmen (Lantz/Nolan). In 1948 Charles Vidor’s The Loves of Carmen became a star vehicle for Rita Hayworth and the focus of a heavy merchandising campaign to tie in with the film. Publicity emphasized that the film was not based on the opera, and the film’s stress on Gypsy customs points to the ethnological final chapter of Mérimée’s novella. Otto Preminger’s 1954 film adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical Carmen Jones, with an all-black cast (including star Dorothy Dandridge), caused controversy in France. Hammerstein used Bizet’s music but with lyrics sung in a supposedly black style, which some sectors of the French press felt debased the original. Their debate assumed that the film could only be valued in terms of French cultural heritage rather than on its own, American terms. The Bizet estate banned the film from being shown in France (at Cannes in 1955 it could only be shown out of competition), and only with the lapse of copyright in 1981 did the film receive a general French release. Later American Carmen films dipped into soft porn (Radley Metzger’s Carmen,
Baby, 1967) or lesbianism (Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts, 1986, which makes a nod to the opera). Carmen also made its way into TV cartoon fare, as in the Tom and Jerry cartoon Carmen Get It! (Deitch, 1962), in which the cat chases the mouse around an opera house during a performance of Bizet; or in the cartoon show The Simpsons, where the Simpsons go to the opera in an attempt to imbibe high culture. The most recent American film version to date is the MTV film Carmen: A HipHopera (Townsend, 2001), starring Beyoncé Knowles of the band Destiny’s Child in the leading role. The film uses rap lyrics set to Bizet’s melodies. Ann Davies See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Hip-Hop Music and Culture; Mérimée, Prosper; Music (Classical); Pornography; Primitivism; Remakes. References Baldwin, James. “Life Straight in De Eye.” Commentary 19, no. 1 (January 1955): 74–77. Batchelor, Jennifer. “From Aida to Zauberflöte.” Screen 25, no. 3 (May–June 1984): 26–38. McClary, Susan. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
CARON, LESLIE (1931–) Born in Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside Paris, Leslie Caron made her name as a Hollywood star in Hollywood musicals playing French ingenues. A classically trained ballerina, she was introduced to Gene Kelly, who had seen her dancing in the Champs Elysées Ballet and was seeking a replacement for the pregnant Cyd Charisse for his next film, An American in
CARPENTIER, ALEJO
Paris. This film was to make Caron a star in 1951, and she repeated her success in Lili (Walters, 1953), with Fred Astaire in Daddy Long Legs (Negulesco, 1955), and in Gigi (Minnelli, 1958). These roles fixed Caron’s star image as emblematic of a waiflike French femininity. Less overtly erotic than Bardot (who trained as a ballet dancer with Caron and who took America by storm in 1957), she nonetheless offered the sexual promise of the femme-enfant. This was a type of youthful femininity that chimed with the times on both sides of the Atlantic: the gamine incarnated by stars such as Audrey Hepburn in Hollywood and Françoise Arnoul and Bardot in France. Caron’s transatlantic connections also extend to her private life. Her mother, also a ballet dancer, was American. Caron cites her mother’s ambition as the motivating force behind her success: she was sent to ballet school from the age of nine. Caron’s first husband was also American: she married George Hormel, the heir to the Spam fortune, at the age of twenty, but the marriage lasted only a short time, and they were divorced in 1954. Later on, the press cited her affair with Warren Beatty as the cause of her divorce from Peter Hall in 1966, but Caron herself refers to her frustration at the limitations her marriage placed on her career. Caron’s star persona was so closely identified with the gamine of her early musical roles that when she decided to give up dancing for health reasons in the late 1950s, she struggled to break into nonmusical dramatic roles. She did succeed, however, and her career has comprised many different kinds of roles and has succeeded in continuing her acting career well into middle age and beyond, in
217
films including Father Goose, with Cary Grant (Nelson, 1964), and the gangster film, Chandler (Magwood, 1971). Caron has been nominated for two Academy Awards, the first for Lili and the second for her role as an unmarried pregnant woman in the British film, The L-Shaped Room (Forbes, 1962). Most recently, she has played roles in the British-American coproductions Funny Bones, with Jerry Lewis (Chelsom, 1995) and Chocolat (Hallström, 2000), with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, and in the FrancoAmerican Le Divorce (Ivory, 2003). Caron has also had a considerable career in television in the United States and in France, including a recent adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express (2001). It is perhaps emblematic of cinematic constructions of femininity that in spite of the diversity of her roles and the fact that she continues to work today, Caron is still best known on both sides of the Atlantic as Gigi. Sarah Leahy See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Binoche, Juliette; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Dance; Kelly, Gene. References Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Parish, James Robert, and Ronald L. Bowers. The MGM Stock Company: The Golden Era. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973.
CARPENTIER, ALEJO (1904–1980) Writer, historian, and musicologist, Alejo Carpentier is best known for novels such as El Reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Los Pasos perdidos
218
CARPENTIER, ALEJO
(The Lost Steps, 1952). A Cuban national who wrote in Spanish, Carpentier is linked to France through ancestry, through long sections of his life spent in Paris, and through the recurring analysis in his novels of France’s historical presence in the Caribbean. Born in Havana in 1904, the son of a French father and a Russian (Swisseducated) mother, Carpentier spent most of his childhood in Cuba, growing up to work as a journalist for the left-wing antigovernment paper Carteles, an activity that culminated in eventual exile in 1928. Carpentier spent the next eleven years in Paris, where he began to explore his dual cultural heritage, not only frequenting the French surrealists but also becoming increasingly preoccupied with the question of how a progressive Latin American identity might be expressed on both an individual and collective level. His first novel, ¡EcueYamba-O! (1933), reflects an idealized vision of the Americas, his (Afro) Cuban protagonist representing the vitality, optimism, and hybridity that Carpentier and other indigenista writers felt were fundamentally lacking in an increasingly desperate and decadent Europe. The outbreak of war and his claim that French culture had completely stopped influencing him led Carpentier to return to Cuba in 1939. (He would leave again for political reasons in 1945, living in Venezuela for the next thirteen years.) His literary project at this point can be described as an investigation into the inadequacy of European thought, ideology, and practice in the essentially magical context of the Americas, from the eighteenth century to the present day. Thus El Reino de este mundo analyzes, from the point of view of the fantastically metamorphosing
slave Ti Noel, the nefarious presence of the French plantation owners in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue, their eradication by the Vodun-inspired new Haitian Republic, and their lingering destructive influence in the shape of new black dictators like King Henri Christophe. Los Pasos perdidos observes the wretchedness of both twentieth-century U.S. capitalism and French existentialism in the face of the nonsystematized timelessness of the Latin American jungle. The historical epic El Siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral, 1959) attacks the utter failure of the French to be faithful to their revolution in the context of the Caribbean, focusing in particular on the hypocritical actions of eighteenth-century French political charlatan Victor Hugues, first abolishing slavery in the Antilles and then reinstigating it when Bonaparte commanded. Carpentier returned to Cuba in 1959 upon the revolution’s victory, becoming Cuban cultural ambassador in Paris. His writing increasingly explored Latin American identity as a fragmented or “baroque” experience, in which any concept of origins becomes impossible to sustain, an idea explored through the metaphor of music in the short novel Concierto barroco (Baroque Concert, 1974). Carpentier died in Paris in 1980. Andrew Asibong See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Christophe, Henri; French Revolution; Haiti; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Venezuela; Vodun; World War II. References González Echevarría, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Harvey, Sally. Carpentier’s Proustian Fiction: The Influence of Marcel Proust on Alejo Carpentier. London: Tamesis, 1994.
CARTIER, JACQUES
CARREFOUR For the latter years of the Third Republic, France was the classic land of the small shopkeeper. This sector thrived in the interwar and then the immediate postwar years, but the trente glorieuses years of economic expansion after 1945 put paid to what was a marginal sector of the economy, though not without considerable political upheaval. Discontent at the difficulties faced by small shopkeepers was expressed through the Poujade movement, but also the various shopkeepers’ representatives (like Gérard Nicoud) had substantial political weight. The upshot was that planning laws prevented the rapid development of supermarket retailing in France, and it lagged behind other European countries until the late 1960s. The first into the breach was Edouard Leclerc’s chain of supermarkets that sold to the public at a discount. They were very successful because of their competitive prices, and Leclerc was soon followed by other retailers. Thus in the 1970s the French retail sector developed the massive American-style hypermarché (hypermarket) that could be as large as 22,000 square meters, led by the Carrefour chain, which dominates the sector but is far from alone. Carrefour, through huge turnover (shifting lots of goods), kept prices low, but their shops were at once gigantic and attractive, designed for areas where driving rather than walking was the primary mode of transportation and located strategically on the periphery of the major towns. Carrefour was founded in 1959 by Marcel Fournier and Defforey, who opened their first shop in Annecy in Haute-Savoie. Their first hypermarché, with twelve checkouts and 400 parking places, opened in 1963 in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bains. In
219
1975 it started to sell “generic” unbranded goods at a discount, and it expanded, taking over other retailers and branching out, as well as setting up more stores in France and abroad. In 2002 it was the first retailer in Europe and the second worldwide, with 9,632 outlets in some thirty countries (in seven of which it was the leading retailer), and there were 45 hypermarchés in the French group by the year 2000. In 1982 Carrefour opened in Argentina and then Brazil, and by 2002 it also had stores in Chile, Mexico, and Colombia, giving it 154 outlets in the Americas as a whole. To a certain extent the mass-market supermarket has developed further in France than in other European countries, and many British citizens use the Eurostar or the Channel Tunnel to shop at the Carrefour in Lille. However, the standardization and homogenization (sometimes called “Americanization”) of this type of retail has not materialized, and variety and distinctiveness have been retained, even as the small local shop has died out. David Bell See also: Argentina; Chile; Mexico; World War II. Reference Ardagh, John. France Today. London: Penguin, 1990: 380–382.
CARTIER, JACQUES (1491–1557) French explorer. Cartier was not the first Frenchman to sail to what is now called Canada, but the royal expeditions he led there (1534– 1542), the third notionally under the command of Jean-François de la Roque, seigneur de Roberval, included the first French attempt at American colonization.
220
CARTIER, JACQUES
It failed, like those that followed in Brazil and Florida. Not until 1608, with Samuel de Champlain’s foundation of Quebec, was a lasting French colony established. François I was determined not to let the Spanish and Portuguese monopolize the New World. In the 1530s he persuaded Pope Clement VIII to concede that the 1493 “Papal Donation” of that world to those two powers applied only to lands that were already known and effectively occupied. Giovanni da Verrazzano had sent François I a report of his 1524 voyage along the eastern coast of the American continent as far north as Newfoundland. Bretons from Saint-Malo had been fishing off Newfoundland since at least the late fifteenth century. In 1534 François I sent Cartier with two ships to explore the hinterland of Newfoundland: they sailed on April 20. Cartier, born in 1491, was a master mariner from Saint-Malo who had already visited Newfoundland and possibly Brazil. The aim at this stage was not colonial settlement but the discovery of gold, other precious materials, and the northwest passage to the Orient that Europeans had sought since Columbus’s voyages. Cartier sailed into the Strait of Belle Isle and soon turned south, charting the west coast of Newfoundland and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, which he then crossed westward, skirting round the Magdalens and Prince Edward Island. Turning north along the coast of New Brunswick, he entered Chaleur Bay, thinking for a while that it might be the northwest passage. Having reached the Gaspé Peninsula but having missed the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, he arrived back in France on September 5. During this 1534 expedition, the first recorded encounters between Euro-
peans and Iroquoian-speaking people took place. On the north shore of Chaleur Bay, the French encountered some Micmac, with whom they traded ironware for furs. Then, in Gaspé Harbor, they came across an approximately 300-strong fishing party from the group of Saint Lawrence Iroquoians who have come to be known as Stadaconans, since they were based in and around Stadacona (the site of present-day Quebec City). Cartier compelled the two sons (Taignoagny and Domagaya) of the Stadaconan headman (Donnacona) to return with him to France so that they could become interpreters and informants. Donnacona seemed to consent, whether because he had no choice or because he wished to secure a trading alliance with the French. Cartier reported back to François I, and although no gold or northwest passage had been found, the king instructed Cartier to continue trying, partly enticed by the captives’ accounts of the native copper trade. A second, better-resourced expedition left Saint-Malo on May 19, 1535. Entering the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the same place as in 1534, they charted its north coast as far as Anticosti Island, and this time, guided by Taignoagny and Domagaya, sailed into the Saint Lawrence River, where they were reunited with Donnacona and then reached Stadacona. They had reached the region that Cartier understood as “Canada”: it stretched along the Saint Lawrence from roughly where the freshwater begins (at Grosse Ile) to halfway between present-day Quebec City and Trois-Rivières. The French noted that the term “Canada,” meaning “village,” was part of the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians’ vocabulary. The safe return of Donnacona’s sons was welcomed, but the Stadaconans
CARTIER, JACQUES
221
Jacques Cartier's first interview with the Indians at Hochelaga, now Montreal, in 1535. (Library of Congress)
seem to have become more mistrustful once Taignoagny and Domagaya told them about France, and especially when they revealed Cartier’s intention of sailing further up the Saint Lawrence to contact the other group of Iroquoians in the region, based in the large town of Hochelaga (present-day Montreal). Although Cartier thought that the Stadaconans were subjects of the Hochelagans, in fact the two were probably just distinct, hostile tribes or groups of villages. Donnacona tried at length to dissuade Cartier from going to Hochelaga: this is the first recorded example of an Indian group in eastern North America trying to secure the lucrative position of middleman in the trading of European goods with the interior. Cartier, uncomprehending of Iroquoian diplomacy, unwittingly rejected the alliance offered and continued to Hochelaga, arriving on October 2 (Octo-
ber 13, modern calendar), on the southern shore of present-day Montreal Island. Aspects of his brief visit, such as his ascent of Mount Royal or his reading the Gospel to Indians, have become legendary. He returned to his base on the Saint Charles River near Stadacona. In December, almost all the French got scurvy; twenty-five died, but the rest were cured by a brew that two women, sent by Domagaya, showed them how to prepare. In May 1536 Cartier kidnapped Donnacona, his two sons, and others, returning to France with them and two young Iroquoian girls whom he had received as tokens of alliance. None of the ten taken ever returned to Canada. By about 1541, all but one were dead. Donnacona had told Cartier about a “Kingdom of the Saguenay” in the interior, full of gold and rubies. He said he had seen one-legged peoples, plus others who lacked anuses and ate no solids. Perhaps hoping
222
CARTIER-BRESSON, HENRI
that this would help their chances of returning, Donnacona and his fellow captives talked up all of this to an impressed François I, who sponsored a third voyage, this time with the intent of establishing a colonial settlement. The king hoped to find spices and gold and silver mines and to profit from the nascent fur trade. The search for the northwest passage had now been displaced by greater focus on the interior. With one eye on the Pope and on Iberian hostility to his plans, François I made the conversion of Indians to Christianity an official aim. Command of the expedition was given to Roberval, with Cartier as second in command. Cartier left first, on May 23, 1541, with five ships, this time including women; the men ranged from felons to nobles. They admitted to the Stadaconans that Donnacona was dead but claimed that the other nine were all living the life of lords in France. From his subsequent actions, it seems that Agona, the new headman, did not believe them. Cartier built a fortified settlement 9 miles upstream from Stadacona, calling it Charlesbourg-Royal. Crops were planted and cattle unloaded from the ships. The surrounding Indians experienced this behavior as a provocation, since no permission had been requested for this use of the land. They ceased bartering and started a war of attrition against the French, picking them off when they ventured outside the settlement, killing some thirty-five over the winter. The Hochelagans became hostile too. By June 1542, with still no sign of Roberval, the colonists gave up, sailing to Saint John’s Harbor in Newfoundland, where Cartier encountered Roberval but, disobeying the latter’s orders, continued back to France. The “diamonds” and “gold” that he thought he was bringing
back with him turned out to be quartz and iron pyrite. Cartier died in 1557. Firsthand accounts of all three voyages exist, probably composed wholly or partly by Cartier himself. They are ship journals and reports to the king on topography and natural resources: their descriptions of “savages” are overtly instrumental rather than aiming at any ideal of ethnographic objectivity. Only the account of the second voyage was printed in French in Cartier’s lifetime, in 1545, once the enterprise’s failure meant that there was no point in secrecy. The account of the first voyage was first published in Italian translation in 1556; that of the third voyage is known only in a truncated English version (1600). Neil Kenny See also: Brazil; Champlain, Samuel de; Florida; François I, King of France; Fur Trade; Montreal; Quebec; Roberval, JeanFrançois de la Roque, Seigneur de; Saint Lawrence River; Saint-Malo; Verrazzano, Giovanni da. References Cartier, Jacques. The Voyages. Trans. H. P. Biggar, intro. Ramsay Cook. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Hoffman, Bernard G. Cabot to Cartier: Sources for a Historical Ethnography of Northeastern North America, 1497–1550. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Trudel, Marcel. The Beginnings of New France, 1524–1663. Trans. P. Claxton. Toronto: Clelland and Stewart, 1973, chaps. 2–3.
CARTIER-BRESSON, HENRI (1908–2004) Artist and photographer. Henri Cartier-Bresson began his artistic life as a student of painting and surrealism. Born in Chanteloup, France, he was first attracted by the ideas of the surrealist
CARTIER-BRESSON, HENRI
223
Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs the streets of Brooklyn from beneath the Brooklyn Bridge (1946). His work in Brooklyn was chronicled in a photographic essay for Harper's Bazaar magazine. (Genevieve Naylor/Corbis)
movement at its very beginnings, in the early 1920s. He studied for a time under the painter and sculptor André Lhote (1885–1962) and always maintained his practice of drawing. It was in 1931 in Africa that he first took up photography as a medium for his images, adopting in 1932 his trademark Leica, an unobtrusive 35mm rangefinder camera. It was the beginning of a long and productive relationship of man and machine.
Cartier-Bresson is perhaps best known for a style of reportage photography for which he coined the phrase “The Decisive Moment” in a publication by that name in 1952. He accomplished, however, much more. After his first exhibition of photographs in 1933, he traveled to North America, first to Mexico, where he exhibited with photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Cartier-Bresson then traveled to New York, where he learned filmmaking
224
CASSATT, MARY
with Paul Strand (1890–1976), already famous for his early modernist film Mannahatta (1921) with painter Charles Scheeler and his proletariat film The Wave (1933). Cartier-Bresson returned to Europe, where he began to make films even while he continued to photograph for news agencies and picture magazines like Verve and Life. He spent three years of World War II in captivity (1940–1943), escaping finally on his third attempt. Work began immediately on a new set of portraits, this time of French luminaries like Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Matisse, even while he joined the resistance movement and helped other escaped prisoners. He again spent a year in the United States in 1946, traveling, photographing, and working for a large exhibition at the Modern Museum of Art in New York. At the time, it was widely believed to be a posthumous exhibition and that Cartier-Bresson had died in captivity. Rumors of his death notwithstanding, he founded, together with Robert Capa (1913–1954), David “Chim” Seymour (1911–1956), William Vandivert, and George Rodger (1908–1995), the Magnum photographic cooperative in 1947— the only international cooperative of freelance photographers. Cartier-Bresson’s artistic life burgeoned as he traveled the world, documenting the death of Mohandas Gandhi and the birth of the People’s Republic of China, as well as street life at home in Paris. In 1970 he married photographer Martine Franck and began to devote more time to his drawing. He retired from photography in 1975, the same year of his first exhibition of drawings, to turn wholly to his selfproclaimed first love of drawing. Kelley Wilder
See also: Mexico; Photography; World War II. References Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment: Photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. Montier, Jean-Pierre. Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.
CASSATT, MARY (1844–1926) American painter. The second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries saw a huge influx of American artists and writers to Paris. They built on a tradition of “returning to cultural sources” popular since the late eighteenth century, and this in turn was based on the “grand tour” of earlier times. Mary Cassatt is one of the more notable artists who went from the United States to Paris. Her painting career really took off in the 1870s. After periods spent in Spain and Italy, she returned to Paris and joined the “independents,” better known to us now as the impressionists (later on, she would play a crucial part in encouraging the collection of impressionism in the United States). Art history has had scant place for women artists before the twentieth century, and her exceptionality (along with that of Berthe Morisot) covers the occlusion of a great number of women artists notable in their day. Cassatt almost invariably portrayed women of the period (1870s to 1900, principally) and showed them in domestic settings or, more accurately, in the spaces women were actually occupying at the time. Art history has tended to reduce her work to a variant of genre painting, but since feminist art historians’ work in the 1970s, her more formal and “social-
CATHER,WILLA
At the Opera by Mary Cassatt. Cassatt was one of the more notable American painters who went to Paris. (Burstein Collection/ Corbis)
critical” practices have been readdressed. Cassatt shows women as subjects rather than as objects of painting, or even as exemplifying a particular social group. This is done through the peculiar proximity of the scenes shown, which position the artist and viewer as female (in contrast to Edouard Manet’s critical use of male positioning). Her work shows experimentation in content and form, in the use of color as a formal tool but also in terms of the realization of the depiction. Cassatt, argues Griselda Pollock, does not simply show us women (she was scathing about “lady’s art” while being part of the suffrage movement) but the women of modernity—where they were, how they dressed, how they relate to one another. Her scenes of mothers and children could be misread as representing something timeless, but could better be read as statements about communication,
225
feminine sociality, and class (as we see women from all classes and how they relate to the interior spaces). One work often cited is Little Girl in an Armchair (1878), wherein a small child slumps sullenly on a blue chair, in a still room filled with blue chairs. Such a picture is not just a depiction of a class milieu but offers a formalized modernist take on that milieu. Similarly, At the Opera (1878) ties in with the modernist radicalization of vision. Rather than being the object of the male gaze, the central female figure looks intently through binoculars, away from the viewer. The theater and opera represented a form of public space accessible to women, and Cassatt shows, in this and a range of pictures set in the theater, but with varying representational and formal strategies, the possibilities of occupying that space as a subject. Paul Hegarty See also: Feminisms; Painting. References Garb, Tamar. “Gender and Representation.” Modernity and Modernism. Ed. Francis Frascina et al. New Haven/London: Yale University Press/Open University, 1993. Pollock, Griselda. Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.
CATHER,WILLA (1873–1947) American writer, born near Winchester, Virginia, who wrote about the European immigrant pioneer and French religion and culture in North America. Cather’s move from Virginia to Nebraska marks her early pioneer novels (O Pioneers! and My Ántonia) and short stories about life on the American Divide, where Cather’s subjects suffer from economic hardship and cultural deprivation.
226
CATHER,WILLA
Willa Sibert Cather (1873–1947), American novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner. Cather wrote about the European immigrant pioneer, French religion, and culture in North America. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Cather grew up a Methodist, believing fundamentally that art was a temple and community builder. A descendant of two Southern families that fought each other in the American Civil War, Cather recounts the same struggle among European families during World War I in One of Ours (1922), just as she laments family and social division over emancipation in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Cather began writing and editing drama and theater criticism at college, where she read William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry James, after whom she modeled her early works. Cather worked as a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh and then was editor for McClure’s magazine and Alfred Knopf in New York. There, she enjoyed Wagnerian opera, which influenced her
most autobiographical novel, The Song of the Lark (1915). Other celebrated works include meditations on art and religion, such as her collection, Youth and the Bright Medusa (a.k.a. The Troll Garden, 1905); Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), recounting the journeys of French missionaries in North America; and her Quebec novel, Shadows on the Rock (1931), exploring the civilizing effect of Catholicism. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel One of Ours, an American fights in the Battle of Verdun and both dies for mankind and lives out his own version of the Christian martyrs’ sacrifices. On the verge of death, Cather’s alter ego finds himself as much enraptured by the landscape and music as by the loss of human life. The work remains an elegy for Provence, with which Cather had a lifelong, long-distance love affair. On her first journey there, Cather decided to quit journalism for the life of an author, and an early work, written in Avignon, about medieval heroism there inspired this love of France and last work, destroyed posthumously by her forty-year companion, Edith Lewis. The French and European influence on Cather’s work is vast and various. Early stories discuss poor youth (“Paul’s Case”) yearning for the music of a European past, such as that of Jules Massenet’s “repetitions of the Blue Danube” and Pietro Mascagni’s “Intermezzo” from Cavalleria Rusticana. American immigrants from Sweden, France, Norway, and Bohemia live and die for their art, and Thea Kronborg, the artistic heroine of The Song of the Lark, sings Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler (Lohengrin and Woglinde). Cather died at her home in New York City from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1947.
CATHOLIC CHURCH
Four volumes of short stories and two volumes of Cather’s critical essays were collected posthumously in The Kingdom of Art (1966). Erna Cooper See also: American Civil War; Catholic Church; James, Henry; World War I. References O’Brien, Sharon. Cather: Stories, Poems and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1992. Porter, David H. “Cather on Cather II: Two Recent Acquisitions at Drew University.” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation Newsletter and Review 46, no. 3 (2003): 53–58.
CATHOLIC CHURCH Catholicism, an export of the Spanish and French colonial governments, had a definitive role in the formation and creation of the religious, cultural, and political life of the colonies and subsequent nations in the Americas. Spanish colonies in the Americas were dominated by the Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism was the only faith tolerated, and large numbers of missionaries and regular clergy went to the colonies with the primary mission of converting the native population. Unlike Catholic dominance in South and Central America, in North America Catholic influence was mainly concentrated in the North, where French explorers and traders settled much of eastern Canada and the United States, bringing with them the Catholic faith. From 1535, when Jacques Cartier explored the valley of the Saint Lawrence River, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region was colonized by French Catholics. By the mideighteenth century, the Catholic population in Canada numbered more than
227
60,000. The dominance of the Catholic Church was particularly evident in its control over the colonies’ cultural and social life. One of the defining aspects of New French settlements was the ongoing battle for control between the French Jesuits and the French colonial government, although the French court supported the church missionary effort. In seventeenth-century France, the state gave the Catholic Church responsibility for education and health care. Therefore, the Catholic Church had a central role in establishing the institutional framework in New France. Before New France had a parish, it had schools, hospitals, and a college run by the church. Founded in 1635, the Jesuits College at Quebec City was the first postsecondary educational institution north of Mexico. However, French colonial efforts were aimed at organizing trade more than settlement. The lack of desire among colonists to settle land, as well as the fact that colonizers were mainly single males (primarily trappers) who often intermarried with the natives, reduced conflicts with the latter. Some French trappers adopted native beliefs, customs, and practices once they married in, but the French government was more tolerant than the Spanish government of non-Catholic and native practices. Although Quebec City, the largest settlement, was founded in 1608 as a missionary town, from the beginning the more secular governmental authorities fought with the Catholic Church for control. The arrival in 1659 of Bishop François de Laval increased the tension between civil and religious officials, particularly over the brandy trade. By the end of the 1750s, Britain or Spain took over all the French territories in North America. In the main French cities—Quebec, Montreal, New Orleans,
228
CATHOLIC CHURCH
and Detroit—French Catholics, wary of foreigners, retreated into their communities. Church and family were at the center of social life. The destruction of New France by British colonization and subsequent attempts to overrun the Roman Catholic population meant that Catholicism was integrated into cultural and national identity. To keep the French Canadians onside as the American colonies headed toward revolution, in 1774 the British parliament passed the Quebec Act, which guaranteed the preservation of the French Civil Code and the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec. Before the British conquest of Quebec, there was no printing press in French Canada, and all public and social activities (theater was often censored) were closely controlled by the Catholic Church. However, writing about New France was abundant, and substantial amounts of colonial literature, mainly concerning exploration and travel, were published in France for European readers. Well into the twentieth century, imported cultural “products” (music, literature, theater, artistic styles, fashion, and social habits) from France inhabited the cultural space of French Canada. The Catholic Church supported this position of hegemony. In contrast to the conflicts between state and religion in the French colonies, religious motivation was one of the reasons the English founded colonies. William Penn founded Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers, and Lord Baltimore founded Maryland as a refuge for Catholics. John Carroll, a representative of a notable colonial Catholic family, was the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States and the first archbishop of Baltimore. Under his leadership, the Roman Catholic
Church became firmly established in the United States. Carroll was a pioneer in exploring positive relations between Catholic religionists and their fellow citizens. In New Orleans the Cathedral of Saint Louis, king of France, rededicated in 1794 after the fire of 1788, is the oldest continuously active Roman Catholic cathedral in the United States. Even more than churches as institutions, educational institutions, including the parish schools, were an important factor in preserving and spreading Catholicism in North America. In the United States, elementary and secondary schools were formed late in the nineteenth century because Catholic leaders feared Protestant influences in public schools. These Catholic agencies helped reconcile the civic (acceptance of the United States as a state) and the religious (belonging to Rome as a religious center). During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church increased the number of missions among the native peoples of both the United States and Canada and extended the already strong Catholic presence established through French colonial governance in Haiti and the French Caribbean. At the end of the seventeenth century, France took Haiti from Spain and developed it as a thriving slave trade colony. Catholicism was the official religion there, but voodoo was a widely accepted practice. In the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in French Canada struggled with British attempts to convert their parishioners to Protestantism and the British political doctrine of assimilating the French nation, which they considered “inferior.” The Catholic Church played an important role in preserving the French nation in Canada. In 1834 the Saint Jean Baptiste
CATHOLIC CHURCH
Society, a French Canadian patriotic association, was founded with the mission of defending the linguistic and cultural heritage of French Catholics. From the 1960s onward, the society was primarily concerned with Quebec separatism. The rebellions of 1837 in Lower Canada (Quebec) were a response to attempts at the cultural elimination of the French nation and Roman Catholic Church from Canada. From the 1840s onward, the Catholic Church slowly started to regain control, and the clergy assumed considerable power. By using education and the press to reach people, the Catholic Church became the driving force behind French Canadian nationalism. For the clerical and professional elite, the acceptable social order was regulated by the Roman Catholic Church. Agriculture was the foundation of social and material life, and the family was the central social institution, whereas commercial endeavors were held in contempt. The contrast between the Protestant idea of acquiring money and wealth through work and Catholicism’s emphasis on the religious mission remained an important social, cultural, and political division between anglophone and francophone communities. Henri Bourassa, one of the key leaders of the Quebec nationalist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, sought to find a way for bilingual coexistence to develop within the confederation of French and English in Canada. Bourassa believed that the province of Quebec by its origin and tradition was home to the idea of social Catholicism and as such could continue to preserve and spread the Catholic faith throughout Canada and America. This idea of Quebec as a bastion of Catholicism having an impact on other Catholic communities in the Americas re-
229
flects a colonial past where religious and cultural protectionism was an outcome of conflict with other religions and nations over land and power. A crisis in the institutions of the Catholic Church in Quebec occurred when Maurice Duplessis was leader of Quebec’s conservative Union nationale and premier of the province for most of the period 1936–1960. He and his party were vehicles for clerical nationalism, a conservative ideology that emphasized agriculture and traditional values that profoundly marked twentieth-century Quebec. During that period, children born to unmarried parents were left in the care of Catholic religious orders that operated orphanages, and during Duplessis’s premiership, a child abuse scandal broke. The “Duplessis orphans” case was widely recognized as the largest case of institution-based child abuse (in many cases sexual abuse) in Canadian history. The Catholic Church lost significant power and followers during the period of the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s. Quebec’s inherited suspicion regarding the real desire of English Canada to assimilate Catholics into the Protestant anglophone majority was later complemented by new criticism of the French colonial legacy. Moreover, Quebec’s need to have its own culture replaced the traditional concern about the possible disappearance of French culture. The role of the Catholic Church as a provider of the social narrative that helps the French nation in Canada to cohere was replaced by a national identity founded on space and territory. Catholic concerns about the preservation of a religious-national identity were replaced or rather merged with the ideology of the political Left, which led to the emergence of Quebec
230
CÉLINE, LOUIS-FERDINAND
separatist movements that strove for the formation of a new nation in Quebec. This factor led to a shift in the 1980s and 1990s from protectionism to internationalism. Aleksandar Dundjerovic See also: Cartier, Jacques; Duplessis, Maurice; Fur Trade; Guadeloupe; Haiti; Jesuits; Laval, François de Montmorency; Mexico; New France; New Orleans; Quebec; Quebec City; Quiet Revolution; Saint Lawrence River; Saint Martin. References Boland, Raymond J. “The French Connection: The Contribution of French Catholicism to the Church in North America.” http://www.diocese-kcsj.org/ Bishop/French%20Connection.htm (cited April 26, 2004). Dickinson, John, and Brian J. Young. A Short History of Quebec. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press; 2nd ed., 2000. Grescoe, Taras. Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey through Quebec. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter and Ross, 2001. Lippy, Charles, Robert Choquette, and Stafford Poole. Christianity Comes to the Americas: 1492–1776. New York: Paragon House, 1992.
CÉLINE, LOUIS-FERDINAND (1894–1961) Pseudonym of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, a physician and writer whose novels combined searingly iconoclastic and dismal views of humanity with street slang and later anti-Semitism. Born in Courbevoie, a Paris suburb, Destouches was sent abroad to study German and English for a business career. Invalided out of the army with arm injuries, headaches, and a ringing in his head that never left him, he worked in 1916 in Cameroon, where he contracted malaria and dysentery. Returning to France, he received a medical degree from the Univer-
sity of Paris in 1924, ultimately becoming a specialist in public health. In 1925, he left to work for the League of Nations, for whom he traveled to Switzerland, Africa, the United States, Cuba, and Canada. He returned to France to open a medical practice in 1928 and three years later joined the Clichy municipal clinic staff in Paris. While there, Destouches published the critically acclaimed journal Voyage, using his maternal grandmother’s first name, Céline, as a nom-de-plume. Céline’s first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of Night, 1932), recalled his injuries suffered at Ypres with the French army during World War I, his subsequent work for a lumber company in Africa, followed by the study of social medical practice in Ford factories in Detroit, and his return to medical practice in Paris. He later wrote of New York’s urban impersonality and the alienation among Ford assembly-line workers in Detroit. His equally acclaimed second novel, Mort à Crédit (Death on the Installment Plan, 1936), recalled a violent father and a mother stricken with polio who helped support the family by working as a saleswoman. In 1936, Céline met Lucette Almanzor, a dancer eighteen years his junior, who became his third wife and constant companion for the rest of his life. Convinced in late 1937 that an international Jewish conspiracy was plotting another world war, Céline published Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre), a lengthy pamphlet that, along with Ecole des cadavres (School of Corpses, 1938) and Les Beaux Draps (The Fine Mess, 1941), established him as a prominent anti-Semitic polemicist. During the 1940–1944 occupation of France, Céline worked at a dispensary in
CÉLORON
suburban Bezons and continued to write. Guignol’s Band, the last of his autobiographical novels, appeared in 1944. He gave interviews for and published letters in the collaborationist press in Paris. Denounced as a traitor, he fled in 1944 with remnants of the Vichy government to Sigmaringen in Germany and, again, in the spring of 1945 across a devastated Germany to Denmark. Following amnesties of collaborators, Céline returned in 1951 to suburban Paris, where he spent the remainder of his years writing novels, in his disjointed and jaundiced style, about his travels and exile. Céline’s denunciations of war and colonialism and his evocation of the seamier sides of urban life influenced writers such as Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and William Burroughs. Critics have tried to reconcile his literary talent and stylistic innovations with his unrelenting pessimism about humanity and his blistering racism. In addition to denouncing Jews during the occupation, he also publicly criticized—at some personal risk—“Aryan stupidity.” Bertram F. Gordon See also: Burroughs, William S.; World War II. References Buckley, William K., ed. Critical Essays on Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Hewitt, Nicholas. The Golden Age of LouisFerdinand Céline. Leamington Spa, UK/New York: Berg Publishers, 1987. Vitoux, Frédéric. Céline: A Biography. Trans. J. Browner. New York: Paragon House, 1992.
CÉLORON DE BLAINVILLE, PIERRE-JOSEPH (1693–1759) Born in Montreal, grandson of a member of the Canadian nobility, Céloron de
DE
BLAINVILLE, PIERRE-JOSEPH
231
Blainville joined the colonial regulars (troupes de la marine) at age thirteen (1707) and spent most of his life and career with the force. In 1738 he was appointed commander at Michilimackinac. While serving in that capacity, in 1739–1740 he led an expeditionary force of 200 Canadians and thirty aboriginal peoples against the Chickasaw of Upper Louisiana. For his military merits, in 1741 he was awarded the cross of Saint-Louis, the highest military distinction. In 1742 he was transferred to Detroit and from there in 1744 to Fort Niagara. In both instances he was praised by the leaders of the aboriginal nations, but the fur traders accused him of inhibiting their commercial ventures. Recalled from Fort Niagara in 1745, in 1747 he was given command of Fort Saint-Frédéric on Lake Champlain, but soon thereafter, in 1748, he was returned to Detroit to quell an insurrection of the western aboriginal nations. Meanwhile, the Ohio valley was the center stage of the new expansionist policy of the British continental colonies. The area was theoretically under French control, but in practice the British were succeeding in winning over several aboriginal nations through a policy of providing cheaper goods. The French Crown began to envisage the building of a line of fortified posts along the Ohio valley meant to curb British expansion. Céloron de Blainville was given the command of an expeditionary force of 213 men, mostly Canadians, accompanied by a few aboriginal peoples. They left Montreal on June 15, 1749, and for five and a half months they traveled for 3,000 miles toward the west and the south, going as far as the mouth of the Great Miami River (Rivière-à-la-Roche). Céloron de Blainville buried several lead plates claiming the land for France but discovered that a number of
232
CENDRARS, BLAISE
powerful Indian nations, such as the Mingo, Shawnee, and Miami, had been won over by the British. In 1750 Céloron de Blainville was sent back to Detroit as town major, only to be recalled to Montreal in 1751 to serve in the same capacity. Overall, he proved to be better as a soldier than as a civil administrator. His activities during the French and Indian War (1754–1763) are not known. He died in Montreal. Luca Codignola See also: Detroit; French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Lake Champlain; Louisiana; Montreal; Ohio. References McConnell, Michael Norman. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
CENDRARS, BLAISE (FRÉDÉRIC-LOUIS SAUSER) (1887–1961) Swiss-French poet, writer, and adventurer. Known for his quasi-autobiographical and mythopoetic writing, Cendrars (born in La Chaux-de Fonds, Switzerland) populated his picaresque novels and poems with the historic figures, types, and sites of the Americas. It was his trip to the United States in 1911 that resulted in his literary debut with the poem, “Les Pâques à New York” (“Easter in New York,” 1911), his rebirth as Blaise Cendrars, and a new style of writing that critics have called the birth of modern poetry. Le Panama; ou les Aventures de mes sept oncles (Panama and the Adventures of My Seven Uncles, 1918), considered Cendrars’s most original poem, interweaves
adventures in Alaska and Panama with tales from uncles in the New World: a butcher in Galveston, Texas; a chef in Denver, Colorado; and a guide in Patagonia. In 1923, Cendrars met the Brazilian writer Oswaldo de Andrade and his wife, the artist Tarsila do Amaral. At their invitation, he traveled to Brazil in 1924, returning again in 1926 and 1927 and possibly a fourth time in 1928. These trips produced numerous works about the Americas: Kodak (Documentaire) (Kodak [Documentary], 1924), poems about North America; Feuilles de routes (Ocean Letters, 1924), poems about South America originally illustrated by Tarsila; L’Or (Sutter’s Gold, 1925), a novel about the California gold rush; Moravagine (1926), a novel in which half of the adventures occur in the Americas; Dan Yack (1929), a two-part adventure with stops in Antarctica; and Rhum (Rum, 1930), a novel about Jean Galmot in French Guiana. In the 1930s, Cendrars turned to journalism and traveled several more times to New York, including a trip in 1935 during which he gave daily radio reports to French listeners. In 1936, Paris Soir sent him to Hollywood for the Universal Studios premier of Sutter’s Gold, a movie based on his book, after which he returned via the Panama Canal. Cendrars’s long-standing interest in film and in visual conceptions of writing resulted in two books about Hollywood. L’ABC du cinéma (The ABC of Cinema, 1926) and Hollywood: La Mecque du cinéma (Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies, 1936) provide vignettes of the era’s stars and their haunts as well as his critique of the studio system. In other works, he claimed meetings with Charlie Chaplin, wrote about Al Capone, and planned projects on John Paul Jones, the U.S. naval
CERTEAU, MICHEL
commodore during the Revolutionary War, and “Admiral” Jim Fisk, the Erie Railroad tycoon. Cendrars sustained forty-five years of correspondence with Henry Miller, whom he met in 1934, and John Dos Passos, who called Cendrars the “Homer of the Transsiberian,” was an early translator. Cendrars in turn translated Al Jennings’s Through the Shadows with O. Henry and Ferreira de Castro’s A Selva (Virgin Forest ). In two late works, Cendrars returned to the subjects of his early travels: Brésil (Brazil, 1952), a poem originally sent to Tarsila in 1926, and Noël aux quatre coins du monde (Christmas at the Four Corners of the Earth, 1953), with stories about a New York rabbi slaughtering chickens in assembly-line fashion on Christmas Day, New Mexican Indians celebrating with peyote, a Mass of the Cock in Bahia, Brazil, and a mystical countess in Rio de Janeiro. Cendrars died in Paris in 1961. Maureen Shanahan See also: Brazil; Dos Passos, John; Guiana; Miller, Henry Valentine. References Bochner, Jay. Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and Re-creation. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Cendrars, Blaise. Complete Poems. Trans. Ron Padgett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Leamon, Amanda. Shades of Sexuality: Color and Sexual Identity in the Novels of Blaise Cendrars. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.
CERTEAU, MICHEL (1925–1986)
DE
French philosopher and cultural theorist who was spurred by the uprisings of May 1968 into undertaking a philosophy informed by anthropology and sociology as
DE
233
they relate to the quotidian. Certeau’s epistemology of alterity in modernity is exemplary of the turn that both cultural studies and philosophy took after the events of May 1968. Born in Chambéry, Certeau entered the Society of Jesus after studying at the Universities of Grenoble and Lyon. After being ordained in 1956 and completing his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1960, Certeau’s academic interest centered on the study of mysticism, the works of Bienheureux Pierre Favre and Jean-Joseph Surin in particular. His interest in the early period of the Jesuits and in the forces that combine to create the collective human sense of history and knowledge in general were complemented by works of contemporary Jesuit philosophy, such as those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and also by an interest in Jacques Lacan. Profoundly affected by May 1968, Certeau secured a grant from the Délégation générale à la recherche scientifique et technique (Office for Scientific and Technical research [DGRST]) for a study into how members of a culture exist within its rules yet in resistance to or engagement with them: a reality demonstrated in the attacks on the establishment by the student riots but also in the academic critiques of Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. To effect this study involved the use of approaches brought from the human sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, as well as the epistemology of belief. This massive project was eventually published in part as L’Invention du quotidien, with a later second volume. Translated as The Practice of Everyday Life in 1984, the study is the dominant text for most people working on Certeau in English, particularly in connection with
234
CÉSAIRE, AIMÉ
other post-1968 philosophers. The influence of this school, especially that of Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as Foucault, is discernible in his approach to the quotidian and to everyday practices as Other to the systems and discipline of the status quo. This is a recognition that the operational logic of culture defines the subject, but that the subject often resists or evades definition through alternative uses (“strategies,” “tactics”) of space and practice, such as those of the workplace or in spectacular culture. The popularity of Certeau’s philosophy is evident in the interest taken by recent philosophers such as Brian Massumi and more widely in a general interest in cultures and practices of alterity in contemporary life. It is not surprising to find that this interest has located itself in the study of Western, and specifically American, politics and culture and its effect on the reality of everyday life (Certeau himself lived in California for six years). One of the most famous and influential passages of L’Invention du quotidien opens with Certeau on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center in New York, beginning his analysis of representation and behavior in modernity by starting with a panoramic view of its spatial metaphor (the city) from its symbolic center. Damian Sutton See also: Deleuze, Gilles; Derrida, Jacques; Foucault, Michel; Guattari, Félix; Jesuits; Lacan, Jacques; Lyotard, Jean-François; Theory. References Ahearne, Jeremy. Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and the Other. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Buchanan, Ian. Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist. London: Sage, 2000.
CÉSAIRE, AIMÉ (1913–) Major Martinican poet, dramatist, and politician whose writing posits the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean, mediated by France and Europe. Césaire’s credentials as an Atlantic figure are impeccable. He was cofounder in 1947 of the Paris-based journal and publisher of books on African and Caribbean affairs, Présence africaine, and a key theorist of négritude, a political and cultural movement and theory of black solidarity and antiracism first developed in the 1930s and 1940s. Négritude attempted to unite all black peoples in the world subjugated by European colonialism and Western racism, but it insisted on the centrality of Africa (and hence slavery) in determining black pride. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and theorized often via poetry, it was renowned for its lack of a coherent and agreed definition. It is, however, a crucial component in the black Atlantic, given its historical horizons of slavery and antislavery. Négritude’s poetic manifesto is undoubtedly Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939). Having met Césaire with Lévi-Strauss in 1942, André Breton described this epic poem as “the greatest lyric monument of our time.” Mixing Caribbean, African, and European poetic traditions into a multivoiced and troubling narrative, the Cahier is a now a classic of francophone Caribbean literature, still taught across the Atlantic in Africa. Inspiration for the poem was Césaire’s return to Martinique in 1935 to find a downtrodden people, who, through discovering their African and slave-revolt roots, are shown to stand up and demand dignity and freedom. Cé-
CHABROL, CLAUDE
saire’s Atlantic is nevertheless a resolutely triangular one. Educated in France in the 1930s, and a member of France’s parliament (elected in 1945 to represent Martinique in the new Constituent Assembly in Paris), Césaire had also cofounded in 1930s Paris the journal L’Etudiant noir (Black Student). As a member of France’s elite education system, he assimilated the greats of French literature—Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé. His 1950 speech, Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), was an indictment of European colonialism and a Communist tirade against U.S. imperialism (but he left the Communist Party over the 1956 invasion of Hungary). His main focus was, nevertheless, Africa and the Caribbean and the history of antislavery. He wrote a biography of Haitian revolutionary and antislavery leader Toussaint L’Ouverture (1961) and then a series of plays, the most famous of which—Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1967)—deals with murdered Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Though Césaire was not a regular visitor to Africa, his work is saturated by references to it and its echoes across the Atlantic, in both the Caribbean and France. Andy Stafford See also: Breton, André; Fanon, Frantz; LéviStrauss, Claude; Martinique; Slavery; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François. References Confiant, Raphaël. Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle. Paris: Stock, 1993. Stafford, Andy. “Travel in the French Black Atlantic: Dialoguing and Diverging, between Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant.” ASCALF Critical Studies in Postcolonial Literature and Culture 1 (2001): 15–30.
235
CHABROL, CLAUDE (1930–) Born in Paris, Claude Chabrol is one of the most important French film directors of the past forty years. A critic at Cahiers du cinéma and one of the founders of the New Wave (considered by many to begin with his film Le Beau Serge/Handsome Serge of 1958; he was also an art supervisor and a consultant on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless), Chabrol’s prolific output of over fifty films has included many styles and genres but is especially characterized by obsessional murder mystery plots set in a bourgeois (and often provincial and familial) milieu. The protagonists’ culture is then dissected in psychologically ambiguous ways, according to varying emphases on (Catholic) guilt and a class politics from which the workers are paradoxically absent. Chabrol’s New Wave credentials are underlined in his first films by the location shooting, direct style, and emphasis on the director/screenwriter as chief creator of his artistic work. In addition, Chabrol’s impeccable cinephile credentials included an interest in identifying with visionary Hollywood author-directors, hence his passion, from his film club youth onward, for Fritz Lang’s German but also American periods (he paid homage to Lang in the Berlin-shot international coproduction Docteur M in 1990) and for Alfred Hitchcock, on whom Chabrol wrote the first full-length book study—along with then fellow-Catholic Eric Rohmer—in 1957. After other important films such as Les Cousins (1958) and Les Bonnes Femmes/The Girls (1960), Chabrol spent some years in genre (war, spy) cinema, until he hit a successful middle period in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the so-called “Hélène cycle” (his then wife Stéphane Audran played
236
CHALLE, ROBERT
various characters by that name): Les Biches (Bad Girls, 1967), La Femme infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife, 1968), Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1969), La Rupture (The Break Up, 1970), and Juste avant la nuit (Just before Nightfall, 1971). Since Violette Nozière in 1978, Chabrol has often worked with Isabelle Huppert, in films such as Une Affaire de femmes (Story of Women, 1988, in which she plays an abortionist executed under the wartime Vichy regime), an adaptation of Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (A Judgment in Stone, 1995, a version of the 1930s Papin sisters case, in which servants murdered their employers), Rien ne va plus (The Swindle, 1997), and Merci pour le chocolat (Nightcap, 2000). Other successes of this period include the pair of films he made with Jean Poiret as the eponymous Poulet au vinaigre (1985, infelicitously translated as Cop au vin) and Inspecteur Lavardin (1986). The ups and downs of Chabrol’s career have included brief forays into Englishspeaking or transatlantic cinema. These films, often neglected or forgotten but many deserving of attention, include Ten Days’ Wonder (1972, based on an Ellery Queen novel), a quasi-metaphysical study of patriarchal authority embodied by Orson Welles and played out in an oedipal relationship with his son Anthony Perkins; the self-parodic Folies bourgeoises (The Twist, 1976), starring Bruce Dern and Ann-Margret; and Blood Relatives (1978), based on a novel by Ed McBain and shot in Montreal, starring Donald Sutherland as the policeman involved in an incestuous intrigue. In the same city Chabrol shot a Brian Moore adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others, 1984, starring Jodie Foster). His adaptation of Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in
Clichy (1990) was one of his least successful films critically and commercially. Chabrol’s eclecticism and prolific output ensure that his work is characterized by paradoxical combinations of the local and global, the historical and the generic, a close engagement with French culture and politics (in 1993 he made a documentary about wartime propaganda films titled L’Oeil de Vichy/The Eye of Vichy), but also an ability to roam across the film culture of the Atlantic world. Bill Marshall See also: Beauvoir, Simone de; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Godard, Jean-Luc; Madame Bovary; Miller, Henry Valentine. References Austin, Guy. Claude Chabrol. Manchester University Press, 1999. Blanchet, Christian. Claude Chabrol. Paris: Rivages, 1989. Wood, Robin. Claude Chabrol. London: Studio Vista, 1970.
CHALLE, ROBERT (1659–1720) For a long time Robert Challe’s connections with Canada were as obscure as almost everything else about him. In the last quarter century, scholars such as Jean Mesnard and Frédéric Deloffre have brought to light more and more aspects of his life and work, including his Canadian experiences. He now emerges as one of the most fascinating figures of eighteenth-century French literature. Born into a Parisian middle-class family, Challe received a good education and saw some military service. He decided to leave France after a family quarrel, with a share his mother’s family had bought him in a new company aimed at developing the Acadian fishing industry (Compagnie des pêches sédentaires d’Acadie). He sailed for
CHAMOISEAU, PATRICK
Canada in 1682, along with Jean Bergier, the company’s manager. Challe made five voyages in all to Acadia, the last in 1687 or 1688. In 1683 he endured a grueling overland journey from Cape Canso to Quebec to plead the new company’s cause to the French authorities in the face of opposition from existing settlers. His reports for the minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Seignelay, on the company’s affairs stressed the ever-present threat of English competition. When Bergier stood down in 1685, Challe hoped to replace him but was set aside in favor of Duret de La Boulaye, a relative of the principal shareholder. Challe blamed La Boulaye’s negligence for the English capture and looting of the company’s headquarters at Chedabucto—a disaster for the company and for Challe himself, who was wounded and captured. Returning to France on his release, he joined an expedition of the French East India Company, which set sail for Pondicherry in 1690, returning to France via the West Indies in 1691. In 1692 he was present at the lost naval battle of La Hougue. Challe seems to have traveled also in the Mediterranean but increasingly devoted himself to writing. Les Illustres françaises (The Illustrious French Lovers, 1713) is now recognized as arguably the most important French novel between La Princesse de Clèves (The Princess of Cleves) and Manon Lescaut. More recently, Challe has been identified (partly because of the Canadian references in the text) as the author of Difficultés sur la religion proposées au Père Malebranche, an original and powerful statement of deism. His Mémoires provide fascinating, if not always reliable, accounts of his Canadian experiences. He bitterly
237
laments the loss to France of the resources of Acadia and prophesies that Quebec will soon fall to Britain as well. While criticizing the French government’s failure to sustain the colonies and the ignorant authoritarianism of the governors, he offers thoughtful analyses of how a colony should be run and shows respect and concern for the indigenous peoples. He reports a powerful anticolonial speech by the Iroquois chief he calls “Arouïmtesche” (Otreouti, or “Grand Gueule”), but he may be projecting his own loathing of the Jesuits onto the speaker. His Canadian disappointments seem to have sharpened his critical and pessimistic outlook on life. In any case, his failure as a colonist was certainly a gain to French literature. Michael Moriarty See also: Acadia; Fishing; Jesuits; Quebec. References Challe, Robert. Mémoires, Correspondance complète, Rapports sur l’Acadie et autres pièces. Ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Popin. Geneva: Droz, 1996. Deloffre, Frédéric, ed. Un Destin, une æuvre: Robert Challe: Textes et documents inédits. Paris: SEDES, 1992.
CHAMOISEAU, PATRICK (1953–) Born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau is one of the most successful and acclaimed francophone Caribbean writers living today. Author of numerous works of fiction (including Solibo magnifique/Solibo Magnificent, 1988, and Texaco, 1992, for which he won the Prix Goncourt), autobiography (Une Enfance créole/Childhood ), and theory (notably Eloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, cowritten with Jean Bernabé and
238
CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL
DE
Raphaël Confiant), his writing project can perhaps be summed up as an exercise in cultural, mental, and material emancipation of the Caribbean from the grip of “Frenchness” in all its repressive guises, an experiment in a new postcolonial subjectivity based on hybridity or créolité. Chamoiseau trained as a lawyer in Martinique and in Paris but currently resides (working as a probation officer) in Martinique. Despite a professed affinity for such writers as François Rabelais and Emile Zola, Chamoiseau refuses to consider himself a French novelist, preferring to draw comparisons with the likes of Spanishspeaking Alejo Carpentier, whose cultural complexity he sees as more pertinent to his own situation than the French language he shares with the writers of the Hexagon. Calling for a new, nonhierarchical relation between France and the Antilles, starting with the destruction of the current “departmental” status of Guadeloupe and Martinique (which he considers as an insidious continuation of French colonialism), Chamoiseau’s work proposes instead an unstable and unreadable “Creole” identity, one represented neither by white France nor by Césairean négritude. In Texaco, the contemporary Martinican heroine Marie-Sophie comes to realize that enslavement by the racist and capitalist “modernizing” forces of the “En-Ville” can only be escaped by a combination of active political resistance and a refusal of all coherent and “recuperable” labels, practices, timescales, identities, and discourses. She finds her place between the oral and the written, the magical and the real, the present and the past. Similarly, the aged maroon, the eponymous hero of L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (The Old Man Slave and the Mastiff, 1997) will attain subjectivity liberated from the nineteenth-
century colonial plantation once he has been reborn into a realm of mental dissolution within the forest. Chamoiseau’s fictitious texts are themselves linguistic warriors against French domination, written in a French imbued with the rhythms, vocabulary, and idiosyncrasies of Creole, a weirdly “possessed” literary language, less definable and more resistant to categorization even than Creole itself. Publishing the epic novel Biblique des derniers gestes (Scripture of Last Acts) in 2002, Chamoiseau continued his experiment in the subversion of both French and Frenchness, reasserting as strongly as ever through his work the need to accept créolité—and all the potential disorder, confusion, and chaos it can imply—as a way of life infinitely preferable to the sterility of metropolitan control. Andrew Asibong See also: Bernabé, Jean; Carpentier, Alejo; Césaire, Aimé; Confiant, Raphaël; Créolité; Guadeloupe; Martinique, Zola, Emile. References Chamoiseau, Patrick. Ecrire en pays dominé. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Condé, Maryse, and Madeleine CottenetHage, eds. Penser la créolité. Paris: Karthala, 1995. Lewis, Shireen K. Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature from Négritude to Créolité. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL (CA. 1570–1635)
DE
Traditionally called the “Father of New France.” From 1603 until his death, he devoted himself to trade, exploration, and colonization in what is now called Canada, becoming the dominant Frenchman in these enterprises. In 1608 he founded the
CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL
first lasting French colony, at Quebec on the Saint Lawrence River. Born in Brouage (Saintonge) in the Bay of Biscay, Champlain was initially a soldier in the French Wars of Religion on the side of Henri de Navarre. In 1598, Champlain, whose father was a sea captain, probably enlisted in a Spanish expedition to the West Indies and Central America that lasted over two years. In 1603, his mapmaking or painting skills may have been what got him onto an expedition sent by Aymar de Chaste to the Saint Lawrence River to trade and to find a site for a new, trade-based colony. Aymar de Chaste held the controversial monopoly over the fur trade of New France. After the failed Cartier/Roberval expedition of 1541– 1543, French free trade had continued to develop in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, but only from the 1580s—following the emergence of a professional fur trade on the Saint Lawrence in about 1581—had French prospects for a trade-based colony reappeared. Colonies at Sable Island (1598– 1603) and Tadoussac (1599–1600) were short-lived, although Tadoussac continued to be the main trading station on the Saint Lawrence. The 1603 expedition convinced Champlain that Acadia might be better than the Saint Lawrence for a colony. He probably helped sway Pierre Du Gua de Mons—to whom the monopoly passed in 1603—in that direction too. Champlain was prominent in a longer expedition (1604–1607) that charted the coastline as far south as Cape Cod and founded a colony on the mouth of the Sainte Croix River (New Brunswick), from where it soon moved to Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy (Nova Scotia), lasting until it was destroyed by the Virginians in 1613.
DE
239
Referred to as the Father of New France, Champlain founded the first lasting French colony, at Quebec on the Saint Lawrence. (Library of Congress)
However, by 1607, when Champlain returned to France, it was clear that the winding Maritimes coastline made it impossible to enforce the monopoly against the free traders. He persuaded de Mons to revert his focus to the Saint Lawrence and was put in command of one of two vessels sent out in 1608. On July 3, Champlain established a colony on the Saint Lawrence, choosing the narrows of Quebec (previously Stadacona) because they enabled illicit river trade to be policed. Unlike Cartier before him, Champlain secured the consent of the local Indians, now the Montagnais, who were the middlemen in the fur trade between the French and the Algonquin, through whom in turn Champlain soon acquired (in
240
CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL
DE
1611) a direct trade link to the Huron. The Iroquoian-speaking Stadaconans and Hochelagans encountered by Cartier and Roberval had disappeared. Because the Algonquin-speaking tribes north of the Saint Lawrence supplied better and more numerous furs than the Iroquois to the south, the French were allied with the former against the latter. Champlain now implemented a new policy devised by him and/or de Mons’s deputy (Gravé du Pont): instead of just arming the Montagnais and others against the Iroquois, the French would fight alongside them. This decision strengthened the alliance with the Montagnais, helped create one with the Huron too (lasting until 1649), and thereby also enabled the French to explore the interior. In 1609 Champlain and two other Frenchmen fought in a Montagnais, Algonquin, and Arendarhonon (Huron) raid against the Mohawk (Iroquois), whom they defeated on July 29, south of presentday Lake Champlain. The French muskets gave an enormous advantage. Having returned to France in 1609, Champlain was back in Quebec in 1610, leaving it on June 14 to go upriver and participate alongside Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron in killing almost all the occupants of an Iroquois fort at the Battle of Richelieu River, where he sustained an injury. In a three-way diplomatic exchange, Champlain left the young Etienne Brûlé with the Algonquin for a while and in return received a Huron headman’s brother (Savignon), whom he took to France in 1610 and brought back to Canada on his next voyage (1611), when Champlain also built a wall, two gardens, and a square on Montreal island, to see if the clay used would withstand the winter.
Between 1608 and 1613 free trade had been winning out: the fur monopoly had been suspended, much to the frustration of Champlain, who proposed grander colonizing plans than those of de Mons, based on a diversified economy exporting not only fur but also timber, tar, fish, and much else. In proposals that he wrote up in 1618, he advocated establishing a new town on the Saint Lawrence called Ludovica (in honor of Louis XIII), in the valley of the Saint Charles River. Champlain’s vision involved assimilating Indians to French culture, converting them to Christianity, and getting them to live like the French. A monopoly on the fur trade west of Quebec was restored, and in 1612 Champlain was invested with wide-ranging powers as the lieutenant of his new patron, the Prince de Condé, viceroy of New France. Champlain’s next voyage there, in 1613, was an unsuccessful attempt to find the rumored northern ocean (Hudson Bay) that one Nicolas de Vignau, whose testimony turned out to be probably false, claimed to have seen. In 1613, the Company of Canada was founded, mostly with Rouen and SaintMalo merchants as shareholders and with Champlain guaranteed a large salary. In 1615 Champlain brought four missionaries (Recollet friars) with him from France. The Huron, having obtained Champlain’s agreement to fight the Iroquois with them, took him on what turned out to be an enormous journey into the interior, some of it against his will: up the Ottawa River, into Georgian Bay, past Muskoka, into Huron country near Lake Simcoe, and then to somewhere in presentday New York State, where they inconclusively attacked the Iroquois, after which Champlain, injured again, had to be car-
CHANUTE, OCTAVE
ried back to Huron country, where he wintered, not returning to Quebec until July 1616. His desire to explore the interior for himself seems to have faded thereafter. He devoted himself to administering Quebec. In 1627 Cardinal Richelieu began expanding colonization, taking direct control of New France and founding the Company of the Hundred Associates. However, in 1627 war broke out between the French and the English. Champlain, hampered by deteriorated relations with the Montagnais, who resented many of his actions as well as the French monopoly, which deflated fur prices, surrendered the small, starving colony of Quebec to the British in 1629. He was repatriated via England, but following Quebec’s restoration to the French in 1632, he returned in 1633 as commander of New France and Richelieu’s representative. He died in 1635, unaware that the decision had already been taken to replace him the following year by an ally of the Jesuits (who had displaced the Recollet friars in New France). He left a wife, Hélène, who was not yet twelve when they married in 1610 and who now became a nun. She had tried to leave him earlier but had been brought back by force. Evaluations of Champlain vary. He was adventurous, courageous, ambitious, egotistical, at times astute. When his Indian allies tortured prisoners after battles or forced them to eat their comrade’s heart, he sometimes (unlike some later Europeans) strongly objected, perhaps less out of abhorrence for violence in itself than because they were prisoners rather than criminals. When in 1608 a locksmith (Jean Duval) led a conspiracy to murder Champlain in Quebec in the hope of obtaining a reward from the Basque free traders, Champlain had Duval’s
241
severed head prominently displayed. Although Champlain gained long experience in dealing with indigenous peoples, he also remained blind to much in their culture, at least partly because he saw them essentially as means to French ends. He chronicled his experiences in a series of books printed in France between 1604 and 1632. Neil Kenny See also: Acadia; Basques; Brûlé, Etienne; Cartier, Jacques; Fur Trade; Jesuits; Montreal; New Brunswick; New France; Nova Scotia; Quebec; Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de; Roberval, JeanFrançois de la Rocque, Seigneur de; Saint Lawrence River; Saint-Malo; Tadoussac. References Armstrong, Joe C. W. Champlain. Toronto: Macmillan, 1987. Heldenreich, Conrad E. Explorations and Mapping of Samuel de Champlain, 1603– 1632. Toronto: York University, 1976. Trigger, Bruce G. The Children of Aataentsic I: A History of the Huron People to 1660. 2 vols. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976.
CHANUTE, OCTAVE (1832–1910) Civil engineer, businessman, and aviation enthusiast. Chanute’s chief contribution to the invention of the airplane lay in his developing a two-wing glider that became the model for the Wright brothers’ invention. Born in Paris in 1832, Chanute emigrated to the United States with his father in 1838 and was educated in private schools in New York City. Although he had no formal training as a civil engineer, he nevertheless progressed through employment with various railroad companies to become the chief engineer of the Chicago and Alton Railroad in 1863. After the Civil
242
CHANUTE, OCTAVE
French civil engineer, businessman, and aviation enthusiast, Chanute's chief contribution to the invention of the airplane lay in his developing a twowing glider that became the model for the Wright brothers’ invention. (Library of Congress)
War he designed and supervised the construction of the first railroad bridge over the Missouri River at Kansas City. In the 1870s and 1880s he served as an engineering consultant to the railroads that were expanding across the American West. In 1890, he went into the business of railroad tie preservation, a successful enterprise that gave him the financial security to pursue his studies in aeronautics. In 1894 Chanute published Progress in Flying Machines, a compendium of articles in a book that quickly became an invaluable reference for aviation experimenters worldwide. He had been researching and experimenting since the 1850s, and his library in Chicago was probably one of the most complete on the subject of aeronautics in the world. In 1896 he engaged in two experiments on the south
shore of Lake Michigan, testing a multiwing machine called the Katy-Did as well as developing a two-wing glider. This glider, 16 feet long, with two arched wings held rigid by wires, weighed 23 pounds. It was flown with a “pilot” hanging off a bar below the wings who directed the machine off a sand dune into a strong wind. On September 4, 1896, a number of flights, the longest of which was 253 feet, convinced Chanute that he was on the right track. A flight of 359 feet into a strong north wind on September 11 was the most successful. Following more experiments in 1897, he presented his findings to the Western Society of Engineers in October of that year. In the following years, a number of lectures and articles by Chanute convinced many engineers that the problem of successful heavier-than-air flight was one that could be taken seriously by professionals, and was not simply the domain of crackpot experimenters. When the Wright brothers became interested in the challenge of heavier-thanair flight, Chanute was the first person they contacted. Over 500 letters between Chanute and the brothers provide one of the best historical sources of the progress of the Wright brothers in their struggle to develop the airplane. Chanute offered advice and encouragement as well as visiting them at Kitty Hawk. Although he remained skeptical of the viability of the airplane until he died in 1910, his contribution was recognized by Wilbur Wright, who wrote in 1911, “I think I was fully justified in saying that if he [Chanute] had not lived the history of human flight would have been quite different from what it has been” (quoted in McFarland, pp. 1018–1019). Steve Spicer
CHARLEBOIS, ROBERT See also: Aviation. References Crouch, Tom. A Dream of Wings. London, New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. McFarland, Marvin D. The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Vol II. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953. Spicer, Steve. The Octave Chanute Pages. March 1996. (cited February 21, 2004, http://spicerweb.org/chanute/chan_ind .html).
CHARLEBOIS, ROBERT (1944–) Psychedelic, anticonformist, and nationalist, Charlebois was the leading light of Quebec rock music and counterculture until the mid-1970s. Born in Montreal on June 24, 1944, he succeeded in creating and exporting to France a repertoire that combined Quebec and wider North American references. Specialists of music of the period tend to talk of a before-Charlebois era and an after-Charlebois era. Even though his mass popularity is in the past, he nonetheless is an undeniable source of influence in Quebec music. Charlebois’s early career augured little of what was to come, since his first album in 1965 straightforwardly followed the path laid out by the hugely prominent folk music of the time. However, a trip to California in 1967 opened up the horizons of flower power and boosted his creativity. At the time, music in Quebec meant either folksingers with their audience of intellectuals and students or “yéyé” singers happy to provide French-language versions of American hits. Transformed by his journey, Charlebois created a francophone rock music combining European and American influences.
243
He offered a kind of cultural revolution, singing about continental North American realities but in joual (a mixture of Quebec slang, English, and standard French). At the end of 1968, this process reached its culmination with L’Osstidcho (L’hostie de show, or This Fucking Show), a sort of antispectacle combining music, humor, improvisation, and all kinds of performance. Its scandalous reception contributed to the Charlebois legend. The sociologist Jacques Julien wrote of Charlebois as a prophet for his generation. In 1972, Charlebois achieved the old Quebec ambition of triumphing in Paris, shattering as he did so the rustic image of Quebec that had existed in France since the success there of Félix Leclerc in the 1950s. Charlebois was worlds apart from that image: onstage, the characters he invented (Garou, Superfrog) and his extravagant costumes put him in the same vein as glam rock and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. Success, however, was relatively shortlived. At the end of the 1970s, Charlebois abandoned his characters, became more conventional, and saw his popularity erode. The cover of his 1977 album Swing Charlebois Swing had him playing golf, dressed in light blue trousers and a canary yellow polo neck. Did this mean Garou was dead and the bourgeoisie had been embraced? Many of his fans saw this transformation as a betrayal. A few years later he enjoyed more hit singles, but in a middleof-the-road style. His output since 1990 has been sporadic. Frédéric Demers See also: Counterculture; Garou; Language; Leclerc, Félix; Music (Pop). References Gagnon, Claude. Robert Charlebois déchiffré. Montreal: Leméac, 1974.
244
CHARLEVOIX, PIERRE-FRANÇOIS-XAVIER
DE
Julien, Jacques. Robert Charlebois: L’enjeu d’ “Ordinaire.” Montreal: Tryptique, 1987. Rioux, Lucien. Robert Charlebois. Paris: Seghers, 1973.
CHARLEVOIX, PIERREFRANÇOIS-XAVIER DE (1682–1761) Father Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix began to write about the New World because of his discontent with existing narratives that purportedly described the landscapes and peoples of New France. He was not along in his feeling of dissatisfaction. At the end of the seventeenth century, the French traveler Dièreville complained of the difference he had encountered between the New France he had observed firsthand and the descriptions of it he had found in books, particularly that of Baron Lahontan. Years later, Father Charlevoix, a Jesuit priest sent to Canada in 1705, would echo this criticism, deploring the runaway success of Lahontan’s New Voyages to North America and characterizing it as “a monstrous hodgepodge of fables.” He was particularly outraged by Lahontan’s anticlericalism and what he saw as the book’s libertine tendencies. In 1719, Charlevoix was officially asked to study the question of the boundaries of Acadia, then a source of conflict between the French and the British. Shortly thereafter, from 1720 to 1723, he carried out at the orders of the king an extensive journey into the interior of the American continent to gather information about the Western Sea. After returning to France, Charlevoix dedicated himself to writing his own account of his experiences in New France. His Journal of a Voyage to North America, published in 1744, is notable for its vivid
Peter Francis Xavier de Charlevoix. Charlevoix dedicated himself to writing his own account of his experiences in New France. His Journal of a Voyage to North America, published in 1744, is notable for its vivid descriptions of not only the topography but the social structures of colonial Quebec. (Library of Congress)
descriptions of not only the topography but the social structures of colonial Quebec. Charlevoix depicts the Creoles of Canada as healthy, vivacious, and obsessed with sartorial elegance to the point of being willing to go without food in order to appear well dressed. He adds that nowhere else is the French language spoken with greater purity. Charlevoix’s narrative is also noteworthy for its detailed discussions of the rituals and social structure of native groups (particularly the Yasous and the Natchez) of the lower Mississippi valley and New Orleans, which have provided invaluable historical and anthropological information about these tribes in the eighteenth century to later ethnographers. Charlevoix describes New Orleans as a precarious settlement consisting of warehouses, barracks, and a few houses but
CHARNAY, CLAUDE-JOSEPH-DÉSIRÉ
imagines the day when its geographical situation and climate will help it become the capital of a large, rich colony. Susan Castillo See also: Lahontan, Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de; Mississippi River; New France; New Orleans. References Amat, Christian. “Un Missionaire philosophe face à l’Amérique: Le R. P. Charlevoix.” L’Amérique des Lumières. Ed. Jean Balcou and René Pomeau. Geneva: Droz, 1997. Marouby, Christian. “From Early Anthropology to the Literature of the Savage: The Naturalization of the Primitive.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (1985): 289–298.
CHARNAY, CLAUDE-JOSEPHDÉSIRÉ (1828–1915) French archaeologist. A key figure in the history of archaeology in nineteenth-century Mexico, Charnay was the author of the first widely known publication of photographs of Mexico’s ancient monuments. Made during his first voyage to Mexico between 1857 and 1859, the forty-seven prints featured in Cités et ruines américaines: Mitla, Palenqué, Izamal, Chichen-Itza, Uxmal, recueillies et photographiées par Désiré Charnay avec un texte par M. Viollet-le-Duc (American Cities and Ruins: Mitla, Palenqué, Izamal, Chichen-Itza, Uxmal, Collected and Photographed by Désiré Charnay with a text by M. Viollet-le-Duc, Paris, 1862–1863) introduced French viewers to Mexico’s extraordinary architectural and sculptural ruins. Charnay’s extremely beautiful, largescale photographs were a remarkable achievement given the cumbersome nature of the wet collodion process, which required not only the coating of a glass plate
245
with a fast-drying emulsion just prior to exposure but also the processing of prints immediately thereafter. In his accompanying text, Charnay cast himself as an intrepid explorer conquering extreme temperatures, strangling overgrowth, murderous insects, humidity, inadequate supplies, and also civil war. Officially sanctioned by France’s minister of public instruction, Charnay’s first voyage coincided with intensifying French interest in the occupation of Mexico. In 1864, Charnay returned to Mexico with French troops sent to support Emperor Maximilian, who had been installed by Napoleon III. If the French government proved ambivalent about extending the empire, Charnay himself was explicitly imperialistic and declared it “France’s duty to rouse Mexico from its numbness” (Davis, p. 21). After the execution of Maximilian in 1867, Charnay left Mexico but returned for a third visit from 1880 to 1882. Regretting his ignorance during his first voyage, an ignorance that had led to his reliance on photography, Charnay now took himself seriously as a professional archaeologist and excavator. He arrived in Mexico determined to prove that all Central American monuments were of “Toltec” origin and also quite modern. Charnay’s archaeological ambitions and unfounded theories were mocked during his lifetime; his self-fashioning as an explorer-archaeologist sharply contrasted with the methodical, scholarly excavations of his English counterpart, the archaeologist Alfred Maudslay. Despite being awarded the Logerot Prize by the French Geographic Society in 1884 and appointed officer in the Legion of Honor in 1888, Charnay suffered a steady decline in his reputation at the century’s close. His superb collodion prints, by contrast, secured his
246
CHARRIÈRE, HENRI
reputation as a photographer. He was also the author of voyage accounts and popular fiction and the translator and editor of precontact and colonial manuscripts. He returned to Mexico for a fourth and final time in 1886 and also made voyages to Madagascar (1863), Chile and Argentina (1875), Java (1878), Australia (1878– 1879), and Yemen (1897) and repeatedly to the United States. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby See also: Argentina; Chile; Mexico; Photography. References Charnay, Désiré. Voyage au Mexique, 1858–1861. Ed. Pascal Mongne. Paris: Gingko, 2001. Davis, Keith F. Désiré Charnay, Expeditionary Photographer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981.
CHARRIÈRE, HENRI (1906–1973) French criminal and prisoner in French Guiana, Henri Charrière depicted a lively career of imprisonment, adventures, and escapes in an autobiography, Papillon (1969). The son of a country schoolteacher, Charrière was born in 1906, in the central French department of Ardèche. His mother died when he was eleven. Charrière’s youth was anything but uneventful, and, after a number of years of committing misdemeanors and petty crime, he had established a solid reputation among the French underworld as a first-rate safecracker and thief. In October 1931 he was convicted of murder—a murder he did not commit, as was later proved—and sentenced to a life of hard labor. Led to the Conciergerie—the
jailhouse located on the banks of the Seine in central Paris—he met his fellow inmates Degas and Julot, with whom he sailed for the hard labor camp in the Pénitencier de Saint Laurent in French Guiana, South America. The three of them spent the first weeks of their imprisonment at the hospital for inmates, from where Julot escaped and was never heard from again. In Cayenne, Charrière—alias Papillon, or “Butterfly,” a nickname given to him because of the butterfly tattoo he wore on his chest—met Clousiot and Maturette, two other inmates, and soon after, the three of them escaped from the labor camp with the help of other inmates. Degas had been given the opportunity to escape as well but preferred to stay behind. This was the beginning of Papillon’s life on the run, full of encounters with many generous people. The three convicts were arrested in Rio Hacha, where Papillon, with the help of another convict, escaped yet a second time. He was taken in by a tribe of South American Indians, with whom he spent seven months before returning to Rio Hacha, where he was then captured once again. Along with Clousiot and Maturette, Papillon was sentenced to two years of solitary confinement in appalling conditions on Devil’s Island, so appalling that Clousiot was unable to bear this burden and died soon after his release. Thus began true prison life for Papillon. Following another escape attempt, which unfortunately failed, he was sentenced to eight years of solitary confinement, but served only nineteen months in all. With another inmate, he escaped by sea to Venezuela, and this time for good. Charrière finally found himself to be a free man at the age of thirty-seven, in 1944.
CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS-AUGUSTE RENÉ
DE,VICOMTE
247
Charrière later became a Venezuelan citizen and lived in Caracas. His most famous autobiographical novel, Papillon, was followed by several other works depicting his adventures and hardships during these years. Henri Charrière died in Madrid, Spain, on July 29, 1973. Claudia Wolosin See also: Devil’s Island; Guiana; Venezuela. Reference Armelle, Pierre, and Georges Psuquey. Le Dieu de Papillon: Essai. Tours: Mame, 1970.
CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOISAUGUSTE RENÉ DE,VICOMTE (1768–1848) French author, born in Saint-Malo. On April 8, 1791, seeking new and firsthand inspiration for an epic poem in prose, Les Natchez (The Natchez: An Indian Tale), Chateaubriand embarked upon his first and only voyage to North America. In keeping with popular interests in eighteenth-century France, Les Natchez embraces American exoticism, the riches of natural history, the customs of the indigenous peoples, and especially man in his natural state (l’homme de la nature). Traveling along the northeastern Atlantic coast and New England, into Upper Ohio, and to the Great Lakes of Canada, Chateaubriand sought to study nature, in its broadest meaning, in a pure, unsullied state. Returning to France on January 2, 1792, armed with copious notes and replete with recollections and ideas, he first wrote Atala, published in 1801. In addition to his own primary sources of information for Atala, René, and Les Natchez (1826) gleaned during his travels, he had a
Portrait of François-Auguste René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), French writer and statesman. On April 8, 1791, Chateaubriand embarked upon his first and only voyage to North America. (Library of Congress)
wealth of secondary material at his disposal: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s La Chaumière indienne (The Indian Cottage, 1790), Jean-François Marmontel’s Les Incas (The Incas, 1778), François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénélon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures of Telemachus, 1699), the Jesuit missionary Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France (History and General Description of New France, 1744), and JosephFrançois Lafitau’s Les Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, 1724), to name but a few. Atala, at once a geographic and human tableau, opens with a magnificent description of the Mississippi—although it is unlikely that Chateaubriand visited the
248
CHAUVET, MARIE
region—before turning to a first-person retrospective on a tragic tale of conflict between natural aspirations and religious laws as told by Chactas, the blind Natchez, to René, a young European living with the tribe. In moving, lyrical passages, Chateaubriand describes the customs of America’s indigenous peoples, funeral rites, marriage ceremonies, ethnic dances, and hunting techniques, concluding in the epilogue with a spectacular tableau of Niagara Falls. René, the sequel to Atala, is a study of the vague des passions, an excess of human emotions, in René’s case, the result of an unconsummated, incestuous relationship with his sister, Amélie. René comes to epitomize the mal du siècle—metaphysical anguish, revolt, a strong inclination to solitude, a love of nature, and reverie—of a generation trying to find a useful function and identity in postrevolutionary France. Set in Louisiana, the story covers René’s travels to Italy, Greece, and England before returning to the peaceful bosom of the “happy savage” (heureux sauvage) in America. Through horrific scenes of rape, murder, and suicide worthy of a roman noir, Chateaubriand argues in Les Natchez, even while taking liberties with historical events, that both civilizations, the French and the Natchez, are capable of profoundly disturbing atrocities. Le Voyage en Amérique/Journey to America (1827) encompasses motivation for the voyage, descriptions of places visited, the study of flora and fauna, the customs and language of the indigenous peoples, and topics previously dealt with in Atala and Les Natchez. Interesting comparisons are made between the indigenous peoples of Florida, Louisiana, and Canada. While reflecting on the myths surrounding
the “savage state” (état sauvage), Chateaubriand muses over the future of the United States, symbol of freedom and a republic he admires, although sometimes with reservation. His optimism is repeated again in Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, vol. 1), the complete version published posthumously between October 1848 and July 1850. In the richness of detail expressed in poetic and lyrical passages, Chateaubriand, precursor of French romanticism, both instructs and seduces by the harmony among the content, rhyme, and musicality of his descriptive and dramatic prose. A visionary of the first order, he foresaw the forging and modernization of all future societies (vol. 4). Janette McLeman-Carnie See also: Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de; Florida; Louisiana; Mississippi; New France; Noble Savage; Ohio. References Chinard, Gilbert. L’Exotisme américain dans l’æuvre de Chateaubriand. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970 [1918]. Painter, George. Chateaubriand: A Biography. London: Chatto and Windus, 1977.
CHAUVET, MARIE (1916–1973) A native of Haiti born in 1916 into the Port-au-Prince bourgeoisie, Marie Chauvet was a playwright and novelist. She began her literary career in 1947 with the play La Légende des fleurs (Legend of the Flowers, published under the pseudonym “Colibri”) and went on to publish four novels: Fille d’Haïti (Haitian Girl, 1954), La Danse sur le volcan (Dance on the Volcano, 1957), Fonds des nègres (1961), Les Rapaces (Birds of Prey, 1986), and a collection of novellas titled Amour, colère, folie (Love, Anger, Madness, 1968).
CHAUVET, MARIE
Amour, colère, folie, her best-known work, is a damning indictment of the regime of Haitian president-for-life François Duvalier. It was published by Gallimard, apparently with the assistance of Simone de Beauvoir. In Haiti, the collection’s depiction of dictatorship and black nationalism instigated much controversy: Chauvet’s husband, apparently fearing reprisals from the Duvalier government, eventually bought the rights to the novel and stored any published copies in a Portau-Prince warehouse, where they languished for twelve years. Following this incident, Chauvet divorced her husband and fled to New York, where she died in 1973. One of the few women writers to publish in Haiti prior to the 1970s, Chauvet was virtually ignored by Haiti’s literary establishment, as well as by critics abroad, until Amour, colère, folie was “rediscovered” in 1980. From that time on, critics of French Caribbean literature, especially those writing from a feminist perspective, have extolled Chauvet’s later works for their subversive depictions of gender, race, and class and for their challenging of Haiti’s male-dominated literary tradition, with its masculinist depictions of race, nation, and political change. Initially a writer of sentimental historical fiction (La Danse sur le volcan and Fille d’Haïti ), Chauvet moved into more experimental directions with Amour, colère, folie and Les Rapaces. Written in diary form by a self-confessed “old-maid” whose dark skin is the embarrassment of her light-skinned bourgeois family, the tale of sexual obsession in “Amour” unfolds against the background of a fictionalized account of a massacre that took place under Duvalier in the town of Jérémie. While women are being tortured in the nearby prison by Calédu,
249
the black general sent to “tame” the town’s recalcitrant and racist bourgeoisie, the protagonist Claire fantasizes scenes of sadomasochistic sexual liaisons, a fantasy life that gradually inspires her participation in the growing resistance to Calédu and her eventual liberation of the town. In the Kafkaesque “Colère,” a middle-class family loses its lands to an armed group reminiscent of Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes. The daughter Rose, a virgin, gives her body to the group’s sadistic leader in exchange for the restitution of the lands, a choice that eventually allows her a kind of political agency. Finally, “Folie” delves into the psyches of three mad poets hiding out in a garret and awaiting the arrival of the black nationalist military commander and their certain execution. Chauvet’s subversive textual politics have gained her the reputation as one of Haiti’s first postmodern novelists. Her craft and her daring criticism of the Duvalier regime make her today one of Haiti’s most discussed writers. Valerie Kaussen See also: Beauvoir, Simone de; Feminisms; Haiti. References Chancy, Myriam. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Dayan, Joan. “Reading Women in the Caribbean: Marie Chauvet’s Love, Anger, and Madness.” Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French. Ed. Joan Dejean and Nancy K. Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Duffey, Carolyn. “In Flight from the Borderlines: Roses, Rivers, and Missing Haitian History in Marie Chauvet’s Colère and Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and The Farming of Bones.” The Journal of Caribbean Literatures 3, no. 1 (2000): 77–91.
250
CHERBOURG Scharfman, Ronnie. “Theorizing Terror: The Discourse of Violence in Marie Chauvet’s Amour, colère, folie.” Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. Ed. Mary Jean Green et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
CHERBOURG The history of Cherbourg is closely linked to that of Normandy. The town and seaport are located in Manche département (the equivalent of “county”), Basse-Normandie région, in northwestern France. Cherbourg lies on the English Channel, at the northern tip of the Cotentin Peninsula and at the mouth of the small Divette River. The port benefits from a well-sheltered harbor.
Cherbourg’s jetty, completed in the 1850s after several decades of intermittent effort, converted the town into a major military and commercial port. Its value as a port made Cherbourg the first objective of the U.S. 1st Army after landing at the beaches of Normandy on D day (June 6, 1944) during World War II. The closest landing took place at Utah Beach, located just a few miles southeast of the town. Supported by amphibious tanks, the first assault waves of the 8th Regiment of General Raymond Barton’s 4th U.S. Infantry Division landed on the beach at 6.30 A.M. Due to a navigational error, they ended up roughly 2 kilometers south of their planned destination. This turned out to be providential, as the German defenses
D day landing on the coast of Normandy, June 6, 1944. (National Archives)
CHEVALIER, MAURICE
were far weaker here. During the battles that ensued, the city was stubbornly defended by its German occupiers, who systematically destroyed the port installations before surrendering to the Allied forces on June 27. The Allied troops rapidly rebuilt a temporary port to handle the vast quantity of weapons and other supplies needed until the hostilities ended. Although the port’s cargo traffic is now light, there is much ferry traffic between Cherbourg and the British Isles, and yachts and commercial fishing boats use the harbor. In 2003, nearly 1.5 million ferry passengers transited through the Cherbourg harbor. For nearly a century the harbor has been a port of call to the world’s most luxurious “floating palaces,” or transatlantic ocean liners, from the Queen Mary I in 1937 to the Queen Mary II in 2004. Gateway to the Americas for more than a century, Cherbourg remains faithful to its tradition of welcoming the greatest cruise liners and is the only French port where the Queen Elizabeth 2, jewel in the crown of the Cunard fleet, regularly stops over en route to New York. Shipbuilding (including nuclear submarines), ship repair, and other industries depending on the port (such as electronics and metallurgy) are economically important in the area. Nearby, the nuclear power plant at La Hague reprocesses nuclear waste. The town is the terminus of a railway line from Paris. Cherbourg’s cultural offerings include the Thomas Henry Museum, which exhibits French paintings of the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, as well as Flemish and Italian works. At the nineteenth-century Fort du Roule, overlooking the town, is the Liberation
251
Museum, commemorating the 1944 invasion of the Allied troops. Claudia Wolosin See also: Nuclear Technology; Painting; World War II. References Gibory, Eric. Normandie. Paris: Hachette, 2003. Herval, René. Normandie. Grenoble: Arthaud, 1971.
CHEVALIER, MAURICE (1888–1972) French-born international music star, who still embodies French culture and identity around the world to this day. Chevalier, who came from a large, poverty-stricken family in a working-class suburb of Paris, started working at eleven in odd apprentice jobs before discovering show business and developing a very personal singing comedy act in local cabarets. He became a highly popular music hall performer in famous venues such as the Empire, the Casino de Paris, and the Folies Bergère. He worked with the music hall star Mistinguett and eventually led stage revues himself with hit songs in the 1920s. Pioneers of the emerging medium of film, such as Max Linder, Louis Gasnier, and Henri Diamant-Berger, started hiring Chevalier for shorts toward the end of the 1910s. The advent of sound made the musical genre extremely popular for a while, and the U.S. studios MGM and Paramount, constantly on the lookout for stars and talent, fought over the French music hall superstar. Chevalier finally settled first for Paramount, leaving for Hollywood in 1928. Despite learning English in a German POW camp with a fellow prisoner
252
CHICAGO
during World War I, Chevalier always retained his characteristically heavy French accent. His stardom was such before he came to Hollywood that his arrival was highly publicized, with French director Robert Florey recording his transatlantic voyage in Skyscraper Symphony (1929). Richard Wallace’s Innocents in Paris (1929) was Chevalier’s first Hollywood film and became a hit largely due to his performance, which established his screen persona for the rest of his long career as a frivolous, roguish seducer. Some twenty musicals followed, in both American and French versions, most of them directed by Ernst Lubitsch (The Love Parade, French and American versions, 1930; The Smiling Lieutenant, French and American versions, opposite Claudette Colbert, 1931; One Hour with You, French and American versions, 1932; The Merry Widow, French and American versions, 1934). Many of these Viennese-style operettas teamed him with Jeanette MacDonald, making them one of the golden screen couples of Hollywood. For the period 1928–1935, Chevalier was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid, topbilled stars despite his humble beginnings and heavy French accent, making him somewhat the personification of the American dream. Despite his huge success, Chevalier eventually fell out with Irving Thalberg at MGM about his billing and returned to France in 1935. In the buildup to World War II, French cinema was entering a dark, pessimistic phase that Chevalier’s persona did not fit, but he was nevertheless offered a few parts in some important films of the period (Julien Duvivier’s L’Homme du Jour, Maurice Tourneur’s Avec le Sourire, both 1936; Robert Siodmak’s Pièges, 1939). Chevalier also starred in René Clair’s Break
the News, shot in the United Kingdom in 1938. Chevalier carried on performing in France but resumed his Hollywood career at the end of the 1950s with box-office hits such as Vicente Minnelli’s Gigi (1958), with Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan. Chevalier’s American films of the 1930s and 1960s, extremely rich in French actors and personnel, have made a lasting impact on Hollywood’s representation of Paris and France. Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Boyer, Charles; Caron, Leslie; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Clair, René; Colbert, Claudette; Duvivier, Julien; Florey, Robert; Gasnier, Louis J.; Hollywood’s Paris; Jourdan, Louis; Pepe Le Pew; Rosay, Françoise; Tourneur, Maurice; World War I; World War II. References Freedland, Michael. Maurice Chevalier. London: Arthur Barker, 1981. Ringgold, Gene, and Bodeen De Witt. Chevalier: The Films and Career of Maurice Chevalier. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1973.
CHICAGO Eschikagou, Algonquian for “a foulsmelling place,” was located at the portage of southwestern Lake Michigan to the Des Plaines River, which eventually ran to the Mississippi River. French explorer Louis Joliet recommended Chicago in 1674 as the site for a canal linking the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River watershed. Nothing came of Joliet’s suggestion, but the site was important enough for the French to build a small fort there in 1680. From the beginning, Chicago sat at the center of a regional transportation network. Besides being a portage, Chicago in 1680 was a Miami Indian village and of
CHILE
some importance in the Great Lakes Indian trade. The Iroquois of New York massacred many of the Miamis at Chicago in 1687 in their effort to control the western Indians’ trade with Europeans. The French ministry closed all western forts save one in 1696 because of a lack of funds, a glutted European fur market, and Jesuit complaints that soldiers and traders hampered efforts at converting Indians to Christianity. The Miamis did not return, but in their place came the Potawatomis, Ojibwes, Ottawas, and Sauks. The French opened a trading post at Chicago around 1716, and it remained until the end of the French and Indian War. The Chicago Indians, however, maintained their affinity for France after the Treaty of Paris of 1763 and were among the leaders in the Indian uprising of 1763–1764, which tried to push the British out of the frontier posts and encourage the French to return. The French eventually came back, but too late for the Indians and not in the manner they anticipated. In 1779 Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable from San Marc, Haiti, built a house and store at the portage, marking the return of western settlement to Chicago. Du Sable (c. 1745–1818) was the son of a French sea captain and an African slave. Apparently his father gave him free status, for he was educated in France. He later worked as a seaman aboard one of his father’s ships, which sank en route to New Orleans around 1764. Injured, du Sable nevertheless made it ashore, but without his identity papers. A French Jesuit mission nursed him back to health and hid him from Spanish authorities who would have seized him as a fugitive slave. At the mission, he met an Indian from the Illinois Country who convinced du Sable to go
253
north, where he met his wife, a Potawatomi. He eventually arrived in Chicago in 1779, building the first permanent house there. Enigmatic and enterprising, du Sable brokered peace treaties between tribes and was in quick succession a French partisan, British informant, and American Indian agent in the 1770s. In 1782, he established a trading post near his house and carried on a prosperous trade with Indians, traders, military contractors, other trading posts, and the region’s few settlers. In 1800 he sold his business to an employee and moved near Saint Louis. He died there in 1818. Jim Fisher See also: French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Haiti; Illinois Country; Jesuits; Joliet, Louis; Mississippi River; New Orleans; Saint Louis; Slavery; Treaty of Paris. References Edmonds, R. David. The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. Meehan, Thomas. “Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, the First Chicagoan.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 56 (1963): 439–453. Tanner, Helen H., ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
CHILE France had an enduring influence on Chilean social, political, and cultural life in the nineteenth century. This influence, which principally affected the political and intellectual elites, was particularly decisive during the period surrounding the country’s independence. The first constitutions, the first civil code, and the restructuring of the education system in the 1820s and
254
CHILE
Map of Chile. France had an enduring influence on Chilean social, political, and cultural life in the nineteenth century. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
1830s owed much to the French model. After 1920, when the political elites started to look toward Germany and the United States, French cultural influence went into sharp decline. France, for its part, turned toward Chile when Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970.
As early as the independence period of the 1800s and 1810s, Chilean elites were interested in French Enlightenment thought. In an attempt to counteract the Spanish colonial authorities, such notions as “nation,” the “social contract,” “separation of powers,” “republic,” and “sovereignty of the people” were emphasized. The French Revolution, however, and in particular its laicism, did not receive much support from the future fathers of Chilean independence. During the 1840s, thanks to a liberalization of trade, books from France became more widely distributed in Chile. It was in this context that Alphonse de Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins (History of the Girondins) met with great success among the Chilean student population. Having taken part in the 1848 revolution, Francisco Bilbao, militant and essayist and admirer of Lamartine, criticized upon his return to Chile the lack of social reform and the influence of the clergy. The political actions of Santiago Arcos had a longer-term effect. Educated in France, a reader of the utopians (Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen), he was one of the first defenders of Socialism in Chile. In 1850, he founded the Society of Equality, a political group that rapidly became the home of protest against the government of President Manuel Bulnes. The society preached the primacy of reason, the sovereignty of the people, and universal fraternity. In the field of literature, writers of the 1842 generation, like José Victorino Lastarria, were greatly influenced by the pre-romantics (Chateaubriand and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and the Romantics (Lamartine and Victor Hugo). Andrés Bello, lawyer and reformer of the Chilean education system
CHIRAC, JACQUES
and an admirer of the Enlightenment philosophers, established a civil code that served as a model for the entire continent of Latin America. In academic spheres, throughout the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the brothers Jorge and Luis Lagarrigue contributed to the popularization of Auguste Comte’s positivism. At the start of the twentieth century, large numbers of French immigrants moved to Chile to specialize in the tanning industry, open department stores, and work in viticulture. Various French religious communities ran prestigious education establishments, while, under the impulse of a dynamic cultural policy, France opened a number of Alliances françaises in major cities. Nevertheless, at the end of World War I, the Chilean education system turned more toward the German community, which was more established, and toward the U.S. model, whose universities were more and more involved in the education of the elites. Chilean writers, for their part, kept their eyes trained on the avant-garde period in France, as is proved by the case of the poet Vicente Huidobro, a great figure of modern Latin American poetry, who not only lived in France for almost ten years but also chose to write both in French and in Spanish. At the start of the 1970s, it was France’s turn to look to Chile, notably to the politically committed poetry of Pablo Neruda, and (through the influence of such figures as Alain Touraine and Régis Debray) to Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Socialist president. Following the assassination of Allende in 1973, many Chileans, such as the filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, the chansonnier Angel Parra, and the musical group Quilapayún, sought exile in France. Ruiz has made nu-
255
merous films in France, taking on all kinds of projects and following the path he has made his own, that of a cinema both surreal and experimental (Les Trois Couronnes du matelot, 1982; Trois Vies et une seule mort, 1996). Mauricio Segura See also: Avant-Gardes; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Debray, Régis; French Revolution; Huidobro, Vicente; Neruda, Pablo; Ruiz, Raúl; Surrealism; World War I. References Contreras, Francisco. Pour l’élargissement de l’influence française dans l’Amérique du Sud. Paris: Bossard, 1919. Matthieu, Gilles. Une Ambition sudaméricaine: Politique culturelle de la France (1914–1940). Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991.
CHIRAC, JACQUES (1932–) French politician, born in Paris on November 29, 1932. Chirac worked and studied in the United States (picking up excellent English). He almost got married there but returned and graduated from the ENA (Ecole Nationale d’administration) in 1959. In 1962 he joined the ministerial staff at the Commissariat du Plan and then moved to Prime Minister Georges Pompidou’s staff before he began aggressively cultivating the left-wing Corrèze constituency, which he won in 1967. Chirac’s attention to constituency business was famous and his ministerial rise was rapid, with eight posts of increasing seniority until 1976. Chirac’s first coup came in the 1974 presidential elections, when, as the minister of the interior, he organized the declaration by forty-three Gaullist deputies that they would support Giscard d’Estaing and not their own candidate.
256
CHIRAC, JACQUES
French President Jacques Chirac, who opposed the American military intervention in Iraq in 2003. (Embassy of France)
When Giscard d’Estaing won the presidency, Chirac was made prime minister. In August 1976 he resigned, declaring that he did not have the means to do the job properly, and he reestablished the Gaullist Party in November 1976 as the Rassemblement pour la République/Rally for the Republic (RPR). Chirac won Paris city hall in 1976, which provided a world stage, enabling him to promote his own people up through the ranks and constitute a sort of government in exile. But Chirac’s RPR felt undervalued, especially after the 1978 election, and the party began a long harassment of the government. In 1981 Chirac’s first presidential campaign proved to be as much against President Giscard d’Estaing as the Left and was a major contributory factor in the de-
feat of the incumbent. Chirac emerged as the principal figure on the Right and his RPR the Right’s largest party. When a conservative victory appeared inevitable in the general elections of 1986, Chirac’s decision, as a Gaullist, to work with an opposition president legitimized the “cohabitation.” As prime minister from 1986 to 1988, he held all the power, but President François Mitterrand had already established Gaullist foreign policy priorities. Both president and premier agreed to refuse overflight rights to the United States so that it could bomb Libya in 1986, and France’s independence within the West was reaffirmed. However, ill-advised education reforms brought students onto the streets in demonstrations reminiscent of 1968 and caused the withdrawal of the measures. A number of high profile “events” failed to win the 1988 election for him—the result was a resounding defeat (he polled only 46 percent). Chirac allowed his former finance minister and friend Edouard Balladur to take the post of prime minister in 1993. Chirac developed a left-leaning presidential program that exploited the disarray on the Left, and although failing to top the first round, he won the presidential election of 1995 in the runoff. There then began a fraught two years, starting with the resumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific to general protests. At this time a move back toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was anticipated, but France’s demand for leadership of the Mediterranean sector could not have been accepted, and the formal reintegration never took place. Prime Minister Alain Juppé ditched the presidential platform, which fomented discontent. He followed it up with a series of policy mistakes that undermined the government’s
CHOPIN, KATE
credibility. President Chirac decided to hold a snap election a year before schedule, in May–June 1997, but the upshot was a narrow victory for the Left, and Chirac had to invite his former Socialist opponent Lionel Jospin to form a government. This “cohabitation” from 1997 to 2002 was the longest of the Fifth Republic, but Chirac started it in poor shape. However, he rebuilt his position and reestablished his control over the opposition and the RPR by 2000. In 2002, therefore, Chirac was by no means a shoo-in candidate, and the Left had changed the electoral calendar to place the presidential elections before the general elections. Chirac had rebuilt his presidential stature as a paternal figure and had used the disaster of September 11 to emphasize his preeminence in foreign affairs. In this he was aided by a prearranged visit to the United States shortly after the disaster, at which he was able to affirm his solidarity with the Americans. At the first ballot of the presidential elections Chirac did prove to be a weak candidate and polled only 19.88 percent, a result that, in other circumstances, would have been a humiliation. However, the Left’s candidate (Prime Minister Jospin) polled only 16.18 percent, and the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen polled 16.86 percent, taking him into the runoff to face Chirac. In the runoff Chirac polled 82.21 percent to Le Pen’s 17.79 percent in the biggest victory of the Fifth Republic. In the subsequent general elections Chirac’s supporters took 365 of the 577 seats in the new assembly. Thus in 2002 Jacques Chirac was elected for a further five-year presidential term, backed by a massive majority in the assembly but on only the most general and vague of campaigns. In 2003, whether by
257
calculation or inadvertence, the French government appeared to be the main obstacle to an agreement on Iraq in the UN Security Council. France was skeptical of the need to invade Iraq and jealous of its independent position in the Middle East but was ultimately powerless to prevent U.S. and coalition action. Chirac’s stature as a president willing to stand up to the United States was undermined, however, by his brusque dismissal of those Europeans who did support the invasion of Iraq. After Saddam Hussein was overthrown, Chirac argued for a bigger UN role in the rebuilding of Iraq. David Bell See also: Gaulle, General Charles de; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Iraq War; Mitterrand, François; NATO; 9/11: Political Perspectives; Pompidou, Georges. References Keeler, John T., and Martin Schain, eds. Chirac’s Challenge. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Knapp, Andrew. Gaullism since de Gaulle. Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994.
CHOPIN, KATE (KATHERINE O’FLAHERTY) (1850–1904) U.S. writer of short fiction and two published novels, profoundly influenced by and responsive to French writing and culture. Born in 1850 of an Irish immigrant father and French Creole mother, Katherine O’Flaherty married a Creole businessman, Oscar Chopin, and moved from her home city of Saint Louis, Missouri, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and then (after her husband’s financial disasters in the 1870s) to Cloutierville, a small town in the rural Cane River area of the state. In both areas she was observing southern life at a time of
258
CHOPIN, KATE
considerable gender and racial tension and upheaval. Her fictional and poetic writing reflects those tensions, especially viewed from the perspective of the French Creole community of New Orleans and the French Acadian rural groups on Cane River. Her interest in these Frenchspeaking people among whom she lived was part of a lifelong engagement with French culture. She visited Paris on her honeymoon (at the very moment of the imperial government’s collapse and the Garde National’s assumption of power) and read widely in French literature, even when—as a young widow—she returned to Saint Louis in 1883 and began to write fiction about French Louisiana at a geographical and emotional distance. Chopin’s biographer, Emily Toth, believes the writer met French painter Edgar Degas in New Orleans, during the five months of 1872 that he spent in the city, exploring his own troubled mixed-race identity and painting French Creole women thrown into shadow during and after the great upheaval of the Civil War. Toth attributes to Degas two names and a possible narrative thread in Chopin’s most controversial and daring novel (now regarded as her masterpiece), The Awakening (1899). His intimate, painter Berthe Morisot, had an unhappily married friend, Edma Pontillon, a name extraordinarily similar to Edna Pontellier, the chosen name of Chopin’s unsatisfactorily married and frustrated artist heroine. Furthermore, Degas’s New Orleans neighbor, Léonce Olivier, had a wife América, who eloped suddenly to Paris with his brother René de Gas—and never returned. This scandal was the talk of the town, especially as Léonce was a decent if dull husband. In Chopin’s
novel, the abandoned husband is called Léonce Pontellier. Like Degas, Kate Chopin was living in New Orleans at a time when racial unease and violence simmered beneath the surface, in a city recovering slowly and bitterly from a civil war it was still waging—not only between Union and Confederate factions but also between the dying French Creole order and the U.S. political and economic forces that sought to homogenize the city. Chopin gathered material for a novel that would reflect the divided houses, waning Creole power bases, and radically shifting nature of class, gender, and race relations in the postbellum city. And she did this by an insistent ironic reference to the Frenchness of her city and adopted community—a Frenchness that was no longer dominant or at ease in a postcolonial, postbellum U.S. city. A recorder of two key Louisiana French cultures, as a half-French writer Chopin uses French names, literary works, and phrases throughout her writing. France is an imaginary and exotic site of nostalgia, yearning, and aspiration. Frenchness signifies desire, the illicit, and sexual pleasure in stories such as “A Point at Issue” and “Lilacs,” as well as in her first published novel, At Fault, and her second, destroyed novel, which began with a Parisian scene and was reputedly explicit. In The Awakening, there are clear intertextual references to Guy de Maupassant and other French writers in terms of a feminized version of city streetwalking, the main character Edna transformed into a female flaneur. However, unlike Charles Baudelaire’s classic anonymous and marginal Parisian man, Edna Pontellier can only masquerade as a flaneur. She walks through the city, but never with that relax-
CHOQUETTE, ROBERT
ation or easy openness to erotic encounter of her lover Arobin or the city dweller celebrated by Walter Benjamin. Helen Taylor See also: Acadia; American Civil War; Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar; Louisiana; New Orleans. References Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. ———. “Walking through New Orleans: Kate Chopin and the Female Flâneur.” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 1, no. 1 (April 1997): 69–85. Toth, Emily. Unveiling Kate Chopin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
CHOQUETTE, ROBERT (1905–1991) Poet, novelist, radio and television scriptwriter, journalist, and diplomat, born on April 22, 1905, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Through his writings, his diplomatic functions, and his active participation in the literary life of Quebec, Robert Choquette played an important role in the promotion and spread of French Canadian culture abroad. Born to Québécois parents who had emigrated to the United States, Choquette moved to Montreal with his family in 1913. In 1917, he began his studies at the Collège Saint-Laurent and went on to obtain an English-language baccalaureate at Loyola College. His literary career began in 1925, when he published his prize-winning first collection of poetry, A travers les vents (Through Winds). Following a period of work at the Montreal Englishlanguage daily The Gazette, from 1927 to 1930 he was director of La Revue moderne. At the same time, he was vice president and
259
secretary of the French section of the Association of Canadian Authors. In 1932, inspired by a trip to New York, he published his second collection of poems, Metropolitan Museum, which again won the David prize, tied with his good friend the poet Alfred DesRochers. This collection introduced the notion of urban life and, more broadly, the modernity of metropolitan centers to French Canadian poetry. His fourth collection of poetry, Suite marine, published in 1953, garnered a third David prize as well as prizes in France. From 1927 to 1975, Choquette also published five novels, a play, a collection of legends, and six essays, as well as contributions to journals and newspapers. The development of French radio in Quebec at the end of the 1920s marked a shift in Choquette’s career. In addition to his literary and poetic works, he created numerous radio programs from 1930 to the 1970s, as well as writing the script for some 5,500 episodes of radio and TV serials, genres in which he was to become a pioneer. His radio and television work ably mixed rural and urban themes, a duality that coincided with changes in the society and imagination of Quebec. Choquette spent many periods abroad: in France, from 1961 to 1963, he gave several interviews and participated in conferences focusing on his work and on French Canadian cultural life. In 1964, he was made consul general of Canada in Bordeaux and built many ties between Quebec and French institutions. From 1968 to 1970, he was Canadian ambassador to Argentina. He became president of the Société des écrivains canadiens in 1971 and president of the Académie canadiennefrançaise from 1973, an institution he had helped to create in 1944.
260
CHRISTOPHE, HENRI
As well as three David prizes, Robert Choquette received numerous distinctions, including companion of the Order of Canada in 1969. Today, a prize for literary creation awarded annually by Radio Canada carries his name. Although it is the aesthetic value of his work that has been recognized by Quebec literary history, Choquette’s role in the development of popular media culture and the spread of French Canadian literature abroad, especially in France, has also been recognized. Choquette died in Montreal on January 22, 1991. Daniel Chartier and Dominic Marcil See also: Argentina; Bordeaux; Literary Relations; Quebec. References Beausoleil, Claude. “Robert Choquette: A Neo-Romantic with Modernist Tones.” Eclipse, no. 41 (1989): 10–54. Legris, Renée. Robert Choquette. Montreal: Fides, 1972. ———. Robert Choquette: Romancier et dramaturge de la radio-télévision. Montreal: Fides, 1977.
CHRISTOPHE, HENRI (1767–1820) Haitian revolutionary leader. Following the assassination of JeanJacques Dessalines on October 17, 1806, Henri Christophe was declared provisional chief of government of the nascent Republic of Haiti. Probably Grenadian by birth, Christophe had spent time in the United States and had worked as a waiter, manager, and innkeeper before becoming a general in the Haitian slave insurrection. Christophe served first under the command of François Toussaint L’Ouverture and then, after Toussaint’s deportation to France, of Dessalines himself as he led the
combined mulatto and black forces to their final, decisive victory. Christophe was soon drawn into a civil war with Alexandre Sabès Pétion, one that lasted until 1820. Like his predecessors, Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines, Christophe pursued a cautious foreign policy: although he supported Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and the abolitionists, he assured the regional colonial powers that he would not interfere in the slave trade. In common with Pétion, King Christophe (he had himself crowned on June 2, 1811) refused to negotiate with France over Haiti’s independence and sought the recognition of “the first black republic” by all world powers. His constitutions of 1807 and 1811 omitted Dessalines’s prohibition of foreign ownership of Haitian property, and in general he encouraged free trade and foreign investment, particularly with Britain, which Christophe saw as a potential ally in resisting French attempts to recolonize Haiti. Christophe’s anglophilia was such that he invited English schoolteachers to settle in Haiti and stated that he would make English Haiti’s official language. Internally, however, Christophe’s autocratic policies became increasingly unpopular. He pursued Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines’s policy of reinvigorating the sugar, coffee, and cotton plantations by placing military and state officers in charge of strictly controlled laborers. Economically, this policy was something of a success, and the surplus generated was used on defense, most famously on the construction of the formidable Citadelle Laferrière. Politically, however, it was a deeply unpopular policy that led to an uprising, in the midst of which Christophe committed suicide in 1820. Christophe’s tragic demise
CINEMA, 1895–1945
has attracted the attention of the major Caribbean writers of the twentieth century: Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott have all written on this contradictory, enigmatic figure, and on the way Christophe, like the other major figures of the revolution, ultimately overturned the colonial rulers only to replace them with their own privileged cliques. Martin Munro See also: Césaire, Aimé; Dessalines, JeanJacques; Glissant, Edouard; Haiti; Slavery; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François. References Cole, Hubert. Christophe: King of Haiti. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967. Geggus, David P., and David B. Gaspar, eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
CINEMA, 1895–1945 Making an Atlantic comparison between France and the United States with regard to film is challenging, since both countries (and their respective film historians) claim to have invented motion pictures. In 1893, Thomas Edison created an imperfect machine, the Kinetograph, that simulated movement with a loop film, but without any projection system and no screen. The viewer had to look inside the lenses in a small hole in order to see the illusion of the movement of the images. However, in 1894, in France, the Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis) invented a way to show motion pictures on a screen, and their first public (and paying) screening of the Cinématographe was held at the Grand Café, in Paris, on December 28, 1895. They presented some ten films, including La Sortie des usines Lumière (1894) and L’Arroseur arrosé (1895).
261
From the early days of motion pictures, the Lumière brothers conceived their invention as a way to educate the masses and show documentary images from all countries and cultures. They hired many cameramen to shoot images on all continents. In 1898, their catalog already had some 1,000 titles, most of them less than a minute long. Among the many locations in the Americas where the Lumière operators (especially Félix Mesguisch) presented French-made films in 1896 were Boston, Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Washington, D.C., but also Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Chile, and Mexico. From then on, many famous settings in the Americas were filmed by the Lumière operators, mostly where they presented their own movie programs, such as in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Mexico. They also went to Canada to film an “Indian Dance” near Montreal in 1898. In the early twentieth century, French cinema was dominant worldwide at a time when Hollywood studios as we now know them were not yet established. French director Jean Durand tried to imitate the western genre with Arizona Bill (1909) and Attaque d’un train (Attack on a Train, 1910). Another French director, Victorin Jasset, adapted a popular serial story for the screen, from a U.S.-style hero named Nick Carter, in 1908. French cinema was quite influential during the 1910s. For instance, Charlie Chaplin copied his tramp character from French actor Max Linder, a comic director who created numerous films inspired by the style of the Parisian théâtre de boulevard from the nineteenth century. In fact, Chaplin’s assembly line in Modern Times (1935) was also copied from a very similar
262
CINEMA, 1895–1945
scene in René Clair’s earlier film, A nous la Liberté (Liberty for Us, 1931). It was only by the late 1910s that the major U.S. studios took control from most nations in terms of distribution networks, especially when France was defending its own border during World War I. Many good French directors from that era, like Léonce Perret, Maurice Tourneur, and his son Jacques Tourneur, all went to the United States in 1914. There, Perret directed almost twenty films that sometimes included references to France, including La Fayette, We Come! (1918). When Perret went back to France, he managed to initiate some coproductions such as Madame Sans-Gène (1923) with Gloria Swanson. Maurice Tourneur stayed in the United States until 1927 and afterward returned to France, staying even during World War II. In the same way, two brothers from Paris, director Albert Capellani and actor Paul Capellani, simultaneously emigrated to Hollywood from 1915 to 1922 after making a fine debut in France. The end of the 1920s saw the coming of the talkies, which changed everything because the ease of reediting subtitles in silent films was replaced by the problem of dubbing. Experimental films gained a select audience during that period. Philadelphiaborn photographic artist Man Ray had met Marcel Duchamp in New York City in 1915; Man Ray emigrated to Paris in 1921 and directed an avant-garde short film, Retour à la raison (1923), followed by Emak Bakia (1927) and L’Etoile de mer (1928), illustrating an animation based on a surrealist poem by Robert Desnos. Man Ray returned to the United States from 1940 to 1951 and went back to Paris until his death in 1976. Spanish-born Luis Buñuel, also a member of the Groupe Sur-
réaliste, directed his first movies in France (Un Chien andalou, 1929; L’Age d’or, 1930) before going to the United States and Mexico in the early 1930s. In fact, Buñuel received Mexican citizenship even though he is known and remembered for his French films. The talkies prompted some producers (MGM, Paramount, Tobis) to shoot new movies in two or three versions (English, French, and sometimes German) in the early 1930s. At that time, it appeared easier to shoot films in many versions instead of dubbing them. Jacques Tourneur began his career as his father’s Maurice’s assistant and directed his first films in France, such as Tout ça ne vaut pas l’amour (All That Is Not Worth Love, 1931). But Parisian-born Tourneur directed his most important movies in Hollywood, where he returned on his own in 1935, specializing in fantastic, gothic films like Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), both produced by RKO. Tourneur stayed in Hollywood for many decades, much longer than his father, and worked a little in England in the 1950s; he later returned to France to retire. Some French directors went to the United States before the Nazi era. Jacques Feyder went to Hollywood from 1929 to 1931 after making ten films in France, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. He was the first director to adapt the legendary story of Atlantis in 1921. In the United States, Feyder directed a silent film with Greta Garbo, The Kiss (MGM, 1929), and a few talkies before going back to France (although Feyder remained in Switzerland during World War II). One of the most respected directors in France, René Clair, first tried a new career in England after the failure of his comedy
CINEMA, 1895–1945
Le Dernier Milliardaire (The Last Billionaire, 1934); he later went to the United States in 1940. Clair directed Marlene Dietrich in The Flame of New Orleans (1941), and carried on with comedies such as I Married a Witch (1942) and drama in And Then There Were None (1945). He went back to France in 1946 to pursue his career and to become the first film director to be elected as a member of the Académie Française. Another important French director, Julien Duvivier, began a brilliant career in France in 1919 and did some double versions (in French and German) of his films from 1931. He had much success with Maria Chapdelaine (1934), the first of three feature films adapted from the Louis Hémon novel and partly shot in Saguenay, Canada. French actor Jean Gabin played the role of lumberjack François Paradis and tried to imitate the Quebec accent. Four years later, Duvivier went to Hollywood to direct The Great Waltz (1938), went back to France afterward, and then returned to Hollywood in 1941 to do Tales of Manhattan (1942), Flesh and Fantasy (1943), and The Impostor (1944). The last film Duvivier directed in France before the war, a patriotic fresco titled Untel père et fils shot in 1940, opened first in 1943 in the United States, not France, where it would have been banned by the Nazis. The French première of that film came only in 1945. After 1933 many German directors, actors, and technicians left their country to settle down in France, where they pursued their creative work, and later emigrated to the United States. The German directors who made at least one movie in France before going to Hollywood are numerous: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Max Ophuls, and G. W. Pabst. In 1932 the
263
latter directed a wonderful remake of Pierre Benoit’s novel L’Atlantide, set in Morocco but filmed in Berlin, in French, German, and English versions. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the new political situation changed two elements in terms of the motion picture industry. First, many good directors and actors left France to go to the United States. The best French actors, such as Jean Gabin, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Michèle Morgan, also emigrated to the United States from 1940. Second, since U.S. films were forbidden in France, movie theaters that were often full because they were warm and safe presented mainly bad German films from the 1940s and very good French films. The 1940–1944 years were a very prosperous era for French cinema in terms of artistic content and commercial success, even though most of these films were not exported to the United States before the end of the war. The lack of competition allowed French films to get the best audiences, thus encouraging producers to make more films in France. Emerging French directors included Henri-Georges Clouzot (Le Corbeau/The Raven, 1943) and Marcel Carné (Les Enfants du paradis/Children of Paradise, 1945); scripts by Jacques Prévert, Jean Giraudoux, and Jean Cocteau were successful. The hiatus in film trade between France and the United States went on for five years. It was only in 1945 that French audiences discovered for the first time the most important Hollywood movies made since the beginning of the decade, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), and Casablanca (1942). But from 1945, the U.S. authorities made sure they could always count on the French audiences in the
264
CINEMA, 1895–1945
future by pushing the controversial BlumByrnes Agreement, which strove to eliminate the French quotas on film imports. In some cases, emigration had durable consequences, as some European directors decided to stay in the United States even after the end of World War II. Strongly influenced by the Hollywood films of Erich von Stroheim, French director Jean Renoir was already famous in Europe during the 1930s, when he directed La Chienne/The Bitch (1931) and La Bête humaine/The Human Beast (1938), two movies that inspired Fritz Lang to produce remakes of them in Hollywood during the 1950s. After the failure of his film La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939), Renoir went to Italy for a short while in 1940 and then left to go to Hollywood that same year in order to gain an international audience. During that period, Renoir alternated between conventional adaptations such as Swamp Water (1941) and The Southerner (1945) with propaganda films made for the free zone in Europe: Vivre libre (This Land Is Mine, 1943) and Salut à la France (Salute to France, 1944). Even though he would later work again in France (in the 1950s), Renoir went on living in Beverly Hills and even took U.S. citizenship. Jean Benoit-Lévy, another French director who went to the United States during World War II, wrote the first book about film ethics, which was in fact first published in Montreal: Les Grandes Missions du cinéma (Editions Léo Parizeau, 1945). As European directors went to the United States, some U.S.-born artists made the reverse journey. Born in Middleton, Connecticut, in 1911, director Jules Dassin studied in France during the 1930s and made a few spy films in Hollywood in
the early 1940s, including Nazi Agent (1942); he was later blacklisted during the McCarthy era and went to France to pursue his career, like Joseph Losey. During World War II, some U.S. films mentioned the political situation in Europe, and many sympathized with France during the occupation. Perhaps the cult movie par excellence, Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca included some talented European actors (the Londonian Claude Rains, the Swede Ingrid Bergman) and some émigré German actors from the expressionist era (Conrad Veidt, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Peter Lorre, from Fritz Lang’s famous M ). All these characters were cast around Humphrey Bogart. Set in North Africa while Morocco was still a colony of occupied France, Casablanca illustrated perfectly the specific alliances and tensions in the Atlantic triangle during World War II. The same winning ingredients were mixed again in 1944 into another film, A Passage to Marseilles. As his own war effort, Alfred Hitchcock (who was fluent in French) directed two short films in French: Bon voyage (1944) and Aventure malgache (1944). After directing The Negro Soldier (1943), a tribute to the African roots of the African American soldiers, Frank Capra supervised another propaganda documentary titled Tunisian Victory (1943), about the Allies’ campaign in North Africa during World War II. But as Suzanne Langlois (2001) explains, most of the strongest images from World War II were seen after 1944, when people in liberated France viewed the illicit documentary images that were shot in the occupied zone since 1940, for instance in La Libération de Paris (1944), showing the Allies in France.
CINEMA, 1945 TO THE PRESENT
In Quebec, the shortage of films from occupied France became a problem when audiences tired of always seeing reruns of the same pre-war movies from Marcel Pagnol and others. U.S. films presented in their original version without any dubbing or subtitles were everywhere. The solution was the creation of a new film industry. Some Canadian producers established companies dedicated to cinema, and they made some of the first Canadian films; some were in fact directed by filmmakers who came mostly from France, such as Jean-Marie Poitevin (A La Croisée des chemins/At the Crossroads, 1943) and René Delacroix. With the exclusive help of a Canadian producer, France-Film, Delacroix went to France to codirect a religious film, NotreDame de la Mouïse (1941) and later a coproduction between France and Canada titled Docteur Louise (1949). Fedor Ozep, who left Russia for France in the mid1930s, emigrated to Quebec for a few years, where he directed films in French such as Le Père Chopin (1944), known in France under the title L’Oncle du Canada, followed by French and English versions of La Forteresse/Whispering City (1949), shot in Quebec City. The years after World War II saw the emergence of francophone films in Montreal and the growing omnipresence of Hollywood in Europe. Yves Laberge See also: Blum-Byrnes Agreement; Chile; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Cocteau, Jean; Dassin, Jules; Duchamp, Marcel; Duvivier, Julien; Hémon, Louis; Language; Losey, Joseph; Maria Chapdelaine; Mexico; Montreal; Morgan, Michèle; Quebec; Ray, Man; Surrealism; Tourneur, Jacques; Tourneur, Maurice; World War I; World War II.
265
References Barnier, Martin, and Raphaëlle Moine, eds. France/Hollywood: Echanges cinématographiques et identités nationales. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002. Langlois, Suzanne. La Résistance dans le cinéma français 1944–1994: De La Libération de Paris à Lebera me. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Legrand, Jacques, ed. Chronique du cinéma. Bassillac: Editions Chronique et Jacques Legrand, 1996. Lévy, Jean-Benoit. Les Grandes Missions du cinéma. Montreal: Editions Léo Parizeau, 1945. Rittaud-Hutinet, Jacques. Auguste et Louis Lumière: Les 1000 premiers films. Paris: Philippe Sers éditeur, 1990.
CINEMA, 1945 TO THE PRESENT The history of Franco-American cinematic relations is highly complex and yet only too frequently is reduced to a simplistic story of Hollywood’s cultural imperialism and valiant French attempts to defend domestic cinema. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, French films represented around 60 percent of the global market and dominated the U.S. market. However, the industry was badly hit by the war years and never fully recovered. The rapidly expanding and increasingly powerful Hollywood industry gradually increased its hold on world markets, and the advent of sound technology in the 1930s and the heyday of U.S. studio production up until the end of the 1940s meant that French cinema never managed to regain its former authority. A love-hate relationship was established. Admiration for the foreign product in both countries was matched by fears of U.S. economic might (in France) and criticism of
266
CINEMA, 1945 TO THE PRESENT
French protectionism and elitism (in the United States). A number of events and statements provide ample illustration of this relationship. At the world conference for ministers of culture organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and held in Mexico in July 1982, Jack Lang, then France’s minister of culture, made an infamous speech in which he decried the invasion of American cultural products, calling for a true program of cultural resistance. Lang was explicit in his condemnation, describing this American influx as cultural and financial imperialism and stressing the need to reinforce France’s cultural position in the world economy. At the heart of this cultural crusade were the audiovisual media, particularly film and television. Lang envisaged a new European cultural order, led by France, that would provide a counterbalance to the economic might of the dominant culture industries, specifically those of the United States. These discourses continued to be voiced by various French commentators throughout the 1980s and reached a head in the early 1990s with the reactions to the negotiations of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and French calls for a “cultural exception.” Attempts to deregulate the audiovisual market revealed the apparent incommensurability of European (specifically French) and North American conceptions of commerce and culture. U.S. executives proposed a trade agreement that would provide equal opportunities for American intellectual services (including the audiovisual industry). They sought curbs on public funding for audiovisual production through European subsidies
and objected to levies imposed on foreign films shown in France. Moreover, they argued that European quota systems inhibited equal access to markets and thus contravened the ethos of GATT. In marked contrast, the French government called for l’exception culturelle, the exclusion of the audiovisual industries from the GATT agreement. France claimed that the loss of a form of protection for indigenous cinema and television industries would signal the end of European production and mean total dominance of the European markets by the United States. The negotiations became a clash of ideologies, between a French tradition of state cultural policy and aid for the audiovisual industries and a U.S. rejection of any form of public regulation of culture and a total commitment to free trade. It is important to stress that the European position was largely a reaction to French governmental pressure. Indeed, in many European states, particularly Britain, the debate was perceived as being between the United States and France alone. The outcome of the negotiations in the form of a decision to exclude the audiovisual industries from GATT was hailed as a great victory by the French government. Lang’s speech and the GATT discussions may well be just two incidents in a long and complex history, but they merit mention here because they clearly demonstrate the rift that separates French and U.S. conceptions of the audiovisual industries. For the U.S. negotiators, audiovisual production was no more than an industry and should be treated in the same way as any other form of material production. As an industry, film and television should be entirely deregulated, and according to hegemonic U.S. free-market ideologies,
CINEMA, 1945 TO THE PRESENT
this would lead to diversity and consumer choice. Attitudes in France were quite different. There existed a wide consensus that deregulation of the audiovisual industries would lead to a standardization dominated by Hollywood. Above all, there was a widespread insistence in France upon the cultural importance of audiovisual production and the necessity of separating this practice from other forms of industrial production. Cultural production was placed at the center of national identity; to forgo protection of the film and television industries would mean an end to French différence and an attendant U.S. hegemony. Such convictions were widespread and were voiced by politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and members of the industry from across the political spectrum. In December 1993, Jacques Toubon, minister of culture for the incumbent right-wing government, echoed the remarks made by his left-wing predecessor in Mexico, calling for a more active international cultural policy that would enter into direct combat with U.S. production and the threat of cultural uniformity. To show that he meant business, Toubon went on to finance ninety supplementary copies of Claude Berri’s Germinal (1993) in order to prevent Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) from dominating French cinemas as it had dominated those of other countries. These discourses can be seen as part of an enduring articulation in France of the threat of American culture, particularly Hollywood cinema. The Blum-Byrnes Agreement of 1946, for example, gave rise to reactions very similar to those mobilized around the GATT. Both agreements involved a whole set of economic measures between France and the United States, but they have typically been reduced in France to the cinema measures, which, it was
267
claimed, very nearly brought about the end of French cinema. This claim itself is extremely simplistic, but the outcry caused by both these agreements and the resistance to the GATT both serve to underline the enduring nature of French fears about the impact of Hollywood cinema on the domestic industry. French cinema does indeed exist in a global cinematic economy dominated by Hollywood and is dependent upon various forms of protection and subsidy in order to retain a space in both the domestic and foreign markets. Moreover, despite the attempts at deregulation described above, Hollywood does indeed practice a number of forms of protectionism, notably the very limited distribution of foreign films in the U.S. market. However, to describe Hollywood production as a straightforward threat to French cinema is to deny the sheer complexity of the various processes of influence and exchange between the two industries and moreover the difficulties inherent in attempting to categorize films as straightforwardly French or American. Since the very early days of film production, the relations between French cinema and Hollywood and the ways in which they have responded to one another have had a profound impact on these apparently distinct cinemas. The remaking of French films in Hollywood and the presence of French émigré personnel in the U.S. market are but two examples of this interaction. Examples of intertextuality and exchange at the level of film style and narrative are plentiful. Perhaps the best-known examples are the films of the French nouvelle vague and their deliberate and self-conscious quoting of U.S. cinema. Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959) pays explicit homage to U.S.
268
CIRQUE
DU
SOLEIL
cinema via its referencing of Hollywood B-movies and Humphrey Bogart, while simultaneously challenging the rather turgid conventions of contemporary French production. More recently, directors such as Luc Besson have turned to the aesthetics of Hollywood and given them a distinctly French twist in an attempt to revivify French popular cinema. Examples include recent domestic box-office successes such as Taxi (Gérard Pirès, 1998) and its sequel Taxi 2 (Gérard Krawczyk, 2000), both scripted by Luc Besson, which transfer the decidedly American car-chase movie to the streets of Marseilles and Paris. Tellingly, and despite French anxieties about Hollywood, the government-sponsored agency Unifrance, dedicated to the promotion of French cinema overseas, has played an active role in selling remake rights to U.S. producers and has long been a presence at the annual Sarasota French Film Festival in the United States. Ultimately, it may be vital to retain some degree of support for French attempts to protect indigenous cinema. If Hollywood production typically represents around 70 percent of box-office takings in France, as opposed to between 80 and 90 percent in Britain, it is largely due to various forms of government support and subsidy. However, we should also remember that if, as these figures suggest, Hollywood films have a very forceful presence in French cinemas, then they clearly become an integral part of French cultural life. It is worth pointing out that the U.S. films that do well in France are not necessarily the same films that do well elsewhere, and they are not necessarily consumed and received in the same way. Finally, any consideration of Franco-American cinematic relations
should recall that Hollywood films contribute sizable sums of money to the compte de soutien (support account), via a levy on box-office receipts and as a result, albeit in a roundabout way, play a key role in the continuation of fresh and innovative French cinema. Lucy Mazdon See also: Anti-Americanism; Besson, Luc; Blum-Byrnes Agreement; GATT; Godard, Jean-Luc; Lang, Jack. References Austin, Guy. Contemporary French Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Forbes, Jill. The Cinema in France. London: Macmillan, 1992. Hayward, Susan. French National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993. Mazdon, Lucy, ed. France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema. London: Wallflower, 2001.
CIRQUE
DU SOLEIL The first circus of Québécois origin to have gained international recognition. Cirque du Soleil is a modern circus that breaks with tradition by banning animals from the ring in favor of human talent, costumes, colored lighting effects, and magical music. It was created in 1984 by young street artists under the leadership of Guy Laliberté, himself an accordionist, stilt walker, and fire-eater, during the Fête foraine de Baie-Saint-Paul, a festival in Baie Saint Paul that brought together many public entertainers. This event led the Quebec government to ask the group, known at the time as Le Club des talons hauts, to put on a show for the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the voyage to Canada by Jacques Cartier. Cirque du Soleil was thus born with the financial support of the Que-
CIRQUE
bec government, and it toured in Quebec and the following year in Ontario. This commission was the beginning of a great adventure that continues through the creation of high-quality, creative, and diverse shows staged for all audiences, as well as through the spread of a whole variety of connected activities. Although continuing to specialize in the creation of shows in the big top or in theaters (such as, for example, the Bellagio in Las Vegas or the Walt Disney Resort in Orlando), Cirque du Soleil has created its own multimedia division, which produces films, videos, music, DVDs, and television programs for which Cirque has received numerous prizes. Cirque du Soleil is recognized for the cultural diversity of its artists and artisans, as well as for its blending of artistic and acrobatic disciplines. It has become a true cultural business. Its headquarters in Montreal employ more than 2,700 people, of which approximately one-quarter are artists, the primary sources of Cirque’s rich success. Since 1984, Cirque has produced fifteen creations, including such classics as Saltimbanco, Alegria, Quidam, Dralion, and Varekai. Now set up in the United States for four permanent shows, the Cirque took a new tack in 1998 with “O,” a show that was staged entirely in water and was presented at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. More controversial, the 2003 creation Zumanity was an adults-only show. Since Cirque first started, more than 40 million spectators in ninety cities across five continents have watched the Cirque du Soleil’s magical performances. Cirque has received numerous prizes and awards: Emmy, Drama Desk, Bambi, and Ace Awards; Gémeaux, Gemini, and Félix
DU
SOLEIL
269
Members of Cirque du Soleil performed at a benefit concert called Quebec/New York, in Montreal September 28, 2001. The benefit concert contained over 100 Quebec artists, including singer Céline Dion, to help raise funds for the victims of the suicide hijackings in New York City on September 11. (Reuters/Corbis)
prizes; and the Golden Rose at the Montreux Comedy Festival in Switzerland. It also won the Prix du Centre national des arts du gouverneur general du Canada in 2000, as well as being given its own star on the Canadian Walk of Fame in Toronto. Sonia Lebel See also: Cartier, Jacques; Ontario; Quebec. References Boudreault, Julie. Le Cirque du Soleil: La création d’un spectacle: Saltimbanco. Quebec: Nuit blanche, 1996. Harvie, Jennifer, and Erin Hurley. “States of Play: Locating Quebec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina, and the Cirque du Soleil.” Theater Journal 51, no. 3 (1999): 299.
270
CITROËN
CITROËN (AUTOMOBILES CITROËN) Citroën was one of the world’s first automobile manufacturers and, as part of the PSA Peugeot Citroën group, is now the largest private car manufacturer in France. It has plants in twelve countries and sales in eighty-five countries. The company was founded in 1913 by André Citroën as the Citroën Gear Company, developing gearing technology that resembled the chevrons that today form its logo. Citroën was key to the importing of modern industrial working practices into France, and its Type A was the first mass-produced car in Europe, made starting in 1919 at the Quai de Javel factory in Paris. Citroën first became known in foreign markets in 1921, a year in which it exported around 3,000 cars, though arguably its first transatlantic claim to fame came when Charles Lindbergh used the lights of the Citroën logo, shining the full length of the Eiffel Tower from 1925 to 1934, as a navigation beacon for his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. Then began a long expansion through a network of subsidiaries. Other corporate landmarks include the introduction of the 5CV Type C in 1922, the so-called democratized car, also dubbed the first lady’s car and painted yellow, earning it the nickname “Petite Citron.” After the 1929 stock market crash, Citroën entered a financial crisis that ended with the government asking Michelin, the company’s chief creditor, to bail it out in 1934 in return for financial control. André Citroën died in 1935. In 1936, morale began to return with the start of work on the 2CV, or deux
chevaux (2 horesepower), first conceived of as an umbrella on four wheels, though production was delayed until 1948 because of World War II (the New York Times called it a cross between a frog and a camel). In 1943 Citroën produced no cars at all and refused to comply with the Vichy government. In 1962, during a decade of international expansion, Citroën established a sales subsidiary in Montreal. An increase in exports to 55 percent of the total sales volume helped the company recover from the 1973 oil crisis. Peugeot’s share in the company had risen to 90 percent by 1976, when the PSA holding company was created, and in the mid-1980s Citroën underwent a complete brand overhaul, with advertising that included a herd of thoroughbred horses and a change in color for the dealership network from blue and yellow to red and white. The last 2CV rolled off the assembly line in 1990. At the time of writing, PSA’s operations in the Americas include two plants in Argentina and one in Brazil. PSA Peugeot Citroën’s sales of 30,000 vehicles are up from 18,000 in 1998 but are dwarfed by the more than 1 million vehicles sold in Western Europe. Mark Vernon
See also: Argentina; Automobiles; Brazil; Michelin; World War II. References Ducorray, R. Dates. 1991. “Valiant Little Champion of the Road, Au Revoir.” New York Times, March 9, 1988. “Why a Little Car Won a Big Place in Europe’s Heart.” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 1984.
CLAIR, RENÉ
CLAIR, RENÉ (RENÉ-LUCIEN CHOMETTE) (1898–1981) One of the greatest French film directors of the classic era, born in Neuilly, near Paris, who also wrote extensively about the medium of cinema. Despite being classified among the top five French directors of the 1930s, alongside Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Jacques Feyder, and Marcel Carné, and also displaying populism in his work, Clair made films quite apart in tone from the pessimistic “poetic realism” of his peers. Clair started in the film business as an actor and critic before moving to directing as an assistant to Jacques de Baroncelli in the mid-1920s and joining the avant-garde. His first notable silents were Entracte (1924), Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (An Italian Straw Hat, 1928), an international success, and Les Deux Timides (1928), already showing his light, witty, satirical style with a lot of movement and apt comic timing. In the many articles and essays Clair wrote on film aesthetics and techniques, he always emphasized the importance of motion and rhythm, which were indeed characteristic of his films (Cinema Yesterday and Today, 1972; Reflections on the Cinema, 1953). Not hampered by the advent of sound, Clair in fact studied its possibilities carefully, using it creatively as a means to further and complement the meaning of images, as in A nous la Liberté/Liberty for Us or Le Million (both 1931). Like his contemporaries, Clair’s favorite subject in the 1930s was working-class Paris and its people, yet he was more interested in showing the comical absurdity of urban life than its alienating or threatening nature. In that respect, Clair’s representation
271
of the modern city was closer to Charlie Chaplin’s than Carné’s. Russian émigré Lazare Meerson designed the sets on Un Chapeau de paille, Les Deux Timides, Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930), A nous la Liberté, Le Million, and Quatorze Juillet/14 July (1933), contributing to Clair’s representation of Paris. Clair left for Great Britain in 1936 and directed the whimsical comedy The Ghost Goes West (1936) and Break the News (1938) with Maurice Chevalier, before spending the war years in Hollywood. Of the French directors exiled in Hollywood, Clair is probably the one who enjoyed the most success, with The Flame of New Orleans (1941), starring Marlene Dietrich, I Married a Witch (1942) with Veronica Lake, Forever and a Day (codirector, 1943), It Happened Tomorrow (1944) with Dick Powell and Linda Darnell, and And Then There Were None (1945). Returning to France after the war, Clair directed Chevalier again, but this time in French, in Le Silence est d’or (1947), an interesting and underrated film about the days of silent cinema. Despite some success with films starring Gérard Philipe (La Beauté du diable, 1950; Les Belles de nuit, 1952; Les Grandes Manoeuvres, 1955), Clair’s postwar films did not revive the interest he had inspired in the 1920s and 1930s. Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Chevalier, Maurice; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Duvivier, Julien; Renoir, Jean; World War II. References Billard, Pierre. Le Mystère René Clair. Paris: Plon, 1998. Dale, R. C. The Films of René Clair. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986. McGerr, Celia. René Clair. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
272
CLAUDEL, PAUL-LOUIS-CHARLES-MARIE
CLAUDEL, PAUL-LOUISCHARLES-MARIE (1868–1955) French author, born in Villeneuve-surFère. Paul Claudel had a fascinating and durable relationship with the United States. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending well into the post–World War II period, he was that oddest of creatures—a poet-ambassador. Outside of his contribution to French letters, Claudel is remembered for comments on U.S. affairs in three different stages of his life; first, as a deeply impressed observer (and critic) of U.S. capitalism in the 1890s, second as the French ambassador in Washington during the tense years 1927–1933, and finally, as a pro-American who was nonetheless cynical about U.S. policy at the end of World War II—a stance somewhat compromised by Claudel’s less-thansterling Resistance credentials. Claudel is one of modern France’s greatest playwrights and poets, a symbolist who dissented from his cohort in his strong devotion to Christianity. His odd, biblically influenced prose has been called “psalmlike,” and his religious dedication is evident everywhere in his work. Like his contemporary Charles Péguy, Claudel adhered to a Catholic worldview that, although extremely conservative, was never reactionary, and his second career as a diplomat suggests the extent to which this man of God was engaged with mundane worldly concerns. After graduating from Lycée Louis le Grand, Claudel entered the Ecole Libre de Sciences Politiques, where his interest in Edgar Allan Poe, complemented by his admiration for Eugène Lavasseur (an economist convinced of the link between true
French author Paul Claudel is remembered for favorable—and critical—comments on American affairs. (Library of Congress)
spiritual freedom and a free-market economy), convinced him to seek an appointment in the United States. In 1893, aged twenty-seven, he accepted a position in the young Third Republic’s diplomatic corps as a vice consul in New York and later consul general to Boston. Fascinated and repelled by U.S. dynamism, Claudel began a lifelong association with the New World—his interest in the United States also always being part of his personal struggle with modernity. A half-forgotten play survives from Claudel’s writing in this era, L’Echange. It is the overblown story of a part American Indian forced to “sell” his French wife to a U.S. capitalist because of his debts. These thinly veiled symbols capture Claudel’s mood—romantic Native Americans; good, simple French Catholics; and practical but morally dubious U.S. capitalists, all struggling on the American frontier. It remains
COCA-COLA COMPANY
an intriguing play, not least because Claudel makes the U.S. capitalist a mouthpiece for economic ideas he himself shared. This play would have been of little interest had Claudel not been appointed, to the surprise of many, French ambassador to Washington in 1927. Although an unremarkable official, Claudel nonetheless won over the Washington establishment. Officially, he conformed to the pro-Americanism of André Tardieu rather than the Americanophobia of Georges Duhamel, yet his letters and private correspondence show a man still struggling with his ambivalence toward U.S. capitalism, as well as an increasing contempt for Protestantism. At the end of World War II and approaching eighty years of age, private citizen Paul Claudel again accepted public positions, speaking out in favor of the Atlantic Charter. But he had also, however, made some famously anti-American remarks in his diaries, including some comparisons to Nazi Germany. The impressions formed by his youth remained unreconciled, and for all his public proAmericanism, the issue of whether the United States was a model or a warning for France seems never to have been settled for Paul Claudel. Seth Armus See also: Anti-Americanism; Catholic Church; Duhamel, Georges; Poe, Edgar Allan; World War II. References Humes, Joy Nachod. Two against Time: A Study of the Very Present Worlds of Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Knapp, Bettina. Paul Claudel. New York: Ungar, 1982. Mathy, Jean-Philippe. Extrême Occident: French Intellectuals and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
273
COCA-COLA COMPANY Coca-Cola enjoys 51 percent of the worldwide soft drinks market, with 160 products distributed in over 200 countries, and is arguably the best-known global brand. North America represents about one-third of its sales, where it also owns the Minute Maid Company and Schweppes Beverages, including the Canada Dry brand. The company’s proficiency is widely admired and said to be based upon four excellences: consumer marketing, infrastructure (production and distribution), product packaging, and customer marketing (including to vendors). But the founder, Dr. John Styth Pemberton, knew none of this success. In 1869, he came to Atlanta, and by 1886 he had invented a mixture of sugar, water, coca extracts, and kola nut, adding caffeine so that it could be marketed as a headache cure. A label in 1887 read: “Makes not only a delicious and invigorating beverage but a valuable Brain Tonic and cure for all nervous afflictions.” He died the next year, when the company was owned by Asa G. Chandler. Chandler’s philanthropic zeal led to success. By 1895, the drink could be bought all over the United States, and sales were growing in Canadian cities. The first bottling franchise was established in 1899, a key to speeding up expansion, and by 1911 the marketing budget had reached a massive $1 million (by which time all references to medicinal benefits had been dropped). In 1916, the curved shape of the Coke bottle could be seen in the shops. In 1923, Winship Woodruff became president, and he stabilized the company financially, as well as introducing such innovations as the six-pack, the suggestion that the drink was good for home consumption,
274
COCTEAU, JEAN
Coca-Cola advertisement, late nineteenth century. By 1895, Coca-Cola could be bought all over America, and sales were growing in Canadian cities. (Library of Congress)
and vending machines. By 1930 a quality control program ensured that Coca-Cola tasted the same wherever it was bought. World War II put Coke firmly on the road to global domination. The company committed to providing any person in uniform with a bottle for five cents regardless of where they were stationed. Coca-Cola became identified with the American way of life, and plants were set up in Europe and North Africa. In the 1950s the company opened up to twenty plants a year as expansion continued, and by 1969, 6 billion gallons of the drink had been sold. The “It’s the Real Thing” advertising campaign was launched in the 1960s to combat the appearance of rival Pepsi Cola. In the 1980s, Coca-Cola enjoyed the most successful brand extension in history, with
the launch of Diet Coke, now the number three soft drink in the world, and committed one of its biggest blunders when it tried to change the original drink. Introduction to France did not at first go smoothly. The Communist Party teamed up with vineyard owners in resistance. But their efforts were futile, and the first bottling plant opened in 1919. Another difficult period in France came in 1997, when the company tried to buy Orangina from Pernod Ricard. The government blocked the sale, citing anticompetitive practices. The purchase of the Schweppes brand was similarly resisted, although it went through in 1999. CocaCola now faces other difficulties, notably the launch of a French Islamic version of the drink, Mecca Cola. For now, though, Coca-Cola’s dominance seems secure: although country sales are kept secret, the scale of its presence is indicated by the fact that it operates five production facilities, two distribution warehouses, and seven sales centers in France and is responsible for 14,000 direct and indirect jobs. Mark Vernon See also: Mineral Water; World War II. References Hays, Constance L. Pop: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company. London: Hutchinson, 2004. Oliver, Thomas. The Real Coke: The Real Story. London: Macmillan, 1987. Pendergast, Mark. For God, Country, and Coca-Cola. New York: Texere Publishing, 1993.
COCTEAU, JEAN (1889–1963) One of the most versatile, prolific authors of the twentieth century, Jean Cocteau elaborated a personal conception of total
COCTEAU, JEAN
art, which he defined in terms of the overarching notion of “poetry” and which found expression in a variety of fields, ranging from fiction to graphic art, from filmmaking to drama, and from couture to postage stamp design and mural painting. Cocteau was born into a middle-class family and became very early on associated with avant-garde circles in Paris. In 1915, he met Pablo Picasso, who had a lasting influence on his work. Only two years later, he collaborated with Picasso, the composer Erik Satie, and the director of the Ballets russes, Serge de Diaghilev, in the creation of a highly controversial ballet Parade, which propelled Cocteau to instant fame. His first book of poems, Aladdin’s Lamp (1919), further established the iconoclastic reputation of an artist already known as the “Frivolous Prince” in Parisian bohemian circles. Cocteau turned this nickname into the title of another collection of poems he published at the age of twenty-one. By this time he had befriended and inspired the Group of Six (which gathered the representatives of the new musical avant-garde, such as Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Georges Auric). During the 1920s, Cocteau published two novels: Thomas l’imposteur (Imposter, 1923) and Les Enfants terribles (1929), as well as a major work of criticism, Le Rappel à l’ordre (Return to Order, 1926). Apart from his landmark adaptation of Beauty and the Beast (1946), released in the United States in 1947, Cocteau’s best-known cinematic work was his “Orphic Trilogy,” which he started in 1930, with The Blood of a Poet, and continued with Orpheus (1949) and the Testament of Orpheus (1959). A quintessential exploration of the author’s conception of poetic creation and of his personal
275
Jean Cocteau, standing on ladder, putting the finishing touches on his wall sketches of the life of Saint Peter in Saint Peter's Chapel, Villefranche, France, 1956. (Library of Congress)
mythology, based on the ancient myth of the poet who descended into the world of the dead in search of his lost love, the “Orphic Trilogy” ingeniously blends autobiographical and fictional elements into a selfreflexive, loosely structured meditation on human mortality and the timeless condition of art. In December 1948, Cocteau traveled to the United States, where he met such figures as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, and Marlene Dietrich. He returned to France in January 1949 and during the flight home wrote the Lettre aux Américains, a critique of the lack of experimentation and creativity in American culture. His U.S. experiences formed the basis of part of Robert Lepage’s play Needles and Opium, which also offers an account of Miles Davis’s almost simultaneous trip to
276
COFFEE
Paris and encounter with French singer Juliette Greco. Following Cocteau’s trip, the U.S. actor Yul Brynner made a cameo appearance (alongside Picasso and Cocteau’s lifelong partner, Jean Marais) in the Testament of Orpheus. Cocteau became a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1949, despite his earlier misguided salute to a fascist artist, Arno Becker. The exhibition of Cocteau’s drawings that opened in November 2000 at the Andy Warhol Museum celebrated the influence of the charismatic French author on the work of the U.S. pop artist, while reminding the general audience and the critics of their shared aestheticization of the male body and their shared iconic status in the gay world. Ramona Fotiade See also: Avant-Gardes; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Dance; Gay Movement; Lepage, Robert; Music (Classical); Painting; Surrealism. References Andra, Jean. “The Myth of the American Experience: Observations by Two Frenchmen, De Tocqueville and Cocteau.” Weber Studies: An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 3 (spring 1986): 28–33. Cocteau, Jean. Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Evans, A. B. Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity. Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1977.
COFFEE Coffee, today the second most valuable commodity traded legally around the world, has played a large role in spreading French culture, cuisine, and habits across the Atlantic. Until well into the nineteenth century, both a good deal of writing about
the drink and copious amounts of the beans themselves reached the United States through French hands. The coffee plant, Coffea arabica, originally grew as an understory shrub in the high forests of what is today Ethiopia. Coffee fruit and beans were initially used as a kind of energy food or stimulant by travelers, warriors, and Sufi monks. Exported first to Yemen and from there in stages around the center of the globe to locales warm and high enough to permit its cultivation, coffee was made into a beverage by the sixteenth century at the latest. Street vendors sold coffee in Venice beginning in the 1630s, and the drink reached Marseilles by 1644, accompanied there by Turkish utensils for its preparation. The first recorded Western coffeehouse opened in Oxford, England, in 1650. Coffee appeared in Paris by 1657 and Versailles by 1664. The Café de Procope, opened in 1686, was perhaps not the first establishment to sell the drink in Paris but quickly became the best-known early French café, especially for its elegant use of marble, elaborate chandeliers, and tall mirrors. Imbibing coffee thus became a new public act in which all classes could hope to participate. Thus the coffeehouses created an important new social niche between home and mosque or church. Here it was possible to exchange news, views, and gossip. Although some rulers appear not to have worried overly about the political implications of such interchange, others attempted to suppress the incipient public life of the coffeehouses by ordering their closure, for example, in edicts issued by the governor of Mecca in 1511 and by Charles II in 1675. Neither order served its purpose, as the Turkish houses quickly revived, and the
COFFEE
English king was forced to rescind his decree within weeks. By 1721 some 300 cafes existed in Paris; possibly 2,000 dotted the city on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789. During the eighteenth century, coffee and later tea began to replace the beer soup that had long served as Europeans’ breakfast, especially among the lower classes. In 1782 a French commentator remarked that every shopgirl and cook drank coffee and that it had reached even the bottom rungs of society. The drink quickly jumped the Atlantic. The Dutch brought coffee to New Amsterdam by 1668 but apparently did not set up a regular shop to sell the beverage. Records of businesses in the early English colonies are scanty and sometimes tainted by the Boston–New York rivalry; in any event, a Mrs. Jones reportedly sold “Coffee and Chuchaletto” from a store in the former city by 1671, and the King’s Arms coffeehouse appeared in the latter in 1696. In the interim, coffee had become not merely a transatlantic but a global attraction. Following their nose for spices, well developed by the High Middle Ages, Western Europeans avidly pursued the new beverage and its exotic accoutrements. Coffee, tea, and chocolate were revolutionary in their role as the first nonalcoholic hot drinks served in Europe. Besides altering dietary patterns, coffee and tea facilitated the grinding labor required in factories by providing physical stimulation and at least the semblance of an occasional hot meal. For the better-off classes, coffee brought with it new forms of dress, furniture design and use, taste and sophistication, and objects of everyday use. An Ottoman ambassador to the French court, Soliman Aga, arrived in Ver-
277
sailles to considerable enthusiasm in 1669. One of the most appealing items the ambassador brought with him was coffee. By virtue of his exalted rank, Soliman could limit his guests, and the coffee he offered, to the top ranks of the French nobility. Thus his visitors could properly distance themselves in their consumption and taste from would-be social climbers among the bourgeoisie. By the late 1690s the Duchess of Lesdiguières and her chambermaids dressed in Turkish costume whenever they served her coffee. Tales of Turkey and Turkish style had captured the French imagination in a powerful way, manifested in plays by Molière and Racine, a travelogue by the Chevalier d’Arvieux, and the translation by Antoine Galland in 1704 of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. But coffee, now an object of desire as well as a pleasant drink, would never have reached many members of the French elite, let alone the shopgirls, if it had not made a circuit across the Atlantic and back to the Old World. Once again, the Dutch led the way. Their skill at seafaring, organizing merchants and fighters, and utilizing capital allowed their conquest of the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) from Portugal in 1605. From spices it was an easy step to be thinking about the profit to be made in coffee. The Dutch East India Company came to dominate the coffee trade at Mocha (Yemen) in 1696, and in the same year the Dutch introduced the cultivation of coffee in Java and Surinam. Having trees to spare, the Dutch gave one to the French government in 1714, which installed it in a Paris greenhouse. Although its distant relatives could already be found across the globe, this particular specimen might be called the mother tree. In 1723 a French naval officer took one of its
278
COFFEE
offspring on a legendary voyage to Martinique, during which he reportedly shared his meager water ration with the plant. The shrub flourished in its new environment, and in turn its descendants spread throughout Latin America and ultimately back through Asia and the Pacific to replace diseased stock in the nineteenth century. Although Martinique was coffee’s first stop in the Caribbean, its major home in that region quickly became Haiti. Across Latin America, sugar and slavery grew simultaneously, with coffee only a short distance behind. From the tree’s arrival in Haiti in the 1730s until the slave rebellion of 1791, the French colony supplied perhaps 50 percent of the world’s coffee and 40 percent of its sugar. The two crops became voracious devourers of men and women even as they produced wealth and pleasure for Europeans. The major works of avid coffee drinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire quickly appeared in English and traversed the Atlantic; Voltaire’s comedy Le Café, ou l’Ecossaise, which takes place entirely in a coffeehouse/inn, premiered in 1760. The play was translated into English in the same year as The Coffee House, or Fair Fugitive. It was convenient for the Americans to have French thought, style, and literature—in English translations—at hand as tension built in the eighteenth century between the British colonies south of Canada and the home country. The French, for all their ancien régime faults, could be elevated by the Americans in contrast to the increasingly irritating British. It was equally fortunate that the consumers of rebellious North America were situated so close to the French coffee-producing islands of the Caribbean. When colonists
vented their anger at British taxes and monopolies by dumping tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, coffee could rise to the occasion. The Continental Congress soon passed a resolution condemning tea, making it almost a patriotic duty to drink coffee. Thomas Jefferson, surely owing in some measure to his stay in France from 1784 to 1789, seconded Americans’ preference when he declared coffee “the favorite drink of the civilized world.” The French connection across the Atlantic through the medium of coffee grew stronger as time went on. By 1815 the word “café” began to replace “coffeehouse” in the United States, partly as a result of the young country’s acquisition of New Orleans. As with most things related to the table, French terms dominated American notions of what coffee should be for many years, even if on the western shores of the Atlantic no one could make a cup worth drinking. It was not until a few American writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, and a few hundred thousand soldiers in two world wars tasted the European product that the desire for fine coffee began to gain ground in the United States. Robert Thurston See also: French Revolution; Haiti; Hemingway, Ernest; Jefferson, Thomas; Martinique; Molière; New Orleans; Sugar; Voltaire, François. References Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Trans. David Jacobson. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Ukers, William H. All About Coffee. 2nd ed. New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1935.
COHEN, GUSTAVE DAVID
COHEN, GUSTAVE DAVID (1879–1958) A French medievalist, born in Saint-Josseten-Noode, Belgium, Cohen was a refugee scholar in New York. He received doctorates in law, romance philology, and literature and, in addition to producing editions, adaptations, and translations, also published widely in fields related to French literary history, romance linguistics, folklore, pedagogy, and criticism. A frequent contributor on literature, culture, and politics to wireless and print media in France and the United States, Cohen was recognized by fellow academics and the public of his day as an authority on the performance history of early French theater. While a professor at the Sorbonne in 1933, Cohen created the Groupe de théâtre médiéval (GTM), a student group known as the Théophiliens and considered part of a revivalist project. His previous faculty posts had included universities in Leipzig and Amsterdam, as well as Strasbourg in 1919, where Cohen saw himself defending the sovereignty of the French university from incursions across the Rhine. Seriously wounded in combat at Vauquois-enArgonne in 1915, he implemented a program to educate refugee children in the Netherlands. His war service and the course of Franco-German relations helped shape Cohen’s professional life and his public calls to protect France against perceived threats from Germany. In October 1940, he fell victim to Vichy’s anti-Semitic statutes; suspended from university teaching, he sought exile in the United States. Cohen’s classicist friend Henri Grégoire contacted the New School’s Alvin Johnson in New York, who coordinated an American campaign to secure funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for a
279
nonquota visa and a position at Yale University. Cohen arrived in New York in August 1941. When the Comité français de libération nationale (CFLN) called Cohen to Algiers in 1943, he left New York as one of the most prominent Gaullist activists in the city. He had worked with Alvin Johnson and Jacques Maritain to establish the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes on Fifth Avenue, assembling exiled French and Belgian scholars in a faculty of letters (administered by Cohen), a faculty of law and political science, a section of sciences, and satellite institutes. The governing council split over a proposition to affiliate the accredited school with the CFLN, echoing political divisions in the émigré community. The dispute that saw Maritain resign his presidency in 1944 pitted his principle of institutional autonomy against overt support for Charles de Gaulle of the kind embodied by Claude Lévi-Strauss and, by cable from Algiers, Cohen. With Maritain’s support, Cohen had organized the first of three consecutive summer encounters at Mount Holyoke College in 1942 and began to assemble an intercontinental list of participants, including Jean Wahl (a veteran of the intellectual gatherings known as “Décades de Pontigny”), Roman Jakobson (of the Ecole Libre), Lee Simonson, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens, and Katherine Anne Porter. Cohen devised a Joan of Arc commemoration in New York in 1943 featuring Shaw’s Saint Joan. He staged the Miracle de Théophile at Yale with Wallace Fowlie as lead. Cohen visited Montreal in 1942 and 1943 to introduce two of his adaptations of Old French plays performed by Père Legault’s Compagnons de saint Laurent, spoke to Canadian community
280
COLBERT, CLAUDETTE
groups about the war effort, and appeared on radio in Montreal promoting the plays. His war-related writings were collected in Lettres aux Américains (1942 and 1943). Stephen Steele See also: Gaulle, General Charles de; Joan of Arc; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; Maritain, Jacques; Stevens, Wallace; World War I; World War II. References Mehlman, Jeffrey. Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan (1940–1944). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Solterer, Helen. “The Waking of Medieval Theatricality: Paris, 1935–1995.” New Literary History 27, no. 3 (summer 1996): 357–390.
COLBERT, CLAUDETTE (LILY CLAUDETTE CHAUCHION) (1903–1996) One of the most capable light comediennes in Hollywood history. Colbert was born on September 13, 1903, in Paris, the daughter of a banker, and arrived in the United States as a child. A chance meeting at a party in 1923 led to a string of ingenue roles on Broadway. She debuted onscreen in For the Love of Mike (Capra) in 1927. But it was as Poppaea, lounging nude in a bath of asses’ milk in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), that Colbert got noticed. After another delectable turn in DeMille’s salacious Cleopatra (1934), Colbert found her niche in the screwball comedy It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934). This cross-country caper was literate and sexy, earning Colbert an Academy Award as the spoilt heiress pursued by Clark Gable’s cynical reporter in a genre that she would make her own. So indelible
was the mark Ellie Andrews made on the national psychology that when an admirer in Since You Went Away (Cromwell, 1944) concocts a recruiting poster in which Colbert hitches her skirt up, audiences could congratulate themselves for recalling a certain ruse to stop a passing car. With her round, slightly feline face, plucked eyebrows, compact deportment, and velvety voice, Colbert exuded a combination of Gallic hauteur and chorus girl sauce that epitomized the “Continental” depression comedies at which she and her studio, Paramount, excelled. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (Lubitsch, 1938) had Colbert purchasing a pair of pajama bottoms in a Nice haberdashers while Gary Cooper searched for a pair of tops. In Midnight (Leisen, 1939), Indiana chorine Eve Peabody masquerades at a Parisian society gathering as the Baroness Czerny, borrowing her name from the cabbie. In 1942, The Palm Beach Story (Sturges) knowingly traded on the characteristically Colbertian theme of opportunistic gold digger ritzing gullible millionaire. Marshaling herself for wartime solidarity, in 1944 Colbert earned an Academy Award nomination for her beleaguered midwestern housewife in Since You Went Away, a melodrama that blithely recalled Imitation of Life (Stahl), the 1934 soap opera in which Colbert’s genteel white lady befriends her sassy black housekeeper. To such wartime vehicles as So Proudly We Hail (Sandrich, 1943), she brought a compassionate steadfastness that recalled a Paris valiantly awaiting liberation. Colbert originally wanted to design clothes, and her sense of haute couture brought elegance to her every appearance. Appreciating that getting in costume
COLBERT, CLAUDETTE
281
Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable hitchhiking in a scene from It Happened One Night. Movie still. (Bettmann/Corbis)
meant getting in character, she also did all her own makeup. Never late, always knowing her lines, she famously preferred her left profile and could be as particular as any leading lady. But she had worked with the finest directors of the classical period and remained popular through the 1950s, occasionally returning to the stage and making two films in France. In later life she lived in retired splendor in Barbados. Colbert’s first husband was actor-director Norman Foster (1928–1935). In 1935 she
married Dr. Joel Pressman, who died in 1968. She died after a series of strokes in 1996. Richard Armstrong See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present. References DiBattista, Maria. Fast-Talking Dames. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Sarris, Andrew. You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film: History and Memory, 1927–1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
282
COLBERT, JEAN-BAPTISTE
COLBERT, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1619–1683) French statesman. Jean-Baptiste Colbert is remembered for his role in the downfall of his rival Nicolas Fouquet; his efforts to reform the French system of taxation and scale down national debt; his vigorous programs for constructing roads, shipyards, and harbors such as Brest and Rochefort; and his policies supporting commerce and colonization. Colbert began his career as private secretary to Cardinal Mazarin, who recommended him to Louis XIV. In 1665, the French king appointed Colbert general comptroller of finances. He was then designated secretary of state for naval affairs in 1669 and set about revamping French naval administration, recruitment, and shipbuilding in hopes of increasing France’s naval capacity and strength. As a practitioner of mercantilism, Colbert encouraged the growth of industry and agriculture, sought to break down trade barriers within France, and challenged Dutch and British commercial strength. Among his methods for establishing French marine and trade supremacy, Colbert privileged the establishment of trading companies and founded the West India Company (1664). He demonstrated a particular interest in the development of New France and demanded that it become selfsufficient and no longer exist at the mercy of maritime disasters. The colony quickly benefited from the implementation of a series of incentives to stimulate emigration through the prospects of owning tax-free land and engaging in hunting and fishing. Additionally, Colbert increased the labor supply for the colony by sending hundreds of indentured workers, settlers, and marriageable girls there annually. It is esti-
mated that as a result of his emigration policy, the population of French-speaking Canada grew from 2,500 to more than 10,000. Other incentives included bonuses for men who married at age twenty or younger; colonists were also encouraged to marry native women who had converted to Catholicism. Parents in New France who failed to marry their sons before age twenty and their daughters before age sixteen were fined. The lure of the lucrative fur trade, however, shifted colonists’ interests away from Colbert’s vision of settlement. He tried in vain through various methods to regulate the fur trade. A patron of the arts and sciences, Colbert is also remembered as founder of the Academy of Sciences and the Paris Observatory. His economic doctrine based upon the principles of mercantilism, nationalism, and state intervention has commonly come to be known as Colbertisme. JeanBaptiste Colbert died in September 1683. Maureen Waters See also: Catholic Church; Fur Trade; New France; Rochefort. References Eccles, W. J. The French in North America, 1500–1783. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1998. Trout, Andrew. Jean Baptiste Colbert. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
COLETTE (SIDONIEGABRIELLE COLETTE) (1873–1954) One of the most celebrated French writers of the twentieth century, born in SaintSauveur-en-Puisaye, France, in 1873. Colette’s novels, journalism, and autofiction are characterized by a lyrical attentiveness to people, nature, and animals; a
COLETTE
283
French writer Colette, author of Gigi. Colette made her first and only visit to the United States in 1935. (Library of Congress)
wry irreverent humor; and great stylistic originality. She has been exceptionally well translated into English, notably by Enid McLeod, Roger Senhouse, and David le Vay. Colette claimed transatlantic blood connections, made a single well-publicized trip to the United States, and saw one of her stories adapted to become a hugely successful MGM musical. It is probable, though unproven, that Colette’s ancestry included a West Indian female forebear. In the auto-fictional La Maison de Claudine (My Mother’s House, 1922), Colette recalls her mother, Sido (née Landoy), speaking of her father (hence Colette’s maternal grandfather) as “Le Gorille.” A daguerreotype of “the Gorilla” that
hangs on the wall explains the sobriquet: it shows “the head and shoulders of a ‘colored man’—a quadroon, I believe—wearing a high white cravat, with pale, contemptuous eyes, and a long nose above the thick Negro lips that had inspired his nickname” (Colette 1966, p. 69). Claude Pichois and Alain Brunet, in their authoritative biography of Colette, agree with earlier biographers that at some point between the midseventeenth and eighteenth centuries members of the Landoy family emigrated to the West Indies and then returned to France, so that Henri Marie Landoy (1792–1854) may well have been the descendant of a white Landoy and a black “Antillaise.” No precise genealogical
284
COMIC STRIPS
records have ever been discovered to prove this claim. Colette made her first and only visit to the United States in 1935, as Le Journal ’s reporter aboard the Normandie, the new French luxury liner that was competing with British ships to make the fastest Atlantic crossing. She broadcast her impressions of the liner and of New York on French radio, as well as publishing them in the newspaper. What seems to have impressed her most was the warmth of her American welcome, which made her feel ashamed of French inhospitality, and her visit to Harlem and its jazz clubs, especially the music and the casual grace of the women dancers. The novella Gigi (1945) was adapted in 1948 for the Broadway stage, with a little-known Audrey Hepburn, recommended by Colette herself, in the title role. Then in 1958 the play was adapted for the screen as a musical: Vincente Minnelli directed; Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote the award-winning songs; Cecil Beaton was art director; and Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, and Louis Jourdan starred. The story of a girl schooled from childhood to be a high-class prostitute, but whose emotional honesty wins the hero’s heart and hand rather than just his financial protection, Gigi was splendidly filmed on location in Paris, in carefully restored belle époque interiors. The decorum demanded in 1950s Hollywood meant that the sex-for-money transactions underlying Colette’s plot were discreetly veiled, but the film makes effective use of costumes, decor, and performance to convey the gap between the era’s glittering surface and the emotions of those it exploits. Gigi introduced a small part of Colette’s
work to a mass transatlantic audience. Colette died in Paris in 1954. Diana Holmes See also: Caron, Leslie; Chevalier, Maurice; Jazz; Jourdan, Louis. References Colette. My Mother’s House and Sido. Trans. Una Vincenzo Troubridge and Enid McLeod. Harmondworth: Penguin, 1966. Holmes, Diana. Colette. Basingstoke/London: Macmillan, 1991. Pichois, Claude, and Alain Brunet. Colette. Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1999.
COMIC STRIPS The francophone comic strip, or bande dessinée (BD), is revered in France under the title of Ninth Art (Neuvième Art), thus standing on a par with the likes of poetry, architecture, painting, or, more recently, cinema. Charles de Gaulle famously once compared himself with Tintin, and the World Cup–winning football team of 1998 was likened to the unconquerable Gauls of the Astérix strips. Sales of bandes dessinées regularly reach six figures, and the genre has its own section in the bibliographical review Livres de France. The national center for the bande dessinée in the southwest city of Angoulême (Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image, or CNBDI) formed part of François Mitterrand’s Grands Travaux of prestige building projects, and its Belgian counterpart, the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée (CBBD), occupies a centrally located art nouveau building as part of an urban regeneration scheme for Brussels. By comparison, comics in the United States are generally viewed as being outside the establishment, often associated with subversive subcultures or the purely infantile. Despite such
COMIC STRIPS
apparent differences, the francophone and North American traditions are closely linked and interdependent, both in terms of historical development and current exchanges. The centenary of R. F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid in 1995 sparked a fierce debate as to who invented the comic strip. Although the Sunday supplements of turn-of-thecentury U.S. newspapers launched a tradition of early serial strips, including the much-celebrated dreamland adventures of Little Nemo (Winsor McCay, 1905), French scholars have pointed to the Swiss schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer as providing the first bandes dessinées. In the 1830s Töpffer created a series of sequential narrative images based on the eccentric mishaps of characters such as M. Pencil or M. Cryptogram, with an explanatory text beneath each box. One might argue, however, that a defining element, the speech bubble or bulle, although present in U.S. cartoons, did not regularly appear in France until Alain Saint-Ogan’s Zig et Puce (1925), the comic adventures of the two eponymous boys, later to be joined by their penguin friend Alfred. The nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury forerunners of the modern BD were generally single images (cf. today’s cartoon) or sequential boxes, each surmounting several lines of text. In illustrated publications aimed at an adult audience (e.g., Le Charivari, 1832; then Le Courrier Français, 1884; Le Sourire, 1891; Le Rire, 1894), these BDs could be political, satirical of everyday life, or overtly erotic. In children’s journals the histoires en images, as they were known, were relatively rare and generally lighthearted in tone. Emile-Joseph Pinchon’s adventures of Bé-
285
cassine (from 1905 onward), the dimwitted Breton maid, center on the comic and absurd mishaps that result from her misunderstandings. Bécassine was perhaps the first illustrated character to embrace stardom in early Hollywood fashion, with La Semaine de Suzette (Suzette’s Week), the girls’ journal in which she appeared, eventually offering a range of spin-off products such as dolls, tea sets, or board games. The birth of the modern bande dessinée can be attributed to American parents with the launch of the Journal de Mickey (Mickey Mouse’s Journal ) in 1934. This was the first publication to reach mass circulation figures, approximately 400,000 a week as compared with 50,000 for previous bestsellers. The formula found by the journal’s owner, Paul Winckler (with the silent backing of the publisher Hachette), was simple but effective. He created a syndication system for France under the name of Opera Mundi, thereby giving journals cheap access to U.S. strips. To these he added a French context through the journal itself: textual stories based on elements of French culture; information sections; and above all, reader participation via games, letters, and the now famous Club Mickey. The strips and characters may have been foreign, but the context Winckler gave them brought them into French culture. In addition to translations of the bestknown Disney strips, Winckler introduced a wide range of favorites from what was to become known as the golden age of U.S. comics: Jungle Jim (Jim la Jungle), Brick Bradford, Pete the Tramp (Père Lacloche), and Little Annie Rooney (Les Malheurs d’Annie). Sister or rival publications such as Robinson, Hurrah! or Tarzan followed the same model or even provided imports
286
COMIC STRIPS
alone, with the result that superheroes such as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon (“Guy l’éclair”), or Prince Valiant became household names in France. The success of Winckler’s system is apparent from the influence it had on the homegrown tradition that followed. It became the norm for bande dessinée journals to contextualize the strips with elements that presented the publication’s particular stance. In the case of the period of wartime occupation, the pro-Nazi Téméraire created a circle of friends akin to the Hitler Youth Movement, to be juxtaposed with strips such as Vers des mondes inconnus (To Unknown Lands) by Auguste Liquois and Raymond Poïvet, in which Aryan figures were the “goodies” and the “baddies” had Semitic features. After the war the same formula held good, but now the two main publications—both for boys—were the Communist Vaillant (Valiant) and the Catholic Coeurs Vaillants (Valiant Hearts). Ironically, the majority of the former Téméraire artists became pillars of these journals: Liquois and Poïvet, for example, produced strips telling of the deeds of Resistance heroes (e.g., Fifi, gars du maquis) for Vaillant. Coeurs Vaillants is also worthy of note as the publication that introduced Tintin to France from 1931 onward. Hergé (the pen name of Georges Remi) had originally published the adventures of the boy scout/detective in Le Petit Vingtième, the children’s supplement of the Brussels-based Catholic newspaper, XXe Siècle. Their popularity and ability to evolve with time led to nineteen complete stories from 1929 to 1976. In hindsight some of the early adventures, such as the colonialist Tintin au Congo (1930) or the anti-Semitic L’Etoile mystérieuse (The Shooting Star, 1942), seem
uncomfortably close to the fashions of their times. In other cases, such as the start of Tintin’s trip to the Moon (On a marché sur la lune/Destination Moon, 1950), nineteen years before Neil Armstrong’s expedition, the innovation is admirable. In terms of style, Hergé is seen as father of the ligne claire school, whereby clearly defined outlines form the backbone of the image. Tintin is also one of the rare bande dessinée creations to have engendered an industry of critical studies, starting with Pol Vandromme’s Le Monde de Tintin (The World of Tintin) in 1959. Hergé is the best-known author of a rich tradition of bande dessinée in Belgium. The journal Spirou, launched in 1938, is one of the longest-running successes in the world of comics and was the launchpad of the Ecole de Marcinelle, named after the district in Charleroi from which Dupuis, its publishers, operate. Successes have included Morris’s Lucky Luke, André Franquin’s Gaston Lagaffe, and Peyo’s Les Schtroumpfs (The Smurfs ). A comparison of the French and Belgian BD traditions is a study that remains to be done. In France it was the Catholic and Communist lobbies that provided the inspiration for a milestone of the BD’s development, the 1949 law on children’s publications (Loi du 16 juillet 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse). Although bande dessinée theory as we now know it was nonexistent, the 1930s and 1940s had seen an array of tracts condemning illustrated stories as an incitement to illiteracy and violence, as a result of their supposedly antieducational, antireligious, or even pornographic nature. The law made illegal most scenes of violence or undress and the depiction of victory by evil forces. Above all, under the Communist
COMIC STRIPS
influence, the law drastically reduced the percentage of foreign (thus principally U.S.) strips that a children’s journal could publish. Around the same time in the United States Dr. Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954) led to a Senate committee investigation—with antiCommunist undertones—and thereafter heavy censorship of comics. The U.S. influence was nonetheless still heavy, with the law resulting in French artists taking over in the style of their transatlantic counterparts. Pierre Nicolas, for example, told the story of Mickey Mouse’s travels through French history, meeting such characters as François I and Napoléon. Furthermore, it was Mad magazine (founded in 1952) that inspired René Goscinny and Jean-Michel Charlier in the creation of Pilote (1959–1989), the magazine that took the bande dessinée into adulthood in the late aftermath of the 1949 law. Although Pilote is best known for introducing Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny’s Astérix series, the list of its artists reads like a Who’s Who of the modern bande dessinée: Claire Bretécher, Cabu, Philippe Druillet, Jean-Claude Forest, F’murr, Jean Gir/Moebius, Marcel Gotlib, Greg, Morris, Raymond Poïvet, Jacques Tardi, and so on. Strips such as Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella (1962), later to be made into a feature film starring Jane Fonda (1968), made it clear that the bande dessinée was no longer for children. Under the influence of U.S. underground comix, new journals (Echo des Savanes, 1972; Fluide Glaciale, 1975; Métal Hurlant, 1975) continued this trend, mixing eroticism, humor, and/or science fiction. In the case of Charlie Hebdo (1970), social satire appeared side by side with U.S. imports—the journal’s
287
title is in reference to Charlie Brown of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts—often introduced to a French audience for the first time. Since the 1980s the journal format has given way to that of album (hardback edition) production and spin-off products, a reflection in itself of the “grown-up” buying power the industry now attracts. With the new content also came adult reaction, and from the mid-1960s there has been an ever-increasing industry of BD criticism, exhibitions, and festivals. In particular the annual festival in Angoulême, held over the last weekend of January, attracts national media attention and hundreds of thousands of visitors. The influence of North America has thus been felt at all stages of the bande dessinée’s historical development, but it has also been a subject of inspiration in itself. Many a French speaker feels acquainted with the values of the Wild West through Morris’s Lucky Luke, or with the adversities facing a trapper in colonial North America via the adventures of Blek le Roc, first chronicled in 1954. Frank Margerin’s 1990s comic adventures of the banlieuebased Ricky show the influence of American culture—pinball, music, cinema, comics—on French life and have culminated in the hero crossing the Atlantic for one album (Ricky chez les Ricains, 1998). The Astérix albums are peppered with pastiches of Hollywood stars—Laurel and Hardy, Kirk Douglas, and Sean Connery all make appearances—and Astérix et Cléopâtre (1965) derives much of its humor from its parody of the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton blockbuster. Astérix also makes the transatlantic trip (La Grande Traversée, 1975) and mimics the Statue of Liberty in one of the album’s central scenes.
288
COMIC STRIPS
For the collector, Hergé’s third Tintin adventure, Tintin en Amérique (1932), remains a milestone. Hergé used a number of anti-American sourcebooks to document a story that centers on organized crime in Chicago, with Al Capone as the chief villain. But the album includes much of the wonders of the United States in the 1930s, as Tintin climbs the skyscrapers, as well as raising social questions—the status and treatment of the Native American population, the economic importance of oil— that are still relevant today. Some original editions of Tintin en Amérique are currently valued at 5,000 euros. The French-language comic strip is also alive and well in Quebec, where the form has its distinct identity while remaining close to the French tradition. In addition to boasting associations, distributors, and regular festivals, Montreal and Quebec have produced a number of artists of note. Serge Gaboury, for example, is known for the caricatures that have adorned magazines (e.g., Croc) and daily newspapers since the 1980s. More recently, Julie Doucet’s stark and often shocking autobiographical portrayal of Montreal life (e.g., Ciboire de Criss, 1996) has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Taking inspiration from Robert Crumb, Doucet gives an intimate female viewpoint to the visualization of fantasies and obsessions that are hers, but also those of modern life. The tradition of exchange between French-speaking Europe and North America continues to underpin the world of comics and bandes dessinées. U.S. superheroes and well-established favorites such as Peanuts continue to fare well in France, as do less traditional productions: the works of Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman (Maus), and Robert Crumb are all available
in French translation, and these artists have been honored guests at mainstream festivals, including Angoulême. The exchange is less marked in the opposite direction, although both Tintin and Astérix have met with reasonable success. One noteworthy case is that of Moebius, whose science fiction fantasy creations have exported well. Not only are his albums available in North America, his Métal Hurlant journal has spawned the spin-off Heavy Metal, and his bande dessinée work has inspired (with his collaboration) large-scale Hollywood productions such as Dune (1975), Alien (1977), and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997). The increasingly vibrant world of animation provides further overlap between BD and the moving image. In addition to adapting successful preexisting strips (Astérix, Tintin, Lucky Luke), the form also has a clear tradition of original creations with a French–North American interconnection: best known is Warner Brothers’ Pepé Le Pew, the romantic skunk with a French touch that makes reference to the country’s perfume industry. Like jazz and the detective novel, the comic strip is a form of popular culture that has seen a rise in status when imported to France. The bande dessinée, however, is unique as an area in which the Gauls have beaten off the transatlantic invader (or believe they have) to make the tradition their own. Laurence Grove See also: Besson, Luc; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Catholic Church; Chicago; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Fonda, Jane; François I, King of France; Gaulle, General Charles de; Language; Lucky Luke; Mitterrand, François; Pepé Le Pew; Quebec; Space Technology; Sport; Statue of Liberty, The; Westerns; World War II.
COMPAGNIE D’OCCIDENT References Dierick, Charles, and Pascal Lefèvre, eds. Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century. Brussels: VUB University Press, 1998. Forsdick, Charles, Laurence Grove, and Elizabeth McQuillan, eds. The Francophone Bande Dessinée. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Gaumer, Patrick, and Claude Moliterni. Dictionnaire mondial de la bande dessinée. Paris: Larousse, 1998. Horn, Maurice, ed. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. Morgan, Harry, and Manuel Hirtz. Le Petit Critique illustré: Guide des ouvrages de langue française consacrés à la bande dessinée. Montrouge: PLG, 1997. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon, 1996.
COMPAGNIE D’OCCIDENT The Compagnie d’Occident (also known as the Compagnie du Mississippi), which was established in 1717 by the Scottish financier John Law and changed its name to the Compagnie des Indes in May 1719, had a monopoly over trade in Louisiana from 1717 to 1731, as well as a monopoly over Canadian beaver exports from 1718 to 1760. As early as 1715, John Law had put to the Regent a plan for the economic and financial recovery of France, the “Système,” which was at first refused but which the Scot finally succeeded in putting into place progressively. After founding the Banque générale in 1716, he created the Compagnie d’Occident, which received its letters patent in August 1717 and was granted a monopoly over trade in Louisiana. The area covered by the company included the whole of the Mississippi valley, the Illinois
289
Country becoming part of Louisiana through a decree in September 1717. The company’s obligations were vast: it was to transport 6,000 colons and 3,000 black slaves over twenty-five years; it was also responsible for expenditure related to religion and defense. Over the following years, the Compagnie d’Occident took over all the other large French trading companies, as well as all large sources of state revenue. Farms were to have brought the company the financial support necessary for the exploitation of its immense colonial domain. Nevertheless, these purchases initially forced it to issue new shares, which the general public bought with banknotes. The Banque générale had been turned into a Banque royale in December 1718; in August 1719, an edict was issued according to which the state’s debt would be written off through the refunding of loans and offices in banknotes. Because the investment market was too rigid, the new holders of banknotes invested them by buying shares in the Compagnie des Indes. From May 1719, the share value began to increase, and this feverish period of investment, fueled by intense propaganda, continued to grow, while the bank continued to issue banknotes that did not correspond to a metal standard. The “Système” thus found itself at the mercy of a shift in public opinion that took place in the first months of 1720. The inability to refund all investors led to bankruptcy. After July 1720, the “Système” was liquidated: the bank was closed, the original financial and fiscal organization was reintroduced, and the Compagnie des Indes was henceforth only responsible for any trade activity under the tight control of the monarchy. While its actions in Louisiana
290
COMPAGNIE
DU
SÉNÉGAL
between 1717 and 1720 had helped to give the colony stability, the company then imposed destructive cuts. Eventually, after the massacre of the Natchez in 1729, the company returned Louisiana to the Crown in 1731. It retained the monopoly over exports of Canadian beaver products until the fall of New France. Cécile Vidal See also: Fur Trade; Illinois Country; Louisiana; Mississippi River; New France; Slavery. References Giraud, Marcel. Histoire de la Louisiane française. 5 vols. Paris: PUF, 1966. Haudrère, Philippe. La Compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle (1719–1795). Paris: Librairie de l’Inde, 1989.
COMPAGNIE
DU SÉNÉGAL French slave trading company. The Compagnie du Sénégal is intimately linked with French participation in the triangular Atlantic slave trade, and it also laid the foundations for the colonization of francophone West Africa. However, the compagnie was not a monolithic institution, and its history was extremely turbulent and unsettled. Its first incarnation was under the name of Compagnie du Sénégal et de Gambie, established in 1624 by merchants from Dieppe and Rouen. In 1634, it became the Compagnie du Cap Vert et du Sénégal, under the patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, and was awarded a monopoly on the nascent slave trade. Control of France’s African and Asian trading posts soon passed to the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, which went bankrupt in 1672, and a new Compagnie du Sénégal emerged, buying the failed company’s Senegal comptoir. The Com-
pagnie du Sénégal sought to strengthen its position on the coast of Africa, taking control of the island of Gorée (off the coast of Dakar) from the Dutch in October 1677. Over the next two years, the Dutch would also be forced out of their coastal positions on the mainland. The compagnie then set about imposing by force its “right” to trade in the region, carrying out a series of violent raids on the Senegalese kingdoms of Baol, Sine, and Kajoor, after local monarchs had attempted to resist its presence. On March 21, 1679, the Compagnie du Sénégal signed a treaty with the Directeurs généraux du domaine royal d’Occident to provide slaves and goods to the French islands of the Caribbean, and it also began to provide slaves for galley ships in France. Originally, it was awarded this monopoly on the slave trade for an eight-year period, for which it had to guarantee a supply of 8,000 slaves per annum. In June 1679, the seal was set on the compagnie’s fortunes when it received lettres patentes from Louis XIV, according it slaving and other trading rights for all of Africa until 1704. However, the compagnie was unable to fulfill the terms of its treaties, and the number of slaves sent to the Caribbean and to French galley ships fell well below the levels promised. Such failings are not surprising as the company had been expected to establish a smooth-running slave operation almost from nothing. Nor was its position helped by France’s entry into war with Spain and Holland, with the company losing many ships to enemy naval attacks. By 1681, it had gone bankrupt, its goods were sold off, and yet another company of the same name was launched. In subsequent decades, the compagnie (in various incarnations) fared little better in
COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
meeting the growing demand for slaves in the Caribbean, but it nonetheless helped to establish the slave trade on the Senegalese coast, a trade that would go from strength to strength as the eighteenth century progressed. The final incarnation of the compagnie was eventually absorbed into John Law’s Compagnie des Indes in 1719. David Murphy See also: Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de; Slavery. References Ly, Abdoulaye. La Compagnie du Sénégal. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958. Searing, James F. West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY Computing technology has—in various ways—been an issue between France and the United States. Since the beginning of the nuclear age in the 1940s, “supercomputing” technological ability has been a requirement for nations with independent nuclear deterrents, and France has therefore been anxious to develop and maintain such ability. In general industrial and commercial terms, computers have become crucial instruments in almost all sectors of economic activity, but additionally, as computing has become a tool of information and communication—most vividly demonstrated by the Internet in the 1990s—the French state has developed concerns over U.S. domination of cyberculture. Both as an underpinning of military applications and strategy and as the medium of cultural communication, computing technology has engaged with the re-
291
lationship between France/Europe and the United States. French governments in the mid-1960s were more than ever preoccupied by the perceived “technology gap” between France (and Europe) and the United States; the sectors that seemed most undeveloped were nuclear and space technologies and computing. Although each of these sectors was crucial in its own right to France’s much-prized military, technical, or industrial independence, computing technology was deemed a field of expertise that was core to French activities in all high-tech sectors, and the weakness of France’s domestic computer industry was thus all the more a cause for concern. The link between technological independence and military/political independence was underlined heavily when the United States refused to allow France the use of the Control Data supercomputer needed to facilitate the final preparation of the nuclear deterrent. State support for the French computer industry was an element—under the heading “Plan Calcul”— of French national planning from 1966 until 1981, as French governments attempted to negotiate a French-EuropeanAtlantic resolution to the U.S. domination of advanced computing technology. Of all France’s attempts to define transatlantic technological and industrial relations on the basis of equality or parity in technical and commercial terms, the field of computing is perhaps where French “technological Colbertism” (to use Elie Cohen’s description of French government policy) has been the least successful. Although in aviation, the Concorde and Airbus projects asserted French and European capabilities and in nuclear technology, France created its own deterrent force and
292
CONCORDE
civil nuclear power industry (albeit with much U.S. technology), in computing, French industry has remained weak. French strategy for computer technology was first to develop a domestic industry capable of competing in France with U.S. products, and then, through European cooperation (led by France’s “national champion”) to match U.S. companies. The first Plan Calcul descended into confusion in the late 1960s as the leading French computer firm La Compagnie des Machines Bull (CMB)—whose difficulties in competing with IBM had drawn the sector’s problems to the attention of government in the first place—failed to conclude partnerships with French companies such as CGE or CSF and collaborated with the U.S. General Electric. What followed was a saga of complex mergers and takeovers that left the French computer industry weakened rather than strengthened. During the early 1970s the state-supported company CII competed in the French market with Bull–General Electric and IBM before being taken over (with Bull) by the U.S. firm Honeywell to become CII-HB. In 1979, CGE sold its participation in CII-HB to Saint-Gobain, which then assumed control of the computing firm while simultaneously acquiring an interest in Olivetti’s computing-related activities. This apparent new departure—a French firm with a strong basis in computers—was then sabotaged, when the new Socialist administration nationalized Saint-Gobain and instructed it to withdraw from computing technology. Attempts to forge a European dimension to French computer expertise likewise failed during the 1970s, as the Unidata project between CII, Siemens, and Philips lasted only two years (1973– 1975).
The 1960s and 1970s were the main period during which France attempted to encourage a domestic computer industry through a dirigiste approach. The failure of French attempts to develop an independent industrial base in computer technology was—somewhat surprisingly—accompanied by something of a success in the field of software, computer consulting, and computing-related services. French awareness of the dangers of the technology gap and forward thinking along the lines of the celebrated 1978 Nora-Minc government report The Computerization of Society seemed to push France into thinking about the ways in which a country without a strong foothold in computing hardware could still participate in the information and communications revolution—the cyberculture—that computers were bringing into existence. During the 1990s in particular, the French state put into operation programs of technological development intended to drag France forward into the Internet information age. Hugh Dauncey See also: Aviation; Concorde; Cyberculture; Nuclear Technology; Space Technology. References Nora, Simon, and Alain Minc. The Computerization of Society: A Report to the President of France. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques. Le Défi américain. Paris: Denoël, 1967.
CONCORDE The Franco-British supersonic passenger transport plane Concorde is arguably the most famous plane in the world, despite the fact that only sixteen planes were ever produced and that its commercial exploita-
CONCORDE
293
A crowd watches as the last of the British Airways Concordes lands at Heathrow Airport in London. On the fence in the background a sign in French reads, “Concorde, we love you.” (Eva-Lotta Jansson/Corbis)
tion was limited both in terms of the routes it served and the small numbers of travelers it carried. The crash of an Air France Concorde near Paris in June 2000—killing all 100 passengers and crew—almost ended the dream of Concorde’s story, but such was the strength of the fame and symbolic significance of the plane in relations between the United States and Europe that Concorde rose Phoenix-like from the flames and in late 2001 was rescheduled for service as long as was deemed technically feasible. However, Air France and British Airways jointly decided after less than eighteen months of flying that in the face of falling revenue and rising maintenance costs, the plane would have to be definitively withdrawn from service by autumn 2003 and thus brought the story of Con-
corde to a conclusion. The conception, birth, development, and exploitation of Concorde have all been intimately influenced by relations between the United States, France, and the United Kingdom; the practical role for the aircraft has always been to shrink the French Atlantic by bringing New York closer to Paris and London, but the symbolism of Concorde has been principally to widen divisions between Europe and the United States. The French and British governments agreed to develop Concorde in late 1962. Both the United Kingdom and Gaullist France were eager to demonstrate to the United States that European technology, industry, and commerce were capable of creating the world’s first supersonic transport plane and that the much-discussed
294
CONDÉ, MARYSE
“technology gap” between the United States and Europe could be bridged by a collaborative project involving Europe’s main aviation champions. Concorde was intended to bridge the Atlantic in a way no U.S. plane could, and the project stimulated the U.S. government and Boeing to launch their own supersonic transport (SST) program in 1963, but ambitious U.S. technical choices (Mach 3 rather than Concorde’s Mach 2) led to the cancellation of the SST in 1971. Initially, as Concorde was developed during the 1960s by BOAC (later British Airways) and Air France, U.S. airlines such as Pan Am expressed interest in purchasing the aircraft, in anticipation of the new era of supersonic air travel to be fully ushered in by Boeing’s larger, faster SST. But after the successful testing of Concorde prototypes in 1969 and the cancellation of the SST, only Air France and BOAC confirmed orders for the plane (1972). U.S. airlines canceled their interest in 1973 as the oil crisis threatened the viability of supersonic air travel, and that, added to U.S. resentment at Europe’s SST, created opposition to Concorde in the United States, which included a ban on supersonic flights in and out of New York. When Concorde inaugurated the world’s first supersonic commercial flights in January 1976, they significantly avoided the North Atlantic, reflecting other traditional French and British geopolitical interests and new tensions the Franco-British SST had created between the United States and Europe. Air France’s Paris-Dakar-Rio and British Airway’s London-Bahrain routes were eventually complemented by services to New York, but throughout its development and operation, Concorde has exemplified the distance (geographical and cul-
tural) as well as the proximity (commercial and industrial) of relations spanning the French Atlantic. Hugh Dauncey See also: Aviation. References Costello, John. Concorde: The International Race for a Supersonic Passenger Transport. London: Angus and Robertson, 1976. Turcat, André. Concorde: Essais d’hier, batailles d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2000.
CONDÉ, MARYSE (1937–) Guadeloupean writer and academic. Condé’s work reflects the tensions and the freedoms of a life spent traveling between three continents. She left Guadeloupe in 1953 and would not live there again for over thirty years. After studying at the Sorbonne, she went to live in Guinea in 1960, and spent over a decade teaching there and in Ghana and Senegal before returning to France in 1973, where she earned her doctorate at the Sorbonne and started writing novels. In 1986 she went back to live in Guadeloupe but soon began teaching at universities in the United States: the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland, and, since 1995, Columbia University, where she remained until her retirement in December 2002. From the 1970s onward, she has written a great deal: not only the thirteen novels for which she is best known but also plays, short stories, children’s books, and many articles and essays on Caribbean literature. She has played an important role in popularizing Antillean literature through her own publications (notably La
CONFIANT, RAPHAËL
Poésie antillaise/West Indian Poetry, 1977; Le Roman antillais/The West Indian Novel, 1977; La Civilisation du bossale, 1978; La Parole des femmes/Women’s Speech, 1979) and through the Center for French and Francophone Studies, which she established at Columbia University. Condé’s writing is characterized by a refusal to conform to conventions; ironic and unsentimental, she exposes the myths of exoticism, of racial stereotyping, and of the cultivation of a racial identity based on a nostalgic and in her view mistaken insistence on belonging to a particular community (satirized in Les Derniers Rois mages/ The Last of the African Kings, 1992). Her critical attitude toward Antillean identity politics has brought her into conflict with fellow writers, in particular the créolité group led by Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. Condé dislikes their fetishization of the Creole language and their phallocentrism; this latter is part of a wider feminist dimension of her fiction, in which the oppression of women by men is a recurring theme. Her ambivalence toward Guadeloupe is motivated by the stifling narrow-minded intolerance that is too often found in small societies, depicted in Traversée de la Mangrove/Crossing the Mangrove (1989). But, equally, the Caribbean fantasy of self-realization in Africa is treated with skepticism in several of her novels—especially Heremakhonon/Heremakhonon; A Novel (1976) and Une Saison à Rihata/Season in Rihata (1981), whose heroines discover that their idealized view of traditional African society blinds them to the political turmoil of postindependence African states. Nor does life in France or the United States offer any simple solution to the problems of the rootless Caribbean subject (La Vie scélérate/Tree of
295
Life, 1987; Desirada, 1997). Her protagonists move between islands and between continents, creating for themselves an existence that is neither idyllic nor tragic but complicated; they have a kind of nomadic energy and determination to resist being confined to one place or one social milieu. For Condé, the Caribbean is not a geographical entity but a migratory transatlantic culture that crosses borders and interacts with others all over the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Celia Britton See also: Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël; Créolité; Guadeloupe. References Callaloo. “Maryse Condé: A Special Issue.” 18.3 (summer 1995). Pfaff, Françoise. Conversations with Maryse Condé. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
CONFIANT, RAPHAËL (1951–) Born in 1951, in Martinique, Raphaël Confiant belongs to the first generation of writers from the postdepartmentalization era. The small islands of the Antilles have for long belonged administratively and economically to France, despite being situated within the Americas. As a result, in both his fictional and theoretical work, Confiant has had to negotiate this complex and often paradoxical French Atlantic relationship. Along with fellow Martinicans, the linguist Jean Bernabé and author and essayist Patrick Chamoiseau, Confiant is a founding member of the créolité movement. The principles of this movement stem from the violence and brutality of the rupture from Africa and the profound and complex impact of the colonial process.
296
CONSTANT, PAULE
For Confiant and his colleagues, the journey across the Atlantic is therefore seen as the birthplace of contemporary Creole identity. The turn of the twenty-first century finds Confiant in a difficult position, expressed once again in the relationship between his role as a fictional author and as a Creole militant. He is an extremely prolific writer and has won several literary prizes in France—most notably the Prix Antigone for his first novel in French, Le Nègre et l’amiral (The Negro and the Admiral, 1988) and the Prix Novembre for Eau de café (1991). Confiant sets most of his novels in Martinique, drawing on the specificity of the Antillean surroundings while highlighting differences from metropolitan France. He caricatures and exaggerates events and characters, constructing a grotesque world that appears to stem directly from the madness of the ongoing colonial process (cf. L’Allée des soupirs/The Lane of Sighs, 1994; or Nuée ardente/Ardent Cloud, 2002). Although he began writing novels in Creole (all of which have now been translated into French), a limited readership eventually led Confiant to write in French. He refers to the impossibility of either language to express fully his Antillean reality and thus follows Chamoiseau in his endeavors to construct a language in which both French and Creole are interwoven to reflect the plural, mosaic identity that he believes is Antillean—neither French nor American. The uniqueness of the islands’ history and geography, the brutal confrontation of so many cultures, and the evolution of the Creole language has resulted in a creolization process that Confiant believes will define tomorrow’s world.
Confiant’s writing can be seen to embody the French Atlantic—representing the continual movement between Europe and the Americas, beginning with the violence of the Middle Passage. However, his perception of the absurdity of the current sociolinguistic and political situation seems to mark the beginning of a realization that the role he wants to accord to the Creole language is not possible through fiction. As his profile as a passionate advocate of Creole linguistic policy continues to rise (cf. Le Dictionnaire des néologismes créoles/The Dictionary of Creole Neologisms, 2001), the danger of stagnation looms, as he is increasingly entrapped in the internal struggles of Antillean politics. Catriona Cunningham See also: Bernabé, Jean; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Créolité; Language; Martinique. References Cecatty, René de. “La Bicyclette créole ou la voiture française: Un entretien avec l’écrivain antillais Raphaël Confiant.” Le Monde, November 6, 1992. Ludwig, Ralph, ed. Ecrire la parole de la nuit: La nouvelle littérature antillaise. Paris: Folio, 1994.
CONSTANT, PAULE (1944–) French writer, born at Gan, France. Constant spent her childhood in French Guiana and Cameroon and her adolescence in Djibouti, Laos, and Cambodia before returning to France, where she earned her doctorate at the Sorbonne. She lived another eight years in the Ivory Coast before settling at Aix-en-Provence in 1975, where she is a professor of French literature at the Institut d’Etudes Françaises pour Etudiants Etrangers, University of Aix-Marseilles. Constant published her
CONSTANT, PAULE
first novel in 1980 and is the author of a total of eight works of fiction and one essay, almost all of which have received prestigious literary honors, as well as numerous articles in journals. In 2000, in Aix, Constant created the Centre des Ecrivains du Sud–Jean Giono, over which she presides, to promote contemporary literature by writers living in the south of France, through interviews, literary days, and conferences. Constant’s work is deeply disturbing and demands particular participation on the part of the reader. In spite of a powerfully oppressive pessimism and an abiding sense of infinite loss, a suggestion of resistance that presupposes the possibility of reparation and rehabilitation emerges in the face of otherwise appalling and virtually unending violence. Constant uses her characters’ failures to expose a primitive and fragile humanity underlying a veneer of civilized sophistication and in so doing poses questions that signal widespread commonalities in pre- and postcolonial worlds. Although her settings are always distant, temporally or spatially, she critiques a pervasive loss of consciousness of the nature of the self and the accompanying loss of collective responsibility for identity construction in contemporary culture. The care and education of girls and the condition of women are themes that are always present in her work, enlarging the broadly anticolonial message to allow female characters to represent human existence. Her work is also profoundly Catholic yet filled with biting (and sometimes hilarious) criticism of hypocrisy within the church. In terms of style, Constant’s oeuvre is intentionally Balzacian; characters and per-
297
sonalities reappear from novel to novel, and there are, so far, three trilogies: the “Tiffany” trilogy includes Ouregano (1980; Prix Valéry Larbaud, 1981), Propriété privée/Private Property (1981), and Balta (1983). The African trilogy includes Ouregano, White Spirit (1989; Prix François-Mauriac, Prix Lutèce, Prix du Sud Jean-Baumel, Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française), and Balta. The U.S. trilogy, of which only the first two are published to date, includes Confidence pour confidence/Trading Secrets (1998; Prix du Roman France-Télévision, Prix Goncourt, 1998) and Sucre et Secret/Sugar and Secret (2003; Prix Amnesty des droits de l’homme, 2003). The first critiques postmodern U.S. sensibilities, and the latter is highly critical of the use of the death penalty in the United States. Constant’s other works of fiction are Le Grand Ghâpal, a comic tale (1991; Prix Gabrielle d’Estrées, 1992), and La Fille du Gobernator/The Governor’s Daughter (1994). The latter is set in a prison colony in Guiana, where Constant lived briefly as a child. It works well as a perfect metaphor for Hell. Her essay on the education of privileged girls in the seventeenth century is entitled Un Monde à l’usage des demoiselles/A World for Young Ladies (Grand Prix de l’Essai de l’Académie Française, 1987). Her works have been translated into twenty-two languages. Margot Miller See also: Catholic Church; Guiana. References Miller, Margot. In Search of Shelter: Subjectivity and Spaces of Loss in the Fiction of Paule Constant. Lanham MD: Lexington Books/Roman and Littlefield, 2003. Rye, Gill. Reading for Change: Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women’s Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant). Bern: Peter Lang, 2001.
298
CONSTANTINE, EDDIE
CONSTANTINE, EDDIE (1917–1993) U.S. actor best known for his embodiment of the hard-boiled FBI agent, Lemmy Caution, in a series of French films made in the 1950s and early 1960s. Constantine is the first American to have become a star working in French cinema. Constantine was born in Los Angeles in 1917 and trained as a dancer and singer. He moved to France in 1947 with his first wife, Hélène Musel, a ballet dancer. Constantine was discovered by Edith Piaf, who launched his singing career. His first French film, La Môme vert-de-gris (Poison Ivy, Borderie), was released in 1953 when he made his mark as Lemmy Caution. His success in the French film industry during the 1950s and 1960s was such that his only substantial U.S. role saw him cast as a French pilot (Raid on Entebbe, 1977). Constantine’s star persona can be seen as emblematic of French postwar attitudes toward the United States: a fascination for U.S. culture tempered by fear of U.S. dominance, engendered partly by the huge influx of U.S. films, which had been banned during the war. This fascination led to many film adaptations, such as the eight Lemmy Caution films based on British writer Peter Cheyney’s novels, including Les Femmes s’en balancent (Dames Don’t Care, Borderie, 1953) and Cet Homme est dangereux (Dangerous Agent, Sacha, 1953). Constantine/Caution was just one of the screen versions of tough, hard-drinking, womanizing masculinity, but his particularity lay in his U.S. roots, emphasized in the films, especially through his accent. This characterization was continued across many different “private-eye” figures played by Constantine, including Johnny Jordan
in Ça va barder (Give ’em Hell, Berry, 1955), Barney Morgan in Je suis un sentimental (Headlines of Destruction, Berry, 1955), and Nick Carter in Nick Carter va tout casser (License to Kill, Decoin, 1964) and Nick Carter et le trèfle rouge (Nick Carter and the Red Club, Savignac, 1965). Constantine is also credited with bringing humor to his roles, creating almost a parody of the private-eye character. Many of his films played knowingly on this, flaunting his character’s outrageous drinking capacity and prowess with women. This self-reflexivity was taken to new heights with his last appearance as Caution in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution, 1965). Alphaville displaced the familiar character into a dystopian future city, combining elements of the science fiction and crime genres. The film deliberately parodied not only Constantine’s star persona but also U.S. film culture. Ironically, given that Alphaville is now possibly the only film that Constantine is known for internationally, his French film career did not survive Godard’s mythologizing of his most famous role—and the films he made during the late 1960s did not enjoy the success of his earlier thrillers. He moved to Germany in the 1970s and worked with young directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, in the 1990s, in European art films—Europa (von Trier) and Allemagne 90 neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, Godard), both 1991. Arguably, Constantine was hugely successful in 1950s France, as Ginette Vincendeau has pointed out, because his gentle mockery of the “ultramasculine” American hero made over the U.S.
COPI
private eye into a French national icon in a way that chimed perfectly with French ambivalence toward the United States at that time. Sarah Leahy See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Film Noir; Godard, Jean-Luc. References Buss, Robin. French Film Noir. London/New York: Marion Boyars, 1994. Vincendeau, Ginette. “France 1945–1965 and Hollywood: The Policier as Inter-National Text.” Screen 33, no. 1 (spring 1992): 50–80.
COPI (RAOUL DAMONTE) (1939–1987) Cartoonist, playwright, and novelist, born in Buenos Aires in 1939. Copi grew up in Uruguay (his novel L’Uruguayen [1972] is a homage to his lost childhood in Montevideo), where his upper-middle-class parents had sought exile from the Peronist regime in 1945, educating their children in U.S. and European culture and encouraging Copi to write plays for pocket money. They emigrated to Paris in the early 1950s and then returned to Buenos Aires to fight to overthrow Peron in 1955. Copi settled permanently in Paris in 1962, where he made ends meet by street painting, eventually getting a break at the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, to which he contributed a series of acerbic cartoons (La Femme assise) depicting the eponymous seated woman who blithely comments on the absurdities of life—a satirical take on the political immobility and conservatism of mid-1960s France. Copi’s later cartoons Libérett, some of which were criticized as racially offen-
299
sive, were eventually deemed too outrageous for Libération in the late 1970s. Copi’s major plays include Eva Peron (1969), with its risqué jokes about the heroine’s fatal cancer, cutting down the Santa Evita myth to a cunning career plan. In a final twist, Evita slaughters her nurse, then passes off the body as her own, while escaping with the loot. The first production, directed by fellow Argentinean exile Alfredo Arias, crossed-dressed Evita and was condemned by Buenos Aires, the theater trashed by far-right extremists. Copi’s subsequent meditation on gender identity, L’Homosexuel, ou la difficulté de s’exprimer (1971), functionally translated into English as Sex Changes in Siberia, showed a group of Russian bourgeois unwrapping each other’s layers of transformation— male actors playing girls who were boys who were girls and so forth. Gay identity based on object choice was secondary to Copi, whose interest was in gender deviance. Le Frigo (1983) is a one-man show, a satire on class pretensions and gay lifestyle—Copi himself played all the parts—a “lady-doctor” Freud, an SM clone, and a Garbo look-alike. Copi is perhaps best known for his television commercials in the 1980s for Perrier water, in which he often appeared as a soubrette, or maid, exuberantly flaunting the product as madness, in a wonderful moment of high camp, proclaiming Perrier to be mad—fou the masculine for folle. The novel Le Bal des Folles (The Queens’ Ball, 1977) weaves the life of his gadfly character into the more substantial web of the homosexual subculture of Saint Germain-des-Près in the 1950s and 1960s. Copi’s narrator situates his project less as a “homosexual novel” than as a “queen’s
300
CORTÁZAR, JULIO
novel.” But Copi was keen to mark his distance from the institution of French literature: he admitted that he took part in the literary TV program of the 1980s (Apostrophes) only because of his national status as a Latin American outsider. The transparent characters of his novels and plays are designed as cartoon sketches of people on the sexual margins of society. To change sex, the Latino Pierre is shown to reject his ethnic origins, viewing other Latinos as vulgar. The narrator follows the transition with a degree of sadness, as he literally loses his lover. This theme of loss later set the tone for his last work, Une Visite inopportune (1988), a play as cruel and witty as ever, making black humor out of his imminent death. Copi died from an AIDS-related illness in Paris in 1987. Nick Rees Roberts See also: AIDS; Argentina; Gay Movement; Hocquenghem, Guy; Mineral Water; Williams, Tennessee. References Copi. Textes rassemblés par Jorge Damonte. Paris: Editions Christian Bourgeois, 1990. Hocquenghem, Guy. La Dérive homosexuelle. Paris: Editions universitaires Jean-Pierre Delarge, 1977. Weiss, Jason. The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. New York: Routledge, 2003.
CORTÁZAR, JULIO (1914–1984) Born in Brussels in 1914 to Argentinean parents, writer, musician, and left-wing activist Julio Cortázar became internationally famous in the 1960s for his fantastical short stories and experimental novels, notably the epic Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), a work that led Carlos Fuentes to describe him as the Latin American Marcel Proust.
Cortázar was a key player in the so-called “Boom” phenomenon of trailblazing writers (including Gabriel García Márquez) emerging from Latin America during the decade of the 1960s. Cortázar grew up in Argentina, where his mother fostered his growing love for French literature (he would later cite Lautréamont as a particularly powerful influence) and fluency in the French language. Cortázar’s first collection of stories, Bestiario, was published in Argentina in 1951, but he left his country the same year, unhappy with Juan Perón’s arrival to power, and settling definitively in Paris. An experienced translator of such French authors as André Gide, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Jean Giono, Cortázar continued to translate in France (for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) and to develop his own writing. Indeed, translation itself is often one of the central themes in his texts, encapsulating as it does some of his major preoccupations: alterity, transformation, and the radical movement between different subject positions. Many of Cortázar’s stories and novels take place in a Paris beneath the surface of which lurks some repressed element that could at any moment tip the protagonists into the unknown realm of the fantastic. Since his characters are frequently Latin Americans resident in Paris, it is often a totally unresolved—and irresolvable— interpenetration of (American) past and (French) present that will showcase the fragility within these subjects of any sense of a coherent and unified self. It is in the traumatic gap between identities that the Cortázarian fantastic (ghosts, possessions, metamorphoses, etc.) will take root and grow. Characters are always prone to dis-
COSMETICS
301
Fascinated by all the fluctuating, unbalanced human products of the French/ American experience, Cortázar does not limit himself to Argentine protagonists: one of his most successful creations is Johnny (a thinly disguised Charlie Parker), the protagonist of the novella El Perseguidor (The Pursuer), an African American in Paris whose inability to be comprehended by those around him will aggravate an already anguished relationship with time, order, and reality and will culminate in his death. Cortázar himself died in Paris on February 12, 1984, having been finally accorded French citizenship by President François Mitterrand in 1981. Andrew Asibong
Julio Cortázar, author of Hopscotch (Pantheon)/ José Gelabert, 1965. (Library of Congress)
solve into somebody else, something else, or into some other era. In addition to these commonplaces of fantastic literature, however, in Cortázar’s world, geography itself becomes equally ungraspable. Thus in the short story “El otro cielo” (The Other Heaven), the Lautréamont-inspired protagonist, a South American serial killer living in nineteenth-century Paris, walks between the second arrondissement and central Buenos Aires by means of a mysterious passage, a phenomenon he has apparently come to terms with. In Hopscotch the two halves of the book, one set in Argentina and the other in Paris, but both concerning the character Horacio Oliveira, often seem to be taking place at the same time.
See also: Argentina; Fuentes, Carlos; García Márquez, Gabriel; Lautréamont, Comte de; Mitterrand, François; Yourcenar, Marguerite. References Carter, E. D. Julio Cortázar: Life, Work and Criticism. Fredericton, NB: York Press, 1986. Standish, Peter. Understanding Julio Cortázar. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
COSMETICS The social and economic significance of cosmetics and makeup has changed in pivotal ways throughout Western history. For the French, the use of cosmetics was emblematic of a life of privileges and sophistication symbolized by the court. When Catherine de Médici married the future king Henri II in 1533, she brought Florentine refinement to the court in the form of unguents, fragrances, and various powders and lipsticks, forming the elementary basis of contemporary makeup. Catherine’s political intentions were, nevertheless, hardly
302
COSMETICS
Chanel cosmetics counter. (Les Stone/Corbis Sygma)
concealed by the gloss of novelty she brought to sixteenth-century courtly life. She also used cosmetics in ruthless and calculating ways, murdering undesirable enemies and family members and therefore turning makeup into a deceiving, poisonous, and often lethal statement of political power. The influence of Italian Barocco, or baroque style, over all aspects of French culture led to the exuberance of Versailles, which was built between 1660 and 1685 by Louis LeVau and Jules HardouinMansart. When Louis XIV moved the court there in 1677, the plays, festivities, concerts, and operas performed for the king meant that makeup had become de rigueur for any self-respecting courtesan, regardless of age and gender. The rapidly
changing fashions of elaborate hairstyles, intricate adornment, and luxurious attire complemented exuberant and often extreme makeup that signified belonging to the exclusive sphere of courtly pleasures. Men wore white powder and bright lipstick often made from natural pigments and animal substances. The significance of the mouche, a black dot resembling a beauty mark worn by courtesans, varied according to its location on a woman’s face. Courtly makeup rapidly became a complex and intricate form of communication. The very act of making oneself up and using cosmetics therefore stood for one’s entry into the world and acted as a significant step toward social and cultural recognition. The prestigious—and somewhat illusory—connotations of cosmetics were in-
COSMETICS
strumental in the expansion of what is now known as one of the most profitable industries across both sides of the Atlantic, generating billions of dollars in profit each year. Elizabeth Arden was one of the first women to turn the cosmetic industry into a highly lucrative and international business. Born Florence Nightingale Graham in Canada in 1878, she initially trained as a nurse. She soon started seeing beauty potential in the skin salves and burn creams she used on her patients. Her kitchen became a laboratory where she began to experiment with different ingredients in order to come up with the perfect cream formula. Despite several initial failures, she stuck to her goals and moved to New York at age thirty. She opened her own beauty salon in 1910 on Fifth Avenue and changed her name to Elizabeth Arden. By selling a range of treatments and products to a growing customer base, she became highly successful, and her credibility grew within the U.S. and Canadian markets. Her genius was to understand that North American women were longing for prettiness and glamour after experiencing the puritanical restraint of post-Victorian society. Her name was soon associated with leading Hollywood stars, who used her innovative products such as Eight-Hour Cream. Arden was a pioneer in marketing and was selling over 100 products by the 1920s. Elizabeth Arden became a global brand, leading the way for other twentieth-century cosmetics empires such as Estée Lauder, Helena Rubinstein, and Bobbi Brown. Arden’s success inspired French houses who were originally famous for their fragrances or clothes to enter the cosmetics business. Guerlain, Chanel, and Dior all introduced skin care and makeup products, realizing the potential for such markets.
303
The French beauty business developed in the 1960s and quickly became a powerful industry. Companies such as Clarins were established in the United States at the beginning of the 1980s. The company is still renowned for producing beauty products and fragrances whose formulations are exclusively based on plants and natural extracts. The family business is now an international group licensing designer fragrances and beauty lines for the likes of Loris Azzaro and Thierry Mugler. The Clarins Group currently employs more than 5,000 people and had global earnings of more than $1 billion in 2002. Other companies such as Lancôme, Sisley, and L’Oréal have enjoyed similar successes in both fragrance and beauty developments. The makeup artist also plays a crucial role in the maintenance and growth of the cosmetics industry. Several makeup artists whose work was initially limited to fashion photography and runway presentations now have their own cosmetics lines. François Nars and Stéphane Marais are the most recent examples of a generation of French makeup artists gaining momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. The key relationship existing between such brands as Elizabeth Arden, Lancôme, and L’Oréal and Hollywood actresses such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, Uma Thurman, and Milla Jovovich means that the industry will always rely on film and style as key marketing tools. “Finding a face” to launch a new product or fragrance is therefore a necessity for international beauty conglomerates. The trend, however, tends to work both ways. Using her name and fame as a singer and actress, Jennifer Lopez recently launched successful fragrances and cosmetics lines.
304
COSTA-GAVRAS
The ultimate taboo seems to be makeup for men. Although the male cosmetics industry is a highly successful and profitable one, men in makeup still have a subversive and scandalous appeal. JeanPaul Gaultier, who put men in skirts in the early 1980s, recently launched a makeup line for men, predicting a change in attitude toward such products. Commercial success is, however, far from being guaranteed, as “male makeup” remains the ultimate challenge for the beauty industry. Philippe Pourhashemi See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Fashion; L’Oréal. References Corson, Richard. Fashions in Makeup, from Ancient to Modern Times. New York: Universe Books, 1972. Gavenas, Mary Lisa. Color Stories: Behind the Scenes of America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Woodhead, Lindy. War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden, Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry. New York: John Wiley, 2004.
COSTA-GAVRAS (CONSTANTINOS GAVRAS) (1933–) A French film director and screenwriter of Greek origin, born in Loutra-Iraias, CostaGavras is associated with political cinema. In more than a dozen films in France and in Hollywood, he has developed the popular genre of the political thriller, combining compelling narratives, real-life events, and international stars. Costa-Gavras arrived in France in 1949 after being refused a visa to the United States. He studied at the Sorbonne and the
IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques) cinema school before starting his career in 1958 as assistant to established directors such as René Clair, Henri Verneuil, Yves Allegret, and Jacques Demy. His first film, Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders, 1965), a successful detective thriller, featured Yves Montand, with whom he worked in several subsequent films. This film, partly financed by the actors, enabled Costa-Gavras to try out a visual style inspired by cinéma vérité documentary techniques. Z (1969), starring Montand, cowritten with Jorge Semprun, and set in the period leading to the 1966 military coup in Greece, was a critical and popular success, marking the international recognition of his talent with an Oscar and prizes at Cannes, and it remains a landmark in French cinema. It defined Costa-Gavras’s style as a director, namely the combination of a popular genre with serious themes like political oppression, imperialism, tyranny, justice, and guilt. Z was followed by other successful political films, such as L’Aveu (The Confession, 1970), denouncing the excesses of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia, and Etat de siège (State of Siege, 1973), criticizing the political role of the United States in Latin America. Section spéciale (Special Section, 1975), one of several films on World War II, examines collaboration within the French Vichy government. When he failed to find money for his films in France, Costa-Gavras moved to Hollywood. His first film in English, Missing (1982), starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek and based on a true story, the kidnapping and murder of an American journalist in Chile, was an uncompromis-
COTTON
ing film and a commercial success. It won an Oscar and a joint Palme d’or in Cannes, possibly because it was accessible and hewed closely to the familiar American thriller conventions. Betrayed (1988), starring Debra Winger and Tom Berenger, explored racism in rural America. In Music Box (1989), a melodrama that won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival, Jessica Lange plays a daughter questioning her father’s Nazi war criminal past. Costa-Gavras’s career has been uneven, and some of his more psychological dramas have not been well received. After the failure of Mad City (1997), he directed Amen (2002), a much-discussed film about the passivity of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust. Costa-Gavras promotes the cause of political justice through films based on historical situations. He is considered a major international political filmmaker, and his films, unsurprisingly, tend to be controversial. While he takes clear stands and questions human conscience, Costa-Gavras uses the dramatic power of the film medium to expose mainstream audiences to important issues. He has always been actively involved in the debates of the cinema profession and was in charge of the Cinémathèque française in the 1980s. Isabelle Vanderschelden See also: Catholic Church; Chile; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Montand, Yves; World War II. References Buss, Robin. French Film Noir. New York/London: Marion Boyars, 1994. Michalczyk, J. Costa-Gavras: Political Fiction Film. Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1984. Prédal, René, ed. Le Cinéma de Costa-Gavras. Paris: Cerf, 1985.
305
COTTON When things go well in Quebec, people say “ça file bien” (it spins well), but when they are fed up, they are “au coton” (in cotton). For better and for worse, cotton defined the industrial experience of French Canadians and Franco-Americans. Yet this primacy of cotton is historical rather than empirical. Time and place accorded it an importance that mere numbers never could. As residents of British colonies, both Canadiens and Acadiens were exposed to large-scale importation of cotton goods as soon as the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815. By both value and volume, cotton goods remained until the late nineteenth century the most important British export to what would become Canada. In the major ports of British North America, dry goods merchants made up a quarter to a third of all mercantile firms. Settlement of the Canadas fed this trade, as the first cash crop of most pioneering peasants on the forested fringe of settlement was potash. Made by leaching the cinders of hardwood trees cut down in land clearance, potash was the principal bleaching agent used in British textiles prior to the development of the modern chemical industry. Most French-speaking residents of British North America, however, continued to wear homespun woolen goods. Indeed, the wearing of this étoffe du pays (homespun woolen goods) became a symbol of political liberties, when in response to the Russell Resolutions of 1836 the Patriote movement launched a boycott of British textiles. (The iconic symbol made famous by the Front de liberation du Québec during the October Crisis of 1970 was of an armed peasant wearing homespun.) The expanding production of homespun by peasant women,
306
COTTON
particularly in the foothills of the Laurentians and along the Lower South Shore of the Saint Lawrence, reached commercial quantities by the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The Cajun population of Louisiana was marginal to the development of King Cotton in the early nineteenth century, but the same could not be said of the wealthy French planter families displaced by the revolution in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and of French citizens expelled from the Spanish Caribbean in 1810, some 2,700 of whom chose to take refuge in New Orleans. Over the ensuing decades they were joined by a further 8,500 French immigrants to this booming capital of the New South. This period coincided with the development in northern France of a large cotton industry, where 368 mills employed 100 hands or more by 1845. So it is not surprising that there were commercial and financial ties, but this nascent industry had in Napoleonic France relied on Italian cotton and then, after the restoration of the monarchy, largely on Egyptian cotton. During the American Civil War, France maintained diplomatic relations with the Confederacy, more in hope of support for its Mexican adventure than out of any dependence on Southern cotton. Direct participation in the manufacture of cotton goods by French Canadians first took place in New England. Although an estimated 70,000 people emigrated to the United States from Canada during the 1850s, the largest migratory waves followed the end of the Civil War and appear to have been linked to the growing indebtedness of French Canadian farming families. From 37,000 in 1860, the French Canadian population in New England grew to 208,000 in 1880 and 573,000 by 1900. These census
figures capture perhaps half of what was a continuous large-scale movement back and forth across the border. Initially, nationalist members of the French Canadian intelligentsia considered these popular class economic migrants to be traîtres (traitors), and Georges Etienne Cartier reputedly dismissed them as la canaille (trash). By the 1880s, however, these textile factory workers were increasingly seen as the future of the French in North America. Honoré Mercier went as far as to predict that a century’s continued growth would see 100 million FrancoAmericans by 1989. These French Canadian migrants found work in textile mills throughout New England, where they displaced a second-generation Irish workforce that dated from the 1850s. Work in the mills was a family affair, with boys and girls as young as thirteen and fourteen working up to seventy-two hours a week, often under the supervision of one of their parents. No clear gender division of labor then characterized the industry, although in all mills the lowest-paid tasks were reserved for women and children. The close relationship between family time and industrial time in Manchester, New Hampshire, went so far by the early twentieth century that two-thirds of married women worked in the mills between pregnancies. This appears to have been the major difference between the lived experiences of female textile workers in the United States and Canada. Women worked after their marriage in the mills in the United States between their pregnancies. This was not the case in Canada, where after marriage women effectively withdrew from the paid labor force. Their husbands, however, shared more than just a varied relationship
COTTON
to the work process: patriarchal privileges and a shared masculine sporting culture. Before the Great War annual baseball tournaments linked Fall River, Massachusetts, to Valleyfield, Quebec. In Canada, the cotton industry dates from 1874, when both the Hudon mill in Hochelaga, just east of Montreal, and Montreal Cotton in Valleyfield opened. Following the adoption of a strongly protectionist trade policy by the Canadian government in 1879, leading dry goods wholesalers moved into cotton production, opening seventeen new plants by 1885. From the industry’s inception, most workers were Québécois. Indeed, the principal textile town in English Canada was Cornwall, Ontario, a largely French Canadian city just west of the Quebec provincial border on the Saint Lawrence River. The binational character of the industry was, therefore, from its inception a defining feature: an overwhelmingly French Canadian workforce labored in mills managed and owned by English Canadians. During the early decades of the cotton industry in Quebec the lack of a clearly defined gendered division of labor facilitated collective action by what was still a predominantly female workforce. Between 1880 and 1913, French Canadian textile workers struck fifty times. The key moments of mass mobilization were 1900 and 1906–1907, with six and nineteen strikes, respectively. Organized as the 7,500-strong Federation of Textile Workers of Canada, the workers in 1906–1907 failed in their attempt to protect wages and piece rates in an industry in the midst of dramatic restructuring. In 1905, under the auspices of the Bank of Montreal, four of the largest Canadian producers merged to create Dominion
307
Textile, which then secretly purchased a controlling interest in Montreal Cotton and, in 1907, established a price cartel with the three remaining independent companies that was to last thirty-one years. This shift from competition to oligopoly financed a dramatic increase in workload along more clearly defined gender lines. In the relatively unskilled carding rooms, where cotton is cleaned and prepared for spinning, wage differentials rose to three to one. With Charles Gordon, the company president, serving as vice chair of the Imperial Munitions Board, World War I proved exceptionally profitable; in 1919 alone, Dominion Textile returned after-tax profits of 87 percent on preferred shares and 31 percent on common equity. Through the 1920s, Dominion Textile’s unchallenged control permitted regional specialization, as the company became the leading private employer throughout the heartland of Quebec. Wage cuts combined with reduced work hours to hit workers hard in the 1930s, particularly in the mills in smaller towns, where company policy, supported by the local Catholic clergy, discouraged women from working after marriage. Strikes in 1937 halted the downward trend and under pressure from the Confederation of Catholic Trade Unions led to a royal commission into the state of the textile industry. Known as the Turgeon Commission, it uncovered the price cartel and revealed a rapacious, unilingual corporate structure. Most workers remained unorganized. In 1943, led by Madeleine Parent, the largely female workforce at the Merchants plant in Saint-Henri, described in Gabrielle Roy’s classic Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute), succeeded in establishing a trade
308
COUNTERCULTURE
union independent from the Catholic Church. In the most important of the immediate postwar strikes in Quebec, Madeleine Parent and Kent Rowley successfully unionized the Valleyfield operations, before falling victim to the Red Scare purges of the late 1940s. New single-floor, continuous-process plant design to accommodate European (largely Swiss) technologies transformed the work environment in the 1950s and early 1960s. Tensions in the older plants over control of the work process led to a major strike in 1964. The degree of worker dissatisfaction was dramatically captured in Denys Arcand’s National Film Board production On est au coton (Cotton Mill, Treadmill ), but Dominion Textile was powerful enough to block release of the film for six years. In the late 1960s the company successfully engineered a secession from the increasingly militant Confederation of National Trade Unions. The resultant Confederation of Democratic Unions blocked rank-and-file attempts to oppose the new corporate strategy of shifting production to the southern United States through the 1970s and 1980s, symbolized by the purchase of the denim producer DHJ. Ironically, it was the success of this denim strategy that ultimately led to the collapse of the industry. In 1993, a Wall Street syndicate purchased control of the company, closed down the Canadian operations, and in a reverse takeover sold the denim factories to the major American producer Burlington. Au coton is now merely the name of a chain of clothing stores. Robert C. H. Sweeny See also: American Civil War; Arcand, Denys; Catholic Church; Denim; Fashion; Montreal; Quebec; Roy, Gabrielle; Saint Lawrence River; Sport; World War I.
References Brandt, Gail Cuthbert. “Weaving It Together: Life Cycle and the Industrial Experience of Female Cotton Workers in Quebec, 1910–1950.” Labour/Le Travail 7 (spring 1981): 113–125. Chassagne, Serge. Le Coton et ses patrons, France, 1760–1840. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1991. Dominion Textile Inc. Fonds. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. Dumont, Fernand. Récit d’une émigration: Mémoires. Montreal: Boréal, 1997. Ingersoll, Thomas N. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.
COUNTERCULTURE The creation of lifestyles and cultural practices alternative to those established has for long been a feature of American life, and a projection of Europeans onto a myth of “America.” Taking utopian and religious forms from the seventeenth century, in the rapidly modernizing and emerging consumer societies of the Western world following World War II countercultural movements were associated with new cultures of youth, music, narcotics, and sexuality. As the advanced form of consumer culture, American society has heavily influenced these trends in Europe, whether through figures such as James Dean in the 1950s or those of the late 1960s who emerged in a country in turmoil over race and the Vietnam War. In France, the hegemony of Marxist thought in intellectual and student circles for much of the 1960s meant that American countercultural tendencies were downgraded. However, in the wake of the events of May 1968—a confused and complex mixture of older revolutionary politics, cultural and ideological upheaval, media event,
COUNTERCULTURE
309
A group of protesters kneel in front of riot police during confrontations outside the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, April 20, 2001. (Reuters/Corbis)
and libidinous carnival that nevertheless mobilized millions over genuine social, economic, and political grievances—elements on the French Left did begin to look at the new American countercultures for inspiration and for a way of disengaging from some of the more puritan Marxist-inspired ideologies in order to address questions of desire. The magazine Actuel (1970–1975), cofounded by Jean-François Bizot, MichelAntoine Burnier, Bernard Kouchner, and Patrick Rambaud, was a crucial conduit in these years. American counterculture also influenced Michel Foucault and Guy Hocquenghem, who in 1968–1970 belonged, along with others from the 1968 generation such as the architect Roland Castro, to a group called “Vive la révolution,” which
was seeking this kind of dialogue. In April 1970, for example, Hocquenghem wrote an article titled “Changer la vie,” in which figures such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin are defended in the name of creativity, for the “revolution” must not subordinate or replace “life.” For Hocquenghem, these evolutions were part of a transition taking him to the founding of a “modern” gay movement in France, itself a reworking in that context of an American development with its roots in black civil rights and the counterculture. But they also expressed a concern that if the post-1968 revolutionaries did not engage with the counterculture, the bourgeoisie would get there first. Indeed, much analysis in France of May 1968 from the tenth anniversary onward
310
COUREURS
DE BOIS
argues that it was the foundation of the new phase in French capitalism characterized by personalization, individualism, fluidity, and hedonism (Debray, Lipovetsky) and that events have proven the victory of the babas (hippies) over the Marxists (Joffrin). With the appropriation by contemporary capitalism of countercultural agendas from the 1960s, attention since the 1990s has been on the emergence of “anticapitalist” or antiglobalization movements. The demonstrations in Quebec City in April 2001 were seen all over the world and even received approbation from Pierre Bourdieu, via a satellite letter sent from Paris. Mobilizing around issues of trade policy at an international level and helped by the Internet, these coalitions are oppositional to the current order, but like those in the 1960s contain a complex array of residual (traditional) and also alternative ideologies whose future place inside or outside the system remains uncertain. Bill Marshall See also: Avant-Gardes; Bourdieu, Pierre; Breton, André; Debray, Régis; Foucault, Michel; Hocquenghem, Guy; Surrealism; Vietnam War; World War II. References Bizot, Jean-François, ed. Underground: L’histoire. Paris: Denoël, 2001. Debray, Régis. “A Modest Contribution to the Rules and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary.” New Left Review 115 (May–June 1979): 45–65. Hocquenghem, Guy. L’Après-mai des faunes. Paris: Grasset, 1974. Joffrin, Laurent. Un Coup de jeune: Portrait d’une génération morale. Paris: Arlea, 1987. Lipovetsky, Gilles. L’Ere du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Moore, Marie France. “Contre-culture et culture politique au Québec: Une analyse de contenu de la revue Mainmise.” M.A. Thesis, Département de science politique. Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal, 1975.
COUREURS
DE BOIS Name given to itinerant French or French Canadian fur traders in New France and Louisiana during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In New France and Louisiana, coureurs de bois was the name given to young French and French Canadian men who traded furs with Indians in their distant villages without official authorization. In exchange for furs, coureurs de bois delivered metal tools, textiles, muskets, alcohol, and other European manufactured goods to their Indian suppliers. Traveling vast distances on foot and by canoe and acquainted with Indian languages and customs, the coureurs de bois played an important role in the French exploration of the continent and in securing military and commercial alliances with Indians. During the last decades of the seventeenth century, the metropolitan government’s willingness to diversify the colonial economy, as well as growing concerns about the disorderliness and “immorality” of the coureurs de bois reported by New France missionaries and officials, prompted authorities to restrict and control fur trading expeditions by setting up a trading permit system (régime de congés) in 1681. This permit system created a “respectable” class of traders known as voyageurs. By contrast, the term coureurs de bois was mostly used to designate illicit traders and carried some pejorative connotation. Despite subsequent prohibitions, hundreds of coureurs de bois continued to travel to Indian country in search of furs. In the eighteenth century, coureurs de bois could be found trading in the Great Lakes region and in the upper and lower Mississippi valley. Even though their knowledge of Indian languages and customs made them valuable intermediaries between
COUREURS
French officials and Indian communities, especially in regions of New France and Louisiana where the French colonial presence was limited or nonexistent, their adoption of Indian ways and their unions with Indian women often drew the ire of civil and church authorities. Formidable agents of cross-cultural interactions, the coureurs de bois would continue to exert their influence over the course of American history well beyond the demise of French North American colonies. Their marriages with Indian women gave rise to the Métis communities of Canada, and a number of traders of French Canadian ancestry would serve as guides and interpreters for U.S. explorers of the American West during the nineteenth century. The precursors of the coureurs de bois in French North America were young Frenchmen who, during the early years of French exploration and settlement, were placed in welcoming Indian communities to learn Indian languages and customs and thus facilitate relations between natives and newcomers. Know as truchements, these young men developed a strong taste for the liberty and fraternity they found among their Indian hosts. Their embrace of Indian life and abandonment of Christian morals and behavior often scandalized missionaries, who accused them of undermining their evangelizing efforts. In 1635, the authorities of New France attempted to recall all the truchements, but the appeal of the Indian world was too strong; many returned to Indian country as coureurs de bois and inspired other young Frenchmen to follow their example. One such truchement turned coureur de bois was Etienne Brûlé. In 1608, the founder of New France, Samuel de Champlain, sent Brûlé to live among the Hurons. When Brûlé came back the next
DE BOIS
311
year to Quebec with a Huron delegation, he reportedly spoke fluent Algonquin, sported face paint, and had adopted Huron dress and hairstyle. Brûlé had no desire to resume his French life and returned to Huronia with those who accepted him as one of their own. For the rest of his life, Brûlé became the archetypal coureur de bois, a Frenchman turned Indian whose life choice disturbed French officials, all the while remaining an indispensable intermediary between French merchants and Indians and a source of valuable geographical and geopolitical information. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coureurs de bois played a crucial economic role in French North America. In New France and Louisiana, the pelts and furs they traded with Indians constituted a substantial proportion of colonial exports. Despite the increasing importance of other Atlantic-bound colonial products such as wheat, rice, wood, or fish, by the mid-eighteenth century, furs still made up 50 percent of New France exports, while peltry accounted for about one-third of the total value of the French Louisiana export trade. The European manufactured goods the coureurs de bois took to Indian communities in exchange for pelts also transformed the economy, material culture, and geopolitics of Indian America. The growing dependence of Indians on the metal goods, muskets, and alcohol the coureurs de bois brought them furthered competition between Indian groups for access to these goods and in turn shaped the dynamics of European-Indian commercial and military alliances. The importance of the coureurs de bois in helping colonial governments secure these alliances cannot be underestimated. Their linguistic skills, their
312
COURNAND, ANDRÉ FRÉDÉRIC
intimate knowledge of Indian diplomacy and warfare, and the strong ties they had established in Indian communities often prompted both French and British colonial governments to seek their services. The coureurs de bois’s knowledge of the peoples and landscape of North America also made them valuable sources of information and guides for the exploration of the American interior during the eighteenth century. If colonial authorities often denounced the “savage ways” of the coureurs de bois, they nevertheless heavily relied on them to stake their imperial claims on the continent. Agents of the now much celebrated process of métissage, or cross-cultural borrowings and transformations characteristic of French colonialism in North America, the coureurs de bois led a life that often baffled contemporary commentators. Their adoption of Indian dress, customs, and languages and the intimate relations they formed with Indian women (a practice vigorously denounced by French civil and church authorities by the turn of the eighteenth century) signified a rejection of their “civilized” background. Indeed, some coureurs de bois assimilated so thoroughly into Indian communities that it was sometimes difficult for European observers to distinguish them from their Indian kin. In most cases, the children they had with their Indian wives were raised among Indians and never integrated into French colonial society. The coureur de bois as historical figure contributed to the development of Métis identity and culture in Canada. But the coureur de bois as cultural figure still resonates in contemporary Canadian society and is often invoked to express notions
of hardiness, virility, and independence associated with Canadian and Québécois identity. The moniker has been adopted by a number of outdoor clubs and tourist businesses in Ontario and Quebec, and the business travel section of the government of Quebec’s official tourist website promises incentive travelers a holiday “filled with high emotions and unexpected adventures” for “the modern coureur de bois.” Guillaume Aubert See also: Brûlé, Etienne; Champlain, Samuel de; Fur Trade; Hurons; Louisiana; Manitoba; Métis; Mississippi River; New France; Quebec; Riel, Louis. References Brown, Jennifer S. H., and Jacqueline Peterson, eds. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001. “Business Travel.” Bonjour Quebec: Quebec Government Official Tourist Site. http://www.bonjourquebec.com/anglais/ affaires/index.html (cited May 30, 2004). Eccles, W. J. The French in North America, 1500–1783. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. Germain, Georges-Hébert. Les Coureurs de bois: La saga des Indiens blancs. Outremont, Quebec: Libre Expression, 2003. Jacquin, Philippe. Les Indiens blancs: Français et Indiens en Amérique du Nord, XVIeXVIIIe siècles. Paris: Payot, 1987. Vaugeois, Denis. America: L’Expédition de Lewis and Clark et la naissance d’une nouvelle puissance. Sillery, Quebec: Septentrion, 2002.
COURNAND, ANDRÉ FRÉDÉRIC (1895–1988) French-trained physician whose medical career in the United States culminated in a Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine.
COURNAND, ANDRÉ FRÉDÉRIC
André Frédéric Cournand was born in Paris on September 24, 1895. He studied physics, chemistry, and biology at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris, graduating in 1913. The following year, he began his medical studies, but upon the outbreak of World War I he volunteered for the French army, where he served as a battalion surgeon until the end of the conflict. On leaving the army, he resumed his medical studies and became an intern at the Hôpitaux de Paris in 1925. During the next few years he gained clinical experience, especially in internal medicine, under Professor Robert Debré, head of the pediatric service of the Children’s Hospital in Paris. In the 1930s, anxious to study and work in the United States, Cournand secured a residency in the tuberculosis (later chest) service of Columbia University at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He became chief resident of this service and conducted research on the physiology and physiopathology of respiration under the guidance of D. W. Richards. Cournand also began his own work on the development of physiologic methods of exploration of the cardiopulmonary system. By using the catheter technique developed by W. Forsmann, Cournand and D. R. Richard Jr. succeeded in measuring the blood pressure in the lung artery. This discovery was crucial for the surgery of patients affected by silicosis, and eventually it was recognized by the 1956 Nobel Prize. During World War II Cournand was an investigator for the U.S. Office of Scientific and Research Development, working in the Chemical Warfare Service. Although Cournand became a U.S. citizen in 1941, he never cut his ties with his home country. Throughout his career,
313
he stayed in close contact with his former teacher, Robert Debré. In the spring of 1945, as the war was ending in Europe, Cournand proposed a plan to the Rockefeller Foundation to assist French medical research. In 1947, with the support of the French government and the Rockefeller Foundation, a Medical and Surgery Relief Committee (MSRC) was established in New York to provide grants to French clinicians eager to learn the new techniques of biomedicine then in use in North America. The MSRC also provided scientific equipment (centrifuges) and new medicines (cortisone) to Louis Bugnard, director of the French Institut National d’Hygiène. In 1950, Debré attempted to lure Cournand back to France, where he could help with the renewal of medical research. When Debré suggested Cournand for a chair at the Collège de France, however, his candidature was blocked by academic rivalries. Cournand decided to stay in New York, where he was appointed professor at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1951. A few years later, when Cournand was awarded the Nobel Prize as a U.S. citizen, Debré characterized this as “a severe warning for French medical research.” Professor André F. Cournand died in 1988. Jean-François Picard See also: World War I; World War II. References Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. “Histoire de la recherche médicale en France au vingtième siècle.” http://picardp1.ivry.cnrs.fr/histrecmed .html (cited March 26, 2004). Schneider, William H., ed. Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine: International Initiatives from World War I to the Cold War. Indiana University Press, 2002.
314
COURRIER
DES
ETATS-UNIS, LE
COURRIER DES ETATS-UNIS, LE (1828–1939) The longest-running French-language newspaper in the United States was founded in New York in 1828. Le Courrier des Etats-Unis (CEU) ceased publication when World War II began in 1939, after a difficult period during the Great Depression. As a tribute, a later French-language U.S. newspaper, France-Amérique, revived the name Le Courrier des Etats-Unis, and since 1966 has incorporated it as its regional (U.S.) news section heading. FranceAmérique was started in New York in 1943 and became an international edition of Le Figaro (Paris); published weekly, its current circulation is around 20,000. It is interesting to note that a similar political impetus was present at the origins of CEU and France-Amérique. The founders of both newspapers sought to provide a New World voice for civil and religious freedom in France. CEU promoted republican and Bonapartist ideals over the ancien régime views perpetuated by Charles X, and it deplored Louis Philippe’s July Monarchy after 1830; France-Amérique supported General Charles de Gaulle in his opposition to the fascist Vichy government of the 1940s. The original slogan of CEU was “Journal politique et littéraire.” The paper’s early period pre-dated the steamship era and the creation of the Cunard line in 1840, which improved the transatlantic supply of news. So, at first, the CEU relied more heavily on literary features, miscellany, and local stories. It appeared on eight pages on Saturdays; an annual subscription cost $8. On November 18, 1829, a Wednesday edition was added. Depending on the news supply, the midweek edition ran between four and eight pages, and an extra weekday edition
would occasionally appear. Beginning on February 25, 1838, there were two weekday editions (Tuesdays and Thursdays) instead of one, the Saturday edition grew to sixteen pages, and the slogan was changed to “L’Organe des populations de langue française.” From June 11, 1847, the CEU was published daily (except Sundays) and continued to increase its popularity by appealing to a general readership. In the bookstore it operated on its premises, La Librairie du Courrier des Etats-Unis, back issues of French newspapers could be purchased along with books and magazines. CEU was not illustrated, but one notable exception was a special Sunday edition of October 24, 1886. On the front page, a four-column engraving accompanied an article celebrating the unveiling, in New York Harbor later that week, of FrédéricAuguste Bartholdi’s famous statue, “Liberty Lighting the World.” H. P. Sampers, the CEU’s greatest owner-editor (from 1879 until 1908) saw the paper as a vital link not only between Franco-Americans and France, but one that promoted understanding between all French and American populations. Indeed, earlier in the nineteenth century, it had been an important information and cultural channel between France and readers in Lower Canada (early Quebec) and, later, between francophone communities as remote as Newfoundland and Louisiana. It printed articles and letters contributed by French Canadians; items from the CEU were also reprinted in French Canadian and other North American Frenchlanguage periodicals. Shelley Beal See also: Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste; Louisiana; Newfoundland; Statue of Liberty, The; World War II.
COUTURIER, MARIE-ALAIN, O. P. References Bélisle, Alexandre. Histoire de la presse francoaméricaine. Worcester, MA: Ateliers typographiques de L’Opinion publique, 1911. Habert, Jacques, and Jean-Louis Turlin. “Cinquantenaire” (fiftieth anniversary edition). France-Amérique (May 22–28, 1993). Lamonde, Yvan. “Le Bas-Canada et le Courrier des Etats-Unis de New York (1828–1840).” Cahier des Dix 56 (2002): 217–233.
COUTURIER, MARIE-ALAIN, O. P. (1897–1954) French cleric and art critic. Father Marie-Alain Couturier played a vital role in the twentieth-century transatlantic debate over the sacred in art. As coeditor of the French journal L’Art sacré, he campaigned against the massproduced, sentimental church decor known as “L’art de Saint-Sulpice.” He called on the church to enlist the talents of the greatest artists of the time, as had been done in earlier epochs. In the twentieth century, this would necessarily mean working with non-Catholics and even with nonbelievers. Born in Montrison (Loire) on November 15, 1897, Couturier moved to Paris in 1919 to study art at the Académie de La Grande Chaumière. He joined the Ateliers d’art sacré later that year, where his training focused on painting, fresco, and stained glass. A supporter of Les Camelots du roi, the youth wing of Charles Maurras’s monarchist Action française, Couturier withdrew from political activism upon choosing to become a Dominican in 1926. He would soon denounce the spirit of conformity and clericalism in the church and would even come to see the anticlerical
315
laws of the Third Republic as the guarantor of the church’s spiritual liberty. In 1940 Couturier traveled to New York to preach the Lenten season and remained in North America until 1945. He frequented other prominent exiles in New York, speaking and writing in support of the Gaullist France libre, invoking the art of the School of Paris as the symbol of the liberty that Vichy and Adolf Hitler had suppressed. He introduced Dominique and Jean de Ménil to the city’s galleries, helping them begin one of the world’s great private collections, now housed at the Ménil Museum in Houston. Couturier also lectured and taught in Montreal, where he sponsored groundbreaking exhibitions of young, antiacademic French Canadian artists favorable to nonfiguration and abstraction, which he now concluded was most suited to conveying the sacred and the spiritual in art. As a cleric who condemned the Vichy regime’s collaboration and anti-Semitic laws, Couturier also won credibility for la France libre in Quebec. Upon his return to France, Couturier assembled a group of artists, including Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipschitz, and Georges Braque, to decorate a new church on the Plateau d’Assy in the Alps. He also convinced Fernand Léger to execute a series of stained glass windows for a new workers’ church in Audincourt, helped Le Corbusier secure a commission for the Dominican convent at L’Arbresle, and served as stained glass consultant and model for Saint Dominic at Henri Matisse’s Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. Father Couturier’s writings include Art et Catholicisme (1941) (republished in 1945 with an additional “Note sur l’abstraction”); Chroniques (1947); and the posthumous compilations Art et liberté
316
CRÉOLITÉ
spirituelle (1958), Dieu et l’Art dans une vie (1965), Art sacré (1983), La Vérité blessée (1984), and Vence Chapel: The Archive of a Creation (1999), a record of Couturier’s and Henri Matisse’s conversations on art and faith. Robert Schwartzwald See also: Catholic Church; Gaulle, General Charles de; Le Corbusier; Painting; World War II. References Schwartzwald, Robert. “The ‘Civic Presence’ of Father Marie-Alain Couturier, O. P. in Québec.” Québec Studies 10 (spring–summer 1990): 133–152. Weber, Joanna M. “Marie-Alain Couturier, O. P. on Art and the Church in the Twentieth Century.” M.A. thesis, Yale University, 1989.
CRÉOLITÉ The word créolité (Creoleness) appears in writing for the first time in 1975, in the subtitle of the second edition of the magazine Mouchach, published by the Guadeloupean linguist Hector Poullet. The word was coined in reaction to comments by the secretary of state of the départements d’outre mer, territoires d’outre mer (DOM-TOM) on the Frenchness (francité ) of Creoles. The magazine, Mouchach: Bulletin de la créolité, focused on the study of Creole but did not bring a theoretical approach to the term créolité. It was only in 1989, with the publication of Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant, that the word was put in a theoretical framework. Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant define créolité as “the interactional or transnational aggregate of Caribbean, European, African, Asian, and Levantine cul-
tural elements, united on the same soil by the yoke of history” (1993, p. 87). The créolité movement is often presented as an antithesis to the négritude movement because it clearly rejects some of its key features, such as universalism and the purity of the black race, in favor of diversity and cultural hybridization. However, despite these apparent contradictions, the advocates of the créolité movement do not see négritude and créolité as opposites. They recognize that they are indebted to Aimé Césaire, father of négritude in the Caribbean, for linking the experience of the black diaspora to its African roots and enabling the black population to rediscover pride in their color and heritage. Créolité is a continuation of the quest for identity explored in both preceding literary movements in the French Caribbean, négritude and antillanité. However, it goes further than these movements by opening a wider field, focusing on the Creole population rather than the Antillean population. Créolité highlights the harmonious cohabitation of the diverse civilizations living in the Caribbean as a result of slavery, indentured servantship, exile, or migration. Writing in a créolité style implies a rewriting of the history of the Caribbean with neither a Franco-centric perspective nor one focused on Africa, but rather celebrating the diverse origins of the population and the cultural mix resulting from the cohabitation. Créolité valorizes the Creole language as a unifying force and a key element of popular identity. The advocates of the créolité movement recognize the limitation of Creole as a language for literature and therefore suggest overcoming this difficulty by creating new vocabulary through, for example, the creolization of
CRÈVECOEUR, MICHEL-GUILLAUME-JEAN
French words or French transformations of Creole. The paradox is that the recognition of this literary movement, through the awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Chamoiseau for his novel Texaco, has encouraged a proliferation of novels written in the créolité style rather than in Creole. Confiant, Bernabé, and other advocates of créolité work for the promotion of the Creole language through the publication of Creole dictionaries, stories, grammar books, and articles on Creole. Many of these are specifically designed for the teaching of the Creole CAPES (certificat d’aptitude pédagogique à l’enseignement secondaire, France’s high school teaching qualification), set up in 2001. There is still, however, an ongoing debate between some créolistes and some advocates of créolité as to the writer’s role: to use or to serve the language. Marie-Annick Gournet See also: Bernabé, Jean; Césaire, Aimé; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël; Language; Poullet, Hector. References Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant. Eloge de la Créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Condé, Maryse, and Madeleine CottenetHage. Penser la créolité. Paris: Karthala, 1995. Perret, Delphine. La Créolité: Espace de création. Martinique: Ibis Rouge, 2001.
CRÈVECOEUR, MICHELGUILLAUME-JEAN DE (1735–1813) Born in Caen, France, as “MichelGuillaume-Jean Saint-Jean,” he died in Sarcelles, near Paris, France. “Hector St. John” was his adopted pen name. At six-
DE
317
teen he migrated to England, and in 1754 he went to North America as an officer in the French army (1754–1763). After traveling extensively in the British colonies from Niagara to Florida, around 1769 Crèvecoeur settled in Orange County in New York State, on the northern side of the Hudson Highlands, where he lived with his U.S. wife, Mehetable Tippet, of Yonkers, New York. During the American Revolution, he took the Loyalist side, was arrested on suspicion of being a spy (1780), and eventually returned to France. After three years in his native Normandy, he served as French consul in New York from 1784 to 1790. There, in 1787, he established the Société Gallo-Américaine with fellow Frenchmen Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754–1793) and Nicolas Bergasse and Swiss republican Etienne Clavière (1735–1793). Crèvecoeur then returned to France for good. Crèvecoeur is best known for his writings. His most influential book was Letters from an American Farmer, which was published in London in 1782 under the name “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur.” It was followed by the three-volume Voyage dans la haute Pennsylvanie et dans l’état de New York (1801). Letters is a fictional account of life in the United States narrated through twelve letters purportedly written by James, an innocent colonial farmer, to a friend in London. A sort of philosophical novel in the accepted style of the times, Letters praises the new American man, the product of a synthesis between his many original ethnicities and his experience in a new country (Americans are “a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes” who bred “that race now called American”). American values such as
318
CRIME FICTION
industry, self-reliance, and democracy were extolled throughout the book. Rural reality, however, was honestly depicted. Crèvecoeur also contributed to several U.S. newspapers under the pen name “Agricola.” A 1925 collection, Sketches of the Eighteenth-Century America, included unpublished papers discovered in the twentieth century. Luca Codignola See also: Florida. References Alvarez Saar, Doreen. “The Heritage of American Ethnicity in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer.” A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America. Ed. Frank Shuffelton. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993: 241–256. Regis, Pamela. Describing Early America. Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992.
CRIME FICTION More than any other genre of French literature, crime fiction has been transformed by influences emanating from the United States. Moreover, in France today crime fiction is a conspicuous example of the way in which boundaries demarcating high and low cultural forms have been blurred. Contemporary novelists such as Patrick Modiano and Jean Echenoz are attracted to structural and psychological motifs associated with crime stories, but unlike their many predecessors who borrowed elements of the crime narrative with a view to parody or pastiche, this generation delivers no such value judgment. Conversely, the work of popular crime writers like Daniel Pennac and Fred Vargas has prompted serious discussion within the conservative French academy. Renewed interest has also
been shown in the canonical figures of Georges Simenon, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Frédéric Dard, whereas writers groomed in the Série Noire—France’s most illustrious stable of crime writing—are forging reputations in the wider literary world beyond the mean streets. The unrivaled position of Commissaire Maigret as France’s most successful export in the field of crime fiction is anomalous, at odds with the new identity that French crime literature has acquired over the latter half of the twentieth century. Maigret’s creator, Georges Simenon, was Belgian, a skilled writer who wrote prolifically to make money. His idle sleuth employs a simple method of detection: he waits and watches until the crime solves itself. Simenon represents France as a geographical entity. Maigret takes us to the dockers’ bars on the banks of the Seine or to the canal systems, but he mostly visits small provincial towns. This is a world of country doctors, lonely widows, traveling salesmen, the prefect and the subprefect, occasionally disturbed by other, less appealing stereotypes. History, politics, and literary ambition are by and large evacuated from the Simenon oeuvre. The evolution of a modern crime fiction in France—one in tune with the ideas, issues, and anxieties of its day—began in the United States of the 1920s with the publication of “hard-boiled” crime stories in cheap “pulp” magazines like Black Mask. Translations of the hard-boiled classics reached France in the 1930s, establishing a fertile cultural exchange that perhaps illustrated the ambivalence of a country dazzled and repulsed in equal measure by American modernity. In 1945 the former surrealist Marcel Duhamel founded the Série
CRIME FICTION
Noire (literally, “black [or dark] series”) in the basement of the Gallimard building, France’s most prestigious publishing house. It proved to be a watershed. Ostensibly set up to provide translations of U.S. and English crime literature, the Série Noire soon began to foster homegrown talent. Other successful ventures into crime publishing, such as the Fleuve noir, Rivages, and Viviane Hamy’s Chemins nocturnes, followed in its wake, but with more than 2,500 titles to its name, the Série Noire remains at the forefront of the industry. Duhamel promised sensationalism, in other words, sordid sex and graphic violence, but in 1944 Raymond Chandler had alluded to a different aesthetic when he wrote of how Dashiell Hammett “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley” (“The Simple Art of Murder”). Crime had been returned to people “who do it for a reason,” and it was this ideological impetus that helped to consolidate a distinctively “French” variant on the hard-boiled U.S. model, which became known as the roman noir. The first three French-authored novels published in the Série Noire—Terry Stewart’s La Mort et l’ange/Death and the Angel (1948) and La Belle Vie/The Beautiful Life (1950) and John Amila’s Y a pas de bon dieu!/There Is No God! (1950)—are all set in the United States, or what the authors imagined to be the United States, yet by this time Léo Malet had published 120, rue de la Gare (1943), a novel that, though its plot owes much to Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929), is clearly set in France and, what is more, in the France of the German occupation of 1940–1944. Malet is better known for his “nouveaux mystères de Paris” series of the 1950s, in which private eye Nestor Burma
319
investigates crimes perpetrated within various arrondissements or districts of the French capital. The author’s dedication to the individual qualities of each arrondissement visited in the course of the series is such that students of architecture in Paris are even now advised to read selected passages from the novels in order to enhance their appreciation of line, plane, and contour. However, Malet’s most accomplished work is his “Trilogie Noire,” published over a twenty-year period, and especially the first installment, La Vie est dégueulasse/Life Is Disgusting (1948). The story is narrated in the authentic vernacular of a young criminal, whose preoccupation with sex and death echoes the surrealist ecstasies of Malet’s pre-war poetry. Having participated in the holdup of a wages’ van and subsequent murder of a security guard, he eludes the authorities for a time until he perishes in a hail of police bullets. La Vie est dégueulasse dispenses with the baggage of the traditional detective or gangster novel. There is no investigation, no compliant moll to comfort the fugitive, and no honor among thieves; instead, we are afforded a perspective on a brief existence of rare intensity in which violence, cruelty, the exaltation of power over death, and the pain of hunger hold sway. André Héléna, a near contemporary of Malet, has been plucked from obscurity by crime-writing devotees. Héléna wrote a handful of scintillating novels that engage more directly with the historical realities of his day. They include Les Salauds ont la vie dure/Once a Bastard, Always a Bastard (1949)—the first of a planned trilogy that was never completed—and his swan song, Les Clients du Central Hôtel/The Guests at the Central Hotel (1959), both of which send his reader on a journey back in time
320
CRIME FICTION
to the années noires of Vichy France. Hélena’s skill and originality lie in his ability to put his reader in a situation that has yet to happen, to write in such a way that we willingly suspend our knowledge of the a posteriori, of the debates, controversies, and discoveries that orientate our perception of the war years. In Les Salauds ont la vie dure, our perspective is reduced to that of Maurice, a small-time crook from Montmartre, who avenges the infidelity of his girlfriend by killing her, her lover who is an officer in the Gestapo, and his driver. At no point are we given an external perspective on Maurice; rather he speaks through the narrative in the rich slang of the underworld. Whereas much occupation literature is overlaid with a retrospective discourse in which ethical choices are justified or beaten down and the Gaullist myth of a united France in silent opposition to Vichy and the German dictator is exposed, the reader of Les Salauds ont la vie dure clings to the coattails of Maurice as he tracks across the country ahead of his pursuers, improvising an existence as a professional killer en route. This is a story of reflexes and the instinct to survive in a world of food scarcities, informants, and double agents. Héléna, himself an ex-maquisard (resistance fighter), gives a vivid insight to life in occupied France that ends on a surprisingly upbeat note, as the criminal outlaw is readmitted into a community fighting for its freedom. The subtle point of this epic tale is that the extraordinary phenomenon of the German occupation of France compelled ordinary people to embrace the world of the gangster or hoodlum, a world of lies, betrayals, and summary death. Likewise, in Les Clients du Central Hôtel, the routine of life in a Perpignan
hotel shortly before and after the liberation functions as a microcosm of occupied France. The institutions that support civil society have evaporated, and bourgeois conventions have peeled away to expose a curious hedonism, as characters pursue fleeting pleasures in an all-encompassing climate of fear. The banality of hotel management contrasts with the precarious existences of the guests for whom a chance remark or encounter could spell oblivion. Les Clients du Central Hôtel brings both the instability of life in France immediately prior to the liberation and a philosophical sense of the absurd into sharp focus. The language of Héléna and Malet’s fiction, incorporating street dialect, criminal slang, and an extravagant use of metaphor, demonstrates the extent to which the French roman noir of the 1940s and 1950s broke with traditional concerns of storytelling. However, as the 1960s erupted in a frenzy of political activism, the genre was hijacked by literary pirates who used it to write stories attacking the vested interests of the ruling classes and statesponsored violence. Seldom has the gap between fiction and reality been so narrow. In 1972 a novel by Jean Amila entitled La Vierge et le taureau/The Virgin and the Bull, which was inspired by the author’s covert, solo operation to delay the testing of nuclear bombs in the Pacific, came out. Within days it had been withdrawn from sale. Two years later, following numerous death threats, Amila was beaten to within an inch of his life. He suffered a total amnesia but somehow relearned to read and write and made a triumphant comeback in 1982 with Le Boucher des hurlus/The Butcher of Les Hurlus, a novel based on his experience as the orphaned child of a World War I deserter. In the vanguard of
CRIME FICTION
the “néo-polar”—as this latest school of crime writing became known—were polemicists from both wings of the political spectrum. From the Right, in novels tinged with nostalgia for a lost rural idyll such as La Nuit des grands chiens malades/The Night of the Big Sick Dogs and Je Suis un Roman noir/I Am a Dark Novel (both published in 1971), A. D. G. attacks the decadence of modern urban life and the hypocrisy of those who would sooner blame the ills of society than the individual who commits the crime. From the Left, Jean Vautrin’s stylized portrayals of the violence, deprivation, and hopelessness of life in the outlying suburban estates surrounding France’s major cities in novels like Billy-ze-kick (1972) and A Bulletins rouges (1974) resonate thirty years later. However, the most influential figure was undoubtedly Jean-Patrick Manchette, a Communist former teacher who had strong links with the radical situationist movement. Aesthetically and politically, Manchette took his cue from Dashiell Hammett. Paul Madvig, the confident fixer in Hammett’s masterpiece, The Glass Key (1931), a story of political maneuvering in a corrupt eastern city, thinks he can force entry to the political elite by wooing the senator’s daughter, but the aristocracy slams the door in his face, and his key shatters in the lock. Money cannot buy social standing. The glass key alludes both to Madvig’s fate and to the identity of the killer. It is a solitary symbol in a fictional rhetoric that has been ruthlessly purged of unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, and metaphor. Over the course of several novels, including Nada (1972), Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest/Singing the West Coast Blues (1976), and La Position du tireur couché/ The Prone Gunman (1981), Manchette
321
fine-tuned a similarly unadorned prose style that encapsulated the alienation of the individual in the late twentieth century, enslaved by market forces and the class system. Crime writers have since continued to take up causes. The villain of Didier Daeninckx’s seminal novel, Meurtres pour mémoire/Murder in Memoriam (1984), is a dead ringer for Maurice Papon, the indicted war criminal and former budget minister during the Giscard d’Estaing presidency. In a brilliant demonstration of the way that the novel form can bring history to life, Daeninckx shows that Papon should also have been implicated for his role in the massacre of hundreds of peaceful Algerian demonstrators that took place in Paris on the night of October 17, 1961, and lasted for several days. Papon was, at the time, prefect of police in the capital. Jean-Claude Izzo wrote three elegiac romans noirs published in the latter years of the 1990s that celebrate the Mediterranean culture of Marseilles while at the same time exposing the extent to which political and business leaders in the South and beyond are in the pay of the Mafia. And, most fascinating, in 1995 Jean-Bernard Pouy instigated the “Le Poulpe (Octopus)” series, whereby different writers were invited to contribute stories starring “Le Poulpe,” otherwise known as Gabriel Lecouvreur, a freelance investigator who takes on cases suspected of having a far-right involvement. However, although contemporary French crime fiction is a significant vector of social and political anxiety, it would be wrong to characterize it as exclusively political and interventionist, just as it would be misleading to talk of it as essentially urban and macho. Some commentators argue that the influence of Hammett and
322
CRIME FICTION
more widely of a modernist American style of writing associated with William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway has been exaggerated. They point to the centrality of the narrative or plot and to the rational powers of observation and deduction embodied in the figure of the Great Detective as robust, resilient archetypes hailing from the nineteenth century. Even the term roman noir is rooted in the gothic tradition. The “Le Poulpe” series is a case in point. Not only does it confound the popular prejudice that sees crime fiction as tacky and disposable, but it also challenges the prevailing literary culture in France, which many people see as an elitist enterprise producing expensive books that are little more than exercises in introspection. Against this backcloth of perceived sterility crime fiction has flourished, with successful series for children like La Souris noire, more comic strip adaptations, and a myriad of new writing talents. The accent is on invention. Two of the most gifted novelists of the current generation are Fred Vargas and Daniel Pennac. Vargas, an archaeologist by trade, describes enigmas, strange happenings that only begin to unravel when specialist historians are called to assist the enquiry. In Pars vite et reviens tard/Have Mercy on Us All (2001), she revives the medieval tradition of la criée, when what we now think of as the petites annonces, or small ads, were recited publicly in the local marketplace. Her plots are beautifully composed, her character portraits are exquisite, and her observations, whether on the nature of public hysteria in the face of inexplicable events or on the work of human memory and the connections between images, are acute. Daniel Pennac is the most widely read contempo-
rary novelist in France. His ongoing “Malaussène” saga, which numbers six novels to date, is infused with an irrepressible exuberance. Pennac’s imagination, like that of his erstwhile friend, photographer Robert Doisneau, works in black and white. The dark side of institutional corruption, social exclusion, rampant consumerism, and a profound reflection on the ancient myth of the scapegoat is juxtaposed with a fantastic evocation of life in the Parisian suburb of Belleville, a veneration of itinerant storytellers, and the construction of an alternative society around the indomitable Malaussène family, or tribe, which is in itself an anthropological enigma. Both Vargas and Pennac have added considerably to what might be regarded as the stock features or residual elements of the modern crime story: a strong narrative, an ear for dialogue, and an eye for detail. They are original voices in their own right; what they share with other equally estimable contemporaries like Tonino Benacquista, Maurice G. Dantec, and Thierry Jonquet is an artistic freedom that they have found through bending the rules of a popular genre. David Platten See also: Film Noir; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Hemingway, Ernest; Maigret; Surrealism. References Atack, Margaret, ed. “Crime and Punishment: Narratives of Order and Disorder.” French Cultural Studies 12, no. 36 (October 2001). Deleuse, Robert. Les Maîtres du roman policier. Paris: Bordas, 1991. Lacassin, François. Mythologies du roman policier. 2 vols. Paris: UGE/10x18, 1974. Lits, Marc. Le Roman policier: Introduction à la théorie et à l’histoire d’un genre littéraire. Liège: Editions du Céfal, 1999. Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. London: Pluto Press, 1984.
CROZAT, ANTOINE Mesplède, Claude. Les Années “Série Noire.” 4 vols. Amiens: Encrage, 1997. “Le Polar: entre critique sociale et désenchantement.” Mouvements, nos. 15–16 (May–August 2001): 5–117. Pons, Jean, ed. “Roman Noir: Pas d’Orchidées pour les Temps Modernes.” Les Temps Modernes 595 (August–September– October 1997). “The Simple Art of Murder.” Atlantic Monthly (December 1944). Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
CROZAT, ANTOINE (1655–1738) French financier, born in Toulouse, who held the monopoly for trade in Louisiana from 1712 to 1717. The early years of the colony had been difficult due to the War of the Spanish Succession, which started a few years after the colony’s creation in 1699. When the armistice was signed in 1712, the Crown, almost bankrupt after half a century of wars under Louis XIV, decided to hand Louisiana over to a trading company. Since the merchants of the Atlantic ports had shown little haste in participating in such an undertaking, the minister for the navy placed his trust in Antoine Crozat, king’s counsel and secretary of finances. This son of a banker and Toulouse magistrate had married Marie-Marguerite Le Gendre d’Armeny, daughter of a rich farmer in 1690. He found himself in possession of a considerable fortune, which he had earned in financial offices and maritime operations. He was one of the shareholders of the Compagnie des Indes orientales and a
323
director of the Compagnies de Guinée, de l’Assiente et de Saint-Domingue. On September 14, 1712, patents were signed that handed the commercial monopoly in Louisiana, excluding the Illinois Country, to the company founded by Crozat for fifteen years. In exchange for its privileges, the company only had to send two ships a year to the colony, with twenty young people of both sexes on board, and twenty-five barrels of merchandise for the king’s use. The financier quickly realized that he would not be able to develop trade in Louisiana with such an unambitious migration policy. However, he considered that this was the responsibility of the monarchy, which, financially ruined, refused all his suggestions. As a result, Crozat persisted with commercial policies that were highly damaging for some colons, sending ships on an irregular basis and selling his goods at prohibitively expensive prices. Furthermore, his commercial operations were quickly limited by the sums of money he paid out in the king’s name from 1714 onward. The establishment of the regency and the navy council in 1715 did not bring any major changes to the situation. In January 1717, Crozat submitted his letter of resignation to the royal authorities. The previous year, a court that was supposed to pursue financiers who were accused of defrauding public funds had imposed a fine of 6,600,000 livres upon Crozat. He immediately decided to give up the colony and suggested to the regent that he should deduct his fine from the capital that he had frozen for the monarchy. In the end, Crozat lost nothing as a result of the Louisiana investment, thanks to his commercial profits and to the compensation paid to him by the Crown for
324
CUBAN REVOLUTION
the remaining ten years before the monopoly was due to end in 1727. The colony developed only slightly under his control. Cécile Vidal See also: Illinois Country; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase. References Giraud, Marcel. A History of French Louisiana. Volume 1, The Reign of Louis XIV (1698–1715). Trans. Joseph C. Lambert. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. ———. A History of French Louisiana. Volume 2, Years of Transition (1715–1717). Trans. Brian Pearce. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.
CUBAN REVOLUTION A philosophy of exporting revolution and a desire to counter the dominance of the United States characterized the CubanFrench relationship during an era of cold war diplomacy that was profoundly influenced by the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The initial reluctance of France to go against the U.S. policy of isolating the Cuban government in the early 1960s was short-lived, and during the cold war, France became Cuba’s most important European trading partner after Spain. In the post–cold war world the relationship has become less important for both nations, as other countries, unwilling to abide by the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba, have invested in the Cuban economy, focusing on the tourist industry. France continues to support the “constructive engagement” approach adopted by the European Union (EU), and although French interests still seek to counter U.S. hegemony, the strategy now centers on strengthening the EU rather than seeking a particular leadership role in the Third World, as was the case in
the 1960s. In addition, the myth of the Cuban Revolution was extremely influential on the French Left of the 1960s and 1970s, as encouraged by writers such as Régis Debray and publishers such as François Maspero. (As an example of the evolution of that generation, the latter’s return to Cuba is recounted in a series of articles in Le Monde in July 1999.) The bipolarity of the superpower conflict encouraged Cuban and French governments to diversify their diplomatic relations. After the humiliations of World War II, France sought to develop a leadership role in the Third World, particularly in Africa. Although a sense of nationalism and anti-imperialism characterized Cuban independence and revolutionary struggles, the need to diversify economic relations began to define Cuban foreign policy as the country shifted from overdependence on U.S. trade to overdependence on Soviet financial assistance. Following the revolution, the White House secured virtual diplomatic and economic isolation of Cuba, with most Latin American nations breaking diplomatic ties. Economic ties had also degenerated following the U.S. embargo initiated as a response to the seizure of U.S. assets by the Cuban government the previous year. The years following the revolution were characterized by the Cuban government’s support of liberation fighters across Latin America and Africa, in an attempt to avoid isolation and establish allies with which to trade in order to offset dependency on the Soviet Union, as trade with the United States, previously some 80 percent of total trade, evaporated with the embargo. Despite U.S. policy, seen by many as serving only to push the island into the Soviet sphere, many European nations con-
CUBAN REVOLUTION
tinued to trade with Cuba, helping consolidate the revolution at a critical juncture. During the period from the revolution until late 1963, however, French-Cuban relations were decidedly cool. In March 1960, French banks formed part of a European consortium withdrawing an offer of a $100 million loan to Cuba, and Charles de Gaulle’s government refused to offer credit guarantees to French firms seeking business on the island. Diplomatically, Algeria had become a particularly contentious issue, as Cuba saw the African country’s struggle for independence as a cause célèbre in the region. France, seeking to ensure the subordination of Algeria to French needs, was also desperate to make concessions to adopt a popular stance among Third World leaders. The response of the Evian Accords, granting Algerian independence in 1962, were therefore met with skepticism in Havana. France’s anti-Soviet posture during the Berlin crisis of 1961 and its instantaneous support of the United States during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 further engendered a spirit of mistrust between the countries. Seeking to position France favorably with Third World countries and the Eastern Bloc, de Gaulle began to follow a course of rapprochement with China and the Soviet Union, lending state support with credit guarantees to French exporters to Cuba, a concession not afforded to other Latin American countries. Trade with the island was further diversified as sugar imports were complemented with other agreements for plant construction, and France imported almost a third of all Cuban nickel exports by the end of the decade. Following the failure of Che Guevara’s Bolivian expedition, Cuban attention further shifted to Africa with the hope of
325
rejuvenating domestic enthusiasm for revolutionary ideals, particularly among Cuba’s Afro-Cuban community. Castro’s involvement in Africa brought Cuba into further conflict with France, which was seeking to establish a series of client states under a process of gradual decolonization. Emphasizing Afro-Cuban culture and a connection between French interventions and neocolonialism, Cuban and French African policy clashed in the Belgian Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo), Algeria, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, and GuineaBissau throughout the 1960s and 1970s. With a moderation of de Gaulle’s foreign policy by the late 1960s and Georges Pompidou’s curtailment of nickel imports in April 1972, the intensity of the FrenchCuban relationship waned. French intellectual enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution declined too, following the “Padilla affair” in 1971, when many important European writers who had previously supported the revolution wrote a letter of criticism to the Cuban government, attacking its “Stalinist” tendencies and poor human rights record. Both the Cuban government’s inward-looking obsession with producing a 10-million-ton sugar harvest by 1970 and the normalization of relations with Chile, Peru, Argentina, and the former British Caribbean states served to shift Cuban attention back toward Latin America. Although the Reagan administration sought to further restrict other nations’ economic relations with Cuba, trade with Europe increased between 1980 and 1988. France had bought some 446 million pesos of exports and was surpassed only by Spain in the European Economic Community (EEC) as an important trading partner in
326
CUISINE
the West. Seeking further sources of hard currency, Cuba expanded its tourist industry, encouraging joint ventures between the Cuban National Institute of Tourism and foreign corporations. One of the first, although ultimately unsuccessful, major contracts being discussed in 1986 was with the French Novotel chain to manage high-class Cuban hotels. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991 sent the Cuban economy into crisis because almost threequarters of Cuba’s import and export market depended on the USSR. Investment since has concentrated on joint ventures with Canadian, Mexican, Spanish, and Italian, rather than French, companies in the tourist industry, now the predominant source of hard currency for Cuba. The United States responded to Cuba’s economic crisis by further tightening the embargo, prohibiting subsidiaries of U.S. corporations in Third World countries from trading with the island. Before the French company Pernod Ricard launched the Cuban trademark rum, Havana Club, onto the international market in 1992, the dominant rum trader, Bacardi, had promoted itself as the “best Cuban rum,” capitalizing on the lack of any authentic Cuban rum being sold on the international market. Once this image was threatened, Bacardi gave financial backing to the Helms-Burton bill in 1996, which supported lawsuits against any foreign company “trafficking” in property previously owned by the United States. In addition, section 211 of the Helms-Burton bill was implemented in 1999, prohibiting the registration in the United States of trademarks that belonged to Cubans before they went into exile. Some critics have argued that this was a measure to support Bacardi in its case against Havana Club. The French
company Pernod Ricard took the U.S. ruling to block Havana Club sales to the World Trade Organization and subsequently won its case. Karen Leimdorfer and Adrian Davies See also: Argentina; Chile; Debray, Régis; Florida; Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Gaulle, General Charles de. References Chomsky, Aviva, Barry Carr, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff. The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2004. Domínguez, Jorge I. To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Erisman, Michael H. Cuba’s Foreign Relations in a Post-Soviet World. Miami: University Press of Florida, 2000. Hennessy, Alistair, and George Lambie, eds. The Fractured Blockade: West EuropeanCuban Relations during the Revolution. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1993. Verdès-Leroux, Jeannine. La Lune et le caudillo: Le rêve des intellectuels et le régime cubain (1959–1971). Paris: L’Arpenteur, 1989.
CUISINE Cuisine refers to the style or quality of cooking for human consumption. The oldest and most essential of the arts and crafts, it involves a variety of primary techniques such as the application of dry heat and immersion in or contact with heated liquids or fats. Cooking has evolved considerably over the centuries, from the use of just local ingredients to today’s globalized food distribution. In France, food and wine are still major topics of conversation, and gastronomy is seriously respected and considered an art. France has had a lasting influence
CUISINE
on the cooking and eating habits of many other countries. In fact, all over the world, French cooking and cuisine have become synonymous. France is also the only country that has an entire flock of institutes devoted to the serious study of food and wine. For example, the term cordon bleu, now associated with a cooking school in Paris, refers to members of a sixteenthcentury French social club who wore crosses hung from blue ribbons around their necks and were famous for their lavish banquets. The nineteenth century was very productive in the domain of gastronomic literature. Among the best known and most quoted is L’Art de la cuisine française au XIXème siècle/The Art of 19thCentury French Cuisine (1833) by MarieAntonin Carême. It is the first work to present culinary preparations as a system of interconnected parts that are built on fundamental principles and supports the belief that French cuisine is “universal.” Another is La Physiologie du goût/The Physiology of Taste (1825) by the world-renowned author Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin (1755– 1826), who was among the first to write seriously about eating and the art of the table. In 1955, the 200th anniversary of his birth, L’Académie de gastronomie Brillat Savarin came into being in France. The purpose of the new organization was to uphold and popularize regional cuisines, encourage gastronomic literature, and support young culinarians through contests and awards. Even though everyone eats, culinary rules and customs are an intrinsic and variable part of a society or culture. For example, some foods are appreciated in some countries and totally rejected in others: in France, horse meat, rabbits, frog legs, and many very odiferous cheeses; in China,
327
dogs and rats; and in Japan, durian, a fruit that is known to have a peculiar fecal smell. The French have taken great pride in their food, and the rest of the world has recognized French cuisine as the most refined and sought after in the world. In France the notion of terroir has to do with the land or, more specifically, the region in which certain food traditions have been established due to climate or the availability of food ingredients such as butter, olive oil, and certain fish or vegetables. Consequently, because most dishes are identified with a specific area of France, most French cookbooks are divided according to regions such as Brittany, Normandy, the Southwest, or the Southeast. Different areas yield different livestock feed, thereby giving the milk a different taste and the cheese its own personality. However, not all foods that are now accepted as indigenous had their origins in France. For example, the potato was first introduced to England from South America, where it was cultivated by the Incas. Peasant agriculture of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury France was a delicate mechanism, and years of prolific yields could be followed by a sharp drop, depending on storms and the amount of summer rain. The potato, a new plant that thrived in wet weather and was hardier than grain, presented a solution. The agronomist Oliver de Serres (1539–1619) had written about it and had given it a name, cartoufle, which became kartoffel and its variants in Russian, Polish, and many other tongues. Unfortunately, the expansion of potato cultivation was unwelcome to some. The upper-class diet revolved around meat, bread, cheese, pastries, and wine. The rich also ate salads and vegetables such as endive, carrots,
328
CUISINE
onions, roasted leeks, cabbages, and turnips. The poor enjoyed no such luxuries. Grain was their staple, and when the crop failed, they starved. So the potato was labeled peasant, undignified, insipid, starchy food. An irate man in Normandy had insisted that the tuber was dangerous because water used to make potato bread turned dark, proving that it contained putrefaction. Also, it belonged to the nightshade species, which was considered poisonous by many. The conflict was finally resolved by Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a French army officer during the French and Indian War (1756–1763), who while a prisoner in Hamburg became used to potatoes, which were part of the prison diet. After his release he brought Louis XVI round to his way of thinking. The potato finally became fashionable and part of French cuisine. To this day, dishes containing potato are styled parmentier. The practice of deep-frying strips of potato— “french fries”—probably originated in France in the eighteenth century, and they are said to have been a common street food in Paris in the 1840s, hence one of their French appellations, pommes pont neuf. Whether or not Thomas Jefferson’s French cook is the source of their spread to the United States remains open to speculation, but it is clear that, like so many aspects of daily life, their popularity at home spread with the tastes and habits acquired by U.S. soldiers in northern France in World War I. Another example of a food making a double translatlantic crossing is the tomato. Originating in Peru and domesticated in Central America, it made its way after the Spanish Conquest to Naples and then to Provence. For long largely disregarded in northern Europe, where it had a reputation for being poisonous, its spread
to northern France is said to be due to its consumption by Marseillais republican troops during the French revolutionary period; its common use in North America from the mid-nineteenth century is thus due to both French and Italian influence. In France, cuisine has been divided into two categories: on the one hand, a popular form, home cooking, linked to the soil and therefore able to exploit the products of various regions and different seasons in accordance with nature. This cuisine is based on skills that are transmitted through generations by way of imitation and habit. It is traditional and not really exportable. On the other hand, the erudite cuisine known as haute cuisine is seen as a refined art form. Haute cuisine, or “grande cuisine,” has always been the province of the well-off classes in every era. This is a cuisine of professionals that only chefs (mostly men) practice as an art based on invention and experimentation. Women have their place in the kitchen as long as they practice bourgeois or home cooking— but where the creations of grand cuisine are concerned, the French tradition agreed with Louis XIV, who liked to have women at his table but preferred men in his kitchen. However, both popular cuisine and haute cuisine are essentially regional. Geography dictates the ingredients—not least the cooking fat. For example, the Northwest uses butter and the Southwest lard, but the Southeast cooks with olive oil. Even though cuisine in France has evolved and has incorporated foreign influences such as North African couscous or Asian ingredients and techniques, there still remains a cuisine known as classical French cooking. This classical French cooking is what most “French” restaurants outside France aspire to emulate.
CUISINE
In the United States, haute cuisine embodies high cultural capital. It is chefs trained in one of France’s culinary schools who can prepare dishes of this caliber. Ingredients are sometimes shipped to the United States from France, or similar ingredients are grown locally in order to achieve a reasonable facsimile. Restaurants serving French fare in the United States also intentionally modify recipes or avoid certain foods to accommodate local tastes and customs. For example, a lot of offal is consumed in France, for example, kidneys and sweetbreads, whereas it is almost never served in the United States. Steak tartare, basically raw hamburger, is rarely or never seen on a menu in the United States. French cuisine in the United States is the province of the well-to-do or those aspiring to a higher social level, with much emphasis placed on the importance of the relationship between the food and the wine. The influence of French culinary terms and attitudes has also become more prominent recently in the U.S. restaurant industry. Many establishments are now called bistros or cafés, and the chef is revered as an artist. The words baguette, vinaigrette, and croissant have entered everyday vocabulary. In contrast, the cuisine of Quebec reflects its French heritage, in what is available both in food stores and on restaurant menus. There are a few typical Quebec dishes that have evolved as a result of the harsh climate or the available ingredients, such as poutine, a mixture of potatoes, cheese, and gravy that is also served in McDonald’s in Quebec. The traditional working-class French Canadian cuisine was characterized by heavy protein and fat-rich dishes such as bacon, baked beans, and pies (the tourtière); the extensive use of maple syrup; and to a certain extent game. How-
329
ever, in contemporary Montreal, the influence is overwhelmingly French. The table d’hôte, a fixed-price menu, is featured in many restaurants and includes three courses, as is the custom in most French restaurants in France. Montreal restaurants’ repertoire is more extensive than that of their counterparts in the United States. Pâtés, steak tartare, rabbit, and many French cheeses are readily available and consumed by the Québécois. In the early eighteenth century, the French arrived in Louisiana, bringing with them their penchant for elegant, fastidiously prepared food—a quality that survives to this day in restaurants such as Arnaud’s and Galatoire’s in New Orleans. The thickening of soups and sauces was very important to them; the rich feel of French food would not exist without great thickening techniques. Their chief method of thickening was making a roux, a combination of butter and flour that is briefly cooked before adding a liquid. But they were intrigued by the Choctaw Indian’s use of the sassafras leaf as a thickening agent, and they called the sassafras powder “filé”: they noticed filé forms long threads if cooked too long in the soup as it thickens it, so they named it for the French verb “to make threads” (filaments). A little later in the eighteenth century, slaves were brought from Africa to work on the local plantations, and with them they brought okra seeds. It was discovered that the mucilaginous nature of okra pods would also turn a thin broth into a thick one. Okra not only went into this evolving soup called gumbo but also gave it its name; the Bantu word for okra is gombo, and the Umbundu word for okra is ochinggombo. An international dish was born and christened. Traditionally, then, all gumbos
330
CUISINE
start with a roux. Louisiana roux differs from French roux in that butter is rarely used in Louisiana; they use oil instead. Where the French cook roux for about two minutes, Louisianans may cook it for half an hour. The longer it is cooked, the darker and more flavorful it becomes, but it loses some of its thickening power, leading to a somewhat thinner gumbo. Louisianans like seafood gumbos that are thinner than most gumbos. Though gumbo is named for okra, a modern gumbo does not necessarily contain it. It is not necessary to use filé, but it adds a very nice texture. If overcooked, it becomes stringy and gummy. In 1762 France gave up New Orleans and the French Caribbean islands to Spain, whereupon the Spaniards arrived in Louisiana, bringing a fourth culinary influence to the melting pot. This Spanish influence was manifest in the widespread use of rice and in the growing popularity of combining meat and fish in the same dish (as in the Spanish paella). Many of the Spanish married into Louisiana French families, and their children were known as Creoles (from a Spanish verb meaning “to create, to be born”). This is the original definition of Creole: a light-skinned person born in the New World whose recent ancestors came from Spain and France. And the Creoles of Louisiana were very strict about this definition. It became an issue because some years later French people living in Canada began migrating to Louisiana from Acadia, today’s Nova Scotia. With their French heritage and New World birth, they assumed they were Creoles. But the Creoles of Louisiana disagreed, saying, “You are from Canada and you don’t have Spanish blood. You are Acadians.” The word Acadians changed over time, and these people
began to be called Cajuns. These transplanted Canadians, denied access to Creole society, exerted the fifth culinary influence on local cuisine, a very powerful one. They took up residence in the bayous of southern Louisiana, developing a rustic cuisine based on the local fish, game, fruits, and vegetables abundant in the bayous. One more culinary element enters the picture. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, a group of Creoles left to live in the Caribbean. However, violent slave revolts forced them to leave Haiti and Martinique and return to New Orleans. Happily, they brought something back with them, the spices of the Caribbean, particularly hot red pepper. Seeds from these peppers were planted on Avery Island, Louisiana, by Thomas McIlhenny and today provide the world’s largest source of Tabasco sauce. Gumbo has become synonymous with the history of Louisiana. The spice of the Creole refugees is there, as well as the Spanish penchant for meat and fish. The Cajun predilection for shellfish is also present, as are the Choctaw, French, and African ideas about thickening. With gumbo ingredients, it is generally agreed that anything goes, as long as the thickening is done properly. French cuisine has had a lasting influence on the cooking and eating habits of the Americas, and indeed, French cuisine has become synonymous with good cooking. It has undergone many changes in the past century. Meals have become smaller and less lavish, but good eating is simply a way of life in France, as well as in French Canada. Every large city in the United States features one or several French restaurants, and many markets sell French cheeses, bread, and wines. French cuisine
CUMMINGS, E.E.
remains dynamic. It is a professional cuisine that belongs to the chefs, but also a distinctive regional cuisine associated with the French provinces. Edith Stetser and Richard Stetser See also: Acadia; Brittany; Cajuns; Catholic Church; French and Indian War; Haiti; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana; Martinique; McDonald’s; Montreal; New Orleans; Nova Scotia; Quebec; Slavery; Wine; World War I. References Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Revel, Jean-François. Culture and Cuisine. New York: Doubleday, 1982. Root, Waverly, and Richard de Rochemont. Eating in America. New York: Ecco Press, 1989. Rosengarten, David. Taste. New York: Random House, 1998. Trubek, Amy B. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. West-Sooby, John, ed. Consuming Culture: The Arts of the French Table. Newark: University of Delaware Press (Monash Romance Studies), 2004. Zuckerman, Larry. The Potato. London: Macmillan, 1998.
CUMMINGS, E.E. (1894–1962) The American Edward Estlin Cummings, better known by his legally changed and lower-cased name e.e. cummings, wrote rich, dense U.S. poetry but was too long dismissed as a sentimental traditionalist hiding behind the surface pyrotechnics of typography. While serving as volunteer ambulance drivers in World War I, he and a friend were interned in a French concentration camp for three months in 1917 for violating censorship laws in a letter they sent home. These events furnished the sub-
331
ject of The Enormous Room (1922), where Cummings’s more or less eponymous protagonist KEW-MANGZ (for so French jailers pronounced his name) recounts how he refused to respond affirmatively to the question “Do you hate the Huns?” and insisted only that “I like the French very much.” Cummings wrote his mother that his stay en prison at La Ferté Macé was the time of his life, and infinitely superior to his job at Collier’s in New York. On this first, not-so-ill-fated trip to France, Cummings learned a lifelong commitment to saving the underdog and freeing the common man. After the war and some time spent in New York, he returned to France in 1921–1923. On a spring night in Paris, in the company of fellow wartime ambulance driver John Dos Passos, Cummings was arrested again, this time only for three hours, for relieving himself in the street near the Place Saint Michel. He returned again in 1924, living in Paris intermittently throughout the 1920s and traveling abroad at least five times thereafter. In “Conflicting Aspects of Paris” and elsewhere, Cummings sang the praises of “Paname over Paree,” a popular and genuine Paris rather than the artificial destination of the tourists, again promoting life over plumbing, that is, the enduring spirit of the city instead of the modern conveniences it lacked. Cummings has been translated into over a dozen languages, from Arabic to Yiddish. In at least two he has enjoyed the special attention of devout fellow poets. Like William Faulkner and Richard Wright, Cummings won an appreciative audience in France, where fellow Harvardian D. Jon Grossman (1922–1990) would later see to his faithful transcription into
332
CYBERCULTURE
“manunkind” of Cummings’s poem “pity this busy monster” is appropriately and cleverly rendered “humanimaldade”: that is, “humanimality.” Roy Rosenstein See also: Dos Passos, John; Literary Relations; World War I. References cummings, e.e. “Conflicting Aspects of Paris.” E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revisited. New York: October House, 1965: 154–158. Friedman, Norman. e.e.cummings: The Growth of a Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1964. Rosenstein, Roy. “Letter on Cummings in Brazil.” Spring: The Journal of the e.e. cummings Society, N.S. 2 (1993): 96–97.
e.e. cummings (from a self-portrait in oils). (Library of Congress)
French. But Grossman did not confer so closely with Cummings and did not deliberately choose the difficult poems, as would Augusto de Campos, a Brazilian concretist poet who embraces formal constraints in his own poetry and in those poets whom he translates, such as the troubadour Arnaut Daniel. Genuinely remarkable is Campos’s devotion in translating those most “perilous” poems of Cummings, beginning with “l(a,” under their author’s scrutiny from 1956 until his death and ever since in his devoted translator’s own style, Campos mentis, that is, supremely attentive to the original but equally innovative, in what Campos has labeled his poetic transcreations (“transçriacões”). The result is a delicate testimonial to the international viability of Cummings’s humanitarian poetics, admirably transposed into Portuguese. The infamous
CYBERCULTURE The Internet—and the cyberculture that it generates—provoke mixed feelings in France. Fundamentally, the French state holds two interrelated views: on the one hand, the World Wide Web is seen as yet another American/Anglophone threat to French language and culture and industry and commerce; on the other hand, the benefits of electronic communication and information give rise to hope that the web may yet be an arena in which French culture can resist the Coca-Colonization of U.S.-led globalization. Another reaction of the French state to the web and cyberculture has been that of concern that its anarchic freedom fits ill with practices of regulation and control of media technologies traditional in France. On a more industrial/technical level, the irresistible rise of the Internet since the 1990s has been all the more galling to France because of the way in which it has undermined the Minitel—a successful
CYBERCULTURE
French technical and sociocultural videotext experiment launched in the early 1980s. In public policy, “what to do about the Internet” questions French traditions of dirigiste industrial policy as well as offering a technological and sociocultural opportunity to reinforce the claimed equality and meritocracy of French society through equalized access to knowledge for all. Culturally and politically, these are important issues, since the high visibility of the Internet in public opinion focuses attention on changing French practices in industry and business (privatizing France Telecom, respecting European Union rulings about competition), and the “democratic” (i.e., liberal/free-market) nature of Internet services has initially magnified existing inequalities of access to knowledge between France’s information-rich and informationpoor. The potential usefulness of the Internet in equalizing information access in France’s still highly centralized society (where cultural and educational facilities are heavily concentrated in Paris) has been seized upon by successive governments anxious to include cyberculture in the Republican toolbox for maintaining liberty, equality, and fraternity. France has been conscious of its backwardness in computer technology since the 1950s and 1960s. In 1967, a major element of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s seminal analysis of the défi américain (“American challenge”) was the way in which he saw U.S. computer hardware and software and the social and commercial use of computing changing the nature of U.S. society and business and leaving France behind. French thinking on the links between computing, culture, and society was further spurred by Simon Nora and Alain Minc’s famous report, The Computerization of Society, which emphasized
333
the fundamental changes that would be wrought by the information age and how countries that did not master new technologies and practices would suffer. France got its first taste of cyberculture in the 1980s with the Minitel. These terminals give French homes and businesses access to France’s videotext network. Since 1980, when it was introduced experimentally in Saint-Malo, the Minitel has grown steadily in both popularity and use and now connects 20 million users with approximately 25,000 online services of all kinds. Minitel/Teletel has been a major element in modernizing the French public’s attitudes toward telecommunications and information technologies. During the 1980s the Minitel was a symbol of France’s industrial and social vision, demonstrating national ability in the techniques necessary for a wired society and familiarizing sometimes reluctant users with machines more complicated than the telephone for communication and transactions. The most famous Minitel service is the “electronic phone book,” first introduced in 1985. But the extent of the other 25,000 services is enormous, ranging from weather information and train timetables, through distance banking and mail order, to the sending of telexes and exchanging of messages (some pornographic or erotic, as in the “Minitel rose”). After a decade of use, the Minitel sector was deemed to have reached maturity at a level of 1.5 billion connections and 100 million hours of communication. During the 1990s the Minitel industry’s turnover continued to grow, and although the total number of calls also continued to rise, faster data transfer and the familiarity of users with the technology led to shorter connections and a slowdown in sector growth. Between a quarter and a
334
CYBERCULTURE
third of French households regularly consult Minitel services, representing a remarkable national cultural practice of some 14 million individual users, but beginning in the mid-1990s, Minitel faced competition from newer, faster systems, typified by the Internet. Although Minitel was symbolic of France’s technological expertise and social modernity in the 1980s, this national experiment in videotext culture may soon become a symbol of France’s declining independence vis-à-vis U.S. colonialism, technologically and culturally. Minitel is an intensely French technology—attempts to export the concept abroad have met with little success—and its replacement with U.S. cybertechnologies, together with the perceived redoubled onslaught of the English language via the Internet, undermines both France’s technological base and its cultural homogeneity. As the use of the Internet gradually increased in France during the late 1990s, software enabling personal computers to emulate the Minitel became available in a neat example of how the videotext experiment had both established a useful familiarity with new communication/information technologies and at the same time constituted a brake on the French public’s espousal of the web. France’s reluctance to abandon Minitel has been a clear example of a persistent mistrust of what is often referred to as the réseau américain (“American network”). Only in 1996 did France Telecom finally resolve to enter the Internet market as a provider of services, thus establishing a positive strategy toward the Internet. For many French commentators on cyberculture, the web (like film in the 1950s or Disneyland Paris in the 1990s) is considered to be a Trojan horse of American
cultural imperialism, whose direct appeal to individuals via uncontrolled and unregulated channels (unlike the state-led Minitel) dupes French citizens into capitulation to the hegemony of “Anglo-Saxon” language and culture. Unlike in cinema, television, and radio, where the French state has erected defenses against Hollywood films and English-language pop songs, no quotas exist to stem the tide of U.S. influence. Jean Baudrillard has suggested that Disneyland Paris is an example of France “dreaming herself American,” and if that is indeed the case, how will a France where homes and families are wired to U.S. and worldwide English-language websites protect its cultural and linguistic sovereignty? At the height of mid-1990s debates on how France should respond to the “American challenge” of the web, in 1996 the French minister of culture Jacques Toubon called for firm action by the state: the defense of France’s “exception” would rely first on protecting French culture (because culture would guarantee the survival of the French language) and second on legal and regulatory controls limiting the pernicious effects of free-enterprise new technologies. Telematics, the Internet, and the move toward multimedia superhighway services pose challenges to French culture and society at the domestic level, as well as potentially threatening the place of French culture and language in the world. The French state hopes to use the new technologies to defend traditional Republican principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity (in contradistinction to “Anglo-Saxon” “freemarket” democracy) for the ordering of society. The modernization of telecommunications has been used in the past as a means of modernizing French society (the telephone system, cable), and a major at-
CYBERCULTURE
traction of cyberculture for the French state is its potential contribution to a more harmonious France through improved access to knowledge for all. As well as this “civic” function, many analysts see cybertechnologies and cyberculture/practices as instruments of empowerment and self-expression representative of a postindustrial, postmodern age in which liberty and equality are synonymous with access to information and in which fraternity is fostered by empowering citizens to both express their differences and tolerate differences in others. “Universal access”—guaranteed by state regulation of information superhighways—to the new technologies is seen as the solution to France’s considerable current concern over la fracture sociale between the “haves” and “have-nots” of French society. “Equality of access” to knowledge, culture, and education brings its own benefits in France’s theoretically highly meritocratic system of schooling, and the “quality of life” is to be improved by new work patterns allowing more efficient and flexible employment distribution across the country. Equal chances for all in the best traditions of the Republican state will thus be guaranteed by the new technologies. A new freedom of access to information will therefore come to the rescue of the old value of equality, increasingly considered threatened by the dysfunctionings of the modern economy. The new media technologies bring with them, of course, precisely the risk of creating a dual society of the information-rich and the informationpoor, both in terms of areas devoid of culture and in terms of inequalities of social class, level of income, and education. France’s traditional suspicion of the culturally hegemonic tendencies of U.S. industry and finance and French sensitivity
335
to the linguistic encroachment of English coalesce in the country’s reaction to the Internet and the information superhighway. The Internet is prompting France to develop its own approaches to providing and regulating services, but it is unfortunate for France that such a challenge to its remaining “exceptionalism” is occurring in a political and economic context unfavorable to France’s usual mechanisms of defense—the nationally led technological grand programme and European Union strictures on the provision of services. The current international triumph of economic liberalism and France’s leading role in the drive to European union are leaving the French state bereft of its traditional weapons of economic, technological, and cultural nationalism. However, as with many issues in France, the question of “rights” is fundamental in the technical and cultural evolution of the Internet. Thus the “freedom,” “individualism,” and “anarchy” of the Internet perhaps pose more problems for France than for other societies less prone to obsessive constitutional definition of liberties and rights and to the complex legal regulation of audiovisual activities. The intensity of debate over the claimed “legal vacuum” in which the Internet has developed in France has revealed the state’s anxiety over the autonomy of electronic information, echoing both traditional fears of U.S. cultural/linguistic imperialism and the disquiet of regulators at the anarchic proliferation of websites and services. While asserting the importance of solidarity, equality, and fraternity, France simultaneously defends the individual’s right to privacy in domestic life and the duty of the state to regulate activities in the best interests of society. The French Internet is indeed fast becoming a symbolic medium
336
CYRANO
DE
BERGERAC
and cultural resource, providing a means of resistance to U.S. influences and a means of combating communication problems in French society itself, but cyberculture and its organization are particularly problematic for the French state. Hugh Dauncey See also: Baudrillard, Jean; Computer Technology; Disneyland Paris; ServanSchreiber, Jean-Jacques; Television. References Breton, Thierry. Les Téléservices en France: Quels marchés pour les autoroutes de l’information? Paris: La Documentation française, 1994. Jacobs, Gabriel. “Cyberculture.” French Popular Culture: An Introduction. Ed. Hugh Dauncey. London: Arnold, 2003: 77–89. Nora, Simon, and Alain Minc. The Computerization of Society: A Report to the President of France. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980.
CYRANO
DE BERGERAC French theatrical character and French historical personage, born on March 6, 1619, and died on July 28, 1655, in Paris. Despite the fact that he was a real person, a French satirist and dramatist who inspired a number of later writers, his name is mostly known as the fictional hero from Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). However, the unfortunate romantic lover from Rostand’s play, who became one of the most popular characters of French theater and a world symbol of generosity and beauty of soul, has little to do with the real Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac. The cause of Cyrano’s real death was a banal accident: a piece of plank dropped on his head. This event was fictionalized in Rostand’s play into assassination by his enemies. The real Cyrano enlisted in the army but had problems with discipline: a
bohemian and duelist, he gave up his military career. He went to study under the philosopher and mathematician Pierre Gassendi, whose scientific theories and liberal philosophies influenced Bergerac’s own writing. His two best-known works, Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Solar World, 1754), reflect Gassendi’s teachings. Cyrano’s writing did popularize new scientific theories; however, his principal aim was not to be scientific but to ridicule authority, particularly religious authority. Although his works point to new theories (he “predicted” the atomic structure of matter), they are rather a reflection of poetic imagination. His approach also mocks René Descartes’s ideas, pointing to relativity and abstract concepts of what constitutes being and thinking. For example, in Cyrano’s book A Voyage to the Moon, in order to get to the moon, the main character travels in a body machine ornamented with firecrackers and ends up in Canada. The dissemination of “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the Americas occurred through the film versions. The charismatic character of the fictional Cyrano appeals to American popular culture mainly because of his selflessness, his ugly appearance yet poetic nature, and his honesty and richness of soul. Rostand’s play first became influential through Italian filmmaker Augusto Genina’s adaptation of it for silent film in 1925. Until then, Rostand’s play was virtually unseen in the United States. The film features magnificent acting from Pierre Magnier as Cyrano. As a European film full of rich emotions and visual extravagance, it rivals the best of U.S. silent films. Three years (starting in 1922) were devoted to the
CYRANO
hand coloring by the Pathe Stencil Color process. The play thrived as a theater piece regularly performed in American repertoire. After World War II, the actor José Ferrer in the title role of Cyrano greatly popularized the play in the United States. After a successful Broadway production, for which Ferrer won a Tony Award, United Artists purchased the rights to the film and recast Ferrer as Cyrano (Michael Gordon, 1950). He won an Oscar and Golden Globe Award for this role. Ferrer also appeared on television as Cyrano, adding to the mass media popularity of this text. However, most people today know Rostand’s play through Steve Martin’s 1987 contemporary
DE
BERGERAC
337
comedy version Roxanne (Schepisi) and through Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s 1990 version with Gérard Depardieu in the title role. Aleksandar Dundjerovic See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Depardieu, Gérard; Theater. References Brockett, Oscar G. Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theater and Drama since 1870. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973. Fort, Alice, and Herbert S. Kates. “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Minute History of the Drama. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935. Freeman, Edward. Rostand: “Cyrano De Bergerac” (Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature). Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995.
D DAGUERRE, LOUIS JACQUES MANDÉ (1787–1851) Artist, proprietor of the Diorama, and inventor of the daguerreotype. Born at Cormeilles-en-Parisis to Louis Jacques Daguerre and his wife, Anne Antoinette (née Hauterre), Daguerre was raised after 1791 at Orléans. He was apprenticed at age thirteen to an architect, and later accepted as a pupil of Ignace Eugène Marie Degotti, scene painter to the Paris Opera, where he exhibited an aptitude for the creation of realistic illusions. In 1807, he began working for Pierre Prévost, the French patent holder of the process, in the production of large panorama paintings. These highly realistic depictions of cities and scenes of historic importance were displayed in rotundas carefully lit from above to enhance the illusion of reality. They appear to have been the basis from which Daguerre and Charles Marie Bouton, another of Prévost’s assistants, launched their own business venture by creating the Diorama. Combining the scale of the panorama with technical details of the diapanorama, the Diorama offered a new and popular form of public entertainment that bore a striking resemblance to modern cinema.
Daguerre and Bouton opened the Diorama in 1822 on the rue de Marais in Paris, earning themselves instant celebrity for the lifelike paintings that appeared to change and move as carefully controlled lighting was applied to translucent canvas. Just two years later, Daguerre began his experiments on the chemical fixation of images in a laboratory on the top floor of the Diorama building. He was unsuccessful in his early work, but his experiments led him to contact Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, with whom he formed a partnership in 1829. Together, until Niépce’s untimely death in 1833, they invented the chemical and technical foundations for the process that would become the daguerreotype, a negative rendered on a polished silver plate, viewed as a positive when reflected against a dark cloth. The January 7, 1839, announcement signaling the beginning of public awareness of the daguerreotype was nowhere received more enthusiastically than in the United States. Excited by imagination and Samuel Morse’s firsthand account of the beautiful images, an account printed April 20, 1839, in the New York Observer, the U.S. scientific and artistic communities anxiously awaited the revelation of
339
340
DALIO, MARCEL
DALIO, MARCEL (ISRAEL MOSHE BLAUSCHILD) (1899–1983)
Daquerre. From a daguerreotype taken at his château, Brie-Sur-Marne, France, 1848. By Meade & Brother, Albany, New York. (Library of Congress)
Daguerre’s working process, in August of the same year, and quickly imported daguerreotype cameras and manuals, adopting the French invention as an art all their own. The art of daguerreotype, both in portraiture and landscape, flourished in the United States and France for twenty years, until it was gradually replaced by less expensive and faster methods of photography. Kelley Wilder
See also: Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore; Photography. References Gernsheim, Helmut, and Alison Gernsheim. LJM Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype. London: Secker and Warburg, 1956. Rinhart, Floyd, and Marion Rinhart. The American Daguerreotype. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981.
Highly prolific French character actor, whose transatlantic career of some 150 films spanned almost fifty years. Despite an unpromising background, starting his life in the Jewish ghetto around the rue des Rosiers in Paris, Dalio reinvented himself as an actor and started in films in the early 1930s. The depth and range of his acting won him the respect of the film profession, and he worked with the greatest directors of the period, such as Robert Bresson (Les Affaires publiques/ Public Affairs, 1934), Julien Duvivier (Le Golem/The Golem, 1936; Pépé le Moko, 1937), Jean Renoir (La Grande Illusion/ Grand Illusion, 1937; La Règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game], 1939), Pierre Chenal, Abel Gance, Robert Siodmak, and Marc Allégret. The actor thus enjoyed a flourishing career up to the time when the right-wing press targeted him viciously, publishing his picture as an example of the “typical Jew.” Although well respected by his peers, Dalio’s small stature and strong Semitic looks had often relegated him to roles of villains and cowards or seedy, louche characters, often Jewish. The first release of La Règle du jeu in 1939 was notoriously panned by audiences and most critics, and Dalio’s portrayal of the Duc De La Chesnaye became an excuse for the press to unleash all their antiSemitic venom. The forty-one-year-old actor was forced into exile with his wife, the actress Madeleine Lebeau, and sought refuge in Hollywood. After a long, difficult journey through Portugal, Mexico, and Canada, Dalio arrived in Hollywood in 1940, and with some help from the émigré and exile
DAMAS, LÉON-GONTRAN
colony, above all the actor Charles Boyer, he eventually landed a contract with Twentieth Century Fox. Dalio was not exactly stranded in the States, however, since many of the film artists he had worked with in France before the war were also in exile in Hollywood (Jean Gabin, Jean Renoir, Duvivier, René Clair, Michèle Morgan, and Jean-Pierre Aumont, to take the most famous). The exile community was very close-knit, and many worked together while in Hollywood. Indeed most of the films directed by French war exiles include a numerous French cast and crew, and Dalio was in Duvivier’s Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Flesh and Fantasy (1943), both also featuring Boyer. This was also true of war propaganda films directed by U.S. citizens or exiles from other countries. Fox did not really know how to employ the actor, who was typically given minor supporting roles as a token Frenchman. Often uncredited for his parts, Dalio was nevertheless cast in many Hollywood classics, such as Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941), starring Gene Tierney and Victor Mature, Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), alongside Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, and Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944) with Bogart and Lauren Bacall. After the war, Dalio went on to lead a transatlantic career, providing memorable supporting roles in both French and U.S. films (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, King, 1952; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hawks, 1953; Sabrina, Wilder, 1954; Razzia sur la Chnouf [Razzia], Decoin, 1955; Tendre Voyou [Tender Scoundrel], Becker, 1966; Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob [The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob], Oury, 1973; L’Aile ou la Cuisse [Wing or Thigh], Zidi, 1976). Catherine Hellegouarc’h
341
See also: Boyer, Charles; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Clair, René; Darrieux, Danielle; Duvivier, Julien; Florey, Robert; Hollywood’s French Caribbean; Hollywood’s Paris; Jourdan, Louis; Morgan, Michèle; Renoir, Jean; Simon, Simone; World War II. Reference Dalio, Marcel. Mes années folles. Paris: Lattès, 1976.
DAMAS, LÉON-GONTRAN (1912–1978) Although of mixed race, Damas was one of the founding members, with Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, of the négritude movement in the 1930s. He was born in Cayenne (French Guiana) and educated at the Lycée Victor Schoelcher in Fort-de-France (Martinique) and the Collège de Meaux in France. He moved to Paris in 1929 and enrolled briefly at the Ecole des Langues Orientales, in addition to attending classes in law and literature. His subsequent studies at the Institut d’Ethnologie de Paris were more fruitful. He worked successively for the La Revue du monde noir (The Review of the Black World), Légitime Défense, and L’Etudiant noir (The Black Student), little reviews brought out by African and Caribbean students. He was first and foremost a poet and was described by Aimé Césaire as the first modern negro poet in the francophone world. He was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, especially Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Claude McKay. His first collection, Pigments (1937), was a trenchant, racy, anticlerical, and anticolonial cry of revolt. Although Damas abandoned traditional French prosody, with its focus on syllable counting, these poems
342
DANCE
have a strong rhythm and often feature a wry, self-deprecating humor. The short texts of Graffiti (1952) are marked by a very personal angst and the theme of lost love (for an unnamed beautiful coquette); they come across as sad, sincere, and spontaneous. Damas himself regarded BlackLabel (1956) as his best poetry: its four cantos renew the theme of revolt, but they are also lyrical songs of exile, suffused with love. Somewhat reminiscent of Césaire’s poetry, Black-Label relies heavily on anaphora and alliteration; more importantly it paints a very positive picture of “les Nègres.” His first important prose writing was Retour de Guyane (“Return from Guiana,” 1938), a virulent ethnological report on colonial rule, which criticizes the Eurocentric educational system, corrects the metropolitan view of French Guiana as a penal colony, and highlights its enormous agricultural and industrial potential. Veillées noires (1943) is a collection of Guianese folktales, transcribed from Creole: Damas’s antiassimilation message continues in these fables peopled by animals, humans, and supernatural beings. He was involved in the Resistance during World War II and represented Guiana in the National Assembly from 1948 to 1951, even though he had originally opposed its elevation to departmental status. He held various international cultural positions, traveled widely, not just in Africa and South America, and gave numerous lectures, especially on topics relating to négritude. In his later years he carved out a distinguished academic career, holding teaching posts at Federal City College and Howard University. His circle of friends included Louis Armstrong, the African American diplomat and educator Mercer
Cook, the French writers Robert Desnos and Michel Leiris, the Senegalese editors Christiane and Alioune Diop, the Belgian poet and jazz writer Robert Goffin, and many African statesmen and diplomats. Keith Aspley See also: Césaire, Aimé; Guiana; Leiris, Michel; Martinique; McKay, Claude; Revue du monde noir, La; World War II. References Kesteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1991. Racine, Daniel. Léon-Gontran Damas: l’homme et l’œuvre. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983.
DANCE France was the birthplace of ballet, as well as many of the court and social dances that pervaded Europe from medieval times. Ballet was a theatricalization of such dances, while the dances themselves survived in the fledgling United States in variants from the genteel cotillion to the more boisterous square dance. In the twentieth century, France also became an important crossroads for the dissemination of dance, primarily in hosting Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets russes (1909–1929), but it was also the gateway for the importation of popular Latin American dances like the habanera, the tango, and the maxixe. Because of the primacy of classical ballet, modern dance was relatively slow to catch on in France, but by the end of the twentieth century, France was home to a number of leading companies representing the full range of theatrical dance.
Social Dance The genesis of all dance is in social dancing. Circle and line dances frequently form
DANCE
part of rituals, particularly those surrounding fertility—planting, harvest, or wedding celebrations. Village dances were gradually “refined” into court dances, often retaining in their names their regional distinctions (pavane [Paduana], allemande [German dance], even later the habanera [Havana dance]). As court dances became more intricate, the emphasis moved from participation to spectatorship; dance was institutionalized first in France when Louis XIV founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661. Meanwhile, social dances emigrated across the channel—French dancing masters were very popular for those English who could afford them—and then across the Atlantic. Understandably, given the puritan foundations of the northern colonies, the dances flourished most prosperously in the South. The landed gentry participated in cotillions—originally a sort of complicated social dance, similar to a quadrille, the word later came to mean a formal dance party, dense with social ritual; this lasted well into the twentieth century as occasions at which young ladies of certain status made their debuts and were courted by prospective husbands. At the opposite end of the class spectrum—though serving almost identical social purposes—was the square dance (an almost literal translation of quadrille) in which four couples form a square and perform complex maneuvers prompted by a “caller.” A number of French terms have been retained: promenade, allemande, do-si-do (dos à dos, “back to back”), and sashay (chassez). As a colonial power, France became a portal into Europe for a number of popular dances from the Americas. One of the earliest, and most important, was the nineteenth-century habanera, with its distinctive 3+3+2 rhythm. The habanera was
343
immortalized in Bizet’s tremendously popular opera Carmen, but it was also disseminated to South America, contributing to the development of the tango. Through trade connections with Argentina, the tango and its sister the maxixe were reimported to France in the first decade of the twentieth century. France also became a refuge for a number of African American musicians and dancers in the 1920s.
Theatrical Dance After the founding of the Académie Royale de Danse (1661), noted opera composer Jean-Baptiste Lully created the Académie Royale de Musique in 1672, with Pierre Beauchamp as ballet master. Over the next century, ballet became a far more integral part of French opera than its Italian counterpart. Although based in social dance, the technique of professional dancers soon outstripped amateur abilities. Several forms of dance notation suggest that the patterns traced on the floor were still more important than the ornamental steps, although leaps, hops, pirouettes, and beats entered the language. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810) advocated the integration of dance with drama; working from his principles, Beethoven wrote his only ballet, Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (“The Creatures of Prometheus,” 1801). By this time, dance had begun separating itself from opera. Ballet reached its peak in France during the romantic period; the earliest preserved full-length ballets date from the first half of the nineteenth century, centering in Paris even though most of the famous dancers were foreign, with the female dancer assuming greatest prominence during this period. Marie Taglioni introduced pointe shoes, and her ethereal movement
344
DANCE
enhanced her performance as the leader of the ghostly nuns in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (“Robert the Devil,” 1831). The chorus of female dancers on pointe in the long, bell-shaped romantic tutu was the genesis of the “white ballet,” purely choreographic interludes in narrative ballets, usually representing supernatural spirits or nonhuman “characters.” Similar choruses appeared in La Sylphide (Auguste Bournonville’s 1836 choreography was not the first, but the oldest surviving example) and Giselle (Jules Perrot-Jean Coralli, 1841), one of the staples of the ballet repertoire. Choreographers trained in France disseminated the burgeoning style to Denmark (Bournonville) and Russia, where the close cultural connections with France led a number of dancers and choreographers to tour. As romantic ballet declined during the latter part of the century, French ballet master Marius Petipa almost single-handedly created classical ballet in Saint Petersburg. His ballets include Tchaikovsky’s three “great” ballets, Swan Lake (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and The Nutcracker (1892), as well as Don Quixote (1869) and La Bayadère (1877); Petipa’s original choreography has degenerated through oral transmission, but his clear-cut movement style and act structure was a dominating influence. Ballet was reimported to Paris by Russian impresario Sergey Diaghilev with his Ballets russes, offering seasons in Paris from 1909 to 1929, the year of Diaghilev’s death. The Ballets russes was undoubtedly the most important dance troupe of the twentieth century, perhaps ever; its impact spread far beyond the world of dance. Fashion, music, and even cinema (particularly the Hollywood musical of such directors as Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly)
Diaghilev’s Ballets russes—exhibition organized by Serge Lifar. Poster by Jean Cocteau, 1939. (Library of Congress)
owe a tremendous debt to the aesthetic of the troupe, which was deeply collaborative—the best artists (Pablo Picasso, Léon Bakst, Jean Cocteau), composers (Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Francis Poulenc), and choreographers (Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine) worked together on ballets that tended to be short and “high concept.” Early on, the Ballets russes was renowned for the exotic (Polovtsian Dances, Cléopâtre, The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, Le Dieu
DANGEROUS LIAISONS
bleu [The Blue God]); it passed through cubism (Parade, Pulcinella), constructivism (Pas d’acier, Le Chat [The Cat]), and Chanel chic (Les Biches, Les Matelots [The Sailors]), and was entering a neoclassical phase with its last ballet master, the young George Balanchine, and his earliest surviving works The Prodigal Son and Apollo. Balanchine emigrated to the United States in 1933 and, building on Petipa and Diaghilev, revolutionized twentieth-century ballet, particularly with his development of the swift, athletic, plotless U.S. style. Other Ballets russes alumni and alumnae spread ballet over most of the Western Hemisphere. The 1920s also saw a flourishing of other dance in France, with the Ballets Russes–inspired Ballet Suédois, which staged Darius Milhaud’s La Création du monde (The Creation of the World, 1923) and Le Bœuf sur le toit (The Cow on the Roof, 1919), as well as a little-known ballet (Within the Quota, 1923) by Cole Porter; meanwhile at the Folies Bergère, African American dancer Josephine Baker was a huge sensation with her eccentric, highly sexual “primitive” dances. After World War II, Diaghilev’s protégé Serge Lifar led the Paris Opéra-Ballet, though its preeminence was eclipsed by Roland Petit’s company in Marseilles; his ballerinas “Zizi” Jeanmaire and Leslie Caron both starred in Hollywood musicals. Modern dance influenced choreographers like Maurice Béjart and Maguy Marin. In the 1980s, Rudolf Nureyev revived the Paris Opéra-Ballet and mentored one of the most celebrated dancers of the late twentieth century, Sylvie Guillem. Their production of Prokofiev’s Cinderella (1986) was a fitting culmination of the century’s tripartite dance trade between Russia, America, and France: Guillem was
345
the ingenue, plucked from obscurity by a Groucho Marx look-alike studio head (Nureyev); she met her leading man on a set resembling the back lot from Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952), populated by King Kong and a giant statue of Betty Grable. Robynn Stilwell See also: Argentina; Baker, Josephine; Carmen; Caron, Leslie; Cocteau, Jean; Fashion; Jazz; Jeanmaire, Zizi; Kelly, Gene; Music (Classical); Porter, Cole. References Garafola, Lynn, and Nancy Van Norman Baer, eds. The Ballets Russes and Its World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Harris-Warrick, Rebecca, Noël Goodwin, and John Percival. “Ballet.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online. Ed. L. Macy. http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed August 15, 2003). Kirstein, Lincoln. Dance: A Short History of Theatrical Dancing. New York: Putnam’s, 1935. Sadie, Stanley, and John Tyrrell, eds. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. London: Grove Dictionaries, 2001. Wiley, Roland John. Tchaikovsky’s Ballets. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.
DANGEROUS LIAISONS Written by Choderlos de Laclos in 1782, the French epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses has emerged as one of the most analyzed works of its time and has in recent years given rise to several cinematic adaptations. The story of the sadistic sexual and psychological manipulations of two perverse French aristocrats and ex-lovers, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, has been reconfigured in highly different screen versions, each of which has injected into the original ancien régime setting certain Americanized elements, the end
346
DANTICAT, EDWIDGE
result being a string of films that defy categorization as purely French or purely American cultural artifacts, but instead combine the two influences in varying proportions. Roger Vadim’s 1959 version, Les Liaisons dangereuses, starring Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philippe, is a French production with French actors, but its temporal transposition of the eighteenth century intrigue to 1950s Paris results, bizarrely, in an intensely transatlantic text. The American jazz soundtrack and the numerous ornamental black American musicians the film relies on to convey the “decadence” of this postwar French existentialist milieu evokes a modern France soaked in American culture. Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (based on Christopher Hampton’s 1985 theatrical adaptation of Laclos’s novel), made in 1988 and starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, is the most famous of the various film versions, and it combines Paris and Hollywood in quite a different manner. Retaining Laclos’s pre-revolutionary French setting (the film was shot largely in and around the châteaux of Champs-surMarne), Frears presents Hollywood stars (including Michelle Pfeiffer, Uma Thurman, and Keanu Reeves) who perform comfortably in modern American accents despite inhabiting the garb of French nobles, actors happy to exploit their established screen images in the service of giving certain twentieth-century dimensions to the aristocratic protagonists. Milos Forman’s less successful 1989 Valmont, with Annette Bening and Colin Firth, follows the same formula—English-speaking stars performing within the original French historical setting—but is an altogether less grandiose affair, its lesser-known stars failing to imbue the Marquise and the Vi-
comte with the quasi-royal arrogance of the earlier film’s Hollywood elite cast. The most thoroughly Americanized of the screen versions of Les Liaisons dangereuses is also by far the most removed from the source novel: Cruel Intentions (Kumble, 1999) changes setting, actors, and characters from 1780s France to 1990s United States. Retaining Laclos’s plot structure, the film settles, however, for a New York high school backdrop against which to paint the puzzlingly jaded teen passions now at stake. The latest adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses continues to mix French and Anglo-American elements: starring Catherine Deneuve and Rupert Everett, Josée Dayan’s Quebec-produced 2002 version is a television vehicle, screened both in Canada and on France’s main channel TF1. Andrew Asibong See also: Deneuve, Catherine; Hollywood’s Paris; Jazz; Remakes; Vadim, Roger. References Humbert, Brigitte E. De la lettre à l’écran: Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000. Marvier, Marie. “Les Adaptations dangereuses.” Synopsis, no. 25 (May/June 2003): 42–45.
DANTICAT, EDWIDGE (1967–) Haitian-born novelist Edwidge Danticat grew up in Brooklyn and writes in English. As a young short story writer emerging from American university writers’ workshops, she met with immediate success, to the extent that she was labeled a younger version of the greatest living African American author, Toni Morrison. Her works were almost simultaneously translated into
DANTICAT, EDWIDGE
French, and the success of her short stories and two novels has been such that no one, not even francophiles themselves, can refuse her affiliation to la francophonie (the French-speaking world). Between two cultures, between contemporary American life and the past of Haiti, between English and either the French or the Creole of her mother and aunts, between the rich and dominant superpower and the poorer island, which has been mistreated for more than two centuries by colonialists and dictators, Danticat combines magic realism and a poetic form of journalism, history (the historical novel) and memory (The Farming of Bones, 1998), travel writing (After the Dance, A Walk through Jacmel, Haiti, 2002), and the short story (Krik? Krak! 1995). The lineage of commères (“godmothers,” literally, “co-mothers,” like Spanish compadre and commadre; it also means “gossips”), daughters and mothers, aunts and neighbors, often women mistreated and viewed as witches, irrational, even mad, is central to her work. Danticat draws ample inspiration from cosmology and Vodun symbolism, and accords great importance to the mother-daughter dyad, to divisions between rural and urban living, and to problems of communication and understanding between first-, second-, and third-generation exiles. Filled with marassa (the Vodun term for “twins”) symbolism, her work illustrates the numerous dualities inherent in the postcolonial condition: a device that is at once thematic (mother and daughter are “twins”), stylistic (Creole and French are the two sides of one language), and structural (a story entitled “New York Day Woman” makes a pair with one entitled “New York Night Woman”). Her orig-
347
inal writing combines tradition and modernity, Creole folklore, and the myths of New York (post-)modernity. Taboo subjects such as the boat people (“Children of the Sea,” in Krik? Krak! ), AIDS, and an examination of virginity in a rural setting where matri-focality goes hand in hand with feminine authority (Breath, Eyes, Memory, 1994) prove her engagement with generations of Haitian émigrés and the people of Haiti who struggle for a better life, in dignity and freedom. Unlike a number of Haitian-Québécois authors, Danticat has fully reterritorialized herself in North American society. Belonging to the post-Duvalierist generation, she suffers less from nostalgia for the lost country, while sharing the pain and heartbreak of the first and second generations. The desire to return home has ceded its place to the urgency to begin a new life on the other shore, to the insertion into a new universe. As editor, Danticat has brought together testimonies on the Haitian diaspora in The Butterfly’s Way (2001) and The Magic Orange Tree (and Other Haitian Folktales) (1997). In her most recent novel, The Dew Breaker (2004), the stories are linked by the fact that all of the characters involved know one former Haitian torturer who has moved to New York and started a new life with his wife and daughter, and has carefully tried to erase his past. When he is finally unmasked, he is rejected and unforgiven by his daughter, who narrates the opening story. In this novel, Danticat returns to the theme of memory and the dilemma of trying to forget or forgive in a republic where blood is still visible on the hands of many former servants of its “présidents à vie” (presidents for life). Kathleen Gyssels
348
DARÍO, RUBÉN See also: Francophonie, La; Haiti; Language; Vodun. References Gyssels, Kathleen. “Une littérature haïtienne doublement exilée: Krik? Krak! d’Edwidge Danticat.” Ruptures. La Revue des 3 Amériques. 13 (October 1997/March 1998): 195–202. Gyssels, Kathleen. “Haitians in the City: Two Modern Day Trickster Stories.” JOUBERT. Journal for Postcolonial Studies 7, no. 1 (autumn 2002).
DARÍO, RUBÉN (1867–1916) Rubén Darío remains Latin America’s most beloved, influential, and studied poet. He gave modernismo its name in 1888, though he had not initiated the movement. After Darío met the great Cuban poet and statesman, José Martí, in New York in 1893, Darío became standard-bearer of the school and the first world-class Latin American poet. A mestizo of African, Indian, and Spanish blood, Darío left his native Nicaragua early, where he published poetry at age thirteen, already preoccupied with the “distant azure.” Before his arrival in El Salvador in 1882, and then Chile in 1886, he was reading the Parnassian poets, especially Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, who said “L’art, c’est l’azur” (Art is the azure). That same aspiration toward an ethereal ideal had been evoked by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Azur” in the Parnasse Contemporain (“Contemporary Parnassus,” 1866). Darío’s Azul appeared in 1888 in Chile, making him famous across South America. By the early 1890s he was visiting Europe, especially Paris and Madrid, as inveterate traveler, diplomat, and cultural ambassador. His last trip was a third visit to New York in 1914, for a lecture series his health would not permit. When he suc-
cumbed to cirrhosis in Nicaragua in 1916, he was mourned internationally. Also from age thirteen, Darío read voraciously in the National Library in Managua. Everything was assimilated, from biblical, classical, and medieval texts to his contemporaries. More important for Darío and subsequent Nicaraguan poets than pre-modern sources or the span of Spanish literature were French and U.S. models. Modernismo meant not servile imitation but the integration of innovations from France and later the United States within the context of native Hispanic themes and inspirations. His first ambition in Azul was to replace Spanish ponderousness by applying lessons learned from French: harmony, shading, suggestiveness. Darío’s improbable dream had been to write in French. Failing that, he renewed Spanish vocabulary with deliberate gallicisms and other foreign words, as French writers since the nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire have renewed French vocabulary with their anglicisms. In addition to the poets, Darío also knew well the novelists Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola, as well as other writers. In Paris he saw the poet Paul Verlaine and met the Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde, whom he cited between 1893 and 1896, then eulogized warmly in 1900. On landing in New York the first time, Rubén imagined himself in the solitary company of “the divine Edgar,” Edgar Allan Poe. Like Baudelaire, he shared Poe’s attraction to the strange and his fear of death, and he played among Spanish speakers a role comparable to the French poet’s in popularizing “the great Yankee.” Darío also read the senior contemporary poet of the United States with enthusiasm and saluted him in “Walt Whitman.” The
DARRIEUX, DANIELLE
anti-imperialist “To Roosevelt” is probably his best political poem. In Los raros (1896), Darío acknowledged strong nineteenth-century figures like Poe, Verlaine, and Martí who had marked him. Yet he himself remained independent, steeped in French and North American authors but a slave to no figure or school, not even modernismo. Indeed, his modernismo rejected any dogma, religious, political, and literary, whether from France or the United States. Roy Rosenstein See also: Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre; Chile; Literary Relations; Poe, Edgar Allan; Zola, Emile. References Faurié, Marie-Josephe. Le Modernisme hispanoaméricain et ses sources françaises. Paris: Instutut d’Etudes Hispaniques, 1966: 48–69. Mapes, Erwin K. L’Influence française dans l’oeuvre de Rubén Darío. Paris: Champion, 1925. Molloy, Silvia. La Diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siècle. Paris: PUF, 1972. Rosenstein, Roy. “Re(dis)covering Wilde for Latin America: Martí, Darío, Borges, Lispector.” Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Ed. George C. Sandulescu. Gerrards Cross, UK: Smythe, 1994: 348–361.
DARRIEUX, DANIELLE (1917–) Very few actresses can pride themselves on having a career as exceptionally long and rich as Danielle Darrieux’s. Her natural beauty and elegance, her excellent comic timing, and her work with legendary filmmakers have contributed to make Darrieux one of the most respected and emblematic icons of French cinema. Darrieux was born in Bordeaux in 1917. She studied the cello as a teenager
349
but quickly turned to acting. At the age of fourteen, she got her first movie part in Le Bal (Thiele, 1931). It was her first success, and she was noticed by high-profile directors such as the U.S. filmmaker Billy Wilder (Bad Blood, 1934, shot in France) and the German-born Robert Siodmak (The Depression Is Over, 1934). She then met her first husband, Henri Decoin, a French filmmaker, who offered her the leading role in Le Domino vert (The Green Domino, 1935). She became Decoin’s muse and showed great comic abilities in works such as Mademoiselle ma mère (1936) and Abus de confiance (Abused Confidence, 1938), the latter arguably her first mature performance. It was with Mayerling (Litvak, 1936) that international recognition came, resulting in a seven-year contract with the U.S. Universal Studios. Her first Hollywood film was The Rage of Paris (Koster, 1938), but her career in the United States did not take off. Her contract with Universal allowed her to keep working with her husband, but despite a creatively productive relationship with Decoin, she separated from him in 1941. The war interrupted her career in America. She worked in occupied France and starred in such films as André Cayatte’s La Fausse Maîtresse (Twisted Mistress, 1942). After the war, Darrieux concentrated on melodramas: Max Ophuls offered her mature roles in La Ronde (Roundabout, 1950), Le Plaisir (Pleasure, 1951), and Madame de . . . (The Earrings of Madame de, 1952). Hollywood wanted her back: together with James Mason, she starred in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Five Fingers (1953). She also had the opportunity to work with some of the greatest French film directors of the time, Marc Allégret,
350
DASSIN, JULES
Claude Chabrol, Julien Duvivier, and Claude Sautet, to name a few. She worked in Spain, Japan, and Germany, but her popularity was on the wane in France. Darrieux eventually renewed with success with Jacques Demy’s exhilarating musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1966). She worked again with Demy in 1982 (Une Chambre en ville/A Room in Town), but between these two films, her film career was irregular. However, she had considerable success in the theater. Darrieux went back to America in the early 1970s when Broadway asked her to replace Katharine Hepburn in the musical Coco (based on the life of the French fashion designer Coco Chanel). The ferocious New York press praised her singing voice and her live stage performance. Although she did not manage to attract as many admirers as Hepburn, Darrieux gave the musical another chance and kept it afloat until the end of the season. Since the 1990s, Darrieux has made frequent appearances in TV dramas. She has not abandoned her work for the cinema, as her work with young French film directors such as Jeanne Labrune and François Ozon shows. Florian Grandena See also: Chabrol, Claude; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Demy, Jacques; Fashion. References Darrieux, Danielle, and Jean-Pierre Ferrière. Danielle Darrieux. Paris: Ramsay. 2003. Sellier, Geneviève. “European Actors in Hollywood—Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Morgan and Micheline Presle in Hollywood: The Threat to French Identity.” Screen: The Journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television 43, no. 2 (2002).
DASSIN, JULES (1911–) U.S. film director and screenwriter Jules Dassin was one of the most defiantly visible survivors of the Hollywood blacklist period in the late 1940s. Born on December 18, 1911, in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin was raised in the Bronx, before paying his own way through drama school in Europe. Upon his return to the United States, he gained experience in radio and theater, making his stage debut at the Yiddish Theatre in New York at the age of twenty-five. In 1940 Dassin moved to Hollywood, where he was first employed at RKO Studios as an assistant director, and soon worked his way up to a directorial spot at MGM’s short subjects unit, where he handled a twenty-minute adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1941). This led to a promotion to full-length feature films like Nazi Agent (1942), Reunion in France (1942), and The Canterville Ghost (1944). From MGM, Dassin went to work for producer Mark Hellinger at Universal Studios, where he directed two crime classics, Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), which both clearly showed his growing penchant for the film noir genre. The late 1940s gave rise to strong anti-Communist sentiments in the United States, and Hollywood celebrities were among those who were scrutinized for leftist tendencies. Just as he was gaining recognition as a director, Dassin was blacklisted in Hollywood as a result of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings, led by Senator Eugene McCarthy, in which he was one of the people the HUAC forced Edward Dmytryk to identify as Communist.
DAVIS, MILES
Forced into exile in Europe, Dassin’s last 1950s film for a major studio was Twentieth Century Fox’s Night and the City, which was shot in London. He then moved to France, where he directed one of the most influential crime movies ever made, Rififi (1955). So successful was it that it earned him the Best Director prize at Cannes (1955) and set the standard for heist movies for decades to come. By the late 1950s Dassin had moved to Greece, and it was there that he directed his second wife Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday (1960), a scandalous comedy—at that time—about a merry prostitute. Mercouri performed superbly, forming a perfect contrast to Dassin, who played the role of a stuffy American moralist. At the end of the McCarthy era, Dassin was allowed to return to Hollywood, and in the mid-1960s he directed Uptight (1968), a remake with a black cast of John Ford’s 1935 film, The Informer; it clearly portrayed Dassin’s alleged communistic tendencies as being a thing of the past. Not many of Jules Dassin’s later, more personal films (the best known of which was an indictment of the Greek junta leaders, The Rehearsal, in 1974) were seen in America, even though the director’s reputation, so unfairly tarnished in the early 1950s, had been completely restored so far as Hollywood was concerned. Dassin, however, never quite forgave the United States for what he had endured, and so chose to go into self-imposed exile in Switzerland. Claudia Wolosin See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Film Noir; Poe, Edgar Allan. Reference Siclier, Fabien. Jules Dassin. Paris: Edilig, 1986.
351
DAVIS, MILES (1926–1991) Jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis was born in 1926, growing up in Alton and East Saint Louis, Illinois, where the precocious and ambitious young man blew harmonies for Eddie Randall’s band. In 1944 Davis departed for New York City to attend the Institute of Musical Art, but the youngster soon dropped out to play with “Bird,” Charlie Parker. In 1959 Davis made his name everywhere with Kind of Blue. The album’s wide popularity was a function of its unpredictability. Kind of Blue’s emphasis on unrehearsed, improvised group performance gave it a novel and exciting edge. The Davis that directed its completion was not only a soloist with a knack for timing or spacing, capable of turning pristine note clusters into languid and wispy yet dynamic moods. (Playing fast or high was not his style, but that of his mentor Dizzy Gillespie.) This Davis was likewise a director capable of placing before his own ego the good of the ensemble, which included alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. Davis was not some capricious, introverted genius of the kind portrayed by the African American novelist Ralph Ellison: he mentored the young, impressionable John Coltrane with care on tenor saxophone, as well as many another future leader. And for all that was avant-garde about Kind of Blue it also, to ease its acceptance, contained a touch of the familiar. “Freddie Freeloader,” titled after a Philadelphia bartender who survived on charity, quotes a hit by bluesman Junior Parker. Similar allusions, including a reference to Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town,” inform other grooves.
352
DEANE, SILAS
For relief from the racism he fought at home, Miles Davis liked to visit Paris, France. He is pictured here with French actress Jeanne Moreau in 1957. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Read in the context of its era, Kind of Blue is also, notwithstanding the presence of pianist Bill Evans, a tribute to “black” creativity, an attempt to make visible the “Invisible Man.” The album celebrates Africa: witness its contrast between open modal rhythms and Western chordal harmonies, especially in “Flamenco Sketches,” which relies on Andalusian scales, originally from Morocco. In its attention to the magnificence of “otherness,” there is additionally a way of hearing on Kind of Blue an outcry against the developing war in Vietnam. And in its glorification of team play it suggests that collective action can make a difference. For relief from the racism he fought at home Davis liked to visit Paris. Here in 1949 he met Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Juliette Greco, with whom he fell in love; the pair enjoyed strolling along the river Seine. In honor of a nation he cherished for its tolerance, accent on leisure, and beauty,
in 1957 Davis (with René Urtreger on piano) wrote and played the score for Louis Malle’s film L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold ). Yet Davis warned that, because of the serenity it offered, a place like the “City of Light,” as Paris has often been called, could be a graveyard for art: it had robbed his friend Bud Powell, the pianist, of his anger and energy. In the 1960s and 1970s the ever probing and imaginative Davis, first with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, then with Chick Corea and John McLaughlin, abandoned his “cool,” or relaxed, version of bebop for “free” and “rock” jazz, incorporating electric guitars and keyboards, even an amplified trumpet, complete with wahwah pedal. Just before his death in 1991, Davis was experimenting with rap, or “Doo Bop.” Johan Åhr See also: Hip-Hop Music and Culture; Jazz; Malle, Louis. References Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1998. Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Kahn, Ashley. Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. New York: Da Capo, 2001.
DEANE, SILAS (1737–1789) Patriot, spy, and diplomat, Silas Deane played an important role in bringing France to the aid of the American colonies during the Revolutionary War, and suffered for it. Born December 24, 1737, in Groton, Connecticut, Deane received a classical education, studying law and graduating from
DEANE, SILAS
Yale College in New Haven, before being admitted to the bar in 1761. Practicing in Wethersfield, Connecticut, Deane also engaged in mercantile pursuits, building up a thriving business in Connecticut as merchant of timber, lead, and copper, goods that were sold to England. Between 1774 and 1776 he became deputy of the General Assembly and member of the Continental Congress, before being ordered by Congress to France in 1776 as secret political and financial agent. As “agent of the American Colonies,” Deane was accorded a status more powerful than that of secret agent, yet less than that of ambassador, since none was officially recognized. Serving with Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee, a young Philadelphia law student transported to London, Deane recruited a group of foreign officers, among them the Marquis de Lafayette, Johann De Kalb, and Baron Von Steuben, who together, by 1778, had arranged a military and commercial alliance between France and the colonies. Dean met in secret with Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais, the radical author of Le Barbier de Seville (The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), to secure arms. Beaumarchais obtained from the American Congress a contract guaranteeing payment. He wrote to Deane that he would send 200 bronze four-pounders, 200,000 rounds of ammunition, 20,000 excellent muskets, a few bronze mortars, in addition to cannonballs, sheets, tents, and gunlock plates. The terms of the agreement between the two men were based on the flimsiest of understandings, hindered by Beaumarchais’s broken English, which hardly rivaled Deane’s command of French, faulty as that was. Disparaging any need for long-term credit on the part of the
353
Baron De Kalb introducing Lafayette to Silas Deane. (Bettmann/Corbis)
American Congress, Deane assured Beaumarchais in 1776 that commodities of tobacco from Virginia and Maryland would readily be shipped as repayment within six months’ time. Despite Deane’s many attempts to persuade the American Congress on his behalf, Beaumarchais never received payment for the shipment of arms.The uncommitted Congress preferred to acknowledge the shipment of arms as “a gift from France,” a misunderstanding that resulted in Deane’s being recalled to America in 1778 and charged with profiteering. Accused as a traitor following the publication of private letters, Deane lived the rest of his life in exile. He returned to Europe to secure documents for his defense. It was not until 1842 that the American Congress voted to pay restitution to his heirs. Deane died on board a ship, sailing from Gravesend to Boston on September 23, 1789. Pamela Gay-White
354
DEBRAY, RÉGIS See also: American Revolution; Franklin, Benjamin; Lafayette, Marquis de; Tobacco. References Central Intelligence Agency, http://www.odci. gov/csi/books/warindep/intellopos.html (accessed February 5, 2004). James, Coy Hilton. Silas Deane: Patriot or Traitor? East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975. Manceron, Claude. Twilight of the Old Order. New York: Knopf, 1977.
DEBRAY, RÉGIS (1940–) One of the most prominent living French intellectuals, known to a wider public primarily for his firsthand involvement with struggles in Latin America in the 1960s, and later prominent for his work in mediology—the effect of technologies of transmission on what is transmitted—and as a defender of French Republican values and the nation-state against the encroachment of globalization. A brilliant philosophy student of Louis Althusser’s at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he left for Latin America on graduation to fight alongside Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. He was captured in Bolivia and sentenced to thirty years in prison in 1967, which focused attention on his theoretical justification of guerrilla warfare, Révolution dans la révolution?/Revolution in the Revolution? Worldwide protests led to his release in 1970. He came to renewed prominence in 1979 with Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (Intellectual Power in France)/Teachers, Writers, Celebrities, a polemic against the corrosive influence exercised by the media over French intellectual life. This text marked the beginning of an unceasing investigation of how the medium profoundly affects the message, an investigation imbued at once
with fascination for the visual image and with nostalgia for the “graphosphere,” in which the written word was dominant. Debray oversees the publication of the journal Cahiers de médiologie, the major institutional expression of what he has termed mediology, distinguished from what an Anglo-American audience would recognize as media studies by its longer historical and philosophical perspective rather than by a specific focus on this or that text. In his more recent work, such as I.f. (intellectuel français, “French intellectual”): suite et fin (“concluded,” 2000), he suggests that the dominance of intellectuals in French public life has come to an inevitable end. Debray’s public life and interventions would appear at least in part to give the lie to that conclusion. He served as François Mitterrand’s Third World policy adviser in the early years of his presidency, though disillusionment with Mitterrand’s second term of office, as for a great many others, rapidly set in. More recently he has been identified with positions close to the “national Republicanism” of former Socialist minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement—skeptical about the cultural and symbolic credibility of the European Union, stalwart in defense of the French nation-state and of the Republican values it supposedly though decreasingly embodies, harshly critical of the United States and of the forces of globalization, with their tendency to turn citizens into consumers. He earned notoriety in 1999 for what many saw as illjudged criticism of the NATO intervention in Kosovo. A demain de Gaulle!/Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation? extols de Gaulle’s commitment to the nation-state and his devotion to the written word—values clearly at the antipodes from the federal
DEGAS, HILAIRE GERMAIN EDGAR
interventionism and culture of the image, or “videosphere,” characteristic of de Gaulle’s old adversary, the United States. From his commitment to the emancipation of Latin America from U.S. control, through his enthusiasm for civic and statecentered values as against those of the virtually omnipresent market, to his recognition of the need to maintain a critical distance from the “eternal present” of the videosphere, Debray’s life and work can be seen as articulating a sustained and consistent opposition to U.S. political and cultural hegemony in a distinctively French style and context. Keith Reader See also: Gaulle, General Charles de; Mitterrand, François; NATO; Republicanism. References Dagognet, François, Robert Damien, and Robery Dumas. Faut-il brûler Regis Debray? Champ Vallon: Seyssel, 1999. Reader, Keith. Régis Debray : A Critical Introduction. London/East Haven, CT: Pluto, 1995.
DEGAS, HILAIRE GERMAIN EDGAR (1834–1917) Born in Paris, Degas was one of the most important French artists of the nineteenth century. A member of the impressionist group, he was a notable draftsman who challenged conventions of painting, drawing, print-making, and sculpture by introducing new techniques and methods. After study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, an extended stay in Italy, and early history paintings, Degas’s representations of modern life and his treatment of the figure from the late 1860s in his pictures of the ballet, the
355
racecourse, and other scenes introduced new standards for these subjects as did the many portraits that he drew and painted. Degas’s mother, who died when he was thirteen, was born in New Orleans. In 1869 Degas’s brother René married his cousin Estelle, a widow who fled to France after her husband was killed in the American Civil War. In October 1872 Degas accompanied René back to New Orleans, where he stayed until March the following year. There he painted A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau), a compelling study of fourteen men engaged in the family business there. Possibly it was these U.S. connections that encouraged Degas to take an interest in U.S. artists in Paris. He tried to persuade Whistler to exhibit in the first impressionist exhibition in 1874, and continued to see him when he visited Paris from his new home in London. Degas also counted the American artist Mary Cassatt as a friend. In 1877 he invited her to show in the impressionist exhibition that year, an offer she took up in 1879. They collaborated on their printmaking, and Cassatt posed for Degas on many occasions. She appears in the pastel At the Louvre (c. 1879, private collection) and posed for several of the pastel studies of milliners of 1882, including At the Milliners (1882, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). By the 1880s, Degas’s difficulties with his eyesight, which eventually left him blind, increasingly led him to turn to pastel and sculpture. Treating the themes of the dancer, the bather, and the woman at her toilet, he created a startling group of late works. By 1882 Cassatt’s friendship with Degas had cooled slightly, but she continued to
356
DELEUZE, GILLES
A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
encourage her family and several American friends to purchase work by Degas. These purchasers included Louisine Havemeyer, whose extraordinary collection is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Anna Gruetzner Robins See also: American Civil War; Cassatt, Mary; New Orleans; Painting; Whistler, James Abbott McNeill. References Benfey, Christopher F. Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Dumas, Ann, and David A. Bienneman. Degas and America: The Early Collectors. Minneapolis: High Museum of Art, 2000. Feigenbaum, Gail, et al. Degas and New Orleans. A French Impressionist in America. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 1999.
DELEUZE, GILLES (1925–1995) French thinker, born in Paris in 1925. Although he traveled little in his career, a conception of the United States— influenced primarily by literary sources, but also drawing on the tradition of U.S.
DELEUZE, GILLES
pragmatism—is developed in his work. Deleuze conceives of literature as something like a diagram or “machine” that, rather than revealing the political or social unconscious, constitutes a dynamic “cartography” of the ways in which challenging ways of thinking might unfold. In this way, he presents not an idealized United States, but rather an abstract United States of variable speeds and intensities. The fact that the U.S. “pragmatic” revolution, based upon the ideal of universal emigration, has failed should not detract from the visionary potential of U.S. literature. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari draw on Leslie Fiedler’s analysis of the role of geography in U.S. mythology and literature. They outline various forms of “cartography” established by significant American writers. The West, for example, establishes a “line of flight” that combines travel, hallucination, madness, and the shifting of frontiers. Such cartographies avoid the private and the autobiographical in favor of the public, the political, and the popular. In Dialogues (1987), Deleuze talks in more general terms about what he calls the “superiority” of “Anglo-American” literature. He claims that to escape or to trace a line of flight—what he calls elsewhere “deterritorialization”—is the highest aim of literature. The French literary tradition, Deleuze claims, is either overly psychological or overly historical. The American tradition is characterized in terms of the “rhizome,” in that it establishes a proliferating network with multiple and unpredictable connections. The French tradition, on the other hand, is primarily “arborescent,” since it is based on the search for roots and the analysis of hierarchy. In short, the ab-
357
stract machine of American literature works on a horizontal axis, whereas the French, or “European” model, works on a vertical axis. Rather than searching for origins, “Anglo-American” literature is a necessarily collective project that is always starting again “in the middle.” Essays Critical and Clinical (1997) contains significant short pieces on Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Here, he talks of the revolutionary American dream of a “society of comrades,” a society “without fathers,” and a pragmatic “unionism” of spontaneous fragments, as opposed to the European search for origins. He acknowledges that this dream was betrayed, but claims that it remains the “reality” of American literature, in which the fragmentary “self ” of the “Anglo-Saxons” is opposed to the solipsistic “I” of the Europeans. Deleuze consistently argues in favor of experimentation rather than interpretation, and it is for this reason that he admires American pragmatism’s affirmation that the world is always “in process.” The discrete, knowing subject is replaced by a nomadic community of explorers, who replace knowledge of the world with “belief ” and “confidence.” Pragmatism should be thought of, Deleuze claims, as an attempt to transform the world, in that it eschews both particularity and universality in favor of the search for “originality.” Deleuze committed suicide by jumping from the window of his Paris apartment in 1995. John Marks See also: Guattari, Félix; Theory. References Khalfa, Jean. ed. An Introduction to the Thought of Gilles Deleuze. London: Continuum, 2002.
358
DELSARTE, FRANÇOIS Lotringer, Sylvère, and Sande Cohen, eds. French Theory in America. London: Routledge, 2001. Rajchman, John. The Deleuze Connections. London: MIT Press, 2000. Stivale, Charles J. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Guilford, 1998.
DELSARTE, FRANÇOIS (1811–1871) Founder of a system of vocal and physical expression, which significantly influenced the development of dance in the United States and acting in Russia and Europe during the modernist period. Delsarte was born in Solesmes, France. Though he was orphaned and impoverished at an early age, his aptitude for music enabled him to undertake training as a singer and actor at the Paris Conservatoire from 1825. Unfortunately this training ruined his voice. He began a study of voice and gesture and from the 1840s began teaching a Cours d’Esthétique Appliqué (Course of Applied Aesthetics), also lecturing and giving demonstrations. He gained great acclaim and taught singers, actors, visual artists, clergymen, and politicians. He wrote little. Some notes, charts, and the beginnings of a book are extant, as well as notes on lessons and from lectures by pupils such as Angélique Arnaud and L’Abbé Delaumosne. His son Gustave and daughter Marie Delsarte-Géraldy continued to teach the system after Delsarte’s death, Géraldy in America in 1892. Delsarte claimed a scientific basis for his work in his systematic observations of living people in activity and also of corpses. He deduced from this a series of laws determining the natural expressiveness of
human beings. The law of trinity affirmed the threefold nature of all things (reflecting the Holy Trinity), such as life, soul, and mind, with vital, spiritual, and intellectual functions. The nature of God was revealed through beauty, goodness, and truth; art was the demonstration of these sublime virtues. Music’s trinity was rhythm, harmony, and melody. Movement is excentric or concentric (away from or toward the center), or normal, the center itself. The law of correspondence asserted that a function of the body corresponded to each spiritual function. A spiritual act corresponded to each grand function of the body: that is, thought or emotion always had a physical expression, and any gesture or movement would convey inner meaning. There were three aspects of gesture: static, dynamic, and semiotic, and nine of motion: altitude, force, motion, sequence, direction, form, velocity, reaction, and extension. With these laws, Delsarte developed a lexicon of gestures and their inner content. He sought also to define the mechanisms of breathing and the characteristics of speech and song similarly. The system spread to America largely through man of the theater Steel Mackaye (1842–1894), who worked with Delsarte daily in Paris from 1869 to 1870. Mackaye lectured from 1871 on Delsarte in America and developed Harmonic Gymnastics, a movement training system on Delsartean principles, which he taught in New York from 1875. Genevieve Stebbins (1857– 1915) studied with Mackaye and developed American Delsartism further, extending its theoretical base and introducing yoga and Swedish gymnastics into its practice, as well as teaching statue posing, pantomime, and drills. From 1870 to 1920 the Delsarte System of Oratory was the most
DEMY, JACQUES
popular single method of speech training in the United States. American Delsartism had a significant influence on the development of modern dance. Isadora Duncan (1827–1927), Ruth St. Denis (1877–1968), and Ted Shawn (1891–1972) found in Delsartism new ways of thinking about movement as an alternative to ballet. Abbé Delaumosne was instrumental in bringing American Delsartism back to Europe in the 1920s; it had already reached Russia and enjoyed popularity, influencing the acting experiments of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vesevolod Meyerhold (largely through the work of Sergei Volkonsky) over the revolutionary period. Delsarte died in Paris in 1871. Rose Whyman See also: Dance. References Delaumosne, Abbé. Delsarte System of Oratory. New York: Werner, 1893. Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa. The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism. Westport, CT/London: Greenwood, 1999. Shawn, Ted. Every Little Movement. New York: Dance Horizons, 1963.
DEMY, JACQUES (1931–1990) Since René Clair’s work in the early days of sound cinema, Demy is the only major French film director to have directed a significant number of musicals. The bigscreen spectacle and bright colors of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)—which gave Catherine Deneuve her first major role—and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) are a worthy match for the Hollywood classics of Vincente Minnelli or Robert Wise. Demy’s close work-
359
ing relationship with the composer Michel Legrand—paralleled in postwar European cinema only by Fellini’s with Nino Rota—accounts for much of the appeal of his oeuvre, which has a more serious sociocultural dimension than may at first appear. The nonmusical Lola (1961), starring Anouk Aimée, ends with her former lover’s returning to carry her off in a spectacularly large white Cadillac—a tongue-in-cheek homage to the modernization and Americanization of France evoked by Kristin Ross in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, set against the background of the Algerian war, likewise figures major changes in France through the contrast between the burgeoning fortunes of a car mechanic who comes to run his own garage and the decline of an old-fashioned umbrella shop in one of France’s rainiest towns. Gene Kelly—epitome of the Hollywood musical—appears as an American pianist in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Demy’s work nevertheless retains a distinctly French quality, partly through the use of Legrand’s music, partly because so many of his films are set in the western French seaports—Nantes (Lola), Cherbourg, Rochefort—that he filmed with evident affection. He worked with many of France’s leading stars—Jeanne Moreau in La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (1963), Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Delphine Seyrig and Deneuve again in Peau d’âne/Donkey Skin (1970), Yves Montand in Trois places pour le 26/Three Places for the 26th (1988)—and was movingly profiled by his widow Agnès Varda in Jacquot de Nantes, released in the United States as Jacquot, of 1991. At once a regionalist poet of the cinema and France’s outstanding
360
DENEUVE, CATHERINE
exponent of a genre surprisingly rare in Europe, he remains an important figure in French film history. Keith Reader See also: Cherbourg; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Deneuve, Catherine; Kelly, Gene; Legrand, Michel; Montand, Yves; Nantes; Rochefort. References Berthomé, Jean-Pierre. Jacques Demy: Les racines du rêve. Nantes: L’Atalante, 1996. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 1995. Stilwell, Robyn J. “Le Demy-monde: The Bewitched, Betwixt and Between French Musical.” Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno. Eds. Hugh Dauncey and Steve Cannon. Aldershot, UK/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003: 123–138.
DENEUVE, CATHERINE (1943–) French film actress, born in Paris in 1943. Catherine Deneuve remains, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, France’s most celebrated and respected film actress. Much of her cinematic importance stems from a consistently daring and unorthodox selection of French and American film projects that she has rendered unexpectedly marketable. From early interpretations of wideeyed singing maidens (in Jacques Demy’s musicals) or neurotic Buñuelian antiheroines in Belle de jour (1966) and Tristana (1971) to recent turns as a gay university lecturer in André Téchiné’s Les Voleurs/ Thieves (1996) and as Odette Swann in Raúl Ruiz’s adaptation of Le Temps retrouvé/Time Regained (2000), Deneuve has continued, well into her fifties, to in-
spire the most experimental directors of the age, lending their ambitiously avant-garde projects a quasi-aristocratic star appeal. Despite, or perhaps because of, Deneuve’s indisputably French iconic status, she has functioned as a significant link between the European and the U.S. cinematic traditions. She is considered in the United States as the Parisian actress par excellence; her early forays into Hollywood were memorable exercises in a new kind of French feminine stereotype. Whether in 1969’s comedy The April Fools (Rosenberg, with Jack Lemmon) or in 1983’s vampire story The Hunger (Tony Scott, with David Bowie and Susan Sarandon), Deneuve brought a disturbing Old World sexuality to the modern, wholesome American backdrop of the film in question. Hitchcock was keen to exploit this highly fetishized aspect of Deneuve’s Frenchness, but died before his plans to turn her into a new Continental “ice blonde” could be realized. More recently, Deneuve has starred in several French-American or international projects, the most recent being Tonie Marshall’s Paris–New York love story Au Plus Près du Paradis/Nearest to Heaven (with William Hurt, 2002). She is drawn to cinematic experiments with intertextuality, especially involving the French-American cultural relationship; this can be most clearly perceived in her increasingly bizarre connection to the contemporary musical. In Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort (1966), a joyous cross between Hollywood cabaret and quirky French melodrama, complete with a dancing Gene Kelly singing in French, Deneuve and her late sister Françoise Dorléac are a bewildering blend of Gallic damsel and Americanized Monroe and Russell clones. Deneuve’s association with
DENIM
this type of perplexing crossbreed genre is persistent. In Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2001), she (playing a character originally conceived as African American) and Icelandic icon Björk are immigrant workers in a 1950s America that is the allsinging, all-dancing world of both the electric chair and The Sound of Music; in 8 Femmes (2002), François Ozon’s musical pastiche of the films of George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, and John Ford, she heads a cast of French actresses who veer constantly between parodies of their own famous personas and those of such American legends as Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, and Madonna. In 2003 Deneuve appeared as the Marquise de Merteuil in a FrancoCanadian television production of Dangerous Liaisons. Andrew Asibong See also: Dangerous Liaisons; Demy, Jacques; Kelly, Gene; Madonna; Ruiz, Raúl. References Vadim, Roger. The Memoirs of Roger Vadim: Bardot, Deneuve and Fonda. Trans. Melinda Porter. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986. Vincendeau, Ginette. “Fire and Ice. An Icon of French Chic and Perverse Sexuality, Catherine Deneuve Tells Us a Great Deal about French Cinema and Culture.” Sight and Sound 3, no. 4 (April 1993): 20. ———. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Continuum, 2000.
DENIM Spearhead of the American commercial empire, uniform of the counterculture, sartorial must of the 1950s rebel, emblem of working-class functionalism, icon of the West, image of equality, fetishized commodity par excellence, denim also has a place in the circular economic and cultural
361
currents of the French Atlantic. Since LéviStrauss arrived in San Francisco in the midnineteenth century, myths have abounded about the origin of denim jeans. According to one version, Lévi-Strauss and Company ordered the fabric for their celebrated trousers from the French city of Nîmes, hence “denim,” and the ships carrying bolts of this serge de Nîmes were manned by sailors wearing pants made of a blue cotton cloth from Genoa. The truth is probably more prosaic. Jean, a cotton and wool blend, does indeed get its name from Genoa, the Italian city reputed to be at the origin of this cloth, but as early as the seventeenth century jean was mainly produced in England. So too with denim. Fashion historian Pascale GorguetBallesteros has shown that as early as the eighteenth century the main centers of production of serge de Nîmes were located in England and the eastern United States, where the term early on designated a cotton, rather than silk and wool, twill. Furthermore, Lévi-Strauss’s first pair of riveted blue jeans—called “waist overalls”—were made from denim shipped to San Francisco from New Hampshire and not from France. A cotton twill was routinely used in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make overalls for workers— called salopettes and bleus de travail (work blues)—but it was not until after World War II that denim in the form of blue jeans became a polyvalent garment in France. Dictionaries attest to the usage of the word jean in France as early as 1948, and then blue-jean, occasionally spelled bloudgine, several years later, while denim, for its part, entered the French language as an anglicism in 1973. One of the iconic images of the early 1960s shows Brigitte
362
DENIM
Denim advertising label showing boy on rigging of ship, ca. 1858. Myths have abounded about the origin of denim jeans. According to one version, Lévi-Strauss and Company ordered the fabric for their celebrated trousers from the French city of Nîmes, hence “denim,” and the ships carrying bolts of this serge de Nîmes were manned by sailors wearing pants made of a blue cotton cloth from Genoa. (Library of Congress)
Bardot wearing jeans on the deck of a cutter off the coast of Saint Tropez, and since then consumers in France have bought millions of pairs of denim trousers. Through it all, denim in France has been made to stand both as the sign of an eager Americanization and as an icon of antiAmericanism. According to the writer Alison Lurie, postwar French teenagers wore jeans as a way of magically absorbing the power and virtue of the United States. In 2001, however, black denim was the garb of choice for the critics of transnational capitalism demonstrating in the streets of Genoa. Denim has become the marker of
an inevitable proximity and the badge of an irrevocable distance between the two sides of the French Atlantic. This simultaneous proximity and distance are echoed in an anecdote recounted by Europe’s most celebrated anthropologist of the Americas. In a book of interviews, Claude LéviStrauss tells of a dinner in a crowded San Francisco restaurant. Asked to make a reservation, Lévi-Strauss left his name, upon which the waiter asked: “The pants or the books?” (Eribon, p. 30). Phil Watts See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Fashion; LéviStrauss, Claude; World War II.
DEPARDIEU, GÉRARD References Downey, Lynn. “A History of Denim.” www.levistrauss.com/about/history/denim. htm (accessed May 6, 2004). Eribon, Didier, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Trans. Paula Wissing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Join-Dieterle, Catherine, et al. Histoires du jeans, 1750–1994. Paris: Paris Musées, 1994. Lurie, Alison. The Language of Clothes. New York: Random House, 1981. Quinn, Carin C. “The Jeaning of America— And the World.” American Heritage, May 1978.
DEPARDIEU, GÉRARD (1948–) Depardieu is arguably the most prominent star in French cinema of the last thirty years. He was born in working-class Châteauroux in 1948, and throughout his career has made frequent reference to his humble origins and violent, marginalized youth. He began his acting career in the Parisian café-théâtres in the 1960s and early 1970s. The libertarian, frequently antiestablishment credentials of this kind of theater reinforced his status as an outsider, and this status was further reinforced in his early film roles, notably Les Valseuses/Going Places (Bertrand Blier, 1973), which turned him and his costar, Patrick Dewaere, into much-sought-after young actors. A paradox lay at the heart of Depardieu’s star persona and performance style until the late 1970s. In many of his major roles, the combination of violence and tenderness—for example, the softness of his voice—suggested a kind of sexual ambivalence. Then Depardieu’s persona softened, and he took on much lighter, less threatening roles. He straddled a number of different genres and filmic styles, yet increasingly
363
he played comic or romantic heroes in films such as Préparez vos mouchoirs/Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Blier, 1978) and Inspecteur La Bavure/Inspector Blunder (Zidi, 1980). By the 1980s Depardieu had become a major French star and a huge box-office draw. The early violence had given way to the lighthearted comedy of the Francis Veber hits, La Chèvre/The Goat (1981), Les Compères/ComDads (1983), and Les Fugitifs/The Fugitives (1986), and, perhaps most tellingly, to leading roles in a vast number of historical, or “heritage,” dramas. Indeed, his presence in heritage hits such as Jean de Florette (Berri, 1986), Cyrano de Bergerac (Rappeneau, 1990), and Germinal (Berri, 1993) made him synonymous with the genre. This association with the heritage genre underlines Depardieu’s identity as the primary French star of recent years. The combination of huge popularity films, quality filmmaking, and cultural authority lent by their literary sources have made these films a key factor in ongoing attempts to reinforce French cultural heritage. Depardieu’s roles in these films have positioned him as another element of the same process. The actor’s career outside France has been both less complex and less successful. Depardieu’s first attempt at conquering the international market was in Peter Weir’s Green Card (1990), in which he plays a stereotypical Frenchman. This kind of role is continued in later English-language films such as Ridley Scott’s 1492 Conquest of Paradise (1992) and Steve Miner’s remake My Father the Hero (1994). Although in Scott’s film the clichéd Frenchness becomes a clichéd Europeanness, in each of these works the ambiguities and thus the forcefulness of Depardieu’s French persona
364
DEPESTRE, RENÉ
are effaced. It is perhaps telling that revelations about Depardieu’s past in Time in 1991 caused a furor in Hollywood, and many believed that it cost him an Oscar for his role in Cyrano. It seems that the very complexities that ensured his early success in France, the combination of tenderness and violence, could lead only to disaster in the global market and as a result had to be removed. Lucy Mazdon See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Cyrano de Bergerac; Veber, Francis. References Austin, Guy. Stars in Modern French Cinema. London: Arnold, 2000. Chutkow, Paul. Gérard Depardieu. New York: Random House, 1994. Vincendeau, Ginette. “Gérard Depardieu, the Axiom of Contemporary French Cinema.” Screen 34, no. 4 (1993): 343–361. ———. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Continuum, 2000.
DEPESTRE, RENÉ (1926–) Haitian intellectual and writer. Of all the young militants of the La Ruche group who came to prominence following Jacques Roumain’s death in 1945, René Depestre has proved to be the most enduring and influential. Unlike Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, Depestre was not born into the Haitian elite, but into a lower-middle-class family in the port of Jacmel. A prodigious talent, Depestre published his first poetry collection, Etincelles/Sparks, in 1945, and this was quickly followed by the surrealisttinged Gerbe de sang/Wreath of Blood in 1946, the year in which he first left Haiti. His studies at the Sorbonne brought him into contact with the key literary and cul-
tural figures of the metropole (metropolitan France), and also with the négritude group. Ever wary of racial absolutism, Depestre has tended to prioritize class conflict over race as the most significant point of tension in colonial and postcolonial societies. In 1951, his militant activities led to his expulsion from France, and thereafter he spent short periods of time in Prague, Havana, Vienna, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, before returning to Paris in 1956. The following year he returned to Haiti, but was forced to leave after refusing to cooperate with Duvalier. On the invitation of Che Guevara, he went once more to Cuba, and lived there until his growing disillusionment with the revolution forced him to leave in 1978. Eight years working with UNESCO in Paris followed, before he finally retired to live in the Aude region of France. In 1991, he and his family obtained French citizenship. Although Depestre has returned to Haiti only once in over fifty years, the island has remained his imaginary center. Following the early poetic expressions of the pain of exile, Depestre has gradually given up the hope and the desire to return, and his later work celebrates exile as a highly creative situation. Similarly, his early radical politics have mellowed, and, in a way that mirrors wider movements in Caribbean literature, the concern with collective issues has given way to the world of the personal and the particular. He has remained primarily a poet, though he has enjoyed most commercial success with his prose fiction works, notably Le Mât de cocagne/The Festival of the Greasy Pole (1979), a parody of Duvalier’s Haiti, and Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (Hadriana in My Dreams, 1988), a magical realist, erotically charged evocation of the Haiti of
DERRIDA, JACQUES
childhood, narrated by means of an exilic reconstruction of the protagonist’s fragmented memory. His prose essays, in particular 1980’s Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (Hello and Goodbye to Négritude), track his own very particular path through négritude, surrealism, and Marxism, and as such are important documents of the major movements and debates in twentiethcentury Caribbean literature. The selfstyled nomade enraciné (rooted nomad) continues to be an important presence in French and Caribbean writing. Martin Munro See also: Alexis, Jacques-Stephen; Haiti; Roumain, Jacques; Surrealism. References Couffon, Claude. René Depestre. Paris: Seghers, 1986. Dash, J. Michael. Literature and Ideology in Haiti, 1915–1961. London/Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1981. Munro, Martin. Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre. Leeds, UK: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2000.
DERRIDA, JACQUES (1930–2004) One of the internationally most renowned philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Derrida was one of the most celebrated and reviled French thinkers in the humanities in the United States. His work first attracted widespread attention in America from the late 1960s onward, in the wake of a 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” This conference marked the arrival of French structuralism in America, and Derrida’s own work was si-
365
multaneously heralded as representing the inception of poststructuralism. The reception of his work in the American context was marked by a series of misappropriations, which can be broadly grouped into two stages: firstly, its annexation as a literary critical methodology, and subsequently, its conflation with, and reduction to, loosely defined variants of postmodern relativism. Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria, on July 15, 1930. He studied at the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris, as well as at Harvard for a year, and taught at the ENS for twenty years from 1964 to 1984. In 1983, he was elected to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and was among the founders of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, becoming its first director in 1984. From 1975 onward, he pursued a joint career, teaching for part of each year in the United States, principally within literature departments: first at Yale, then starting in 1987 at the University of California at Irvine, and from 1992 at the Cardozo School of Law, New York City. The reception of Derrida’s work in America is well known and has become problematic in its own right, in terms of both intellectual and institutional and cultural/linguistic displacements. The early impact of his work was exclusively within comparative literature and modern language departments rather than philosophy departments, which in turn had a determining influence on the mode of appropriation of his work. This reception was staged throughout the 1970s and early 1980s through the work of the “Yale critics,” most notably Paul de Man, but also Geoffrey Hartman, Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom. In 1979, the German-American translator
366
DES ROSIERS, JOËL
and scholar Rodolphe Gasché accused these critics of turning Derrida’s deconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition into a recast form of New Criticism, a reapplicable method of close reading of texts. Subsequent attacks accused Hartman and the others of instituting a “wild” literary Derrida at the expense of the major philosophical themes and import of his work. Jonathan Culler, himself instrumental in the wider reception of Derrida’s work in the United States as an early and successful expositor, argued that the radical potential of deconstruction can only be tamed and defused by any institutionalization. Nonetheless, deconstruction has reemerged in America within a series of contexts from architecture and postcolonial studies to education, critical legal studies, and ethics. From this period also date the first attacks by American scholars and philosophers on Derrida’s work as the source of apolitical textualism (Frank Lentricchia), nihilism (M. H. Abrams), bad or false philosophy (John Searle), and all the ills of U.S. higher education (Allan Bloom). Academic philosophy in the United States has taken an interest in Derrida in terms of the influential expositions of Richard Rorty, who divides early from late work in order to valorize the latter. More recently, Stanley Cavell has sought to relate Derrida’s work to the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin, on which Derrida himself wrote, and Wittgenstein. Vivienne Orchard See also: Theory. References Arac, Jonathan, ed. The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983. Cavell, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Rapaport, Herman. The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
DES ROSIERS, JOËL (1951–) Born in the town of Cayes, Haiti, on October 26, 1951, Joël Des Rosiers belongs to a generation of Haitian-Canadian poets (which also includes Robert BerrouëtOriol, St. Valentine Kauss, and St. John Kauss) who were either born in Montreal or who went there at a young age, and whose work has been shaped by this double sense of belonging. Leaving Haiti at the age of ten, Des Rosiers spent his adolescence in Montreal, before moving to study in Strasbourg in the early seventies, where he became involved with the situationist movement. Physician, prize-winning poet, and essayist, he has published four poetry collections and one essay collection with Editions Triptyque in Montreal: Métropolis Opéra (1987), Tribu ( Tribe, 1990), Savanes (Savannahs, 1993), Théories caraïbes (“Caribbean Theories,” 1996), and Vétiver (Vetiver, 1999). Des Rosiers has traveled widely, notably to Mexico, Israel, and the Sahel region of Morocco, where he spent several weeks with Touaregs. His work reflects the wide itinerary of his life: questions of roots, belonging, and sense of place are persistent concerns. In contrast to his antecedents in Haitian and Caribbean writing (Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Aimé Césaire), Des Rosiers does not romanticize Africanness and traditional culture in any straightforward nationalistic or racial way.
DESJARDINS, RICHARD
His work is concerned with the relationship between tradition and modernity, with conceptualizing an alternative modernity in which cultural traditions are reinterpreted and revalorized, without what he sees as the negative, ultimately futile pull of nostalgia and mourning for that which is lost. In this sense, his work has a timeless feel: he insists on creating and living now a future free from tradition, while at the same time he reinvokes humankind’s deepest cultural mythologies as unchanging, necessary markers of our “tribal” identity. Des Rosiers similarly eschews the great ideological discourses of his predecessors (Marxism, indigenism, and négritude), and his work, influenced by young Québécois poets such as François Charron and JeanPaul Daoust, sketches an introspective movement to the personal and the intimate in Haitian-Canadian exiled writing. Unlike, say, his contemporary and compatriot, Dany Laferrière, Des Rosiers embraces la francophonie (the French-speaking world), and its inherent possibilities of intercultural communication and cross-fertilization. Although he at times infuses his restrained, sparse, lyrical poetry with creolisms, Des Rosiers generally employs French language as a neutral tool, and does not see it as a “trap,” or means of potential cultural assimilation. In his celebration of exile and displacement from Haiti as sources of enriching cultural hybridization and as avenues to inspiring encounters with otherness, Des Rosiers’s vision is ultimately influenced by postmodern conceptions of identity and belonging as fluid and multiple entities. His work at once describes and shapes the contemporary reconfigurations of Haitian identity in North America and beyond. Martin Munro
367
See also: Alexis, Jacques-Stephen; Césaire, Aimé; Haiti; Laferrière, Dany; Montreal; Roumain, Jacques. References Des Rosiers, Joël. “Poems and Interview.” Callaloo 15, no. 2 (1992): 407–430. Gyssels, Kathleen. “Encre et ancrage: les recueils de Joël Des Rosiers.” Théories caraïbes: Poétique du déracinement. Joël Des Rosiers. Montreal: Triptyque, 1996: xvii–xxx.
DESJARDINS, RICHARD (1948–) Québécois singer-songwriter. Desjardins is one of Quebec’s most celebrated singersongwriters of the 1990s, accompanying carefully crafted lyrics with his evocative piano or bluesy ballads with the guitar. Desjardins was born in Abitibi, in the northwest of Quebec, the son of a middleclass francophone forester. He joined the band Abbittibbi in the mid-1970s, playing piano as well as singing and writing, and toured the province in small-scale festivals, mostly playing covers of U.S. rock hits. Unable to carve out an original niche, the band split in 1982, their initial promise unfulfilled. In 1988, however, Desjardins managed to produce his first solo album (Les Derniers Humains [The Last Human Beings]), funding it through a system of advanced subscription from his old fans and friends. This album set the tone for his subsequent work, with his smoky voice changing abruptly from velvet softness to gravelly attack, to the accompaniment of a melancholy piano or guitar. Lately, his music has also been peppered with Mediterranean influences, and the overall effect is one of intimacy and subtle eroticism.
368
DESSALINES, JEAN-JACQUES
Desjardins has consciously attempted to give a certain timelessness to his lyrics by referring to solitude, despair, or passionate love, and his most famous song is probably the love ballad “Quand j’aime une fois j’aime pour toujours” (“When I Love Once I Love Forever,” 1990), adapted from a Cajun blues melody and popularized in France by the singer-songwriter Francis Cabrel (1992, reissued in 2000). Nonetheless, Desjardins has also anchored his songs in a specifically contemporary context, alluding for instance to anti-immigrant discrimination (“Miami,” 1988), or using black humor to depict a stubborn clerk (“La caissière populaire/Cashier of the People,” 1998). Desjardins has also composed some curious historical pieces, tracing the violent foundation of Quebec (“Les Yankees,” 1988), a mysterious journey through an icy night (“Akinisi,” 1988), or a homosexual relationship in fifteenth-century France (“Lomer,” 1998). Following his solo success, especially after his second album Tu m’aimes-tu (You Love Me? 1990), the band Abbittibbi regrouped in 1994–1997 and finally achieved a degree of success. A versatile artist (he has composed film music and codirected two films), Desjardins is strongly committed to left-wing causes, campaigning for Native Indian rights in Mexico and green issues such as antideforestation. In 1999, he codirected L’Erreur boréale/Forest Alert with Robert Monderie, a documentary showing how the beloved forest of his childhood was being savagely destroyed by logging corporations. Critics of the government enthused about the film and helped establish Desjardins’s image as an “authentic” and “rebellious” artist involved in concrete politics.
Since his first appearance at the 1992 Francofolies festival of La Rochelle in France, Desjardins has gathered a faithful audience on both sides of the Atlantic, receiving a string of prizes in Quebec and regular coverage from the mainstream French media. In 2001, after a yearlong stay in France, he was elected Man of the Year by the Canadian newspaper L’Actualité, thanks to his artistic skills and political credibility. Barbara Lebrun See also: Cajuns; Dion, Céline; Francofolies, Les; Leclerc, Félix; Mexico; Music (Pop); Quebec; Timber. References Baillargeon, Richard, and Christian Côté. Une Histoire de la musique populaire au Québec, Destination Ragou. Montreal: Triptyque, 1991. Desjardins, Richard. Paroles de chansons. Montreal: VLB, 1991. Thérien, Robert, and Isabelle d’Amours. Dictionnaire de la musique populaire au Québec (1955–1992). Quebec: IQRC, 1992.
DESSALINES, JEAN-JACQUES (1758–1806) Haitian general and revolutionary leader. On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines formally proclaimed the independence of the former French colony of SaintDomingue, and returned the newly declared first black republic to its Arawak name, Haiti. This black general had been born on the Cormiers plantation, in the modern-day parish of Grande Rivière du Nord. He was first owned by a brutal white planter named Duclos, and later sold to a black master. Dessalines had fought since the earliest days of the slave insurrection with Georges Biassou and, in 1794, had
DESSALINES, JEAN-JACQUES
become Toussaint L’Ouverture’s guide in Grande Rivière du Nord. After the deportation of Toussaint L’Ouverture to France in June 1802, the remaining generals, including Dessalines, had been forced to make peace with Napoléon’s general, Leclerc. By mid-October, however, Pétion had instigated a new rebellion, and Dessalines became the leader in this final, successful push for independence. Dessalines stands apart from the two other members of Haiti’s black trinity, Toussaint and Henri Christophe, in his unremitting hatred of all things French, a hatred he would justify to people by showing his deeply scarred back. Whereas most of the postrevolution Haitian elite, perhaps paradoxically, continued to identify with French customs, language, and principles, Dessalines rejected European “civilization,” seeing in the adoption of its values a danger of imitating colonial structures and of instigating a new servitude in Haiti. Such was his resistance to “civilized” values that he refused to live in the colonial cities, instead establishing himself at Marchand, close to the Cahos hills. Also, whereas Toussaint and Christophe suppressed Vodun adherents, Dessalines was deeply involved with the houngans, the Vodun priests. His Haitian constitution did not permit one dominant religion, and thereby simultaneously weakened Catholicism’s hold on religious power and legitimized Vodun. The 1804 Proclamation of Independence clearly expressed Dessalines’s francophobia, stating “Peace to our neighbors, but damn the French. Eternal hatred of France shall be our cry,” and imploring the Haitian people to, “Swear to the whole world, to prosperity, to ourselves, to renounce France forever and to die rather
369
than live under domination.” Dessalines’s rejection of all things “white” was also apparent in the 1805 constitution’s declaration that no white, of any nationality, could own property in Haiti. Certain whites—those Germans and Poles who had deserted Leclerc’s army in 1802–1803— could consider themselves Haitian, though all Haitians, whatever their color, would henceforth be known as “blacks,” a term that sought to replace the colonial “pigmentocracy,” the sliding scale of color and class identity, and to bring racial cohesion and equality to Haiti. The new republic faced many pressing problems, most notably the postindependence relationship with the foreign powers in the region, especially Britain, Spain, and the United States. Dessalines’s first speech as head of state sought to reassure these powers that Haiti posed no threat to their colonies. Although the constitution forbade foreign ownership of Haitian property (a law that would not be lifted until the U.S. occupation of 1915–1934), Dessalines was sensitive to the importance of trade, and actively sought to forge links with Britain and the United States. The Americans cooperated until French pressure led them to impose an embargo on Haiti in 1806. Dessalines controlled trade closely, applying taxes on all imported goods and on some exports, including coffee. Internally, too, Dessalines was beset by problems: the country was in ruins, and production was caught in a downward spiral. Also, despite his designation of all Haitians as blacks in the constitution, Dessalines was concerned about the perpetuation of the inherited colonial racial hegemony in the color and class conflicts between the predominantly mulatto anciens
370
DESSALINES, JEAN-JACQUES
libres (literally, “old freedmen”) and the mainly black nouveaux libres (new freedmen). Dessalines wished to eliminate this division, and unlike Toussaint, sought to unify black and mulatto into one larger, racially equal whole. He faced resistance, however, from the anciens libres, who were unwilling to give up their newly acquired lands and to lose the social advantages that they had inherited due to their lighter skin. The land issue was particularly delicate: many mulattoes had taken or been given lands owned by their fleeing white fathers. In 1804, Dessalines repealed all land transfers made after October 1802, effectively annulling mulatto claims to rich plantation lands. Although twentieth-century intellectuals like Jacques-Stephen Alexis and René Depestre later interpreted Dessalines’s policy as an attempt to democratize land ownership, literally to give the land back to the people, disinherited mulattoes resented the move, and it was this issue above all that led to his final demise. In addition, Dessalines was setting up his administration in a political void; the ruling white elite had been eliminated, and the new leaders of Haiti were essentially military generals, not politicians. Inevitably, therefore, the administration took on a military and authoritarian shape. There was a fine line between authoritarianism and autocracy, and Dessalines often crossed that line, alienating his fellow generals, as well as influential groups such as the mulattoes and the rich merchants. In 1806, an insurrection began in the South, with the support of most of the black and mulatto generals. On October 17, 1806, the Haitian emperor, as he had become known, was shot dead at Pont Rouge near Port-au-Prince. The order to assassinate Dessalines had come from a group of mulattoes and blacks in the South and West, a
group that included his close friend General Alexandre Pétion; moreover, Christophe, Dessalines’s successor, was aware of the plot. The brutality of Dessalines’s murder has passed into Haitian folklore: some accounts tell of how, when his body reached Port-auPrince, his head was shattered, and his feet, ears, and hands severed, and scraps of his body were thrown to the crowd. A subsequent inspiration for many Haitian folktales, Dessalines was the only revolutionary leader to be made into a loa, a Vodun god, image, or spirit. The state, too, has propagated a cult of Dessalines: on the centenary of the Proclamation of Independence, the Haitian national anthem, the “Dessalinienne,” was sung for the first time, and noiriste, or black nationalist, writers throughout the postindependence era have sought to rehabilitate Dessalines as a champion of the black masses. Duvalier proposed that Dessalines was “the first Haitian socialist,” assassinated by the mulattoes due to his egalitarian policies. Unlike Christophe or Toussaint, however, Dessalines has not been the subject of biographies written in English, nor has he been widely celebrated by modern Caribbean authors; Derek Walcott, well-known West Indian poet, presented him as a bloodthirsty butcher in his first published work, Henri Christophe, and later, in “What the Twilight Says,” called Dessalines and Christophe “squalid fascists who chained their own people.” Ultimately, it seems that Dessalines’s violent excesses, contradictions, and incoherences, in short his unalloyed, unrepentant “Otherness,” are less easily accommodated into humanistic or rational literary or historical discourse than into the realms of noiriste propaganda, or of the oral baroque and the popular fantastic. Martin Munro
DETROIT See also: Alexis, Jacques-Stephen; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Christophe, Henri; Depestre, René; Haiti; Slavery; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François; Vodun. References Arthur, Charles, and J. Michael Dash, eds. Libete: A Haiti Anthology. London: Latin American Bureau (Research and Action), 1999. Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1995. Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
DETROIT Founded by French soldier and colonialist Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, in 1701, Fort Pontchartrain du De Troit, soon known simply as Detroit, became one of the most strategic locations in North America, falling successively under French, British, and U.S. control.
371
Located on the Detroit and Rouge rivers at the narrowest point of the channel connecting Lake Erie and Lake Huron, and opposite the present-day city of Windsor, Ontario, Detroit evolved from a small fur trade outpost into a regional trade center. Captured by the British in 1760 during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Detroit again became a center of conflict three years later when tensions between natives and British regarding trade resulted in the unsuccessful five-month siege of the fort by a confederacy of Great Lakes tribes led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac. Detroit remained under British occupation until after the American Revolution. In 1802, it was incorporated as a city and in 1805 named capital of the Michigan Territory. A great fire swept through Detroit shortly after, burning it to the ground. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the arrival of steam navigation in the area in 1818
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac landing at Detroit, Lake Michigan, 1701. (Bettmann/Corbis)
372
DEVIL’S ISLAND
opened the region to trade and immigrants from the East Coast and Europe. The Great Lakes became the world’s largest inland waterway, with Detroit at its center, and although the state capital was moved to Lansing in 1847, the twentieth century again placed Detroit on the map of the world, thanks to the automobile industry. Initially intended to block British interests in the region, early Detroit grew rapidly under the French and by 1706 included a church, a barracks for soldiers, a warehouse, a storage area for gunpowder, an icehouse, and a beer brewery. For reasons of safety, convenience, and easy access to water by canoe, land was divided into traditional sections of “ribbon” farms of 400 to 900 feet wide and 1 to 3 miles deep perpendicular to the river. The first streets constructed bore the names of the French farmers (Chene, Beaubien, Dequindre) and ran parallel to the ribbon farm property boundaries. Much of modern-day east side and central Detroit maintains the French pattern, whereas main avenues in northwest Detroit are American style. The only operating entity today that dates to the city’s founding in 1701 is Sainte Anne’s parish. As the second-oldest parish in the United States, it is preceded only by Saint Augustine’s in Florida. Among the most notable priests to serve Sainte Anne’s was Gabriel Richard, who came to Detroit in 1796 and acted as a bridge between the remaining French and newly emerging U.S. communities. Richard helped found the University of Michigan in 1817, organized educational instruction for the hearing impaired, encouraged education for Native Americans, brought the first printing press to Detroit, and was elected to Congress in 1823, where he served for two years. Local printers produced religious books in
French throughout the nineteenth century to be used by parishioners at Sainte Anne’s, and the last French sermon was pronounced there in 1946. Maureen Waters See also: American Revolution; Automobiles; Catholic Church; French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Pontiac; Steamboats. References Dunnigan, Brian Leigh. Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Vander Hill, C. Warren. Settling the Great Lakes Frontier: Immigration to Michigan, 1837–1924. Lansing: Michigan Historical Commission, 1970. Woodford, Arthur M. This Is Detroit, 1701–2001. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001.
DEVIL’S ISLAND The notorious French penal colony in French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America. The first French effort to colonize Guiana, in 1763, failed utterly when tropical diseases and climate killed all but 2,000 of the initial 12,000 settlers. The survivors found refuge on the three small islands 10 miles off the coast, calling them collectively the Salvation Islands; individually, they were named Royal Island, Saint Joseph Island, and Devil’s Island—the last allegedly deriving from the flocks of black birds nesting there. Nearly a hundred years of further effort produced little progress, and in 1854 the French government decided to make Guiana a prison colony to which any male sentenced to a term at travaux forcés (hard labor) would be transported. Although most of the prisoners, called bagnards from the penal dockyards, bagnes, to which they had previously been
DEVIL’S ISLAND
373
Part of Detention House on Devil’s Island. Photo shows a part of the main detention house, facing the grand court, where guards are constantly on duty. The cells are veritable fortresses, with heavy steel doors and small openings on top through which air circulates. (Bettmann/Corbis)
condemned, were held on the mainland, the colony and its regime of horrors became known by the expressive and appropriate name “Devil’s Island.” To guarantee settlers for Guiana, a sentence of five to eight years required the convict to remain as a free colonist for an equal period, a penalty called doublage; for a sentence of any greater length, the convict was prohibited from ever leaving Guiana. Few ever left under any circumstances. Prisoners died so rapidly and in such great numbers that from 1867 to 1887 only convicts from France’s other colonies were sent to Guiana; after 1887, based on the arguments that hard labor punishment should be painful and exhausting and that the reputation of Devil’s Island would be a deterrent to
crime, all hard labor convicts were transported to the colony. Popular opinion changed by the early 1930s, and in 1938 legislation ordered all hard labor to be served in France. Plans to close the colony were delayed by World War II but were completed in 1946. During its existence, France transported approximately 56,000 prisoners to Devil’s Island. Fewer than 10 percent survived their sentence. That France, the most open, liberal government in Europe, produced and sustained this barbaric and repressive penal colony is one of history’s great ironies. Hard labor in Guiana meant cutting timber or constructing roads with only axes and shovels. Attempts to escape were rarely successful. Guards shot to kill. Free
374
DEYGLUN, HENRY
colonists were paid a bounty for reporting escapees. Inland tribes were hostile. Dangerous insects, spiders, and reptiles filled the swamps and jungles. Sharks patrolled the seas. Convicts who survived escape attempts were condemned to months of solitary confinement in the so-called tiger-cage cells on Saint Joseph Island, called “the man-eater” because so many did not survive. For long in France, the fate of men transported to Guiana was ignored. The great exception before World War I was Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely convicted for treason and held on Devil’s Island itself from 1895 to 1899. After World War I, the same conditions, sensationalized in leading newspapers and in The Dry Guillotine, a chilling account by René Belbenoit, who did manage to escape, seemed less acceptable and led to the decision ending transportation. In 1970, there was one last depiction of Devil’s Island, in Papillon, the alleged autobiography—many details were challenged—of another escapee, Henri Charrière, which three years later was made into an enormously successful U.S. film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. That readers and moviegoers would cheer for hard labor convicts demonstrated that attitudes toward crime and punishment had changed drastically. Benjamin F. Martin See also: Charrière, Henri; Dreyfus Case; Guiana. References Charrière, Henri. Papillon. New York: Morrow, 1970. Donet-Vincent, Danielle. La Fin du bagne. Rennes: Ouest-France, 1992. Redfield, Peter. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Wright, Gordon. Between the Guillotine and Liberty: Two Centuries of the Crime Problem in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
DEYGLUN, HENRY (1903–1971) Dramatist and novelist, born in Paris in 1903. Deyglun spent his childhood in Marseilles and interrupted his studies in 1918 to join the navy. Six months after the end of World War I, he traveled to Paris and was employed at the Théâtre du VieuxColombier, where he worked with director Jacques Copeau. At the same time, he sang in a club in Montmartre, Le Lapin à Gilles. He arrived in Montreal in September 1921 and quickly established a friendship with Fred Barry and Albert Duquesne, who were the directors of a theater group at Chanteclerc and then at the Théâtre SaintDenis. With them, he made his debut as an actor in Canada, and he collaborated with them in the founding of the Théâtre Stella in 1930. His first play, Bonne maman (Good Momma), was staged successfully at the Théâtre Chanteclerc in 1926 and was quickly reprised under the title La Mère abandonnée (The Abandoned Mother) at the Théâtre Saint-Denis. From 1926 to 1930, he wrote a dozen plays. In 1935, Gens de chez nous (People from Here), which had first been staged at the Théâtre National, toured France and Belgium in September 1937 under a new title, Vers la terre canadienne. At the same time, he embarked on a career in radio and great success at CKAC, then at CRCM (Radio Canada’s predecessor). From 1932 to 1940, he wrote several adaptations of dramatic texts for Le
DION, CÉLINE
Théâtre du docteur J. O. Lambert, Le Théâtre populaire (The Popular Theater), Le Théâtre Lux, Le Théâtre N. G. Valiquette, and Le Théâtre des étoiles (The Theater of the Stars), while also offering his own comic sketches, such as Octave et Cyprien and Nénette et Rintintin. He participated in La Rumba des radioromans (The Radio Novel Rumba, 1939) and created Vie de famille (Family Life, 1938–1947) and Les Secrets du docteur Morhanges (“The Secrets of Doctor Morhanges,” 1940–1947), radio serializations from which he took several episodes and adapted them for the stage. His greatest successes were, nevertheless, Le Roman d’une orphéline (The Novel of an Orphan Girl, 1936), which has been staged more than 2,000 times in Canada, France, Belgium, North Africa, and the United States, and Cœur de maman (Mother’s Heart, 1936), adapted from his first melodrama, turned into a twenty-episode radio serial, staged at the Théâtre Arcade, readapted for the cinema, and directed by René Delacroix in 1953. At the start of the 1950s, Deyglun founded the ephemeral Théâtre du Hasard and staged Jenny Madore there in 1952. He wrote a second film, L’Esprit du mal (The Spirit of Evil, 1954), produced by Richard Jarvis and directed by Jean-Yves Bigras, and he presented further dramatic texts for CKVL radio (1955–1960). Nevertheless, he spent more and more time writing chronicles and memoirs for radio broadcast or for publication in the written press, and he worked on the preparation of a historical account of performance entitled “Les Années folles” (The Crazy Years). The first manuscript was destroyed in a fire and the second, which was unfinished, is held at the National Archives of Canada. Deyglun died of cancer on February 27, 1971.
375
Deyglun’s work includes seventeen theater plays, two novels, and 32,000 pages of radio texts, as well as several newspaper and magazine articles. Lucie Robert See also: Montreal; Theater. Reference “Dossier Henry Deyglun.” L’Annuaire théâtral 1, no. 1 (1985).
DION, CÉLINE (1968–) Québécois and international pop singer. During the 1990s, Céline Dion became the most glittering, if at times controversial, symbol of the international success of francophone Quebec culture. Her personal itinerary and her worldwide commercial success, particularly in the United States and in France, conferred on her the status of a Quebec icon. In the context of cultural globalization, for the Québécois she symbolizes a small nation and a linguistic minority asserting themselves on the world stage. Born in Charlemagne, Quebec, on March 30, 1968, Dion began her career at the age of thirteen. In 1982, she achieved her first success abroad when she won the gold medal at an international festival in Tokyo. The following year, her single “D’amour ou d’amitié” (Of Love and Friendship) obtained a gold disc in France. In 1988 in Dublin, she won the Eurovision Song Contest. These successes, however, found little echo in the wider world. A huge star in her native Quebec since 1981, she remained relatively unknown elsewhere at the end of the 1980s. This began to change in 1990 with her first recording in English, Unison, which
376
DION, CÉLINE
Céline Dion sings “My Heart Will Go On” from the film Titanic. (Los Angeles Daily News/Corbis Sygma)
sold more than a million copies. Her presence on the soundtrack of the animated Disney film Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale and Wise, 1992) gave her in turn her first number one hit single in the United States and sent her second album to the top there and elsewhere round the globe. The Color of My Love (1993) outsold her previous albums, with 10 million sales worldwide, surpassing the record set by some sales figures that went back to the Beatles and confirmed her status as superstar. There followed appearances at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games
in Atlanta in 1996, and again on a film soundtrack, this time on that of James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), the biggest grossing film of the decade. Spectacular successes continued on the coattails of this unsinkable film, with the albums Falling into You (1996) and Let’s Talk about Love (1997). After an absence of two years, Dion reappeared in March 2002 with A New Day Has Come, which achieved similar success. Dion’s international fame in the 1990s was not limited to the English-speaking world. In the middle of the decade, she simultaneously launched herself into the French-speaking European market. In the same way that she had used producers and songwriters to penetrate the U.S. market, she collaborated with a French star, JeanJacques Goldman, to establish herself in France. The resulting album, D’eux (1995), was a huge critical and commercial success, selling nearly 7 million copies, a first for an album sung in French, and even selling 150,000 copies in English-speaking countries. S’il suffisait d’aimer (If It Were Enough to Love), another album written and produced by Goldman, was a hit in 1998. Several factors have helped to hoist Dion to status of heroine for the Québécois. The ideologues of the old French Canada had for long valued large families living a rural life as a mythical rampart against the encroachment of, and assimilation to, the Anglo-Saxon world. Dion explicitly echoes these founding myths, being the youngest of fourteen children from a modest background in a small rural town. The bearer of national “authenticity” for her local audience, she represents a shared memory. At the same time, more concrete factors, such as her worldwide commercial successes, contribute to her popularity in
DISNEYLAND PARIS
Quebec, where public opinion tends to celebrate her triumphs as those of a whole people. For while Dion uses the English language in her career, she does not submit to it. Equally at easy in the English- and French-speaking worlds, she happily crosses all barriers, including those of language. Because of her professional success and her continued emphasis in interviews on her “belonging” to Quebec, strong emotional bonds have developed between her and the cultural community of francophone Québécois. On the other hand, intellectuals in Quebec have been reluctant to recognize her value, importance, and significance as a figure around whom cultural identities coalesce. In the wake of her first successes on the world stage, Dion has been awarded the status of ambassador by Quebec public opinion, and the singer has herself claimed this status. She plays a determining role in the relations between Quebec, France, and the United States. The numerous expressions of admiration coming out of France for Dion arouse strong, contradictory feelings in Quebec francophones, who for a long time lived their relationship with France in a kind of “distant proximity,” characterized by a mixture of envy and affection and a wish for recognition. In semiological terms, the average French person “exists” in two ways in Quebec: as an admirable, superior, and cultured individual, and at the same time as the caricature of the arrogant, pedantic, and conceited maudit Français (bloody French). And so the Québécois react with glee at every celebration of Dion’s talent that comes out of the French (be the speaker a journalist, public figure, or simple admirer), for approval in this context means that the admirable is returning the
377
admiration and that there is no need to be arrogant. Dion has thus turned to the Québécois’s advantage the traditional terms of the relationship with France, and so partially satisfied their long-held quest for recognition. The relationship with the United States has different premises. There is certainly a love-hate relationship, but the Québécois seek not love from the world’s superpower, but rather the proof that they can compete with it. For a long time they had in the economic domain a negative image of themselves. Quebec elites before 1960 hammered in the idea that material prosperity was for English-speaking Protestants. But while Quebec nationalists condemned the album Unison as a sellout, others chose to see it as a first stage in conquering the world. Today Céline Dion illustrates the fact that Quebec can win on the world stage. So her successes in the United States are perceived as the jewel in the crown, confirming her symbolic conquest of the world of pop music. Frédéric Demers See also: Music (Pop); Quebec; Quiet Revolution. References Beaunoyer, Jean. Céline Dion: une femme au destin exceptionnel. Montreal: Québec Amérique, 1997. Demers, Frédéric. Céline Dion et l’identité québécoise. Montreal: VLB, 1999.
DISNEYLAND PARIS Statistics on tourism in France for the late 1990s showed that Notre-Dame de Paris received almost as many visitors per annum as Disneyland Paris. Between 10 and 13 million people annually undertake pilgrimage to the French Disneyland, making it
378
DISNEYLAND PARIS
Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse visit the site of the future Disneyland in Marne-la-Vallée (1985). (Alain Nogues/Corbis Sygma)
the most popular tourist attraction not only in France but in the whole of Europe. While the city of Paris often seems close to becoming a gigantic theme park in its own right, the close competition between “Mickey” in the Ile-de-France and the Parisian home of the Virgin Mary exemplifies a number of the issues raised by the Disneyland enclave of U.S. culture in the outskirts of Paris. In the United States, Disney set up the Disneyland amusement park in Anaheim, California, in 1955 and Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, in 1971. In Japan, Tokyo Disneyland was created in 1983. Euro Disneyland was opened in April 1992, and in 2002 a second theme park was added focusing on film, animation, special effects, television, and new audiovisual technologies. Located some 20
miles east of Paris in the Seine-et-Marne department’s “new town” of Marne-la-Vallée, these theme/amusement parks have given rise to considerable discussion— much of it impassioned—about culture (French and American) in general, and more specifically, about the appropriateness of such an entertainment center on French soil. In microcosm, Euro Disneyland, or Disneyland Paris—as it was renamed in 1995—is a case study for French debates on cultural values and standards and national identity and globalization. More concretely and prosaically, it is an example of planned local economic development designed to bring employment and infrastructures to a struggling area in the shadow of Paris. The best way to understand Disneyland Paris in real terms is to analyze its creation and development both
DISNEYLAND PARIS
as economic development and cultural symbol, since globalization is as much economic as it is cultural, and the French state’s reasoning in supporting the project was grounded in the conviction that leisure, tourism, and culture were integral parts of the new economic landscape. The Euro Disneyland project was discussed by a number of French governments of both Left and Right during the 1980s and early 1990s. Agreements signed by Prime Ministers Fabius (PS [Parti Socialiste]) in 1985 and Chirac (RPR [Rassemblement pour la république]) in 1997 with the Walt Disney Company contracted the French state to work with Disney’s French subsidiary until 2017 in a variety of activities including, but not restricted to, the amusement park. It has been suggested that the Disney theme park should be understood as part of President Mitterrand’s policy of grands travaux, which throughout his two periods in office endowed France—or Paris—with a number of impressive cultural and architectural monuments of various kinds, such as the Opéra de la Bastille, the Grand Louvre and Pyramids, the Cité de la musique, the Grande Arche at La Défense, and the Très grande bibliothèque (TGB; “Very Large Library”) later to become the Bibliothèque de France François Mitterrand. Although there are some similarities between these projects and Euro Disneyland, there are also important differences, and a more appropriate—and enlightening—comparison should perhaps be made with the “grand stade” (great stadium) project, which eventually produced the Stade de France in Saint-Denis for the 1998 World Cup Finals in soccer. Mitterrandian grands travaux were in essence intended to be prestigious monuments of and to high cultural values such as
379
(classical) music, (fine) art and avant-garde architecture and literature, and (elite) knowledge. The main grands travaux bequeathed to France by Mitterrand are highculture, noncommercial iconic institutions intended to reaffirm France’s cultural exceptionalism—variously interpreted—in a globalized world. In contrast, the Stade de France, despite strenuous efforts at every stage of its planning, construction, and running to make it a multiuse facility, is firmly linked to sport and popular culture rather than to high culture in any of its forms. Still, the Stade de France is—as the name eventually chosen for it suggests—a symbol of France and an arena for the expression of French sporting prowess and national sentiment, whereas Euro Disneyland/Disneyland Paris—however it is named—is a symbol of American culture. Much of the furor of discussion raised by EuroDisney focuses solely on the cultural and political symbolism of the French state’s encouragement of its location in France. Commentators of both the Left and Right decried the launch of the theme park by suggesting that it was a “cultural Chernobyl” or ironically noting that its timing coincided neatly with the French people’s approval of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on European integration and France’s consequent abdication of sovereignty. The left-wing Republican politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement diagnosed France’s acceptance of EuroDisney as an act of collective schizophrenia, and the philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, in an article in Libération, interpreted it as being another way in which France was prepared “to dream herself American.” These analyses will be discussed below, but first, as background, there are other ways in which “Mickey”
380
DISNEYLAND PARIS
engages France in her permanent sociocultural dialogue with the United States. Under the terms of the agreement of 1987 between the Walt Disney Company and the French state, elements of government and local authority planning policy in the Paris region have to be undertaken jointly with the EuroDisney company. In this way, a new urban center based around an out-of-town shopping mall, new RER station and road links, university campus, and housing is planned for Val-de-Paris in the Seine-et-Marne, amounting to a new ville nouvelle (new town). In addition to the disquiet provoked in some Republican quarters at the influence of an American corporation on state aménagement du territoire (planning), perhaps more concretely, small shopkeepers and retailers in the area have complained bitterly (as French commerce traditionally has in a Poujadist corporate reflex) that the new commercial center will threaten established livelihoods and employment by the introduction of U.S. retail approaches. This local social and political opposition to the influence and actions of EuroDisney has echoed complaints from the Communist Party and the Communist CGT (Confédération générale du travail) trade union in particular—and other political and union bodies—over the management style prevailing in the theme parks themselves. In the first ten years of its existence, Disneyland Paris was run by five CEOs, alternating between U.S. and French managers, as the human relations difficulties of running an Americaninspired business in France have required a certain amount of smoothing out. In particular, Disney rules on the physical appearance of employees conflicted with French expectations of personal freedoms.
The establishment of EuroDisney in 1992 as another bridgehead in France for American popular culture brought a predictable outcry from intellectuals and cultural commentators. The fact that government seemed to be not only permitting but actively encouraging Disney to choose France rather than Spain as the site for their European theme park shocked cultural elites and the general population alike, accustomed as they traditionally were to either state promotion of high culture (in the manner of the novelist André Malraux, when he served as minister of cultural affairs in the sixties) or the Socialist administration’s encouragement of popular French cultures “pour tous” (for all, in the manner of Jack Lang, minister of culture, later culture and communication, in the eighties). Wherever Jack Lang had encouraged popular cultural forms such as rap, hip-hop, and ragga, they had at least been French (if originally imported genres) and francophone, and they had essentially been supported by the state rather than by the private sector. EuroDisney did everything wrong: it was U.S. popular culture, at best purveying American interpretations of classics of European children’s literature; it was “cultural” distraction provided by an organization driven by the profit motive; it was leisure as an industry. All this meant that for many concerned by globalization and its effects on French culture and society, the theme park at Marne-la-Vallée was another major step toward the CocaColonization of France. What visitors can see at Disneyland Paris is often interesting sui generis. Apart from the unavoidable curiosity of a “Disneyworld” located in the Seine-et-Marne, the park’s substitution of pastiche for au-
DJIAN, PHILIPPE
thenticity and of appearance for reality underscores contemporary questioning of what is to be considered real; the ways in which the stories of Andersen, the brothers Grimm, and even Victor Hugo (in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) are reinterpreted by Disney for European audiences raise issues concerning the conservation of literary heritage. Perhaps more hopefully, the second park’s exhibitions on cinema, animation, and new technologies (rather than representations of traditional popular cultural forms of children’s literature) and the original exhibitions in which technology and industry are presented as leisure point to a feature of the French demand for theme parks, which some analysts see as an antidote to the much feared U.S.-inspired dumbing down of French civilization. In a market for theme parks that is still growing, there appears to be a demand for attractions that combine amusement with education, just as Disneyland Paris complements its traditional Disney material with other—arguably less trivial—displays, Franco-French theme parks such as Parc Astérix (founded 1990), but more significantly the Futuroscope (Poitiers, 1987), the Cité des sciences (Paris, 1984), and former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s Vulcania (Auvergne, 2002) attract visitors to see and learn about nature and technology. Since the early years of low visitor numbers, financial difficulties, weak stock exchange quotations, and conflicts with the staff and unions, Disneyland Paris has become a highly successful commercial venture. In a context of expanding demand for amusement parks, “Mickey”—and the cultural icons and values it purveys—is more than holding its own both against other parks in France and against the classical
381
monuments of French national heritage such as Notre-Dame and other, lesser grands travaux of the past. Disneyland Paris is becoming accepted, politically (the generous state funding, tax breaks, and loans are being forgotten) and culturally, since it has even achieved the consecration (in terms of popular culture) of hosting a stage finish of the Tour de France. Hugh Dauncey See also: Anti-Americanism; Architecture; Baudrillard, Jean; Chirac, Jacques; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Hunchback of Notre-Dame/NotreDame de Paris; Lang, Jack; Mitterrand, François; Sport; Tourism. References Ariès, Paul. Disneyland: Le royaume désenchanté. Villeurbanne: Golias, 2002. Baudrillard, Jean. “Disneyworld Company.” Libération (March 4, 1996): 5. Hauteserre, Anne-Marie d’. “The French Mode of Social Regulation and Sustainable Tourism Development: The Case of Disneyland Paris.” Tourism geographies 1, no. 1 (February 1999): 86–107. Philips, Deborah. “Carnival and Control at Disneyland Paris.” Tourism and Tourist Attractions. Ed. Neil Ravenscroft et al. Eastbourne, UK: LSA, 1998. Smadja, Gilles. Mickey l’arnaque: EuroDisneyland. Paris: Messidor, 1998.
DJIAN, PHILIPPE (1949–) French writer, born in Paris on June 3, 1949. The author of novels and short stories, as well as a song lyricist, Djian has been called “the most read writer of his generation” since his best-selling works of the 1980s, most famously Betty Blue (37,2° le matin) of 1985. He has lacked critical acclaim, but he is the contemporary French writer most influenced by U.S. literature.
382
DORZIAT, GABRIELLE
In his novels, a rapid, acerbic style, in which the everyday and the universal mingle, combines with a depiction of landscapes that seem to recall the Americas: forests of firs, which could be in Canada, the northern United States, or the Belgian Ardennes, and arid regions that resemble Texas or Provence. The names he gives to his characters are also elusive: Franck, Patrick, Betty, Eileen, Francis, Ethel. Music is very present in his texts and is more precisely marked: rock, Bob Dylan, and PJ Harvey, among others. Critical hostility and a large readership in the early phase of his career are explained by the important role of sex in his books and the liberties he takes with the French language. Djian makes no bones about the American influence. In an essay, “Ardoise” (2002), he himself pays tribute to the ten writers to whom he feels in debt, and only two of them are not Americans, Blaise Cendrars and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The best known are Herman Melville, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, but also J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac (whose influence is palpable in Djian’s style), and less famous figures such as Richard Brautigan and Raymond Carver. Djian’s works include a trilogy, Assassins (1994), Criminels (1995), and Sainte-Bob (1997); his most recent work is a volume of short stories, Frictions (2003). Djian also writes the lyrics for the songs in French by the Swiss Stéphan Eicher. As a teenager, Djian traveled around the United States for four months, and even worked at the French bookshop in the Rockefeller Center in New York. He crossed the continent as far as Colombia. After the success of Betty Blue and the film adaptation (37°2 le matin, directed by Beineix in 1986), he moved in 1989 to
Martha’s Vineyard where he stayed two years; since then he has lived in Florence, Lausanne, Biarritz, and Paris. He returned to work in the cinema in 2003, as scriptwriter for Luc Bondy’s Ne fais pas ça!/ “Don’t Do That!” Pablo Aiquel See also: Beineix, Jean-Jacques; Céline, LouisFerdinand; Cendrars, Blaise; Dylan, Bob; Hemingway, Ernest; Kerouac, Jack; Miller, Henry Valentine; Remakes. References Boudjedra, Mohamed. Philippe Djian. Monaco: Du Rocher, 1992. Djian, Philippe, and Catherine Flohic. Philippe Djian revisité: Rencontre avec Catherine Flohic. Paris: Les Flohic, 2000. Platten, David. Philippe Djian. 37°2 le matin. Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995.
DORZIAT, GABRIELLE (GABRIELLE SIGRIST) (1880–1979) Already a well-known theater actress before she went into films, Dorziat was a star of the Parisian night and friend of many authors and theater directors such as Lucien Guitry, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Giraudoux. As early as 1900, Gabrielle Dorziat was ubiquitous on the boulevard stage, appearing in the likes of La Bourse ou la vie/ Stock Exchange [or Purse] or Life! (1900) by Alfred Camus, which she created at the Théâtre du Gymnase. Gabrielle Dorziat made her first appearance onscreen in 1921 in a film by Henri Houry, L’Infante à la rose/The Infanta with the Rose. It was not, however, until 1935 that she returned to the studios and dedicated herself to the silver screen with regularity. She was seen in Mayerling by Anatole Litvak, and then in six other
DOS PASSOS, JOHN
films in 1937 alone. She kept up this rhythm and made no fewer than sixty-six films between that time and 1964. From her point of view, however, her film work was always eclipsed by the theater, and if some successes are remembered, such as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Manon (1949), or Les Parents terribles/The Storm Within (1948) by Jean Cocteau, in which she played a witty but severe old aunt, many films to which she contributed did not make it into film history. She devoted herself to theater, and this gave her much public as well as professional esteem, in France and abroad. Thus, after signing a contract in December 1913, she left for New York for the first time on September 5, 1914, shortly after the declaration of war. She was hired to act in L’Epervier by Francis de Croisset, scheduled at the Shubert Theater run by William Faversham. After the company went to Baltimore to “try the play on the dogs” (Dorziat, p. 193), as she said, that is, to let the show get into its stride, it played in New York for 136 performances. On the first night, on hearing whistles, she became angry with the public before it was explained to her that whistling was a sign of success, and not the same as booing. From then on, she acquired the habit of having a chat with the public after each show. “I don’t know a more hospitable and warm country in the world than America,” she used to say. Helped by the jeweler Louis Cartier based in New York, she organized a collection of donations for war-torn France. Afterward she made numerous tours, playing in English, in the United States, South America, Great Britain, and Canada. She left France after two months of rehearsals for eighteen roles, parts of a reper-
383
toire of twenty or twenty-two plays, in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The tours were exhausting but sometimes surprising, as in Canada where, after a full month of success, she had problems with local clergy who reproached her for her daring repertoire. She published her life story in 1968, Côté cour, côté jardin/Over the Courtyard or Garden, relating in lively fashion her vast theater and cinema experience. Roger Bourdeau See also: Argentina; Brazil; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cocteau, Jean; Theater; World War I. Reference Dorziat, Gabrielle. Côté cour, côté jardin. Paris/Geneva: La Palatine, 1968.
DOS PASSOS, JOHN (1896–1970) American writer. Dos Passos’s grandfather was a Portuguese immigrant who settled in Philadelphia as a cobbler. At the age of forty-seven, his father, a respected lawyer and author of several treatises on industrial commerce, married Lucy Addison, a woman from the South. John Roderigo Dos Passos was born of this union on January 14, 1896, in Chicago. His parents took him to Mexico and to Belgium, and then to Britain. Upon his return to the United States, he studied at Harvard and graduated in 1916. On condition that he renounce his intention to enlist in World War I, his father offered him the chance to travel to Spain to study architecture. Dos Passos’s essays on his stay there are collected in Rosinante to the Road Again (1922). In 1918, he enlisted in the ambulance division in France, a meeting place for authors of the so-called Lost Generation, which included such figures as
384
DOS PASSOS, JOHN
John Dos Passos, U.S. essayist, novelist. (National Archives)
Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His wartime experiences gave him the inspiration for his first two novels: One Man’s Initiation (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), the latter his first success. After the 1918 armistice, Dos Passos traveled farther in Europe, including Paris where he frequented the Montparnasse district. He then abandoned the topic of war and wrote two novels about New York: Streets of Night (1923) and Manhattan Transfer (1925). As a reaction against Broadway, he founded the New Playwrights Theater in New York in 1927 with four other young authors; it staged, among other productions, his three plays: Fortune Heights, The Garbage Man, and Airway, Inc. Pursuing his critique of all forms of oppression, he wrote The 42nd Parallel in 1919 and The Big Money, which were published together
in 1938 in his U.S.A. trilogy, which signaled the end of the Lost Generation. He published in 1934 In All Countries, writings that stemmed from his travels; he then wrote another trilogy, District of Columbia, which included Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949). He also published other works, including Midcentury (1961). Dos Passos adopted in his writing elements of the cinematographic techniques of David Wark Griffith and Sergey Eisenstein, and many other elements—interior monologue, American slang, journalistic information—fed his work, lending it a critical and social foundation whose influence was felt by subsequent generations of European and American authors, including in France the “unanimist” groupe de l’Abbaye founded by Georges Duhamel and Charles Vildrac. Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel cycle Les Chemins de la liberté/The Roads to Freedom (1945–1947) is indebted to Dos Passos techniques of simultaneity, especially the second volume, Le Sursis/ The Reprieve. Dos Passos died in Baltimore on September 28, 1970, without having completed his final novel, The Thirteenth Chronicle. His posthumous publications include Easter Island (1971), The Fourteenth Chronicle (1973), and Century’s Ebb (1974). Aurea Fernandez Rodríguez See also: Duhamel, Georges; Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Hemingway, Ernest; Mexico; Romains, Jules; Sartre, Jean-Paul; World War I. References Hook, Andrew, ed. Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
DOUBROVSKY, SERGE Robles Pazos, J. “Prologue” to Manhattan Transfer. John Dos Passos. Madrid: Cenit, 1929. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “A propos de John Dos Passos et de 1919.” Situations, I. Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris: Gallimard, 1947: 14–24.
DOUBROVSKY, SERGE (1928–) Serge Doubrovsky is best known for his work on life writing. His five volumes of autobiographical writing, including Fils (“Son,” 1977) and Un Amour de soi/A Self Love (1982), have received considerable critical acclaim. Indeed, the most controversial of these works, Le Livre brisé (“The Broken Book”), was awarded the Prix Médicis in 1989. Doubrovsky’s literary criticism has included work on Corneille, Sartre, and Proust, although he is perhaps best known for his contribution to lifewriting theory. In particular, he is reputed to have coined the term auto-fiction to refer to an innovative form of life writing. Like classic autobiographies, auto-fictions establish a homology between the author, narrator, and protagonist of a work, and draw their inspiration from real-life experiences. Unlike classic autobiography, however, they recognize the fallibility of memory and the impossibility of telling “the truth” of a life. Doubrovsky’s own auto-fictions are highly literary endeavors, reveling in wordplay and textual innovation. Doubrovsky’s relationship with the French Atlantic is both enduring and complex. Since emigrating to the United States in 1955 to take up a temporary post as a French assistant at Harvard, his life has remained in continual flux between France and America. As a professor of French literature, his working life has regularly alter-
385
nated between the New York and the Parisian branches of New York University. Within his auto-fictional writings, the dual attachment to France and the United States is constructed as not only one of the fundamental organizing features of his life, but also of considerable importance to Doubrovsky’s textually constructed identity. The geographical division is cited as the source of considerable angst for Doubrovsky’s textual self, who never establishes a coherent home space in either country. On the contrary, he describes himself as living in an entre-deux or in-between situation, caught between two cultures and two languages, between his Paris-based mother and his American first wife and daughters. Within his writing, Doubrovsky seems to attribute the complexity of his relationship with France and the United States to the sense of cultural dispossession that he felt as a French Jew living in Paris during the occupation. At this time, the teenaged Doubrovsky was forced to spend almost a year in hiding in a relative’s house in the outskirts of Paris in order to escape Nazi persecution. Although France remains the site of Doubrovsky’s literary success and the only place to which the Self he constructs in his texts can contemplate retiring, he is strongly attached to the United States. In his writing, he describes this country in terms of une terre promise (a promised land), as a land of opportunity and a melting pot of cultures. Doubrovsky’s textual construction of the French Atlantic, then, seems to position France as the Old World, which remains marked by anti-Semitism, and the United States as the New World, in which he is able to transcend his ethnicity through professional success. Elizabeth H. Jones
386
DREYFUS CASE See also: World War II. References Jones, Elizabeth H. “De la patrie perdue à la patrie recyclée: Home as a Collage of Recycled Cultural Practices in Serge Doubrovsky’s Autofiction.” L’Esprit créateur 42, no. 4 (winter 2002): 17–27. Robin, Régine. “Trou de mémoire: Le travail de la judéité.” Les Temps modernes, nos. 611–612 (December 2000–January/ February 2001): 192–209.
DREYFUS CASE The court-martial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer wrongly accused of transmitting military secrets to Germany in 1894, attracted little interest throughout Europe and across the Atlantic until the publication in 1898 of the letter beginning “J’accuse,” novelist Emile Zola’s indictment of the French General Staff. By the following year, the national scandal had erupted into an international affair, triggering demonstrations, largely in support of Dreyfus, from New York to Budapest. The most celebrated case of the epoch, the Dreyfus Affair became inextricably linked with issues of nationalism, anti-Semitism, modern Zionism, the separation of church and state, civil liberties, and more. In the late summer of 1894, a French undercover agent in the German attaché’s office in Paris discovered a memorandum dealing with French military materiel. Comparing the handwriting with that of General Staff officers, the army’s intelligence unit rushed to accuse Alfred Dreyfus, a staff probationer, of treason. Scion of a prosperous Alsatian family and a fervent patriot, the captain protested his innocence. But he had no allies in high places. Intensely private and widely disliked, he was also the only Jewish officer assigned to the
General Staff at that time. Court-martialed and then “degraded” in front of crowds shouting “Death to the Jews!” the prisoner was exiled to Devil’s Island off the northeastern coast of South America. In 1896, new evidence pointed to another officer as author of the treasonous memorandum, but Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy’s courtmartial, delayed until 1898, ended with an acquittal by unanimous vote. Esterhazy, unlike Dreyfus, enjoyed protection. Shocked by that injustice, Zola penned his attack on the General Staff. Divisions deepened between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, and anti-Semitic riots spread throughout France and French Algeria. Later in 1898, further revelations confirmed that forgeries had been inserted into Dreyfus’s court-martial dossier, and after Esterhazy fled to London, the army ordered the Devil’s Island prisoner back for a “revision” of his case. Reported to the world by legions of journalists and photographers, that dramatic trial ended with yet another shocking verdict: military judges reconvicted Dreyfus with “extenuating circumstances.” Immediate protests from throughout Europe and America (including threats to boycott the Paris World’s Fair of 1900) helped prompt the French government to grant the prisoner a presidential pardon in September 1899. Seven years later France’s highest court affirmed Esterhazy’s guilt and reinstated Dreyfus in the army, complete with the Legion of Honor. In the United States at the height of the affair, a Dreyfus Propaganda Committee rallied to the prisoner, and Mark Twain joined less notable citizens who sent letters of support. A community of “Frenchdescended Huguenots” based in Massachusetts condemned the intolerance rampant
DREYFUS CASE
387
Captain Alfred Dreyfus, facing left, with three other French military officers, all in uniform. (Library of Congress)
in France, and in the wake of the presidential pardon, Dreyfus received invitations to lecture in the United States. He declined them all, but the symbolic case endured on both sides of the Atlantic. Zionists pointed to the affair as proof of the failure of assimilation and the need for a Jewish state; militant nationalists from Quebec to Languedoc perpetuated the image of Dreyfus as traitorous Jew; and in 1927, in the closing stages of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, civil libertarians looked to the example, as the New York Times reported, of “Alfred Dreyfus of Devil’s Island fame.”
Finally, in both France and America, the affair figured prominently in the history of motion pictures. Pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès re-created the affair’s major events in a fifteen-minute film in 1899 (the longest and most “realistic” of its time), and the American motion picture, The Life of Emile Zola, released in 1938, garnered an Academy Award, though that and other films dealing with the affair were banned in France until 1959. And in the plastic arts, as in cinemas, the image of Dreyfus continues to inspire admiration and venom. While a statue of the captain on Paris’s Left
388
DUBOS, RENÉ JULES
Bank commemorates his courage, militant nationalists smear on its base the graffiti of intolerance. Michael Burns See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Devil’s Island; Twain, Mark; Zola, Emile. References Bredin, Jean-Denis. The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Braziller, 1986. Burns, Michael. France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Feldman, Egal. The Dreyfus Affair and the American Conscience. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981. Kleeblatt, Norman L., ed. The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
DUBOS, RENÉ JULES (1901–1982) One of the twentieth century’s foremost microbiologists and public intellectuals, René Jules Dubos was born in Saint-Bricesous-Forêt, France, on February 20, 1901, into a family of rural butchers. Dubos showed early academic promise beyond the limits of the one-room school that he attended in his youth in Hénonville, a small farming village. In 1914, on the eve of war, his family moved to Paris, where his educational opportunities were enriched at the Collège Chaptal. After overcoming a series of childhood hardships, Dubos was accepted by the Institut National Agronomique, where he began his formal scientific training. In 1922, unable to accept a scholarship at the Ecole d’Agriculture Coloniale in Paris because his susceptibility to fever made him ineligible to journey to Indochina, René took instead a position in Rome with the League of Nations’ International Institute of Agriculture.
In 1924 Dubos met future U.S. Nobel laureate Selman Waksman at a scientific conference in Europe. Having already expressed interest in traveling to the United States to complete his scientific training, Dubos soon accompanied him back to Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he completed a doctoral dissertation on soil microbiology under Waksman’s guidance in 1927. Later that year Dubos began his professional association with the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, remaining there for the next fifty years. In his time at the Rockefeller, Dubos carried out pathbreaking research in biomedicine and environmental microbiology dealing with a host of issues involving microbial genetics, enzymology, immunology, and the experimental pathology of pneumonia and tuberculosis. In 1934 Dubos married his first wife, Marie Louis-Bonnet, who died unexpectedly of pulmonary tuberculosis in early 1942. Prior to her death Dubos carried out the most important research of his career involving the discovery of the antibiotic characteristics of tyrocidin and gramicidin. Derived from soil samples of the bacteria Bacillus brevus, these were the first of the antibiotics that soon transformed the face of modern medicine. This success resulted in international scientific acclaim and numerous awards, including election to the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1945 and the 1948 Lasker Award. Dubos spent the war years 1942–1944 at Harvard University working on tuberculosis and simultaneously carrying out topsecret research on biological warfare for the U.S. Army. The recipient of more than forty-one honorary degrees from universities around the world, Dubos is perhaps best remembered today less for his scientific accomplishments than for his author-
DUBUFFET, JEAN
ship of a series of popular yet intellectually rigorous books for nonscientists, most written in the last third of his career. So Human an Animal, awarded the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, is representative of his writing style. Making the historical and philosophical evolution of modern scientific practice accessible to lay readers, René Jules Dubos was able to explain the powerful impact such activity had had on both the world’s environment and on human society. Gerard J. Fitzgerald See also: World War I; World War II. References Dubos, René J., and Jean Dubos. The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Hirsh, James J., and Carole L. Moberg. “René Jules Dubos: February 20, 1901–February 20, 1982.” Biographical Memoirs Volume 58, National Academy of Sciences, 1989. Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences Press, 1989: 133–161.
DUBUFFET, JEAN (1901–1985) French painter, writer, sculptor, sometime untrained musician, born in Le Havre, France. His use of everyday materials and dirt mashed into his pictures marked a key moment in late twentieth-century art. His attacks on academic art were equally influential, whether in the form of his own painted, cartoonlike worlds, free of contemporary perspective, of his writings, or of his championing of art brut (raw art), a type of art essentially unacknowledged until his interest in the 1940s. For Dubuffet, like the surrealists, art came from somewhere outside rational experience,
389
and who better to take us there than the insane, the “untalented,” the childlike. Unlike the surrealists, that those who produced the art should be mad was not enough—it would still be the products that counted. This focus on the product can be seen in the vast amount of time he himself spent developing his techniques, ordering his work into series, and collating his own catalogue raisonné. His early work nonetheless set the tone for his career: in these pictures we see flattened landscapes (and often townscapes) with cartoonlike figures, out of scale, sometimes unconnected even with the rest of the specific form of nonperspective set up in the picture’s visual field. Dubuffet was a late starter as an artist, and the French public and critics were equally slow to pick up on his work. He effectively began painting in the 1940s and was very quickly recognized in the United States as an important figure. His pictures sold well from regular shows in Pierre Matisse’s New York gallery, and as the leading modernist critic Clement Greenberg was writing about him positively in 1946, Dubuffet represented a major exception at a time when French art was seen as hopelessly behind the times. The Parisian art world persistently rejected Dubuffet’s naïve, primitivist pictures and did not know what to make of his use of clay, earth, and dirt within paintings (notably his Matériologies series). This use is precisely what caught Greenberg’s attention, as he took this interest in the material aspect of a picture (as opposed to a straightforward painting), correctly, as signaling a new departure for “painting.” Dubuffet’s first major retrospective took place in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), in 1962. The first staging of his Coucou
390
DUCHAMP, MARCEL
Bazaar, a moving tableau of his Hourloupe series (made up of red, blue, and black lines only, in a continuous pictorial space, or sculpture), took place in New York, in 1973. The American reception of Dubuffet continually contributed to his reputation as a major artist of the twentieth century. Although he stayed in New York (in the Bowery) in 1951–1952, little of the United States features in his work, except the Bowery bums he liked. What singles Dubuffet out as an artist is that amid the portentousness of postwar art, his work is both inventive and humorous (see his portraits and his “Beard” series). Dubuffet died in Paris in 1985. Paul Hegarty See also: Painting. Reference Dupleix, Sophie, and Daniel Abadie, eds. Jean Dubuffet. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2001.
DUCHAMP, MARCEL (1887–1968) Prominent avant-garde painter and installation artist, most often associated with the manifestations of dada, Marcel Duchamp was born near Blanville (Normandy, France) in an upper-middle-class family. In 1904, he joined his elder artist brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian. His early works were postimpressionist in style. During the following years, Duchamp’s paintings displayed the influence of fauvism (Paradise, 1910–1911; Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel, 1910), and cubism (Chess Players, 1911). Between 1911 and 1913, he became involved with the group of artists known as the Golden Section, alongside
Marcel Duchamp, prominent avant-garde painter and installation artist. (Library of Congress)
Fernand Léger, and started using cubist techniques in an attempt to capture movement on canvass (Sad Young Man in a Train, 1911; King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, 1912). Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), first shown at the Salon des Indépendants, then at the New York Armory Show in 1913, aroused fierce controversies and established Duchamp’s reputation in the United States. The same year, Duchamp created his first installation piece, Bicycle Wheel (mounted upside down on a kitchen stool), which announced the famous series of readymades (a concept he launched three years later). The idea of taking banal objects from their everyday environment, and endowing them with an iconoclastic message by signing them and providing a title for what is thereafter displayed as an “art object” (e.g., Bottle Rack, 1914), predated
DUCHARME, RÉJEAN
the first dada manifestations in Paris, and exerted a powerful influence on avantgarde movements in France and the United States, most notably on postwar pop- and op-art paintings and installations. Duchamp’s provocative Fountain—1917 (a urinal signed R. Mutt) was refused by the Society of Independent Artists and the Armory Show. As early as 1913, Duchamp started elaborating one of his most complex mixed-media works, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), which he officially declared “unfinished” in 1923. In 1915, he traveled to the United States and met Man Ray, who was to become one of his closest friends and collaborators. From 1920 to 1926, the two artists worked together on a series of experiments with optics and movement: Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics)—1920 and Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics)— 1925. This project inspired Duchamp’s film Anémic Cinéma (1926), which he produced with the help of Man Ray and Marc Allégret, and which included a combination of verbal puns and optical effects. During the early 1920s, Duchamp cofounded (with Katharine Dreier) the Société Anonyme, Inc., which was devoted to the propagation of modern art in the United States, and he edited the only issue of the magazine New York Dada (1921) with Man Ray. In 1934, Duchamp published the Green Box, which contained a series of documents related to The Large Glass. During World War II, Duchamp helped Breton organize the 1942 surrealist exhibition in New York City and coedited (with Ernst and Breton) the magazine VVV. In 1954, he married Teeny Salter, and in 1955 he became an American citizen. For the last twenty years of his life,
391
Duchamp worked secretly on a major installation piece, Etant donnés/ Given, which has been posthumously exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ramona Fotiade See also: Avant-Gardes; Breton, André; Cinema, 1895–1945; Painting; Ray, Man; Sculpture; Surrealism; World War II. References Sanouillet, M., and Elmer Peterson, eds. The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp: Salt Seller. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975. Schwarz, Arturo. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. London/New York: Thames and Hudson/Abrams, 1969.
DUCHARME, RÉJEAN One of Quebec’s most famous and respected writers, Réjean Ducharme was first published in 1966, at the age of twentyfour, by Gallimard. After having been rejected by Pierre Tisseyre, editor of the Cercle du livre de France in Montreal, Ducharme’s novel L’Avalée des avalés/The Swallower Swallowed, along with L’Océantume and Le Nez qui voque, were accepted for publication by Raymond Queneau for the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard. Subsequently to Tisseyre’s rejection, Ducharme, following a friend’s advice, sent his three manuscripts to France in a single envelope. L’Avalée des avalés was listed for the Goncourt literary prize, and although Ducharme did not win the award, he was compared to Rimbaud, Céline, Vian, and Queneau. One of the first Quebec authors to be published in metropolitan France, Ducharme’s success participated greatly in the promotion of Quebec literature in Europe as well as in the United States.
392
DUFRESNE, DIANE
Since 1966, Ducharme has published novels (L’Hiver de force/Forced Winter [1973], Les Enfantômes [1976], La Fille de Christophe Colomb/The Daughter of Christopher Colombus [1969], Dévadé [1990], Va savoir/Go Figure [1994], Gros mots/“Swear Words” [1999]), plays (Le Cid maghané [1968], Ines Pérée et Inat Tendu [1976], Ha ha! . . . [1982], Le Marquis qui perdit/“The Marquis Who Lost” [1969]), songs (for singer Robert Charlebois), and film scripts (Les Bons Débarras/Good Riddance [1980], which was distributed in France, and Les Beaux Souvenirs/Happy Memories [1981]). He is also known as Roch Plante, a pseudonym with which he signs collages made out of recycled materials. Throughout the years, Ducharme has been awarded a number of prizes, among which are: the Governor General’s Award for L’Avalée des avalés and the Prix de la Province de Québec for Le Nez qui voque in 1967, the Governor General’s Award for L’Hiver de force in 1973, the Prix BelgiqueCanada for the entirety of his work in 1974, the Prix France-Québec for Les Enfantômes in 1979, the Governor General’s Award for his play Ha ha! . . . in 1983, the Prix Gilles-Corbeil for Dévadé in 1990, and the Prix Athanase-David in 1994. What most distinctively characterizes Ducharme’s work is a fascination for childhood: the author perceives children as imprisoned inside an adult world, against which they must constantly fight to keep their creativity and imagination, a process that he immortalizes through fiction. His hyperbolic writing, which has been described as baroque, is marked by a constant use of neologisms and puns, a style that serves the characters’ biting irony. That irony is shared by the author, who, for the last thirty-five years and through-
out his successes, has remained outside of the public realm, refusing to grant interviews or be photographed, and sending a third party to receive awards in his place. This need for privacy, which has been described as the effet Ducharme (the Ducharme effect), has always been respected by the public, friends, journalists, and critics. A myth has surrounded the character of Réjean Ducharme since the beginning of his career, a myth that has not only been preserved but entertained within Quebec society. Martine Delvaux See also: Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Charlebois, Robert; Vian, Boris. References Laurent, Françoise. L’Oeuvre romanesque de Réjean Ducharme. Montreal: Fides, 1988. Nardout-Lafarge, Elizabeth. Réjean Ducharme: Une poétique du débris. Montreal: Fides, 2001. Schendel, Michel van. Ducharme l’inquiétant. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1967.
DUFRESNE, DIANE (1944–) Québécois singer and rock music performer. Dufresne gained popular and critical acclaim with her eccentric stage performances, which combined revealing costumes and erotic lyrics to predictable effect in the buttoned-up Quebec of the 1970s. Dufresne grew up in Montreal in a modest francophone family. Her mother, who died when Diane was thirteen, would dress her up for family parties, which no doubt contributed to her love of costumes and live performance. As a trainee nurse, Diane was encouraged by her singing teacher to embark on a musical career.
DUFY, RAOUL
Dufresne’s debut was difficult. She first appeared in a Montreal boîte à chanson (song club) in 1965, with a repertoire of French rive-gauche (Left Bank) artists, but was perceived as being too French. But when she tried her luck in Paris, interpreting the songs of Quebec artists (Gilles Vigneault), she was considered too exotic for mainstream success. In the meantime, however, she had met the composer and arranger François Cousineau, who became her partner and artistic collaborator. Their first collaboration was for the soundtrack of a soft-porn film (L’Initiation, 1970), in which Diane sang with a mock-prudish voice. Her musical career really took off in 1972 with the album Tiens-toé ben, j’arrive/Hold on, I’m Coming, written especially for her by Cousineau and Luc Plamondon. Plamondon, a Montreal lyricist, had met Dufresne in the late 1960s. Influenced by American rock music, he sought to leave the rigidity of French and Quebec poetic texts, and considered songs as pretexts for a performance. The single “J’ai rencontré l’homme de ma vie”/“I’ve Met the Man of My Life” (1972) was intended as a pastiche of pop music, in an album exploring the sexual fantasies and anxieties of contemporary women. Ironically, this song was received as a “classic” romantic pop song and became an immediate success. Today, it remains Diane’s most popular (and misunderstood) success. Nonetheless, Diane had created a powerful artistic persona, winning a Quebec audience through shocking performances. Onstage, she changed costumes constantly, playing a dominatrix and a nun, Barbarella and Joan of Arc, a witch and an aristocrat in a crinoline. She performed stripteases and faked masturbation (“La main de
393
Dieu” [The Hand of God], 1977). Her wide singing range befitted this exuberance, and many commentators saw her as the first “authentic” Quebec show woman, combining erotic lyrics, electric rock music, and outrageous behavior to unsettle the audience. In 1978, she starred in Starmania as Stella Spotlight. An aging sex symbol, Stella was another opportunity for Diane to assert her persona as a crazy, scary, even desperate, seducer. Her success continued throughout the 1980s, as she moved on to writing her own lyrics, while continuing with her distinctive brand of performance. In the 1990s, she added illustration and documentary direction to her list of accomplishments. Two compilations of her music were produced in 2000 and 2003, testifying to her ongoing commercial success. Barbara Lebrun See also: Charlebois, Robert; Dion, Céline; Joan of Arc; Music (Pop); Plamondon, Luc; Vigneault, Gilles. References Baillargeon, Richard, and Christian Côté. Une Histoire de la musique populaire au Québec, Destination Ragou. Montreal: Triptyque, 1991. Beauvarlet, Geneviève. Diane Dufresne. Paris: Seghers, 1984. Thérien, Robert, and Isabelle d’Amours. Dictionnaire de la musique populaire au Québec (1955–1992). Quebec: IQRC, 1992.
DUFY, RAOUL (1877–1953) French artist born in Le Havre on June 3, 1877; died in Forcalquier on March 23, 1953. One can classify Raoul Dufy’s artistic creations as having affinities to late impressionism, fauvism, and cubism. As an artist,
394
DUHAMEL, GEORGES
he did not differentiate between the value of high art and the merits of more pedestrian forms of artistic production that his contemporary public enjoyed. This egalitarian approach to culture is evident in Dufy’s wide range of artistic work, which includes paintings, watercolors, drawings, wood engravings, lithographs, etchings, ceramic pieces, tapestry cartoons, fabric designs, stage sets, murals, and monumental decorations. Influenced by Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne, Dufy was a major contributor to the decorative arts. Whatever the medium, in all of Dufy’s creations the real coexists with the imaginary without an appeal to tragedy. The resulting ease and lightness of his style have guaranteed his appeal in the many different milieus in which he worked. Raoul Dufy visited the United States several times, exhibited his work in many major U.S. cities, and completed commissioned work in the States. Dufy exhibited his work in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York as well as at shows in Chicago and Boston. In 1930, Dufy began collaborative work on fabric designs with the Maison Onondaga, in New York. Although he refused to exhibit his La Fée Electricité in a New York department store in 1937, Dufy did travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a member of the Carnegie Prize Jury. A year later, he had exhibitions in New York and Chicago. Dufy was particularly active in the United States during the period between 1949 and 1951. In 1949, he exhibited his work at the Galerie Louis Carré in New York. In 1950, Dufy exhibited in a retrospective of fauvism and also at a show at the Perls Galleries in New York. The same year, Dufy designed scenery for Jean Anouilh’s Invitation au château/Ring Around the
Moon, which was to be produced by Gilbert Miller in New York. In 1951, he exhibited in New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, Chicago, and Richmond, Virginia. Also during the same year, Dufy painted jazz bands in Mexico. In September 1951, Lincoln Kerstein commissioned work from Dufy for the New York City Ballet. After Dufy’s death in 1953, there were several major U.S. retrospectives of his work. In 1953, there was a Dufy retrospective in New York. In 1954, retrospectives were held in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Matthew Hilton-Watson See also: Dance; Jazz; Matisse, Henri; Mexico; Painting. References Clement, Russell T. Les Fauves: A Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Perez-Tibi, Dora. Dufy. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. New York: Abrams, 1989.
DUHAMEL, GEORGES (1884–1966) Novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and physician, whose Scènes de la vie future (America the Menace, 1930) was a searing indictment of American civilization as commercialization, industrialization, and technocracy run riot with irreparable harm to individualism. Born in Paris on June 30, 1884, Duhamel overcame poverty and strained family relations to study both literature and medicine. From 1905 to 1908, he was a founding member of the literary commune, the Abbaye de Créteil, and before 1914 had established a minor reputation for poetry and plays. During World War I, he served fifty-one months with a mobile surgical unit close to the trench line. He wrote of these horrors in Vie des martyrs,
DUHAMEL, GEORGES
1914–1916 (The New Book of Martyrs, 1917) and Civilization 1914–1917 (1918), the latter winning the Prix Goncourt. The experience of modern war led him to detest technology, converted him to pacifism, and confirmed his defense of the individual. Giving up medicine for literature, he won renown for two multivolume novels, Vie et aventures de Salavin (The Life and Adventures of Salavin, five volumes, 1920–1932) and Chronique des Pasquiers (Caged Beasts, ten volumes, 1933–1944), which explored, through the stories of an eccentric individual and a family, what modern society in France had become. This achievement was recognized by his election to the Académie Française in 1935. Duhamel also sought to encourage harmony between French and Germans as an antidote to future war, but by the late 1930s he concluded that Hitler had to be opposed at all costs. Immediately after the 1938 Munich conference, he accused French appeasers of having abandoned the “Descartes line,” by which he meant defense of truth and liberty, and in Positions françaises (1940), he justified the defense of civilization against tyranny. At the liberation in 1944, he joined the Comité national des écrivains (National Committee of Writers) but resigned in 1946 in disapproval over the excesses committed in purging collaborators. For the next two decades, Duhamel produced a series of novels dealing with the issues of morality and human destiny, but he fell out of fashion. He also continued the social criticism for which Scènes de la vie future had made him celebrated, warning in Problèmes de l’heure (Problems of the Hour, 1957) of the increasing encroachment of the state upon the individual. When Duhamel died on April 13, 1966, at his country home in Val-
395
mondois (Val d’Oise), his writings filled ninety-nine volumes. Duhamel’s condemnation of materialism, commercialism, collectivism, and the worship of technology was the dominant theme in all that he wrote. His most celebrated attack on what he called these enemies of the individual, and for which he was awarded the Grand prix de l’Académie française, was Scènes de la vie future, written after a short trip (October–December 1929) to the United States, where he visited principally New York, New Orleans, and Chicago. He fulminated against the ugliness of billboards, automobile graveyards, and pollution. He decried the assembly-line mentality of standardizing everything from manufactured goods to food to opinion. He predicted that the complete embrace of automobiles and cinema foretold the end of originality—of activities such as wandering and the conjuring of personal images—and the imposition of a passivity and enslavement to technology. The result, he warned, would be to create a society in which the collective would completely overwhelm the individual. Above all, Duhamel urged Europeans not to emulate America, but he feared that the lure would be too great to resist. Benjamin F. Martin See also: Camus, Albert; Sartre, Jean-Paul; World War I; World War II. References Duhamel, Georges. Light on My Days: An Autobiography. London: Dent, 1948. Keating, L. Clark. Critic of Civilization: Georges Duhamel and His Writings. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965. Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz. Georges Duhamel. New York: Twayne, 1972. Lafay, Arlette. La Sagesse de Georges Duhamel. Paris: Minard, 1984.
396
DUHAMEL, MARCEL
DUHAMEL, MARCEL (1900–1977) The French translator, actor, and editor Marcel Duhamel was born in the north of France in 1900, spending most of his life in Paris. A participant in the surrealist movement during the 1920s, Duhamel began translating modernist U.S. fiction into French in 1930. From 1945 until his death in 1977, he directed the Série Noire (black [or dark] series), the highly influential detective fiction series at the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard, which popularized American hard-boiled crime writing in France, and which helped spawn the French critical notion of film noir. During his post–World War I military service, Duhamel met the future surrealist painter Yves Tanguy and the screenwriterpoets Jacques and Pierre Prévert, who became his lifelong friends. With Duhamel supporting their bohemian lifestyles by working as a manager at the Hôtel Grosvenor, the four shared a house in Paris. It was during this period that Duhamel and the Préverts acquired their appetite for cinema—Pierre’s job as a projectionist affording them exposure to the latest U.S. films—and that Duhamel became acquainted with the surrealists; his house soon became the site of numerous surrealist activities, particularly its experimental drawing and word games known as exquisite corpse. Leaving—but never renouncing—the surrealists in 1928, Duhamel sold his house to the surrealist writers Georges Sadoul and André Thirion. Supporting himself through advertising, Duhamel began translating U.S. gangster novels whose modern prose seemed especially sympathetic to his cinematic interests, be-
ginning with Raoul Whitfield’s Green Ice (1931) and W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar (unpublished). He continued to translate American modernist fiction throughout his career, including works by Dashiell Hammett, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes. During the 1930s, Duhamel participated in the October Group, a worker’s theater organization affiliated with the leftist Fédération du Théâtre Ouvrier Français (Federation of French Workers’ Theater). Dedicated to proletarian and antifascist politics, the group’s membership included Sylvia Bataille and the former surrealists Marcel Jean and Max Morise, with scripts composed by Jacques Prévert or adapted by Duhamel himself. Duhamel traveled to Moscow with the October Group in 1933, winning first prize for France in the International Workers’ Theatre Olympiad. In 1935, the group became the ensemble cast for Jean Renoir’s film The Crime of M. Lange, written in collaboration with Prévert, whose plot centers on a publishing house for American-style popular fiction. In 1944, the publisher Gaston Gallimard hired Duhamel to direct a new collection of detective fiction in the American hard-boiled style. Launched after the liberation, the Série Noire became the popular voice of France’s haunted postwar memory, famous for its stark black and yellow covers and for its newly minted French slang. The majority of early titles in the collection were direct translations of American novels by writers like Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler; gradually, the series began publishing works by European authors influenced by this type of genre fiction, such as Albert Simonin. In 1958, at Duhamel’s request, the African American
DULUTH
writer Chester Himes published his first detective novel in the Série Noire, to wide acclaim. The series published its 1,000th title in 1966, garnering extensive critical praise. In 1949, Duhamel launched the Série Blême (“pale series”), a parallel collection of suspense thrillers that popularized American authors like David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich. In 1972 Duhamel published a memoir, Raconte pas ta vie! (Don’t Tell Your Life Story!), which reflects upon his ties with surrealism and the modernist writers he translated. Jonathan Eburne See also: Crime Fiction; Film Noir; Goodis, David; Hemingway, Ernest; Himes, Chester; Language; Renoir, Jean; Surrealism; Tanguy, Yves. References Blakeway, Claire. Jacques Prévert: Popular French Theatre and Cinema. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Duhamel, Marcel. Raconte pas ta vie! Paris: Mercure de France, 1972. Fauré, Michel. Le Groupe Octobre. Paris: Bourgeois, 1977. Mesplède, Claude. Les Années “Série Noire.” 5 vols. Amiens: Enorage, 1992.
DULUTH Duluth is the westernmost port city on the Great Lakes and the biggest inland port in the United States, with over 1,000 vessels visiting annually. With a population of 86,000, Duluth is the third-largest city in Minnesota and the cultural center of Lake Superior’s North Shore. Duluth is nestled in the hills above the outlet of the Saint Louis River and the Minnesota Point peninsula, across the bay from Superior, Wisconsin. In 1679, Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut (as he spelled it), came to the local
397
area, then called Fond du Lac. Duluth had set out from Montreal with two goals: to broker a peace between the local Dakotas and Ojibwas, and to explore inland Minnesota. In September 1679, Duluth succeeded in his first goal, thereby ensuring the uninterrupted supply of furs for the French. The following year, Duluth continued his explorations, most notably freeing Jesuit missionary Louis Hennepin from the Dakota. Nearly 200 years later, early citizens of Duluth named their city after Daniel Greysolon. During the fur trade era, the Duluth area was home to a seasonal Ojibwa village, as well as various fur trade posts. In the 1820s, the fur traders moved out, and the cartographers and politicians moved in. The first treaty between the local Ojibwa and the U.S. government occurred in 1826. Formal surveying and additional treaties cleared the way for settlement in 1854. The subsequent rush of land speculators seemed to bode well for the frontier town, but the dual economic disasters of the 1857 financial panic and the Civil War conspired to delay Duluth’s heyday. In the 1880s, Duluth began to recover once more as the great port for Minnesota’s major industries of the era: wheat and lumber. In 1891, the discovery of iron nearby further secured Duluth’s fortunes. This time, when a crash occurred in 1893, Duluth survived. From the early 1900s through World War II, Duluth was a center for the iron ore industry. After the war, however, the local high-grade hematite became scarce and less affordable to mine. For a few decades, the development of taconite processing revived the industry of the North Shore and Duluth, but by 1980 it was clear that Duluth’s Iron Age was ending.
398
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE
Today, Duluth’s economy has diversified. Main industries include international shipping, tourism, health care, financial services, and education. An aquarium, zoo, convention center, and revitalized waterfront draw tourists to the city year-round. Echoes of the early French influence can be seen at the annual folk festival and in the use of the fleur-de-lis in decoration. Nancy O’Brien Wagner See also: American Civil War; Fur Trade; Hennepin, Father Louis; Minnesota; Montreal; Wisconsin; World War II. References Carey, Judge John R. History of Duluth and Northern Minnesota. Compiled from Duluth News Tribune, 1898. Cooley, Jerome Eugene. Recollections of Early Days in Duluth. Proctor, MN: Published by the author, Journal Printing Company, 1925. Lydecker, Ryck, and Lawrence J. Sommer, eds. Duluth: Sketches of the Past; a Bicentennial Collection. Duluth, MN: American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, 1976. Sandvik, Glenn N. Duluth: An Illustrated History of the Zenith City. Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor, 1983.
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE (1802–1870) One of the most celebrated nineteenthcentury French writers, Dumas is best known for his historical novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both written between 1844 and 1845. Both works belong to popular culture, and Dumas was among the first French writers who fully used the possibilities of the serial novel. He is credited with revitalizing the historical novel in France, although his abilities as a historical writer were largely disputed because he was not faithful to his-
torical facts, but rather a writer of fastpaced adventure novels. The grandson of a black slave from Santo Domingo and a military general who served under the First Empire, Alexandre Dumas was born in Villers-Cotterêts, France. His 1843 novel Georges, set on Mauritius, deals centrally with questions of race and colonialism. After his father’s death in 1806, the family lived in poverty. Dumas worked as a notary’s clerk in Villers-Cotterêts and went to Paris in 1823 to find work. Due to his elegant handwriting, he secured a position with the Duc d’Orléans, who later became King LouisPhilippe. An illegitimate son, Alexandre Dumas fils (son), was born in 1824. As a playwright Dumas made his breakthrough with Henri III et sa cour/Henri III and His Court (1829), produced by the Comédie-Française. It met with great success, and Dumas went on to compose a number of additional plays, novels, and short stories. In all, he produced some 250 books with his seventythree assistants. The story of the king’s Musketeers was continued in Vingt ans après/Twenty Years After (1845) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou dix ans plus tard (or Ten Years Later)/The Vicomte Bragelonne (1848–1850). Dumas lived as adventurously as the heroes of his books. He took part in the revolution of July 1830 and became a captain in the National Guard, caught cholera during the epidemic of 1832, and traveled in Italy to recuperate. He married his mistress Ida Ferrier, an actress, in 1840, but he soon separated from her, after having spent her entire dowry. With the money earned from his writings, he built a fantastic château de Monte-Cristo on the outskirts of Paris.
DUPLESSIS, MAURICE LE NOBLET
399
See also: Louis-Philippe, King of France. References Davidson, Arthur Fitzwilliam. The Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1902. Spurr, Harry A. The Life and Writings of Alexandre Dumas. New York: Haskell House, 1973.
DUPLESSIS, MAURICE LE NOBLET (1890–1959)
Alexandre Dumas, one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century French writers, is credited with revitalizing the historical novel in France. (Library of Congress)
Fleeing debt, Dumas spent time in Belgium, Russia, and Italy, where he lived for four years as keeper of museums in Naples and supported Garibaldi’s struggle for Italian unity. Dumas died on December 5, 1870, at Puys, near Dieppe. Other popular works by Dumas include The Corsican Brothers (1844) and The Man in the Iron Mask (1850). The popular nature of the author’s works is all the more attested to as several of his novels were adapted by Hollywood producers and made into major full-length motion pictures. Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–1895) was also a novelist and playwright. His best-known work is La Dame aux camélias (Camille, 1852), adapted by Giuseppe Verdi as La Traviata. Claudia Wolosin
Québécois politician. Maurice Duplessis was born in TroisRivières, in the parish of l’ImmaculéeConception on April 20, 1890. He was the son of Nérée Le Noblet Duplessis, lawyer and conservative member of parliament in Saint-Maurice from 1886 to 1900, and mayor of Trois-Rivières from 1904 to 1905. He studied at the Collège NotreDame in Montreal, at the Trois-Rivières seminary, and in the Faculty of Law at the Université de Montréal (which was, at the time, called Université Laval à Montréal). Maurice Duplessis was admitted to the Quebec bar on September 4, 1913. He worked as a lawyer for various practices in Trois-Rivières before becoming president of the bar in Trois-Rivières in 1937, and, in 1937 and 1938, president of the bar of the province of Quebec. He was Conservative Party candidate at the 1923 elections in the Trois-Rivières constituency before eventually being elected under the Conservative banner in 1927, 1931, and 1935. He became leader of the Conservative Party on October 4, 1933. On November 7, 1935, he merged the Conservative Party with Paul Gouin’s National Liberal Party in order to found the Union nationale. Maurice Duplessis rapidly eclipsed Paul Gouin both in the
400
DUPONT FAMILY
party and on the political stage. Maurice Duplessis was elected and reelected member for Trois-Rivières at the Quebec general elections of 1936, 1939, 1944, 1948, 1952, and 1956. Duplessis was premier of Quebec, president of the executive council, and procurator general of Quebec from August 26, 1936, to November 8, 1939, and from August 30, 1944, to September 7, 1959. At the 1939 general election, Duplessis lost to Adélard Godbout of the Quebec Liberal Party. He was then leader of the official opposition until the general election of 1944. A nationalist, conservative clerical ideology can to seen to have characterized Duplessis’s political work. He left his mark in Quebec history as a charismatic figure, known as le chef (the boss), who scorned intellectuals and artists. It must be noted that, under his party, Quebec electoral morals were characterized by generalized partisan corruption. In the history of contemporary Quebec, he is closely associated with the grande noirceur (great darkness) period, which went from the end of World War II to Jean Lesage’s Quiet Revolution from 1960 onward. On the international stage, Maurice Duplessis was not very interested in political relations between France and Quebec. He played host to the French president Vincent Auriol when Auriol visited Quebec in April 1951. He adopted an openly pro-American attitude in order to attract U.S. capital and investors to Quebec. Duplessis’s detractors accused him of underselling Quebec resources to the Americans. In short, Duplessis had an intracontinental vision without having any real international ambition for Quebec. It was only with the Quiet Revolution that Quebec’s
international role became more important, with the opening of a number of delegations, including the Paris one in 1961. In Quebec historiography, a strong anti-Duplessis sentiment evolved after he died, although, since the mid-1980s, this vision has tended to fade. Duplessis died in office in Schefferville, on September 7, 1959, at the age of sixty-nine. Jean-François Béland See also: Quebec; Quiet Revolution; World War II. References Black, Conrad. Duplessis. Montreal: De L’Homme, 1977. Hébert, Jacques. Duplessis, non merci! Montreal: Boréal, 2000. Saint-Aubin, Bernard. Duplessis et son époque. Montreal: La Presse, 1979.
DUPONT FAMILY The DuPont dynasty of gunpowder and chemical magnates was founded by Pierre Samuel DuPont (1739–1817), a French Huguenot who became Louis XVI’s inspector general of commerce in 1773. Jailed during the French Revolution and suspicious of the directory, DuPont emigrated to the United States, encouraged by his long correspondence with Thomas Jefferson. It was Pierre Samuel’s son Eleuthère Irenée (1772–1834), however, who had studied chemistry with Lavoisier, who founded the family’s specially constructed gunpowder plant on the Brandywine River in Delaware in 1801 as part of his father’s Franco-American land and business holdings. Because of the family’s connections to Jefferson, the plant soon had American army contracts and produced powder far
DUPONT FAMILY
superior to any competitor in North America. Despite the accidents and fires that plagued the industry, one of which killed Pierre Samuel, the family flourished, especially after the War of 1812. Under the leadership of Henry DuPont (1812–1889), the company became entirely American, severing its legal ties to France in 1837 and becoming known for its paternal policies toward workers and increasing political control of Delaware. Henry made all of the DuPont sons work their way up through the company, and he supported their education in chemistry and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and West Point. Henry arranged for the company to sell to both sides of the Crimean War, angering the French tremendously. During the Civil War, the DuPonts, who had sympathies with both the North and South, chose to remain with the Union and provided new, more powerful “Mammoth” gunpowder that armed the Monitor against the Merrimac. DuPonts also served in both the army and navy, with Colonel Henry A. DuPont’s (1838–1926) service and standing in the Republican Party recognized thirty years after the war with the Congressional Medal of Honor and the naming of Washington’s DuPont Circle after Admiral Samuel DuPont (1803–1865), who blockaded Charleston. Forming the “Powder Trust” in 1872, the DuPonts monopolized the gunpowder market in postwar America, driving their rivals out of business and branching out into the new field of nitroglycerine, while a Kentucky branch of cousins invested in textile mills and coal mining. In 1889, Alfred I. DuPont (1864–1935) licensed “smokeless” gunpowder from the Belgian firm Coopals
401
Pierre Samuel DuPont, founder of the DuPont dynasty of gunpowder and chemical magnates. (Library of Congress)
and Company, which, along with cheaper soda replacing saltpeter in explosives, gave the family an advantage. The SpanishAmerican War relied on DuPont smokeless powder, while the company made advantageous deals with German and British rivals to keep their domestic market. By World War I, the DuPonts, under the leadership of P. S. (Pierre Samuel) DuPont (1870–1954), completely dominated Delaware politics, controlling newspapers, a Senate seat, and the turnpike system, and their political clout averted an antitrust suit in 1906. The war made the company enormous profits from gunpowder sales, even though German saboteurs attacked the Brandywine factory in 1915 over their sales to the French and British. Anticipating that World War I was truly a war to end war, the DuPonts branched out into chemicals and automobile manufacturing, acquiring controlling interest in
402
DURTAIN, LUC
General Motors in 1922. The family also brought on French censure by offering jobs and refuge to German scientists from I. G. Farben and BASF fleeing the French. These men gave the DuPonts critical trade secrets from the German chemical dye and petroleum industry, and the relationship led to heavy investment in Germany in the 1920s. The Depression did little to harm the company, which produced a series of tremendous innovations from the mind of chemist Wallace Carothers, including nylon in 1930 and neoprene and Teflon in 1935. Severing their ties to Nazi Germany during World War II, the DuPonts contributed heavily as military contractors, inventing plastic tubing and insecticides, and building Oak Ridge and Hanford as sites for the Manhattan Project. By 1954, when the DuPonts escaped another antitrust suit, the family had ceased to honor Henry DuPont’s spartan and utilitarian policies and had drifted away from active management of the company. Plagued by tuberculosis, hereditary deafness, marital scandals, and political failures, most DuPonts withdrew and lived on their inheritances, as professional managers took over the business and dismantled its huge reach into the auto and coal industries. Many of the family’s philanthropic projects remain, including Nemours, a country estate modeled after Versailles and now a children’s hospital; many Delaware and Florida public schools, including the first African American high school (1927); and Longwood, another estate, which was donated to the state of Delaware. As for the Dupont de Nemours company, by the 1980s the chemical industry
had matured, and its historic growth rate of twice GNP had moderated: opportunities to create major new products also diminished. Research interests now are focused on technologies such as displays for devices like mobile phones. In 2003, it was a $27 billion company, with 78,000 employees, approximately half of whom work outside the United States, throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Far and Middle East. Margaret Sankey See also: American Civil War; Automobiles; French Revolution; Huguenots; Jefferson, Thomas; Kentucky; World War I; World War II. References Mosley, Leonard. Blood Relations: The Rise and Fall of the DuPonts of Delaware. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Wall, Joseph Frazier. Alfred I. DuPont and His Family. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Winkler, John. The DuPont Dynasty. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1935.
DURTAIN, LUC (ANDRÉ NEPVEU) (1881–1959) French poet and novelist, born in Paris. Luc Durtain was a constant traveler who visited Asia, Africa, and northern Europe, as well as Brazil, the United States, and Canada in the early twentieth century. Dr. André Nepveu chose the pseudonym of Luc Durtain and began writing poems around 1897. He published ten books of poetry, plus some novels and plays, between 1908 (an early cycle of poems entitled Pégase) and 1952. In 1906, Durtain was a member of a literary commune, the Abbaye de Créteil, living for fourteen months with friends such as French writers Georges Duhamel and Pierre-Jean Jouve. Much of
DUVERGIER
his vivid poetry is directly inspired by the places he visited, with enthusiastic descriptions in exalted verse of landscapes, including Niagara Falls, Chicago, and Havana. Durtain was a joyful poet who wrote with jubilation and whose words were spiced with generous punctuation and stars that could surprise and inspire as well. In fact, Durtain’s book of poems entitled Quatre Continents (“Four Continents,” 1935), with a whole section of poetry named “Suite américaine,” synthesizes the poetic essence of Atlantic studies, as well as of Atlanta studies. Here he talks, for example, of the skyscrapers of the “half black city” (Durtain, p. 35), which carries the name of the ocean that has been a willing participant in the slave trade. “Cap Eternité” describes, with various images and clichés, his own fascination for the fjord in the region of the Saguenay River, in Quebec. Here, Durtain talks of steamers breaking through the cold and deep waters, and of the whales that swim alongside them. While in South America, Durtain wrote another cycle of eight poems entitled “Suite brésilienne” (“Brazilian Suite,” including “Atlantique Sud” [South Atlantic] and “Vers Rio de Janeiro” [Toward Rio de Janeiro]) that also appeared in Quatre Continents, a book of more than 200 poems, dedicated to his son Pierre. It confirmed Durtain as a landscape poet of the world he visited, with the eyes of a European in America. Among many recent commentators, French author Serge Faucherau has recognized strong similarities with German expressionist poetry in Durtain’s passionate style, a rare phenomenon in French literature from the early twentieth century. In the 1960s, Vincent Gauthier had under-
DE
HAURANNE, ERNEST
403
lined in his thesis many recurrent themes related to “Américanité” in the novels of Durtain (Gauthier, 1966). Sadly, none of Durtain’s books are available at the moment, and there seem to be no translations of his works in other languages. Yves Laberge See also: Brazil; Duhamel, Georges; Niagara Falls. References Durtain, Luc. Quatre Continents: Poèmes. Paris: Flammarion, 1935. Faucherau. Serge, Expressionnisme, Dada, surréalisme et autres ismes. Paris: Denoël, 2001. Gauthier, Vincent. “Luc Durtain et l’Amérique à travers la suite américaine de ses romans.” Thèse de maîtrise, Sainte-Foy, Université Laval, 1966.
DUVERGIER DE HAURANNE, ERNEST (1843–1877) French political theorist and art critic. Duvergier published an account of his travels throughout the United States and Canada in the last months of the American Civil War. Inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville, he studied the functioning of the social and institutional underpinnings of American democracy during this critical moment in the nation’s history. Born in Paris on March 7, 1843, Ernest was the son of an important member of the Liberal Party, Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, author of works on political philosophy and representative from the Department of the Cher from 1831 to 1851. The influence of his father was apparent as Ernest developed his talents as a political analyst and theorist as well as a representative of the Cher in the early years of the Third Republic.
404
DUVIVIER, JULIEN
The work on his travels in North America was published as a series of twelve articles in the Revue des deux mondes (Review of Two Worlds) from August 15, 1865, to April 1, 1866, under the title Huit mois en Amérique, Lettres et notes de voyage, 1864–1865/Eight Months in America, Letters and Travel Notes 1864–1865. The articles were written in the form of a daily journal with thematic subheadings. The composite structure allowed him to use his particular experiences in a given site to explore the nature of American democracy in general. For example, during the presidential elections of 1864, he attended electoral meetings in Chicago and from this experience drew conclusions regarding the importance of the party system in U.S. political life. The work also contained occasional critiques of Napoléon III’s regime. In a style that resembles that of Tocqueville, he used the American case as an attempt to gain a perspective on the nature of French politics and democracy. Upon his return to France he continued to write for the Revue des deux mondes and became increasingly involved in the opposition to the Second Empire. In 1869 he published two works critiquing the regime, Le Gouvernement personnel (“Personal Government”) and La Coalition libérale (“The Liberal Coalition”). He continued to write articles on politics and art criticism for the Revue politique et littéraire and Revue des deux mondes and published a final book in 1873 entitled La République conservatrice (“The Conservative Republic”), in which he argued that a “conservative republic” was the only form of government that could satisfy the French desire for both equality and order.
In 1870, he was injured in the FrancoPrussian War at Beaune-la-Rolande, for which he was awarded the Légion d’honneur. During the Third Republic he was elected as representative of the Cher on July 2, 1871. He was reelected to this position in 1876, a year before his death on August 25, 1877. Stephen Sawyer See also: American Civil War; Tocqueville, Alexis de. Reference Bowen, Ralph H. “French Liberalism and American Mass Society, Tocqueville and Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne.” Histoires d’Europe et d’Amérique. Le monde atlantique contemporain: Mélanges offerts au professeur Yves-Henri Nouailhat. Ed. Michel Catala. Nantes: Ouest, 1999.
DUVIVIER, JULIEN (1896–1967) One of France’s greatest film directors of the classic era, with a career spanning five decades. Duvivier was born in Lille, France, and died in a car crash in Paris in 1967. Beginning as a stage actor, Duvivier started making silents in 1918, first as an assistant director to Louis Feuillade or Marcel L’Herbier, and then as a director in 1919. However, it was not until the 1930s that Duvivier gained his status as one of the top five French directors, alongside Jean Renoir, Jacques Feyder, René Clair, and Marcel Carné. Duvivier made some twenty-five films in the 1930s alone, giving actors some of their best roles. He directed Jean Gabin in three of his major works of the 1930s, contributing to the actor’s myth and stardom: La Bandera (Escape from Yesterday, 1935) opposite Annabella, La Belle
DYLAN, BOB
Equipe (They Were Five, 1936), and Pépé le Moko (1937), also starring Mireille Balin. La Belle Equipe and Pépé le Moko are highly representative of the period, prime examples of what was happening in society with the election of the Front Populaire in 1936 and in cinema with the distinctive style of “poetic realism.” Duvivier’s talent with actors is widely recognized, though often overshadowed by his work with Gabin. The director was, however, also faithful to the great Harry Baur in some seven films, most notably in La Tête d’un Homme (A Man’s Head, 1933), or other legends, Michel Simon (La Fin du jour/The End of a Day, 1939; Panique/Panic, 1945) and Louis Jouvet (Un Carnet de bal/Dance Program, 1937; La Fin du jour/The End of the Day, 1939; Untel Père et fils/The Heart of a Nation, 1943), to name but a few. Duvivier indeed directed some of the greatest actors in the history of French cinema, such as Maurice Chevalier, Raimu, Françoise Rosay, Pierre Fresnay, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Fernandel, Danielle Darrieux, Brigitte Bardot, and Alain Delon. Duvivier’s skills at directing actors was most apparent when he worked with a large cast in a genre that he favored, the episode or sketch film, such as Un Carnet de bal, Tales of Manhattan (1942), or Flesh and Fantasy (1943). The huge international success of Pépé le Moko, one of the most remade French films (Algiers, 1938; Casbah, 1948), ignited the interest of Hollywood studios, which invited the French director shortly after (The Great Waltz, 1939). When war broke out, Duvivier returned to Hollywood and became part of the colony of French exiles and refugees who spent the war years in the United States (Renoir, Clair, Aumont,
405
Marcel Dalio, Gabin, Michèle Morgan, Max Ophuls, and Simone Simon, to take the most famous). The French exile community worked closely together on many projects, and Duvivier’s films indeed featured some of them. Lydia was produced by Alexander Korda, Tales of Manhattan included Marcel Dalio and Victor Francen in its extremely large cast, and Dalio was again in Flesh and Fantasy, while The Impostor (1943), a war propaganda film, was mainly a vehicle for Gabin. Duvivier resumed his career in France at the end of the war but never regained his pre-war status, despite some remarkable productions and some huge popular hits like Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1951), with Fernandel. Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Boyer, Charles; Chevalier, Maurice; Clair, René; Dalio, Marcel; Darrieux, Danielle; Florey, Robert; Jourdan, Louis; Morgan, Michèle; Pepe Le Pew; Remakes; Renoir, Jean; Rosay, Françoise; Simon, Simone. Reference Leprohon, Pierre. Julien Duvivier. Paris: Anthologie du Cinéma, 1968.
DYLAN, BOB (1941–) Born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in May 1941, Bob Dylan is frequently hailed as the most significant and influential singer-songwriter of the twentieth century. Dylan’s formative influence was the folksinger Woody Guthrie, who had himself been inspired by the prose style of Guy de Maupassant during his brief spell in the armed services in the 1940s. With the influence of Guthrie and the
406
DYLAN, BOB
Singer Bob Dylan. Some critics have compared Dylan’s eclecticism with French postmodernism and bricolage, particularly his use of multiple personae, his fondness for open-ended and nonlinear narratives, and his fusion of high and low culture. (Library of Congress)
American folk revival of the late 1950s, Dylan began his career performing and recording ballads, protest songs, and “talkin’ blues” in the early 1960s, later in the decade establishing his own fusion of folk-rock when he “went electric” for the albums Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966). From the late 1960s Dylan’s style became more eclectic, shifting from the lyrical John Wesley Harding (1968), to the country music of Nashville Skyline (1969), to the raw sounds of The Basement Tapes (recorded in 1967), to a potent mixture of styles on the mid1970s albums Blood on the Tracks and Hurricane (both 1975). In the 1980s and 1990s, when his influence on popular
music was less direct, Dylan continued to experiment with styles: fusing folk, rock, gospel, country, old-time, jazz, blues, and Motown, with a lyrical range that draws on a plethora of literary and cultural sources. Dylan has never favored French culture over other national influences, although he was very pleased to be in France during a European trip in 1964. Critics Aidan Day and Stephen Scobie have compared Dylan’s eclecticism with French postmodernism and bricolage, particularly his use of multiple personae, his fondness for open-ended and nonlinear narratives, and his fusion of high and low culture. It can be argued that Dylan’s interest in the carnivalesque is deeply rooted in New Orleans culture, while Michael Gray suggests that his blending of musical and lyrical sounds creates a multidimensional aesthetic comparable to Charles Baudelaire’s theory of synesthesia, as in lyrics such as “your baby’s eyes . . . are tuggin’ at your sleeve” from “Ballad of Hollis Brown” (The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964) and “got all those buckets coming out of my ears” from “Buckets of Rain” (Blood on the Tracks). Dylan even gives Walt Whitman’s fondness for listing a French spin in “I Shall Be Free” (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965) in which American and French pop icons are intermingled, with Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Cassius Clay, John F. Kennedy, and Elizabeth Taylor standing shoulder to shoulder. At times he draws on distinct French traditions: for example, some of the prose sketches in Tarantula (1966) are a direct homage to surrealism and Arthur Rimbaud, and he even manages to find a rhyme for Rimbaud in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” (Blood on the Tracks). But sometimes his allusions to French culture prove
DYLAN, BOB
subtler than this, as in the tragicomic lyric in “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight” (Infidels, 1983): “It’s like I’m stuck inside a painting / That’s hanging in the Louvre.” Underlying these examples is Dylan’s versatility to creatively fuse a number of cultural impulses, some identifiably French (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, François Villon, Jean Genet), others distinctly American (Whitman, Guthrie, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg), and others drawn from Hispanic, British, Caribbean, and African sources. In January 1990, Dylan was made Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des
407
Lettres (Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters) in France. Martin Halliwell See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Baudelaire, CharlesPierre; Duluth; Genet, Jean; Jazz; Minnesota; Music (Folk); Music (Pop); New Orleans; Surrealism. References Corcoran, Neil, ed. “Do You, Mr. Jones?”: Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors. London: Chatto and Windus, 2002. Scobie, Stephen. Alias Bob Dylan. Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1991. Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Work of Bob Dylan. London: New English Library, 1986.
France
and
the Americas
Other Titles in ABC-CLIO’s
Transatlantic Relations Series
Britain and the Americas, by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl FORTHCOMING: Africa and the Americas, by Richard M. Juang, Kim Searcy, and Noelle Searcy Germany and the Americas, by Thomas Adam Iberia and the Americas, by J. Michael Francis Ireland and the Americas, by Philip Coleman, Jason King, and Jim Byrne
France
and
the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME II EDITED BY
Bill Marshall Professor of Modern French Studies, University of Glasgow assisted by Cristina Johnston
Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor
Santa Barbara, California
Denver, Colorado
Oxford, England
Copyright © 2005 by Bill Marshall All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data France and the Americas : culture, politics, and history / edited by Bill Marshall assisted by Cristina Johnston. p. cm.— (Transatlantic relations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85109-411-3 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 1-85109-416-4 (ebook) 1. America—Relations—France—Encyclopedias. 2. France—Relations—America—Encyclopedias. 3. America—History—Encyclopedias. 4. France—History—Encyclopedias. 5. North America—History—Encyclopedias. 6. Latin America—History—Encyclopedias. 7. South America—History—Encyclopedias. 8. America—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 9. Framce—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. I. Marshall, Bill, 1957– II. Johnston, Cristina. III. Series. E18.75.F73 2005 303.48'21812044—dc22 200500096
08
07
06
05
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an e-Book. Visit abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ . Manufactured in the United States of America
for Maria
CONTENTS Advisory Board, xvii Series Editor’s Preface, xix Editor’s Preface, xxi Topic Finder, xxiii Chronology of France and the Americas, xxxi Introductory Essays, 1 The French Atlantic, 3 France and Canada, 9 France and the Caribbean, 17 France and Latin America, 27 France and the United States, 37
France and the Americas, 47 Art Deco, 91 Art Nouveau, 92 Artaud, Antonin (1896–1948), 94 Atget, Eugène (1857–1927), 95 Atlanticism, 96 Audubon, John James (1785–1851), 98 Aury, Louis-Michel (1788–1821), 99 Auster, Paul (1947–), 100 Automobiles, 101 Avant-Gardes, 104 Aviation, 106 Aznavour, Charles (Charles Aznavourian) (1924–), 108
Acadia, 49 Adam, Paul (1860–1920), 55 Adams, Henry Brooks (1838–1918), 56 Adams, John (1735–1826), 57 AIDS, 59 Alberta, 61 Alexis, Jacques-Stephen (1922–1961), 62 Allen, Woody (Allen Stewart Konigsberg) (1935–), 63 American Civil War, 64 American Revolution, 69 Annaud, Jean-Jacques (1943–), 74 Anti-Americanism, 74 Antislavery Movements, 77 Aquin, Hubert (1929–1977), 80 Arcand, Denys (1941–), 81 Architecture, 82 Argentina, 86 Aron, Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand (1905–1983), 90
Baker, Josephine (Freda Josephine McDonald) (1906–1975), 111 Baldwin, James (1924–1987), 114 Ballooning, 115 Bardot, Brigitte (1934–), 118 Barnes, Djuna (1892–1982), 119 VII
VIII
CONTENTS
Barney, Nat(h)alie Clifford (1876–1972), 121 Barrin de La Galissonière, Roland-Michel, Marquis (1693–1756), 122 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980), 123 Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste (1834–1904), 124 Basques, 125 Bataille, Georges (1897–1962), 128 Baton Rouge, 128 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre (1821–1867), 130 Baudrillard, Jean (1929–), 131 Bazin, André (1918–1958), 133 Beach, Sylvia (1887–1962), 134 Beau Dommage, 135 Beauchemin, Yves (1941–), 136 Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–1986), 137 Bécaud, Gilbert (François Silly) (1927–2001), 140 Bedaux, Charles Eugène (1886–1944), 141 Beguine, 142 Beineix, Jean-Jacques (1946–), 143 Benezet, Anthony (1713–1784), 144 Benoît, Jean (1922–), 145 Bernabé, Jean (1942–), 147 Bernanos, Georges (1888–1948), 147 Besson, Luc (1959–), 149 Bianciotti, Hector (1930–), 150 Bienville, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de (1680–1767), 151 Bigelow, John (1817–1911), 152 Binoche, Juliette (1964–), 153 Blais, Marie-Claire (1939–), 155 Blum-Byrnes Agreement, 156 Bluteau, Lothaire (1957–), 156 Boileau-Narcejac, 157 Bolívar, Simón (1783–1830), 158 Bombardier, 160 Bombardier, Denise (1941–), 161 Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson (1785–1879), 162 Bonaparte, Jérôme (1784–1860), 163 Bonaparte, Josephine Tascher de la Pageier de Beauharnais (1763–1814), 164 Bonaparte, Napoléon (1769–1821), 165 Bordeaux, 166 Borduas, Paul-Emile (1905–1960), 169 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), 170 Bossu, Jean-Bernard (1720–1792), 172 Bouchard, Lucien (1938–), 173 Bouchard, Michel Marc (1958–), 174
Bougainville, Louis Antoine de (1729–1811), 175 Boukman, Daniel (Daniel Blérald) (1936–), 176 Boulle, Pierre (1912–1994), 177 Bourassa, Robert (1933–1996), 178 Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002), 179 Bourgeois, Louise (1911–), 180 Bourget, Paul (1852–1935), 181 Boyer, Charles (1897–1978), 182 Boyer, Jean-Pierre (1776–1850), 183 Brault, Michel (1928–), 184 Brazil, 185 Brel, Jacques (1929–1978), 188 Bresdin, Rodolphe (1822–1885), 189 Breton, André (1896–1966), 190 Brittany, 192 Brossard, Nicole (1943–), 194 Brûlé, Etienne (ca. 1592–1633), 195 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo (1939–), 196 Bugnet, Georges (1879–1981), 197 Bujold, Geneviève (1942–), 198 Burroughs, William S. (1914–1997), 199 Butor, Michel (1926–), 201 Cabet, Etienne (1788–1856), 203 Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe (1658–1730), 204 Cahiers du cinéma, 205 Caillois, Roger (1913–1978), 206 Cajuns, 208 Camus, Albert (1913–1960), 209 Capucine (Germaine Lefebvre) (1931–1990), 211 Carle, Gilles (1928–), 212 Carlson, Carolyn (1943–), 213 Carmen, 214 Caron, Leslie (1931–), 216 Carpentier, Alejo (1904–1980), 217 Carrefour, 219 Cartier, Jacques (1491–1557), 219 Cartier-Bresson, Henri (1908–2004), 222 Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926), 224 Cather, Willa (1873–1947), 225 Catholic Church, 227 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894–1961), 230 Céloron de Blainville, Pierre-Joseph (1693–1759), 231 Cendrars, Blaise (Frédéric-Louis Sauser) (1887–1961), 232
CONTENTS Certeau, Michel de (1925–1986), 233 Césaire, Aimé (1913–), 234 Chabrol, Claude (1930–), 235 Challe, Robert (1659–1720), 236 Chamoiseau, Patrick (1953–), 237 Champlain, Samuel de (ca. 1570–1635), 238 Chanute, Octave (1832–1910), 241 Charlebois, Robert (1944–), 243 Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de (1682–1761), 244 Charnay, Claude-Joseph-Désiré (1828–1915), 245 Charrière, Henri (1906–1973), 246 Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de, Vicomte (1768–1848), 247 Chauvet, Marie (1916–1973), 248 Cherbourg, 250 Chevalier, Maurice (1888–1972), 251 Chicago, 252 Chile, 253 Chirac, Jacques (1932–), 255 Chopin, Kate (Katherine O’Flaherty) (1850–1904), 257 Choquette, Robert (1905–1991), 259 Christophe, Henri (1767–1820), 260 Cinema, 1895–1945, 261 Cinema, 1945 to the Present, 265 Cirque du Soleil, 268 Citroën (Automobiles Citroën), 270 Clair, René (René-Lucien Chomette) (1898–1981), 271 Claudel, Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie (1868–1955), 272 Coca-Cola Company, 273 Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963), 274 Coffee, 276 Cohen, Gustave David (1879–1958), 279 Colbert, Claudette (Lily Claudette Chauchion) (1903–1996), 280 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619–1683), 282 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette) (1873–1954), 282 Comic Strips, 284 Compagnie d’Occident, 289 Compagnie du Sénégal, 290 Computing Technology, 291 Concorde, 292 Condé, Maryse (1937–), 294 Confiant, Raphaël (1951–), 295 Constant, Paule (1944–), 296
IX
Constantine, Eddie (1917–1993), 298 Copi (Raoul Damonte) (1939–1987), 299 Cortázar, Julio (1914–1984), 300 Cosmetics, 301 Costa-Gavras (Constantinos Gavras) (1933–), 304 Cotton, 305 Counterculture, 308 Coureurs de bois, 310 Cournand, André (1895–1988), 312 Courrier des Etats-Unis, Le (1828–1939), 314 Couturier, Marie-Alain, O. P. (1897–1954), 315 Créolité, 316 Crèvecoeur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de (1735–1813), 317 Crime Fiction, 318 Crozat, Antoine (1655–1738), 323 Cuban Revolution, 324 Cuisine, 326 cummings, e.e. (1894–1962), 331 Cyberculture, 332 Cyrano de Bergerac, 336 Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé (1787–1851), 339 Dalio, Marcel (Israel Moshe Blauschild) (1899–1983), 340 Damas, Léon-Gontran (1912–1978), 341 Dance, 342 Dangerous Liaisons, 345 Danticat, Edwidge (1967–), 346 Darío, Rubén (1867–1916), 348 Darrieux, Danielle (1917–), 349 Dassin, Jules (1911–), 350 Davis, Miles (1926–1991), 351 Deane, Silas (1737–1789), 352 Debray, Régis (1940–), 354 Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar (1834–1917), 355 Deleuze, Gilles (1925–1995), 356 Delsarte, François (1811–1871), 358 Demy, Jacques (1931–1990), 359 Deneuve, Catherine (1943–), 360 Denim, 361 Depardieu, Gérard (1948–), 363 Depestre, René (1926–), 364 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 365 Des Rosiers, Joël (1951–), 366 Desjardins, Richard (1948–), 367
X
CONTENTS
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques (1758–1806), 368 Detroit, 371 Devil’s Island, 372 Deyglun, Henry (1903–1971), 374 Dion, Céline (1968–), 375 Disneyland Paris, 377 Djian, Philippe (1949–), 381 Dorziat, Gabrielle (Gabrielle Sigrist) (1880–1979), 382 Dos Passos, John (1896–1970), 383 Doubrovsky, Serge (1928–), 385 Dreyfus Case, 386 Dubos, René Jules (1901–1982), 388 Dubuffet, Jean (1901–1985), 389 Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968), 390 Ducharme, Réjean, 391 Dufresne, Diane (1944–), 392 Dufy, Raoul (1877–1953), 393 Duhamel, Georges (1884–1966), 394 Duhamel, Marcel (1900–1977), 396 Duluth, 397 Dumas, Alexandre (1802–1870), 398 Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet (1890–1959), 399 DuPont Family, 400 Durtain, Luc (André Nepveu) (1881–1959), 402 Duvergier de Hauranne, Ernest (1843–1877), 403 Duvivier, Julien (1896–1967), 404 Dylan, Bob (1941–), 405 Ecole de Brive, L’, 409 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890–1969), 412 Elf-Aquitaine (TotalFinaElf ), 413 Elvis Gratton, 414 Ernst, Max (1891–1976), 415 Erté (Romain De Tirtoff ) (1892–1990), 417 Escomel, Gloria (1941–), 418 Etienne, Franck (1936–), 418 Etienne, Gérard (1936–), 420 Evangeline, 421 Evans, Walker (1903–1975), 422 Expo 67, 423 Exposition Coloniale (1931), 425 Exposition universelle (1900), 427 Fanon, Frantz (1925–1961), 429 Fashion, 431 Feminisms, 434
Filles du Roy, 439 Film Noir, 440 Fini, Leonor (1908–1996), 441 Firmin, Anténor (1850–1911), 443 Fishing, 444 Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896–1940), 447 Flanner, Janet (1892–1978), 448 Florence, Hercules (Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence) (1804–1879), 450 Florey, Robert (1900–1979), 450 Florida, 452 Folch-Ribas, Jacques (1928–), 455 Fonda, Jane (1937–), 456 Ford Motor Company, 457 Foreign Policy, 1776–1945, 458 Foreign Policy, 1945–Present, 464 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984), 468 France Telecom, 469 Francofolies, Les, 470 François I, King of France, 472 Francophonie, La, 473 Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790), 474 Fréchette, Louis (1839–1908), 476 French and Indian War, 477 French Revolution, 482 Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de (1622–1698), 488 Fry, Varian (1907–1967), 489 Fuentes, Carlos (1928–), 490 Fur Trade, 492 Gagnon, Clarence Alphonse (1881–1942), 497 Gainsbourg, Serge (Lucien Ginsburg) (1928–1991), 498 Gallant, Mavis (1922–), 499 García Márquez, Gabriel (1928–), 501 Garou (Pierre Garand) (1972–), 502 Gary, Romain (Roman Kacew) (1914–1980), 503 Gasnier, Louis J. (1878–1963), 504 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 505 Gauguin, (Eugène Henry) Paul (1848–1903), 507 Gaulle, General Charles André-Marie-Joseph de (1890–1970), 509 Gay Movement, 511 Genêt, Edmond-Charles (1763–1834), 514 Genet, Jean (1910–1986), 515
CONTENTS Girard, François (1963–), 516 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry (1926–), 517 Gleizes, Albert (1881–1953), 519 Glissant, Edouard (1928–), 521 Godard, Jean-Luc (1930–), 523 Godbout, Jacques (1933–), 525 Gonçalves de Magalhães, Domingos José (1811–1882), 526 Goodis, David (1917–1967), 527 Grandbois, Alain (1900–1975), 528 Grappelli, Stéphane (1908–1997), 529 Gratiant, Gilbert (1895–1985), 530 Green, Julien Hartridge (1900–1998), 531 Grenada, 532 Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des (1618–1696), 534 Guadeloupe, 535 Guattari, Félix (1930–1992), 540 Guérin, Daniel (1904–1988), 541 Guiana, 542 Guillemin, Roger (1924–), 545 Guy-Blaché, Alice (1873–1968), 546 Hagège, Claude (1936–), 549 Hahn, Reynaldo (1874–1947), 550 Haiti, 551 Hassam, Frederick Childe (1859–1935), 557 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864), 558 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961), 560 Hébert, Anne (1916–2560), 561 Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961), 562 Hémon, Louis (1880–1913), 564 Hennepin, Father Louis (1626–?; exact date of death unknown, sometime after 1701), 564 Heredia, José Maria de (1842–1905), 566 Héroux, Denis (1940–), 567 Himes, Chester (1909–1984), 568 Hip-Hop Music and Culture, 570 Hippolyte, Hector (1894–1948), 571 Hocquenghem, Guy (1946–1988), 572 Hollywood’s French Caribbean, 573 Hollywood’s Paris, 575 Hollywood’s Quebec, 577 Houdon, Jean-Antoine (1741–1828), 579 Hugo, Victor-Marie (1802–1885), 580 Huguenots, 582 Huidobro, Vicente (1893–1948), 583 Hunchback of Notre-Dame/Notre-Dame de Paris, 584
XI
Hurons, 586 Huston, Nancy (1953–), 588 Hydro-Quebec, 589 Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne Sieur d’ (1661–1706), 593 Illinois Country, 594 Indian Wars, 597 Indiana, 598 Inspector Clouseau, 600 Iowa, 601 Iraq War (2003–present), 602 Jacob, Suzanne (Suzanne Amos) (1943–), 609 Jazz, 611 James, Henry (1843–1916), 610 Jean, Raymond (1925–), 615 Jeanmaire, Zizi (Renée) (1924–), 616 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826), 617 Jesuits, 620 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre (1953–), 623 Joan of Arc, 624 Jodorowsky, Alejandro (1929–), 625 Joliet (Jolliet), Louis (1645–1700), 627 Jones, John Paul (1747–1792), 628 Josephson, Matthew (1899–1978), 630 Jourdan, Louis (Louis Gendre) (1919–), 631 Jouvet, Louis (1887–1951), 632 Julien, Pauline (1928–1998), 633 Juneau, Laurent Solomon (1793–1856), 634 Jutra, Claude (1930–1986), 636 Kaplan, Nelly (1934–), 639 Kassav’, 640 Kattan, Naïm (1928–), 641 Kelly, Gene (Eugene Curran Kelly) (1912–1996), 642 Kentucky, 645 Kerouac, Jack (Jean Louis Kerouac) (1922–1969), 647 Kerry, John (1943–), 648 Klein, William (1928–), 649 Kokis, Sergio (1944–), 650 La Condamine, Charles-Marie de (1701–1744), 653 La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de, Sieur (1683–1765), 654 La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de (1741–1788), 655
XII
CONTENTS
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, FrançoisAlexandre-Frédéric de, Duc (1747–1827), 656 La Rochelle, 657 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur (1643–1687), 660 Labat, Jean-Baptiste (1664–1738), 661 Labro, Philippe (1936–), 662 Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981), 663 Lachaise, Gaston (1882–1935), 664 Lafayette, Marquis de (1757–1834), 666 Laferrière, Dany (1953–), 668 Laforgue, Jules (1860–1887), 669 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de (1666–1715), 670 Lake Champlain, 671 Lalemant, Jérôme (1593–1665), 674 Lam, Wilfredo (or Wifredo) (1902–1982), 676 Lambert, Christophe (1957–), 677 Lamothe, Arthur (1928–), 677 Lanctôt, Micheline (1947–), 679 Lang, Jack (1939–), 680 Language, 681 Lanois, Daniel (1951–), 689 Lara, Christian (1939–), 690 Laroche, Maximilien (1937–), 691 Lassalle, Eugène (1859–1929), 692 Laure, Carole (1948–), 693 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse) (1846–1870), 694 Laval, François de Montmorency (1623–1708), 695 Le Bris, Michel (1944–), 696 Le Clézio, Jean Marie Gustave (1940–), 697 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard JeanneretGris) (1887–1965), 698 Le Franc, Marie (1879–1964), 699 Le Havre, 700 Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques (ca. 1533–1588), 701 Lebel, Jean-Jacques (1936–), 703 Leclerc, Charles-Victor-Emmanuel, General (1772–1802), 704 Leclerc, Félix (1914–1988), 705 Leclercq, Chrétien (?–ca. 1698), 706 Lefebvre, Jean Pierre (1941–), 707 Legrand, Michel (1932–), 708 Leiris, Michel (1901–1990), 710 L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles (1755–1825), 711
Lepage, Robert (1957–), 712 Lesueur, Charles Alexandre (1778–1846), 713 Lettres d’une Péruvienne, 714 Lévesque, René (1922–1987), 715 Lévis, François Gaston de, Duc (1720–1787), 717 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–), 718 Levy, Raoul J. (1922–1966), 719 Leyrac, Monique (Monique Tremblay) (1928–), 720 Liberalism, 721 Lispector, Clarice (1920–1977), 723 Literary Relations, 724 Loewy, Raymond (1893–1986), 730 Loopy De Loop, 731 L’Oréal, 732 Lorimier, Louis (1748–1812), 732 Losey, Joseph (1909–1984), 733 Louisbourg, 734 Louisiana, 738 Louisiana Purchase, 743 Louis-Philippe, King of France (1773–1850), 745 Lucky Luke, 746 Lyonnaise des Eaux (Lyonnaise des EauxDumez), 747 Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–1998), 748 Madame Bovary (1857), 749 Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone) (1958–), 750 Maigret, 751 Maillet, Antonine (1929–), 752 Maine, 753 Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de (1612–1676), 755 Malaquais, Jean (Vladimir Malacki) (1908–1998), 755 Maldoror, Sarah (1939–), 757 Malle, Louis (1932–1995), 758 Mallet, Marilú (1944–), 759 Malraux, André (1901–1976), 760 Mance, Jeanne (1606–1673), 761 Manitoba, 763 Marbois, François, Marquis de BarbéMarbois (1745–1837), 767 Marceau, Sophie (Sophie Maupu) (1966–), 768 Maria Chapdelaine, 768 Maritain, Jacques (1883–1973), 771
CONTENTS Marker, Chris (Christian François BoucheVilleneuve) (1921–), 772 Marquette, Jacques (1637–1675), 773 Marshall, Bill (G. William Marshall) (1919–1994), 774 Marshall Plan, The, 775 Martinique, 778 Masson, André (1896–1987), 781 Mathieu, Mireille (1946–), 782 Matisse, Henri (1869–1954), 783 Mattelart, Armand (1936–), 785 Maurois, André (Emile Herzog) (1885–1967), 786 Maximin, Daniel (1947–), 787 McDonald’s, 788 McKay, Claude (1889–1948), 788 Melville, Jean-Pierre (Jean-Pierre Grunbach) (1917–1973), 791 Mendès France, Pierre (1907–1982), 792 Ménil, René (1907–), 793 Mérimée, Prosper (1803–1870), 794 Merrill, Stuart Fitz Randolph (1863–1915), 796 Métis, 797 Mexico, 800 Michaux, Henri (1899–1984), 803 Michelin (Compagnie Générale des Etablissements Michelin), 804 Michigan, 805 Miller, Henry Valentine (1891–1980), 807 Mineral Water, 808 Minnesota, 810 Miranda, Francisco de (1750–1816), 812 Miron, Gaston (1928–1996), 813 Misérables, Les, 814 Mississippi, 816 Mississippi River, 817 Missouri, 819 Mitterrand, François (1916–1996), 819 Mobile, 822 Modernization, 823 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622–1673), 827 Mons, Pierre Dugua de (1560–1628), 829 Montagnais, 830 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–1592), 831 Montand, Yves (Ivo Livi) (1921–1991), 832 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de MontcalmGrozon, Marquis de (1712–1759), 834 Montigny, Louvigny de (1876–1955), 835
XIII
Montreal, 836 Morand, Paul (1888–1976), 840 Morgan, Michèle (Simone Roussel) (1920–), 840 Morin, Edgar (1921–), 841 Music (Classical), 843 Music (Folk), 847 Music (Pop), 850 Nantes, 853 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 855 Nelligan, Emile (1879–1941), 858 Neruda, Pablo (Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Bosoalto) (1904–1973), 859 New Brunswick, 860 New France, 863 New Orleans, 866 Newfoundland, 872 Niagara Falls, 874 Nicot, Jean (ca. 1525–1600), 876 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore (1765–1833), 877 9/11: Cultural Perspectives, 878 9/11: Political Perspectives, 880 Noble Savage, 883 Norman, Jessye (1945–), 885 Nougaro, Claude (1929–2004), 886 Nova Scotia, 887 Nuclear Technology, 891 Ocampo, Victoria (1890–1979), 895 Ohio, 896 Ollivier, Emile (1940–), 897 Ontario, 898 Ottawa, 900 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809), 903 Painting, 906 Palcy, Euzhan (1957–), 910 Panama Canal, 911 Parent, Mimi (1924–), 914 Parkman, Francis (1823–1893), 916 Paz, Octavio (1914–1998), 917 Péan, Stanley (1966–), 918 Peck, Raoul (1953–), 919 Pepe Le Pew, 920 Pépin, Ernest (1950–), 921 Perec, Georges (1936–1982), 922 Péret, Benjamin (1899–1959), 923 Perrault, Pierre (1927–1999), 925
XIV
CONTENTS
Perrot, Nicolas (ca. 1644–1717), 926 Petrucciani, Michel (1962–1999), 927 Peugeot—PSA Peugeot Citroën SA, 928 Photography, 929 Piazzolla, Astor Pantaleón (1921–1992), 932 Pineau, Gisèle (1956–), 933 Piracy and Privateers, 934 Placoly, Vincent (1946–1992), 936 Plamondon, Luc (1942–), 938 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849), 939 Pompidou, Georges (1911–1974), 940 Pontiac (ca. 1720–1769), 941 Pool, Léa (1950–), 943 Pornography, 944 Porter, Cole (1891–1964), 946 Positif, 947 Poulin, Jacques (1937–), 948 Poullet, Hector (1938–), 949 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885–1972), 950 Primitivism, 952 Project FAMOUS, 954 Provost, Joseph (1847–1918), 956 Quebec, 959 Quebec Act, 964 Quebec, Battle of, 966 Quebec City, 969 Quiet Revolution, 972 Radisson, Pierre-Esprit (ca. 1636–1710), 975 Ray, Man (Emmanuel Radnitsky) (1897–1976), 976 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François (1713–1796), 978 Reeves, Hubert (1932–), 979 Reichenbach, François (1922–1993), 980 Reinhardt, Django (1910–1953), 981 Remakes, 982 Reno, Jean (1948–), 984 Renoir, Jean (1894–1979), 985 Republicanism, 986 Resnais, Alain (1922–), 992 Revel, Jean-François (1924–), 993 Revue du monde noir, La, 994 Ribaut, Jean (ca. 1520–1565), 995 Richard, Nelly (1948–), 996 Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de, (1585–1642), 997 Riel, Louis (1844–1885), 998 Rivet, Paul (1876–1958), 1000
Roberval, Jean-François de la Roque, Seigneur de (1500–1561), 1001 Robin, Régine (1939–), 1002 Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de (1725–1807), 1003 Rochefort, 1004 Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917), 1005 Romains, Jules (1885–1972), 1007 Ronfard, Jean-Pierre (1929–2003), 1008 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1882–1945), 1009 Rosay, Françoise (Françoise Bandy de Nadèche) (1891–1974), 1011 Rouch, Jean (1917–2004), 1012 Roumain, Jacques (1907–1945), 1014 Roy, Gabrielle (1909–1983), 1015 Rubber, 1016 Ruiz, Raúl (1941–), 1019 Sábato, Ernesto (1911–), 1021 Saer, Juan Jose (1937–), 1022 Saint Lawrence River, 1023 Saint Louis, 1027 Saint Lucia, 1028 Saint Martin, 1029 Saint Phalle, Niki de (Catherine Marie-Agnès de Saint Phalle) (1930–2002), 1030 Saint-Amand, Edris (1918–2004), 1031 Saint-Denis, Louis Juchereau de (1684–1744), 1032 Sainte-Hélène, Marie-André Regnard Duplessis de (1687–1760), 1033 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de (1900–1944), 1034 Saint-John Perse (Alexis Léger) (1887–1975), 1035 Saint-Malo, 1036 Saint-Mémin, Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de (1770–1852), 1038 Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, 1039 Sand, George (Aurore Dupin) (1804–1876), 1041 Santo Domingo, 1042 Sarduy, Severo (1937–1993), 1045 Sargent, John Singer (1854–1925), 1046 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980), 1047 Saskatchewan, 1050 Schoelcher, Victor (1804–1893), 1051 Schuessele, Christian (1824–1879), 1052 Schwarz-Bart, André (1928–), 1053 Schwarz-Bart, Simone (1938–), 1054 Scorza, Manuel (1928–1983), 1056
CONTENTS Sculpture, 1057 Seberg, Jean (1938–1979), 1061 Segalen, Victor (1878–1919), 1062 Serge, Victor (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) (1890–1947), 1064 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques (1924–), 1065 Shuman, Mort (1936–1991), 1066 Siegfried, André (1875–1959), 1067 Sign Language, 1068 Signoret, Simone (Simone Kaminker) (1921–1985), 1070 Simon, Simone (1911–2005), 1071 Simone, Nina (Eunice Waymon) (1933–2003), 1072 Simoneau, Yves (1957–), 1073 Slavery, 1075 Sodexho, 1079 Solanas, Fernando (1936–), 1080 Soupault, Philippe (1897–1990), 1081 Space Technology, 1082 Sport, 1083 Stanton, Theodore Weld (1851–1925), 1089 Statue of Liberty, The, 1090 Steamboats, 1092 Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), 1093 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), 1095 Sudbury, 1096 Suez Company (Compagnie de Suez/Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez), 1097 Sugar, 1098 Supervielle, Jules (1884–1960), 1100 Surrealism, 1101 Swaim, Bob (1943–), 1104 Tadoussac, 1107 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de (1754–1838), 1108 Talon, Jean (1625–1694), 1109 Tanguy, Yves (1900–1955), 1110 Tanner, Henry Ossawa (1859–1937), 1111 Tavernier, Bertrand (1941–), 1112 Tel Quel, 1113 Television, 1115 Tertre, Jean-Baptiste du (1610–1687), 1118 Texas, 1119 Theater, 1121 Theory, 1126 Thériault, Yves (1915–1983), 1130 Thurber, James (1894–1961), 1131 Timber, 1132
XV
Tobacco, 1134 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–1859), 1137 Toklas, Alice B. (1877–1967), 1140 Tourism, 1141 Tourneur, Jacques (1904–1977), 1146 Tourneur, Maurice (Maurice Thomas) (1876–1961), 1147 Toussaint L’Ouverture, François (1742–1803), 1148 Travel Writing, 1151 Treaty of Paris (1763), 1154 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 1155 Tremblay, Lise (1957–), 1156 Tremblay, Michel (1942–), 1157 Tremblay, Rémi (1847–1926), 1158 Trenet, Charles (1913–2001), 1159 Trinidad, 1160 Tristan, Flora (1803–1844), 1161 Tropiques, 1163 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott (1919–21164), 1164 Truffaut, François (1932–1984), 1165 Twain, Mark (1835–1910), 1167 Ursulines, 1169 Utopias, 1170 Vadim, Roger (1928–21174), 1173 Vallières, Pierre (1938–1998), 1174 Van Peebles, Melvin (1932–), 1175 Varèse, Edgar (1883–1965), 1176 Vattemare, Nicolas-Marie Alexandre (1796–1864), 1178 Veber, Francis (1937–), 1179 Venezuela, 1180 La Vérendrye Family, 1182 Vermont, 1183 Verne, Jules (1828–1905), 1184 Verrazzano, Giovanni da (ca. 1485 to death unknown), 1186 Vian, Boris (1920–1959), 1187 Viatte, Auguste (1901–1993), 1188 Vielé-Griffin, Francis (Egbert Ludovicus Vielé) (1864–1937), 1189 Vietnam War, 1190 Vigneault, Gilles (1928–), 1192 Vigny, Alfred de (1797–1863), 1193 Villechaize, Hervé (1943–1993), 1195 Vivendi Universal, 1196 Vodun, 1196 Voisine, Roch (1963–), 1197
XVI
CONTENTS
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de (1674–1778), 1198 Warner-Vieyra, Myriam (1939–), 1201 Washington, George (1732–1799), 1202 Westerns, 1205 Whaling, 1208 Wharton, Edith (1862–1936), 1210 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill (1834–1903), 1211 White, Edmund (1940–), 1213 Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983), 1214 Williams, William Carlos (1883–1963), 1215
Wilson, Lambert (1958–), 1216 Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924), 1217 Wine, 1219 Wisconsin, 1224 World War I, 1225 World War II, 1228 Wright, Richard (1908–1960), 1234 Yourcenar, Marguerite (Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour) (1903–1987), 1237 Zobel, Joseph (1915–), 1239 Zola, Emile (1840–1902), 1240
Index, 1243 About the Editor, 1297
E DE BRIVE, L’ The Ecole de Brive (School of Brive) is a group of writers (Claude Michelet, Michel Peyramaure, Denis Tillinac, Gilbert Bordes, Jean-Guy Soumy, Yves Viollier, Collette Laussac, and Martine Marie Muller) centered on Brive in southwestern France. Their closely related themes may be seen as representative of la France profonde (rural and provincial France), in particular the themes of changes in the countryside, the end of the peasantry, and the problem of rural desertification over the course of the twentieth century, together with the changing role of women, the effect of state education (l’école laïque), and the problem of identity, all seen in rural contexts. Their novels have had a wide popular appeal in France since the beginning of the 1980s. Their settings are not only local or regional, as they have also written about the Americas, as well as French Africa or the Pacific to some extent, with the exception of Bordes and Laussac. Denis Tillinac (born 1947), who describes himself as “le d’Artagnan de la droite” (the D’Artagnan of the Right), and has Parisian as well as Corrézien roots, is a novelist and essayist, whose themes center on the loss of the sense of culture, history, and identity in modern France. Although
ECOLE
many of the themes are postmodern, he has adopted an anti-left-wing position, refusing to be bound by ideology. Unusually, he has also written about the Americas very positively. In Elvis, ballade sudiste (Elvis, a Journey through the Deep South, 1996), Tillinac recounts his discovery as a teenager of the early Elvis, whom he sees as a rebel, deeply influenced by jazz and blues music from black southern culture. The book recounts his journey from Memphis to New Orleans in search of Elvis and the Deep South in an essay deeply influenced by Kerouac and revelatory also of the influence of William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essay is an exploration of the myth of Elvis within the context of the myth of the South, which Tillinac sees as a poor region oppressed culturally and economically by the North, just as the southwest of France is oppressed by Paris. Le Bar des Palmistes (“The Bar of the Palm Tree Square People,” 1997) is a travelogue about French Guiana, again in Kerouac style. Tillinac sets out to capture the feeling of the country by venturing off the beaten track. From his base in Cayenne, he visits the bagne (penal colony) on the Ile Royale where Dreyfus, a captain in the French army who was unjustly condemned for spying for Germany, was sent from
409
410
ECOLE
DE
BRIVE, L’
1894 to 1900, and explores the country from the Surinam to the Brazilian borders, becoming aware of social and political issues. The traveling makes him reflect on French culture and identity, what France brings to Guiana as a colony both economically and culturally, and the similarities between Guiana and the Limousin. All of France, colonies included, sleeps in the shade of the Eiffel Tower. Claude Michelet (1936–), author of the best-selling trilogy Des Grives aux loups (Firelight and Woodsmoke/Applewood/The Scent of Herbs, 1979–1990), chose to write about Latin America in another trilogy, Les Promesses du ciel et de la terre (“Promises of Heaven and Earth”), Pour un arpent de terre (“For an Acre of Land”), and Le Grand Sillon (“The Great Furrow”) (1985–1988). Michelet shows very effectively, through the slow social ascension of the protagonists Antoine and Martial, the covert struggle for influence and power in Chile between the colonial powers of Great Britain and Germany, the war between Peru and Bolivia, and the building of the Panama Canal. In a historical fresco of Latin America between 1870 and 1900, accompanied by corruption in France, Michelet uses the historical setting to evoke problems of identity, the future of the land, and colonialism, while concentrating on the narrative sweep and the point of view of his characters to portray the context. In a postscript, La Nuit de Calama (“The Night of Calama,” 1994), Michelet revisits Chile in the 1970s. Christian, a journalist and great-grandson of Antoine, is imprisoned under the dictator Augusto Pinochet while reporting on Chile. His experience makes him realize what life must
have been like for his father in France during the occupation. Michelet thus draws the parallel between life under Vichy, the Resistance and his father’s deportation to Dachau, and life in a contemporary police state. Michel Peyramaure (1920–) has written two historical novels dealing with French involvement in North America, speculating on what might have been had settlers in Quebec and Louisiana received more support from France in their struggle against the British and had the interests of French ministers been more enlightened and not been purely economic. In Les Tambours sauvages (“The Savage Drums,” 1992), covering the period 1630 to 1690, Peyramaure follows French development in Quebec through his main characters, adolescents from the Périgord. He shows the power struggle in Acadia, which allows New England to intervene in the French colony; the defense of Montreal against the Iroquois; and finally the exploration of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi down to Louisiana. As a novelist, Peyramaure puts the accent on dialogue and action, while making extensive use of historical sources and showing how personal ambition and greed undermined the colony. In Louisiana (1996), he paints a vast historical fresco of the period from 1698 through to 1770, suggesting the big political drama through the actions of individuals who are unaware of the larger picture. Again, he indicates the slow growth of the colony, the decimation caused by disease, and the lack of political or military support when no gold was found. Yves Viollier (born 1946) completed the two volumes of Les Saisons de Vendée
ECOLE
(“The Vendée Seasons,” 1996–1998), the story of a peasant family in Vendée in the first half of the twentieth century, with Notre Dame des Caraïbes (“Our Lady of the Caribbean,” 2000). The tale centers on the young son of the family who becomes a missionary to the black population of the island of Dominica in 1945. Although concentrating on the personal problems and development of his main character, Viollier evokes the problems of missionary work in general (and not only the problem of celibacy), the legacy of a colonial past, and the problem of identity, both for the protagonist and the islanders. Jean-Guy Soumy (1952–), best known for his trilogy Les Moissons délaissés (“The Abandoned Harvests,” 1992–1995), deals with the question of slavery in La Belle Rochellaise (“The Beautiful Woman of La Rochelle,” 1998), which is set in 1831 in the Limoges area. Although the plot is not “realistic” (a black slave, brought illegally to France by her master, escapes captivity with the help of a woodcutter and eventually gets back to Africa after a series of adventures), it is anchored in a good knowledge of the historical conditions of the period, both with regard to France and the application of the Code Noir (the French legal black slave code) on the treatment of slaves, and shows the constraints on freedom in France at the time. In a further novel, Julie de bonne espérance (“Julie of Good Hope,” 1996), the hero flees to the United States for political reasons, but the emphasis is on repression in France, after left-wing agitation in Limoges linked to the Revolution of 1848, rather than on the United States, which is presented summarily as a land of freedom, opportunity, and new markets.
DE
BRIVE, L’
411
Martine Marie Muller (1954–) set her novel Terres brûlantes (“Burning Lands,” 1998) in Mexico in the period 1910–1918, during the Mexican Revolution within the circle of the descendants of the people from Barcelonnette who had emigrated to Mexico in the nineteenth century. Through the eyes and emotions of a young girl of peasant origin from the Béarn in southwest France, the novel evokes the various revolutions and betrayals of the period and the desire of the Mexican peasants to reclaim their land for themselves from the great landowners, including the French. Generally, the writers of the Brive school, irrespective of what part of America they are dealing with, adopt a point of view that conforms with peasant origins in class terms, a love of the land, and a feeling of revolt based on poverty and justice. The authors go beyond the evocation of an exotic or distant setting, to reflect on contemporary France, its culture, peasantry, colonial attitudes, and history. This dual perspective, within a traditional narrative framework, enriches the problems of identity and history, relating the past to the present. William Dickson See also: Acadia; Aviation; Brazil; Chile; Dreyfus Case; Guiana; Kerouac, Jack; Louisiana; Mexico; Mississippi River; Montreal; New Orleans; Panama Canal; Quebec; Slavery; World War II. References Dauzier, Pierre, and Denis Tillinac. Les Corréziens. Paris: Laffont, 1991. Dryhurst, James. Michelet la grande muraille. Glasgow: Glasgow French and German Publications, 1996. Panen, Pierre. Claude Michelet sur la terre des hommes. Paris: Laffont, 1995. Peuchmaurd, Jacques. L’Ecole de Brive, son histoire, ses acteurs. Paris: Laffont, 1996.
412
EISENHOWER, DWIGHT D.
EISENHOWER, DWIGHT D. (1890–1969) Thirty-fourth U.S. president (1953–1961), Dwight David Eisenhower, popularly known as Ike, played a key role in FrancoAmerican relations at the liberation of France, in the development of the postwar European defense organization, and in the unsuccessful French colonial war in Indochina. As a career officer, Eisenhower first went to France in 1928 on a mission to revise the official American guidebook to the trenches and monuments of World War I. In World War II, he became successively commander of the U.S. forces in Europe and then supreme commander of the allied expeditionary force, responsible for the invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch, November 8, 1942), the D day landings (June 6, 1944), and the subsequent liberation of France. In this key role, Eisenhower found himself at the center of stormy Franco-American relations, with President Roosevelt on one side refusing to recognize any French, especially Gaullist, authority before free elections had been held, and General de Gaulle on the other, deeply sensitive to any slighting of French national integrity. Eisenhower’s pragmatic behavior in North Africa—accepting the overtures of compromised politicians and supporting the candidacy of General Giraud as a rival to de Gaulle—temporarily soured relations. By the time of the D day landings, however, Eisenhower was convinced that de Gaulle’s administration was the only alternative, despite Roosevelt’s continued intransigence and arguments between the French and the other Allies about detailed preparations for liberation. When de Gaulle insisted that troops should be diverted from the main operation to liberate
Thirty-fourth U.S. president (1953–1961) Dwight David Eisenhower played a key role in FrancoAmerican relations at the liberation of France, in the development of the postwar European defense organization, and in the unsuccessful French colonial war in Indochina. (Library of Congress)
Paris (August 1944) and then asked Eisenhower to parade American troops through the capital as a tangible demonstration of support for the new provisional government of France, Eisenhower acquiesced. In 1950, Eisenhower became the supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), based in a château outside Paris, once owned by Napoléon III. Defense relations between Eisenhower and the French government were often difficult at this time, with disagreements about the extent to which France felt it appropriate to accept a unified military command. When Eisenhower became president in 1953, these issues continued to be of vital importance to both sides, with the Americans keen for the French to be part of a European Defense
ELF-AQUITAINE
Community, a proposal eventually voted down by the French parliament in August 1954. More immediate military issues arose in relation to France’s unresolved colonial war in Indochina. The United States had been financing some three-quarters of the French war effort, and in early 1954 Eisenhower was persuaded to send in U.S. technicians on the ground, the first U.S. servicemen to go to Vietnam. Despite this help, the French were in grave military difficulties and asked the Americans for more overt military help to save the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. Eisenhower hesitated to commit U.S. troops, and the French were defeated on May 7, 1954, in what was perceived in France as an event of considerable symbolic importance to the nation. Hilary Footitt See also: Gaulle, General Charles de; NATO; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Vietnam War; World War I; World War II. References Ambrose, Stephen E. The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Anderson, David L. Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Crusade in Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
ELF-AQUITAINE (TOTALFINAELF) Elf-Aquitaine was France’s largest company at the end of the 1990s and one of the top ten petrochemical companies in the world, with more than 800 subsidiaries across the hydrocarbon, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries. It was a fully integrated oil
413
and gas company, upstream and downstream, with oil fields in a dozen countries, producing about 1 million barrels a day, and 6,500 gas stations across Europe and North Africa. Other brands include Yves Saint Laurent. The company was founded in 1939 by the French government as the Régie Autonome de Saint-Marcet, referring to the region in southwest France where modest gas findings were made. The Vichy government reorganized the company, adopting the reference to Aquitaine, which had become the site for the reserves of choice in 1941, and after the war it was restructured again, as part of the country’s effort to regain control over energy supply. Exploration in North Africa faltered until 1956, when oil was struck, quickly followed by the discovery of other oil and gas fields. But the French product was not competitive on the world stage, and the government instigated a national duty (devoir national ) to ensure sales in France. Moves into Iraqi hydrocarbons came in the 1960s. The French populace awoke to the Elf brand in April 1967. It was thought necessary to give the company the sprightly image suggested by the name in order to encourage brand recognition and loyalty. Algerian nationalization of oil assets in 1971 was a major blow to the company, though the discovery of oil in the North Sea mitigated disaster. Diversification was also necessary, notably into pharmaceuticals, and by the 1980s the company was the secondlargest player in that market in France. In that decade, new leadership turned toward the United States too, and the acquisition of Texasgulf tripled U.S. revenues overnight and brought success in sulfur.
414
ELVIS GRATTON
The French government sold all but 13 percent of its stake in the company in 1994, generating a windfall of $6 billion, though the company reported its first loss that year too. It was also in 1994 that it was blighted by scandal: an investigation by French magistrate Eva Joly eventually revealed a chain of fraud and bribery that touched many of the leading politicians in France and led to the convictions of France’s former foreign minister Roland Dumas and of the former head of Elf, Loïk Le Floch-Prigent. Both subsequently appealed: Dumas was acquitted; FlochPrigent was jailed. The new company was created through two successive mergers, the first when the former Total joined with Belgian oil company Petrofina to form Totalfina, and the second when Totalfina combined with French oil company Elf Aquitaine to create TotalFinaElf. Mark Vernon See also: Fashion; World War II. References Grayson, Lynn E. Natural Oil Companies. London: John Wiley, 1981. L’Histoire d’Elf Aquitaine. (Published by the company), 1986.
ELVIS GRATTON Fictional character in Quebec films directed by Pierre Falardeau (b. 1946) and played by Julien Poulin (b. 1946), his coscriptwriter. The comedies written about this Elvis Presley impersonator in Quebec have a nationalist political edge, denouncing U.S. mass culture and the ravages of contemporary globalization. Falardeau’s other work includes a dramatization of the 1970 October hostage crisis (Octobre, 1994) from
the point of view of the FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec) activists, and 15 février 1839 (2000) about the execution of the Patriotes rebelling against British rule. The first movie, called simply Elvis Gratton, is in fact an amalgamation of three short films made in 1981–1985; after its television broadcast, it became the most popular rented video in Quebec. The feature-length and bigger-budget sequel of 1999, Elvis Gratton II: Miracle à Memphis (Miracle in Memphis), was the largestgrossing Quebec film that year and in the overall top ten. It was followed in 2004 by Elvis Gratton III: La revanche de Elvis Wong (The Revenge of Elvis Wong). The first film belongs to the aftermath of the 1980 referendum result, when nearly 60 percent of the Quebec electorate voted against sovereignty. This huge disappointment to nationalists determines the way in which Gratton is mercilessly targeted as the butt of satirical humor. This potbellied and physically uncoordinated individual is a federalist and admirer of Trudeau, his Elvis obsession to be read as an example of cultural alienation and colonization. Criticism is woven in of U.S. foreign policy (the Grattons go on holiday to “Santa Banana,” which is ruled by a midget President “Ricochet”), and by the end of the movie everyone in a supermarket is wearing an Elvis mask and thus suitably homogenized. The 1999 film, which again followed a referendum defeat, trades less on the Presley connection and more on a generalized critique of globalization and the media. Gratton, who had suffocated in an excessively tight Elvis suit at the end of the first movie, miraculously resuscitates and goes on to global fame. With the help of his American agent, “D. Bill Clinton” (a pun on the Quebec word for idiot, débile, only one of
ERNST, MAX
numerous swipes at contemporary political figures), Gratton stars in Hollywood films, ruthlessly merchandised in his fast food chain, and opens his own theme park, Grattonland. He becomes a demagogue in favor of “privatizing everything.” The scattershot nature of the second film’s satire in fact conceals many ambivalences. As well as the butt of mockery, Gratton also has the capacity to become a figure of affection for Quebec audiences. Although the 1999 film in particular is resolutely politically incorrect, it purports to justify this by including in its mockery the ordinary Québécois. The inexportable humor of the Elvis Gratton films indeed involves much self-mockery, but Québécois audiences have to ask, does this display of kitsch and cultural backwardness (known as le quétaine) represent what “we” have left behind since the Quiet Revolution, or is it still what “we are”? Moreover the question remains open as to what extent Quebec culture has always been a conversation with those who are “not us,” those figures so mercilessly sent up here, be they native, ethnic minority, French, or American. Bill Marshall See also: Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. References Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Rousseau, Yves. “Le Temps des bouffons.” 24 Images 98–99 (Autumn 1999): 86–87.
ERNST, MAX (1891–1976) German painter, printmaker, and sculptor, naturalized U.S. (1948) and French (1958) citizen; emigrated from France to the United States during World War II. Born
415
in 1891 in Brühl, Germany, died in 1976 in Paris. Ernst’s experiments with frottage (a rubbing and drawing technique involving chance), dripped paint, and collage placed him at the forefront of the surrealist movement, and influenced U.S. abstract expressionist painters, who adapted some of these techniques. An avid collector of Native American sculpture, Ernst settled in the Southwest and incorporated its landscape elements and art into his later work. Ernst began his career in the late 1910s as a leader of Cologne dada, working under the pseudonym Dadamax. He moved to Paris in 1922, where he met Paul Eluard and André Breton. In 1924, Ernst’s work was included in the premier issue of La Révolution surréaliste, the group’s first journal. He exhibited steadily with the surrealists, breaking briefly with Breton in 1938 (they reconciled three years later). The beginning of World War II forced Ernst into exile. Aided by Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee and his future wife, the collector Peggy Guggenheim, Ernst arrived in New York in July 1941 and was briefly arrested by U.S. immigration officials (he was still a German national). He traveled to California with Guggenheim, stopping in New Mexico, Arizona, and Louisiana. Upon his return to New York, Ernst worked closely with the exiled surrealist group. His work was already well known in the United States, where it had been featured in individual and group exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 show “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.” With Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and David Hare, Ernst established the surrealist journal VVV (1942–1944), which became the mouthpiece for the exiled group of artists and writers.
416
ERNST, MAX
Battle of the fish, Max Ernst, 1917. Ernst moved to Paris in 1922, where he met Paul Eluard and André Breton. In 1924, Ernst’s work was included in the premier issue of La Révolution surréaliste, the group's first journal. (Library of Congress)
Wartime exhibitions provided American artists the opportunity to view firsthand the work of Ernst and the European avant-garde. Pierre Matisse Gallery’s 1942 “Artists in Exile” included Ernst’s Europe after the Rain II (1940–1942). Begun in France and completed in New York, the painting reflects Ernst’s commitment to automatic painting processes (here he employed decalcomania, pressing paint onto the canvas to create random shapes). Many scholars interpret its decayed rock formations as reflecting the world devastated by war. Surrealism and Painting (1942, Menil Collection, Houston), which depicts a birdlike creature creating an image through dripped paint, received much critical attention in the 1942 “First Papers of Surrealism” group exhibition. Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery opened the same year, showing contemporary European art (including Ernst) and providing a common
meeting place for exiled surrealists and American artists. In 1946, Ernst and his new wife, the painter Dorothea Tanning, settled in Sedona, Arizona. Ernst continued to collect Native American art, paint, and create sculpture for his new house, including Capricorn (1948), a work influenced by pre-Columbian art. He returned to Paris in 1953, working and living in Europe until his death. Ellen Adams See also: Breton, André; Duchamp, Marcel; Fry, Varian; Painting; Sculpture; Surrealism. References Barron, Stephanie, with Sabine Eckmann. Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997. Sawin, Martica. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Speis, Werner. Max Ernst: A Retrospective. Munich: Prestel, 1991.
ERTÉ
ERTÉ (ROMAIN DE TIRTOFF) (1892–1990) “Erté: inventor of the modern woman, for him clothes are not function but sign,” said Roland Barthes about him (Barthes, p. 14). Fashion designer and stylist, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, he started working with couturier Paul Poiret. He was also a wellknown illustrator for many magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, in the United States, as early as 1915 and for twenty-two years. Inspired by masters of art nouveau like Emile Gallé and René Lalique, but also by orientalism, which was extremely fashionable at the time, Erté cleverly mixed those two trends. His success and the presence in Paris of Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets russes, aroused an overwhelming passion for Russian culture in France. By the beginning of the 1920s, Erté had already developed all the characteristics of his mature style, its spirit, fantasy, and concern for minute details; his work had a strong influence on art deco, and in a sense formed a bridge between art nouveau and art deco. The son of an admiral, he had a golden childhood in the last splendors of czarist Russia. Precocious, he created his first evening gown for his mother at the age of five. He arrived in Paris at the age of eighteen, and after a short stay at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he started work in Paul Poiret’s atelier in 1913. His great creative ability, ranging from interior decoration to furniture, jewelry, and book illustration, also applied to stage design for the theater as well as the cinema. From 1921 to 1929, in Paris, he created shows for the Folies Bergère, the Casino de Paris, and the renowned Bal Tabarin. In 1925, Hollywood opened its doors to him. He worked with Cecil B. DeMille and King Vidor on productions such as Ziegfield Follies (1946). He invented the
417
“collective costume,” in which each individual costume becomes an element of another ensemble when the wearers join together. It is also said that some scenes in the more extravagant musicals needed as much as 7 kilometers of gold lamé. After the war, Erté worked intensively on the creation of scenery for both theater and opera, working on such productions as Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) by Guillaume Apollinaire, with music by Francis Poulenc, at l’Opéra Comique in Paris in June 1947. The critics were unanimous in their approval, but the public booed each show. He pursued this activity for many years, with, for example, a sumptuous performance of Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss at the Glyndebourne festival in 1980. But it was really only in the middle of the 1960s that various exhibitions brought him back into celebrity status, demonstrating his enduring talent. Coming to sculpture in 1972, at the age of eighty, he once again achieved a brilliant success. Inspired by his drawings for Harper’s Bazaar, but also by his famous alphabet started in 1928, the bronze sculptures picture mostly feminine forms in motion. Transition to this new expression was easy for someone like him, who had always taken the third dimension into account when he conceived his drawings. Erté died in Paris in 1990. Roger Bourdeau See also: Art Nouveau; Barthes, Roland; Cinema, 1895–1945; Dance; Fashion; Music (Classical); Sculpture; World War II. References Barthes, Roland. Erté. Parma: FMR, 1973. Erté. Things I Remember: An Autobiography. London: Owen, 1975. ———. My Life, My Art: An Autobiography. New York: Dutton, 1989. Spencer, Charles. Erté. London: Studio Vista, 1970.
418
ESCOMEL, GLORIA
ESCOMEL, GLORIA (1941–) Poet, short story writer, novelist, and radio scriptwriter, born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on October 15, 1941. Gloria Escomel arrived in France in 1960. She obtained a degree in literature at the Université de Paris in 1964. She was awarded her doctorate at Montreal University, which she attended when she settled in the city in 1979. A lecturer at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), as well as at the Université du Québec, also in Montreal, from 1978 to 1988, she wrote for many publications: Châteleine, L’Actualité, Perspectives, Vivre, La Gazette des femmes, Le Devoir, La Nouvelle Barre du jour, La Liberté. She was a member of the editorial board of La Vie en rose. La Nouvelle Barre du jour, which was created in 1977, was edited by Jean-Yves Colette and Michel Gay, who placed great emphasis on their modernity. La Liberté, launched in 1959, was quite close to this movement and broadened the literary horizon, giving a voice to the positions and aspirations of a generation eager for cultural difference and the nationalist question. La Vie en rose (1980–1987), which took up where Les Têtes de pioche (1976–1979) left off, united women who attacked models of patriarchal power and favored the emergence of a feminine culture. It was against this intellectual backdrop that Gloria Escomel evolved, expressing her own difference. Her article “Stérilité: jusqu’où faut-il aller pour avoir un enfant?” (Sterility: How Far Must One Go to Have a Child?) was awarded the 1986 Robertine Barry Prize for the best feminist article. In 1988, in the magazine category and along with other journalists from La Gazette, she received the Judith Jasmin Prize for her arti-
cle “Quelle vieillesse vous préparez-vous: un âge d’or ou d’argent?” (What Kind of Old Age Are You Preparing for Yourself: A Golden or Silver Age?). Gloria Escomel is also a member of the Union des écrivaines et écrivains québécois (Union of Québécois Writers). In Les Eaux de la mémoire: Contes et nouvelles (“The Waters of Memory: Tales and Stories,” 1994), Escomel offers an exposition of human suffering. In all simplicity, she introduced her love of women in this work, describing friendships that have died or friends who have left. In this collection, the short story “Le Personnage”/“The Character” depicts a man who returns to Paris with the secret wish to find his former mistress and his lost youth. In fact, this man, Pierre, stands for the author herself, a woman suffering as she looks for the woman she has loved and who has disappeared. Escomel also talks of time, of the period of vital importance in the life of this woman, both loved and lover, who tries to progress in a world made of both the real and the imagined. Escomel recounts moments of a life, in a gentle style, with enigmatic and split characters. Jérôme Ceccon See also: Feminisms. Reference Kailo, Kaarina. “Ecriture migrante, écriture d’extase—le fruit de la passion de Gloria Escomel.” Multiculture, Multiécriture. Ed. Maïr Kerthuny and Lucie Lequin. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996: 199–208.
ETIENNE, FRANCK (1936–) Prolific educator, singer, actor, playwright, writer, and painter, Franck Etienne (alias Frankétienne, Franketienne, or Franketyèn) was born on April 12, 1936, in the
ETIENNE, FRANCK
Haitian countryside, a child of the “rape” of a poor Haitian teenage girl by an old American industrialist. This primal scene—which is first of all a story of an almost white kid, raised without his natural father in a popular urban black neighborhood—became the main motif of one of his greatest books, H’ErosChimères (2002). This huge “family novel” of 350 of 8.5” x 11” pages in a completely mixed or hybrid form—which Frankétienne called “spirale” (spiral), like almost all his nondramatic works since Ultravocal (1972)—is also the “novel” of HaitianAmerican relationships. At least, it shows a kind of U.S. presence in Haiti of which the McDonald’s train furrowing the Haitian countryside should be the obsessive metaphor. The image appears again in Dézafi (1975), the first novel ever published in the Haitian language. Frankétienne has explored and used systematically the most challenging writing techniques involved in the experimentation of French and American writers like Michel Butor, Joëlle de la Casinière, or John Dos Passos, to name a few, blending them with popular Haitian poetics to describe the powerful, dominant North. Hence, it is not by chance that he published in 1995 with the Haitian painter and writer Claude Dambreville, L’Amérique saigne (Gun blesse America): a series of short stories with one main character who is also prefacer-narrator-novelist-scholar, Dave King Freeman, of which the full title is an ironical calque of the famous God Bless America to say quite the contrary: America Bleeds (Gun Injures America). The conversations of this super-character with his parents about the daily bloody TV news alternate with stories of quiet, sordid, and gratuitous murders. L’Amérique saigne
419
portrays a stereotypical violent and crazy America where the Haitian subject is absent; in contrast Pèlin-Tèt (1978), his great popular success, narrates a dark part of the Haitian migration of the 1970s in New York. Indeed, in his free adaptation in Haitian language of Slamowir Mrozek’s Les Emigrés (“The Emigrants,” 1975), Frankétienne put on stage two Haitians from very different social conditions and backgrounds discussing in their New York basement apartment their outcasts’ life in the United States and the difficult history of Haiti. Hence, Frankétienne transforms an absurd European drama into a HaitianAmerican tragicomedy, as he did later with his very personal Haitian version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Bobomasouri (1984), which was his first collaboration with the French director Jean-Pierre Bernay of the Centre dramatique francohaïtien (1984–1987). It is especially in the chaos of his 800page “spiral,” L’Oiseau schizophone (The Schizophone Bird, 1993), that Frankétienne explores more deeply and more globally the links between Haiti and the United States, and at the same time the key role of the Caribbean plantation in the huge growth of colonial Europe and imperial America, mainly through his Maître Lolo Rosaire Dubois Lajoie Lapaix. This character, which recalls the Mac Abre of Ultravocal, is one of the emblematic figures of this omnipotent power that crosses time and space in his work. L’Oiseau also marks a turning point in Frankétienne’s literary production: mixing visual and literary arts to produce large books that are at the same time essay, story, poetry, and art album, but also fiction and autobiography. Transcending the dichotomies of
420
ETIENNE, GÉRARD
painting versus writing or visual art versus verbal art, these books, above all H’ErosChimères, showcase different formats of his numerous and various paintings from 1974 to date (where Jackson Pollock’s influence, for example, is obvious), offering an exceptional vision of the Haitian imaginary in its baroque and carnivalesque tragic drift. Jean Jonassaint See also: Butor, Michel; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël; Créolité; Haiti; Painting. References Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Raphaël Confiant. Lettres créoles. Paris: Hatier, 1991. Frankétienne. Interview by Charles Rowell. Callaloo 15, no. 2 (1992): 385–392. Jonassaint, Jean. “Beyond Painting or Writing: Frankétienne’s Poetic Quest.” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (2004): 141–156.
ETIENNE, GÉRARD (1936–) Poet, novelist, and essayist, born in CapHaïtien (Haiti) in 1936; exiled to Canada in 1964, where he studied linguistics and literature and became a professor at the University of Moncton. Etienne makes the harrowing experiences of his life the main theme of his creative writing. It goes without saying that his literary universe and his poetic work are autobiographical. The two literary genres describe the tyranny in his homeland that lasted for thirty years. Explicitly, his work reveals that the United States of America gave its support to the dictatorial regime and denounces vehemently U.S. interference in Haitian politics. As a victim of despotism when a teenager, Etienne, who has described his
torture in his fictional work, was thus led to seek a cure for the trauma he suffered by writing. Such is basically the message of his books: La Charte des crépuscules (“The Twilight Charter,” 1993), La Pacotille (“The Piece of Junk,” 1991), Un Ambassadeur macoute à Montréal (“A Macoute Amabassador in Montreal,” 1980), Le Nègre crucifié (“The Crucified Negro,” 1974), and Dialogue avec mon ombre (“Dialogue with My Shadow,” 1972). His poetry and other literary work, like René Depestre’s (Journal d’un animal marin/“Diary of a Marine Animal,” 1990, Hadriana dans tous mes rêves/Hadriana in My Dreams, 1988, Le Mât de cocagne/The Festival of the Greasy Pole, 1979, Gerbe de sang/“Wreath of Blood,” 1946), is a fundamental engagement between aesthetics and politics in Haiti and in North America. In fact, Etienne’s novels and his poetry focus on two referential spaces: Haiti and America, which constitute the subject matter for his work. The latter is both a political battle in his homeland and in the United States and in Canada, the land of hospitality. His work takes part in political struggle in his homeland, in the United States, and in Canada, the land where he found hospitality. Etienne, who saw only in revolution real hope for the moral and social distress of his country, received some prestigious literary prizes in Canada. Jean Norgaisse See also: Depestre, René; Haiti. References Desroches, Jenner. Prolégomènes à une literature haïtienne en diaspora. Montreal: CIDIHCA, 2000. Dumontet, Danielle. L’Esthétique du choc: Gérard Etienne ou l’écriture haïtienne au Québec. Frankfurt: Lang, 2003.
EVANGELINE
EVANGELINE Evangeline, the Acadian heroine of the poem Evangeline, written by U.S. poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807– 1882), became one of the world’s bestknown literary creations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. More than 150 years later, Evangeline remains a recognizable icon and, for some, a source of inspiration. Longfellow claimed he first heard the story of the Acadian woman whom he later named Evangeline at an 1841 dinner party in Boston. An Episcopalian minister, Horace Lorenzo Connolly, recounted the legend of a girl who, at the time of the forcible British removal of Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755, “was separated from her lover and passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only found him dying in a hospital when both were old” (Elliott 1958, pp. 48–49). Longfellow later stated that what struck him about the story was that it was simply “the best illustration of faithfulness and constancy of women that I have ever heard of or read” (Griffiths 1982). The poet began work on the project in 1845, initially calling the heroine Celestine or Gabrielle. A month and a half into the writing he changed the name to Evangeline. There had never been anyone by that name in Acadia, nor with the family name he gave her, Bellefontaine. Nor was there a Gabriel Lajeunesse, the name he gave her betrothed. Two works influenced Longfellow’s interpretation of Acadia. One was Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 1770), with its short but evocative description of pre-deportation Acadia as an idyllic place of peace and plenty. The other was T. C.
421
Haliburton’s An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova-Scotia (1829), from which Longfellow learned details of what happened at Grand-Pré in 1755. Thanks to Longfellow’s poem, Grand-Pré subsequently became the location most closely identified with the Acadian deportations. Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, was published in Boston on October 20, 1847, where it was an instant success. The first edition sold out, and it was reprinted many times over. In the course of its first hundred years, Longfellow’s Evangeline went through at least 270 editions and 130 translations. The first illustrated editions of Evangeline were published in London and Boston in 1850. Over the next century and a half, many dozens of artists offered their visual interpretations of the character Evangeline and the various locales described in the poem, and many images of Evangeline ended up on commercial products, such as ceramic dishes, boxes of chocolates, and soft drink bottles. When motion picture technology came along, the story of Evangeline and Gabriel was tailor-made for a film version. Short, one-reel adaptations of the tale by Longfellow were produced in 1908 and in 1911. In 1913, a Halifax-based company came out with the first feature-length film ever produced in Canada: a five-reel production of Evangeline lasting over an hour and costing $30,000 to produce. It opened to a packed house in Halifax in 1914 and was subsequently shown elsewhere in Canada and in New York. American versions of Evangeline were released in 1919 and 1929, with the latter adaptation being through United Artists and starring Dolores Del Rio in the lead role.
422
EVANS,WALKER
A striking aspect of the Evangeline phenomenon is that its origin and spread was due almost entirely to non-Acadians, indeed to anglophones. Once created by a New England poet, Evangeline was transformed by British and American publishers, illustrators, filmmakers, and other commercial interests into an icon that sold millions of products. A. J. B. (John) Johnston See also: Acadia; Nova Scotia; Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François. References Elliott, Shirley B. “A Tale of Love in Acadie, the Origin of Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline.’” Atlantic Advocate 48, no. 8 (April 1958): 48–49. Griffiths, Naomi. “Longfellow’s Evangeline: The Birth and Acceptance of a Legend.” Acadiensis 11, no. 2 (spring 1982): 28–41. LeBlanc, Barbara. “Evangeline as Identity Myth.” Canadian Folklore canadien 15, no. 2 (1993): 139–151. ———. Postcards from Acadie: Grand-Pré, Evangeline, and the Acadian Identity. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2003. Viau, Robert. Les Visages d’Evangéline: Du poème au mythe. Beauport, QC: MNH, 1998.
EVANS,WALKER (1903–1975) American photographer (active 1929– 1975) whose lyrical black-and-white images owe much in style to the influence of French photography. Walker Evans is best known for his photographs of rural life during the Great Depression; he first traveled the southern states of America on his own, then worked on government propaganda, before collaborating with the writer James Agee on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. A college dropout, Evans traveled to Paris in 1926 to join the thriving expatriate
community on the Left Bank, with the intention of becoming a writer. Immensely shy and self-conscious, Evans struggled with writing and became immersed in French culture away from “the Crowd.” Upon his return to New York in 1927, he entered into the emerging artistic and literary community and became friends with Lincoln Kirstein, Hart Crane, and Ben Shahn. Evans’s photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge illustrated Crane’s epic poem The Bridge in 1929. Earlier, Evans had become friends with Berenice Abbott, another returned expatriate, who in turn introduced him to the work of Eugène Atget. Evans reviewed Atget’s work for Kirstein’s Hound and Horn. Atget’s melancholic style of street photography was a huge influence on Evans, whose interest in precise literary form seemed to be echoed in the diligent photographs of the French artisan. Evans later admitted that his own photographic style was “uncomfortably close” to Atget’s, and Evans’s photographs of shop fronts, signage, and empty streets appear to support this. Evans also admired Henri CartierBresson’s street photography, and as a result took to using the new small-format Leica that Cartier-Bresson preferred. In 1935 Evans went to work for the Farm Securities Administration, working on images to promote Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms; his sense of independence often caused friction with the agency. He followed this job in 1936 by staying with a sharecropper family for the project with Agee, originally a commission for Fortune magazine. After the war, Evans became the staff photographer for Fortune, later becoming its picture editor. His work for such a wellheeled magazine actually demonstrated Evans’s uncompromising nature. Evans, an ardent skeptic of American capitalism,
EXPO 67
423
American photographer Walker Evans, whose lyrical black-and-white images owe much in style to the influence of French photography. (Library of Congress)
sought to destabilize the romantic image of U.S. industry that the magazine had previously upheld. He stayed at Fortune until 1964, continuing to produce portfolio works that continued the disinterested style he had developed in the 1930s. In 1964 he took up a professorial post at Yale School of Art, which he kept until his death. Damian Sutton See also: Atget, Eugène; Cartier-Bresson, Henri; Photography. References Daniel, Pete. Official Images: New Deal Photography. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987. Hambourg, Maria Morris, et al. Walker Evans. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University Press, 2000. Rathbone, Linda. Walker Evans: A Biography. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
EXPO 67 The Exposition universelle de Montréal held in the summer of 1967, known as Expo 67, remains a memorable event in Canadian history. Many people believe that this Montreal World’s Fair, the only one ever held in Canada, contributed to make the whole world aware of Canada and Quebec, not only as an ex-British colony or Dominion, but as a distinctive, creative, prosperous place. It attracted some 50 million visitors from April 27 to October 29, 1967, to two islands in Montreal. For the occasion, a whole island (Ile Notre-Dame) was created on the Saint Lawrence River, just at the beginning of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, while the Ile Sainte-Hélène was modified and enlarged.
424
EXPO 67
Simultaneously, a modern underground subway was built through the city, including a station on the Expo site. Organized for the celebrations of the hundred years of Canadian Confederation (July 1, 1867), this universal exhibition was named Terre des hommes (Man and His World), from the title of a novel by French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. That unique event was a place of convergence between nations, with a record number of countries present, more than ever before in any previous world’s fair (for instance Paris in 1900 and 1937 or Brussels in 1958). More than fifty countries from five continents were represented, and in each national pavilion, visitors could get a glimpse of the country’s way of life, traditions, arts, culture, cuisine, industry, scientific research, and people, with the help of images on posters, multimedia, films, and artifacts. Many national treasures, old and new inventions, and works of art were exhibited. This new, living way of displaying exhibits and organizing the visit into a logical narrative, rather than juxtaposing objects simply beause they belonged to the same period, changed the way future exhibitions would be conceived in many Canadian museums. Concerts, operas, plays, and ballets were held by artists from all styles and cultures, as well as Canadian performers (Gilles Vigneault, Renée Claude, Stéphane Venne, Donald Lautrec). Near the pavilion of Canada, a giant teepee was dedicated to the Canadian Native heritage; at the entrance, the visitor was greeted by a violent, resentful accusation directed toward non-Native visitors: “You have stolen our native land, our culture, our soul . . . and yet our traditions deserved to be ap-
preciated, and those derived from an agegold (i.e., golden-age) harmony with nature even merited being adopted by you” (quoted by de Lorimier, p. 118). Atlantic links were recalled in many places. In the Vermont pavilion, sculptor Ferdinand L. Weber created with a giant piece of granite a 12-foot-high statue of French explorer Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec City and the man who discovered the lake and valley that now carry his name. The immense Pavilion of France had four floors and eight movie theaters. Most of the artifacts were associated with Atlantic relations, with some 165 maps, books, and ancient objects related to the discovery of Canada. Also in the Pavilion of France, visitors could see a multiscreen film about Paris, directed by François Reichenbach, with views of the Eiffel Tower, the Trocadero, the Champs-Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, the Jardin des Tuileries, Montmartre, the Quartier Latin, and SaintGermain-des-Prés. It is not, however, exact to say that Expo 67 was the only encounter the Québécois had with foreign cultures and people from distant countries. A long tradition of immigration to Canada and a constant presence of the Quebec religious missions in many countries had already created many kinds of exchanges. Furthermore, Expo 67 was centered on the Montreal region, and other Canadian cities participated without always getting their share of tourism and visibility. Nonetheless, Expo 67 gave visibility and a very positive image to Canada. It fed a whole generation with a taste for international exchanges, as film and theater director Robert Lepage and others have pointed out.
EXPOSITION COLONIALE
Expo 67 cannot, however, be considered as a place friendly to countercultures, but rather as the site for cross-cultural exchanges and international meetings: countless exhibitions and their delegations were officially presented and often organized by foreign governments, although visitors came on their own from almost everywhere. Many kings, queens, princes, and presidents came as well to visit their country’s pavilion, including French president Charles de Gaulle, who at the city hall uttered his famous words, “Vive le Québec libre!” (Long live free Quebec!). Almost all the pavilions of Expo 67 were dismantled or recycled; only the beautiful building of the Pavillon de la France remains today. It was used for a few years as an exhibition hall and later as a casino (the Casino de Montréal). Also, on Montreal Island one can still see Habitat 67, a modern, giant, abstract, residential complex that is now considered as a Heritage at Risk by UNESCO and ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites). As a member of the organizing board of Expo 67, novelist Gabrielle Roy recalled the initial board meeting when she wrote in 1966 a tribute to the concept of Man and His World, explaining that one firm basis of accord was established: faith in progress. Expo 67 was a huge success because it gathered the best of many worlds and embodied an ideal, even utopian, vision, providing millions of visitors with a direct encounter with a modern utopia. It was Expo 67 that gave the city of Montreal the strength to organize the Olympic Games of 1976, which although successful were marred by the financial fiasco surrounding them. Yves Laberge
425
See also: Champlain, Samuel de; Counterculture; Gaulle, General Charles de; Lepage, Robert; Maine; Montreal; Quebec; Quebec City; Roy, Gabrielle; Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de; Saint Lawrence River; Sport; Vermont; Vigneault, Gilles. References Clairoux, Benoît. Le Métro de Montréal, 35 ans déjà. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 2001. Jasmin, Yves. La Petite Histoire d’Expo 67: L’Expo 67 comme vous ne l’avez jamais vue. Montreal: Québec/Amérique, 1997. De Lorimier, Jean-Louis, ed. Album mémorial d’Expo 67. Montreal: Thomas T. Nelson and Sons, 1968. O’Neil, Jean, and Pierre Philippe Brunet. L’Ile Sainte-Hélène. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 2001.
EXPOSITION COLONIALE (1931) Between May 6 and November 15, 1931, over 33 million people attended the International Colonial Exposition in Paris, a state-sponsored celebration of colonialism, the civilizing mission, and exoticism. Maréchal Hubert Lyautey, the exposition’s commissioner general, transformed the Bois de Vincennes in Paris into an idealized microcosm of the French colonial empire. Colonial pavilions, native villages, spectacles, exhibits, and publications were constructed to stimulate popular support for and investment in the colonies. More than just entertaining, the exposition was didactic: it articulated both a racial hierarchy and the colonial ideologies of association and, especially for the French Atlantic, assimilation. The dominant images at the exposition were derived from colonial Africa and Indochina: these representations emphasized
426
EXPOSITION COLONIALE
Exposition Coloniale, Paris, 1931. Over 33 million people attended this state-sponsored celebration of the French colonial empire. (Keystone/Getty Images)
the radical otherness and inferiority of indigenous peoples and the French responsibility to colonize. Picturesque interpretations of mud mosques, native huts, and l’art nègre (negro art) represented “primitive” African cultures. Re-created souks and minarets manifested the mysterious orientalism of North Africa. And a full-scale recreation of Angkor Wat, the icon of Khmer society, represented the historic but no longer flourishing culture of Indochina. African and Indochinese peoples in native attire were also put on display. They demonstrated their traditional crafts, served food, played music, and danced. The French represented indigenous peoples as colorful and fascinating, but also as distinct from Europeans: primitive, childlike, and racially inferior. As depicted at the
exposition, the civilizing mission, though efficacious, could not raise such inferior peoples to the moral and intellectual level of Europeans. The colonial ideology of association expressed this constructed reality: African and Indochinese peoples were to be associated with, not integrated into, metropolitan culture. By contrast, the Creoles, Métis, and black descendants of slaves in the old colonies of the French Atlantic were portrayed in terms of their assimilation. Assimilation was predicated upon the effacement of indigenous culture and the adoption of French ways. The exposition, therefore, represented Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana as devoid of a native architecture. Thus the Martinique pavilion was constructed in a classical metropolitan
EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE
style but with tropical ornamentation, and the Guadeloupe pavilion had clean, modern lines, a style criticized for its lack of exoticism. Both pavilions manifested a contemporary Frenchness, befitting assimilated peoples. The citizens of the old colonies, like colonial subjects, were put on display, but to represent their well-integrated and historic place in French culture, not their primitiveness. Thus the Martinique pavilion hosted a dance in the style of the old regime, and the Guadeloupe pavilion exhibited the island’s fine French lace making. There was even an exhibit dedicated to Empress Joséphine, just one of the many from the Atlantic colonies who contributed to France. Assimilation did not, however, preclude exoticism. The French Atlantic pavilions hosted popular bals where metropolitans could dance both contemporary steps and the more sensual beguine with island women who evoked the exotic quality of France outre mer (beyond the sea). Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, two small islands south of Newfoundland that still belong to France, also represented the French Atlantic. Their pavilion was a prosaic fisherman’s house. This exhibit, which anticipated the flourishing of regionalism in France, celebrated the French descendants of the original settlers of the islands and the fishing industry. Together, the exhibits of the French Atlantic, unlike others at the exposition, exemplified the original colonial ideal: assimilation and the unity of Frenchness in diversity. Brett Berliner See also: Architecture; Beguine; Dance; Fishing; Guadeloupe; Guiana; Martinique; Métis; Primitivism; Saint-Pierre et Miquelon.
427
References Hodeir, Catherine, and Michel Pierre. L’Exposition coloniale. Paris: Complexe, 1991. Morton, Patricia A. Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
EXPOSITION (1900)
UNIVERSELLE
The first Universal Exhibition was held in London in 1851. Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, the organization of this type of event was an integral part of the colonial context of the industrial revolution. The exhibitions aimed to show the industrial and technological development of European nations, as well as putting on display the cultures and natural products of the countries and colonies of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. In the course of the nineteenth century, Paris played host to five universal exhibitions. In 1900, the city hosted the first exhibition of the twentieth century, whose theme was “Evaluation of a Century.” Held from April 15 to November 12, 1900, the event had 50,861,000 visitors and 83,000 exhibitors from more than twenty-five countries. At the time, Paris was undergoing a great deal of construction work for the Métro system and the 1900 Olympic Games. The 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition marked the high point of the art nouveau movement: the Petit and Grand Palais, the Gare d’Orsay, and the Alexandre III bridge are key examples of this style. The event occupied 112 hectares, of which half were dedicated to France. Exhibitors were spread through the pavilions of the
428
EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE
colonial exhibition and foreign countries, as well as in themed pavilions. Most French colonies were represented, including SaintPierre et Miquelon and the French colonies in the Americas, such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana. Most European countries were represented, as well as the likes of China and India. Some American states, such as Peru, Mexico, Canada, and the United States, were also present. The Canadian pavilion showed the main natural resources of the country. Among the minerals on display were gold-bearing quartz and gold nuggets, copper, silver, asbestos, and nickel. The exhibition also showed the different types of Canadian timber used in the construction of furniture and paper; products made from maple syrup; the main hunting products destined for the food chain (bear, caribou, and musk ox) or the fur trade (seals, beaver, hares, foxes, wolves, and otters), as well as various fishing products (shark, sturgeon, halibut, cod, and lobster). The Mexican pavilion was, for the main part, taken up with mineral resources: rocks (conglomerates, tuff, lime, chalk, limestone, Tecali, and Mexican onyx) and minerals (iron, copper, sulfur, gold, silver, platinum, mercury, lead, and zinc). Also exhibited was produce from the agro-food industry, such as fish, horses, mules, rice, coffee, cocoa, beans, fruits, vanilla, maize, and chicle. Plants used in textile production had a whole section to themselves: henequen, or agave sisal, maguey, ramie, and cotton.
The U.S. display was held inside a large exhibition space on the Esplanade des Invalides and cost more than any of the other foreign pavilions. The United States also had several special pavilions dedicated to agriculture, forestry, publishing, and printing. Many U.S. companies, such as the McCormick Harvester Company, had their own pavilions. In one of the thematic pavilions, exploring the idea of sociology in the world, there was an exhibition of photographs showing the history and living conditions of African Americans. Among the other thematic pavilions, those examining electricity, mining and metallurgy, threads, cloths and clothing, mechanics, decoration, and hunting, fishing, and forests are worth mentioning. The “Decennial Exhibition” in the Grand Palais, dedicated exclusively to French and foreign art, gathered together a large number of paintings and sculptures. Ana Lucia Araujo
See also: Architecture; Art Nouveau; Coffee; Cotton; Cuisine; Fur Trade; Guadeloupe; Guiana; Martinique; Mexico; Painting; Sculpture; Timber. References Betrand, Jacques. “La Page francophone des Expositions Universelles et Internationales.” http://netrover.com/~berta/pagexpo.html (accessed June 8, 2004). L’Exposition de Paris (1900). 3 vols. Paris: Montgrédien et Cie, 1900. Mandell, Richard D. Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1967.
F FANON, FRANTZ (1925–1961) The writings of Frantz Fanon constitute a complex reflection on the legacy of slavery and empire on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon served in the Free French forces in Europe in World War II. He later returned to France, where he trained as a psychiatrist in Lyons. After several years of psychiatric practice in France, he transferred to a mental hospital in Blida, Algeria, in late 1953, just one year before the outbreak of the war of independence. Increasingly outraged by the repressive nature of the colonial system, Fanon abandoned his post and took up the cause of the independence movement (Front de Libération Nationale, FLN), serving as a polemicist and propagandist for the Algerian cause from a base in exile in Tunisia. Although he died prematurely of leukemia at the age of thirty-six, a year before Algeria gained its independence, Fanon left behind a considerable body of work, and his reputation grew as an important theorist of race and empire throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States, he was seen by radical African Americans as a theorist of black emancipation (Eldridge Cleaver famously claimed
that “every brother on a rooftop” could quote Fanon [cited in Macey, p. 24]), while in many parts of the formerly colonized world, Fanon was seen as the prophet of liberation from European rule. Consequently, Fanon can be seen as an “Atlantic theorist,” whose work consistently explores the tortured relationships between the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. His first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), is an exploration of the troubled identity of the black community in the French Caribbean, whom Fanon saw as deeply alienated by their desire to “act white” in imitation of their former slave masters. In a complex and sometimes opaque style, laden with psychological neologisms, Fanon put his psychiatric training to use in an attempt to understand the mind-set of a people previously reduced to slavery but now told they are “equal” members of the French nation. It is highly significant that this “myth” of equality was shattered for Fanon himself when he traveled to France. In the chapter, “The Fact of Blackness,” he describes how the realization of his own “difference” is made clear to him when a small child fearfully points at him in the street, proclaiming, “Look, a negro!” Fanon returns to this traumatic incident obsessively throughout the text,
429
430
FANON, FRANTZ
Frantz Fanon, twentieth-century anticolonial author and revolutionary from Martinique. (Algerian Ministry of Information)
traumatized by the essential difference imposed upon him by the “white world.” His text also underlines, however, the need to overcome such essentialization and to break free from racial stereotyping. After his move to Algeria in 1953, Fanon’s writing became increasingly political, calling for an end to European, and particularly French, imperial rule in Africa and Asia. His “Algerian” books, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1959), The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and the posthumous For the African Revolution (1964), were radical political attacks on imperialism. In particular, The Wretched of the Earth—written in the final months of Fanon’s battle against leukemia and published just a few days before his death—became a key text for the
Third World movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw in the emerging decolonized world a revolutionary force, which might overthrow Western-based capitalist imperialism. The Wretched of the Earth is composed of five essays dealing with different aspects of the anticolonial struggle. Although the main focus is on Algeria, Fanon also ranges across sub-Saharan Africa and his native Martinique in his analysis of both colonialism and resistance to it. This “global” approach of his writing sometimes leads him to conflate different colonial realities and to oversimplify arguments, but Fanon’s supporters argue that such an approach was necessary to counter the global reach of empire itself. Fanon’s progression from psychologist to revolutionary (albeit as propagandist rather than armed fighter), and the reflection of that progression in his writing, has led to major critical debates about his work in the past two decades, as commentators attempt to understand how a man interested in healing torn psyches was transformed into a man who believed in the transformative powers of anticolonial violence. In the 1980s and 1990s, as the left-wing ideas of “Third Worldism” waned, it was the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks who became central to many critical discussions of his work. The leading postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha has presented Fanon as a writer primarily interested in the ambivalence and ambiguity of identity produced by colonialism. This reading has proven highly influential with those who see Fanon as a champion of “identity politics” rather than of “nationalist politics.” Other critics, however, have attacked Bhabha for effectively reading Fanon backward, making Black Skin the terminus of Fanon’s thinking rather than the starting point.
FASHION
Despite the increasingly political nature of Fanon’s later work, the need to confront the psychological effects of colonialism remained central to his writing. He believed that colonialism had produced a system that had completely disenfranchised the colonized, which meant that the only way for the colonized to become active agents in their own history was to overthrow the colonial system. Fanon does not have an explicit program for the liberation of the colonized world: his texts seek rather to explore the symbolic and psychological barriers that confront the process of decolonization. For instance, his famous essay “Algeria Unveiled” examines the way in which women’s involvement in the struggle for independence creates new, dynamic social roles for women, which undermine the received ideas of French colonialism about the submissive Muslim woman. In The Wretched of the Earth, he includes a series of psychological case studies of trauma—seen in both European and Algerian patients— induced by incidents in the war of independence. Even as he speaks of the political necessity of violence, Fanon is only too aware of the human suffering that this violence will cause, suffering that will have to be addressed in a postcolonial world. Much has been written about Fanon’s excessively idealized portrayal of the independence movement as an egalitarian, leftwing phenomenon, and there is a general consensus that he got many things “wrong” about the process of decolonization. On the other hand, critics have also underlined the extent to which he foresaw many of the problems that would face the newly liberated colonies, particularly the development of narrow ethnic nationalisms. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that colonizer and colonized must develop a
431
new relationship and a new understanding of their shared humanity. The “universal” truths of Western humanism must be replaced by a humanism that genuinely attempts to speak for and of the entire world. It is the idealism of this attempt to forge a new relationship between the peoples of the Atlantic world that have made Fanon such a charismatic and appealing figure to political and cultural radicals in the past forty years. David Murphy See also: Feminisms; Martinique; Slavery; Theory; World War II. References Bhabha, Homi K. “Remembering Fanon.” Introduction to Black Skin, White Masks. Frantz Fanon. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto, 1986: vii-xxv. Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta, 2000. Stafford, Andy. “Frantz Fanon, Atlantic Theorist; or Decolonization and Nation State in Postcolonial Theory.” Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction. Ed. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy. London: Arnold, 2003: 166–177.
FASHION It was in the 1920s that Parisian fashion started to play a significant role in relation to art and literature. French high fashion at the turn of the twentieth century was a mainly self-referential and exclusive affair answering the needs of wealthy aristocrats and privileged clients. The couturier, as exemplified by Paul Poiret and Jacques Doucet in the 1910s, created extravagant outfits and often worked with musicians, painters, and opera composers. Women spent hours dressing up, and luxury was
432
FASHION
conspicuous. In the 1910s, an orientaliste wave swept Paris, and Tales from a Thousand and One Nights became the literary reference of the day. This baroque trend ended in the 1920s when Elsa Schiaparelli and Gabrielle Chanel finally freed female bodies from heavy, constrained, and corseted dresses. Their understanding of the clients’ needs and morphology led to a significant fashion revolution, which marked a new era for French style. On the one hand, dress designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s ironic and theatrical statements were inspired by the surrealist movement, which had become important by the end of the decade. She was close to Man Ray, André Breton, and Jean Cocteau, who were all influential in the world of art, film, photography, and literature. On the other hand, Chanel changed the face of French fashion by popularizing practical clothes and “poor” fabrics such as wool jerseys with her twinsets, knee-length black dresses, and fluid pants inspired by menswear. These clothes shocked her contemporaries by their simplicity and refusal of ostentatious luxury. Her signature items became strands of imitation pearls and gold chains, slingback pumps in ivory with black toes, quilted bags, and gardenia brooches. The second half of the twentieth century marked the development of the relationship existing between the exclusive world of French haute couture and American style. Haute couture consists of fashion collections where unique hand-sewn pieces are sold privately to individual clients. The items have to be shown and produced in Paris to receive the haute couture label. Each client has her own Stockman (a dummy made especially for her) that is used during fittings and alterations. All garments are therefore made to measure,
while showcasing the craft of artisans renowned internationally, such as Lesage for embroidery, Lemarié for feathers, and Massaro for shoes. Haute couture set fashion trends worldwide but had to be pragmatic about its future. Most houses had special agreements with leading U.S. department stores to sell their patterns with each new collection. The designs presented in the showroom were then copied and mass-produced for wealthy American and Canadian clients. It is worth bearing in mind that most of the haute couture clients were actually Americans, whose regular orders prevented most houses from extinction. Ten years after Christian Dior’s revolutionary 1947 New Look collection, whose fitted jackets, defined waists, and full skirts caused a stir among U.S. editors, the young Yves Saint Laurent was asked to take over the atelier after Dior’s sudden death. The trapeze line he showed in 1958 brought some of the audience members to tears, while his country heralded him as the savior of French fashion. He was just twentyone years old when his name rose to international fame. Saint Laurent is a key figure in French fashion and one of the first designers to gain critical and commercial acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. If Chanel liberated women’s bodies from the corset by designing jersey outfits and light tweed suits, Saint Laurent understood the power of street fashion and the impact of contemporary culture on dress sense. In 1966, he developed the democratic concept of prêt-àporter when he opened the first Rive Gauche (Left Bank) ready-to-wear boutique associated with the couture house. Pop art was an influential movement at that time, and the designer drew inspira-
FASHION
433
Coco Chanel, French fashion icon. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
tion from American artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. By dressing Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de jour (1967), he turned the actress into an ambassador of French elegance. Hollywood glamour, hippies, biker heroes, and Africa were also among his favorite sources of inspiration. Saint Laurent created sartorial designs that were often ahead of their time. He used see-through fabrics, put women in pantsuits, and turned safari wear into desirable, luxurious fashion. His female version of the dinner suit, Le Smoking, caused such a furor in the late 1960s that certain Manhattan restaurants refused to let fashionable women in who wore his clothes. In 1977, he launched the fragrance Opium, with a provocative ad campaign starring Jerry
Hall. Opium encapsulated the excesses of the disco era with its heady, musky tones. It was the scent of choice for partygoers who favored the decadent atmosphere of Studio 54 in Manhattan. The late 1970s were, in fact, a pivotal moment for American fashion. Halston, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren were all designers coming to the fore and defining the essence of American style. Halston was renowned for disco jersey dresses and slinky designs that flattered the body. Calvin Klein created the concept of “designer denim” while selling his jeans worldwide and using young Hollywood star Brooke Shields in his advertising campaigns. Ralph Lauren drew on the heritage of English, Western, and Navajo styles in order to create sartorial designs with a distinctive American flavor.
434
FEMINISMS
When Donna Karan introduced stretch in the 1980s and turned the “body” into an essential item for every wardrobe, American fashion took off with an identity of its own. Karan’s designs were female friendly and luxurious, while remaining casual and comfortable. Clean lines, simplicity, and a no-nonsense approach to fashion have characterized her style ever since. Along with Klein and Lauren, she gave designer fashion a practical and approachable twist by relating to the needs of the workingwoman. Sportswear, sneakers, and smart pantsuits became signature elements for a body-conscious and comfortable look. More recently, the flattering and wearable creations of Cuban American Narciso Rodriguez have given American style a new contemporary feel. Salma Hayek, Claire Danes, and Sarah Jessica Parker are faithful followers of his designs. Now that fashion is truly global, key elements of American style have found their way into French designer fashion. The mid-1990s saw two major Parisian houses hiring American designers: Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, in 1998, and Tom Ford at Yves Saint Laurent, in 2000. French designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Nicolas Ghesquière, and Hedi Slimane constantly reinterpret American sartorial themes such as western wear, film star glamour, science fiction superheroes, and rebellious rockers. Denim has become a major staple for French fashion houses, along with sportswear and designer sneakers. The former divide between French and American fashions has ceased to exist, due to the predominant influence of global popular culture, music, and film over fashion. This does not mean, however, that French luxury brands have lost any of their prestige. Chanel, Dior, and
Vuitton are still household names and important labels on both sides of the Atlantic. The success of hip-hop and ensuing creative partnerships between the music industry and designer fashion has, in fact, revitalized their image as desirable, youthful, and successful brands. Philippe Pourhashemi See also: Breton, André; Cocteau, Jean; Deneuve, Catherine; Feminisms; Hip-Hop Music and Culture; Painting; Ray, Man; Surrealism; Westerns. References Fox, Patty. Star Style: Hollywood Legends as Fashion Icons. Santa Monica, CA: Angel City, 1995. McDowell, Colin. Fashion Today. London: Phaidon, 2000. Rawsthorne, Alice. Yves Saint Laurent: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Wallach, Janet. Chanel: Her Style and Her Life. New York: Talese, 1998.
FEMINISMS Feminism in France and the United States developed in similar ways and influenced each other’s responses to what women saw as sexist and oppressive practices. Nevertheless, French and American feminism are often defined in opposition to each other. French feminism is characterized as intellectual and theoretical, while American feminism is characterized as practical and activist. This oversimplified construction of both movements offers an incomplete picture. More accurately, the development of feminism in France and the United States has depended on both theoretical and practical strands. One overarching definition of feminism or what constitutes feminist thought and practice does not exist. Many different feminisms exist, each defined by a particu-
FEMINISMS
lar focus. For both France and the United States, “feminism” and “the women’s movement” serve as umbrella terms that cover a variety of women’s groups and organizations. These groups differ in their analyses of women’s oppression in society and in their approaches to addressing these issues. The many different approaches can be separated generally into two categories—reformist and radical. Reformist groups and organizations work within the existing political and social structures and are often aligned with other political organizations. Radical groups challenge the dominant political and cultural structures, resist political alignment, and call for radical and revolutionary change. In both France and the United States, twentieth-century feminism stems from a long tradition of women’s struggles against sexism and oppression and for women’s rights. In the eighteenth century, progressive women fought for recognition in public life; demanded political rights, education for girls, marriage law reform, and economic changes to support family subsistence; and participated in reform movements concerned with the public good. The Enlightenment movement, with its emphasis on the individual and on reason, inspired several early feminists to argue for the recognition of women’s equal citizenship. In France, Olympe de Gouges rewrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man as the Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791. A radical text for her time, Gouges’s document offers a statement declaring women equal with men in both public and private life. One year later, the British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft penned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this text, she argues for the development of women’s rational capacities through
435
women’s education. Like Gouges and her work for feminists in France, Wollstonecraft’s text serves as one of the early feminist documents for Anglo-American feminists. The nineteenth century ushered in the age of reform and saw an increase in women’s organized struggle against sexism and oppression. In France, early feminist efforts were intertwined with the Socialist movement and class struggle. One of the primary debates centered on the inclusion of women’s concerns in the effort for workers’ rights. The early Socialist movement tended to align feminism with the bourgeoisie and therefore dismissed women’s concerns as those against workers’ efforts. Several prominent feminists argued that these concerns were interrelated and critiqued the dominant social structures that kept women in a class below men. In the 1840s, Flora Tristan, considered one of the first Socialist feminists, argued for women’s right to divorce, based on her claim that marriage prostituted and enslaved women. In 1848 women produced a feminist newspaper, arguing that the revolutionary cry for “liberty, fraternity, equality” should also apply to women. In the 1870s, Hubertine Auclert led a small movement for women’s right to vote. By the end of the nineteenth century in France, over a hundred feminist organizations existed, characterized by their reformist efforts. Although efforts to reconcile their allegiances to class and to sex remained a concern for French feminists into the twentieth century, women’s right to vote did not become the galvanizing issue for feminism in France that it did in the United States. It was more than seventy years after Auclert began her campaign that women’s suffrage was granted in France in 1944.
436
FEMINISMS
The women’s movement in the United States during the nineteenth century was born from women’s participation in the many reform movements that characterize this century. The reform movements often were intricately related to women’s issues. Many aspects of health reform dealt directly with women’s concerns for their family and for their physical health and brought about substantial changes in diet, hygiene, and clothing. The temperance movement came about because of women’s belief that men’s alcohol use led to violence against women. In the movement to abolish slavery, women were especially vital. Both free women and enslaved women worked to end slavery through the publication of pamphlets, public lectures, and organizations to aid slaves and former slaves. Indeed, some of the main figures in the women’s movement were actively involved in the abolitionist movement. In 1848, the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Led by the abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the small group of women and men gathered there approved the Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Stanton. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence, this document enumerated the many ways men “tyrannized” women and called for a more egalitarian treatment of all citizens. For these women, the vote came to represent the first step toward gaining women’s citizenship and enacting change in other areas of public and private life. Several prominent feminists in the history of the U.S. women’s movement dedicated their lives to securing the vote for women, including Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone. Unfortunately, many nineteenth-century feminists did not live
to see their efforts come to fruition with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The years after World War II saw a return to traditional gender roles in both France and the United States. Women in both countries received contradictory messages—encouraged to participate in the restructuring of society through economic and productive participation and at the same time told that participation primarily meant reproduction. Women, who had been integral to all phases of the war effort, were now told their rightful place was in the home, cooking, cleaning, and raising children. The 1950s saw a return to more traditional sexual divisions of labor, but this decade is not necessarily a dormant stage in the women’s movement. Two texts, both with transatlantic influence, emerged from this climate as the early rumblings of feminism’s second wave: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, first published in France in 1949 and translated into English in 1952, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963 and translated into French in 1964, gave voice and vocabulary to the burgeoning feminist movement of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although constructing two very different analyses of women, both Beauvoir and Friedan argue for women’s autonomy and independence. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir constructs a rich analysis of woman’s place. Her statement that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” makes the distinction between biological sex and gender, identifying gender and gender norms as socially constructed (p. 267). Friedan directly challenges the postwar
FEMINISMS
image of women as contented housewives and mothers in their realm of home and family. She coined the phrase “the feminine mystique” to name this ideal depiction of women, an ideal to which “real” women were to aspire. She argues that women’s efforts to achieve “the feminine mystique” result in what she calls “the problem that has no name,” a sense of dissatisfaction, loneliness, and boredom (pp. 15–32). Second-wave feminism was born out of the civil unrest that characterized the 1960s. In France, second-wave feminism, or neofeminism, was born from the student and worker protests of May 1968. In the United States, the second wave was born from the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. In both countries, women participated in progressive movements that took up various causes, including the Socialist movement in France and the protests against the Vietnam War in the United States. Feminists, however, witnessed their efforts to incorporate women’s issues discounted or dismissed completely. They recognized that the organizational structures for these movements mirrored the hierarchical structures of patriarchal society. These women realized that to advance women’s issues they would have to do the work themselves. In their efforts, they eschewed hierarchical models and instead strove to create inclusive groups without traditional leadership or representative spokespeople. Initially, these groups focused on consciousness-raising activities, giving women an opportunity to speak with each other about their individual experiences of sexism and oppression. This emphasis on women’s individual experiences was an effort to incorporate the feminist belief that the personal is political,
437
that individual lives and the elements of the home and of private life are intimately connected to the public and political world. Using tactics they learned in the Socialist, antiwar, and civil rights movements, feminists in both countries staged their first demonstrations within two years of each other. These demonstrations were designed to gain the media’s attention and to emphasize women’s status in society. In 1968, feminist women in the United States protested the objectification of women exemplified by the Miss America pageant held in Atlantic City. In August 1970, feminist women in France attempted to place a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier located at the Arc de Triomphe for someone even more unknown, his wife. Reporting this incident, the French press incorporated the name the American press had applied to the women in the United States—Mouvement de liberation des femmes (MLF), or “the women’s liberation movement.” The second-wave women’s movement on both sides of the Atlantic staged many public demonstrations during the 1970s to bring attention to their cause. One of the more pressing issues for feminists at this time involved securing reproductive rights, including information about and access to contraception and to legal, safe abortions. In April 1971, Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde published the Manifeste des 343, signed by 343 prominent French women, including Simone de Beauvoir, declaring they had obtained illegal abortions. This action resulted in the formation of CHOISIR (to choose), an organization designed to defend these women against legal prosecution. In 1972, Ms. Magazine, a feminist
438
FEMINISMS
magazine in the United States, published a similar list. In both France and the United States, intense activity and textual output marked the feminism of the 1970s. Feminists used every means possible to advance their struggle against sexism and oppression. They published books, pamphlets, magazines, and journals; opened their own bookstores; created abuse shelters and other safe women’s spaces; and demonstrated in the streets. Like the feminists of the nineteenth century, they worked for the public good. Many different feminist organizations and groups constituted feminism during this decade, bearing witness to the myriad issues concerning women in the last half of the twentieth century. Feminism during this time is often divided into several interconnected strands, though these strands do not adequately describe feminism’s diversity. In France, three currents have been named and are often used to characterize the women’s movement. The class struggle current (La tendance Lutte de Classes) identified an inextricable link between capitalism and patriarchy. This current worked within other Socialist movements, established local women’s groups, and fought for women’s access to contraception and legal abortions. Revolutionary feminists (Les Féministes révolutionnaires), also referred to as nonaligned feminists (féministes nonalignées), were influenced by the radical feminists in the United States. The third current, Psychoanalyses et politique (Psych et po), was influenced by the theories of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, incorporating psychoanalysis and deconstruction to interrogate the concepts of language, difference, and feminine specificity.
In the United States, early secondwave feminism was divided into two strains—liberal and radical. Liberal feminists focused their attention on reforming the existing societal structures. Through organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), liberal feminists argued for women’s equality in employment, the law, education, and politics, as well as in the home. Radical feminists shaped their efforts around revolutionary change of existing sexist stereotypes and institutions. In the last half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, the time of what is often called third-wave or contemporary feminism, these different strands have become less distinctive. The explosion of feminist activity that characterized the 1970s subsided in the 1980s. At the end of the decade in France, Psych et po made the proprietary move of registering MLF’s name and logo as trademarks. This move is often used to mark the end of the women’s movement that distinguishes the 1970s. In both countries, the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by an intense backlash against feminism and the women’s movement. The gains feminists had made in both France and the United States during the previous decade became incorporated into mainstream culture and daily life, causing news and popular media outlets, along with more conservative political organizations, to proclaim feminism dead. Nevertheless, contemporary feminism thrives in both countries. Feminists continue to present alternatives to sexism and oppression in many forms and through many outlets. The intellectual and practical strands of feminism still exist. Feminism has become a viable
FILLES
force in academia. Women’s studies programs are integral parts of university campuses. In the United States, “French feminism,” an American construction, has gained significant influence. In the 1980s, several texts written by a few French women (Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray) were translated and circulated in feminist academic circles. Although these three authors hardly represent feminism in France, their work has transformed feminism in the United States. Along with feminism’s academic presence, there are countless feminist political organizations with voice and influence. And, though feminist movements continue to advocate women’s reproductive rights and equality in public and private life, feminism in the twenty-first century also deals with advances in technology and science, as well as with globalization. Feminism in the twenty-first century is an international movement, a collection of voices from all over the world. Kristi Branham See also: Antislavery Movements; Beauvoir, Simone de; Derrida, Jacques; French Revolution; Lacan, Jacques; Language; Slavery; Theory; Tristan, Flora; Vietnam War; World War II. References Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1957. Delphy, Christine. “The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move.” Yale French Studies 87 (1995): 190–221. Duchen, Claire. Feminism in France: From May ’68 to Mitterrand. London/Boston: Routledge, 1986. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1983. Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.
FILLES
DU
ROY
439
DU ROY The term used for women recruited in France for emigration to New France between 1663 and 1673. Under the new royal administration of Louis XIV, there began a recruitment drive aimed at strengthening the colony with white female settlers of childbearing age who were free to marry (i.e., were either single women or widows). Certain inducements were offered to the women (free transportation, the provision of a basic trousseau, temporary accommodation upon arrival, in some cases a dowry of money payable from the royal treasury [le dot du roi], or payment in kind). In return the women were expected to accept an offer of marriage in the first few months and to help colonize and populate the land. The 770 women who were recruited play a significant part in the genealogy of present-day francophone Quebec, since it has been estimated that those pioneers settled prior to 1680 in New France have provided about two-thirds of the gene bank of the francophone Quebec population. Certainly the decade of immigration was successful in speeding the colony’s population growth. In 1663 the population of New France was about 3,000. Ten years later this figure had almost tripled. In terms of geographical origin, almost half of the filles du roy were from the Paris area, 16 percent from Normandy and 13 percent from western France, particularly from Poitou and Saintonge. Their social origins were diverse, but at the time of emigration many were orphans, and many had very meager personal possessions. The relatively low levels of literacy of the filles du roy suggest that the women were of
440
FILM NOIR
comparatively low social status. It is therefore likely that for the majority the choice of emigration was determined by economic need. To date, the work by Yves Landry represents the most rigorous biographical register of the filles du roy. His study of parish records also reveals much data about their subsequent lives in New France, such as their life expectancy and fertility, both of which were higher than those of their peers in France. His research suggests that, because of the expense of the recruitment drive, only about a third of the filles du roy actually received the dowry from the king. Over the centuries there has been much debate about the morality of the filles du roy, in response to contemporary rumors that many of the unmarried women who emigrated were prostitutes, forced to join ships leaving for the New World. However, the recent work of historians and genealogists, together with literary portrayals such as that by Anne Hébert in Le Premier Jardin (The First Garden, 1988), have done much to renew interest and pride in this group of women. Rosemary Chapman See also: Hébert, Anne; La Rochelle; Montreal; New France; Quebec. References Dumas, Silvio. Les Filles du roi en Nouvelle-France: Etude historique avec répertoire biographique. Quebec: Société historique de Québec, 1972. Lanctôt, Gustave. Filles de joie ou Filles du roi: Etude sur l’émigration féminine en Nouvelle-France. Montreal: Chantecler, 1952. Landry, Yves. Les Filles du roi au XVIIe siècle, Orphelines en France, pionnières au Canada. Montreal: Leméac, 1992. Poirier, Anne Claire. Les Filles du roy. National Film Board of Canada, 1974.
FILM NOIR Often considered as a genre in itself, film noir appeared in the United States in the 1930s and blossomed in the 1940s, when many German film technicians who had left Nazi Germany for Hollywood studios reinvented a new way of lighting film sets, combining in a single image dark spots and well-lit spaces, but without the violent contrast that characterized German expressionist movies in the 1920s. Another distinctive sign that differs from the expressionist era can be seen in film noir scripts, which were inspired not by old gothic legends but rather by contemporary U.S. detective novels. This hybrid urban style was later named film noir by French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier, who noticed the new tendency after 1946, when an abundant flow of Hollywood movies arrived in a liberated France, after five years of absence due to war. In 1955 film historian Raymond Borde, along with Etienne Chaumeton, wrote the first book ever to study the genre, Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953. Among the directors discussed were Howard Hawks, who directed films such as Scarface (1932) and The Big Sleep (1946). Many champions of the film noir in Hollywood were actually born in Europe: Robert Siodmak (Phantom Lady, 1944), Wilhelm Dieterle (Portrait of Jennie, 1949), plus some films by U.S.-born Jules Dassin (The Naked City, 1948) and Austrian-born Fritz Lang (Man Hunt, 1941; The Ministry of Fear, 1944). Some French directors adopted film noir aesthetics, such as Henri-Georges Clouzot, who directed Le Corbeau (The Raven, 1943) and Quai des orfèvres (1947). Other examples include Une si jolie petite plage (Riptide, 1949) and Manèges (The
FINI, LEONOR
Cheat, 1950), both directed by Yves Allégret. The Atlantic connection continued when Otto Preminger directed in Hollywood a remake of Clouzot’s Le Corbeau, entitled The Thirteenth Letter (1951), starring Charles Boyer. That film was partly shot in Quebec. When Jules Dassin went to France from Hollywood (where he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era), he directed Du Rififi chez les hommes (Rififi, 1954), adapted from a novel by Auguste Le Breton, which was to become a classic. Among the first Canadian feature films ever made are two important movies produced in Quebec after World War II, both influenced by the film noir aesthetics: La Forteresse (released in English as Whispering City, 1947), directed by Russian-born filmmaker Fedor Ozep, and Forbidden Journey (1949), a thriller directed by Richard Jarvis and Cecil Mayden. Some of the first feature films from the French new wave era were in fact tributes to the American film noir and B series: Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) and François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste/ Shoot the Piano Player (1960; adapted from Down There by David Goodis), plus a few dramas by Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le flambeur/Bob the Gambler, 1955; Le Doulos/The Finger Man, 1963) and Claude Chabrol (Les Fantômes du chapelier/The Hatter’s Ghost, 1982; Docteur M/Club Extinction, 1990). The influence on French culture of this period of the well-known French publisher Gallimard’s postwar translations of American crime fiction in the Série Noire was considerable. In retrospect, it seems clear that film noir was just an artificial label for a Hollywood genre that was in fact created outside the United States; European movies such as La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Cross-
441
roads, 1932) by Jean Renoir (from a novel by Georges Simenon) and Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933) by Fritz Lang (from a detective novel written by Luxembourgeois author Norbert Jacques) are earlier examples of dark and contrasted universes adapted from intense detective stories. Yves Laberge See also: Boyer, Charles; Chabrol, Claude; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Crime Fiction; Dassin, Jules; Duhamel, Marcel; Godard, JeanLuc; Melville, Jean-Pierre; Remakes; Renoir, Jean; Truffaut, François; World War II. References Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941–1953). San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002. Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Guérif, François. Le Film noir américain. Paris: Denoël, 1999. Palmer, R. Barton, et al., eds. Perspectives on Film Noir. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.
FINI, LEONOR (1908–1996) One of the most memorable artists and women of the twentieth century, Leonor Fini was born in her father’s house near Buenos Aires but grew up in Trieste, Italy. Fini never knew Argentina, from where her mother, terrified by her husband’s machismo, fled after her marriage. He subsequently tried to kidnap Leonor, who, disguised as a boy, eluded him. The story became so legendary that some scholars doubt its veracity. Nevertheless, the mother’s total rejection of her husband imprinted on the child an antipatriarchal frame of mind that became part of Fini’s
442
FINI, LEONOR
Portrait of Leonor Fini, 1936. Fini's first exhibits in Paris (1936) attracted the surrealists’ attention. (Library of Congress)
fundamental identity. Fini’s close friend, Richard Overstreet, affirms that she never tried to locate her father or explore any affinities with her Argentinean origins. Although she befriended Argentinean artists, she was apparently unaware to what extent she inspired some of them. Bernard McGuirk affirms for instance that Maria Luisa Bemberg in the film De eso non se habla/We Don’t Want to Talk about It (1994) named one of her characters, Doña Leonor, who was muy fina (very fine), after Leonor Fini. In Trieste she learned drawing from observing the corpses in the local morgue, and although expelled from some educational institutions, she became familiar with writers and artists such as Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Caspar David Friedrich, and Novalis. Her first exhibits in
Paris (1936) attracted the surrealists’ attention and led to friendships with Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, Paul and Nusch Eluard, Victor Brauner, and René Magritte. Fini shared many beliefs with the surrealists, but disliked Breton and never joined the collective activities of the group. After the separations of the war, she saw Carrington many times and continued her friendship with Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1942 at an all-women exhibit organized in New York by Peggy Guggenheim, Fini’s works were exhibited with paintings by Carrington, Tanning, Frida Kahlo, Jacqueline Lamba, and Kay Sage, among other women artists. Her relationships with surrealist artists did not stop in the 1940s, as some studies affirm. From Arcachon in 1939 Fini went to Monte Carlo and Rome to spend the war years. In 1946 she returned to Paris, where she remained for the rest of her life. An accomplished artist, she designed jewelry for Schiaparelli; created costumes for the ballets Les Demoiselles de la nuit/Ladies of the Evening and Le Rêve de Leonor Fini/The Dream of Leonor Fini, among others; and excelled in painting, watercolor, drawings, pastels, and lithographs. Inhabited by androgynous figures, sphinxes, animals, and warrior or psychic women, the atmosphere in her paintings is often theatrical, decaying, morbid, hallucinatory, or mysterious. Whitney Chadwick considers that Fini explored and affirmed women’s power, passions, sexuality, and exclusive freedom in her works. Fini considered sexuality a form of revolution, and although she never married, legend has it that she lived most of the time with two male companions. Leonor Fini fiercely defended her independence and accomplishments. Her resistance to being associated with various
FIRMIN, ANTÉNOR
artistic movements is often interpreted today as an act of revolt against social tendencies to marginalize women’s contribution to the artistic field. Lenuta Giukin See also: Argentina; Breton, André; Dance; Ernst, Max; Fashion; Painting; Surrealism; World War II. References Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Overstreet, Richard, and Arlette Souhami. Leonor Fini. Paris/Tours: Favre, 2001.
FIRMIN, ANTÉNOR (1850–1911) Haitian scholar whose De l’Egalité des races humaines (Anthropologie Positive)/The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology), translated by Asselin Charles in 1885 (Paris), was a response to European racist thought in the nineteenth century. This remarkable yet obscure work of anthropology was a product of early Pan-Africanist and postcolonialist thought. Unknown except to Haitians and a few specialists in the twentieth century, Firmin’s scientific rebuttal was directed at the work of Count Arthur de Gobineau, whose four-volume work, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–1855), was widely read in French, English, and German in the “century of progress.” Firmin was born to a working-class family on October 18, 1850, in northern Haiti in Cap-Haïtien. Educated entirely in Haiti, he studied law and became a successful advocate in Cap-Haïtien, as well as a politician, with early appointments as inspector of schools in Cap-Haïtien and commissaire (commissionner) of the Re-
443
public of Haiti in Caracas. Firmin was a product of the third generation of postindependence Haitians, who took justified pride in the heroic achievement of the world’s first black Republic of Haiti in 1804. In 1881 Firmin married Rosa Salnave, daughter of former president Sylvain Salnave, and the couple arrived in Paris in 1883, where Firmin was posted as a diplomat. He was admitted to the Societé d’anthropologie de Paris (Society of Anthropology of Paris) in 1884, whereupon he undertook the writing of De l’Egalité des races humaines. The Mémoires d’anthropologie of the society indicate that Firmin twice rose to speak, but was silenced by unflattering, racially biased comments from his colleagues. He remained in Paris until 1888 and returned to Haiti when in 1889 he accepted the post of minister of finance, commerce, and foreign relations in the government of Florvil Hyppolite. While minister of foreign affairs in 1891, Firmin negotiated with Frederick Douglass, U.S. consul general to Haiti, about the concession to the United States of Môle Saint Nicolas, the deepwater harbor on Haiti’s northwest coast where Columbus landed in the New World. Firmin successfully staved off this claim, which might have delivered Haiti to U.S. control at this early date. Anténor Firmin was also a pioneer in négritude and Pan-Africanist scholarship. Although De l’Egalité des races humaines was marginalized in mainstream scholarship, it was nonetheless recognized among Pan-Africanist and activist scholars of color in Haiti, the Caribbean, and the United States. Aimé Césaire in his history of négritude cited “a genius like Anténor Firmin [who] . . . tried to reevaluate African culture
444
FISHING
in Haiti in order to combat the colorless assimilation of our early author.” It is possible that Kwame Nkrumah, African liberator, learned about Anténor Firmin through his close relationship with Jean Price-Mars. The two Haitian giants, Price-Mars and Firmin, met in London in 1900, and the latter paid homage to Anténor Firmin in a biography of his intellectual predecessor, Joseph Anténor Firmin (published posthumously in 1964), chronicling his life as scholar (comparing his ideas to those of noirist Senegalese writer Cheikh Anta Diop), diplomat, and politician. Firmin was an activist as well. He attended the First Pan-African Congress in London in 1900, which W. E. B. Du Bois also attended, and he was present at the second congress in 1909. Anténor Firmin died in exile in Saint Thomas in 1911. His works include: Haïti au point du vue politique, administratif et economique (“Haiti from Political, Administrative and Economic Points of View,” 1892); La France et Haïti: Lettre au journal Le Réveil (“France and Haiti: Letter to the Journal Le Réveil,” 1893); Une Défense: M. Stewart et les finances haïtiennes (“A Defense: Mr. Stewart and Haitian Finances,” 1892); Diplomates et Diplomatie: Lettre ouverte à M. Solon Ménos (“Diplomats and Diplomacy: Open Letter to Mr. Solon Ménos,” 1899); M. Roosevelt, Président des EtatsUnis et la République d’Haíti (“Mr Roosevelt, President of the United States and the Republic of Haiti,” 1905); Lettres de Saint Thomas: Etudes sociologiques, historiques et littéraires (“Letters of Saint Thomas: Sociological, Historical and Literary Studies,” 1910). Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban See also: Césaire, Aimé; Haiti; Theory.
References Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. “Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 102, no. 3, (2000): 449–466. Geloin, Ghislaine. “Introduction.” De l’Egalité des races humaines. Anténor Firmin. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004. Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de. Essai sur l’inégalité des races. 4 vols. Paris 1853–1855. Price-Mars, Jean. Joseph Anténor Firmin. Haiti: Seminaire, 1964.
FISHING Today’s barren waters of Newfoundland have very little in common with the flourishing fishing grounds of previous times, which engendered a migratory fishing industry luring thousands of entrepreneurial Europeans to fish off the shallow water reefs situated off the coast of Newfoundland known as the Grands Bancs (Grand Banks). As early as 1470, small numbers of European fishermen were already venturing to the southeast coast of Newfoundland to fish for cod. News of abundant returns soon spread, and by the early sixteenth century regular expeditions were setting out from Spain, Portugal, and France to fish for what became known as Newfoundland Gold. In a Catholic Europe compelled by papal decree to consume fish on Fridays and holy days, the market for cod flourished. French migratory fishermen played a particularly important part in the early exploration and settlement of Newfoundland. From the early sixteenth century, fishermen from towns in Normandy and Brittany, Honfleur (1506), Bréhat (1508), and Dahouet (1510), set off to fish the bancs (shoals) and in particular the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
FISHING
By the mid-seventeenth century, numerous small French settlements had sprung up in Placentia (Plaisance) Bay, the islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, Fortune and Hermitage Bays, and the Northern Peninsula. By the eighteenth century, the French were setting sail in the thousands to the Newfoundland coast. According to Jean-François Brière’s study La Pêche française en Amérique du nord au XVIIIe siècle (French Fishing in North America in the Eighteenth Century), Granville sent 73,980 men to Newfoundland fishing grounds in the years between 1722 and 1792. SaintMalo was another major port of embarkation; the town sent 138,600 men over the course of the eighteenth century. The migratory French developed two methods for fishing for cod. The first method, “dry fishing,” involved casting a hand line from a fleet of small boats (chaloupes) set down by the principal vessel. The catch was then gutted and cured on a hastily constructed wharf on the harbor side before being transported back to France. The approach most favored by the French, however, was known as “wet fishing.” The fish, caught on multiple hook lines, were immediately thrown into barrels of salt for preservation and transported back to France to be cured. The “wet fishermen” generally did not set foot on land from spring to autumn, fishing off the coast for a seven-month period and returning to sell to an expanding dry fish market in Catholic Europe. A number of particularly hardy French fishermen made two annual trips to Newfoundland. Braving treacherous weather in January and February, they would set sail for the cod banks, return to France with their catch in May, and almost immediately set off once again
445
to fish the lucrative autumn season. Although the fishing grounds were shared with fishermen from other European countries, and with Spain and Britain in particular, the French dominated this early period of migratory fishing because they were able to provide their own salt in which to preserve their catch. The cheap and plentiful supply harvested from the salt beds of the Gironde in Brittany was also sought after by competitors, and the revenue from sales of salt contributed to the financing of French fishing expeditions. The friction between the French and British governments in the late seventeenth century finally resulted in France recognizing British sovereignty over Newfoundland and, as a result, losing rights to prime fishing grounds. The Treaty of Utrecht confined French fishing activity to an area between Cape Bonavista and Pointe Riche, which was reduced still further in 1763, by the Treaty of Versailles, to a smaller area from Cape Ray to Cape John around the Northern Peninsula. The French were forced to abandon Plaisance by the Treaty of Utrecht. The loss of Plaisance was a huge blow to the French migratory fishing industry. Plaisance had represented France’s only attempt to set up a colony in Newfoundland. Unlike the British colonies, which had been funded by commerce and private individuals, Plaisance was founded by the French Crown to protect the interests of the French migratory fishing industry and to establish a commercial base to serve transatlantic commerce. Forced to give up Plaisance, the French were offered, as meager compensation, the islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, which were subsequently settled by a small indigenous population seasonally boosted by migratory fishermen from France. The islands of
446
FISHING
Cod fishing off Newfoundland. Currier & Ives, 1872. French migratory fishermen played a particularly important part in the early exploration and settlement of Newfoundland. (Library of Congress)
Saint-Pierre et Miquelon became the base for French migratory fishing and sheltered the French fleet throughout the twentieth century. Denied territorial rights in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, the French, unlike the British who could fish from ports in Newfoundland, were thus forced to fish at a disadvantage. Enforced reliance upon migratory fishing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prompted the French, eager to maximize the effectiveness of their limited fishing opportunities, to introduce quasi-mechanized methods to the fishing industry. Trawl fishing, first used in 1840, was the first of the many modern technological innovations seeking to maximize catch return that over the course of the twentieth century inflicted se-
vere damage upon Newfoundland fish stocks and their marine environment. The invention of the steam engine in the early twentieth century and onboard freezing facilities by the 1950s meant that fishing became an even more lucrative source of revenue. Fishing vessels were able to fish in all weather conditions throughout the year, and more powerful vessels meant the deployment of larger nets. By the mid-1960s, East European, Asian, and South American countries had joined the French, British, Canadians, and Spanish fishing off the Grand Banks. As early as the 1920s, it had been clear to many in the North American fish industry that stocks were under unsustainable pressure, but no effective quota legislation was introduced. Ironically, when the Cana-
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT
dian government finally acted and introduced an exclusion zone of 200 miles in 1977, it was the signal for its domestic industry to step into the gap vacated by foreign fishing fleets. Overfishing thus continued, with the Canadian government failing to heed the warnings of its own marine science community in the early 1980s. The 1992 ban on cod fishing off the coast of Newfoundland effectively brought to an end a 500-year-long fishing tradition that had acted as a catalyst for the exploration and settlement of North America by Europeans. Whether the fishing industry will ever recover its former economic and cultural importance remains to be seen. Wendy Michallat See also: Brittany; Catholic Church; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Saint-Malo; Saint-Pierre et Miquelon; Treaty of Utrecht; Whaling. References Brière, Jean-François. La Pêche française en Amérique du nord au XVIIIe siécle. SaintLaurent, PQ: Fides, 1990. Cazeils, Nelson. Cinq siècles de pêche à la morue, Terre-Neuvas et Islandais. OuestFrance, 1997. Dodge, Ernest S. Northwest by Sea. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Kurlansky, Mark. The Basque History of the World. New York: Walker, 1999. Mancke, Elizabeth. “Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space.” The Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999). Seaver, Kirsten A. The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000–1500. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT (1896–1940) American writer Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
447
On academic probation from Princeton and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917, and a year later was assigned to Camp Sheridan, Alabama, where he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. In 1919 Fitzgerald began his career in New York City as a writer of stories for mass-circulation magazines, particularly The Saturday Evening Post. His early stories included “The Offshore Pirate” (1920), “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920), “May Day” (1920), and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1920). His first short story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, also appeared in 1920, as well as his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922),
In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald settled on the Riviera in Valescure, where he wrote The Great Gatsby, which marked a striking advance in his technique. (Library of Congress)
448
FLANNER, JANET
was published shortly after the birth of the Fitzgeralds’ only child, Frances Scott. That same year, his second collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, earned Fitzgerald a reputation as a social historian. In spring 1924, Fitzgerald took his family to France; they settled on the Riviera in Valescure, near Saint Raphael, where he wrote The Great Gatsby, which marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique and closely examines the author’s principal themes of aspiration and mutability in an American setting. His achievement was highly acclaimed, although sales of the book were disappointing. Fortunately, the stage and movie rights brought the additional income that was needed to maintain the couple’s extravagant lifestyle. The author’s third collection of stories, All the Sad Young Men, was published in 1926, when Fitzgerald formed a somewhat awkward friendship with the then unknown Ernest Hemingway during one of his stays in Paris. That year, he and Zelda often traveled back and forth between Paris and the Riviera, finally returning to the United States at the end of 1926 to escape the distractions of life in France and to allow Fitzgerald to concentrate on his work. Little progress, however, was made in America, and in 1929 they sailed for France again, where Zelda suffered her first breakdown a year later. She was interned in a Swiss clinic, and Fitzgerald lived in Swiss hotels and wrote short stories to pay the medical bills until Zelda was released in 1931. Returning again to the United States in the fall of 1931, Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood. Zelda
Fitzgerald suffered a relapse in February 1932, and from this point on, she was to spend the rest of her life in and out of sanitariums. While Zelda was interned, Fitzgerald completed his fourth and most ambitious novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Soon afterward, he published his fourth short story collection, Taps at Reveille (1935). Fitzgerald went to Hollywood alone in the summer of 1937 with a six-month screenwriting contract, but was let go due to his alcoholism. In California he fell in love with movie columnist Sheilah Graham, with whom he spent the rest of his short life, succumbing to a heart attack on December 21, 1940. Claudia Wolosin See also: Hemingway, Ernest; Jazz; Literary Relations. References Bruccoli, Matthew, and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Eble, Kenneth Eugene. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
FLANNER, JANET (1892–1978) American writer, who, under the nom-deplume Genêt, wrote for fifty years, from 1925 to 1975, the fortnightly column “Letter from Paris” in the New Yorker. Born in Indianapolis, she lived in Paris for all of her adult life and spent her career capturing, characterizing, and depicting Paris for her urbane American readers. Her life began, she claimed, when she came to Paris.
FLANNER, JANET
Flanner was part of the legendary group of expatriate American writers living in Paris between the wars. She knew and wrote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, and Djuna Barnes. Flanner was instrumental in developing the New Yorker writing style—elegant, amusing (amused), and vivid, and able both to inform her readers and also to make them feel like such insiders that they already had the information she was conveying. She came to write the “Letter from Paris” as a result of her personal correspondence from Paris with Jane Grant, the wife of the new New Yorker editor, Harold Ross. Although her writing always maintained this distinctive personal style, Flanner also came to cover some politically and historically important events: she was one of the first journalists to enter liberated Auschwitz, and she covered the Nuremberg Trials. Flanner has in recent years become almost as famous for her personal letters as for her professional ones. Her letters to her longtime companion, Natalia Danesi Murray, published under the title Darlinghissima (an invented superlative for “darling,” by which she addressed her “passionate friend”), have captured—in a more personalized version of her familiar style— the avid interest of readers and scholars interested in twentieth-century women writers’ lives. Though never an openly avowed lesbian, Flanner also never made a secret of her lifelong relationships with women (and most of them were indeed lifelong). There may be some truth to the idea that Paris was a haven for American artists who could
449
not feel at home in their own country— because of their race proclivities, temperaments, or sensibilities—and that Flanner was drawn to Paris for the freedom of sexual expression that it offered her. But if so, then it was only one among many reasons. Janet Flanner was always most at home in Paris; and it was there, through her fortnightly letter home, that she made it possible for Americans to apprehend what it meant to be a sophisticated Parisian, and therefore, in her own—and the New Yorker’s—stylized textual mirror, what it meant to be a sophisticated American. Flanner wrote one novel, The Cubical City (1926); a book of art monographs, Men and Monuments (1957); and a profile, Pétain: The Old Man of France (1944). She also translated books by Georgette LeBlanc and Colette, but her main and most prodigious literary output was her fortnightly “Letter from Paris,” which was subsequently collected into numerous published volumes. She was made an honorary doctor of literature at Smith College in 1958, and she was decorated with the Légion d’honneur. Monica Pearl See also: Barnes, Djuna; Barney, Nat(h)alie Clifford; Beach, Sylvia; Colette; Gay Movement; Hemingway, Ernest; Stein, Gertrude; Toklas, Alice B.; World War II. References Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Castle, Terry. “The Gaiety of Janet Flanner.” The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Murray, William. Janet, My Mother, and Me. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Wineapple, Brenda. Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner. London/New York: Pandora, 1989.
450
FLORENCE, HERCULES
FLORENCE, HERCULES (ANTOINE HERCULE ROMUALD FLORENCE) (1804–1879) French photographic pioneer. Born in Nice, France, Florence sailed for Brazil as a young man, arriving May 1, 1824. A trained draftsman, he was hired by the baron of Langsdorff, consul general of Russia, to accompany and document the Langsdorff Expedition, a scientific expedition to Amazonia, from 1825 and 1829. In 1830, he arrived in São Carlos Villa (now known as Campinas), where he married Maria Angelica Alvares Machado e Vasconcellos and lived the remainder of his life. Very little is known about Florence’s education or his training. He may have been active in anthropology and zoology in France, but there is no evidence of this. His intention appears to have been to reproduce visually and audibly the sights and sounds encountered on the expedition, especially the animal voices, for which he developed a system he called zoophonie. It was in São Carlos Villa that he met his mentor and friend the botanist and chemist Joaquim Correa de Mello (1816– 1877). De Mello was also the most likely source of Florence’s knowledge and access to silver nitrate. There is, however, very little documentation about Florence’s work. According to his notes, he set about inventing new methods of printing, frustrated by the lack of available printing presses for the publication of his work on zoophonie. To do this, he employed the characteristic blackening of silver nitrate in sunlight, building frames to hold the sheets. He also built a simple camera obscura, a machine that he was likely acquainted with through his drawing training. According to Florence’s notebooks, he
made the printing experiments as early as 1832 and succeeded some time in 1833, inventing two different methods and calling them poligraphie and photographie, the latter suggested to him by de Mello. Florence’s work was not known outside Brazil, although he published his experiments December 29, 1839, in the Rio de Janeiro Journal do Comercio (Journal of Commerce). He did not press this claim of priority of invention during the remainder of his lifetime, having either given up hope of recognition or realizing that his experiments differed in the extreme from the daguerreotype. There is no evidence that his manuscript reached France, and his work was rediscovered only in the 1970s. Kelley Wilder See also: Brazil; Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé; Photography. References Carelli, Maria. “Hercules Florence: Le nouveau Robinson.” Cahiers du Brésil contemporain, 1990, no. 12 http://www1 .msh-paris.fr/revues/vernumpub/ 2-%20M.%20Carelli.pdf (accessed April 14, 2004). Castanho, Eduardo. “Brazilian Photography: An Introduction.” http://www.brazil.org .uk/page.php?cid=1061 (accessed April 14, 2004). Kossoy, Boris. “Hercules Florence, Pioneer of Photography in Brazil.” Image (George Eastman House) 20, no. 1 (March 1977): 12–22.
FLOREY, ROBERT (1900–1979) Highly prolific and versatile French-born filmmaker, who made a remarkable contribution to Hollywood history and television. Florey was born in Paris and died in Santa Monica, California.
FLOREY, ROBERT
From an early age, Florey’s passion for cinema drove him to take almost any job on a film set, from film journalist to actor, to screenwriter, to director. Florey made his first steps in the film industry in Geneva in the 1910s while still a student, before returning to Paris and working as an assistant director and actor on Louis Feuillade’s L’Orpheline (“The Orphan Girl,” 1921). With a genuine flair for the industry and fascinated by Hollywood, Florey went to the United States as a French press writer for Ciné-Magazine in 1921, determined to absorb as much as possible about the craft and the industry. Once again, Florey worked in several capacities, from assisting directors Emmett Flynn, Josef von Sternberg, Henry King, and King Vidor to being a technical director and actor. Florey settled well in Hollywood, building lasting friendships and work relations with some of the greatest film artists, such as Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino, and becoming an integral part of the Hollywood scene. Working and learning relentlessly, Florey graduated to directing his own feature in 1927 with One Hour of Love; he also developed an expertise in special effects. With the advent of sound, Paramount asked him to direct some of the very first sound films, which starred Claudette Colbert, Edward G. Robinson (The Hole in the Wall, 1929), and, most notably, the Marx brothers, onscreen for the first time in Cocoanuts (1929). With the Hollywood aura attached to his name and his experience of sound films, Florey was called to Paris by Pierre Braunberger to direct the first French sound film, La Route est belle (The Road Is Fine, 1930). Despite being in fact preceded by Les Trois Masques (The Three Masks) by a few weeks, La
451
Route est belle can still be claimed as the first successful French talkie. L’Amour chante (Love Songs) and Le Blanc et le noir (“The White and the Black,” with Marc Allégret) followed the same year, as well as two German films. Back in Hollywood, Florey directed one of his most successful films, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) starring Bela Lugosi, a precursor to the horror genre that revealed his talent for gothic horror. Like Charles Boyer later in the decade, Florey was very much a cultural ambassador for France, helping build bridges between the French and American film industries from the early 1920s and often being the first point of contact for French filmmakers in Hollywood. His commitment to his compatriots was constant, but it became most evident during the war years when he helped many French exiles and refugees. In 1950, after some sixty feature films, Florey was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur before crossing over to television and becoming one of the most prolific television directors on some cult series (The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables, The Outer Limits, Four Star Playhouse). As a writer, Florey contributed eight books on Hollywood life and history, all published in France, as well as numerous press articles. Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Boyer, Charles; Chevalier, Maurice; Clair, René; Colbert, Claudette; Dalio, Marcel; Duvivier, Julien; Hollywood’s Paris; Jourdan, Louis; Rosay, Françoise; Simon, Simone; Tourneur, Jacques; Tourneur, Maurice. References Florey, Robert. Hollywood d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Prisma, 1948. ———. Hollywood Village: Naissance des studios en Californie. Paris: Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet, 1986.
452
FLORIDA Lebrun, Dominique. Paris-Hollywood. Paris: Hazan, 1987. Servel, Alain. Frenchie Goes to Hollywood: La France et les Français dans le cinéma américain de 1929 à nos jours. Paris: Veyrier, 1987.
FLORIDA Although Spain and England eventually dominated the European colonization of Florida, French activity was considerable. It was at its most intense first in the 1560s and then from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century. The destruction, by the Spanish, of the French colony in 1564–1565 became notorious: no foregone conclusion, it had a decisive impact on subsequent colonization. In the sixteenth century, Europeans often referred to the entire eastern coastline of North America as Florida. François I, king of France, received from Giovanni da Verrazzano a report on the Italian’s 1524 voyage charting that coastline, from south to north as far as Newfoundland. Following French failure to establish a colony either in Canada (with the expedition led by Cartier and Roberval) or in Brazil, attention turned to Florida, where a hospitable climate and fertile vegetation seemed preferable to the climactic extremes of Canada and Brazil. At this time, France was the main threat to the monopoly over the Americas that was claimed by the Iberian kingdom. By 1559, Spain was so worried about French activity in Florida that it tried unsuccessfully to establish a preemptive permanent settlement at the Cape of Santa Elena. In February 1562, a French expedition set out for Florida from Le Havre with 150 men under the command of Jean Rib-
aut and his deputy René Goulaine de Laudonnière. One of the motives was the hope of finding precious metals and stones. The driving force, as in the case of Brazil, was the Protestant Gaspard de Coligny, admiral of France. The commanders and most of the crew were also Huguenots. One long-term aim may have been to establish an overseas refuge for Huguenots in case persecution worsened in France. Also, Florida could act as a base for unofficial raids on the Spanish New Indies (the Caribbean). Such outright aggression was not, however, necessarily Coligny’s aim, which may have been more subtle—to foster tension between Philip II of Spain and the French regent Catherine de Medici, pushing her toward an accord with Protestant England. On April 29, the ships reached Anastasia Island, which Ribaut named Cap François. On May 1, he found the entrance to Saint John’s River, naming it the Rivière de May. The expedition soon established initially friendly relations with Satouriwa, the headman of the local Timucuan Indians. Ribaut then explored northward along the coast as far as “Belle a veoir” (Saint Helena Sound) before returning south to Port Royal Sound: he had now investigated a large portion of the eastern coastline of present-day Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. On a river that he named the Chenonceaux (Battery Creek), near the site of the present-day town of Port Royal, Ribaut built a fortified outpost, calling it Charlesfort. Leaving a garrison of thirty men, he sailed back to France, landing in Dieppe on June 22. Those left behind established relations with other Indian groups, especially the Oristan to the north and their headman Adusta. In 1563, however, faced with
FLORIDA
453
Map of Florida. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
inadequate supplies, the settlers built a craft and sailed back to Europe in desperate conditions, eating one of their own number on the way. Meanwhile, Ribaut had reported back to Coligny. A second expedition was organized by Coligny and Laudonnière, helped by unofficial support, both political and financial, from Charles IX. Laudonnière, whom the king now made lieutenant general of New France, set sail from Le Havre on April 22, 1564, with about 300 men, this time including adventurers from the court nobility. Once in Florida, they reached an agreement with
Satouriwa, who welcomed them to settle in his territory in return for military support against his enemies in the interior. A new fortress, La Caroline, named after the king like the first, was constructed on the southern shore of the Saint John’s River, 6 miles upstream from its mouth. French aspirations focused mainly on obtaining copper, gold, and silver from the interior. There were no immediate plans for growing crops, and so, largely dependent on bartering for Indian produce, the French soon disrupted the economy by depleting Indian stores. Some exploring was done, but many of the settlers were soon discon-
454
FLORIDA
tent. Laudonnière was under orders not to attack the Spanish, but some of the more radical Huguenots wanted to. On November 23, 1564, following an earlier episode of revolt, the radicals temporarily imprisoned Laudonnière and then sailed off on December 8, returning with a captured Spanish brigantine on March 25, 1565, only to have their four leaders executed by Laudonnière. By June 1564, the French had alienated both Satouriwa and also the Utina tribe, whose enmity made penetration of the interior unlikely. With no sign of the supplies promised by Ribaut, Laudonnière prepared to abandon Fort Caroline. However, on August 28, with the planned return to France imminent, Ribaut’s relief squadron arrived, almost four months late. In May and June 1564, a Spanish force had located and razed the remnants of the Charlesfort outpost. Philip II dispatched a larger expedition, under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, to make sure that it would be the Spanish and not the French who settled in the region. Menéndez set sail on June 29, 1565, and hastened to Florida, in contrast with the inexplicably leisurely progress being made by Ribaut. Menéndez sighted the Florida peninsula on August 25. At the end of Anastasia Island he established his base in an inlet that he named San Agustín after the saint on whose day (August 28) he found it. Ribaut, who had orders to relieve Laudonnière of his command, decided that his best chance was an all-out attack by sea. Leaving the ill Laudonnière at Fort Caroline with the noncombatants and about two dozen soldiers, he took his battleworthy vessels to the bar at Anastasia Island but, due to the state of the tide, was unable to cross it and push home the advantage that he probably had. He may also have be-
come sidetracked into the pursuit of two large ships that Menéndez had sent away to avoid capture. A hurricane then blew up, wrecking the French fleet on the beaches to the south. Unaware of that development, the Spanish marched to Fort Caroline and took it with ease, killing all the men and possibly (though only one of the eyewitness accounts claims this) some women and children. Some of the French escaped, including Laudonnière. Fort Caroline was renamed San Mateo. Menéndez then found two groups of the French shipwreck survivors: they surrendered without a fight, though the terms of the surrender have been disputed; then Menéndez had almost all, perhaps some 200, including Ribaut, bound and executed, because, he said, they were Lutherans. This event happened at present-day Matanzas—“the place of the massacres.” A third group, encountered later, secured conditional terms of surrender and was spared. Estimates of the total number of French killed vary from a few hundred to nearly 1,000. The massacres have long haunted Huguenot memory. They outraged some in France, but the response of Catherine de Medici and Charles IX was weak. In 1568 a Gascon nobleman, Dominique de Gourgues, whose religious affiliations at that time are unknown, exacted reprisal by destroying three Spanish forts on Florida’s east coast, including San Mateo, where he hanged some 200 Spanish prisoners. French settlers again threatened the Spanish in the Gulf of Mexico when their progression down from Canada reached the mouth of the Arkansas River (1673) and of the Mississippi (1682). The Spanish colonization of Pensacola Bay in 1698 was
FOLCH-RIBAS, JACQUES
a response to this threat. A French expedition under Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville arrived there too late, in January 1699, and so settled instead at Biloxi (1699) before then founding Mobile (1702), which moved to its present-day site in 1711 as the capital of French Louisiana. The French later occupied Pensacola Bay during the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1719– 1721), leaving in 1722. Neil Kenny See also: Brazil; Cartier, Jacques; François I, King of France; Huguenots; Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’; Le Havre; Louisiana; Mississippi River; Mobile; Newfoundland; Ribaut, Jean; Roberval, Jean François de la Roque, Seigneur de; Verrazzano, Giovanni da. References Laudonnière, René Goulaine de. A Foothold in Florida: The Eye-Witness Account of Four Voyages Made by the French to That Region and Their Attempt at Colonisation, 1562–1568, Based on a New Translation of Laudonnière’s “Histoire notable de la Floride.” Trans. Sarah Lawson. East Grinstead, UK: Antique Atlas, 1992. Lestringant, Frank. L’Expérience huguenote au nouveau monde (XVIe siècle). Geneva: Droz, 1996. McGrath, John. The French in Early Florida: In the Eye of the Hurricane. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Quinn, David. Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500–1625. London/Ronceverte: Hambledon, 1990. Tebeau, Charlton W., and William Marina. A History of Florida. 3rd edition. Miami: University of Miami Press, 1996.
FOLCH-RIBAS, JACQUES (1928–) Novelist and critic; born in Barcelona. Exiled in France at the age of eleven because of the Spanish civil war, he went on to study architecture in Paris. In 1956
455
he moved to Montreal, where he exercised his profession and also taught history of art and architecture. He was on the editorial board of the journal Vie des arts from 1958 to 1981, and of Liberté from 1962 to 1981. As a cultural commentator he regularly appeared on broadcasts by Radio Canada, and he had a column on French literature in the newspaper La Presse. Member of the French Canadian Academy, the Association des écrivains de langue française (Association of Writers of the French Language), and the Union of Quebec Writers, Folch-Ribas wrote several novels. Une Aurore boréale (Northlight, Lovelight, 1974) won the Prix QuébecParis and was translated into seven languages. He won the same prize for Le Silence ou le parfait bonheur (“Silence, or Perfect Happiness,” 1988), as well as the Governor General’s Prize. In 1993 he won the Prix Molson for Le Valet de plume (“The Pen Valet”), about a sculptor whose work is promoted by a man of letters. In Folch-Ribas’s work, characters find it difficult to relinquish the memory of the past, and find it a burden. In Le Démolisseur (“The Demolisher,” 1970), the buildings of the city are symbols of a past to be erased. The protagonist of Le Greffon (“The Graft,” 1971) is led by violent revolt to forget a peaceful countryside of fields and shepherds. In Aurore boréale, the hero recalls his childhood, wild and free, in order to rediscover peace in the form of a new land, a new paradise, and can blend gently into a virgin America and a world of civilization and culture. In Le Silence ou le parfait bonheur, seven characters retreat to the countryside to tell tales of love and music, as in Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century collection of tales, the Decameron. Jérôme Ceccon
456
FONDA, JANE See also: Architecture; Quebec. References Basile, Jean. “Jacques Folch-Ribas, Théâtre et viscosité de l’exil.” Le Devoir, September 7, 1991. Marcotte, Gilles. “Folch-Ribas et son Valet: Une heureuse rencontre.” L’Actualité, September 1, 1983. Parienti, Sandra. “L’Exil dans l’oeuvre romanesque de Jacques Folch-Ribas.” M.A. thesis, Université de Sherbrooke, 1996.
FONDA, JANE (1937–) One of the most noteworthy American film actresses of her generation. Fonda’s career began, however, in France, and the radical shift in the type of French film she appeared in between 1964 and 1970 illustrates the most significant of her much discussed aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical metamorphoses. Fonda spent the mid-1960s acting “sex kitten” roles à la Brigitte Bardot in several lightweight French-produced films made by her then husband, director Roger Vadim: La Ronde (Circle of Love, 1964), an inferior remake of the 1950 French movie classic; La Curée (The Game Is Over, 1966), an ill-advised twentieth-century version of Zola’s tale of adultery; and Histoires extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead, 1968), a poorly conceived triptych of stories based on stories by Poe. Fonda and Vadim’s most successful collaboration was the 1968 sci-fi extravaganza Barbarella, based on a French comic strip, in which Fonda starred as a forty-first-century galaxy crusader, bringing peace to the universe with her sexual charms. Fonda left Vadim at the end of the 1960s, increasingly drawn to a radical political activism she wanted her work to reflect, both in France and Hollywood. In
Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout va bien (All’s Well, 1972) she starred alongside Yves Montand as a journalist who visits a French sausage factory during a strike and, in the process, becomes aware of her bourgeois complicity in the perpetuation of the proletariat’s oppression. The film was Godard’s attempt to respond to May 1968, his deliberate use of stars Fonda and Montand a self-conscious comment on the function of celebrity in the context of fetishistic capitalism. It is difficult to imagine two more contradictory faces of an American actor’s involvement in French cinema than Fonda’s work with Vadim and her work with Godard. In the United States Fonda spent the next few years stirring the wrath of most of white America by her involvement with such militant groups as the Black Panthers (French writer Jean Genet became her ally in this project) and by her 1972 trip to Vietnam to protest against America’s involvement in the war. Back in France Godard reinscribed Fonda in French experimental cinema with his documentary Letter to Jane (1972), in which he analyzes a photograph of Fonda taken in Vietnam, criticizing her for her alleged lack of awareness of how image operates in a consumer society. Fonda, meanwhile, had been forging a reputation in Hollywood as a serious actress in such angst-ridden films as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (Pollack, 1969) and Klute (Pakula, 1971), a reputation she consolidated with performances in liberal “issue” movies like Coming Home (Ashby, 1978) and The China Syndrome (Bridges, 1979). In the 1980s, a decade during which her increasingly sporadic but generally successful film projects abandoned all aspiration to left-wing commitment, Fonda was best known for her phenomenal worldwide success as a physical
FORD MOTOR COMPANY
457
Director Roger Vadim on the set of Barbarella with Jane Fonda. (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis Sygma)
fitness pioneer. In the 1990s she stopped making films, married and divorced media mogul Ted Turner, publicly renounced her earlier political activism, and converted to Christianity. Andrew Asibong See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Comic Strips; Genet, Jean; Godard, Jean-Luc; Montand, Yves; Poe, Edgar Allan; Vadim, Roger; Vietnam War; Zola, Emile. References French, Sean. Jane Fonda: A Biography. London: Pavilion, 1997. Vadim, Roger. The Memoirs of Roger Vadim: Bardot, Deneuve and Fonda. Trans. Melinda Porter. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.
FORD MOTOR COMPANY The Ford Motor Company is a $150 billion American automobile manufacturer that is also a significant player in financial services and other businesses, such as car rental through its ownership of Hertz. Its brands include Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Jaguar, Volvo, Aston Martin, and Mazda. Henry Ford, the company’s founder, is an American legend and inventor of Fordism, often cited as the first mass-production management methodology. In the 1920s, however, the company teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Henry Ford’s resistance of the financial houses that would have taken control of
458
FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1945
the company is also legendary: in a few short months he saved the day in a series of brilliantly conceived business moves. The company has only ever been a depositor at the bank since. In the 1940s, Ford was resistant again, this time to American involvement in the war. He canceled a contract with the RAF for 6,000 engines in protest. However, as public opinion shifted, so he changed his mind, eventually masterminding a manufacturing plant of colossal proportions. Its assembly line, 3 miles long, produced a plane a day and worked twenty-four hours. Henry’s son, who also led the company, died before his father in 1943, and his loss was keenly felt both at a personal and commercial level. And when Henry died in 1947, the company was fighting a reputation that it merely imitated its great rival, General Motors. The 1970s saw strong growth in Europe, though they did not go well for Henry Ford II, who resigned as CEO in 1979. Ironically, it took Japanese standards of industrial management and quality to reinvigorate the company, not least with the launch of its Taurus model, and in 1986 the company passed General Motors in sales for the first time since 1924. The automobile recession of the 1990s witnessed another period of faltering business. The year 1992 was the worst with a $7 billion loss. However, partly as a result of developing the vans and trucks side of the business, the company pulled through. The Lebanese-born and Australianraised Jacques Nasser became president and CEO in 1998, and he sought to throw out the old familial-bureaucratic culture once and for all, and replace it with his entrepreneurial spirit. However, his attempt was short-lived. In 2001 William Clay
Ford Jr., Henry’s great-grandson, took over as CEO. Ford faces fierce competition. At the start of 2004, Toyota overtook the company to become the second-largest motor vehicle manufacturer in the world, and Ford is struggling to halt a decline in sales across Europe. In France, Ford’s fortunes lie low. It has no production plants, compared to three in the United Kingdom and others in Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal. Sales in 2001 were 163,000 vehicles, compared to 640,000 in the United Kingdom, and about half of these were in former French colonies (including Algeria, Gabon, Mauritius, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia), not in France itself. Relatively new vehicles, such as pickups, segments in which Ford dominates in the United States, do not show much signs of growth in France either: it will sell only a few hundred in 2003 compared to the many thousands sold by Japanese brands. Mark Vernon See also: Automobiles; World War II. References Gelderman, Carol. Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Nye, David E. Henry Ford: Ignorant Idealist. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1979.
FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1945 The relationship between France and North America has long been a tenuous one. The period from 1776 to 1945 is characterized by brief periods of cooperation, interrupted when interests diverged. The dominant tendency, however, is a drifting apart of France and North America. With the Treaty of Paris signed in 1763, France relinquished most of its terri-
FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1945
tories in North America, keeping only a coastal strip in Newfoundland and a few islands in the Caribbean. The country was no longer an important actor on the North American continent, and the rare attempts it made to reestablish its presence were unsuccessful. France and the United States fought three major wars side by side during the period, each in turn helping the other achieve freedom and independence. Between conflicts, however, relations were relatively sparse, often defined by conflicting interests and poisoned by debt. Cordial but superficial at their best, official relations even led on several occasions to severe crises and nearly provoked a war between the “two oldest allies.” When the American War of Independence broke out, France’s foreign minister Vergennes was anxious to vindicate the country’s standing, in order both to weaken Great Britain and to overcome the humiliation of the Treaty of Paris. After the insurgents’ victory in Saratoga in October 1777, King Louis XVI opted to recognize the United States formally, and two treaties were signed in Paris on February 6, 1778. The French fleet was sent from Toulon in 1778, and troops led by the Count of Rochambeau and the Admiral de Grasse participated in the battle of Yorktown, conquering the city in October 1781 in the last important battle of the War of Independence. Yet the common victory, which led to the peace treaty signed in Versailles on September 3, 1783, failed to create a prosperous alliance between France and the United States, and was instead the beginning of quarrels and resentment. Indeed, Britain managed to split the allies, inviting the two U.S. negotiators, John Jay and John Adams, to negotiate secretly with their envoy and conclude a separate pre-
459
liminary peace treaty. Only with great difficulty did Benjamin Franklin manage to appease the French, as well as to obtain a loan, starting a story of debts that repeatedly disrupted relations between the two countries. When the French Revolution erupted, the United States encouraged the formation of a republic in France, but declined to intervene in 1792 when France waged war with Britain. The provisions of the alliance treaty of 1778 were breached by both parties in turn, as French privateers began seizing American ships, while the United States agreed to a trade treaty with Britain, putting an end to France’s “exclusive rights” of trade. Both countries sought revenge, and the tension escalated into a “Quasi War,” as it is traditionally called, which remains the only moment in history (unless one counts the Allied landing in North Africa in November 1942) when blood has been spilled between France and the United States. President Adams sent a delegation to Paris to resolve the situation. The delegation was secretly informed that France would consent to negotiating a new treaty only after an important bribe was paid. The affair, known as the XYZ Affair (in reference to the coded names given to the three representatives who met the American delegation), was made public. Adams called a special session of Congress, and by July 1798 all the former treaties with France had been revoked. Without declaring war outright, the two countries spent the following two years in a state of quasi war: the Americans declared an embargo on French goods, offered assistance to the insurgents in Haiti, and armed their commercial ships. France adopted similar measures, and for two years naval combats and skirmishes were
460
FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1945
numerous. Rapidly, however, it became clear that the quasi war was a great expense to the United States, with very little hope of reward. A resolution appeared when Bonaparte seized power in France. He welcomed American envoys, and under the leadership of his brother Joseph, the Treaty of Mortefontaine was signed in October 1800, reestablishing free trade and ending the quasi war. Tension grew again only a few months later, however, when the provisions of the secret Treaty of Saint Ildefonse, through which the Louisiana Territory was ceded from Spain back to France, were made public. Ready to intervene, President Jefferson misunderstood Bonaparte’s intentions: Louisiana interested him only insofar as it could be used to regain control of Haiti, which was of greater commercial interest. Monroe was sent to France to negotiate the purchase of part of the territory, and effortlessly obtained the cession of the whole land. On May 2, 1803, Monroe signed the U.S. purchase of Louisiana for $24 million. Over the next century, France and the United States generally did not intervene in each other’s affairs or military campaigns and entertained distant relations, except on three occasions. In 1821, France intervened in Spain to reinstall the king, leading the United States to fear the rebirth of a “Holy Alliance” that would threaten its interests. The tension that built up on this occasion— based on another mistaken reading of France’s intentions—rapidly decreased, but the incident marked the origins of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), according to which any intervention by European nations in American affairs would be deemed intolerable and a direct threat to the United States. Over the next forty years, the only significant contact between the two countries was
on the issue of French debts. After some twenty years of negotiations, an agreement was reached in July 1831 and quickly ratified by the U.S. Senate, but not by the French Chamber. President Andrew Jackson was furious, and tension escalated again; the possibility of war was even evoked, but negotiations eventually restarted, and in April 1835 the French Chamber reversed its prior decision and agreed to pay. The Civil War in the United States (1861–1865) catalyzed a swift intensification of French-American relations. France initially supported the continuation of the Union, but when war erupted, it declared neutrality. The ensuing Northern embargo on Southern goods caused problems in Europe, as the textile industry depended on cotton produced by Confederate states. The major unemployment and financial crisis that followed in France led many to call for more active support for the South. At the same time, France, Britain, and Spain organized a naval demonstration off the coast of Mexico, after Benito Juárez, leader of the Mexican democrats, announced in 1861 that Mexico’s debts to European countries would not be honored. The United States was entangled in the Civil War and thus could not enforce the Monroe Doctrine, and Napoléon III took advantage of the expedition to sweep Juárez out of power and to install Archduke Maximilian, the brother of Austria’s emperor Franz-Joseph, at the head of a Catholic empire. The U.S. Senate voted a resolution condemning France’s actions in February 1863, and the United States sent weapons to Juarez from New Orleans. Napoléon III was tempted to recognize the South, but he decided after 1864 to remain neutral and tried to reach an agreement with the North over Mexico. He was eventually led to
FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1945
withdraw French troops in 1866. Maximilian, who refused to leave, was captured and executed on June 19, 1867. The episode marked the last French attempt to intervene militarily on the American continent. A new crisis between the United States and France arose in 1898, on the occasion of the Spanish-American War, which put France in an embarrassing situation because of its cultural and financial ties to Spain. After its attempts to prevent the war failed, France declared neutrality, but agreed to take over Spain’s interests in the United States. After the U.S. victory, peace talks were held in Paris, but resentment ran deep on both sides. Aside from the aforementioned crises, however, relations between the United States and France were cordial: the United States recognized France’s colonial conquests, while France, in turn, agreed not to intervene in South America and recognized the creation of the Republic of Panama. By the time Theodore Roosevelt became president of the United States, France was seen as a “natural ally,” and some twenty-five treaties were signed between the countries. Yet economic relations remained superficial, and mutual investments were remarkably weak. During the two world wars of the twentieth century, relations between France and the United States unfolded following a similar pattern. On both occasions, the United States was initially neutral, yet eventually intervened and contributed to victory. The pattern, however, was much accentuated the second time. As soon as World War I was declared, President Wilson enacted his “new diplomacy,” declaring neutrality and asserting that the mission of the United States was to work for peace and to defend the rights of neutral nations. Wil-
461
son emphasized that the belligerents could not seize trading goods. This initially caused some frictions with France and Britain. For three years, Wilson encouraged the promotion of peace, until Germany announced a total submarine war in January 1917, threatening the rights of neutral nations. Wilson severed diplomatic ties with Germany, and on April 6, 1917, after the Algonquin was torpedoed, the United States entered the war. The U.S. Treasury then granted important loans to France and Britain, offering greatly needed relief to their economies, but also setting the stage for postwar debt issues. General Pershing arrived in Paris in June 1917, and President Wilson insisted on the deployment of an independent U.S. Army. American troops arrived progressively, but their equipment could not be transported, so France provided most of their ammunition and all their artillery, tanks, and aircraft. In July 1918, American units took part in decisive victories and were entrusted with a portion of the front to protect. At the end of the war, Wilson was very popular in France; the Socialists even passed a motion in the National Assembly declaring him an asset to humanity. This extraordinary gratitude and the vibrant friendship between France and the United States disappeared rapidly, however. Extended mutual exposure between U.S. soldiers and the French population turned their friendship sour, and the true respect between Wilson and Clemenceau did not suffice to overcome misunderstandings and bitterness. Once they reached an agreement, however, Wilson stood firm and forced Germany to accept the terms he had reached with Clemenceau. In the 1920s, the enormous war debt France owed to the United States created a major and long-
462
FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1945
lasting rift. Drawing a distinction between political and commercial debts, the United States refused to grant France a guarantee clause that would peg French payments to the payments of war reparations it received from Germany. After a long negotiation, the Mellon-Beranger Agreement, reached in April 1926, organized the payment of France’s debt in sixty-two installments. Both the French cabinet and the French parliament initially contested the agreement, and it took France three years to ratify it finally in August 1929, only a few months before the 1929 Slump. International debt payments thereafter became irregular, and President Hoover granted a moratorium in 1931. In 1932, European nations agreed to cancel Germany’s debt, but the United States refused to do the same. France and Britain subsequently stopped paying their annual installments, engendering American resentment. The end of the 1920s was also marked by the interventions of France’s foreign minister Aristide Briand, the “apostle of peace,” who in 1927 endeavored to appease political tensions with the United States by issuing a solemn declaration in which he proposed that the two countries should forever renounce waging war on one another. Despite the warm reception of the speech by the U.S. press, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, who did not share Briand’s idealism, did not reply immediately. A few months later, Senator Borah of Idaho, close to the radical peace activist Salmon Levison, drafted a response for Kellogg in which he accepted Briand’s offer, and extended it to all the countries in the world. The League of Nations appropriated the idea, and eventually only five countries refused to sign the KelloggBriand Pact. The pact, breached after only
two years when Japan invaded Manchuria, nevertheless demonstrated that France and the United States, with different methods, shared a vision for democracy and peace. The breach of the pact, combined with the lagging debt problem, engendered a period of U.S. isolationism, thus diluting FrenchU.S. relations. Indeed, diplomatic relations between France and the United States nearly ceased to exist from 1932 to 1939. While France became increasingly worried about its security, the United States passed a series of strict neutrality laws and decided to implement a stringent embargo on weapons for any belligerent country, associated with a cash-and-carry clause for all other products. The course of this policy of retreat was progressively changed after 1937, when President Roosevelt understood that, despite its isolationism, his country might not be able to resist the spiral of war about to be set in motion. Roosevelt delivered a “Quarantine speech” in which he proposed to isolate autocratic regimes, beginning an effort to raise U.S. awareness of the dangers of Nazism and fascism. The speech was not followed by any direct measure; Roosevelt did not officially react to the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. After the Munich agreements, he sent a list of thirty nations to Hitler and Mussolini that they should not attack and secretly helped France modernize its air force. When France and Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, however, Roosevelt declared neutrality and did not intervene to rescue France as it was defeated in June 1940. After the defeat, the United States did not initially question Pétain’s legitimacy and established diplomatic ties with the Vichy regime. Admiral Leahy was named ambassador in France, a position that he
FOREIGN POLICY, 1776–1945
occupied until April 1942, when the Germans replaced Admiral Darlan with Pierre Laval at the head of the French cabinet. The following years of common struggle against Germany on the European front were marked by the tense relationship between de Gaulle and Roosevelt, characterized by mutual suspicion and distrust. Roosevelt believed that de Gaulle was a dangerous adventurer, devoid of any legitimacy, and while he praised the “free French,” he consistently endeavored to find a third man, originally opting for General Henri Giraud, a conservative officer. After meeting Roosevelt for the first time in 1943, de Gaulle was convinced that the American president was organizing a redistribution of spheres of influence favorable to American hegemony—a conviction that he was to keep for the rest of his life. Giraud eventually proved an inept leader, and de Gaulle, who won over the direction of the French Committee of National Liberation (FCNL), developed a bond with General Eisenhower, who convinced Roosevelt to renounce the creation of an Allied Military Government in France at the end of the war. After the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1994, de Gaulle was invited to Washington. He persuaded Eisenhower to divert the course of the American army toward Paris, to assist the insurgents. In October 1944, the French provisional government in Paris was recognized de jure by the three major Allies. Then, on May 9, 1945, General de Lattre de Tassigny signed the act of German capitulation in Berlin, and France participated in the Allied occupation of Germany. De Gaulle, however, who had not been invited to participate in the Yalta conference in February 1945, refused to meet Roosevelt in Algiers. The French
463
population, for its part, enthusiastically celebrated the United States as its liberator. Olivier Ruchet See also: American Civil War; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Gaulle, General Charles de; Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Franklin, Benjamin; Haiti; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Mexico; New Orleans; Newfoundland; Republicanism; Treaty of Paris; Wilson, Woodrow; World War I; World War II. References Blumenthal, Henry. A Reappraisal of FrancoAmerican Relations, 1830–1871. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. ———. France and the United States: Their Diplomatic Relation, 1789–1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970. ———. Illusion and Reality in FrancoAmerican Diplomacy, 1914–1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. Bowman, Albert Hall. The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy during the Federalist Era. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974. Case, Lynn Marshall. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste. France and the United States from the Beginnings to the Present. Trans. Derek Coltman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978 [1976]. Egan, Clifford L. Neither Peace nor War: Franco-American Relations, 1803–1812. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Salinger, Pierre. La France et le Nouveau Monde. Paris: Laffont, 1976. Stinchcombe, William C. The XYZ Affair. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Tardieu, Jean. Devant l’obstacle: L’Amérique et nous. Paris: Emile-Paul, 1927. Zahniser, Marvin R. Uncertain Friendship: American-French Diplomatic Relations through the Cold War. New York: John Wiley, 1975. ———. Then Came Disaster: France and the United States, 1918–1940. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
464
FOREIGN POLICY, 1945–PRESENT
FOREIGN POLICY, 1945–PRESENT Since the end of World War II, the United States has adopted different approaches in its foreign economic, military, and geopolitical policies. Before 1941, the point when the United States entered World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. foreign policy has been termed isolationist. Indeed, the United States did not sign the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, refused to join the League of Nations, and strongly restricted immigration from 1921 onward. Moreover, the 1929 economic crisis closed the U.S. market to European exports. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, the United States carried out an expansionist policy, as evidenced by the implementation of an international financial system whose main purpose was to increase U.S. investment abroad. Moreover, the cultural model of the United States was enjoying growing global influence. In 1937, the principle of “cash-andcarry” allowed exports to foreign nations under certain conditions in order to aid the U.S. domestic economy. This policy benefited above all Great Britain, which controlled vast marine territory at the time. In the Pacific Ocean, the United States was increasingly concerned by Japanese offensives against China. As a consequence, President Franklin Roosevelt undertook a massive rearmament process in the late 1930s and chose to stop exporting strategic goods to Japan. In addition, although he had promised the American people in 1940 that the country would not take part in the war in Europe, he implemented a lend-lease program aimed at Great Britain and China, which provided for the protection by the U.S. Army of goods transported on the Atlantic Ocean. The events
in Pearl Harbor provoked U.S. entry into World War II, with the support of U.S. public opinion. The war increased cooperation between the government, big companies, and experts. It also contributed to the promotion of the democratic ideal: Roosevelt signed the Charter of the Atlantic, and in 1941 Winston Churchill declared the right of nations to self-determination and free access to trade and raw materials, which since then has been primarily of benefit to the United States Cooperation between the United States and the USSR, which was essentially pragmatic during the war, ceased in 1945, a time when the reconstruction of Europe and especially Germany was becoming a highly profitable enterprise. Roosevelt and his successor, Truman, feared that the impoverishment of Germany could lead to the spread of Communism all over Western Europe. The cold war then began in 1947 with the Truman doctrine of containment and the implementation of the Marshall Plan, which aimed at helping postwar Europe’s financial and economic recovery. Stalin rejected the plan, not only as concerned the USSR, but all other Communist “popular democracies.” It therefore concerned only Western countries. From then on, a new world order emerged. First, new institutions, such as the UN, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, aimed at promoting democracy, peace, and economic and financial stability all over the world. Secondly, as the world was divided into two blocs, each side developed its own security organizations: the West created NATO in 1949, while Stalin set up the Cominform (the Communist Information Bureau, the coordinating body of world Communism) in 1947 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955. In
FOREIGN POLICY, 1945–PRESENT
1948, the division of Berlin and the coup d’état in Czechoslovakia ushered in a policy based on mutual suspicion. The rivalry between the two superpowers made each region of the planet of potential strategic interest and inspired most of America’s foreign policy until 1989. The United States sought to contain the influence of Communism, while the USSR sought to propagate its ideological and economic model. The financial aid the United States gave Chiang Kai-shek to help him—unsuccessfully—combat Marxists in China, the war in Korea (1950–1953), the Cuban crisis (1961–1962), and the war in Vietnam are some of the most striking and often terrible regional side effects of the cold war. Moreover, the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation created a sort of power balance between the two superpowers. The international rivalry between them was not only military, economic, industrial, and ideological, but also cultural. An example was the creation in 1950 of the American Congress for Culture and Freedom, whose purpose was to encourage anti-Communist intellectuals from all over the world to work together. Finally, foreign policy had become so crucial that it shaped domestic policy for quite a long time. The famous example of the Communist “witch hunt” within the United States illustrates the American state of mind during the 1950s and the early 1960s, which resembled sometimes a form of collective paranoia. President Eisenhower, who was in power from 1952 to 1960, militarily supported anti-Communism all over the world, a policy based on the logic of the “domino theory.” As soon as an ally of the United States was threatened by a pro-USSR nation, the U.S. Army was ready to intervene. The ob-
465
jective was also economic, insofar as the United States sought to guarantee access to raw materials and foreign markets through encouraging free trade wherever possible. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, historians generally speak of a thaw in the relationship between the United States and the USSR. Nevertheless, the military establishment remained very strong in the two countries. For example, in South America, where American strategic but also economic interests have been threatened since the mid-1950s, the U.S. government sought to suppress the influence of Marxists through the activities of the CIA. In reality, from the late 1950s onward, the emergence of nationalist independence movements in this region no longer conformed to the Manichaean cold war vision of the world. Although the cold war was a struggle for influence over nations aspiring to independence, most of these new countries rejected both the United States and the USSR, as shown by the nonalignment conference in Bandoeng. Moreover, most of the time, wherever U.S. interests were not at stake, for instance in Algeria, the United States did not support European military intervention and encouraged decolonization, in the name of peoples’ right to self-determination. During the 1990s, multilateralism was the leitmotif of the world order. But since the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, America has striven to impose its unilateral vision on the world, which has created tension with some European countries and especially France. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, relationships between France and the United States have always been tense. The peaceful years since World War II in
466
FOREIGN POLICY, 1945–PRESENT
Western Europe have seen anglophobia and anti-German sentiment displaced by anti-Americanism in the French collective imagination. Political anti-Americanism emerged within the political Left during the cold war. The French Left, notably among the intellectual elite, have always distrusted money, materialism, economic imperialism, and democratic ideals, and despised the American culture of mass production and its lack of historical depth. General de Gaulle was always suspicious of the United States, which did not recognize him as leader in exile when France was under Nazi occupation, and was reluctant to have France become a permanent member of the UN Security Council. De Gaulle never compromised France’s independence on the international scene, as evidenced by the fact that he openly challenged U.S. policy many times—by acknowledging Mao’s China, by quitting NATO in 1965, by encouraging the French nuclear industry, and by promoting the independence of Quebec. Furthermore, French colonialists did not appreciate the fact that the United States was in favor of the decolonization of Algeria and disapproved in 1956 of France’s Suez policy. Although Marxism has less currency among French intellectuals than it enjoyed in the 1960s, anti-Americanism is still alive and well among the radical Left, which sharply criticized Reagan’s policy toward the USSR, as well as among Gaullists, who still feel threatened by America’s international ambitions. For instance, President Chirac challenged American policy several times, the most recent example being the second war in Iraq, which provoked severe tension with the Bush administration. More generally, French society still fears American cultural influence: abstraction,
conformism, materialism, utilitarianism, uniformity have often been seen as threatening French tradition and specificity. Nevertheless, despite their rivalries, France and the United States both wish to promote the values of democracy and freedom all over the world. Since the 1950s, the economic relationships between France and Canada have mainly occurred within the framework of the European Community and the G8 (Group of 8: countries who meet together to discuss economic concerns). As a member of NATO, however, Canada has long been involved in the same diplomatic and military operations as France (who left NATO’s military structure from 1966 to 1995). A common language and history between the two countries have contributed to close cultural and academic relationships. Moreover, since the end of the cold war, Canada has not always agreed with the U.S. global vision: Canada and France share the same opinions on a large number of foreign policy issues. Accordingly, they have implemented close cooperation on a number of issues, such as human security, human rights, the nonproliferation of weapons, illegal migrants, drugs, treatment of children, terrorism, and organized crime. Unlike the United States, they have both signed many international treaties. In 1997, France and Canada strengthened their partnership on various targeted actions such as bilateral industrial, scientific, and technological exchanges. Investment and regional development have been especially favored, notably with regard to small and medium-sized companies of the two countries. France and Canada work together to reduce tariffs outside the framework of European negotiations and have collaborated on the preparation of the
FOREIGN POLICY, 1945–PRESENT
WTO (World Trade Organization), G8, and UN negotiations. The preservation of cultural identity is also one of their main preoccupations, as well as public aid to developing countries and the promotion of French-speaking areas around the globe (known as the francophonie). Starting around 1918 and even more so after 1940, the notion of European colonial empire has become less and less prestigious. Most Third World countries have sought emancipation and independence, a movement that led to a revolution in the relationships between Europe—especially France—and Latin America. In the 1960s, de Gaulle promoted bilateral cooperation with French former colonies and the Third World in general, including South America. But the installation of dictatorships froze all such partnerships for almost twenty years. Subsequently, since the mid1980s, the French state has encouraged the process of democratization and economic liberalization in Latin America. Active partnerships and favorable political and economic relationships were implemented in the 1990s. In this respect, regional integration through various framework agreements, notably through the free trade area Mercosur, has been a primary goal, as well as the improvement of European economic investments and the fight against social inequality, financial uncertainty, drugs and criminality. Scientific, cultural, and educational exchanges have also been developed, notably by virtue of historical links between Latin America and Spain. Generally speaking, France has favored European cooperation and the institutionalization of such relationships. Bilateral partnership has also been developed between France and South Amer-
467
ica: financial aid has been forthcoming for South and Central America, as well as public and private disaster relief after hurricanes. A Fund for Technical Cooperation was created at the Trans-American Development Bank: the decrease of the debt and economic reforms, for example, through privatizations, has induced French companies to invest in Latin America (notably Argentina and Brazil) and made exports and imports increase. Due to the proximity of Latin America to some of its overseas territories, especially the West Indies and Guiana, France has tried to favor cultural partnerships with Latin America: linguistic cooperation aims at promoting the French language, but also multilingualism and the teaching of native tongues, and therefore at integrating French overseas territories into the Caribbean sociopolitical environment. In the geopolitical field, France and several countries in Latin America share the will to fight against unilateralist inclinations and to contribute to the creation of an alternative global vision. But this approach has challenged the diplomatic and trade relationships between South America and the United States: the creation of NAFTA in 1992 put an end to the privileged economic partnership between Europe and Latin America. As a matter of fact, NAFTA allowed the United States to displace European companies in Latin America, especially in Mexico. Nevertheless, despite the strength of regional integration, disagreements on agricultural trade barriers in Europe, and the financial fragility of Latin American countries, economic cooperation between Europe and Latin America has continued, alongside political and cultural partnerships. For example, the Rio summit in June 1999
468
FOUCAULT, MICHEL
aimed at bringing together the thirty-three Latin American and fifteen European political leaders for the first time to cooperate on economic, political, and cultural issues. Marie-Cécile Naves See also: Anti-Americanism; Argentina; Brazil; Chirac, Jacques; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Francophonie, La; Gaulle, General Charles de; Iraq War; Language; Liberalism; Marshall Plan, The; Mexico; NATO; 9/11: Political Perspectives; Quebec; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Vietnam War; World War II. References Ambrose, Stephen. Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938. New York: Penguin, 1985. Charpentier, Louise. Nouvelle Histoire du Québec et du Canada. Montreal: Educative and Cultural Center, 1985. Costigliola, Frank. France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World War 2. Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992. Lacorne, Denis, Jacques Rupnik, and MarieFrance Toinet, eds. L’Amérique dans les têtes: Un siècle de fascinations et d’aversions. Paris: Hachette, 1984. McAllister, Ian. Regional Development and the European Community: A Canadian Perspective. Montreal: Political Research Institute, 1982. Nouailhat, Yves-André. Les Etats-Unis et le monde au XXe siècle. Paris: Colin, 1997. Paxton, Robert Owen, and Nicholas Wahl. De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial Reappraisal. Oxford: Berg, 1994.
FOUCAULT, MICHEL (1926–1984) In a series of original and provocative books, Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, described the evolution of a variety of social and discursive practices from the classical period to modern times. His goal was to expose the unacknowledged ways in which human beings have been subjected to social con-
trol, especially in the modern world, where domination masquerades as rationality. Underlying all of his work is a conviction that there is no underlying human nature, but that what we think of as the essence of the human is produced in different ways by distinct historical epochs. What changes in his work is the way Foucault conceptualizes the means by which this humanness is constituted. Foucault’s work falls into three periods, based on an evolution in his theoretical assumptions. His early period—represented by such texts as Naissance de la clinique/The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique/Madness and Civilization (1961), and Les Mots et les choses/The Order of Things (1966)— traces the evolution of the social practices that constitute human beings as objects of study and social control. Here, Foucault targets a progressive understanding of historical change, such as that underlying Hegel’s grand synthesis, arguing that history is subject to discontinuity and chance. This stage is followed by that of Foucault’s most original work—both in Surveiller et punir/Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité/The History of Sexuality (1976). Foucault now asserts that the human being is constituted by technologies of power, which change from epoch to epoch, as the forms of knowledge also vary. He coins the concept of powerknowledge to signify how specific modes of social control are both made possible by and make possible specific types of knowledge. His focus on power, though derived from Nietzsche, provides an original lens for understanding the evolution of society and social oppression.
FRANCE TELECOM
Foucault’s final period—represented most clearly by the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality (1984)— traces the evolution of practices through which human beings constitute themselves as subjects. Moving beyond a negative understanding of power as social domination, Foucault enlarges power to include a subject’s means of self-affirmation. Looking at a range of sexual practices beginning with ancient Greece, Foucault shows how human beings have constituted themselves through techniques of self-discipline. Although Foucault’s theoretical work connects to his advocacy for political causes, it has been criticized for lacking the theoretical foundation to undergird his progressive politics. In particular, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and his followers have argued that Foucault’s critique of modernity is self-defeating, since it cannot account for its own possibility. Foucault’s work has been immensely influential, both on the Continent and across the Atlantic. His claim that discourse is structured by regimes of power-knowledge has influenced the thinking of many diverse intellectuals, from the American-Palestinian intellectual Edward Said to the feminist philosopher Judith Butler. Such disciplines as queer theory and postcolonial studies have been fundamentally shaped by Foucault’s work. Thomas E. Wartenburg See also: Gay Movement; Hocquenghem, Guy; Theory. References Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Falzon, Christopher. Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation. London/New York: Routledge, 1998.
469
FRANCE TELECOM One of the world’s leading telecommunications carriers, with 113 million customers on the five continents (220 countries and territories) and consolidated operating revenues of 46.6 billion euros for 2002. Through its international brands, including Orange, Wanadoo, Equant, and GlobeCast, France Telecom provides businesses, consumers, and other carriers with a portfolio of solutions that spans local, long-distance, and international telephony, as well as wireless, Internet, multimedia, data, broadcast, and cable TV services. It is the second-largest wireless operator and Internet access provider in Europe and a world leader in telecommunications solutions for multinational corporations. The company, then France Télécom, was the last of the European wholly stateowned telecommunication companies. It was floated on the Paris Bourse just before the European Union’s deadline for the elimination of the old monopolies. The story of French telecommunications links science with politics. In 1889, the company was first incorporated as Direction Générale des Télécommunications. Between 1880 and 1915 the number of telephones in France doubled every year to around 350,000. That was low compared to the rest of the developed world, growth hindered by the devolved financial structure of the government-owned company. After World War I, the government intervened heavily again, favoring the development of telecommunications for commercial and industrial use over domestic, so that by 1938 less than 4 percent of French citizens had phones (in the United Kingdom it was approaching twice that). World War II badly damaged the country’s
470
FRANCOFOLIES, LES
infrastructure, and even then, the government did not prioritize development. Change came in the 1960s, with the replacement of the old rotary technology by the newly invented crossbar switching system, which was convenient for all types of user. During the 1970s, the first steps were taken toward digitization, and by the 1990s France not only had one of the most modern infrastructures in the world, but France Télécom was a major shareholder in the advanced international maritime satellite company, Inmarsat. International ambition motivated the dropping of the accents in Télécom in 1993, though the company was slow off the mark when it came to the Internet, partly due to the legacy of the cash cow Minitel (its text and screen technology of the 1980s). Its Internet service provider Wanadoo was formed in 1996. Denationalization was resisted by strikes several times. A strike in October 1993 was a huge success (75 percent of employees took part) and slowed down the privatization program. Two further strikes in May 1995 (with 65 percent employee participation) and in October 1995 were similar success stories. Anxieties over company and employee status then led to a huge turnout in the industrial dispute from November to December 1995. However, the indefinite strike launched by unions on June 4, 1996, ended in failure for the unions with only 31 percent employee participation. And in 1997, when further partial privatization plans were announced, unions opted for alternative representation of their views. The French government has even passed a law so that it can reduce its stake in the company below the 50 percent threshold, and France Telecom fights along
with other players in the ferociously competitive, heavily indebted, and fast-paced contemporary telecommunications marketplace. The company operates predominantly in Europe. In the Internet space, for example, 99 percent of the company’s business is done in France and Europe, where it serves over 10 million customers. The notable exceptions in the United States are Orange USA and France Telecom R&D, which has a single laboratory in San Francisco (compared to eight in France). In Canada, France Telecom is present in the shape of its data communications subsidiary Equant. In South America, the company divested its stake in Telecom Argentina and CTE Salvador in 2003, leaving subsidiaries in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic (brands include Equant, Orange, and Sofrecom). Mark Vernon See also: Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Computer Technology; Cyberculture; Television; World War I; World War II. References Carré, Patrice A. Histoire des Télécommunications. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. “France Télécom.” Revue France Télécom, December 1990.
FRANCOFOLIES, LES Montreal music festival, the largest event dedicated to French-language music in the world. Set up in 1989 by Alain Simard and Guy Latraverse, the Montreal Francofolies festival aims to promote French-language music from around the world. Its creation followed the success of the La Rochelle, France, Francofolies, which was set up in
FRANCOFOLIES, LES
471
Director and founder of the Francofolies de la Rochelle, Jean-Louis Foulquier, stands before the crowds at the 2004 festival. (Eric Vernazobres/Corbis)
1985 by the famous radio DJ Jean-Louis Foulquier and was to feature exclusively francophone artists. Since the 1990s, annual Francofolies events have sprung up in Bulgaria, Belgium, Switzerland, and Argentina. A truly international event, the Montreal festival has created a network of partnerships between Quebec, France, and the wider French-speaking world, which provides artists with worldwide exposure. Further transatlantic connections were established in 1996 when the existing Félix Leclerc newcomers’ prize was awarded as part of the festival, offering a series of Paris concerts to the winner(s). Indeed, the festival is a gold mine of new talent, in keeping with its primary aim of showcasing the vitality and diversity of French-language music, be it French reggae, West African rap, or Quebec rock. For established artists,
moreover, the festival has become a virtually compulsory date for promoting new albums and celebrating career anniversaries, as was the case in 1990 for Gilles Vigneault and in 2001 for Diane Dufresne. The selection of artists therefore manages to satisfy the agenda of the record companies and to support “risky” unknown artists, a mixture that has ensured the festival’s success. It received over 760,000 visitors in 2002. Taking place annually over ten days in late July, the festival regularly attracts more than 1,000 artists. Prices for special events and big-name concerts range from $5 to $39 (2003 figures), but most concerts are free, taking place outdoors in the heart of the city center, between the rue SainteCatherine and rue Jeanne-Mance. Street performers also provide free entertainment,
472
FRANÇOIS I, KING
OF
FRANCE
while existing concert halls such as the Metropolis and the Spectrum are reserved for the most prestigious artists. The site is divided into various music zones, including folk music, chanson, rock, hip-hop, pop, and world music. Organizing free concerts can only be sustained with vast public and private sponsorship, from such sources as the governments of Quebec and Canada, Montreal’s city council, music-related bodies such as artists’ unions, and large businesses (Ford, Le Lait). In 2003, for its fifteenth anniversary, the Montreal Francofolies gave a series of free concerts featuring major stars and brought out a compilation CD on the Virgin-EMI label. Just as the Quebec event reached an unprecedented level of success, the original La Rochelle festival was, ironically, canceled in summer 2003, due to a strike by French artists and technicians (les intermittents du spectacle, contract workers in the entertainment industry) protesting against changes in their government benefits scheme. Barbara Lebrun See also: Argentina; Beau Dommage; Dufresne, Diane; Francophonie, La; Hip-Hop Music and Culture; Leclerc, Félix; Music (Folk); Music (Pop); Vigneault, Gilles. References Allix, Grégoire. “Dix ans de Francofolies à Montréal.” Québec-France 23, no. 3 (summer 1998): 26–27. Clynes, Tom. Music Festivals from Bach to Blues: A Traveler’s Guide. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1996.
FRANÇOIS I, KING FRANCE
OF
François I was the first French monarch to sponsor voyages to the New World, commissioning Verrazzano’s preliminary explo-
ration of the eastern coast of America and the subsequent exploration and attempts at colonization of what is now known as Canada. One of the major concerns of François’s reign was his relationship with Spain, which was at best strained and at worst openly hostile. In defiance of the Treaty of Tordesillas, drawn up by the pope in 1494, which separated the new discoveries on the far side of the world between the Spanish and Portuguese nations, François was determined to keep up with his Iberian neighbors in the race for the exploration and possession of the New World. The intentions behind these voyages were fourfold: the discovery of new lands for colonization, the spread of the Christian religion and subsequent salvation of the indigenous people, the discovery of plentiful sources of gold and other precious metals, and the discovery of a passage to the East. In the tense atmosphere that characterized European relations at that time, François officially called only for exploration of lands that had not already been discovered by the other European powers. The first voyage sponsored by François, and thus the first French voyage to the New World, was that of Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524. Verrazzano successfully explored a vast region of the eastern coastline of the northern United States and as far as Newfoundland, identifying lands that would be suitable for colonization but failing to find any passage that might lead to the mythical city of Cathay. The news of the voyages was well received in France, and François was keen to follow up on Verrazzano’s initial explorations. He was, however, in no position to follow up the discoveries until almost a decade later, not least due to his capture at Pavia by the
FRANCOPHONIE, LA
473
See also: Cartier; Jacques; Saint-Malo; Verrazzano, Giovanni da. References Biggar, H. P. Documents Relating to Jacques Cartier and the Sieur de Roberval. Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1930. Garrison, Janine. A History of Sixteenth Century France, 1483–1598: Renaissance, Reformation and Rebellion. Trans. Richard Rex. New York: Macmillan, 1995. Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America. Vol. 1, Pioneers of France in the New World. New York: Ungar, 1965.
FRANCOPHONIE, LA
François I was the first French monarch to sponsor voyages to the New World. (Library of Congress)
Spanish. It was not until 1534, a full decade after the initial voyage, that François was in a position to continue his support of New World exploration. He chose Jacques Cartier, a well-known mariner from Saint-Malo, to lead the voyage, which sailed on a more northerly course than Verrazzano in an attempt to extend the French knowledge of this coastline. Cartier was to lead a total of three voyages to what later became known as Canada, again looking for areas that could be colonized but, more importantly, searching for a passage to the East. Although colonies were attempted on two of the voyages, neither succeeded, and no westward passage was found. These failures marked the end of François’s activity in the New World. Jo Edwards
La francophonie is a term that refers to French-speaking communities across the world—in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. However, its meaning has constantly shifted, depending on the geographical and historical context. Often used in an abstract sense to evoke a perceived set of values shared across these French-speaking communities, la francophonie is also a concrete, political entity with its own institutions. The history of la francophonie is inextricably intertwined with the history of French colonialism. The term was first coined in the 1880s by the geographer Onésime Reclus to refer to the African territories recently colonized by France. It subsequently disappeared, only to be reborn in the aftermath of French decolonization in the 1960s, when African leaders such as Habib Bourguiba (Tunisia) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) were key players in the creation of francophone institutions. Products of a French education that had promised them full assimilation as Frenchmen, they fully believed in the “universality” of French language and culture, and they sought to create a set of institutions that would create concrete cultural
474
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN
and political links between France, its former colonies, and other francophone countries and regions. They found willing allies in the newly assertive Québécois, who, as a minority within a predominantly anglophone Canada, were keen to establish links with French-speaking nations. The French authorities saw la francophonie as a means of providing a cultural counterbalance to the seemingly inexorable spread of English around the globe. The first conference of “Francophone States” took place in Niamey (Niger) in 1969, after which various francophone bodies were established: for example, Association des Universités partiellement ou entièrement de langue française (AUPELF, “Association of Wholly or Partly French-Language Universities”) and Agence de coopération culturelle et technique (ACCT, “Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation”). However, this cultural and educational cooperation has been slow to extend to political cooperation: for instance, the first Conference of Francophone Heads of State did not take place until 1986. The desire to create a genuine political entity saw the creation of l’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) in 1998. To give this organization added international weight, the former UN secretary-general, Boutros-Boutros Ghali, was elected as its first leader. However, this body has yet to gain an international reputation (even among the public of the francophone world). In the wake of the World Trade talks of the 1990s, la francophonie was again reinvented as the defender of cultural and linguistic pluralism (not simply of French) in what is perceived as an increasingly globalized, “Anglo-Saxon” world, a move that has brought it many new supporters. Critics, however, remain unconvinced, claiming
that the official discourse of la francophonie remains based on the almost mystical vision of the universal mission of the French language, which has its roots in eighteenthcentury French thought and France’s vision of its own exceptionalism. Whatever the respective merits of these arguments, it is clear that la francophonie has a difficult task ahead to establish itself in world affairs. David Murphy See also: Language; Quebec. References Deniau, Xavier. La Francophonie. Paris: PUF, 1983. Sahli, Kamal, ed. French in and out of France: Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue. London: Lang, 2002.
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN (1706–1790) American journalist, publisher, author, scientist, public servant, diplomat, inventor, abolitionist, and philanthropist, born in Boston in 1706. One of the most illustrious figures in American history. Benjamin Franklin was first elected in 1751 to the Assembly of Pennsylvania. In 1753, he became deputy postmaster general of the colonies. He reorganized the postal system, making it both efficient and profitable. (He also used his position to advance his relatives.) As a Pennsylvania delegate to the Albany Congress (1754), he proposed a plan of union for the colonies, which was accepted by the delegates but later rejected by both the provincial assemblies and the British government. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress and was sent to the Province of Quebec (formerly New France) in 1775, with Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, to persuade the French-speaking popula-
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN
tion to join the patriot cause. With Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Benjamin Franklin wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He was immediately sent to France to help get recognition for the new American nation; he obtained that recognition from Louis XVI in 1778. Received with great fanfare in Paris, seen as a man of the Enlightenment, Franklin remained until 1785. He lived in Passy, in a house donated by JacquesDonatien Le Ray de Chaumont, who became a friend and the most important foreigner to help the United States win the War of Independence against the British forces. Franklin frequented Voltaire, Condorcet, the Académie Française, and the elite of Parisian society. He negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1763), which recognized the independence of the new republic and its new borders and confirmed the departure of the British forces from the territory. Upon his triumphal return to Philadelphia in 1785, he became president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, an executive body that replaced the office of governor under the state constitution of 1776. With a reputation unmatched, Franklin was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia who played an important role, although he was very ill and could not attend all the sessions. In his last years he became a strong opponent of slavery, and he presided over an abolitionist association. Benjamin Franklin died on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-five. Second to George Washington as the champion of Independence, Franklin was the only Founding Father who signed all three major documents of the new republic: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the U.S. Constitution. This great author, scientist, and first am-
475
The reception of Benjamin Franklin in France. After writing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Benjamin Franklin was immediately sent to France to help get recognition for the new American nation. (Library of Congress)
bassador of the United States, who spoke French, German, Italian, and Spanish, was described by philosopher David Hume as “the first great man of letters of America” (http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/ biography/chap02.htm). Benjamin Franklin is one of the most enduring figures of U.S. history. When he died, he bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time) in trust for 200 years to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. Jean-François Lessard See also: Adams, John; Jefferson, Thomas; New France; Quebec; Voltaire, François. References Fohlen, Claude. Benjamin Franklin: L’Américain des Lumières. Paris: Payot, 2000. Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. Morgan, Edmund S. Benjamin Franklin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
476
FRÉCHETTE, LOUIS
FRÉCHETTE, LOUIS (1839–1908) Lawyer, journalist, politician, and writer. Louis-Honoré Fréchette was born in Lévis, Quebec, on November 16, 1839. He studied at the Quebec Seminary and the Université Laval. He regularly visited Octave Crémazie’s bookshop, wrote for the Journal du Québec, and worked as a translator for the Legislative Assembly. His first plays, Les Notables du village (“The Village Noteworthies”) and Félix Poutré, were staged in 1862. The success of the latter enabled him to publish his first collection of poems in his own name, Mes Loisirs (“My Leisures,” 1863), which launched his literary career. He became a lawyer in 1864, opened an office in Lévis, and, with his brother Edmond, started two short-lived journals with liberal leanings. In 1866, Fréchette went to live in the United States, where he founded L’Observateur (1866); then, in 1868, he became editor of L’Amérique, a Republican newspaper, while at the same time occupying the post of corresponding secretary for the Land Department of the Illinois Central Railroad Company. It was during these five years in exile that he wrote a long poem opposed to the Canadian Confederation, La Voix d’un exilé (The Voice of an Exile), which ensured him a degree of recognition in Quebec. The great fire of Chicago in 1871 destroyed a large portion of his manuscripts. Upon his return to Quebec in 1871, he embarked on a short-lived career in politics, serving one term as member for Lévis. His literary career was more successful: two collections of poetry were published, PêleMêle in 1877 and Les Fleurs boréales (“Northern Flowers”) in 1880. He also wrote five more plays: Le Retour de l’exilé
(The Return of the Exile) and Papineau (Montreal, 1880), Un Dimanche matin à l’Hôtel du Canada (“A Sunday Morning in the Canada Hotel,” Quebec City, 1881), Hamberbold (New York, 1883), and Change pour change (“Fair Exchanges,” 1886). Fréchette traveled a great deal, in the United States, France, Belgium, Ireland, and Britain, and he maintained an important network of correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic that included such figures as Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Sarah Bernhardt, François Coppée, and Virgil Rossel, who invited him to write for his Histoire de la littérature française hors de France (History of French Literature outside France) in 1895. In 1887, he published his great epic poem La Légende du peuple (“The People’s Legend”) in Paris, a work that earned him a post as clerk to the Quebec Legislative Council in 1888. He continued to write poems (around 400 in total), as well as trying his hand at stories and portraits (Originaux et détraqués/“Eccentric and Deranged” in 1892, Mémoires intimes/Intimate Memoirs in 1900, La Noël au Canada/Christmas in French Canada in 1900) and writing for liberal newspapers, where his acerbic style fed many controversies. His final play, Veronica, written for Sarah Bernhardt (although she never appeared in it), was staged at the Théâtre des Nouveautés in 1903. At once politician, journalist, poet, and dramatist, Louis Fréchette represented a model of the romantic writer in Quebec’s literary history. He has been criticized for imitating too closely the style of Victor Hugo, with some critics even going so far as to accuse him of plagiarism. A liberal in politics and a romantic in aesthetics, Fréchette led a life of combative writing, glorifying the people rather than their lead-
FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
ers, against a vision of ancien régime France. In this way, however, he stopped himself from developing a true poetic modernity, which would have presupposed that form and writing took the upper hand over ideas. Lucie Robert See also: Hugo, Victor-Marie; Illinois Country; Liberalism; Quebec; Republicanism; Theater. References Blais, Jacques, Hélène Marcotte, and Roger Saumur. Louis Fréchette épistolier. Quebec: Nuit blanche, 1992. Dugas, Marcel. Un Romantique canadien: Louis Fréchette (1839–1908). Montreal: Beauchemin, 1946. Klinck, George Alfred. Louis Fréchette, prosateur. Montreal: Le Quotidien, 1955.
FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR Begun as colonial muscling for control of the Ohio River valley, the French and Indian War (1754–1760) ignited the worldwide conflict between the British and French known as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and ended France’s North American empire. British colonials and later Americans so named the conflict for the French partisanship of the Indians; Canadians have called it the English and Indian War, as many native tribes abandoned the French and adopted neutrality or supported the British. The key to this North American theater of a global war was the allegiance of its native peoples. By 1750, both the French imperial administration and its English counterpart had concluded that whoever controlled the Ohio valley controlled the North American interior. French merchants and Indian traders, however, showed little interest in the region, as their trade with the natives
477
was based on beaver pelts harvested from northern climates, not the deerskins common south of the Great Lakes. To astute French colonial officials like GovernorGeneral Roland-Michel Barrin, comte de La Galissonière, the absence of French traders and French military authority threatened to allow the British to sever Canada from Louisiana, simply by attaching the Indians to British colonial interest through the activities of profligate Indian traders. British imperial administration was typically quite lax. Although Sir William Johnson of New York was trying to create a unified Indian policy and treaty system, only he, officials in England, and his sometimes client Indian nation, the Iroquois, recognized his efforts. Instead of centralized planning, competing British colonial interests dominated British activity in the Ohio valley. The British colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia had economic ambitions in the Ohio valley. Since the 1710s, Pennsylvania merchant houses had been profiting handsomely from the deerskin trade with the Shawnees, Delawares, Miamis, Ottawas, and many other tribes who lived between the Great Lakes and Ohio River. Ever in search of more deerskins for burgeoning clothing, glove, and book cover manufacturing for both domestic and foreign consumption, early Pennsylvania’s commercial leaders sent their traders further and further west, trading even with French-allied Indians. In 1749, the commandant of Fort des Miamis, about 100 kilometers southwest of Lake Erie on the Maumee River, reported more than 300 British colonial traders (overwhelmingly representing Pennsylvanian concerns) in that area alone. The colony also needed
478
FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
land for its swelling Scots-Irish and German immigrant population. Virginia did not have many Indian traders, but it did seek land. The Ohio Company of Virginia, formed in 1748 by the colony’s elite to speculate in real estate, sought by treaty with the Iroquois to acquire land rights to the Ohio valley. As the Iroquois had never lived in the valley, nor had they ever conquered the area’s inhabitants, the treaty was a dubious proposition to all but those agreeing to terms. The Indians in question represented three main groups, each with often conflicting interests. The Ohio Indians, represented by the Shawnees, Delawares, and Mingoes, lived between the Ohio and Scioto rivers and were heavily dependent on Pennsylvania for trade. They usually strove to be independent and played the competing imperial powers against one another, but they were no longer economically or culturally independent. Consequently, they leaned toward the British. The southern Great Lakes Indians—Miamis, Potawatomis, Wyandots, and Ottawas—were split. The Miamis had close ties to Pennsylvania through the Shawnees, whereas the others were generally in the French orbit. But the proliferating Indian trade was undermining French authority. In 1747, the Wyandots at Sandusky attacked French traders in their midst; the next year they relocated to eastern Ohio, seeking better terms with Pennsylvania’s traders. The northern Lakes Indians, on the other hand, were devout French partisans. The Sauk, Fox, and Ojibwa tribes, as well as some Ottawa, were stalwart French supporters during the French and Indian War. Alarmed that fickle and opportunistic Ohio Indians could wreck the French inland empire, La Galissonière began a series
of administrative reforms to reassert French sovereignty south of the Great Lakes. He banned the previously tolerated British traders and arrested those who returned. He sent an expedition down the Ohio River in a show of force. His call for more soldiers and fortifications was finally answered in 1752 when one of his successors, Ange de Menneville, marquis de Duquesne, built a road and string of posts from Lake Erie to the upper Ohio. What had been marginally French now seemed reassuringly so. The French and Indian War began as an undeclared war. In 1754, a Virginia militia colonel named George Washington tried and failed to root the French out of Fort Duquesne at the headwaters of the Ohio River. England would not let Washington’s embarrassment stand. Major General Edward Braddock was named commander in chief of North American forces and sent to the colonies with two regiments; he was authorized to raise two additional colonial militia regiments. Suspecting British mobilization, the French sent 4,000 regulars to Louisbourg and Quebec. The British responded by raiding French vessels off the coast of Newfoundland and seizing more than 300 French ships and 8,000 sailors on the high seas or in English ports. Braddock, meanwhile, was steadily moving his 2,200-man army over the Allegheny Mountains toward Fort Duquesne. Meeting only sporadic and ineffective resistance, he advanced within about 35 kilometers of the fort by November 1755. To the French, who had doubted that Braddock could ever get so large an army so deep into the wilderness, disaster looked imminent. French Indian allies began wavering, an ominous sign, as Fort Duquesne
FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
479
General James Wolfe, lying mortally wounded on the field, surrounded by soldiers and an Indian, during the siege of Quebec in 1759. (Library of Congress)
was manned by only 254 regulars and militia. But Captain Daniel de Beaujeu resolved to attack Braddock with his skeleton force and shamed his Indian allies into joining the raid. The small French force with some 600 Mission, Great Lakes, and Ohio Indians ambushed and destroyed Braddock’s force. Braddock himself was killed, his papers captured, and detailed British plans for the invasion of Canada discovered. War had begun in earnest. British plans called for a three-prong offensive against New France. First, by taking Acadia, Britain would control much of the North Atlantic. Second, Lake Champlain was to be opened and used as an invasion corridor to Quebec. Finally, Lake Ontario was to be captured to cut off the
French from the upper Ohio valley, thereby cutting the empire in two and neutralizing many of the French-allied Indians. Armed with this information, the French, although badly outnumbered, blocked early British offensives. They fought the British to a standstill in the North. Although unable to take Fort William Henry at the foot of Lake George, the French prevented the loss of Lake Champlain, which was to be the main invasion corridor into Quebec. In June 1755, Fort Beausejour on the Acadia frontier fell to the British, who summarily began the forced relocation of 10,000 French subjects, a move that rallied even the most indifferent Frenchmen to the cause of New France.
480
FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
French military policy during the early years of the war was shaped by Governor General Pierre-François de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial. Vaudreuil, the son of an earlier governor, had been born and spent most of his life in New France and knew the New World military realities well. Outnumbered by 70,000 to 1,250,000, the Canadians needed Indian allies, guerrilla-style frontier attacks, and French regulars to block main invasion routes. Vaudreuil’s policy kept Britain’s North American colonies on the defensive for the first four years of the war. Canadians and Indian allies razed the British frontier colonies from New York to Carolina, pushing the frontier back east, in Pennsylvania for example, to within 50 kilometers of Philadelphia. Vaudreuil’s frontier offensive was so effective that in 1757 the governor of Pennsylvania offered to give marauding Indians free passage to Virginia so long as they spared Pennsylvania’s settlements. The British colonies, constantly bickering and quarreling between themselves, lacked the centralized command and sense of common purpose to mount any effective unified defense, let alone any offensive campaign. The war went well for the French in other theaters too. Louis-Joseph, marquis de Montcalm, laid siege to and took Forts William Henry and Ticonderoga in 1757, which seemed to foretell French victory. The French now controlled Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes, and had pushed the northern English frontier south of Lake George in upper New York. But a series of reversals, some avoidable, some not, killed French hegemony along the Saint Lawrence, in the eastern Great Lakes, and west of the Allegheny
Mountains. The harvest of 1757 failed and was followed by an epidemic. Some French regular units were reduced by as much as 25 percent. But food and pestilence were not as serious as the leadership crisis New France developed. The New World realist Vaudreuil quarreled constantly with the military traditionalist Montcalm who commanded the regulars in the field. Even while winning battles, Montcalm considered New France lost, and his defeatism, his belief in the superiority of pitched battles, his hatred for Vaudreuil, and his tactics were enough to kill the colony. In 1758, Montcalm appealed successfully to the French government for control of both strategy and troops. Unfortunately for New France, which had made the turn toward incompetence with Montcalm, Britain had found a new competence in William Pitt. The new minister saw plainly that the war could be won only with British regulars, not the colonial militia. He sent thousands of troops to America for campaigns against Louisbourg, Ticonderoga, and Fort Duquesne, a revival of the strategy first outlined in the captured papers of Braddock. Pitt charged the colonial legislatures with defense of their own frontiers and, unwisely as it turned out, promised to reimburse them their expenses. In the spring of 1758, an energized and focused British military began undoing what seemed a French iron grip on much of North America. Louisbourg at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence fell on July 26, although it fought off the British long enough to stall a campaign against Quebec that year. In the West in August, Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet took and burned Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario. While strategically unimportant, the fort housed many provisions headed for Fort
FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
Duquesne. Meanwhile, General John Forbes and Colonel Henry Bouquet, copying French frontier tactics, were building a string of blockhouses and entrepôts west through Pennsylvania. Forbes Road, as it became known, was to secure lines of communication and supply for a siege of Fort Duquesne. Undermanned and low on supplies—Montcalm insisted that Forbes and Bouquet were merely a diversion from the real war along the Saint Lawrence River— the French and their Indian allies were no match for Forbes’s disciplined army. Although roughed up twice by the Duquesne garrison, the British regulars were not routed. Worse for the French, the Ohio Indians suffered heavy casualties in the second attack. Unable to stop the frontier advance of the British army, the French abandoned Fort Duquesne and withdrew north to Fort Micheault-Venango. The Ohio Indians did not make peace with the colonials in the face of their ally’s retreat, but they were never again fierce French partisans. Although Forts Louisbourg, Frontenac, and Duquesne were not essential to the defense of Quebec, the pessimistic Montcalm found confirmation in their loss for his defeatism. Encouraged by the successes of 1758, the British continued their three-pronged offensive against Quebec the following year. General James Wolfe advanced along the Saint Lawrence toward the town of Quebec. By midsummer he had reached unmolested the Ile d’Orléans, an island across from the town. Incredibly, Montcalm permitted Wolfe to gain the heights of the island, from which Wolfe’s artillery reduced the city to rubble, although he could not flush out Montcalm’s army. Meanwhile, Major General Jeffrey Amherst, who was to advance up Lake Champlain to the heart of
481
Quebec, did not move, choosing instead a vigorous campaign of organization. By the end of July, Brigadier General John Prideaux had ousted the French from Fort Niagara, giving the British control of Lakes Ontario and Erie and, by extension, the upper Ohio valley. Wolfe spent the summer unsuccessfully trying to bomb Montcalm into the open, battering the French forces below the town. He even unleashed the American rangers to terrorize the Quebec countryside, to no effect. Finally, with the campaigning season near the end, at the constant pleading of his officers, Wolfe agreed to land above Quebec, thereby cutting off Montcalm and Quebec’s supply line. Montcalm had expected Wolfe to strike below or at the center of the town and was utterly unprepared when 4,500 British regulars appeared just beyond the town walls on the Plains of Abraham on September 13. Montcalm rushed his own comparable force to meet Wolfe. But the French army was ill trained, ill equipped, and undisciplined. The combination of Canadian backcountry guerrilla fighters, British deserters, and French regulars broke upon Wolfe’s first volley. Ironically, the French inflicted heavy casualties upon the British, due almost entirely to the Canadian backcountry fighters, who broke ranks, took cover, and fired into the well-ordered enemy lines. The aftermath of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was nearly as curious as the events preceding and including the battle. Montcalm was killed (as was Wolfe), and most French officers considered New France lost. Vaudreuil, however, was not done. He slipped most of the remaining French troops past the British, and they linked up with Bougainville’s 3,000-man
482
FRENCH REVOLUTION
army (which Montcalm had never called for) less than 20 kilometers away. While they continued to harass British troops, there were no further formal military engagements between the two enemies. By September 7, 1760, Vaudreuil had fewer than 2,000 men, and with Amherst outside Montreal, he decided that the war for North America was over. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 formally ended hostilities between the two powers, both in America and around the world. It did not, however, bring peace to North America. The Ohio and Lakes Indians had made peace with the British in 1762, but a year later were at war with the British again. In vain they begged the French to return, as they again ravaged the countryside in what is popularly known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. The French did eventually return, of course, but not to help the Indians. Instead they helped unhinge from Britain part of the empire they had lost in 1760, making possible the birth of the United States of America. Jim Fisher See also: Acadia; Barrin de La Galissonière, Roland-Michel, Marquis; Fur Trade; Lake Champlain; Louisbourg; Louisiana; Montcalm, Louis-Joseph, Marquis de; New France; Newfoundland; Ohio; Pontiac; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Treaty of Paris. References Bakers-Crothers, Hayes. Virginia and the French and Indian War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928. Downes, Randolph C. Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940. Eccles, W. J. The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760. Rev ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983.
Gipson, Lawrence Henry. The British Empire before the American Revolution. 15 vols. New York: Knopf, 1958–1970. Jennings, Francis. Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
FRENCH REVOLUTION The 1789–1799 French Revolution was a complex series of historical events that marked the end of absolute monarchy and the Old Regime in France. Revolutionaries proclaimed the general principles of individual freedom and civic equality among men and eliminated aristocratic privilege and absolute rule. Among the revolution’s most notable achievements were the abolition of the system of seigneurial rights, the guarantee of freedom of worship, and the promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. These and other reforms significantly transformed French institutions and individuals. But because eighteenth-century France was not merely a state but also an imperial power throughout the Atlantic world, it is useful to move beyond the internal history of France when examining the causes and consequences of 1789. Beginning in the seventeenth century, France gradually had been integrating into an Atlantic system that involved a vast exchange of commodities, people, cultural practices, and ideas between Europe and the Americas. Adopting a broad transnational perspective when discussing the origins, development, and aftermath of the French Revolution allows one to gain a clearer understanding of these links connecting France and the Atlantic world during the final decades of the eighteenth century.
FRENCH REVOLUTION
While the American War of Independence (1775–1783) differed from the French Revolution in significant ways, the former provided material and ideological conditions that had an impact on the unfolding of the political crisis in France. Up until the middle of the eighteenth century, France and her Indian allies dominated much of North America, from the North Atlantic coast to the Sioux plains. However, following the crushing defeat at the hands of the British in the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the French presence in mainland North America largely disappeared. Eager to reassert itself, the French monarchy readily assisted the American colonists in their fight for independence from Great Britain. From 1776 to 1783, the French sent supplies, thousands of troops, and badly needed naval power to the rebellious British colonists. This prolonged involvement in the American war cost France millions of livres and greatly contributed to the draining of the royal treasury. By 1788, the kingdom was bankrupt, with nobody coming forth to grant any additional loans. Confronted with this crisis and responding to mounting pressure from the parlements (parliaments), the king and his ministers convened the Estates-General in May 1789 to address long overdue financial and administrative reforms. This gathering, which by the summer had formed itself into the revolutionary National Assembly, was the institution through which reformers criticized and eventually dismantled monarchical absolutism and feudal privilege. From an ideological standpoint, the American Revolution also gave French revolutionaries a concrete example of a modern political order based on a written constitution, a declaration of rights, and
483
constituent conventions. Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–1793), for example, who later led the moderate Girondin faction in the National Assembly, traveled to the United States in 1787 and 1788. During his stay, he closely followed the American debates over the ratification of the federal Constitution. Upon his return to France in the fall of 1788, he drafted and circulated a “Plan of Conduct” for the deputies of the Estates-General who were to meet the following spring. What most impressed Brissot and others was the very process of constitution making, the constituting or reconstituting of a polity based on the idea of the people as the constituent power. Though few actually visited the United States like Brissot, the literate French public was made conscious of the American experience in a variety of ways. Beginning in the early 1780s, communication between America and France, which had previously been quite limited and usually mediated through Great Britain, now poured directly across the Atlantic. Besides the Declaration of Independence and the new federal Constitution and Bill of Rights, a wide array of American political thought was made available. The French avidly read Thomas Jefferson’s works, such as Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), as well as Thomas Paine’s widely circulated pamphlet, Common Sense (1776). Adulated by the French for his combination of simple virtue and political sophistication, Benjamin Franklin also exercised a pervasive influence on French writers. Mirabeau, for example, when composing his Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus (Considerations on the Order of Cincinnatus, 1784), drew heavily from an earlier essay by Franklin that attacked the Society of
484
FRENCH REVOLUTION
Influenced by their American counterparts, French citizens proclaim a new constitution on September 14, 1791, during the French Revolution. (Library of Congress)
Cincinnati and the principle of aristocracy. American ideas also reached a wide audience through newspapers, reports of returned soldiers, reading clubs, academies, and Masonic lodges. The United States provided the French public opinion with an exciting contemporary example of Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality and motivated them to think more concretely about political and social reform. In this way, the American experience significantly contributed to the ideological challenge to the absolute monarchy during the final years of the Old Regime. With the eruption of the French Revolution in the summer of 1789, France superseded the United States as the revolu-
tionary center in the Atlantic world. French events attracted considerable attention and soon made a significant impact throughout the Americas. The revolution quickly became integrated into U.S. politics, as each political party defined itself and its adversary in relation to the revolutionary experience. Jefferson’s Republican Party was an outspoken supporter of the National Assembly’s efforts to severely limit aristocratic and monarchical power. The Republicans feared that the Federalists were promoting the establishment of a system of aristocratic privilege that would benefit the affluent at the expense of others. Members of the Republican Party proudly displayed their support of the rev-
FRENCH REVOLUTION
olution by wearing red bonnets or tricolor cockades and planting liberty trees, and they would address one another as “citizen.” Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party, on the other hand, believed that the revolution in France was essentially an outbreak of unruly segments of the population. Starting in 1789, U.S. newspapers devoted three to four times as much space to events in France, and both the Republicans and the Federalists mobilized this burgeoning print culture to diffuse their opposing viewpoints. While Republican papers reproduced in painstaking detail the deliberations and decrees of French deputies, readers of Federalist publications found accounts of agrarian revolts, of bands of rioters attacking customs barriers, or of burning châteaux. Neither party was necessarily interested in an objective understanding of events, but instead used the French Revolution for its own ideological purposes. Outside this party framework, U.S. reactions to the French Revolution evolved in relation to events in France and in Europe. During the first half of the 1790s, a mostly favorable attitude was preponderant in the United States. Even some Federalists did not wish French defeat at the hands of Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain. Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–1792), a vehement defense of the French Revolution, was widely circulated by Jeffersonian societies in the United States. Paine’s best-seller described the American and French Revolutions as kindred movements, part of an “enlarging orb of reason,” together united in their opposition to aristocratic despotism (p. 72). Clergymen in the United States spoke favorably about the revolution in its early stages, blaming much of the violence of the Terror on the fraudulence of
485
Roman Catholicism and the haughtiness of European aristocrats. In January 1793, the month in which Louis XVI was guillotined, a public meeting was held in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to celebrate the victories of the French Republic against rival European powers. Three weeks before the fall of Robespierre in 1794, the orator of an Independence Day celebration in Boston justified the Terror, explaining that such bloodshed was inevitable in great revolutions against tyrannical absolutism. Overall, French history and culture were becoming more popular, and French language began to be taught at Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. By 1795, however, the American public was uncertain about the implications of the French Revolution. The French invasions of Holland (1795) and Switzerland (1798), two Protestant countries held in high esteem, made a negative impression. Paine’s profession of a rational faith in his Age of Reason (1794, 1796), along with Elihu Palmer’s popular lectures on deism, worried U.S. religious authorities that the revolution threatened not just Roman Catholicism, but Christianity itself. Antirevolutionary writings from home and abroad, such as Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1798) and Cannibals’ Progress (1798), now began circulating in the United States. French Republicans were portrayed in these works as an irreligious coterie of Freemasons and freethinkers, or as brutal occupiers, charging across Europe, pillaging towns, and slaughtering civilians. Franco-American relations further deteriorated in 1796 with the ratification of the Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain. France, at war with Britain, saw this commercial agreement as an explicit violation of its own 1778 treaty
486
FRENCH REVOLUTION
with the United States. French anger translated into a series of maritime attacks carried out against the United States for the remainder of the decade. In an effort to assuage escalating hostility between the two powers and protect U.S. shipping, President John Adams dispatched three diplomats to France in 1798. Before negotiations began in Paris, the U.S. commission was unofficially approached by French agents who indicated that maritime peace with France could be had for a price: a bribe of $250,000 to foreign minister Talleyrand, and a $10 million loan to France. The Americans indignantly rejected this proposal and returned to the United States. Adams, under pressure from the Federalists to discredit the French, published the documents of this incident, known as the XYZ Affair. Federalists eagerly seized this opportunity to condemn the incapacity and corruption of the French Directory, while Republican sympathizers of the revolution expressed disappointment. Jefferson and the Republicans also blasted the 1799 government of Napoléon Bonaparte as unduly authoritarian and anti-Republican. By 1800, American idealization and admiration of the French Revolution had completely faded. While the ideology and events of the French Revolution made a significant impact in the United States, the region of the Atlantic arguably most affected consisted of France’s Caribbean colonies. In the wealthy sugar colony of Saint Domingue, for example, the political instability of the revolution enormously magnified already existent domestic struggles between free coloreds and colonial elites. Upon hearing of the revolutionary outbreak in France, white colonists and planters devoted their efforts to consolidating their socioeco-
nomic power base within the National Assembly. One of their major demands was a significant colonial representation in this metropolitan assembly, a political first in European history. They also advocated greater autonomy, claiming that they alone had the right to dictate laws regarding the internal structure and organization of the island; it was hoped that the royal governor and intendant would become ultimately subservient to colonial governance. In France, meanwhile, other factions claiming to represent the interests of Saint Domingue quickly emerged. First, under the leadership of Julien Raimond, mulattoes living in Paris organized a movement for their political representation. Such a cause would have surely been doomed in Saint Domingue, but with the assistance of certain admirable figures like Abbé Grégoire, both a deputy in the assembly and member of the abolitionist society, the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of Friends of the Blacks), this radical group presented its case and was eventually granted two representatives. At the same time, absentee planters in France organized themselves into the Massiac Club and, unlike their colonial counterparts, opposed colonial representation in the National Assembly. They rightly understood the dangerous implications of having colonial matters—especially civil rights and social equality— openly debated in this revolutionary context. White efforts to exclude mulattoes and free blacks from local and provincial assemblies in Saint Domingue could turn violent. At Le Cap, for example, one mulatto was executed for submitting a petition to a provincial assembly requesting political rights for free persons of color. A horrific incident befell a white who had drafted a
FRENCH REVOLUTION
similar document. He was arrested at his home in Petit Goave by an angry mob, dragged through the streets, brutally beaten to death, and then had his head cut off and stuck on a pike. Conflicting interpretations of deliberately ambiguous revolutionary proclamations arriving from France provoked further bloody conflict. In March 1790, the assembly declared that all property-owning persons at least twenty-five years of age could vote and hold office in Saint Domingue. But, as recent historians have aptly pointed out, who in fact qualified as a “person” was a decision left completely up to the white colonists. Unsurprisingly, free coloreds met stiff opposition when they attempted to claim political rights based on the revolutionary decree. Their frustrated movement soon escalated into a revolt, which was outnumbered and easily crushed by government forces in early 1791. They nevertheless persisted in their demand for political equality, and in April 1792 the National Assembly passed a law granting full rights to free coloreds. Besides eventually enfranchising free persons of color, the revolution also made a political and ideological impact on the slave population. Politically, the elite power structure was fragmented into different factions, from royalists to secessionists. This disarray enabled autonomous slave revolts, which historically had been suppressed with little difficulty, to sustain themselves and gain momentum; such was the case of the massive insurrection on August 22–23, 1791. Slaves were also directly implicated in the tête-à-tête between whites and free coloreds, as both groups armed slaves to fight for them. In 1793, as Saint Domingue faced invasion from Spanish and British forces, the Republican commis-
487
sioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax offered liberty to all slaves who joined his army. He eventually abolished slavery outright in August 1793, and the National Convention in France followed suit the following year. Because of a lack of sources, it is difficult to ascertain precisely how slaves responded to and appropriated the libertarian and egalitarian ideology of the revolution. Like other segments of the population, slaves undoubtedly discussed the new concepts of equality and freedom and likely integrated them into their own political struggle against the brutal plantation system. In Latin America, the direct impact of the French Revolution was more limited. Revolutions in the Spanish world did not begin until 1808, nearly a decade after France had entered a new political era under Napoléon Bonaparte. Although influenced by the European Enlightenment and intrigued by the exciting examples of democratic revolution in France and the United States, revolutionaries in the Iberian world largely drew upon political thought and cultural traditions that had long been present in their own culture. Furthermore, those individuals who were aware of the revolutionary events in Europe often held strongly negative opinions of France following the stinging defeat of Spain by French forces in 1794. Nevertheless, pockets of pro-revolutionary sentiment in Latin American could be found. At Bogotá, in 1793, Antonio Nariño translated and printed several hundred copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Copies found their way into Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru, piquing the curiosity of educated elites. In Quito, a doctor who had conducted a literary society for the discussion of French political
488
FRONTENAC, LOUIS
DE
BUADE, COMTE
thought and news was arrested in 1795 for conspiring to overthrow colonial rule. Authorities uncovered a number of other conspiracies during the 1790s in Caracas, La Paz, Bahia, Buenos Aires, and even in the remote mining town of Potosí. Generally, these movements employed the language of the French Revolution—such as “citizen” and “republic”—and were well informed of revolutionary developments. The French Revolution continued to cast its shadow on political developments on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century. While one revolution clearly does not inevitably cause another, the American and European revolutions of the nineteenth century were to some degree heirs to 1789. They were inspired by its political and social reforms, espoused its republican ideals, and borrowed from its institutions and practices. The French Revolution was thus a pivotal moment in the history of the Atlantic world. News of revolutionary events poured across the ocean, generating excitement and radically recasting political debate, especially in the United States. Social and political reforms radiated from France, permanently transforming colonial societies. Intense warfare between revolutionary France and rival European powers also plunged much of the Americas into decades of political instability, significantly reconfiguring international relations. After 1789, nothing remained the same: old constraints had been seriously undermined by revolutionary reforms and ideology. In the place of monarchical absolutism and social privilege had arisen a republican government based on popular sovereignty and individual rights. In this way, the French Revolution ushered the Atlantic community into the modern world. Kenneth Loiselle
DE
See also: Adams, John; American Revolution; Antislavery Movements; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Brazil; Catholic Church; Franklin, Benjamin; French and Indian War; Jefferson, Thomas; Language; Mexico; Paine, Thomas; Republicanism; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Sugar; Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de; Venezuela. References Gaspar, David Barry, and David P. Geggus, eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Godechot, Jacques Léon. France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799. Trans. Herbert H. Rowen. New York: Free Press, 1965. McPhee, Peter. The French Revolution, 1789–1799. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Paine, Thomas. The Rights of Man. Introduction by Arthur Seldon. New York: Dutton, 1958. Palmer, Robert Roswell. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1964. Rodríguez O., Jaime E. The Independence of Spanish America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Stone, Bailey. Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
FRONTENAC, LOUIS BUADE, COMTE DE (1622–1698)
DE
Governor general of New France (born at Saint-Germain, France, on May 22, 1622; died at Quebec City on November 28, 1698). The son of a prominent family—Louis XIII was his godfather—Frontenac leaves a
FRY,VARIAN
divided legacy. He is seen both as a great military leader and as a recklessly imperious individual. The former reputation brought him great accolades; the latter earned him numerous enemies and troubles. The history of Frontenac’s two terms as governor is one of both exploits and disgrace. At the time of his nomination as governor in 1672, Frontenac had already secured a brilliant military reputation, through valorous service and leadership in Holland, France, Germany, and Italy. In Canada, this bravery and authority allowed him to build military forts and instigate exploratory expeditions, such as that of Cavelier de La Salle to Louisiana. Conversely, his pride and ambition led him to quarrel with the majority of the other officials of the colony, such as the intendant, Duchesneau; the governor of Montreal, Perrot; and François de Montmorency Laval, the first bishop of Quebec. Frontenac was recalled in 1682 after repeated reprimands from the king. When Governor Denonville’s dealings led to the perilous uprising of the Iroquois and the Lachine massacre in 1689, Frontenac was sent back to the colony as a rescuer. Brilliant military victories against both the Iroquois and their British allies at Corlar (later Schenectady), Salmon Falls (New Hampshire), and Casco (Maine) reinforced his reputation as a martial strategist. When Sir William Phipps attacked Quebec in reprisal for Frontenac’s campaigns and demanded through a messenger that the governor surrender, the Frenchman’s reply was simply: “I will answer your general by the mouths of my cannon” (cited in Parkman, p. 281). In 1696, he commanded highly damaging expeditions against the Iroquois, which destroyed the villages and crops of the Oneidas and Onondagas. It was as a hero and savior of
489
New France that Frontenac died at Quebec in 1698 and was buried in the Recollect Church. As always with Frontenac, however, disgrace was looming, and it is possible that had he not died, he would have been unseated once again, this time for profiting illegally from the fur trade. Brian Brazeau See also: Fur Trade; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Louisiana; New France; Quebec. References Eccles, W. J. Frontenac, the Courtier Governor. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1959. ———. France in America. Rev. ed. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1990. Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1904.
FRY,VARIAN (1907–1967) American human rights worker. Born in New York and a Harvard graduate, Fry worked as a journalist and visited Nazi Germany in 1935 where he witnessed anti-Semitic violence. He was selected by a group of wealthy American liberals, with Eleanor Roosevelt as their figurehead, to run the operations in France of the American Relief Committee, which was a cover for aiding writers and artists fleeing from Nazi-occupied Europe. The place in history of this “American Schindler” is due to his activities in Marseilles during a period of thirteen months between August 1940 and September 1941, when the Centre Américain de Secours or Emergency Rescue Committee was responsible for the escape of over 2,000 individuals by ship or across the land route through Spain and Portugal. Article 19 of the armistice signed by Vichy France and the victorious Nazis in June 1940 had stipulated the “surrender on
490
FUENTES, CARLOS
demand to Germany of foreign nationals residing in France.” In October that year, Vichy brought in its own vicious antiSemitic laws. Armed with a relatively short list of artists provided by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, some of whom, like Pablo Picasso, refused to leave and thought they were not in danger, Fry soon realized the need to expand the criteria for aid and rescue, and his office became a hive of activity, receiving thousands of refugees. The first high-profile escapees were the German writer Heinrich Mann, and Franz and Alma Werfel, whose arrival in New York boosted the profile of the committee’s work but threatened to limit its activities by instituting an artistic “star system.” The activities of Fry and his team had to become unorthodox and sometimes illegal, as they navigated between increasing harassment from the Vichy police (Fry and others were interned on a ship in the harbor during Pétain’s visit to Marseilles in December 1940) and a largely obstructive U.S. consulate and government, slow and parsimonious in the granting of visas. Fry was instrumental in the escape to the Americas of the writers André Breton and Victor Serge in April 1941. He also had, indirectly, a major influence on postwar American art, ensuring the departure from France of Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Masson, Benjamin Péret, and Jacques Lipschitz, among others. Fry was finally expelled by the Vichy authorities, crossing the frontier to Spain, as had so many of those he aided. Fry recorded his experience in a memoir, Surrender on Demand, published immediately after the war in 1945 (rewritten as Assignment: Rescue, and published under that title in 1968). He had been discharged from the committee shortly after his return
to New York in 1941, and his achievements went largely unrecognized in his lifetime. He died in obscurity, teaching classics at a school in Connecticut. By the 1990s, however, his activities were being officially commemorated. The U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher participated in a ceremony in Israel in 1996 naming Varian Fry one of the “Righteous among the Nations.” A BBC television documentary followed in 1998 and a UKCanada coproduction, Varian’s War, directed by Lionel Chetwynd and starring William Hurt as Varian Fry in 2001. Bill Marshall See also: Breton; André; Ernst, Max; Masson, André; Péret, Benjamin; Serge, Victor; World War II. References Bénédite, Daniel. La Filière marseillaise: Un chemin vers la liberté sous l’Occupation. Paris: Clancier Guénaud, 1984. Berman, Elizabeth Kessin. “Moral Triage or Cultural Salvage? The Agendas of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee.” Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler. Ed. Stefanie Barron. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Abrams, 1997: 99–112. Gold, Mary Jayne. Crossroads Marseilles 1940. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Isenberg, Sheila. A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry. New York: Random House, 2001. Marino, Andy. A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
FUENTES, CARLOS (1928–) Mexican writer, born in 1928. Carlos Fuentes is considered one of Mexico’s bestknown authors in spite of the fact that he was born in Panama, and, as the son of a diplomat, he grew up in various Latin American and European cities. He contin-
FUENTES, CARLOS
ues to lead a cosmopolitan life today, keeping a flat in London as well as Mexico. Fuentes, whose writing has always been well received in France, has recently become even more popular in France since speaking out—as he did in an article in the Mexican magazine La Reforma called “A la Gloria de Francia” (March 31, 2003)— against U.S. francophobic attacks during the 2003 Iraq crisis and calling for solidarity between Mexico and France. As a student at the Faculty of Law at the National University of Mexico in the 1940s, Fuentes developed his interests in Mexican politics and political theory. It was during this time that Fuentes joined the Mexican Communist Party. Once he graduated in 1948, Fuentes was offered work, first as a Mexican delegate to the International Labor Organization in Geneva, and later as chief press officer for the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was not until the 1950s that Fuentes turned to literature (he claims that it was seeing Thomas Mann in Geneva that made him want to be an author), writing his first book of short stories, Los Días enmascarados (“The Masked Days”), in 1954. The following year Fuentes founded La Revista Mexicana Literaria/The Mexican Literary Review with Octavio Paz and Emmanuel Carballo. During the 1960s, novels such as La Muerte de Artemio Cruz/The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), and Cambio de Piel/Change of Skin (1967) all demonstrated Fuentes’s interest in experimenting with narrative forms and symbolism, as well as his continuing preoccupation with Mexican national identity and politics. Peter Standish (1986) has suggested that this experimentalism and the “influence of the French nouveaux romanciers” may explain European enthusiasm for Cambio de
491
Piel, which won the Spanish Seix Barral Biblioteca Breve Prize (p. 20). During a five-year stay in Paris, Fuentes bore witness to the May 1968 uprisings, which he recorded as a volume of essays and photographs in Paris, La Revolución de Mayo (ERA, Mexico City, 1968). Fuentes’s relationship with France developed further when between 1974 and 1977 he held the post of Mexican ambassador in Paris. In 1992 Fuentes was awarded the title of Officier de la Légion d’honneur by President Mitterrand. Later, in October 2003, Carlos Fuentes was awarded the title of Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur by the French ambassador to Mexico, Philippe Faure, who referred to Fuentes as “Usted, el francés” (You, the Frenchman) and applauded him for his “relation passionnelle” (passionate relationship) with France and, in particular, Paris. In a recent French interview, Fuentes gave some insight into the influence of French literature on his work and also his plans for the future when he proclaimed, “Je suis comme Balzac, je mourrai en écrivant . . . les romans qui m’attirent le plus sont de lui et [il] est mort en écrivant” (I am like Balzac, I will die writing . . . the novels which I am most attracted to are written by him, and he died writing). Scarlet Harris See also: Iraq War; Literary Relations; Mexico; Mitterrand, François; Paz, Octavio. References Delden, Maarten van. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico and Modernity. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. Faris, Wendy. Carlos Fuentes. New York: Ungar, 1983. Standish, Peter, ed. Fuentes Carlos—Aura. Durham: University of Durham, 1986. Willams, Raymond Leslie. The Writings of Carlos Fuentes. Austin: Texas University Press, 1996.
492
FUR TRADE
FUR TRADE The trade in furs between French and aboriginal peoples was a major vehicle for French exploration and empire in North America. Aboriginal peoples traded the pelts of beavers, martens, otters, lynxes, foxes, wolves, moose, and bears, for a range of European goods such as cloth, metal, vessels, ornaments, and alcohol. Europeans used the underhair of beaver pelts to make felt for the booming hat industry, as well as other types of fur for clothing and trim, while aboriginal peoples welcomed material goods that they did not produce themselves. French explorers, colonizers, and missionaries relied on the fur trade to form relationships with aboriginal peoples to advance their goals of empire and evangelization. Some Frenchmen married aboriginal women, and those of their children who were raised with a dual heritage became known as Métis. The fur trade began in the sixteenth century, reached its peak in the nineteenth century, and continues today as a limited industry in northern Canada. When European fishers and explorers landed on the northeastern shores of North America, aboriginal peoples incorporated them into existing patterns of continental trade. In 1534, the Micmacs initiated trade with Jacques Cartier by holding up animal skins and making signs. In 1608, Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent fur trade post (Quebec) in the Saint Lawrence valley. French ambitions encouraged explorers to create alliances with aboriginal peoples, based on the fur trade. Missionaries also relied on the trade to forge relationships with aboriginal peoples in their program to spread Christianity. The most active of the religious orders in New France, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits),
arrived in 1625. In order to cement their trading alliance with the French, the Hurons allowed the Jesuits to establish a mission base, Sainte Marie among the Hurons, near Georgian Bay. Hurons acted as middlemen in the trade with aboriginal peoples to the north and west until 1649, when Huronia was destroyed by the Five Nations Iroquois. Profits from the fur trade helped subsidize the missionary efforts and funded the immigration of hundreds of colonists to the Saint Lawrence valley. In 1642, Ville-Marie (Montreal) was founded as a mission center, and it quickly became the central terminus of the fur trade because of its western location, closer to aboriginal traders. Many habitants traded with aboriginal peoples visiting Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal, and New France officials organized the trade to maximize profits. In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu, first minister of Louis XIII, created the Compagnie des Cent-Associés (“Company of the Hundred Associates”) as a monopoly, which lasted until 1642, when the company ceded control of the fur trade to the colonists, who formed the Communauté des Habitants (“Community of Habitants”). In theory all habitants had a right to trade freely, but before 1652 trade was open only to members of the Communauté, and after, traders were subject to taxes and fees. By 1663, wildly fluctuating profits, caused mainly by the Five Nations Iroquois blocking trade routes to the interior, encouraged the French Crown to take control of the trade once again. By the 1650s, specialized merchants began journeying north and west to trade along the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa rivers and throughout the Great Lakes. These men borrowed capital, purchased outfits of trade goods, and traveled to the
FUR TRADE
pays d’en haut (upper country) to trade with aboriginal peoples in their communities. In 1681, French minister of the marine Jean-Baptiste Colbert inaugurated the license, or congé, system, in which the government of New France granted a limited number of licenses and quotas every year allowing merchants to trade in the pays d’en haut, although illegal trading was common. By this time, merchants specialized to the point of forming small partnerships and began to hire servants (engagés) known as voyageurs to transport the goods and furs back and forth between Montreal and the interior. West of the Saint Lawrence valley French traders encountered Algonquian-speaking refugees rebuilding after war with the Five Nations. These aboriginal peoples and French traders created a “middle ground,” or world of shared meanings, diplomatic alliances, friendships, and stable trading relationships. Although the fur trade became a central economic enterprise in New France, the French expanded its reach far into the continent not simply for profit, but also to meet political and religious aims. In 1700, Louis XIV planned an expansion intended to confine English colonies in the South to the Atlantic seaboard. French fur trade and military posts were established in Detroit, the Mississippi valley, and Louisiana. The strongest rival to the French fur trade, however, was far to the north in Hudson Bay. In 1660, Pierre Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers learned of a vast northern region rich in beavers that was most easily accessed from the shores of Hudson Bay. But they failed to find French Canadian or French support for a sea route. Prince Rupert of England, cousin of Charles II, supported their trad-
493
Fur traders socializing with Indians in a Canadian village. French explorers, colonizers, and missionaries relied on the fur trade to form relationships with native peoples to advance their goals of empire and evangelization. (Library of Congress)
ing venture in 1668. The success of this venture led Charles II to proclaim a royal charter in 1670 for “The Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), as it became known, was granted exclusive trading rights to Rupert’s Land, a vast territory draining into Hudson Bay that stretches into what are now six modern Canadian provinces and territories as well as four U.S. states. Hudson Bay and Rupert’s Land became a new arena for the ongoing struggles between the British and the French, and the HBC’s monopoly was interrupted several times. Unlike the small partnerships in the Saint Lawrence valley, the HBC was a hierarchical and conservative joint stock company that established trading posts exclusively on the shores of the bay. Only in the 1770s, after the competition mounted from Canadian traders moving far into the West and North, did the HBC begin to set up posts inland.
494
FUR TRADE
In the Saint Lawrence valley, the system of small partnerships financing and outfitting themselves continued through the eighteenth century. After the French and Indian War (1756–1763), when the French abandoned North America to the British and Spanish, the Saint Lawrence valley became the British colony of Quebec. A few administrative changes ensued. The congé system was dismantled, and Montreal trade was opened to everyone, which led to its significant expansion farther north and west. The American Revolution discouraged the expansion of the Montreal trade south of the Great Lakes. Slowly people from Scotland, England, and the United States replaced the French Canadian merchants. Smaller partnerships began to merge into larger companies. In 1783, the North West Company (NWC) was created out of nine partnerships and became the largest fur trade company to operate out of the Saint Lawrence valley. French Canadian voyageurs in the fur trade continued the spread of French culture into the interior of the continent even after 1763. They came primarily from parishes surrounding Montreal and TroisRivières and were inducted into an evolving occupational culture. A fierce competition for furs between the HBC and the NWC led to a dramatic expansion of the trade by the 1780s. Increasing distances between new trading posts and Montreal forced the NWC to divide its servants into distinct groups. Seasonally employed mangeurs de lard, or pork eaters, transported goods from Montreal to the administrative center at the western tip of Lake Superior. Hommes du nord, or Northmen, transported goods from Lake Superior to distant posts and wintered in the interior. A small group who wintered north of
Methy Portage became known as Athabasca Men. Voyageurs had a significant impact on the fur trade and cultural landscape of the pays d’en haut. The lingua franca among many fur traders was French until the mid-nineteenth century. Voyageurs numerically dominated the Montreal fur trade. They formed kin ties with aboriginal women, and many settled in the Northwest to raise their families. Many francophone communities exist in northwestern North America today because of their influence. Aboriginal women and their bicultural offspring became central figures in the fur trade. Along with teaching their husbands to survive and thrive in the pays d’en haut, these women negotiated a middle ground between French and aboriginal cultures by converting to Catholicism and constructing elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that facilitated both French and aboriginal values and trade practices. The fur trade became the site of the ethnogenesis of the Métis, now one of Canada’s three federally recognized native peoples. Carolyn Podruchny See also: Cartier, Jacques; Catholic Church; Champlain, Samuel de; Colbert, JeanBaptiste; Detroit; Fishing; French and Indian War; Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des; Hurons; Jesuits; Louisiana; Métis; Mississippi River; Montreal; New France; Ottawa; Quebec; Radisson, Pierre-Esprit; Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de; Saint Lawrence River. References Brown, Jennifer S. H. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980. Eccles, W. J. “The Fur Trade and EighteenthCentury Imperialism.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 40, no. 3 (July 1983): 341–362.
FUR TRADE Innis, Harold Adams. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. New York: Yale University Press, 1930. Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural
495
Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Thorne, Tanis C. The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
G GAGNON, CLARENCE ALPHONSE (1881–1942) Painter, engraver, and illustrator, born in Montreal, to Alphonse-Edouard Gagnon, manager of the Ogilvie flour mill, and the English-born Sarah Ann Willford. Gagnon was the brother of the architect Willford Gagnon. He married Montrealer Katherine Irwin in Paris on December 2, 1907, and, after her death, he married Lucile Rodier on June 10, 1919. Gagnon began his studies at the Ecole du Conseil des arts et manufactures (School of the Council of Arts and Manufactures) in Montreal under Ludger Larose and Edmond Dyonnet. In 1898, he entered the Montreal Art Association school (MAA), where he was taught painting after nature and watercolor techniques by Charles E. Moss and painting by William Brymner. In 1901, the MAA awarded him a one-year scholarship and admitted him to their Spring Exhibition, where he continued to exhibit his work until 1925 (winning the Jessie Dow prize in 1917). He began sending work to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCAA) in 1902, with landscapes of the Beaupré region, inspired by the work of his compatriot, Horatio Walker, and by Barbizon’s
aesthetic. He became an associate member of the RCAA in 1909 and was elected as a member in 1922. In 1904, financial support from James Morgan, of the gallery of the Henry Morgan & Co. shop, enabled him to perfect his artistic training in Europe. In Paris, he briefly attended Jean-Paul Laurens’s studio at the Julian Academy. Gagnon was more interested in engraving, and he took advantage of an encounter with the engravers Donald Shaw McLaughlan and Herman A. Webster, whom he met at the Parisian American Art Association Club, in order to complete training in graphics, which he had previously embarked upon in Montreal. Between 1904 and 1908, his talent as an etcher came to the fore in a range of subjects drawn from his trips to Italy, Spain, and Normandy. In 1906, an honorable mention from the Société des Artistes Français earned him an international reputation in this domain, as well as articles in specialist journals and commissions from several European museums. Two years earlier, his work Les Labours had won a bronze medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at Saint Louis, Missouri. In 1909, following a brief trip to Canada, which had allowed
497
498
GAINSBOURG, SERGE
him to produce a series of landscape paintings of the Baie Saint Paul area (in Charlevoix county), Gagnon returned to painting in his Parisian studio in the rue Falguière, in preparation for a personal exhibition in the Reitlinger Gallery in 1913. He subsequently continued to favor the Canadian landscape, but not without bringing back from his travels views of the Swiss Alps, Norwegian fjords, and Swedish forests. In Canada, he exhibited regularly from 1909 to 1915 at the Canada Art Club in Toronto. In 1923, two years after his admission to the Salmagundi Club in New York, he received the Trevor Prize for his painting L’Hiver dans les Laurentides (Winter in the Laurentians), with colors he had created himself. During the 1920s and 1930s, he reached an enviable position in the world of illustration by creating images for two luxurious works, edited by the Mornay publishing house in Paris: Le Grand Silence blanc (The Great White Silence), by L.-F. Rouquette (1928), and Maria Chapdelaine, by Louis Hémon (1933). In 1936, he returned to settle in Canada and became involved in a number of projects connected with heritage preservation and the promotion of local crafts. He received an honorary doctorate from the Université de Montréal in 1938. Hélène Sicotte
See also: Hémon, Louis; Maria Chapdelaine; Painting. References Boissay, René. Clarence Gagnon. Montreal: Marcel Broquet, 1988. Tovell, Rosemarie. Un Nouvel Art: L’estampe originale au Canada de 1877 à 1920. Ottawa: Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, 1996.
GAINSBOURG, SERGE (LUCIEN GINSBURG) (1928–1991) Prolific French singer-songwriter. Behind the controversial persona lay one of France’s finest songwriters. Drawing heavily on Anglo-American genres, he opened up new vistas for French pop. Born in Paris of Russian-Jewish parents, Gainsbourg learned to play the piano as a child with his father, a jobbing musician. After a brief stint at art college, he became a bar pianist and started writing bittersweet songs for established chanson singers. Although he was determined to become successful, his rise to fame was slow, due in particular to stage fright and his offbeat looks. His first hit was in 1958 with “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas”/“The Ticket-Puncher of the Lilas,” the story of a metro conductor contemplating death. Gainsbourg’s sophisticated jazz influences (Cole Porter) showed in this piece, which combines melodic nonchalance with semispoken vocals. In the early 1960s, France was in the grip of yéyé (the French version of soft rock ’n’ roll), and Gainsbourg’s American influences (twist, blues-rock) became more evident in his compositions. However, somewhat older and less conventionally attractive than many of his rivals, he performed little and mainly released studio EPs, composing for others. In 1965, he became one of the most sought-after songwriters when “Poupée de cire, poupée de son”/“Wax Doll, Straw Doll” won the Eurovision song contest. He then moved to London to record English-sounding psychedelic pop, developing his trademark lyrics that, laden with French and English double entendres, produce wryly intelligent but often sexually provocative themes.
GALLANT, MAVIS
Gainsbourg’s music is inseparable from his public persona as a seducer, playing Pygmalion to a string of beautiful female singers. His affair with Brigitte Bardot, for instance, led them to record several songs together, including “Initials (sic) B.B.” (1968). In 1969, during the shooting of a film (Gainsbourg also directed, scripted, and acted in several films), he met the English actress Jane Birkin, who remained his partner throughout the 1970s. They released in 1969 the duet “Je t’aime moi non plus”/“I Love You . . . Me Neither,” with Birkin’s orgasmic moans ensuring international success as well as national outrage. In 1977, his reggae cover version of the national anthem (“Aux armes, etc”) sparked further controversy, while he continued to establish himself as a highly experimental stylist and pioneer of crossovers. In the 1980s, Gainsbourg found ways to gain media attention as he morphed into Gainsbarre, his debauched alter ego, whose three-day stubble, chain-smoking, and alcohol-fueled antics made for some legendary TV moments. That period also saw an increase of American-influenced poprock sounds, with the release of Love on the Beat (1984), recorded in New Jersey with American guitarist and backup singers, Lemon Incest (1984), You’re under Arrest (1987), and the film Stan the Flasher (1986). In 1991, after years of heavy drinking and alcoholism, Gainsbourg died of a heart attack. His rich and complex musical legacy lives on to this day in the work of French and foreign artists. Barbara Lebrun See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Deneuve, Catherine; Jazz; Music (Pop); Porter, Cole.
499
References Clayson, Alan. Serge Gainsbourg: View from the Exterior. London: Faber, 1998. Simmons, Sylvie. Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes. London: Helter Skelter, 2001.
GALLANT, MAVIS (1922–) One of a handful of post–World War II writers of the short story (she has also written two full-length novels and an impressive number of reviews and articles) who have achieved international stature. Though Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922 and has retained her Canadian passport, she has lived in Paris since 1960, turning out hundreds of finely crafted stories, most of which were first published in the New Yorker magazine. Her nuanced and musical prose has gained her the reputation of being a writer’s writer. Although displacement and exile are traditionally regarded as Gallant’s major themes, the triangulated relationship between the cities of Montreal, Paris, and New York provides an important clue to her preoccupations as well as the horizon of reception of her work. Gallant is also aware of her position as a cultural translator, a self-assigned task that is foregrounded in the prose essay “Immortal Gatito: The Gabrielle Russier Case,” which was reprinted in Paris Notebooks (1988), a selection of her nonfiction essays and reviews. Writing in the New Yorker for an American audience about the French scandal of a former lycée teacher who was hounded into suicide after an affair with a student, she tells her readers: “To translate the Gabrielle Russier Case into American terms you would have to improvise a new society.” In place of the melodrama framework that
500
GALLANT, MAVIS
typically accompanied the French cause célèbre, she set out for her readers the wider social drama of France’s intellectual, academic, and juridical history. This same attention to the stubborn particularity of language and culture marks many of her earliest fictions. The Canadian protagonist of her novel A Fairly Good Time (1970) becomes unstuck by the vertigo of a social universe in Paris that she cannot understand. The central character in the Montreal-based story “Saturday,” reprinted in the volume Home Truths (1981), is trapped in a split world that shuttles back and forth between French and English, giving him no place to stand. These concerns almost certainly spiral back to Gallant’s own formation. Her peripatetic schooling in Montreal (some seventeen schools) began with a stint in a French-speaking Catholic convent school to which she had been sent by her mother (both her parents were English-speaking Protestants) at an early age. There she learned the position of sociological voyeur that was to characterize her fiction in the years to come. This experience also established the lifelong pattern of inhabiting two separate and compartmentalized linguistic universes (she lives almost entirely in French in Paris and writes exclusively in English), which marks her life and work to this day. As the young girl in her novel Green Water, Green Sky (1959) charges her mother in an imagined colloquy: “It was always your fault. I might have been a person, but you made me a foreigner.” Gallant’s fascination with dislocation can also be traced to her experience of wartime refugees flooding out of Europe into Montreal. In the 1950s, Gallant searched them out once more in an intensely personal journey through the heart
of darkness that was postwar Europe. As a journalist for the Montreal Standard, she famously refused to write captions for the first photographs of the Allied liberation of the death camps, which she declared as life at “degree zero.” The German stories of The Pegnitz Junction (1973) and From the Fifteenth District (1979) are marked by the same attention to traumatic history and the ethics of memory. These are ghost stories that bear comparison with the postwar films of Alain Resnais, and they are often marked by a grammar of experimental cinema as much as prose. (Gallant reviewed films as a journalist and has a longstanding interest in the cinema.) Given her residence in Paris during the decades of France’s belated coming to terms with its collaborationist past in the postwar period, it is worth placing Gallant’s own preoccupations with history and memory in the cauldron of Vichy coming-to-memory. Later volumes such as Overhead in a Balloon (1985) couch the national ethical crisis in almost theological (though also cartoon) terms, while Across the Bridge (1993) moves Gallant’s lifelong preoccupation with history into the cataclysmic personal as well as geopolitical events produced by the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the historical marker of the end of the twentieth century. Barbara Gabriel See also: Catholic Church; Language; Montreal; Resnais, Alain; World War II. References Besner, Neil. The Light of Imagination: Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988. Gabriel, Barbara. “The Wounds of Memory: Mavis Gallant’s Baum, Gabriel (1935–).” “National Trauma, and Post-War French Cinema.” Essays on Canadian Writing 80 (2003): 189–216. Kulyk-Keefer, Janice. Reading Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, GABRIEL
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, GABRIEL (1928–) Born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1928, Gabriel García Márquez is the most successful of the so-called boom generation of writers emerging from Latin America in the 1960s and the author of numerous internationally best-selling novels. He was initially influenced by many of the classic nineteenth-century French authors and spent two key years of his career in Paris, so that reflections on the impact of French culture in Latin America permeate many of his novels. García Márquez grew up in provincial Colombia, moving to Bogotá in the early 1950s to study law. He began working instead as a journalist for the left-wing Colombian newspaper El Espectador, which in
501
1955 sent him to Europe to work as its foreign correspondent. Settling in Paris, García Márquez rented an apartment in the rue Cujas, a street full of Latin American exiles. Upon the Colombian dictator Rojas’s accession to power, García Márquez found himself immobilized in Paris, his funds abruptly terminated. Starting to dedicate his time to writing fiction during what turned out to be a two-year stint in Paris, García Márquez became aware of a Latin American identity that had to be expressed through his writing and of the need to engage with the realities of social and political injustice. Influenced not only by the horrors of political violence in his native Colombia but also by his exposure to right-wing intolerance in France (he himself was arrested and beaten as a suspected Algerian), the novel García Márquez
Nobel Prize–winning author Gabriel García Márquez sits with a copy of his book One Hundred Years of Solitude open on his head. As he spent two key years of his career in Paris, reflections on the impact of French culture in Latin America permeate many of García-Márquez’s novels. (Colita/Corbis)
502
GAROU
produced during this period, El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba/No One Writes to the Colonel, reflects the poverty and suffering of which he was becoming so aware. Returning to Latin America in the 1960s—he lived in Venezuela, Mexico City, and postrevolutionary Cuba—García Márquez eventually published Cien Años de soledad/One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), his first exercise in the deliberately folk-influenced blend of realism and myth that has been labeled magical realism. García Márquez has since then produced a body of writing characterized by its refusal to yield to a Eurocentric vision of time, culture, or reality, preoccupied instead with deconstructing linear or over-coherent presentations of history or truth. Characters such as the francophile Dr. Juvenal Urbino in El Amor en los tiempos del cólera/Love in the Time of Cholera (1986) and the French marquis in El Amor y otros demonios/Of Love and Other Demons (1989), obsessed as they are with the imposition of order, are contrasted negatively with hybrid figures who refuse to fit in with the rigors of identity (cf. Patrick Chamoiseau). García Márquez’s admiration of much popular culture is reflected in eulogistic pieces on artists such as the French singer Georges Brassens. Awarded the French Légion d’honneur in 1981 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, García Márquez has continued to move between France, Spain, and the Americas. The first volume of his memoirs, Vivir para contarla/Living to Tell, was published in 2001 and still holds the record as the fastest-selling book in the Spanish language. Andrew Asibong See also: Chamoiseau, Patrick; Cuban Revolution; Literary Relations; Venezuela.
References Bell, Michael. Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1993. Minta, Stephen. Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Colombia. London: Cape, 1987.
GAROU (PIERRE GARAND) (1972–) Québécois singer, born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, in 1972. Propelled into the international limelight thanks to his participation in Luc Plamondon and Richard Cocciante’s musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, NotreDame de Paris (published in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and known for his rough voice, Garou began his career singing in bars with his group The Untouchables, who later accompanied him on the promotional tour for his album Seul (Alone), both in Quebec and in Europe. Luc Plamondon discovered Garou during one of the group’s concerts in 1997 and offered him the role of Quasimodo in the musical drama that brought him to the public’s attention. For months, he played the role of the unloved hunchback in Paris, Montreal, Lyons, Brussels, and London. Furthermore, it was the song “Belle,” taken from the show, that allowed him to win the Félix de la Révélation de l’Année 1999 in Quebec, a trophy at the World Music Awards, and a Victoire award in France. Following the success of Notre-Dame de Paris, he contributed to several albums by various artists, including Ensemble contre le sida/Together against AIDS, on which he sang “L’Amour existe encore” (Love Still Exists) (written by Plamondon and Cocciante for Céline Dion) with Hélène Ségara.
GARY, ROMAIN
In 1999, Garou met someone who was to mark a turning point in his career: René Angeli, Céline Dion’s manager. Following this meeting, he was invited to play alongside Bryan Adams during the concert that Céline Dion gave for the start of the year 2000, before going on to take a break from the musical scene for two years. After a long period of preparation, and collaboration with many greats from the world of rock music such as Bryan Adams, Richard Cocciante, Didier Barbelivien, David Foster, Aldo Nova, and Luc Plamondon, Garou released his first solo album, Seul. Although he is himself a talented writer of both music and lyrics, and plays guitar, harmonica, trumpet, piano, and the organ, Garou preferred to limit himself to songs written by other artists on this album. He spent 2001 and 2002 on tour in Quebec and Europe. These tours, which are the part of his career with which Garou feels most at ease, resulted in two live albums: Seul . . . avec vous (Alone . . . with You) and Live à Bercy. In the meantime, he sang “Sous le vent”/“In the Wind” with Céline Dion, which received an impressive welcome across the francophone world. In the fall of 2003, he released the album Reviens/Come Back, also in French, and once more with an impressive list of French and Québécois contributors. Garou has received numerous awards from the ADISQ (l’Association québécoise de l’industrie du disque, du spectacle et de la vidéo, the Quebec association for the record, entertainment, and video industry), as well as several NRJ Music Awards in 2002, a second Victoire in France for Sous le vent, and a World Music Award. He was made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. In 2003, he even received awards in Poland, as best interna-
503
tional male artist, proving that Garou’s career is thriving and that he can aspire to a global audience. Sonia Lebel See also: AIDS; Dion, Céline; Hunchback of Notre-Dame/Notre-Dame de Paris; Music (Pop); Plamondon, Luc; Quebec. References Alamo, Valérie, and Stéphane Deschamps. Garou, le gitan de Sherbrooke. Paris: Hors Collection, 2002. Goudeau, Mathias. Garou de A à Z. Paris: Prélude et fugue, 2002.
GARY, ROMAIN (ROMAN KACEW) (1914–1980) One of the best-known French faces in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was, in turn, the spokesman for the French delegation to the UN Security Council in New York (1952–1954), consul general in Los Angeles (1956–1960), and the husband of the heroine of Otto Preminger’s Joan of Arc, Jean Seberg (from 1961). Gary, who was born in Vilna, Russia, in May 1914, immigrated to France in 1928. After completing his lycée education in Nice and a law degree in Aix-en-Provence and Paris, he joined the French air force in 1938. In 1940 he refused to accept the armistice, made his way to London, and joined the Free French. He served as an aviator in Africa and the Middle East, then in England. Gary was made a Compagnon de la Libération in 1945 and offered special entry to the foreign service. He served in Sofia (1946–1948) and Bern (1949–1951), before being posted to New York on the basis of his excellent English. Gary’s diplomatic career coincided with his career as a popular novelist. Education européenne/A European
504
GASNIER, LOUIS J.
Education, a stark novel of resistance in Eastern Europe, won the Prix des Critiques in 1945, but neither the satire of Tulipe (1946), presciently set in New York, nor the noir realism of Le Grand Vestiaire (1948) attracted much attention in France. However, the latter novel, translated by New York Times correspondent Joseph Barnes as The Company of Men, made Gary well known in the United States just prior to his arrival as a diplomat. All Gary’s subsequent work appeared in English translation in the United States (many of the translations, notably those attributed to “John Markham Beach,” being Gary’s own work). His Goncourt prize–winning novel about African elephants, Les Racines du ciel/The Roots of Heaven (1956), and above all his sentimental, unreliable, but utterly captivating personal memoir, Promise at Dawn (1960), were nationwide best-sellers. Combining high visibility as a diplomatic representative with his celebrity as a novelist—and with a natural talent for television and radio interviews—Gary was probably the best-known French “name” in the United States after Charles de Gaulle and Maurice Chevalier. Gary began writing directly in English during his American residence: Lady L (1958), The Talent Scout (1961), The Ski Bum (1964, about dropouts), White Dog (1970, about race relations), and The Gasp (1973) were not translated from French but written directly in Gary’s language of adoption. He also wrote film scripts and many magazine articles directly in English and was no doubt the only French novelist able to command huge fees for commissioned articles in Life and Vogue. His American literary career was cut short when he resigned from his post in Los Angeles because of his relationship with Seberg and moved back to France in 1961. For the
next decade he remained a frequent visitor to the United States, accompanying Seberg on location and also making two of his own films with her as the star: Birds in Peru (1968) and Kill (1972). But as Gary’s relationship with Seberg fell apart around 1970, he became more concerned with his position in French literature, and his visibility in the United States declined. Gary’s last reincarnation, adopting the pen name Emile Ajar, was of course as well kept a secret in the United States as it was in France. Gary is an exceptional figure in FrenchU.S. relations. He thought highly of Kennedy and was not afraid to say so to his Gaullist colleagues. In the United States, he was an eminent representative of French culture, but also an astute observer of American issues. Yet all of Gary’s work, in fiction and in film, in French and in English, is built on the Russian literary culture that he acquired as a child and is shot through with a moral sensitivity forged in his experience of brutality in the Second World War. David Bellos See also: Chevalier, Maurice; Gaulle, General Charles de; Joan of Arc; Seberg, Jean; World War II. References Anissimov, Myriam. Romain Gary, le cameléon. Paris: Denoël, 2004. Schoolcraft, Ralph. Romain Gary: The Man Who Sold His Shadow. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
GASNIER, LOUIS J. (1878–1963) Louis J. Gasnier was born in Paris in 1878 and was a stage director, producer, and actor before being hired by the French studio Pathé to direct.
GATT
Gasnier began his film career in 1905 making short French silent comedies in which he worked with film legend Max Linder in his earliest movies. Pathé was an international filmmaking studio, and in 1912 Gasnier took over Pathé’s American operations. It was there that he first focused on making serials, short episodic movies that were shown in theaters on a weekly basis. Gasnier’s movies are probably better known than their director. The early silentera serials The Perils of Pauline and the 1935 cult classic and low-budget phenomenon Reefer Madness are widely known and referenced in popular culture. Even people who have not seen the films are often aware of them in some sense. Gasnier, however, after a long career in filmmaking is still relatively unknown and not highly regarded by media scholars or critics. His first series, The Perils of Pauline, was very successful and pushed Pathé to the forefront in the United States. The films that make up The Perils of Pauline are neither the first serials made, nor are they considered the best. Each episode featured the character Pauline, a young woman who has inherited a fortune. If anything should ever happen to Pauline, her trusted family lawyer, Koerner, will have control of the riches. Therefore, in each of the eighteen episodes, Koerner devises a new disguise and a new peril for Pauline. However, each time the handsome Harry Marvin is there to foil the dastardly plan and rescue sweet Pauline. Gasnier was unable to successfully shift from making silent films to talkies in the late 1920s. This problem was a common one for silent film directors, actors, and screenwriters. At that point, Gasnier’s work was relegated to low-budget, independent
505
studios, with some work in France and Spain during the early 1930s. His most famous film, Reefer Madness, is an unintentionally hilarious propaganda movie about the evils of marijuana. In this drama, high school students are lured into smoking marijuana. The results are disastrous, as all of their young lives are ruined. The film’s theme and the fact that it is poorly made and overacted have pushed it to cult status in America. Throughout his long career, Gasnier was known for spotting talented actors and was often praised by his stars. His directing skills have not been lauded. He retired from filmmaking in 1942. Gasnier died in 1963 in Hollywood, California. Danielle E. Williams See also: Cinema, 1895–1945. References Abel, Richard. The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Armes, Roy. French Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Brandy, Mary Lea, ed. Rediscovering French Film. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983. Lanzoni, Remi Fournier. French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2002.
GATT (GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TARIFFS AND TRADE) The first international body ever to attempt to regulate world trade peacefully came on the heels of World War II, in the wake of other new multilateral institutions dedicated to international economic cooperation—notably the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. After centuries of unregulated and fierce economic
506
GATT
competition, GATT became over the next fifty years the cornerstone of global economic development, so successfully that it ultimately evolved into a yet more powerful regulation tool, the World Trade Organization (WTO). In an effort to boost trade liberalization in a largely protectionist world market, the twenty-three founding GATT “contracting parties” opened tariff negotiations in 1946. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was signed provisionally on January 1, 1948, and a draft charter for an International Trade Organization (ITO) —a new specialized agency of the UN— was proposed by some fifty members of that body. But ITO’s objectives were so broad that it met with resistance and never fully materialized. One of those objectives was ending restrictive business practices, a goal that was to make difficulties for GATT as well in its dealings with France’s demand for cultural exceptions to the global liberalization of trade. In France, culture has traditionally been an affair of state. The relationship between the government and culture is much closer than in many other countries. In the areas of publishing, theater, music, press, and the audiovisual media, France innovates neither more nor less than other countries of Europe and North America. Culture in the Western world is in general dictated by the laws of economics, but in France certain cultural sectors are under the watchful eye of state legislators and are a priority on the national budget. What characterizes the country’s exception culturelle, or cultural exception, what makes France culturally distinct, is the official, institutional character of France’s culture. Since 1986, the European Economic Community (EEC), now the European
Union (EU), has also sought to protect its cultural sector. A directive called “Television Without Borders” (1989) requires the member states to broadcast a majority proportion of European programs “whenever possible,” and to devote either 10 percent of their airtime or else 10 percent of their budget to the production of European programs, as well as creating various other obligations regarding advertising and the broadcasting of motion pictures. Confronted with the rise of satellite television, France was determined to enforce its position on protecting its culture and tried to make the French exception culturelle part of the agenda of trade talks to be held in Marrakech, Morocco, in 1994. In March 1993, however, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), declared in an interview published by the leading French daily Le Monde that the U.S. government would not sign a GATT agreement that stipulated that the cultural sector was an exceptional one, adding that the U.S. government would not turn its back on the audiovisual sector, which represented one of the main economic assets of the country. Valenti, a powerful lobbyist, had an outstanding amount of influence in Washington. On September 20, 1993, the French government’s request to maintain the exception culturelle in the GATT agreement was on the agenda of the Council of (the European Community’s) Ministers in Brussels. Nonetheless, due to resistance from other member nations and to strong lobbying from Washington and the MPAA, the exception culturelle was never put on the Marrakech agenda. Toward the end of 1999, prior to the Millennium Round, French authorities had to lobby again in Brussels to get the
GAUGUIN, PAUL
backing of the fifteen member nations of the EU. The French were forced, however, to accept the principle of counternegotiations and to make concessions to other EU members that did not share the same cultural views as those of France. The dossier was therefore not excluded from the WTO negotiations—unlike the GATT negotiations of 1994—but it was not addressed at the Millennium Round in Seattle due to the collapse of the talks. GATT did succeed in liberalizing much of world trade over forty-seven years. Continual reductions in tariffs alone helped spur world trade growth to 8 percent a year on average in the 1950s and 1960s. And the momentum of trade liberalization helped ensure that trade growth consistently outpaced production growth throughout the GATT era. By the early 1980s, however, it became apparent that the General Agreement was less relevant to world trade than it had been in the 1940s. World trade was far more complex, the globalization of the world economy was under way, international investment was exploding, and trade in services—not covered by GATT—was of major interest to more and more countries. In other respects, GATT had fallen short of resolving heated disputes in such sectors as agriculture and textiles. Eventually, the Marrakech agreement gave birth to the World Trade Organization. GATT was terminated in late 1994, and the WTO came to existence on January 1, 1995; its first attempt to start a new “millennium” round of talks failed miserably in Seattle at the end of 1999, when antiglobalization protestors brought the conference to collapse. Current restructuring has come in response to numerous studies indicating that
507
current trade liberalization rules and policies have led to increased poverty and inequality and have eroded democratic principles, with a disproportionately large effect on the poorest countries. Claudia Wolosin and Marc Journoud See also: Television; World War II. References Hoekman, Bernard M., and Michel Kostecki. The Political Economy of the World Trading System: From Gatt to WTO. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kirshner, Orin, et al. The Bretton Woods–Gatt System: Retrospect and Prospect after Fifty Years. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1995. Stewart, Terence P. The GATT Uruguay Round: A Negotiating History (1986–1992): Textiles. Cambridge, MA: Kluwer Academic, 1993.
GAUGUIN, (EUGÈNE HENRY) PAUL (1848–1903) French painter, draftsman, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Paris, Gauguin is best classified as a symbolist. He left conventional life, including his wife and five children, in search of a purer world where he hoped to live, firsthand, his aesthetic vision. This drive to live out his vision, which ultimately led him to the South Seas, distinguished him from contemporaries who merely collected evidence of the “untouched.” When he died, syphilitic on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, his oeuvre had achieved only limited critical acclaim; yet interpreted by artists of the next generation, such as Henri Matisse, it proved fundamental to the emergence of twentieth-century modernism. Gauguin was the son of Socialist parents who left France for Peru in 1849 after the return of Louis Napoléon. The death of Gauguin’s father at sea led his mother to
508
GAUGUIN, PAUL
Painter Paul Gauguin spent formative years in Peru and Martinique before his more famous sojourn in the South Pacific. (Corel Corp.)
seek out the protection of her noble and wealthy uncle, Don Pío Tristan y Moscoso. Thus Gauguin spent his formative childhood years in Lima living in considerable luxury. A chief distraction for Gauguin’s mother at this time was collecting pre-Inca art, and this art was an important source of her son’s subsequent taste for all things primitive and exotic. In 1855 Aline Gauguin took her children back to France, but only ten years later Gauguin sought fresh pastures, working first on a ship bound for Rio de Janeiro, then on a round-the-world voyage, and lastly in the French navy. After the Franco-Prussian War, Gauguin found high-paying work in Paris as a stockbroker, and in 1873 he married.
By the late 1880s Gauguin was disillusioned, both with France and with the role of husband. In 1887, in an endeavor to recapture the spirit of his Peruvian childhood, as well as inspired by the model of his maternal grandmother Flora Tristan (1803– 1844), who had traveled tirelessly, Gauguin went to Panama and then Martinique. Though Gauguin honed his ability for translating color into paint there, he and his traveling companion, Charles Laval, were beset by illness and forced to return to France. Martinique gave Gauguin a taste for remote island life, however, and his tempestuous sojourn with Vincent van Gogh in Arles at the end of 1888—which precipitated the latter’s famous self-mutilation— confirmed that even the color-flooded, rustic South could not offer an unspoilt environment. Encouraged by what he saw at the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris, Gauguin set out for the South Seas in 1891. Despite a financially motivated return to Paris from 1893 to 1895, Gauguin remained in the Pacific until his death. Inspired by local artifacts and the Polynesians around him, Gauguin’s vision of a lost and decaying Eden took form in increasingly roughly hewn, color-based paintings, primitive sculptures, and lowrelief carvings. Extraordinarily, although many of the works are clearly identified as Tahitian by the text inserted into them and by Gauguin’s descriptions of them in his letters, his sources were by no means exclusively Oceanic. European references persisted (he had photographs and prints sent from France), and these were fused with motifs mined from non-Western sources as diverse as Japanese prints and Near Eastern statuary. Similarly, even though his immediate subjects were local, he never forgot his European audience, and native myths
GAULLE, GENERAL CHARLES ANDRÉ-MARIE-JOSEPH
DE
509
jostle with Christian allusions, qualifying and recalling Gauguin’s blended cultural heritage. Jo Saxton See also: Martinique; Matisse, Henri; Painting; Tristan, Flora. References Coatalem, Jean-Luc. In Search of Gauguin. Trans. Liz Herron. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004. Hoog, Michael. Paul Gauguin: Life and Work. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
GAULLE, GENERAL CHARLES ANDRÉ-MARIE-JOSEPH DE (1890–1970) French Resistance leader and president, 1958–1969. De Gaulle’s view of France as a proud nation with a great role to play in world affairs brought him into conflict with U.S. leaders from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Richard Nixon. De Gaulle was born in Lille into a strongly Catholic and conservative middleclass family He chose a military career and studied at the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy. Wounded and taken prisoner during World War I, de Gaulle tried four times unsuccessfully to escape. In 1920, he married Yvonne Vendroux, was appointed history lecturer at Saint-Cyr, and settled into a quiet life, raising a family, in Paris. During the mid-1920s, the French military leaders, including Marshal Philippe Pétain—under whom de Gaulle had served during World War I—ordered the construction of a series of fortifications, the Maginot Line, to protect against renewed German attacks. In Le Fil de l’épée/The Edge of the Sword (1932) and Vers l’armée de métier/The Army of the Future (1934), de Gaulle argued unsuccessfully for a more
Leader of the Free French during World War II and president of France (1958–1969) Charles de Gaulle, who sought an independent role for France in a Western world dominated by the United States of America. (Library of Congress)
mobile strike force including the use of tanks to ward off future invasion. When the Germans attacked, in May 1940, they skirted the Maginot Line, and in less than six weeks routed the French. De Gaulle was put in charge of a tank force but could do little to stem the tide. On June 17, Marshal Pétain, a ceasefire supporter, was named premier. De Gaulle refused to accept the defeat and with his family sought refuge in London, where the next day he broadcast a call for the French to resist Nazi Germany. Few in France heard the radio appeal, and most welcomed the armistice that Pétain signed and the new Vichy government. De Gaulle was sentenced to death in absentia as a traitor.
510
GAULLE, GENERAL CHARLES ANDRÉ-MARIE-JOSEPH
From London, de Gaulle worked assiduously to control the resistance elements within France, especially after the German invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941 brought the Communists into the struggle. At first Vichy controlled the French fleet and most of France’s colonies, and Roosevelt chose Vichy’s side in hopes of keeping these resources out of German hands. Because he refused to compromise on what he considered essential French interests, de Gaulle quarreled continually with the other Allied leaders, and Roosevelt sought other potential French leaders. In the end, however, de Gaulle emerged as undisputed leader of the French Resistance, and he led the victory parade down the ChampsElysées in Paris when the city was liberated in August 1944. Still, France was excluded from the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, which split Europe into Anglo-American and Soviet zones of influence, and de Gaulle was to spend the rest of his career working to dissolve the bipolar world created in 1945. After the liberation of France, he headed the provisional government, but he resigned in 1946 when it became clear that the Third Republic political parties would once again dominate French political life. The Fourth Republic was established in 1946, but soon got bogged down in colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. Dissatisfied with the pace of the military repression of the revolt, European settlers in Algiers and other Algerian cities rioted against the Paris government in May 1958. Fearing civil war, the parliament in Paris invited General de Gaulle to form a new cabinet and gave him authority to write a revised constitution with a stronger executive.
DE
De Gaulle became the first president of the Fifth Republic in December 1958. He determined that the only practical solution to the Algerian war was to grant independence to the Muslim insurgents. As his policy became clear, many of those who had supported him in 1958 felt that he had betrayed their cause. Disgruntled partisans of French Algeria formed the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS; Secret Army Organization), which launched a terror campaign to block Algerian independence. De Gaulle withstood coup attempts in 1960 and 1961 and survived assassination attempts but maintained his policy, and in March 1962 Algeria was offered independence, subsequently confirmed by over 90 percent of the French in a referendum. With Algeria gone, de Gaulle granted independence to virtually all the black African French colonies, turning France’s image from Western colonial power to friend of the newly independent Third World countries. To build a strong Europe as a counterbalance to the United States, de Gaulle helped create a Franco–West German axis in 1963, which dominated the affairs of the developing Common Market (European Economic Community, or EEC, founded in 1958 and progenitor of the European Union). He continued the development of French nuclear weapons, started under the Fourth Republic; withdrew the French military from NATO, which he argued was dominated by the United States; and, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, moved France from a pro-Israel to a pro-Arab position. Supporting a greater world role for the French language and francophone communities, while visiting Montreal in 1967 he caused a furor by calling for a “free” Quebec.
GAY MOVEMENT
In 1968, General de Gaulle was faced with his most serious crisis since the Algerian war. Opposed to authoritarian university structures and outdated curricula, the squalid conditions of foreigners living and working in France, and the U.S. war in Vietnam, protesting university students took over campuses in and around Paris. Workers against governmental policies of low wages joined the students, and the country was virtually shut down by a general strike in May. Caught off guard by these events, de Gaulle won the support of France’s military leaders against the strikers and amnestied the pro-French Algeria military leaders charged with plotting against him in the early 1960s. He called for new parliamentary elections, which resulted in a sweeping victory for his partisans. Attempting to regain prestige with decentralization reforms put to a referendum in April 1969, de Gaulle was defeated and immediately resigned. Retiring to his country estate at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, he worked on his memoirs until his death in 1970. De Gaulle’s successors, including his political opponent François Mitterrand, have maintained his institutions and foreign policy essentially intact. The 1989– 1991 end of the cold war was a posthumous victory for de Gaulle, whose attempts to balance U.S. hegemony have been continued by his successors. Bertram M. Gordon
See also: Catholic Church; Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Francophonie, La; Mitterrand, François; NATO; Nuclear Technology; Quebec; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Vietnam War; World War I; World War II.
511
References Gordon, Bertram M. “The Formation of de Gaulle’s Political Philosophy: Legacies of the Belle Epoque.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 19, no. 1 (winter 1993): 63–80. Lacouture, Jean. De Gaulle. 2 vols. Vol. 1, The Rebel, 1890–1944. Trans. Patrick O’Brian. Vol. 2, The Ruler, 1944–1970. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991–1992. Paxton, Robert O., and Nicholas Wahl, eds. De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial Reappraisal. Oxford/Providence, RI: Berg, 1994. Shennan, Andrew. De Gaulle. London/New York: Longman, 1993.
GAY MOVEMENT Organized effort to increase esteem, among themselves and in others, of people defined as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered, and to abolish discrimination against them in such areas as housing, employment, military service, adoption, and the right to marry. A movement for gay equality appeared in Germany before World War II, but did not emerge in France, Canada, and the United States until afterward. In all three countries, the movement became increasingly active and successful during the latter years of the twentieth century, with samesex marriage an especially contentious issue, though one that had rarely even been imagined a half century earlier. Many scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, especially those influenced by French social theorist and historian Michel Foucault, maintain that the very idea of sexual orientation is of modern vintage. Though sexual activity between people of the same sex has occurred throughout human
512
GAY MOVEMENT
history, according to this line of thought societies could only afford to consider the homosexual a distinct type of person when modern living had lessened the necessity to reproduce. The word homosexual was indeed only coined—originally in German— in 1869. Others maintain that, even though sexual activity has been treated differently in different societies at different times, sexual orientation is significantly determined by biology, transcending time and place. Whether or not we should classify them gay or homosexual, there were historical figures in France and the United States who showed such vigorous sexual interest in persons of their own sex that members of today’s gay movements sometimes claim them as ancestors. In France, these ancestors would include poets (and lovers) Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) and Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), novelist and memoirist André Gide (1869–1951), and novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922). Except for the sensuous celebrations of manly affection by poet Walt Whitman (1919–1892), major American writers who dealt openly with homosexuality did not emerge until the movement for gay equality began in the years after World War II. French laws prohibiting sodomy ended in 1791, while the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated such legislation only in 2003. Before the gay movement achieved dramatic success in the United States, some American gay men and lesbians with the means and gumption to do so had chosen to live much of their adult lives in France. Writers James Baldwin (1924–1987) and Natalie Barney (1876–1972) exemplify such transplantation. There was nonetheless a stigma attached to homosexuality in France throughout much of the twentieth century.
Though the consequences of engaging in homosexual acts or simply being thought to be a homosexual might be more severe in the United States, French law and medicine were hardly receptive to homosexuality. Although there were no laws against homosexual acts themselves, laws forbidding public indecency were at times used against French homosexuals, and the United States was not alone in witnessing pervasive alarm about the contagion of homosexuality at midcentury. On both sides of the Atlantic, there was more concern about male homosexuality than about lesbianism, revealing not so much greater acceptance of lesbianism as greater interest in male behavior of any sort. The transatlantic gay movement was emboldened by the cultural ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the fresh questioning of traditional gender roles. The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, rioting by gay men and lesbians against police harassment at a New York City gay bar, is commonly seen as the symbolic beginning of militancy in the gay liberation movement worldwide. By the 1980s, in Canada, the United States, and France, a network of organizations had developed to promote changes in law and custom that would improve the lives of gay men and lesbians. Gay pride parades were common, as were gay publications and lobbying efforts. The prevalence of AIDS in the gay male community made government health policies a particular concern in the gay movement in both North America and France. As with all movements for social reform, the gay movement on both sides of the Atlantic has had its uncompromising militants as well as individuals more inclined to support compromise and gradual change.
GAY MOVEMENT
The movement has had significant success, with conservative Christians its primary opponents in all three countries. Most conservative politicians remained opposed, but those on the Left—Democrats in the United States, Liberals in Canada, and Socialists in France—were more sympathetic, at least by the 1990s. American President Bill Clinton tried to lift the ban on gays in the military, but in 1993 had to settle for the awkward “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise, a policy that sought to forbid both official inquiries and individual disclosures about sexual orientation. Neither supporters nor opponents of gay rights have expressed much satisfaction with that policy. By 2000, the French defense ministry simply forbade openly gay soldiers from trying to convert others. Canada had removed its ban on gays and lesbians in the military in 1992, and though considerable hostility toward homosexuals was said to remain by 2000, the country’s Department of National Defense had worked energetically to promote both equality and harmony. Gradually and haphazardly, support for marriage between persons of the same sex increased in all three countries during the 1990s, slightly more so in France and Canada than in the United States, with much greater support everywhere for legal unions not actually called marriages. Quebec, which had been the first province to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in its charter in 1977, was, with Nova Scotia, the first to allow “civil unions” between members of the same sex. Though the Canadian judiciary had supported full marriage equality, and though Canada became a popular destination for gays and lesbians from the United States who wanted to marry, new Liberal Prime
513
Minister Paul Martin, taking office in 2003, was less supportive than the judiciary had been. A few American states had established civil unions by 2004, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had even endorsed full marriage equality. But there was also support throughout the United States for a federal constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman. The French National Assembly, on the other hand, had passed the Civil Solidarity Pact in 1999, giving registered couples of the same sex many of the same rights and responsibilities as married persons, making France the first predominantly Catholic country to do so. Though the United States appeared to have a larger proportion of openly gay and lesbian politicians than either Canada or France, no gay American politician was more prominent than Bertrand Delanoë, the Socialist elected mayor of Paris in 2001. Some French Conservatives denounced Delanoë’s sexual candor, and the mayor was even stabbed in 2002 by a man allegedly harboring strong antigay sentiments. Delanoë nonetheless supported the establishment in Paris of the nation’s first gay archive, and he vigorously promoted gay tourism in his city. French and American politics remained in flux on gay issues. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a far-right conservative who strongly opposed gay rights, was Jacques Chirac’s principal opponent for the French presidency in 2002, but the following year Conservative French Prime Minister JeanPierre Raffarin met with gay rights advocates and supported including gays in antidiscrimination laws. It was a rare conservative politician in the United States who would support gay rights, but equally
514
GENÉT, EDMOND-CHARLES
rare by 2004 was the Democrat who would oppose equal treatment for gay men and lesbians, certainly in housing and employment, if not in the right to marry and adopt. John Ibson See also: Baldwin, James; Barney, Nat(h)alie Clifford; Catholic Church; Chirac, Jacques; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Foucault, Michel; Hocquenghem, Guy; Nova Scotia; Quebec; World War II. References Adam, Barry D. The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Adam, Barry D., et al., eds. The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Copley, Antony. Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980: New Ideas on the Family, Divorce, and Homosexuality. London/New York: Routledge, 1989. Dean, Carolyn J. The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Smith, Miriam. Lesbian and Gay Rights in Canada: Social Movements and EqualitySeeking, 1971–1995. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
GENÊT, EDMOND-CHARLES (1763–1834) French diplomat. Genêt was the French Republic’s first minister to the United States. His instructions to export revolution into the Spanish and British empires brought him into conflict with the administration of George Washington. Genêt’s intransigence caused a foreign policy crisis for the fledgling U.S. government and led the Washington administration to request Genêt’s recall.
Genêt was born at Versailles, where his father was chief interpreter at the French foreign ministry. In 1781 Genêt replaced his father as chief interpreter. In 1787, having already served in Berlin, Vienna, and London, Genêt secured a posting to Saint Petersburg as legation secretary. In 1792 he was expelled from Russia for his Republican views. When Genêt arrived in Paris in September 1792, the ruling Girondin faction recognized his Republicanism and named him minister plenipotentiary to the United States in November 1792. Genêt was ordered to maintain good relations and negotiate a new commercial treaty with the United States. Simultaneously, he was to arm privateers in U.S. ports and raise troops to attack Canada, Louisiana, and Florida, with or without the support of the U.S. government. The minister, on board the French frigate L’Embuscade, sailed from Rochefort at the end of February 1793. L’Embuscade arrived at Charleston, South Carolina, in early April 1793. During his stay there Genêt commissioned privateers and gave French consul MichelAnge-Bernard de Mangourit responsibility for the invasion of East Florida. That done, Genêt traveled overland to Philadelphia, enjoying enthusiastic public receptions along the way. The Washington administration, alarmed at the war in Europe and Genêt’s behavior, issued a proclamation on April 22, 1793, stating the United States would remain neutral in the European war and prohibiting U.S. citizens from getting involved in the hostilities. The administration also refused to advance payments from the U.S. debt to France, which the Girondins had hoped would finance the invasion projects. Debates over the Genêt mission, both within the government and
GENET, JEAN
in the media, crystallized political factions. The Federalists opposed the French Revolution, wished to draw closer to Great Britain, and were led by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. The Republicans supported the French Revolution and were led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Rather than moderate his course, Genêt informed Thomas Jefferson that he would appeal to the U.S. people. He also supported opponents of the administration and continued to violate U.S. neutrality. As late as July 1793, Genêt fitted out a privateer in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, he sent an agent to Canada and contacted a veteran of the American Revolution on the frontier, George Rogers Clark, to raise a force in Kentucky to liberate Louisiana and West Florida. The administration requested Genêt’s recall. The Jacobin government, which had repudiated Girondin foreign policy, agreed. Rather than return to an uncertain fate, Genêt requested asylum in the United States in early 1794. He married Cornelia Clinton, the daughter of New York’s governor, and settled down in the life of a gentleman farmer, essayist, and amateur scientist. Robert J. Alderson See also: Florida; French Revolution; Jefferson, Thomas; Kentucky; Louisiana; Piracy and Privateers; Republicanism; Rochefort; Washington, George. References Ammon, Harry. The Genêt Mission. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Bowman, Albert Hall. The Struggle for Neutrality: Franco-American Diplomacy during the Federalist Era. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974. DeConde, Alexander. Entangling Alliance: Politics and Diplomacy under George Washington. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1958.
515
GENET, JEAN (1910–1986) Jean Genet is best known as a key French playwright of the twentieth century. He is connected to the United States primarily through his radical political activity with the Black Panthers in the early 1970s. Born in Paris in 1910, to an unmarried mother, Genet was raised by foster parents and later in a series of state orphanages. A petty thief and prostitute, he spent much of his early adulthood in prison, where he began writing novels like Notre-dame-desfleurs/Our Lady of the Flowers and Miracle de la rose/Miracle of the Rose, unsettling combinations of autobiography and lyrical fantasy that unashamedly present Genet’s homosexuality, criminality, and hatred for his native France. Released from prison after World War II at the request of Cocteau and other influential intellectuals, Genet turned to theater as a preferred means of expression, his confidence as a prose writer shattered after the appearance of Sartre’s brilliant but intrusive existential analysis Saint Genet. Although Les Bonnes/The Maids and Le Balcon/The Balcony, quasi-absurdist portraits of the French proletariat in pathetic revolt, make clear Genet’s antipathy toward the ignominy of the class system, it is with Les Nègres, a deliberately crude, “antiwhite” analysis of the power of “black” hatred, and Les Paravents/The Screens, a highly controversial satire on the French presence in 1950s Algeria, that Genet started to experiment with a truly revolutionary theater, an experiment that led him on a path away from the “hexagon” (metropolitan France) and toward a truly international struggle against oppression. The American version of Les Nègres (The Blacks, starring future African American stars such as James Earl Jones and Maya Angelou) was a
516
GIRARD, FRANÇOIS
a latter-day Dreyfus, casting himself in the role of Zola. Leaving the United States and the Panthers when the movement became increasingly chaotic, Genet devoted much of the remainder of his life to the Palestinian struggle, traveling with the fedayeen and meeting with Yasser Arafat. His final work, Un Captif amoureux/Prisoner of Love (1983), was a monumental record of his involvement with the Panthers and the Palestinians, the complex prose shifting constantly between the Middle East and the United States, between present and past. Genet died in Paris in 1986. Andrew Asibong Jean Genet is best known as a key French playwright of the twentieth century. (Library of Congress)
tremendous success off Broadway in the early 1960s and linked Genet’s name to an increasingly visible black America. Having expressed disappointment at the insubstantial theatrics of Paris’s May 1968 and having already begun to take an interest in American revolutionary politics (he participated in anti–Vietnam War protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago later that year, meeting Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac during the visit), Genet consolidated his tie to U.S. events by his extensive collaboration in 1970 with the Black Panthers. Invited by the Panthers to lend their cause his support, Genet toured the United States with them, giving lectures on their behalf, recording official statements for President Nixon, intervening in the trial of Angela Davis, and writing the introduction to George Jackson’s prison letters. Attempting to illustrate a parallel between French and U.S. organized racism, he would refer to the arrested black activist Bobby Seale as
See also: Burroughs, William S.; Cocteau, Jean; Dreyfus Case; Kerouac, Jack; Sartre, JeanPaul; Vietnam War; Zola, Emile. References Read, Barbara, ed. Flowers and Revolution: A Collection of Writings on Jean Genet. London: Middlesex University Press, 1997. White, Edmund. Genet. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993.
GIRARD, FRANÇOIS (1963–) One of the most resourceful of Quebec’s film directors, born in Saint-Félicien. François Girard first came to cinema from video art. Constantly in search of new images, his productions are marked by a personal style, a meticulous artistic direction, and sophisticated aesthetic. These elements are always combined to demonstrate the durability of art and his passion for art. Director of many short experimental films rewarded worldwide, such as Le Train (1986) and Suspect Nº 1 (1989), Girard has filmed music videos as well as stage works. His adaptation of the show by the company Carbone 14, Le Dortoir (“The Dormitory,”1990), halfway between theater
GISCARD D’ESTAING,VALÉRY
and choreography, won him an international reputation and opened the doors to cinematographic production for him. After a first feature, Cargo (1990), which was interesting but disconcerting for both critics and public, he moved on to a more important project about the internationally renowned Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould. The great skill he demonstrated in this film by using continuous narrative structure inside a serial film, contributed to make 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) a success in North America and Europe. The film is built on the structure of the famous Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the best-known recording of Glenn Gould. Combining fact and fiction, it shows the complex character of the virtuoso through a kaleidoscopic prism that unveils his intimate certitude and distress. Girard’s passion for art led him to the production of remarkable essays on architecture, Le Jardin des ombres (“The Garden of Shadows,” 1993); cinema, with Souvenir d’Othello (“Memory of Othello,” 1995) about the Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier and her collaboration with Orson Welles; and music, with the adaptation of a Robert Lepage production, Peter Gabriel Secret World Live (1994). Finally, The Sound of Carcieri (1997) is the brilliant illustration of the second suite for cello by Bach played by the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma, in which the director skillfully combines his sure sense of Bach’s universe and architecture. It was above all The Red Violin (1998), starring Samuel Jackson, that gave Girard a wider audience. In this ambitious film, coproduced by Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, music and drama are interwoven to tell the life story of a violin through the centuries, from its conception in Cremone in the seventeenth
517
century, until an auction sale in Montreal in 1998, after travel through Austria, Oxford, and Maoist China. Using again the serial structure, the director happily crosses time, frontiers, and cultures to create a strong illustration of art as a fundamental part of life and of the way the passion for art can give life meaning. In the same way, Girard went on to stage Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in Toronto in 1997. He was interested by this project as an opportunity to find a way to renew the direction of opera in the same way as Stravinsky himself brought opera into question. Music again led him to stage the play Novocento by Alessandro Barrico in Montreal in 2001. This story of a pianist spending his whole life on a boat touches the very heart of François Girard’s work: idealism in its noble sense and perseverance in reaching the artist’s goal. Roger Bourdeau See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Lepage, Robert; Music (Classical); Theater. References Kleber, Pia, and Jörg Bochow. “Oedipus Rex and the Riddle of the New Media: François Girard at the Canadian Opera Company.” University of Toronto Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2003). La Rochelle, Réal, François Girard, and Alain Resnais. Opérascope: le film-opéra en Amérique: Avec les voix de Alain Resnais et François Girard. Montreal: Tryptique, 2003.
GISCARD D’ESTAING,VALÉRY (1926–) Third president of the Fifth Republic (1974–1981), born in 1926. Giscard d’Estaing was elected in 1974 (narrowly beating François Mitterrand) in the surprise elections occasioned by the
518
GISCARD D’ESTAING,VALÉRY
death in office of Georges Pompidou. He failed to be reelected for a second term in 1981, when he was defeated by Mitterrand, whose Socialist presidency and government ended twenty-three years of right-wing rule in France. Giscard’s presidency was undertaken against a backdrop of worldwide economic difficulties and within a context of vast aspirations for cultural, social, and political change deriving from France’s rapid modernization during the postwar period and voiced most radically in the events of May 1968. The success of Giscard’s time in office is still the subject of debate, but in a number of ways, Giscard’s domestic policies, diplomatic ambitions, and personal political style aimed to continue and refocus the modernization of the “trente années glorieuses” (thirty glorious years). As the first non-Gaullist president of the Fifth Republic, Giscard’s reinterpretations of France’s foreign and defense policies were marked by a subtle mix of change and continuity that redefined France’s stance in the international system. Sometimes described as the French JFK because of his youth—he was fortyseven when elected—and because of his apparent zeal to reform French politics and society, there were a number of ways in which Giscard’s exercise of the presidency exhibited features that were interpreted as an importation of American influences. An initial example of this was provided by Giscard’s approach to political communication, as he espoused newer and more “professional” ways of getting his electoral and governmental messages across to the French public. (Jean Lecanuet had introduced some techniques of American political marketing to his own presidential campaign in 1965.) Linked to this was Giscard’s personal style (at least during the
earlier years of his term in office), which he intended to be more informal and casual than that of his predecessors in the Elysée: unlike the remotely aloof de Gaulle and in contrast to Pompidou, Giscard attempted to portray himself as a young, dynamic, and approachable president. Many of the ways in which he attempted to impress this image upon the public may seem simplistic, but from the perspective of the 1970s, the image he portrayed was one that appeared to owe more to U.S. politics—interpreted by the French voters as more open and relaxed—than to the rigid and traditional approaches of the general and his Gaullist dauphin Pompidou. Thus Giscard at his investiture eschewed the traditional frock coat in favor of a lounge suit and chose a relatively informal official presidential photograph; likewise, he was keen to be seen with his wife and daughters in casual dress and private contexts and depicted himself as a man of simple culinary (scrambled eggs, albeit with smoked salmon) and musical (accordion playing) tastes. Such a “spin” of personal image was seen, in the 1970s, as an Americanization of the presidency, which mirrored France’s continued and accelerating transformation into a mass consumer society. Whereas under de Gaulle and Pompidou French military strategy, diplomacy, industrial, technological, and foreign policy had all been fundamentally predicated on the concept of national “grandeur” and the independence of action in the international system that was France’s privilege and right, under Giscard it is possible to see a cautious reinterpretation of the traditional Gaullist tenets of the Fifth Republic’s relation to the wider world. As a more committed supporter of European integra-
GLEIZES, ALBERT
tion than either of his predecessors, Giscard was active in encouraging the European Economic Community (particularly via his close relations with West Germany’s Chancellor Schmidt) as well as maintaining balanced relations with the superpowers. It was also under Giscard that cooperative European projects in aviation and space technology such as the Airbus and the Ariane satellite launcher came to fruition, helping, as the launch of development of the Concorde had done in the 1960s, to redraw the lines of Franco-European-American relations in transport and industrial/technological expertise. A significant feature of Giscard’s defense policy was that, militarily, France was also involved in some greater interaction with her European neighbors. Within the framework of negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union on nuclear arms and European concerns over the implications of U.S. strategy for conventional and (tactical) nuclear conflict in Europe, France accepted that, although her independent nuclear capability was to remain inviolable, the defense of France was also tied to that of Europe and, via Europe and NATO, to the United States. In 1976 the concept of sanctuarisation élargie (a kind of widened nuclear umbrella) was considered by Giscard and Chief of Staff Méry. Under this doctrine the deterrent protection afforded France by her strategic weapons would be extended to NATO allies, but the concept was not adopted as an operational principle, and French strategy remained tied to sanctuarisation, although with closer dialogue with NATO colleagues. Much of Giscard’s significance in terms of French-Atlantic relations concerns issues of image and symbolism. As a youthful president (thirty-six and fifteen years
519
younger respectively than his two immediate predecessors and ten years younger than his successor) during a decade of rapid change, his approaches to culture and society, the world economy, foreign policy, and diplomacy were marked by an experience of life and politics acquired in the postwar era, and therefore informed by a knowledge and understanding of “the American century” in its mature period. Most recently, the role he has undertaken in advising the European Union on the creation of a democratically elected European presidency will continue to redraw the bases upon which relations between the United States, France, and Europe are defined. Hugh Dauncey See also: Aviation; Chirac, Jacques; Concorde; Gaulle, General Charles de; Mitterrand, François; NATO; Pompidou, Georges; Space Technology. References Corcelette, Jean-Pierre, and Frédéric Abadie. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Paris: Balland, 1997. Frears, John. France in the Giscard Presidency. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Gaïti, Brigitte. “Des Ressources politiques à valeur relative—le difficile retour de Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.” Revue française de science politique 40, no. 6 (December 1990): 902–917.
GLEIZES, ALBERT (1881–1953) Painter, printmaker, and writer, born in Paris, who brought cubist and abstract art to New York through the treatise Du Cubisme (1912) and his colorful “Orphist” paintings. Gleizes’s apprenticeship in the family interior design firm shaped his lifelong commitment to the ideals of craftsmanship and communal identity. After three years
520
GLEIZES, ALBERT
of national service, Gleizes cofounded the Association Ernest Renan in 1905, through which he created working-class theater productions. In 1906 he joined the Abbaye de Créteil collective, which sought to free creativity from financial constraint by collaborating on a printing firm. After his impressionist debut at the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts in 1902, Gleizes joined Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger in exhibiting at the 1910 Salon d’Automne and in “room 41” at the Salon des Indépendants of 1911, which, due to Picasso’s and Braque’s reluctance to exhibit, were the public’s first encounters with cubism. As part of the Duchamp brothers’ Puteaux group, Gleizes and Metzinger helped to articulate new visions of cubist form and the modern artist-craftsman in their treatise Du Cubisme (1912), as well as in the “Cubist House” installation. The coloristic cubism of Delaunay and Gleizes at the 1912 “Section d’Or” (literally, “section of gold,” referring to the ideal mathematical proportions of the golden section) exhibition was labeled Orphism by Apollinaire and triggered the American “Synchromatist” paintings of Stanton Macdonald Wright and Morgan Russell. Along with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Gleizes created a sensation at the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Armory in New York. After his demobilization in 1915, Gleizes sailed for New York with his bride, the painter Juliette Roche. Paintings, such as Brooklyn Bridge (1915, Guggenheim Museum, New York), and unpublished writings reveal Gleizes’s initial excitement about the metropolis, which faded into disquietude about the city’s poverty and the nation’s entry into war. An aloof ob-
server of Duchamp and Picabia’s New York dadaist experiments, Gleizes briefly explored a more abstract painterly style before retreating almost entirely into writing, including an unpublished treatise, “En attendant la victoire: L’Art dans l’Evolution générale”/“Waiting for Victory: Art in General Evolution,” and experiencing a private spiritual awakening unaffiliated with any institutional religion. Returning to France in 1919, Gleizes championed a pan-European abstract art. However, amid the return to classicism after the horrors of war, the Exposition de la Section d’Or and his treatise La Peinture et ses lois (“Painting and Its Laws,” 1923) met with muted responses. During the interwar years, Gleizes helped form the artist group Abstraction Création, which included dissidents from Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Gleizes formed an artist commune, Moly-Sabata, at Serrières south of Lyons. In La Forme et l’histoire (“Form and History,” 1932), Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire (“Toward a Plastic Consciousness,” 1932), and Homocentrisme (“Homocentrism,” 1937), Gleizes advocated collective life and the inspiration of Roman, early Christian, and non-European art. Gleizes focused upon mural painting ensembles, notably for l’Exposition Internationale des Arts Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exhibition of Technical Arts in Modern Life) and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (Arts and Crafts Conservatory). During World War II, Gleizes formed another artist commune in Saint-Rèmy-de-Provence. Gleizes’s last work was etchings for Pascal’s Pensées (1950). He died in Avignon in 1953. Claire O’Mahony See also: Duchamp, Marcel; Painting; World War I; World War II.
GLISSANT, EDOUARD References Brooke, Peter. Albert Gleizes for and against the Twentieth Century. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2001. Robbins, Daniel. Albert Gleizes. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1964.
GLISSANT, EDOUARD (1928–) Martinican novelist, poet, and essayist. Recognized as one of the foremost writers of the Caribbean, Glissant is as significant for his political and philosophical works as for the novels and volumes of poetry that he has published. He has played an influential role in theorizing the construction of cultural identity in postcolonial societies in general, but his primary concern has always been with the situation of the French Antilles, which he sees as a society wholly created out of transatlantic crossings: from France in the case of the initial colonization, from West Africa in the slave trade, and to France in twentiethcentury immigration, culminating in the ambiguous assimilation into France, as Martinique acquired the status of département d’outre-mer in 1946. In Le Discours antillais/Caribbean Discourse (1981), Glissant presents Martinique as a “diseased” society, lacking the sense of collective identity that would make autonomy and political agency possible. Both historical and contemporary factors are responsible for this condition: transportation severed the African slaves from their traditional culture, and, later, the colonial policy of assimilation instilled an alienated identification with French culture. History is experienced as trauma and loss, and contemporary life is blighted by the lack of viable economic independence and by political passivity. Glissant’s proposed solution is,
521
firstly, to free Martinicans from the pressures and the fantasies resulting from these Atlantic connections by creating a countervailing sense of belonging to the island itself. In the period of international decolonization movements in the 1950s and 1960s, this took the form of the Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l’indépendance, founded in 1959 by Glissant and Paul Niger (with the encouragement of Frantz Fanon) to promote the notion of antillanité: Martinique as part of a federation of independent Caribbean nation-states. De Gaulle responded to this in 1961 by banning the founders from the Antilles: thus Glissant spent the early 1960s in France and was actively involved in anticolonial politics in Paris, supporting the FLN in the Algerian war of independence. On his return to Martinique in 1965, Glissant set up the Institut d’Etudes Martiniquaises to counteract the influence of the official French education, teach young Martinicans about their own distinctive culture, and provide a forum for research and debate on social issues in the island. National identity is thus crucial to Glissant’s thought in this period, but it is equally important to him that it must not be exclusive or inward-looking, but based in an open and equal system of relations with other communities. The diversity of the world’s cultures is an absolute value that must be safeguarded (Glissant’s regard for the work of Victor Segalen is relevant here). Later, in Poétique de la relation/Poetics of Relation (1990), Introduction à une poétique du divers (“Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity,” 1996), and Traité du tout-monde (“Treatise on the Whole-World,” 1997), this emphasis on “relation” and diversity on a global scale is developed further, to the point where the original focus on national
522
GLISSANT, EDOUARD
independence becomes marginalized. This “late” Glissant is sometimes seen as having abandoned his commitment to Martinique in favor of a postmodern Deleuzian enthusiasm for deterritorialization; in fact, however, he remains actively involved in the island both on a political level, in various ecological campaigns, and in his poetic writings. The pessimistic assessment Glissant made for a time of Martinique’s “morbidity”—which prompted him to return to Paris in 1980 when offered the job of editing UNESCO’s magazine, Courrier de l’UNESCO—has been replaced by a new confidence in the island’s participation in the opening up of the world community that Glissant sums up in the idea of the tout-monde. This confidence has been reinforced by his involvement in the International Writers’ Parliament, of which he has been honorary president since 1993. Since 1988 he has held academic posts in the United States, first at Louisiana State University and subsequently, since 1995, at the City University of New York. But in his critical essays he has always promoted a vision of America that extends beyond the United States to the whole continent and the Caribbean; with the notable exception of a long-standing interest in Faulkner— culminating in his Faulkner, Mississippi (1996)—he has concentrated his attention mainly on Latin American and Caribbean writers and artists (including Saint-John Perse, whose childhood was spent in Guadeloupe). “Le Roman des Amériques” (The Novel of the Americas) in Le Discours antillais emphasizes the different conceptions of landscape and of time that inform American literature in this enlarged sense. Thus despite the influence of the Parisian literary circles in which he moved in the 1950s, and especially his association
with Les Lettres nouvelles and its editor Maurice Nadeau, Glissant’s own poetry and novels have always expressed a distinctively non-European, Caribbean vision of the world. The titles of his first two collection of poems, Un Champ d’îles (“A Field of Islands,” 1953) and La Terre inquiète (“The Anxious Land,” 1954), indicate the importance of this geographical specificity in his work, while the epic cycle of six poems, Les Indes (“The Indies,” 1956), is organized around the split between colonial intention and geographical reality: Columbus’s dream of discovering the Indies and his real discovery and colonization of the Americas. The theme of this split is echoed in the later collection entitled Pays rêvé, pays réel (“Dreamed Country, Real Country,” 1985). The strong sense of place with which he invests Martinique is always based in the concrete, sensuous features of the landscape—in the 1959 poems Le Sel noir/ Black Salt, but equally in his novels. The first of Glissant’s novels, La Lézarde/The Ripening (1958), places the story of a politically motivated murder in the context of a journey down the eponymous river to the sea. Le Quatrième Siècle/The Fourth Century (1964) traces the descendants of two Africans who arrived on the same slave ship at the end of the eighteenth century, one who remained a slave and one who escaped to found a Maroon community in the hills, showing the slow process of putting down roots in the new landscape, through to the 1946 election that formed the backdrop to La Lézarde. Malemort (1975) evokes, in tones varying from simple pathos to sardonic humor, the abjection and despair of the “morbid” society that Martinique, according to Glissant, became in the wake of departmentalization. La Case du commandeur
GODARD, JEAN-LUC
(“The Commander’s Hut,” 1981) and Mahagony (1987) reintroduce the element of historical narrative that characterized Le Quatrième Siècle, but in a more fragmented and disorienting fashion. These novels, like the previous ones, are wholly based in Martinique, but Glissant’s next work of (quasi-) fiction, the enormous Tout-Monde (1993), consists of a number of very loosely connected episodes ranging from the Caribbean to France, Italy, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere; some of these are purely fictional, often restaging characters from earlier novels, and some are autobiographical. All express a newly found exhilaration at the increasing interconnectedness of diverse cultures and communities and a new, more flexible and plural sense of personal identity; in this unpredictable and chaotic world it will, Glissant believes, prove impossible for traditional hierarchies and modes of domination to survive. Sartorius (1999) moves away from realistic representation to recount the story of an invented people, “les Batoutos,” who exemplify Glissant’s notion of errance—a kind of migration that is not based on territorial conquest and oppression. Le Monde incréé (“The Uncreated World,” 2000), however, an intergeneric text that he describes as poétrie, a combination of poetry, drama, and story, returns to Martinique and some of the themes and characters familiar from his earlier work. His most recent novel, Ormerod (2003), is also concerned with the Caribbean and the relationships between Martinique and other islands, notably Saint Lucia and Grenada. Celia Britton See also: Deleuze, Gilles; Fanon, Frantz; Gaulle, General Charles André Marie Joseph de; Grenada; Martinique; Saint Lucia; Saint-John Perse; Segalen, Victor.
523
References Britton, Celia M. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Dash, J. Michael. Edouard Glissant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
GODARD, JEAN-LUC (1930–) Probably the best known—certainly the most written about—of contemporary filmmakers in France (not “French filmmakers,” since, although born in France, Godard is Swiss). Godard began as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, one of the prime movers in the politique des auteurs, an editorial policy inspired by the work of U.S. directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock that emphasized the authorial and creative centrality of the director. His first feature, A Bout de souffle/Breathless (1960), is dedicated to the Hollywood B-movie production company Monogram Pictures and focuses on a love affair between an American student in Paris (played by Jean Seberg) and a French airline steward turned robber and police killer (Jean-Paul Belmondo) obsessed with Humphrey Bogart. The relationship between U.S. and French culture, characterized by simultaneous mutual fascination and incomprehension, is mediated through Hollywood techniques such as the jump cut and culminates in Belmondo’s being gunned down in the street after Seberg has betrayed him. The strong political commitment to the Left that was to inform Godard’s work after 1968 is already hinted at in his earlier films, such as Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier, 1963) about the Algerian war, Vivre sa vie/My Life
524
GODARD, JEAN-LUC
French director Jean-Luc Godard (L) gives French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo some advice before filming a scene for Pierrot le fou. (Alain Nogues/Corbis Sygma)
to Live (1962) with its Brechtian treatment of prostitution, and the gloriously Technicolor Pierrot le fou (“Pierot the Fool,” 1965), in which Belmondo plays Ferdinand/Pierrot, a writer whose commitment to the intellectual life sits ill with his passion for Marianne (Godard’s then wife Anna Karina), who prefers popular culture and dreams of going to Miami while Ferdinand favors Florence. This gender inversion of A Bout de souffle’s Franco-American cultural relationship ends, like the earlier film, in violent death—this time for both partners—after she has betrayed him. Godard’s concern for the exploitation of women, often figured by prostitution, exists side by side with a periodic misogynist streak epitomized by his complicity
with the Hollywood myth of the treacherous femme fatale. From the late 1960s his criticism of the Americanization of France became more outspoken, foreshadowing the events of May 1968 in La Chinoise and the venomously anticonsumerist Week End (both 1967). 1968 revolutionized Godard’s work, which embarked upon a sustained interrogation of the relationship between sound and image, seen in commercial cinema as profoundly imbricated with a bourgeois ideology that needed to be overthrown. He moved from Paris to Grenoble with his professional and personal partner Anne-Marie Miéville and began working in video, before returning to Switzerland and the art-house cinema with Sauve qui peut (la vie)/Slow Motion (1980). A preoccupation with the transcendental has informed his work of the past twenty years or so— most notoriously in Je vous salue, Marie/Hail Mary of 1983, lambasted sight unseen by the pope, and most recently in Eloge de l’amour/In Praise of Love (2001), which in part belies its romantic title through its astringent observations on the French Resistance and on Hollywood cultural hegemony—itself, in a revival of a 1968 trope, in need of being resisted. Godard remains a major contemporary cultural icon despite—some may say because of—the difficulty of viewing much of his work. Keith Reader
See also: Cahiers du cinéma; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Seberg, Jean. References McCabe, Colin. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Sterritt, David. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
GODBOUT, JACQUES
GODBOUT, JACQUES (1933–) Novelist and film director. Jacques Godbout gained a master’s degree in arts from the Université de Montréal in 1954 and spent three years in Africa (1954–1957), mainly Ethiopia, where he was a teacher at the University College of Addis Ababa. Back in Montreal, he was hired as a scriptwriter by the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada, in 1958. Godbout has many interests and brings many constant themes into his films: national identity, the subjectivity of perceptions, the quest for origins, and the place of Quebec in the world. As a filmmaker, he has shot many documentaries and film essays outside Quebec, and especially in France. In his debut, Godbout codirected Georges Dufaux’s documentary about early European immigration in Canada, entitled Pour quelques arpents de neige (1962), inspired by Voltaire’s words about New France. Godbout’s first feature film, entitled YUL 871 (1966), was the story of a French engineer who emigrated to Montreal and whose Jewish parents had tragically disappeared during World War II. But the film went unnoticed. His documentary Les Vrais Cousins (“The Real Cousins,” 1970) is a quest for his own French origins in Normandy, but also a way to underline the distance (geographical and cultural) that still exists between contemporary Québécois and France. His most popular feature film, IXE-13 (1971), is a parody of detective stories and spy films from the 1950s, with a Brechtian approach and a mixture of melodrama and comedy, featuring a funny French character full of clichés (played by a comic actor from Montreal, Marcel Saint-Germain).
525
Since that time, the director Jacques Godbout has made exclusively documentary films, using fiction only for his books. His funny film essay about dogs, Aimezvous les chiens? (“Do You Like Dogs?” 1975), is a social comment about the cult of bourgeois dogs and deluxe pets, mainly in France and the United States. For his codirected documentary Distorsions (1981), Jacques Godbout and Professor Florian Sauvageau (codirector, from Laval University) asked African journalists to present their perceptions (and their own clichés) about ways of life in America and Europe. In a short documentary entitled Québec Soft (La Musique adoucit les moeurs) (“Music Softens Customs,” 1985), Godbout raises the question of French culture and identity inside an ocean of AngloAmerican mass-produced commercial music, interviewing Luc Plamondon and artists from Quebec who have chosen to sing in English. Also in that film, French author Jacques Attali gives a few comments about the imagined country in which many Québécois seem to live, as if Quebec was already politically independent: according to this logic, if many people live in that virtual situation, that could replace the real quest for a real sovereign state, explains Attali. Godbout’s documentary Pour l’amour du stress (“For the Love of Stress,” 1991) is the story of Hans Selye, who first theorized research about stress and who lived in Montreal. His next film, L’Affaire Norman William (1994), also focuses on a man who spent time in Europe and Quebec. Commenting again on the issue of Quebec, Godbout’s film Le Sort de l’Amérique /The Fate of America (1996) is a meditation about the consequences of the
526
GONÇALVES
DE
MAGALHÃES, DOMINGOS JOSÉ
famous battle between Britain and France that took place on the Plains of Abraham in 1759; Godbout even introduces two men whose ancestors were respectively Montcalm and Wolfe, the two generals who fought for the future of New France. After retiring from the NFB, Godbout released a tribute to novelist and friend Anne Hébert in 2002. Like Anne Hébert, Réjean Ducharme, and Denise Bombardier, Godbout has published most of his novels with publishers in France. This explains why, in 1973, he received the Prix France-Canada for his novel L’Aquarium (1962) and the Prix Dupau de l’Académie française for his novel D’Amour P.Q. (1971). Among many other distinctions, he also received the Prix Belgique-Canada in 1978. Yves Laberge See also: Bombardier, Denise; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Ducharme, Réjean; Hébert, Anne; New France; Plamondon, Luc; Quebec; World War II. References Bellemare, Yvon. Jacques Godbout romancier. Montreal: Parti-Pris, 1984. Godbout, Jacques, and Richard Martineau. Le Buffet: Dialogue sur le Québec à l’an 2000. Montreal: Boréal, 1998. Klinkenberg, Jean-Marie. Une Etude de Salut Galarneau! de Jacques Godbout. Montreal: Boréal, 1997.
GONÇALVES DE MAGALHÃES, DOMINGOS JOSÉ (1811–1882) Brazilian romantic poet and patriot, deeply influenced by French romantic literature. Gonçalves de Magalhães was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1811. A contemporary of
the first years of the presence of the Portuguese court in Brazil (a result of the Napoleonic invasions of the Iberian peninsula in 1808), his first contact with French culture took place on Brazilian soil. In fact, with the aim of giving the empire and its new capital a brilliance compatible with his desire to civilize, and in order to legitimize the monarchy, João VI’s minister for foreign affairs recruited a number of artists via the intermediary of the Portuguese ambassador in Paris. This French artistic delegation arrived in Rio in March 1816, bringing with it materials and paintings. Among the eighteen “missionaries” was the historical painter Jean-Baptiste Debret who, despite the failure of the mission, remained in Brazil for several years. It was during this stay that Gonçalves de Magalhães met him and discovered his own passion for painting. It was also on Debret’s advice that he enrolled at the Académie des beaux-arts, which had been founded in Rio in November 1820. Nevertheless, in 1832, he opted for the field of medicine, while at the same time publishing his first poems. It was at this time that he traveled to Europe, where he discovered the literature of the romantic period, which had a strong influence on his writing and which, in turn, constituted the distinguishing feature of Brazilian romanticism. His 1836 work Suspiros Poéticos e Saudades is considered to be a central text of the movement. In the same year, he went to Paris, where he founded, with some Brazilian friends, the journal Niterói: Revista Brasilense and wrote on the need to reform Brazilian literature by making it a more truly national literature. Gonçalves de Magalhães’s encounter with the romantic literature of Chateau-
GOODIS, DAVID
briand, Lamartine, and Manzoni, with its strong patriotic current, rendered his own poetry more mature, marking a transition from earlier phases. He explored the themes that were dear to romanticism and added that of the native to them. Along with José de Alancar, another representative of this first generation of Brazilian romantics, he gave an epic tone to this indigenist literature, which played its part in the construction of an epic recounting of the birth of the Brazilian nation. After his return to Brazil in 1838, he wrote Antônio José, the first Brazilian tragedy, which was performed by the National Drama Company. In parallel to these literary activities, he demonstrated a high degree of political commitment to his country. As well as his post as professor at the Colégio Pedro II, he was secretary to the Duque de Caxias, governor and member of parliament for Rio Grande do Sul. A supporter of the emperor, he composed a romantic and patriotic poem in his honor: A confederação dos Tamoios. In exchange for this devotion, he received the title of baron and viscount of Araguaia. He died in Rome in 1882, far from his home country, like most of the European romantic poets, in another European city that was one of the sources of inspiration for his literary works. Jorge P. Santiago See also: Brazil; Chateaubriand, François-René de; Literary Relations. References Bosi, Alfredo. História concisa da literatura brasileira. São Paulo: Cultrix, 2002. Cândido, Antônio. Formação da literatura brasileira: Momentos decisivos. 9th ed. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 2000.
527
GOODIS, DAVID (1917–1967) Born in Philadelphia, David Goodis came to prominence as a crime writer during the pulp fiction heyday of the 1940s and 1950s. As with many writers of his generation and genre, his work came to the attention of international filmmakers who adapted it for the screen in Noir-style movies—low-budget thrillers whose major features were their urban locations and underworld characters, with liberal doses of sex, crime, and alcohol. While many such novels (including those by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet) were routinely adapted for the American screen, many were also translated for the international market, including the French Série noire collection. This collection, published from 1944 by Gallimard, had a high profile in French cultural circles, and the atmospheric American texts were particularly admired by filmmakers. The first David Goodis novel to come to cinematic attention was Dark Passage (1946), which was adapted for the screen in a film of the same name starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (Delmar Daves, 1947). The film was a boxoffice success and led to a brief career for Goodis as a Hollywood screenwriter. Goodis’s critical reputation took off after François Truffaut adapted Down There (1956) as the follow-up to his groundbreaking new wave debut Les 400 Coups/The 400 Blows (1959). Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Piano Player (1960) imaginatively transposed Goodis’s novel from Philadelphia to Paris, while offering a novel Gallic take on Noir content and style. Truffaut’s love affair with American pulp fiction continued in adaptations of books by Charles Williams, Henry Farrell,
528
GRANDBOIS, ALAIN
and William Irish, while further Goodis novels were adapted by filmmakers such as Henri Verneuil (The Burglar, 1953/Le Casse, 1971) and René Clément (La Course de lièvre à travers les champs/And Hope to Die, 1972, based on Black Friday, 1954). In the 1980s, Goodis came to the attention of the cinéma du look (a film style emerging from advertising based on the cult of the image), when his novel The Moon in the Gutter (1953) was adapted by Jean-Jacques Beineix as La Lune dans le caniveau (1983), starring Gérard Depardieu, Nastassia Kinski, and Victoria Abril. In spite of his remarkable international visibility, and a long career as a writer of novels, short stories, and screenplays, Goodis died in obscurity in 1967. Ironically, he received significantly more attention and critical acclaim in France than he ever did in his native United States. Sue Harris See also: Beineix, Jean-Jacques; Cinema, 1945–Present; Crime Fiction; Depardieu, Gérard; Film Noir; Truffaut, François; World War I. References Garnier, Philippe. Goodis: La Vie en noir et blanc. Paris: De l’Olivier, 1998. Holmes, Diana, and Robert Ingram. François Truffaut. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
GRANDBOIS, ALAIN (1900–1975) French Canadian poet, essayist, novelist, journalist, and extensive world traveler, Alain Grandbois became a means through which Quebec came to know and be known by the four corners of the globe. Born in Saint Casimir de Portneuf, Quebec, Grandbois completed a law degree at Laval University in 1924 and then
traveled between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-nine in Europe, Africa, and the Orient, thanks to his family’s fortune. He frequented numerous artists and writers of the day, including Ernest Hemingway, Paul Valéry, Miguel de Unamuno, and Saint-John Perse. A descendant of French Canadian explorers who arrived in New France in 1635, Grandbois closely identified with and immortalized the life story of Louis Joliet in Né à Québec (Born in Quebec). First published in Paris in 1933 by Albert Messein, the novel was not published in Quebec until 1948 by Fidès. The following year, a collection of his poems, Poèmes d’Hankéou, was published in China. Repatriated in 1939 because of war, the author established himself near the city of Quebec, where he wrote Les Voyages de Marco Polo, published in 1941. From April 18, 1950, to September 22, 1952, Grandbois directly related his exotic journeys and fabulous tales on the Radio Canada program Visages du monde/Faces of the World, which was later published by Hurtubise in 1971. In addition to his writing career, Grandbois worked as bibliographer of the Saint Sulpice library in Montreal, and in 1961 he was appointed to the Musée de la province de Québec. He collaborated significantly with several journals, including Amérique française, Poésie 46, Liaison, Liberté, and La Nouvelle Revue canadienne. On three separate occasions he received the Prix Athanase-David (1941, 1947, and 1969), in addition to recognition in the form of other prizes, including the Prix Duvernay in 1950, Prix Paris-Québec in 1963, and the Prix Molson in 1964. In 1968, he was awarded the Médaille d’or de l’Académie canadienne-française for the ensemble of his work.
GRAPPELLI, STÉPHANE
Alain Grandbois is generally recognized as one of the first great modern poets of Quebec, and he inspired many poets of later generations. His poetry is characterized as symbolic yet simple, breaking with classicism and covering the themes of love, death, and exile. In his prose, Grandbois often contrasted New and Old World societies, clearly identifying the magical qualities of both. He expressed a particular love and appreciation of Europe, yet his writing was securely anchored in North American landscape and history. In 1977, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Québec established archives of his life and work. Other major publications by Grandbois include Les Iles de la nuit (“The Islands of the Night,” 1944), Avant le Chaos (“Before Chaos,” 1945), Rivages de l’homme (“Shores of Man,” 1948), and L’Etoile pourpre (“The Crimson Star,” 1957). Maureen Waters See also: Hemingway, Ernest; Joliet, Louis; New France; Quebec. References Beaver, John. “The Prose of Alain Grandbois: The Landscape of an Apprentice-Poet.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 4, no. 1 (1975): 136–145. Blais, Jacques. Présence d’Alain Grandbois. Quebec: Presses Universitaires de l’Université Laval, 1974.
GRAPPELLI, STÉPHANE (1908–1997) Born in Paris in 1908, French jazzman Stéphane Grappelli studied the violin formally at the Paris Conservatory, but grew up playing the piano. After World War I he made a living performing for dance bands and, in cinemas, playing the accompanying
529
scores for silent films, typically either Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or George Gershwin, depending on the mood required, although Grappelli himself preferred the work of Maurice Ravel. In 1934 he met Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt, and together they formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France, proving in time that distinctive and powerful jazz could be fashioned miles away from New Orleans and the United States. Whereas his partner spent World War II on the Continent, Grappelli fled to England, where in London he could be heard jamming with George Shearing, the pianist, blind from birth (and hence not a soldier). Both Grappelli and Reinhardt survived the cataclysm of 1939–1945, but whereas the guitarist died soon thereafter, the violinist lived until 1997, having time for another career, out of his friend’s shadow. Enjoying sharing the duties of the soloist onstage—to play versions of call and response—he continued his habit of collaboration, “meeting” with countless artists of various genres, young and old, who were leaders in their own right, from Jean-Luc Ponty to Yehudi Menuhin and Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist. Among these allies can also be counted, on the piano, Martial Solal, born in Algeria, and Gary Burton, a master of the vibraphone from Indiana. In each, Grappelli, whose violin’s mellifluous, singing tone remained a constant, sought Django. A 1969 recording of Grappelli’s with Barney Kessel (President Jimmy Carter’s “Ambassador of Jazz,” known for sets with the likes of Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker) on guitar is titled “I Remember Django.” There is a touch of both nostalgia and defeatism in this tribute, coinciding as it did with the dominance of rock and roll and the resourceful yet icono-
530
GRATIANT, GILBERT
clastic attempt of someone like Miles Davis to revive, through funk, jazz’s relevance and popularity. Because they were artistic and productive on the same instrument, comparisons can be made between the styles of Grappelli and Stuff Smith (1909–1967) of Portsmouth, Ohio. They did swing together, but where the former’s aesthetic was poised and suave, the latter’s tended to be comedic and percussive—welcoming a dissonance absent in Grappelli’s oeuvre, who despite his love of Claude Debussy never did seek to surrender his connection to the coherence of classical Western composition. Johan Åhr See also: Jazz; Music (Classical); New Orleans; Reinhardt, Django; World War II. References Balmer, Paul. Stéphane Grappelli: With and Without Django. London: Sanctuary, 2003. Grappelli, Stéphane. Mon Violon pour tout bagage: Mémoires. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1992.
GRATIANT, GILBERT (1895–1985) According to the writer Aimé Césaire, Gratiant was the “first Martinican intellectual in the modern sense of the term.” He made illustrious use of Creole, and one of the distinguishing features of his work is its equal linguistic division between French and Creole. Born in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, to the mulatto bourgeoisie, Gratiant was one of the last witnesses of the world that disappeared after the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902. He offered a detailed account of this event in Par les deux bouts de la lorgnette, chroniques du passé réfléchi (“From
Both Ends of the Eyeglass, Chronicles of a Reflected Past,” InterAntilles, 1974). From the age of ten, Gratiant studied in France, and after the baccalaureate, he entered the Henri IV preparatory school in Paris and was elected its president. The philosopher Alain (pseudonym of Emile Chartier) was one of the teachers whose influence was to be deep and lasting. During World War I, Gratiant fought at the front in the Champagne region where he was seriously wounded. He described his recovery period in Martinique as “creolization holidays.” When he returned to metropolitan France in 1919, Gratiant started to work as a teacher. He received the agrégation in 1923 and was posted to the lycée de la Martinique, where he counted among his students Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, who, some years later in Paris, along with Léopold Senghor, were to found the négritude movement. Gratiant criticized the abuses of the colonial administration. His first protest texts were published in 1925 under the title Cris d’un jeune (“Shouts of a Young Man”). In 1927, with a group of local writers, he cofounded and directed the journal Lucioles, “the first Antillean literary manifesto worthy of the name” (Senghor [1948] 2002, p. 29). After his return to France, Gratiant published Poèmes en vers faux/“Poems in False Lines,” in French in 1931 and wrote for La Revue du monde noir. The year 1932 marked a decisive stage in Gratiant’s career. The journal Légitime Défense singled him out as the archetype of a culturally alienated person. From 1933, Gratiant taught in two large Parisian lycées. A response to Légitime Défense was given in 1935 in a long article entitled “Mulâtres . . . pour le bien et le mal,” which was published by the journal L’Etudiant noir. In it,
GREEN, JULIEN HARTRIDGE
Gratiant explained the stance that he would never cease to defend, most notably in his long lyrical poem Credo des sang-mêlé ou Je veux chanter la France”/“Credo of MixedBlood People or I Want to Sing France,” which celebrated the creation of “a new Creole civilization” (Gratiant 1996). Joseph lève! (“Joseph get up!”), the first poem in Creole, dates from 1935. The following year, Cinq Poèmes martiniquais/ “Five Martinican Poems” was published, subtitled Fab’Compè Zicaque, legitimizing Creole as a literary language. Gratiant made only two more trips to Martinique before his death and burial in Paris in 1985. Gratiant also published poems in French (1963) and essays in which his originality is expressed, arguing, most notably, for autonomous status for Martinique, in the context of the French Republic (1961). An atypical figure, Gratiant was an innovative visionary, expressing the originality of métis experience. A “bilingual poet,” he was the precursor of many developments, aiming for equal dignity for all components of the Antillean heritage. Isabelle Gratiant See also: Césaire, Aimé; Créolité; Damas, LéonGontran; Language; Martinique; Republicanism; Revue du monde noir, La; World War I. References Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Gratiant, Gilbert. “Credo des sang-mêlé ou je veux chanter la France.” Paris: Soulanges, 1948. Reprint, in Fables créoles et autres écrits. Paris: Stock, 1996. Joubert, Jean-Louis. Introduction to “Gilbert Gratiant, poète créole.” Fables créoles et autres écrits. Gilbert Gratiant. Paris: Stock, 1996. Senghor, L. S. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française. Paris: PUF, 1948. Reprint, Presses Universitaires de France, collection Quadrige, 2002.
531
GREEN, JULIEN HARTRIDGE (1900–1998) Novelist, essayist, and playwright, born in Paris, in 1900, to parents from the American South. Green was educated in Paris at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and at the University of Virginia. Although France was his adopted home, he never gave up his American citizenship and carried an American passport until he died in 1998. In 1971 he was the first foreigner elected to the prestigious Académie Française. A prolific writer, Green wrote primarily in French and produced over a dozen novels, five plays, a four-volume autobiography, several biographies, essays, and a multivolume daily journal published from 1938 to 1996. Signing his English books as Julian and the French ones as Julien, Green saw his role as an outsider in each country, yet as a cultural observer, bridging the differences between the two cultures of America and France. Neither nation is spared his critique of provincial life and spiritual ennui. In particular, his novels detail the lives of tormented characters who are chiefly haunted by greed, carnal sins, irrational fears, and self-loathing. Critics have often compared Green’s dark and melancholic works to those of Edgar Allan Poe. Green’s early Journals describe in great detail the recurring motifs in his work: his feelings about his family’s heritage as told to him through his parents’ stories of the antebellum South and the Civil War, and his sense of bitterness regarding the Civil War years, slavery, and the injustice in NorthSouth relations. Green openly explored these questions in the first drafts of his novel, Mont-Cinère/Avarice House (1926), which had a decidedly historical angle and which fictionalized the hospitality that his
532
GRENADA
deeply influenced especially by his mother’s experiences. In interviews for Le Figaro and Le Magazine littéraire (1989), Green spoke openly about his perception of the destructive nature of Northern propaganda during the Civil War and described his mother’s family’s slaves and his dislike of Lincoln. When asked whether he thought that the South was still a “nation,” he answered in the affirmative. Carina Yervasi
American writer Julien Green spent most of his life in France. (Library of Congress)
grandfather had shown General Sherman during the Civil War. At the advent of World War II, Green left Paris and spent the war years in the United States, teaching at Goucher College (Maryland) and Mills College (California) and writing essays about his American experiences that were published primarily in Le Figaro. These short essays written specifically for French readers depicted such contemporary American cultural phenomena as the development of cities (Detroit and Savannah, for example), the use of colloquial language in the South, and arts events. This second return to his parents’ native land, as he notes in his Journals, refueled his desire to paint a more developed and personal portrait of the South. Much of Green’s fictional work from the 1950s through the 1990s touches on historical events, social questions of slavery, and the politics of North-South relations and is
See also: American Civil War; Detroit; Language; Literary Relations; Poe, Edgar Allan; Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de; Slavery. References O’Dwyer, Michael. Julien Green: A Critical Study. Dublin: Four Courts, 1997. Robinson, Paul. “Three French Novelists: André Gide, Jean Genet, Julien Green.” Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 169–258. Stanley, Robert. “Julien Green.” The Contemporary Novel in France. Ed. William Thompson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995: 54–73.
GRENADA Along with the smaller adjacent islands of Carriacou and Petit Martinique, Grenada is an independent island state, the most southerly of the Windward Islands with a total area of 344 square kilometers (133 square miles). Because of emigration, the population remains stable at around 90,000. Most (82 percent) are descended from African slaves; the remainder are mulatto (13 percent) and of European and East Indian descent (5 percent). The island was named Concepcíon by Columbus, who found the island on his third voyage (1498), but was changed to Granada by
GRENADA
533
This print shows the victorious French troops in the British battery on Grenada. (Library of Congress)
Spanish sailors, to Grenade by the French, and finally to Grenada by the British. For over a century after discovery, the indigenous Caribs fiercely resisted European attempts to inhabit the island. They were finally overcome by the French in 1654. The country was settled and controlled for the next century by French expatriates, who at first established small farms that produced indigo, tobacco, and cotton for export. Then small estates were replaced by large sugar plantations that led to the importation of African slaves. Spice and cocoa production later superseded cane agriculture. The island changed hands several times through the eighteenth century. It was ceded to the British in 1763 by the Treaty of Paris, regained by the French in
the Treaty of Versailles in 1779, but permanently yielded to Britain in 1783. The British promptly changed place-names, confiscated the holdings of the Catholic Church, and barred Catholics from political activity. This fueled a French settler uprising in 1795 led by a mulatto planter, Julien Fédon. The rebels succeeded in capturing the entire island and executing the governor and forty-seven others. However, the British regained political control in 1796. The French legacy is evident today in high Catholic Church membership, place-names, the use of French Creole, and the memorialization of Fédon’s rebellion. The country became a constitutional monarchy in 1974, with a governor-general representing the British Crown, a prime minister, and a bicameral parliament. Eric
534
GROSEILLIERS, MÉDARD CHOUART
DES
trade deficit and unemployment problems through the expansion of export agriculture and commercial fishing and the development of the tourist industry. Blessed with beautiful beaches and coral reefs, the island enjoys tourism largely based on the standard Caribbean amenities of sand, sea, and sun. In addition, the country has a magnificent mountainous interior with rain forests and montane lakes found in Grand Etang National Park, which is promoted for ecotourism. Catherine Cameron
Map of Grenada. (Maps.com/Corbis)
Gairy was the first prime minister. A leftist movement (New Jewel) led by Maurice Bishop seized power from Gairy’s corrupt government in 1979 and established the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG). In October 1983, Bishop and others were murdered after an internal power struggle in the PRG. The subsequent period of civil unrest was the catalyst for an invasion by the United States shortly after, although there had been ongoing U.S. concerns about the socialist policies and sympathies of the government. Following an appeal from the governor-general and with the ostensible objective of rescuing U.S. students at St. George’s University Medical School, U.S. marines invaded the country and reestablished civil order. In December 1984, a coalition government was formed, which was friendly to the United States and foreign investment. Since then, the nation has tried to address its
See also: Catholic Church; Fishing; Slavery; Sugar; Tobacco; Treaty of Paris. References Brizan, Georges. Grenada, Island of Conflict. London: Macmillan, 1998. Schoenhals, Kai, and Richard Melanson. Revolution and Intervention in Grenada. The New Jewel Movement, the United States, and the Caribbean. Boulder: Westview, 1985.
GROSEILLIERS, MÉDARD CHOUART DES (1618–1696) Explorer and trader, Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and his brother-in-law Radisson were the first Europeans to explore the area surrounding Lake Superior; they were the first to trade and negotiate treaties with many of the aboriginal nations that inhabited it. They devised a commercial approach that led to the creation of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). Son of Médard Chouart and Marie Poirier, Médard Chouart des Groseilliers was baptized on July 31, 1618, in Charlysur-Marne, France. Little is known about his early life, save that he arrived in Canada at a young age, perhaps in 1641, and spent some years in the service of the Jesuits at their mission in Huronia.
GUADELOUPE
In 1654–1656, following the cessation of the war that had been waged between the French and the Iroquois, des Groseilliers undertook a first and extremely successful trading expedition to the Great Lakes region, reaching as far as Michilimackinac. In 1659, he led a second expedition, this time bringing along Pierre-Esprit Radisson, the half brother of his second wife, approximately twenty years his junior. The pair reached Lake Superior and were the first Europeans to explore the woodlands to its south and west. Their activity during this period was central to the revival of the fur trade, which had suffered as a result of the destruction of Huronia by the Iroquois. More significantly, perhaps, their skillful first contacts contributed in no small part to the development of a durable Franco-Amerindian alliance in the Great Lakes region. It was as a result of these early explorations that des Groseilliers came to believe that the most practical way of reaching the rich beaver reservoirs at the heart of the continent was not by canoe through the Saint Lawrence and Great Lakes route, but rather through Hudson Bay, using ships capable of rapidly transporting large cargoes. Following a run-in with the governor of New France and failure to find financial backers in France, a frustrated des Groseilliers traveled with Radisson to Boston. From there, they reached London, where their vision of a fur-trading venture to Hudson Bay was received enthusiastically. In 1668, backed by British interests, the pair launched a first expedition to the bay; it was as a result of its success that the HBC was granted a royal charter two years later. The desertion of the two Canadian adventurers had spawned a commercial rivalry between two great powers in a region
535
where there had been none before. Thus, the bay became a central preoccupation of French and British diplomats, and the theater of several skirmishes, until its formal transfer to Britain in 1713. Radisson and des Groseilliers, employed by the new company, undertook further voyages to the bay. Yet in 1675 they were persuaded to return to New France, where they remained generally wellrespected men despite their desertion. There, they found employment with the Compagnie du Nord (Company of the North), an outfit newly formed by Canadian merchants to compete with the HBC. While Radisson eventually chose to return to the service of the British company, des Groseilliers settled in New France after 1684. Little is known about his subsequent life, but it is believed that he may have passed away in Sorel in 1696. Jean-François Lozier See also: Fur Trade; Jesuits; New France; Radisson, Pierre-Esprit; Saint Lawrence River. References Fournier, Martin. Pierre-Esprit Radisson: Merchant, Adventurer, 1636–1710. Sillery, Quebec: Septentrion, 2002. Nute, Grace Lee. Caesars of the Wilderness: Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, and Pierre Esprit Radisson, 1618–1710. New York: Appleton, 1943.
GUADELOUPE Together with Martinique, Réunion, and French Guiana, Guadeloupe is one of France’s oldest surviving American “colonies.” The island, along with its dependencies Marie-Galante, la Désirade, les Saintes, Saint-Barthélemy, and the French half of
536
GUADELOUPE
Saint Martin, was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus at the time of his exploration of the Americas in 1492 and was settled by the French in 1635. By this time, the Spanish had almost entirely exterminated or driven out the Amerindian population, and after a brief attempt at using French indentured laborers to work the land, the colonial authorities began to import African slaves and establish the sugar plantations that came to dominate Guadeloupean history. Slaves soon vastly outnumbered the white plantation owners, and in 1685 Louis XIV introduced the infamous Code Noir (Black Code), a statute apparently intended to provide guidelines for plantation owners about the appropriate treatment of slaves but which, with threats of appalling punishments and promises of the rewards of the afterlife through conversion to Catholicism, actually ensured the lasting subjugation of the growing slave population. The plantations were extremely prosperous economically, a fact that explains France’s willingness, during the French and Indian War (1756–1763), to cede the majority of its North American colonies to Britain in order to maintain its colonies in the Caribbean. The victory of the French Revolution in 1789, however, marked the beginning of a turning point in France’s Caribbean colonies, since the logic of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” threw into sharp relief the inequalities inherent in the regime of slavery. It was therefore perhaps unsurprising when, in 1794, the abolition of slavery was announced, even if this was chiefly because large numbers of extra soldiers were needed if France were to safeguard its empire against British invasion. In Guadeloupe, this strategy succeeded, but with no
slaves to work the plantations, the economy began to suffer, and in 1802 Bonaparte ordered the reestablishment of slavery. Led by the now legendary Martinican soldier Louis Delgrès, the black soldiers took up arms against Bonaparte’s men, and although they were defeated, the famous mass suicide of Delgrès and his army at Fort Matouba has come to be seen both as one of the most symbolic moments in Guadeloupean history and as an instance of resistance upon which a revolution like that of Haiti might have been built. The first half of the nineteenth century, until abolition in 1848, continued to be turbulent. Since the seventeenth century, Guadeloupe had been evolving into a hierarchical society divided along classcolor lines, as an “intermediate class” made up predominantly of mixed-race gens de couleur libres (free people of color) who had managed to free themselves from slavery, gradually established itself between the whites, or békés, at the top and the mass of black slaves at the bottom. Since the Code Noir, French colonial discourses had always encouraged acculturation, and in the nineteenth century France’s colonial enterprise began explicitly to be framed as a “civilizing mission,” as what has come to be seen as the distinguishing feature of French colonialism—the policy of assimilation— began to be applied in the Antilles. France’s avowed aim became to export, wholesale, French language and French culture in order to re-create overseas colonies and their inhabitants in the image of France. By the early to mid-nineteenth century, the emerging mulatto middle class began to see the gap between assimilationist rhetoric and actuality, and called for rights and recognition, finally gaining
GUADELOUPE
537
Map of Guadeloupe. (Maps.com/Corbis)
French citizenship in 1833. With the abolition of slavery in 1848 and the extension of assimilationist aspirations to the black masses, the arrival of indentured laborers from India, and then the extension of voting rights to all black men in 1870, the racialized social hierarchy began to become more nuanced and to allow for some upward social mobility. And the legacy of this colonial social structure is very much a feature of Guadeloupean society today, for while the class-color hierarchy of Martinique has remained relatively rigidly three-tiered, Guadeloupe—and in particular its mixed-race middle class—is more ethnically diverse; it has a much smaller
béké population and a larger population of East Indian descent at the very bottom of the social ladder. In 1936, Félix Eboué became Guadeloupe’s first black governor, but ten years later, as France’s other colonies throughout the world were beginning to call for independence, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guiana, Réunion, and Algeria were assimilated ever more into the mère-patrie (mother country), becoming full-fledged departments of France. Famously promoted by the then Communist mayor of Fort-de-France and Martinican député (deputy) Aimé Césaire, and fully backed by his Guadeloupean counterpart Paul
538
GUADELOUPE
Valentino, departmentalization was greeted with general approbation by the Guadeloupean population, for whom gaining the same rights as metropolitan French citizens seemed much fairer than independence as a reward for the centuries of slavery, assimilationist aspirations, and more recently, service in two world wars. In practice, the majority of laws and benefits were not extended to the Antilles until well into the 1950s and 1960s, with many not being extended until the 1970s and 1980s. Since the sugar industry began to decline in the 1950s, the once prosperous islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe have seen the virtual disappearance of viable island economies and have become increasingly dependent on France instead. The cost of living is high, as most goods are imported from France, the rate of unemployment is approximately double that of mainland France, and underemployment is also a significant problem. Early “solutions” to these problems were found in official immigration programs, which meant that, from the 1960s to the 1980s, thousands of Guadeloupeans went to live and find work in France. Despite the 1990s phenomenon of retired returnees, there is still a massive brain drain toward the metropole, and despite the growth of the tourist industry, it is likely that this will continue. The current population of Guadeloupe is slightly larger than that of Martinique, at around 420,000. What is striking is that the current combined population of Martinicans and Guadeloupeans living in France is 400,000. Guadeloupe’s dependence on France and its artificial, consumer economy has brought a mixed reaction from Guadelou-
peans, especially politically. Many, especially among the older generations, are grateful for France’s “benevolence” and, convinced that the DOM (départements d’outremer, “overseas departments”) simply could not survive without France’s aid, see themselves primarily as French citizens. Others, however, see the islands’ relationship with France as one that has remained that of colony to colonial power and have pointed out that, invested as it still is in retaining vestiges of empire, France may be seen to have deliberately discouraged the implantation of viable local economies in order to foster a culture of passivity and dependence. Indeed, this link between economy and culture in Guadeloupe is a crucial one. One of the most damaging effects of the postdepartmentalization erosion of the traditional Guadeloupean economy has been the ensuing erosion of traditional Guadeloupean culture. Such considerations have long been among the arguments of the pro-independence groups who, since the 1960s, have been calling for independence for the DOM. The burgeoning anticolonial activities of these groups were given extra impetus during a series of riots and strikes in 1967, as ordinary Guadeloupeans protested the social inequalities that persisted two decades after departmentalization. A series of bombing campaigns during the 1970s and 1980s gave the island a reputation for anticolonial terrorist activity and harmed the nascent tourist industry, to the benefit of Martinique. While the pro-independence groups do still have some local support, this has become increasingly diluted, and, in 2000, “la loi d’orientation des DOMs” (the orientation law for overseas departments) was ratified. This aims to
GUADELOUPE
give the DOMs much more autonomy and control over their own economic, social, political, and cultural affairs, thus making independence and the sacrifices it would necessarily entail even more unattractive to the majority of Guadeloupeans. Historical and social differences between Guadeloupe and its île soeur (sister island), Martinique, have led to interesting divergences in their literary and intellectual traditions. Guadeloupe, with its smaller béké population, its larger black population, and its greater reputation for rebellion and insurgency (from Delgrès to the twentieth-century pro-independence activists), has always been less favored by France, its people seen as less assimilable. Accordingly, those French Caribbean writers and thinkers usually considered as most important, and who have gained the most acceptance within the French intellectual establishment, are from Martinique. This is a trend that began, of course, with Césaire, who, along with his literary “sons” Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, and Prix Goncourt–winning Patrick Chamoiseau, is part of an anticolonial, yet paradoxically assimilated, tradition of writing. Guadeloupe has certainly not lacked seminal and influential intellectual figures, such as Guy Tirolien, Paul Niger, Sonny Rupaire, and Daniel Maximin. Yet these have never been as well known as their Martinican counterparts. Instead, Guadeloupe’s best-known writers have come from the most marginalized groups within Antillean society. Theater, never a predominant genre in the Antilles, has received much more state aid in Martinique and is consequently more “French” there. In Guadeloupe, by contrast, it flourished in a less institutionalized form alongside the
539
anticolonial, pro-independence movements of the 1970s, drawing upon traditions of storytelling in the Creole language well before the work of Martinican Creolists like Chamoiseau. More recently, it is from Guadeloupe that the best-known writers from the East Indian minority, such as Ernest Moutoussamy, have come, and since the 1970s it is from Guadeloupe that the best-known French Caribbean women writers have also come. Indeed, to frame it differently, the best-known Guadeloupean writers—Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart—are women. Although this curiously gendered split may certainly be coincidental, it perhaps also leads one to wonder whether Guadeloupe’s more marginal status and greater reputation for rebellion has allowed marginal writers to emerge in a way that Martinique’s more favored relationship with France has not. Samantha Haigh See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Césaire, Aimé; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Condé, Maryse; Fanon, Frantz; French and Indian War; French Revolution; Glissant, Edouard; Guiana; Haiti; Martinique; Maximin, Daniel; Saint Martin; Schwarz-Bart, Simone; Slavery; Sugar. References Abenon, Lucien-René. Petite histoire de la Guadeloupe. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992. Aldrich, Robert. Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996. Burton, Richard D. E., and Fred Reno, eds. French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995. Haigh, Sam, ed. An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Martinique and Guadeloupe. Oxford: Berg, 1999.
540
GUATTARI, FÉLIX
GUATTARI, FÉLIX (1930–1992) French thinker, born in Villeneuve-lesSablons, France, in 1930. It is inevitable that Guattari’s work on capitalism and the production of subjectivity should refer to the United States. There are three features that characterize his treatment of the United States: a left-wing critique of what Guattari sees as American military, cultural, and economic imperialism; a critique of the forms of subjectivity that American society produces; and an appreciation of what might be considered the potential dynamism that constitutes the American social “machine.” Writing in the late 1960s on American imperialism in Vietnam, Guattari accused the United States of having compromised its central role in the maintenance of the international status quo established after World War II. He identified the position of the Vietnamese people with workers and intellectuals in contemporary capitalist societies, and went so far as to draw parallels between U.S. aggression in Vietnam and European fascism. Writing in the 1970s, Guattari suggested that U.S. society was at the forefront of a move toward a new form of psychiatric repression, involving the use of drugs and psychoanalysis in the wake of the closure of psychiatric hospitals in a number of states. However, despite this critical stance, Guattari was fascinated by what he called the American tendency toward “deterritorialization” and by American pragmatism. In order to illustrate this “nomadic” conception of America, Guattari drew on Sartre’s comments on American cities in the 1940s. Whereas European cities have “contours” and defined limits, and are weighed down by history, American cities are open to the vast geography that surrounds them. They
are composed of “lines” and “planes” that cross and slide and are in this way “deterritorialized.” The force of much American literature, whether in the form of modernism—Faulkner, Henry Miller, William Burroughs—or popular forms such as the mystery novel, stems from the “reterritorializations,” in the form of provisional, dynamic subjectivities that result from this drive toward deterritorialization. In the forms of cinema, jazz, and the mystery novel, the United States has generated what Guattari called extraordinary forms of “subjectivation.” In their coauthored work, Guattari and Deleuze extracted a philosophical “concept” or “event” from the reality of the United States. In their terms, this would not be the hidden essence of the United States, but rather a revolutionary and utopian “enthusiasm” that entails a refusal of transcendence. In A Thousand Plateaus (1988) they claim that every great American author creates a “cartography” that is connected to social movements, and in What Is Philosophy? (1994) they argue that the fact that the American and Soviet revolutions have failed does not prevent philosophy from following its “immanent” path. Guattari also perceived a positive potential in American pragmatism (both in the everyday and the philosophical sense of the term). Americans have, he claimed, a “pragmatic” relationship with the world. In this sense Guattari claimed that Americans are an essentially “scientific” people who are willing to be creative in their search for solutions to problems. This constant readiness to move on to “something else” implies an immanent rather than transcendental approach to the search for practical solutions. Guattari died in Paris in 1992. John Marks
GUÉRIN, DANIEL See also: Burroughs, William S.; Deleuze, Gilles; Jazz; Miller, Henry Valentine; Theory; Vietnam War; World War II. References Genosko, Gary. Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction. London: Continuum, 2002. Stivale, Charles J. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Guilford Press, 1998.
GUÉRIN, DANIEL (1904–1988) A presence on the French Left throughout most of the twentieth century, Daniel Guérin introduced French readers to the struggles of U.S. workers and blacks, and U.S. readers to the European tradition of workers’ self-organization in Socialist and anarchist theory. A prolific author, Guérin struggled against militarism, fascism, colonialism, racism, and the oppression of homosexuals, and for workers’ rights. He was wary of trade union bureaucracies on the one hand, and of the authoritarian and sectarian tendencies of Leninist vanguard organizations on the other. Sympathetic to Marxist theory and anarchism, he became an eloquent spokesperson for “libertarian communism” in his later years. Guérin credited the liberal Parisian family into which he was born and several influential teachers for his early embrace of Socialism. Attending the celebrations that followed the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 sparked a lifelong revulsion against national chauvinism and xenophobia. Abandoning university and a burgeoning literary career in 1926, Guérin spent three years in Beirut, where he developed friendships with French anticolonial and Arab nationalist personalities. He took two trips to Germany as a reporter just before and soon after Hitler became chancellor.
541
His writings on fascism are published in English as Fascism and Big Business (1939, 1994) and The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (1994). In France, Guérin worked at various times with Socialists, Communists, anarcho-syndicalists, Trotskyists, and a wide range of nonaligned left-wing committees and publications. Between December 1946 and 1949, Guérin traveled the United States, focusing on the struggles of workers and blacks. The result was Où va le peuple américain? (“Where Are the American People Going?” 1950–1951). A portion was translated into English as Negroes on the March: A Frenchman’s Report on the American Negro Struggle in 1956, followed by the anticolonial The West Indies and their Future (1961) and Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (1970). Class Struggle in the First Republic: Bourgeois and Bras Nus, 1793–1795 (1977) champions the radical struggles of the popular classes during the French Revolution. Guérin contributed to the homophile journal Arcadie, published Kinsey et la sexualité in 1955, supported the Front Homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire in the 1970s, and wrote for the gay publication Gai pied in the 1980s. In his Autobiographie de jeunesse (“Autobiography of Youth,”1972) and Le Feu du sang (“Blood’s Fire,” 1977), he wrote retrospectively about his attraction to men, especially young proletarians. Like others of his generation, Guérin saw homosexuality as a form of “class treason.” His support for an independent and democratic Algeria, for French conscripts’ rights, and for the student movement were all fueled by this homoerotic desire for working-class, colonized, and oppressed youth. Only in the final two decades of his life, however, was
542
GUIANA
Guérin able to openly integrate his political and erotic lives. Guérin died in Paris in 1988. Robert Schwartzwald See also: French Revolution; Gay Movement; World War II. References Copley, Anthony. “Daniel Guérin: Towards Self-Acceptance.” Sexual Moralities in France, 1970–1980. London: Routledge, 1989: 181–197. Schwartzwald, Robert. “Introduction.” The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany. Daniel Guérin. Trans. Robert Schwartzwald. Durham, NC/ London: Duke University Press, 1994: 1–38.
GUIANA French Guiana, a département d’outre-mer (overseas department) like Martinique and Guadeloupe, is often referred to as part of the French Caribbean, despite its location on the northeast coast of South America, between Surinam and Brazil. There are certainly similarities between this continental département français d’Amérique (French department in the Americas) and its island neighbors, but there are far more striking differences, examples of which are to be found everywhere in Guiana’s geography, history, population, and literature. While it is slavery and the plantation system that have dominated the history of Martinique and Guadeloupe and made their societies and cultures what they are today, Guiana’s history has been marked just as much by its role as a penal colony and by the gold rush that began in the nineteenth century as it has by slavery. First explored by Europeans around 1500 when one of Columbus’s Spanish companions, Vicente Yañez Pinzon, landed
there, Guiana spent a century and a half changing hands between the Spanish, the English, and the Dutch before it was finally settled by the French in the 1670s. The vastness of the area and the hostility of the climate meant that Guiana proved much more difficult to settle than the Caribbean colonies. It covers a surface area of 90,000 square kilometers, and is still 90 percent covered in tropical forest, which means that the majority (80 percent) of its 157,000 inhabitants still live on the narrow 320-kilometer Atlantic coastal strip, which is the only land suitable for farming. The vast interior remains hardly populated, and road links are still difficult to maintain. During France’s first empire, Guiana remained underpopulated and underexploited as a colony, but when France lost almost all of its first empire, and in particular its possessions in North America, it became the largest remaining colony, and in 1763 an attempt at large-scale settlement was undertaken, only to end in disaster. About 10,000 inexperienced and illprepared emigrants were transported there under the orders of Louis XV; over 6,000 of them died of disease and hunger in the first few months. Nevertheless, slavery and the plantation system were established, but, just as it had proved impossible to eradicate the native Amerindian population, since large numbers of them fled into the inaccessible interior, it also proved much harder than in the Caribbean islands to control and put down marronnage (escape) and rebellion. As in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, the French Revolution brought with it a temporary abolition of slavery. After slavery had been reinstated by Napoléon at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the colony had changed hands be-
GUIANA
tween the Portuguese and the British before definitively returning to French control in 1817, and after slavery had finally been abolished in 1848, Napoléon III decided, in 1852, to make Guiana into France’s foremost penal colony. While in Martinique and Guadeloupe indentured workers from India were imported to work the plantations after the abolition of slavery, in Guiana prisoners were imported from France. This policy was both a bid to clear congested French prisons and, theoretically at least, a renewed attempt to populate a still underpopulated colony. However, of the 70,000 convicts shipped from France, it has been estimated that only 5,000 survived to return. During roughly the same period, gold was discovered in Guiana, and a gold rush began. Despite a brief decline in 1963–1964, the mining of gold continues to be one of Guiana’s few remaining profitable industries. Guiana remained a penal colony for almost a century until departmentalization, in 1946, changed its status, along with that of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, and Algeria. Famously promoted by the Martinican député Aimé Césaire, and fully backed by his Guianese counterpart Gaston Monnerville, departmentalization was seen, at a time when most other colonies were beginning to negotiate their independence from European powers, as the only viable solution to the underdevelopment of Guiana—an underdevelopment much more acute in this forgotten, underexploited, and unprofitable colony than in either of the new Caribbean DOMs (départements d’outremer, “overseas departments”). Since departmentalization, the situation in Guiana has been similar to that in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Never pros-
543
Map of Guiana. Guiana's history has been marked just as much by its role as a penal colony and by the gold rush that began in the nineteenth century as it has by slavery. (Maps.com/Corbis)
perous like its island neighbors, Guiana is now, like them, based on an artificial, consumer economy in which very little is produced either for local consumption or for export. The cost of living is high, since so much is imported from France, and unemployment runs at about 20 percent. There have been successive attempts to develop Guiana, most notably Giscard d’Estaing’s Plan vert (Green Plan) of 1975, but most attempts at exploiting the country’s forestry, maritime, or mineral resources have ended in failure. If it is tourism in the Caribbean islands that has provided some small means of avoiding complete dependence on France, in Guiana it is the European Space Center in Kourou, established in 1978 and famed in particular for its program of Ariane rocket launchings, that has led to some regeneration and development. The Space Center remains, however,
544
GUIANA
more significant economically and technologically for France than for Guiana, since most of those who live and work in Kourou are temporary white European residents. Emigration of Guianese people to France has not been as significant as that of Martinicans and Guadeloupeans, partly because the population of Guiana is so much smaller than that of either of the Caribbean islands. More significant are the successive waves of immigration into Guiana, since this makes it by far the most ethnically diverse of the DOM, with over twenty ethnic groups. Creoles—black or mixed-race descendants of slaves and European colonizers—make up the majority, about 72 percent, of the population. Descendants of the Maroons, escaped slaves who lived (and live) a much more African lifestyle outside the plantations, make up 6 percent of the population, and the Amerindians also make up a significant proportion of the population, as do whites, either French or descendants of the colonizers, and those of East Indian, Lebanese, and Syrian origin. More recently, immigrants from neighboring Brazil, Surinam, and (ex-British) Guyana as well as from Haiti and Saint Lucia have arrived. Many of these are illegal immigrants, attracted by the relative wealth of a French DOM, which means that, each year, Guiana expels about 15,000 people, almost a tenth of its population. About 2.5 percent of Guiana’s population is made up of H’mongs and their descendants, who arrived in the early 1970s as refugees from Laos as part of yet another state-organized attempt to “populate” Guiana. With the H’mongs now well integrated as fruit and vegetable producers, this wave of organized immigration is generally seen as a success story. From the beginning, there was resistance to the idea of departmentalization,
notably from Léon Damas, négritude poet and writer alongside Aimé Césaire and, briefly, député for Guiana in the late 1940s. As in Martinique and Guadeloupe, from the late 1950s through the 1960s and 1970s and into the 1980s, various anticolonial Marxist groups, parties, and trade unions formed and re-formed to oppose departmentalization and work for independence. A significant political figure, from his election as député in 1958 until his death in a plane crash in Guadeloupe in 1962, was Justin Catayée, who sought not independence, but autonomy. His vision of an increase in local decision making within the structure of a département not only resembled that of Césaire for Martinique, but also prefigured the aims of “la loi d’orientation des DOMs” (“the orientation laws for overseas departments”) that was ratified in 2000 and that, for all the DOMs, has probably laid to rest any lingering possibility of independence. Historical, geographical, and cultural differences have also had their influence on Guianese literature, which, like Guiana itself, can be counted as French Caribbean only as a matter of convenience. Colonial myths and stereotypes about Guiana are very different from those about the Caribbean. In the early years of exploration, and around the time of the gold rush, Guiana, like North America, was often imagined as a vast empty land, a fertile paradise, an El Dorado of wealth and opportunity. More commonly, however, the disastrous early attempts at population, followed by the horrors of the penal colony, led to an image of Guiana as a graveyard for Europeans, as images of whites oppressing whites ran alongside the more familiar Caribbean images of racialized oppression and slavery. This is the
GUILLEMIN, ROGER
Guiana of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), Gaston Leroux’s Chéri-Bibi (1911), and Henri Charrière’s Papillon (1969), and it is also that of early, assimilated black and mixed-race Guianese writers like René Maran and A. E. Whily-Tell. It was not until the work of Léon Damas that such images began to be challenged. His collection of poetry, Pigments (1937), earned him a reputation abroad as a consciously black writer, a major poet of négritude, but was largely ignored in Guiana itself. Guianese literature today remains in its infancy and is nowhere near as well developed or acclaimed as that of Martinique or Guadeloupe. The literary magazine La Torche, set up by the Association des amis de Léon Damas in 1978, is an important forum for postnégritude Guianese writers. Key figures are the poets Elie Stephenson and Serge Patient, both of whom began writing in the 1970s, and the novelist Bertène Juminer, who, strongly influenced by Fanon, began writing in the 1960s. Stephenson, in particular, is noteworthy, as he has also written plays and songs, as well as some of his poetry, in Creole. In fact, in Guiana, the Creole language has always been more widely used and less socially stigmatized than in Guadeloupe and Martinique, just as Guianese culture in general, with its diverse ethnic groups and influences, has been much more creolized and allowed for much more cross-fertilization between its different constituent cultures. Cuisine and Carnival are two examples of this Guianese creolization that can be singled out, but it is theater, in particular, that seems the most likely to develop there into a radical, creole, and distinctively Guianese cultural form. Samantha Haigh
545
See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Césaire, Aimé; Charrière, Henri; Damas, Léon-Gontran; Devil’s Island; French Revolution; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Guadeloupe; Haiti; Martinique; Misérables, Les; Saint Martin; Slavery; Space Technology. References Jones, Bridget. “French Guiana.” A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 1, Hispanic and Francophone Regions. Ed. A. James Arnold. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1995: 389–398. Jones, Bridget, and Elie Stephenson. “Society, Culture and Politics in French Guiana.” Ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno. French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995: 56–73. Mam Lam Fouck, Serge. Histoire générale de la Guyane française. 2nd ed. Matoury, Guyane: Ibis Rouge, 2002. Redfield, Peter. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Schwarzbeck, Franck. “Guyane: A Département like the Others?” Dual Legacies in the Contemporary Caribbean. Ed. Paul Sutton. London: Cass, 1986: 171–187.
GUILLEMIN, ROGER (1924–) French medical scientist. Roger Guillemin retired in 1989 as a distinguished professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1977 as a result of discoveries made in his laboratories by his handpicked team of multidisciplinary scientists, discoveries that laid the foundation for brain hormone research. The discoveries were the isolation, purification, and identification of a class of peptide hormones critical in the regulation of growth, development, reproduction, and stress. Born January 11, 1924, Guillemin attended school in Dijon, France, and entered
546
GUY-BLACHÉ, ALICE
medical school at nineteen. His clinically oriented MD degree was granted in Lyons in 1949, and although he qualified to practice medicine, his desire was to study endocrinology (the action of hormones) in the laboratory. Guillemin left France for Montreal to become a disciple of Hans Selye, a pioneer in the study of stress and the link between the brain and hormone secretions. The sojourn at Selye’s institute completing his Ph.D. research (1953) stimulated and formed the basis of his lifelong commitment to understanding the control mechanisms involved in the relationship between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. Guillemin’s academic and research career began at Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he remained for eighteen years, with a brief, nostalgic, but disappointing interlude at the Collège de France in Paris. He moved to the Salk Institute in 1970, where he retired from science in 1989. Guillemin shared an obsession with understanding the physiology and control of the pituitary gland with his fellow 1977 Nobel laureate, Andrew Schally. He had collaborated with Schally at Baylor for about five years, starting in 1957, after which the two competed for the remainder of their careers. Guillemin acknowledges that the impetus for the discovery of the hypothalamic peptides originated with the ideas of Hans Selye and Murray Saffran in Montreal and Geoffrey Harris in London. It was, however, the crusade of Guillemin, relentlessly pursuing the ideas of these pioneers and spurred on by competition from Schally, that produced the discoveries. The hormonal peptides of this area of the brain exist and function at submicrogram levels, and their isolation and analysis
required the gathering of hundreds of thousands of brain fragments from the slaughterhouses of the southern United States. The brain fragments were collected and analyzed by his assembled research team, which was composed of a cross section of physical and organic and analytic and synthetic chemists, biochemists, and molecular biologists working with highly talented physiologists. Guillemin expressed his appreciation for his team’s efforts in his Nobel lecture, although it was his emotional drive and organizational efforts to raise the finances, supervise the scientists, and maintain focus that provided the basis for their academic insights and the creativity involved. Guillemin was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1973, the Lasker Award in Basic Sciences in 1975, the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1976, and the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1977. He is a member of the French Académie des sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Geoffrey Grant See also: Montreal. References Guillemin, Roger. “Autobiography.” http:// www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1977/ guillemin-autobio.html (accessed April 14, 2004). Wade, Nicholas. The Nobel Duel: Two Scientists’ 21-Year Race to Win the World’s Most Coveted Research Prize. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981.
GUY-BLACHÉ, ALICE (1873–1968) First female director and producer in film history, and one of the first cinema pioneers of either gender.
GUY-BLACHÉ, ALICE
Guy-Blaché’s impact on international cinema in its early years was unprecedented. She is today credited with input into thousands of early French and North American feature films, although a substantial part of her contribution to both industries has been lost to history. She was the first woman to rise to authorial prominence in filmmaking and was responsible for training major figures from the next generation of French filmmakers (including Louis Feuillade and Victorin Jasset); in the United States she launched the careers of major screen stars, including Olga Petrova, Marion Swayne, and Billy Quirk; in both industries she created a forum for the work of international set designers such as Ben Carré and Henri Menessier. She directed over 400 films in her career and was the first European filmmaker to have a genuinely transatlantic profile. She died in the United States in 1968. Born in Paris in 1873, Guy’s first contact with the cinema world was as a secretary for the Gaumont company. After witnessing an early Lumière brothers projection in 1895, Guy made her first film La Fée aux choux (“The Cabbage Fairy,” 1896), which was showcased at the Paris International Exhibition of the same year. Her mastery of new cinema technologies was such that she was quickly promoted to head of production at Gaumont, a position she held until her marriage to her colleague Herbert Blaché in 1907. During her employment with Gaumont, Guy directed and produced silent, color, and synchro-
547
nized sound films and was an early pioneer of the story-based narrative film. In 1908, the Blaché couple relocated to the United States, where they founded their own production company, Solax (1910), later complemented by a state-ofthe-art studio plant in New Jersey (1912); it was here that Guy continued to develop her technical expertise, experimenting with multiple-reel filmmaking and developing stylistic techniques such as the split screen and the use of dialogue title cards. Solax was quickly admitted to the prestigious Motion Picture Patents Company, and its films were distributed alongside those of the major American studios. But the success of the Solax Company was ultimately short-lived: the war in Europe, the rapid growth of the Hollywood studios, and increasing financial problems relating to Herbert Blaché’s business interests meant that the company went bankrupt in the mid1920s. Subsequent attempts to form new U.S. production companies came to little, and Guy returned to France, divorced, in 1920. Guy’s influential involvement in international film production effectively ended at this point. Sue Harris See also: Cinema, 1895–1945. References McMahan, Alison. Alice Guy-Blaché, Lost Visionary of the Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2002. Millar, Michelle. “Alice Guy: A Life in Motion.” French Cultural Studies 7, part 3, no. 21 (October 1996).
H HAGÈGE, CLAUDE (1936–) French linguist, holder of the Chair of Linguistic Theory at the renowned Collège de France. Hagège is an established theorist who has received several prizes for his work. The main focuses of his research are language typology, linguistic comparison, and cognitive linguistics. Hagège was born on January 1, 1936, in Tunis. He grew up in a multilingual environment and learned French, Arabic, Italian, and Hebrew as a child. Later, he studied classical philology (lettres classiques) and worked as a lecturer and professor at various French schools and universities. He is currently director of studies at the Ecole pratique des hautes études and since 1988 has been a professor at the Collège de France. This academic career has been supplemented by numerous research sojourns that have led Hagège—in the ethnolinguistic tradition of fieldwork—all over the world: to sub-Saharan Africa, the Far East, Micronesia, the Arabic-speaking countries, Eastern Europe, and the Indian reservations in British Columbia. Hagège possesses extraordinary language talents. Not only is he known for lecturing in a number of Germanic and Semitic languages, Chinese, and several Slavic and Romance lan-
guages, but he also speaks Hungarian, Hindi, two African oral-tradition languages, an Austronesian language, Malay/ Indonesian, and Japanese. Furthermore, he has knowledge in more than 100 additional languages, such as North American Indian Comox/Sliammon (British Columbia). Characteristic of Hagège is his anthropological conception of language and linguistics: he emphasizes the social and historical—thus, the human—dimension of language. Since linguistic reality always reveals a certain variety and diversity, Hagège rejects abstract universalism. In his view, the idealized model of linguistic competence, upon which the Chomsky-style generative grammar is based, is too formalist to correspond with linguistic reality. Hagège regards language as an eminently political affair and sees it as the linguist’s mission to be involved in the politics of language. Accordingly, he actively took part in the 1994 Toubon Act, which defines the limits for foreign-language usage in everyday life in France. Likewise, Hagège openly argues against the increasingly hegemonic tendencies of AngloAmericanism and rejects English as the main international language. He believes that the variety of languages should be seen
549
550
HAHN, REYNALDO
as cultural richness and not as communication barrier in international business; similarly, Hagège propagates the idea of linguistic diversity and pluralism, since the dominance of certain languages represents an impoverishment. Linguistics, in particular, is dependent on a broad research basis comprised of a plethora of different, and “exotic,” languages if it is to capture and adequately explain linguistic and cognitive processes in their entirety. Consequently, Hagège ardently supports languages threatened by extinction, such as the Indian languages in North America. Through numerous lectures and publications, Hagège’s views and findings are accessible to a broad audience. His ability to present complex subject matter in a way that is also understandable for laypersons has certainly contributed to several of his books becoming best-sellers in France. On the other hand, nonfrancophones are often not (yet) familiar with the name Claude Hagège. Rebekka Bratschi See also: Language. References Fodor, Istvan, and Claude Hagège, eds. La Réforme des langues: histoire et avenir— Language Reform: History and Future— Sprachreform: Geschichte und Zukunft. Hamburg: Buske, 1983–1994. Hagège, Claude. The Language Builder: An Essay on the Human Signature in Linguistic Morphogenesis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1993.
HAHN, REYNALDO (1874–1947) Venezuelan-French composer, born in Caracas on August 9, 1874, of German Jewish and Venezuelan Catholic parentage and died in Paris on January 28, 1947.
The youngest of twelve children, Hahn lived in Venezuela until 1877, when his parents moved to Paris. In 1912, he became a naturalized Frenchman. Cultured, wealthy, and socially well connected, Hahn’s parents were readily accepted in the most elegant Parisian salons. Thus from early childhood Reynaldo had access to society’s most sophisticated artistic meeting places and inhabited a world where his musical talents were appreciated and allowed to flourish. At age six, he made his debut at the home of the Princess Mathilde, cousin of Napoléon III , accompanying himself on the piano in songs by Jacques Offenbach. At age eleven, he entered the Conservatoire as a student of piano, solfège, and composition, and two years later he was admitted to the most celebrated composition class of the day, that of Jules Massenet. In 1891, Massenet introduced Hahn to the music publisher Heugel. A year later, his first collection of songs appeared in print. Hahn is best remembered as a composer of mélodies, the French art-song genre that emerged in the nineteenth century under the influence of the German lied. Of the 126 mélodies he wrote, some 70 are still in print. A number (notably “Si mes vers avaient des ailes” [If My Verses Had Wings] and “L’Heure exquise” [The Exquisite Hour]) have become part of the standard recital repertoire. Most date from before 1912, and many were written by the time he was fifteen. They include settings of poems by Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine and are marked by the composer’s unusually acute sensitivity to words. By 1920, chamber music had replaced song as Hahn’s main compositional focus. The Quintet for Piano and Strings (1922) is the first of a series of works for various
HAITI
ensembles, among them the Sonata in A for Piano and Violin (1926), two concertos for violin (1927, 1931), two string quartets (1939), and his final work, the Quartet in G for Piano and Strings (1945–1946). His output also includes a substantial number of pieces for solo piano, among them Premières Valses (1898) and the Sonatine in C (1907). Conservative and sometimes unashamedly derivative, Hahn’s musical writing is nevertheless accomplished, witty, often richly melodic, and gratifying for both performer and listener. Hahn composed several operas and was renowned as a conductor of opera, especially of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), whose Don Giovanni he conducted in Salzburg in 1906. In 1945, he became director of the Paris Opera. One of the foremost music critics of his day, he contributed, between 1898 and 1945, to numerous newspapers and journals, including La Presse, Le Journal, and Le Figaro. He also published several books, among them a series of lectures entitled Du Chant/On Singers and Singing (1920) and two collections of essays, L’Oreille au guet (“The Alert Ear,”1937) and Thèmes variés (“Varied Themes,” 1946). Hahn enjoyed close friendships with several of the most distinguished artists of his day, notably Marcel Proust (1871–1922), whom he met in 1894, and Sarah Bernhardt (1844– 1923), whose biography he published in 1930. Mary Breatnach See also: Music (Classical); Venezuela. References Hahn, Reynaldo. On Singers and Singing: Lectures and an Essay. Trans. Leopold Simoneau. New York: Hal Leonard, 1990. Prestwich, P. F. The Translation of Memories: Recollections of the Young Proust. London: Peter Owen, 1999.
551
HAITI Once the “jewel” in France’s colonial crown, Haiti is a nation debilitated by a postcolonial legacy of racial division, debt, and underdevelopment. It is also a remarkably rich nation culturally and continues to produce authors, intellectuals, and artists of note. Haiti’s modern history began with its “discovery” by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) in December 1492. The Columbian encounter marked an irreversible moment in history. The Amerindian Taino population was forced into slavery, extracting gold for the Spanish, and with no immunity to European diseases, it was quickly decimated. The island colony’s labor shortage was subsequently met by the Atlantic slave trade. The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola (as Columbus had named the island) in 1501. Following the quick depletion of the island’s gold resources, the slaves were forced into work on the new, profitable sugarcane plantations. In their mania for gold, the Spanish concentrated less on developing colonies than on using the Caribbean islands as bases from which to launch their incursions into the mainland. Hispaniola was consequently susceptible to rival European influence, and the deserted northwestern part of the island became the center of French and English buccaneering activity. The French soon banished the English from the island, and some eventually settled the land, living from hunting and growing crops. The Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 ceded the western third of the island to France, which named its new colony SaintDomingue. Large numbers of French settlers soon arrived, and the combination of French capital and slave labor proved to be
552
HAITI
Unloading flour from ships, Miragoâne, Haiti, between 1909 and 1932. (Library of Congress)
a profitable one. By the mid-eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue’s indigo, sugar, cotton, and coffee plantations had created a hugely prosperous economy, at least for the planters. The arts, notably the theater, flourished: Saint-Domingue hosted the major French plays and actors and also witnessed the earliest creole operas and comedies. In 1789, the population comprised approximately 40,000 whites, 30,000 free coloreds (affranchis), and 450,000 slaves. The slaves were therefore fundamental to the colony’s prosperity, and their subjugation—essential to colonial capitalism—was enshrined in French law by Louis XIV’s Code Noir (Black Code), the infamous 1685 edict that, to the chagrin of the grands blancs (great white) planters, had
prescribed conditions for the treatment of slaves, yet had nonetheless commodified slaves, divested them of their very selfhood, and rendered them movable or immovable assets of the planters’ personal estates. Despite the extreme and brutal punishments for insubordination, isolated slave revolts were common, as were the practices of poisoning the colonists’ livestock and of marronnage, that is, fleeing the plantations to hide out in the mountains and often forming small communities of Maroons. In 1758, after leading a major slave uprising that sought to poison the plantation owners en masse, the Maroon chief François Makandal was executed. As the century progressed Saint-Domingue moved ever closer to a general slave revolution.
HAITI
The booming economic prosperity of Saint-Domingue ironically led to the violent collapse of the colony. In The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James (1901–1989) argues that the need to fuel Saint-Domingue’s economy with ever greater numbers of African slaves had by 1789 created a slave population of which two-thirds had been born in Africa. Because these African-born slaves were more resentful and more rebellious than the Creole slaves, they infused the slave population with a lust for freedom and revolution. The major catalyst for change in Saint-Domingue came, however, from the revolutionary movement in France. The grands blancs called for more autonomy from the metropole, while the petits blancs (poor whites) sought to access political power, and the affranchis pushed for the full application of the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the colony, that is, for equality with the whites. The slave rebellion of 1791 urgently posed the colonial question: could the principles of the French Revolution be reconciled with a slave-owning, racist society? As the rebellion continued, the answer soon became clear: under intense pressure not only from the slaves, but also from the British, who feared for the repercussions of a successful revolt across the colonized New World, and from the Spanish, who sought to repossess their former colony, the French abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue in August 1793. This act led to the realignment with France of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who had emerged as one of the leaders of the revolt. Toussaint’s forces were victorious in the war of the South against the mulattodominated army of Villate, and in the constitution of 1801 he was declared governorgeneral. Toussaint had already negotiated trade agreements with the British, who
553
sought to supplant the French and to control the spread of the revolt by pitting the blacks against the mulattos, and also with the United States, which foresaw the economic benefits for itself of a free Caribbean. He moreover sought to establish Saint-Domingue’s political autonomy, legal freedom for all slaves, and a reworked plantation system that included new conditions for the white planters. Napoléon, however, rejected the idea of an autonomous SaintDomingue and landed a considerable contingent at Cap Français in 1802. Reinforced by the support of mulatto generals, the French convinced Toussaint that cooperation was his only choice. Toussaint was subsequently tricked into arrest by the French, and he was deported to France, where he died in the fort of Joux in the Jura. The movement toward independence was, however, irresistible, and mulatto and black generals soon deserted the French army. Under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the combined black and mulatto generals, independence was declared on January 1, 1804. One of their first acts was to reinstate the island’s preColumbian name, Haiti. The “first black republic” in the New World was born. The early years of Haitian independence were marked by the massacre of all remaining whites, the hostility and suspicion of the colonial powers, and the consequent need to maintain a war-ready army. The country, moreover, was in ruins: every town had been set ablaze and the sugar plantations destroyed. Politically, too, the new republic was far from unified: Dessalines was assassinated in October 1806 by opponents of his attempts to bring large areas of cultivated land under state control. He was succeeded by Henri Christophe (1767–1820), who became
554
HAITI
King Henry I in 1811. In the South, however, the controlling mulatto minority, led by Alexandre Pétion (1770–1818) until his death in 1818, seceded, and Haiti was divided into two separate entities. Christophe sought to revive the plantation system by force, though this proved unpopular, and in the face of a revolt he committed suicide in 1820. Pétion’s successor, Jean-Pierre Boyer, then became president of a united Haiti. Boyer annexed the hispanophone eastern part of the island and ruled the whole of Hispaniola until his government collapsed in 1843. Boyer had bought French recognition of Haiti in 1825 by agreeing to pay a huge indemnity (150 million francs) to compensate the white planters for property lost during the revolution. Between 1843 and 1915, only two political administrations completed their terms in office—the others were prematurely ended by coups or political revolts. Economically, the country was still shackled by the legacies of colonialism, not least the crippling debt to France and new debts owed to Germany, Great Britain, and the United States for the loss of their nationals’ property in Haiti. The hostility and endless plotting of the other colonial powers, together with the continued rise of Western capitalism, only increased Haiti’s dependence on outside forces for its survival. By the end of the nineteenth century, Haiti was drowning in debt, paying an estimated 80 percent of its annual revenue to foreign financiers. The first black republic had become the first victim of the vicious circle of Third World debt. Despite the Haitian elite’s continued francophilia—since the earliest postrevolution days, it had continually looked to Europe for its cultural and political models— the United States was gradually challenging
the influence of the traditional colonial powers, France and Britain, in Haitian affairs. This shift culminated in the 1915 occupation of Haiti by U.S. Marines. The U.S. invasion was partly provoked by rising political turmoil in Haiti, but also by the desire to counter German interests in the island, which had become strategically important after the opening of the Panama Canal. The demoralized Haitian population barely resisted at first. When, however, the Americans introduced the corvée system of forced labor on its public works programs, the Haitian peasantry revolted, notably from 1918 to 1920 in the ultimately unsuccessful insurrection led by Charlemagne Péralte (1886–1919). Franklin Roosevelt wrote a new constitution allowing foreign ownership of land, and U.S. investment in Haiti trebled between 1915 and 1930. This investment led to improvements in roads, health, technical education, and communications, though in other fields, such as fishing, forestry, and industry, little change was effected. Haitian social structures were only reinforced by the occupation, and the lot of the great mass of Haitian poor improved little. Indeed, many were forced off their land by compulsory purchase orders from U.S. companies seeking to establish agricultural plantations. Newly colonized and dispossessed of their lands, hundreds of thousands of poor Haitians emigrated to Cuba, or to the hispanophone part of the island, the Dominican Republic. Even after their withdrawal in 1934, the Americans maintained a strong influence by means of a succession of compliant presidents, as well as through their close links with the Haitian military. The occupation had important repercussions for Haitian culture. In the immediate postrevolution period, much of
HAITI
Haiti’s writing referred to the declaration of independence and expressed pride in the nation’s anticolonial, antislavery victory. Later, the European romantic movement inspired Haitian literary statements of racial and cultural uniqueness and detailed presentations of the land, its flora and fauna, as a repository of the essence of Haiti. The U.S. occupation, however, brought the political realities of Haiti into sharp focus, and a new more radical generation of intellectuals appeared in the 1920s. This generation instigated the indigenist movement, which revalorized “authentic” Haitian culture. This authenticity was thought to exist in the peasantry—the very class most at risk from U.S. influence—notably in its strong residual sense of Africanized culture. The reviews La Trouée and La Revue indigène were the focus of the group’s attempts at once to assert Haitian particularity and to reach out to other emerging traditions, such as the nascent literary movements in Harlem and Latin America. The central figures of the movement were Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Emile Roumer, Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, and Jean Price-Mars, whose Ainsi Parla l’Oncle/So Spoke the Uncle (1928) accused Haiti’s francophile elite of collective bovarysme, that is, of negating Haitian folk culture, which, he felt, had to be rediscovered in order to preserve Haiti’s identity. Although the indigenist movement was largely inspired by and carried a direct challenge to the racist U.S. administration, its influence continued to grow after the occupation ended in 1934. This was a Haitian négritude, one that preceded Aimé Césaire’s later explorations of Africanity in the colonial Caribbean context by at least fifteen years. Of all the indigenists, the legacy of Jacques
555
Map of Haiti. Once the jewel in France's colonial crown, Haiti is a nation debilitated by a postcolonial legacy of racial division, debt, and underdevelopment. (Maps.com/Corbis)
Roumain, founder of the Haitian Communist Party, has proved to be the most enduring. His posthumously published novel, Gouverneurs de la rosée/ Masters of the Dew (1945), remains almost omnipresent on francophone literature programs. The 1940s saw renewed metropolitan French influence with the visit of André Breton to Haiti. Breton found a receptive audience among Port-au-Prince’s new generation of young radicals, notably René Depestre and Jacques-Stephen Alexis, whose journal La Ruche embraced the ideals of surrealism as a means to further their political objectives. These goals were partially realized in the 1946 overthrow of the proAmerican president Elie Lescot. And yet, this “victory” inadvertently led to possibly the most harrowing of all Haiti’s troubled periods: the Duvalier years. The election of the black president Dumarsais Estimé signaled the movement into power of noirisme, a doctrine that shared common roots with
556
HAITI
indigenism, but which had diverged into black nationalism and Vodun (voodoo) mysticism. In 1957, another noiriste, François Duvalier (1907–1971), assumed the presidency, and thus started a twenty-nine-year spiral of violence and decay. Duvalier’s doctrine was a mix of racial mystification, militarism, xenophobia, and totalitarianism. Opposition was met with extreme violence by the infamous Tontons Macoutes, and most intellectuals were forced into exile. “Papa Doc” Duvalier exploited U.S. fears of a “second Cuba” to secure generous aid from the United States, which overlooked the dictator’s contempt for human rights, press freedom, and democracy. When Jean-Claude Duvalier (b. 1951) inherited the presidency from his deceased father in 1971, U.S. warships patrolled Haitian territorial waters to ensure a smooth transfer of power. Official U.S. support was withdrawn in 1986, the year of “Baby Doc’s” removal from power. The subsequent military regime led by General Namphy aligned itself with the Duvalierists and instigated the violence that led to the cancellation of the 1987 elections. American-funded elections took place in December 1990 and produced an unexpected winner in the radical Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who only eight months later was deposed by a military coup. Although Washington was less than rigorous in its application of sanctions against the military regime, Aristide was finally returned to power in 1994. Recent years have seen little political or economic progress, and in 2001, an unsuccessful coup attempt was launched against Aristide, though his opponents claimed he had staged it himself in order to discredit them. Almost 200 years after independence, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western
Hemisphere, an ecological, political, social, and economic disaster. Dependence on various exploitative outside powers, together with its own perpetuation of colonially inherited race and class divisions, have created a nation whose most common contemporary image is that of the boat people, the refugees whose only hope is to leave Haiti. Significant new communities of Haitians have grown up in France, though most notably in North American cities such as Miami, Montreal, and New York. Exile has for many become a means of escaping the degradations of Haitian life and of assuming a place in the global economy and culture. Haiti is itself in a kind of exile, a state of separation from the modern world, as if the first “black” postcolonial nation is still paying the price for its initial, epic insubordination. The bicentenary of Haiti’s independence ushered in yet more political turmoil in Haiti: Anti-Aristide groups had been gaining momentum during the buildup to 2004, and on February 29, under severe pressure from the U.S. government, Aristide fled Haiti, clearing the way for French and American troops to once again take control. Martin Munro See also: Alexis, Jacques-Stephen; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Breton, André; Césaire, Aimé; Christophe, Henri; Coffee; Cotton; Depestre, René; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; French Revolution; Montreal; Panama Canal; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Roumain, Jacques; Slavery; Sugar; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François; Vodun. References Arthur, Charles, and J. Michael Dash, eds. Libete: A Haiti Anthology. London: Latin American Bureau (Research and Action), 1999. Dash, J. Michael. Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination. 2d edition. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997.
HASSAM, FREDERICK CHILDE
557
Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1995. Geggus, David P., ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Geggus, David P., and David B. Gaspar, eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins. London: Allison and Busby, 1994. Originally published 1938. Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Color, and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
HASSAM, FREDERICK CHILDE (1859–1935) Painter and printmaker, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, who translated the latest French painterly techniques and subject matter into an American rhetoric. On European visits he encountered and responded to the vibrant palette, brushwork, and cityscape motifs of the impressionists and the themes and techniques of the postimpressionists and symbolists. The son of an influential Boston merchant, Hassam is best known as a landscape painter, but he began and ended his artistic career as a graphic artist and watercolorist. After his apprenticeship to a wood engraver, his early work was principally illustrations for children’s books and popular illustrated journals. In later life he returned to printmaking, executing over 400 etchings and lithographs. Each of his long visits to Europe marked a transition in his approach to painting. After a first trip in 1883 accompanied by the artist Edmund C. Garrett, on a second visit in 1886, with his wife
American impressionist painter Childe Hassam. (Peter A. Juley & Son)
Kathleen, Hassam enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he was immersed in the academic tradition of draftsmanship under the tutelage of Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. Hassam also absorbed the techniques and motifs of the impressionists, which by the 1880s were much less controversial and emulated by many salon painters. Hassam blended these innovations with other important influences, such as the English painters Constable and Turner. Hassam applied these new effects and viewpoints to his paintings of New York when he returned there in 1889. On a third European visit in 1896–1897, Hassam encountered the mystical imagery of the symbolist artists and painted a number of less well-known allegorical works. A number of views of Brittany and Pont Aven attest to his contact with the circle
558
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL
that had formed around Gauguin. The flag paintings that dominated his work during World War I began after his Bastille Day paintings, created on a final trip to Paris in 1910–1911. The Parisian art dealer Durand-Ruel gave him a one-man exhibition in 1901, a rare honor for a foreign artist. Hassam was the quintessential painter of cityscapes of Paris, London, and New York, and these works remain the most celebrated aspect of his oeuvre. He never, however, abandoned rural motifs and his earlier preferred medium of watercolor. His friendship with Mrs. Celia Thaxter, who owned a hotel on Appledore Island off the Maine–New Hampshire coast, inspired a vibrant set of seascapes and garden paintings of the picturesque eastern seaboard. Two visits to Oregon in 1904 and 1908 to visit Colonel Wood, for whom he painted a mural, inspired a startling set of impressionist desertscapes. Hassam actively supported many artist organizations, helping to found the Ten American Painters Exhibitions in 1897, visiting the artist colonies at Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, where he befriended Julien Alden Weir and Willard Leroy Metcalf, and creating a meeting place for artists at his own Long Island home in East Hampton, New York. He left his estate to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York to sell off to support the purchase of American artists’ work for museums. Claire O’Mahony See also: Brittany; Gauguin, Paul; Painting; World War I. References Adams, Adeline. Childe Hassam. New York: American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1938.
Burnside, Kathleen. Childe Hassam in Connecticut. Old Lyme, CT: Florence Griswold Museum, 1988. Fort, Ilene Susan. The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988. Park Curry, David. Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 1990.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL (1804–1864) American author, born in Salem, Massachusetts. Nathaniel Hawthorne spent his literary career exploring American history, character, and identity. Despite this consistent thematic focus, European history, especially the history of French revolutions, informs his most significant and most enduring work, The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne spent much of the 1850s in Europe, including a short time in France, and used Italy as the setting for his final novel, The Marble Faun (1860). According to one prominent critic of American literature and culture, The Scarlet Letter began America’s institutionalized literary tradition. Henry James affirmed this idea, observing that with Hawthorne’s first novel “something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American” (James, p. 111). Set in puritan America, the novel explores the confluence of early American history, burgeoning national character, and personal identity; thus, the attention to its “Americanness” is understandable. Moreover, the novel represents the fruition of his two decades exploring similar literary terrain, a period
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL
during which Hawthorne’s best-known nod to the French was claiming that “Rappacini’s Daughter” (1844) was his translation of a work by “M. de l’Aubépine” (French for “Mr. Hawthorne”). Yet, despite this intense American focus, the oblique invocation of French history reveals his skepticism about political revolutions, which in turn undermines the nascent revolutionary yearning of Hester Prynne, the novel’s central character. As Larry Reynolds has demonstrated, France’s revolutions provided a foundation for Hawthorne’s skepticism. Ten days before beginning to write the novel, he borrowed the first two volumes of Lamartine’s History of the Girondists from the Salem Athanaeum, and two weeks later, in the midst of an intense writing period, he borrowed the third. Such circumstantial evidence is corroborated by the central role of the scaffold, an icon not of the American puritan colony but of the first French Revolution. Upon the scaffold, Lamartine’s Louis XVI demonstrated courage and dignity, a contrast to the demeanor and attitude of the revolutionary mob. It is on the scaffold that Hester is publicly displayed and punished for her adultery, and it is there that Arthur Dimmesdale dies, after both revealing himself as Hester’s adulterous lover and rejecting the revolutionary thoughts proposed by Hester. Hawthorne followed The Scarlet Letter with The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852), continuing his exploration of American identity. Hawthorne then became U.S. consul in Liverpool, spent considerable time in Italy, and stayed briefly in France. His experiences on the Continent were largely unpleasant, due to inclement weather, his own
559
Nineteenth-century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. (National Archives)
recurring health problems, and his daughter Una’s contraction of malaria. Despite these misfortunes, his travels provided the basis for The Marble Faun, which anticipates the transatlantic concerns James later spent his literary career examining. Less a shift of focus than of setting, The Marble Faun unveils Hawthorne’s interest in European identity and its interconnections with the United States and casts light on how similar concerns shaped his previous work. James Britton See also: French Revolution; James, Henry. References Bercovitch, Sacvan. Office of the Scarlet Letter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. James, Henry. Hawthorne. New York: AMS Press, 1968. Originally published 1887. Reynolds, Larry. European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
560
H. D.
H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) (1886–1961) American poet and writer, who was a key figure in transatlantic modernism and one of the founders of “Imagisme.” This poetic movement, now usually referred to as imagism, originated among a coterie of English and American writers in London in 1912 and announced itself in a special issue of Poetry (Chicago) the following year. The influence on Imagisme of new ideas about literature and aesthetics emanating from France is registered in the spelling of the movement’s name. In addition to her spare, incisive poems (best represented by Sea Garden [1916]), H. D. wrote drama, translations, memoirs, and fiction (including Palimpsest, first published in Paris in 1926). She was both of the modernist movement and detached from it, an American in Europe but one who abjured the usual haunts, a wife and mother who was involved in successive heterosexual relationships but whose most significant partnership was long-lived and lesbian, a formal innovator who looked back to classical models for inspiration and whose interest in questions of language and sexual difference anticipated later feminist and poststructuralist thought. H. D. was born in Pennsylvania in 1886 and studied at Bryn Mawr College. In 1911 she traveled to Europe, visiting Paris, but choosing to live in London and Switzerland. Shari Benstock reads H. D.’s decision not to settle in Paris, the locus of modernism, as a sign of her larger ambivalence about the modernist project and her desire to maintain a wary distance from it. In 1913, she married the poet Richard Aldington, from whom she was later separated. Perdita, her daughter from a subsequent affair, was born in 1919. The two key rela-
tionships of H. D.’s life, however, were with Ezra Pound (to whom she had once been engaged) and Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman). The former exerted a strong— even oppressive—professional influence; it was Pound who, unbeknownst to her, signed her work “Imagiste” and dispatched it for publication. But it was Bryher who played the crucial role in sustaining H. D. emotionally and practically from their first meeting in 1918 to H. D.’s death in 1961. The impact of World War I and of contemporaneous personal crises (the stillbirth of her first child, the death of her brother in action in France) were formative to H. D.’s writing, which may be understood as an attempt to comprehend and represent—with the aid of myth, imagination, and formal innovation—the barely conceivable. In the aftermath of the war, H. D. traveled to Greece, Italy, Egypt (the mythology of these ancient civilizations emerges and is transformed, often feminized, throughout her oeuvre as, for example, in Helen in Egypt [1961]), and finally to Vienna where she underwent an analysis with Sigmund Freud. Her Tribute to Freud (1974) recollects this period. World War II, which H. D. spent in London, stimulated three fine poetic sequences: The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946), subsequently published as Trilogy. Trilogy traces and transmutes the trauma of the war, indeed of the modern period, in a poetry that, while borrowing from classical, biblical, and psychoanalytic discourses, brings a specifically female consciousness, and a taut imagistic idiom, to bear. Jo Gill See also: Feminisms; Gay Movement; Pound, Ezra Loomis; World War I.
HÉBERT, ANNE References Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. London: Virago, 1987. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H.D.: The Career of That Struggle. Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1986. Friedman, Susan Stanford, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, eds. Signets: Reading H.D. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1990.
HÉBERT, ANNE (1916–2000) One of Quebec’s best-known and most successful writers, the poet, fiction writer, and dramatist, Anne Hébert, spent a significant part of her adult life divided between her country of origin and France. A descendant of Louis Hébert, the first French settler in Canada to live selfsufficiently, Hébert had a literary family: her father was the critic and poet Maurice Hébert, while her maternal cousin was Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, a leading poet of the 1930s. Hébert received a classical French education and began publishing poems in literary journals in 1939: her first anthology, Les Songes en équilibre (“Dreams in Balance,” 1942), was critically acclaimed. A collection of short stories, Le Torrent/The Torrent (1950), was selfpublished after being rejected by publishing houses on the grounds that it was too violent for a woman. In 1954, a grant from the Royal Society of Canada enabled Hébert to go to France, where she found the cultural climate preferable to that of 1950s Quebec. She lived alternatively in Montreal and Paris until the death of her mother in 1965. Hébert then settled in Paris, where she published a number of works, including the best-selling historical epic, Kamouraska (1970), before returning finally to Montreal in 1997.
561
Hébert’s work inscribes a tension between North America and Europe: her early poetry is compared with that of Paul Verlaine, while much of the fiction that she published in France either mediates themes associated with Quebec or is set there. Les Chambres de bois/The Silent Rooms (1958), about a suffocating heterosexual relationship, is interpreted as mediating the cultural and political stalemate popularly associated with the era of Union nationale leader, Maurice Duplessis, despite the fact that the novel is set in France. Hébert described her writing as being shaped by the Québécois landscape, and this is especially illustrated in Kamouraska. The novel’s evocative rendering of a snow-covered lower Saint Lawrence accounts for a large part of its appeal, especially among European audiences attracted to the exoticism of the wintry landscape. Exemplifying a trend in Quebec women’s writing of the period, which rejected the idealization of the maternal bound up in francophone Canada’s Catholic traditions, Kamouraska is a canonical text of the nationalist assertion of the 1960s known as the Quiet Revolution. Based on a story told by Hébert’s mother, it has an autobiographical impulse that is typical of the writer and that informs subsequent novels such as Les Fous de bassan/In the Shadow of the Wind (1982), set in an imaginary anglophone village on the shores of the Saint Lawrence, and Le Premier Jardin/The First Garden (1988), in which a retired actress returns to her native city of Quebec after a lengthy, self-imposed exile in France. These texts mediate the themes of feminine desire, social conventions around class and gender, the mother-daughter relationship, violence, and optimism associated with Hébert, but problematize Quiet
562
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST
Anne Hébert, one of Quebec’s leading twentieth-century novelists. (Sophie Bassouls/Corbis Sygma)
Revolution discourses around national belonging. Occupying an important position within the academy both in and outside of Quebec, Hébert’s works have been translated into several languages. Appropriately for an author who engaged with the question of feminine genealogies, Hébert, with her distinctively poetic aesthetic, has been an important influence on younger generations of female Québécois writers. Ceri Morgan See also: Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet; Feminisms; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Saint Lawrence River. References Knight, Kelton W. Anne Hébert: In Search of the First Garden. New York: Lang, 1998. Pallister, Janis L., ed. The Art and Genius of Anne Hébert: Essays on Her Works: Night and the Day Are One. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001.
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST (1899–1961) American author. Born in 1899 in Oak Park, an affluent suburb of Chicago, he finished high school in 1917. His first job was as a journalist for the Kansas City Star. In 1918, he left the Star to go to Europe. He tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but failed the medical. He became an ambulance driver in France and in Italy. Seriously wounded in the leg on July 8, 1918, he was awarded the Medaglia d’argento by the Italian government. When he returned to the United States, he found work as a journalist at the Toronto Star in 1920. In 1921, he married Hadley Richards and soon after went to live in Paris as correspondent for the Toronto Star. Paris was, at the time, considered the capital of the literary and artistic
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST
avant-gardes, and a great number of his compatriots were living there. It was at this time that Hemingway, along with the Canadian author Morley Callaghan whom he had met in Toronto, met F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. All of these authors, members of the so-called Lost Generation, frequented the Montparnasse area. In 1923, Hemingway published his first work, Three Stories and Ten Poems. With In Our Time (1924) and The Torrents of Spring (1926), he made a name for himself with his innovative style. In 1926, with the publication of The Sun Also Rises, he became a spokesperson for the Lost Generation. In 1929, he published his first great novel, A Farewell to Arms. It is the story of a tragic love affair between a British nurse and an ambulance driver, and many critics considered it the best novel written about World War I. Based on his experience as a journalist during the Spanish civil war, Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel in which he pleads for fraternity among men. With The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway earned his place as a great author on the international stage. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and it was partly due to this novel that he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. He also had a number of posthumous publications, including A Moveable Feast (1964), which was an account of his memories of 1920s Paris. Islands in the Stream (1970) and True at First Light (1999) were based on the safari he went on in 1954. Hemingway had learned his style— brief, concise, laconic, and without elaborate descriptions—during his first posting at the Kansas City Star. His writing is a hymn to honor, fraternity, courage, and stoicism. A lover of boxing, an aficionado
563
Ernest Hemingway worked in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. (Library of Congress)
of the corrida, witness to the Spanish civil war and to two world wars, Hemingway represented a particular masculine American ideal, communicating what he felt to be the absurdity and futility of life. On July 2, 1961, a few years after his father, Hemingway committed suicide. Jean-François Lessard See also: Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Pound, Ezra Loomis; Stein, Gertrude; World War I; World War II. References Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life without Consequences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Da Capo, 1999. Plath, James. Remembering Ernest Hemingway. Key West: Frank Simons Ketch and Yawl Press, 1999. Schuyler Lynn, Kenneth. Hemingway. New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1995.
564
HÉMON, LOUIS
HÉMON, LOUIS (1880–1913) French writer. Born in Brest, Louis Hémon is above all remembered as the author of what came to be accepted as a key representation of rural Quebec, the novel Maria Chapdelaine (1914). It is paradoxical that this text, perhaps the best-known fictional representation of French Canada, was written by a French citizen who spent less than two years in Canada. The son of a middle-class family, Hémon studied law at the Sorbonne, and like his father and elder brother, seemed to be heading for a career in the civil service. However, probably with the desire to escape such a future, he left France for England, where he lived for nine years, working as a bilingual secretary for a ship broker and writing fiction and journalism. During this period he completed his novel Lizzie Blakeston, published in serialized form by Le Temps. He traveled to Canada in 1911. After a few months spent in Montreal working for a life insurance company, he set off to the Lac-Saint-Jean, where he found work as a farm laborer in Péribonka, researching the material for Maria Chapdelaine. He then found secretarial work, first at Saint-Gédéon and then at Kénogami on the southern shore of the Lac-Saint-Jean. Here he completed the manuscript of his novel and sent it off to the editor of Le Temps in Paris before setting off west with a friend. On his route west, walking along the rail tracks near Chapleau, northern Ontario, he was killed by a train (July 8, 1913). Maria Chapdelaine was published posthumously, first in serialized form in Le Temps, but then in book form both in France and Canada. Although it proved very popular with French readers, in Quebec the reception was more mixed. Never-
theless, for many readers, the lifestyle and moral climate depicted in the text came to epitomize the positive value of the traditional rural way of life of Catholic French Canada, and it was used as a positive symbol in support of campaigns to colonize regions such as Abitibi-Témiscamingue in the interwar years. In France the novel appealed to various strands of right-wing thinking, for which rural Quebec seemed to represent a morally superior way of life to that of contemporary Europe. The central conflict between two ways of life, that of the habitant and that of the Coureurs de bois, has been developed in a number of “sequels” written by French and Québécois authors, including Sylva Clapin, Philippe Porée-Kurrer, and Gabrielle Gourdeau. Recent interest in Hémon has resulted in the publication of correspondence with his family (1980) and nonfiction writing about Quebec (1993), which cover such topics as the landscape, the lumber trade, and sport, one of Hémon’s abiding interests. Rosemary Chapman See also: Coureurs de bois; Maria Chapdelaine; Quebec. References Ayotte, Alfred, and Victor Tremblay. L’Aventure Louis Hémon. Montreal: Fides, 1974. Chapman, Rosemary. Siting the Quebec Novel: The Representation of Space in Francophone Writing in Quebec. Oxford/Bern/Berlin: Lang, 2000.
HENNEPIN, FATHER LOUIS (1626–?; exact date of death unknown, sometime after 1701) French missionary and travel writer. Born in Spanish-occupied Flanders, Louis Hennepin entered the Recollect
HENNEPIN, FATHER LOUIS
565
French missionary Father Hennepin discovering St. Anthony Falls. (Library of Congress)
order at the age of sixteen and led the life of a mendicant friar for more than three decades. Sent as a missionary to Canada in 1675, he was designated sometime later along with two other monks of his order to accompany La Salle’s expedition to explore the course of the Mississippi River. Returning to France in the autumn of 1681, he published his Description of Louisiana two years later, and later went to live once more in Flanders. In 1696 he offered his services as an explorer to King William III of England. A year later he published a second book titled The New Discovery of a Very Great Country/Nouvelle Découverte d’un très grand pays and, shortly thereafter a third, New Travels in a Country Larger Than Europe/Nouveau Voyage d’un pays plus grand que l’Europe. After a series of polemics in Utrecht, Hennepin wandered, lonely and embittered, between Rome and his native Flanders. His date of death is not known.
The Description of Louisiana begins with a letter to King Louis XIV in which Hennepin states that the purpose of La Salle’s expedition to the lower Mississippi valley had been “to labor for a God, whom I wished to see known and adored by those nations, and for a King whose glory and whose virtues are unbounded” (Castillo and Schweitzer, p. 182). This is followed by a journal of Hennepin’s journey from Quebec to the upper Mississippi valley, in which he describes the difficulties faced by the comte de Frontenac and LaSalle, the landscapes and peoples he observed in the course of his journey, and also his brief captivity among the Issati Sioux. Based on his experiences among the natives of the Mississippi valley, Hennepin concludes his Description of Louisiana with a lengthy appendix titled “Manners of the Indians,” which is probably the most interesting portion of his book. He discusses the
566
HEREDIA, JOSÉ MARIA
DE
fertility of the Indian country and describes the remarkable abundance of game and the lushness and prolixity of plant life, including medicinal herbs unknown at the time to Europeans. He speculates about the origin of the Indians and retells what is probably an Ottawa or Anishinabe origin myth of the primeval turtle on whose back America rests, comparing elements of this tale to the Creation narrative in Genesis. After this, he goes on to speculate about the health of the Indians and their medicinal practices, their marriage customs, and the obstacles to their conversion. Susan Castillo See also: Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Louisiana; Mississippi River. References Castillo, Susan, and Ivy Schweitzer. The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Greenfield, Bruce. “The Oral in the Written: The Irony of Representation in Louis Hennepin’s Description de la Louisiane.” Historical Reflexions 21, no. 2 (spring 1995): 243–259. Tremblay, Mylene. “L’Image de l’Amérindien chez Louis Hennepin: Méthodologie, perception et référence.” Canadian Folklore Canadien 18, no. 2 (1996): 111–127.
HEREDIA, JOSÉ MARIA (1842–1905)
DE
French poet of Cuban origin, not to be confused with the Spanish-language poet of the same name, in fact his cousin (1803–1839), on whose centenary Heredia composed three sonnets in Spanish. Heredia was born on a coffee plantation near Santiago de Cuba on the southern coast of the island. His father’s family had owned a whole province in Santo
Domingo. His mother, Louise Girard, was French and a descendant of a Norman aristocrat who had obtained an important post there. Both were driven out by Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave rebellions and settled in Cuba, along with other wealthy French and Spanish property owners. At the age of nine, Heredia left to study at Senlis in France, obtained his baccalaureate, and after a brief return to Cuba in 1859–1861 settled in France with his mother, enrolling at the Ecole des Chartes, which trained librarians and archivists. Heredia frequented Parisian literary circles and hosted salons, becoming close friends with another Creole poet, Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894, born on Réunion). Along with the latter and Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), Heredia is associated in literary history with the Parnassian group of poets, named after the literary revue Le Parnasse contemporain, which in a reaction to the direct and sometimes declamatory expression of emotion associated with the romantics, favored the cult of artistic form and impersonality, an art-for-art’s-sake approach that idealized classical Greece and other past civilizations. He was admitted to the Académie Française in 1894 and was appointed head administrator of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in 1901. Heredia’s major poems were collected in Les Trophées (“Trophies,” 1893). These 118 erudite sonnets are grouped according to place and time, beginning with “Greece and Sicily,” and present a gallery of historical moments and settings. The transatlantic dimension emerges in Heredia’s proud invocation of his conquistador ancestry and in nostalgia. The final eight poems in the “Middle Ages and Renaissance” section paint this epoch in heroic fashion: “Les Conquérants” with the fervor
HÉROUX, DENIS
of departure, “Jouvence” with the aged Juan Ponce de León’s conquest of Florida and thus immortality. The final four concern Heredia’s ancestor Don Pedro de Heredia, who participated in Columbus’s brother Bartholomew’s expedition to the Indies and founded Cartagena (“a new Carthage”) in present-day Colombia: two of these four bear the titles “A un fondateur de la ville” (To a Founder of the City) and “A une ville morte” (To a Dead City), and past glory is contrasted with current decadence. In 1869, Heredia published his “Conquérants de l’or” (Conquerors of Gold), intended as the prologue to an in fact unwritten epic poem about the conquest of Peru. Between 1877 and 1887 he translated in four tomes the True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz de Castillo (1492–1581). The juxtaposition of a personalized, colonial grand narrative and hints of loss and transience, the coupling of heroic “immortality” with the march of time and nature, continue in muted form in the section on Brittany, “Nature and Dream.” Here the Atlantic itself is a tangible presence, and in “Brise marine” (Sea Breeze) becomes the vehicle with which Heredia invokes his Cuban connection, as he detects the “arôme subtil” (subtle aroma) of his native West Indies wafted to this bleak Breton headland. It is not a huge leap to speculate whether the ambivalence of heroism and loss, and the linking of personal, family, and world histories, are ways for the repressed element of that narrative to return (slavery, the expulsion from Santo Domingo). Thus the first, classical, section of Les Trophées contains the sonnet “L’Esclave” (The Slave), in which a Sicilian laments his exile and lost love. Bill Marshall
567
See also: Brittany; Coffee; Florida; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François. References Harms, Alvin. José-Maria de Heredia. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Ince, W. N. Heredia. London: Athlone, 1979. Szertics, Simone. L’Héritage espagnol de JoséMaria de Heredia. Paris: Klincksieck, 1975.
HÉROUX, DENIS (1940–) Québécois film director and producer. His name is mainly tied to Quebec’s cinema history for his productions of very softly erotic films at the end of the 1960s, but he remains one of its most prolific producers, a figure behind many big-budget international coproductions. Although of differing quality, these works contained a few pearls, and above all showed the sure taste of Denis Héroux as a creative producer and his possession of a sharp business sense. Codirector with Stéphane Venne and Denys Arcand of a film produced by the student association of Montreal University, Seul ou avec d’autres (“Alone or with Others,” 1962), he demonstrated his entrepreneurship by getting the National Film Board of Canada involved in the production. In those times of the so-called Quiet Revolution, the film was a critical success, and it is still seen today as an important breakthrough made in the sclerotic world of education, as it expressed the anguish and dreams of French-speaking youth. Later, while a history teacher, he entered the real film world with the production of Pas de vacances pour les idoles (“No Vacations for Pop Stars,” 1965), a comedy constructed on the popularity of television stars. But it was finally three years later that he found the recipe for real popular cinema
568
HIMES, CHESTER
with Valérie (1968, with box-office takings of $1.5 million for a budget of $99,000), which was to start a long wave of slightly erotic films that were still filled with traditional values. Héroux claimed he wanted to undress the woman of Quebec, to show them the way to modern times, liberated from the weight of religion, and he was right on time for this type of discourse. Many titles of the same type followed, popular comedies using more or less the same ingredients every time, but always highly successful. A few years later, he directed two horror films made as international coproductions, Born for Hell (1976) and The Uncanny (1977), but these two films did not add anything to his record as a film director, and he quickly abandoned this role to concentrate on his real passion as a producer, mainly specializing in international coproductions. Many films resulted from his restless work, such as three films by French director Claude Chabrol, Les Liens du sang/Blood Relatives (1977), Violette Nozière (1978), and Le Sang des autres/The Blood of Others (1984). He also produced Atlantic City (1980) by Louis Malle and La Guerre du feu/Quest for Fire (1981) by JeanJacques Annaud. Finally, one particularity that is worth noting is that he innovated again in producing cinematographic productions from which television series were made simultaneously, such as Gilles Carle’s Les Plouffe/The Plouffe Family (1981) and Louisiana (1983) by Philippe de Broca. Now sharing his time between Paris, London, and Los Angeles, Héroux is still working as an independent producer, mainly for television, on behalf of various production companies. Roger Bourdeau
See also: Annaud, Jean-Jacques; Arcand, Denys; Carle, Gilles; Chabrol, Claude; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Malle, Louis; Montreal; Pornography; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Television; Theater. References Lever, Yves. Histoire générale du cinéma au Québec. Montreal: Boréal, 1995. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
HIMES, CHESTER (1909–1984) Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909, the African American novelist Chester Himes is best known for the detective fiction he began writing in Paris in 1957, which reinvents Harlem (New York) as a violently comic fictional universe. Rather than depicting black life in postwar America in the language of literary naturalism, Himes’s detective novels represent the basic conditions of American racial consciousness as fundamentally absurd. Himes began writing during the Depression as a prisoner in the Ohio State Penitentiary, publishing short stories in a number of African American magazines and, in 1934, in the mainstream magazine Esquire. Arrested in 1928 after an ill-fated attempt at armed robbery, Himes spent eight years in prison, a period documented in his semiautobiographical novel Cast the First Stone (1952), as well as in the first volume of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972). Himes’s first novel, If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945), a psychological drama of racial and sexual hostility between a black narrator and a white female coworker in postwar Los Angeles, garnered acclaim from the Left. During this time, Himes was
HIMES, CHESTER
bolstered by the critical and financial support of Richard Wright, then an influential member of the Communist Party. Later novels, which further explored violent fantasies of interracial sexuality, alienated both mainstream audiences and the Left. After several years of critical and personal turmoil, Himes emigrated to Paris in 1953, joining the circle of African American expatriates that included Wright, James Baldwin, Ollie Harrington, William Gardner Smith, and Leroy Haynes. Himes began writing detective fiction at the request of Marcel Duhamel, the editor of the Série noire, the crime fiction series at Gallimard; Duhamel had translated If He Hollers, Let Him Go into French in 1947 and was an admirer of Himes’s writing. Himes’s first detective novel, For Love of Imabelle (now A Rage in Harlem), which appeared in French in 1958, has little to do with so-called “classic” English and French mysteries of the prewar era. Written in English as The Five Cornered Square in 1957, it was translated by Minnie Danzas for its publication in the Série noire as La Reine des Pommes—Danzas’s French for the “sucker” named in the English title as the “five-cornered” square, the square so square as to have a fifth corner. Like the title, or titles, themselves, the stylistic universe of Himes’s novel embraces the cacophony of exaggerations, jokes, and divergent stories that people use to describe lived experience. The novel, which introduces the detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, made Himes a literary celebrity in France, winning the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière (Detective Fiction Grand Prix) in 1958. Moving between Paris, Majorca, and Spain throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Himes published seven
569
Portrait of Chester Himes, 1946. Himes is best known for the detective fiction he began writing in Paris in 1957, which reinvents Harlem as a violently comic fictional universe. (Library of Congress)
additional novels in the Harlem detective cycle, each becoming increasingly bleak in its depiction of racial violence. The seventh novel in the cycle, Cotton Comes to Harlem, was filmed by Ossie Davis in 1970. In 1972, Himes published the first volume of his autobiography; the second, My Life of Absurdity, appeared in 1976. Shortly before his death in 1984, he released the unfinished Plan B, the apocalyptic final novel in the Harlem detective cycle. Jonathan P. Eburne See also: Crime Fiction; Duhamel, Marcel. References Fabre, Michel, and Michael Skinner, eds. Conversations with Chester Himes. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
570
HIP-HOP MUSIC AND CULTURE Sallis, James. Chester Himes: A Life. New York: Walker, 2001. Silet, Charles, ed. The Critical Response to Chester Himes. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
HIP-HOP MUSIC AND CULTURE Hip-hop emerged in the South Bronx, New York, in the early 1970s as an organic art form comprised of four fundamental elements: DJ’ing, break dancing, rapping, and graffiti art. Though chiefly associated with African Americans, who provided a critical backbone to the art, the originators of hiphop also included children of Puerto Rican and English-speaking Caribbean immigrants. Young people, influenced by the Black Power movement and Puerto Rican nationalism, initiated efforts to stop the violent gang culture in New York City in the early 1970s. In 1973 they initiated a gang truce in the Bronx. Out of this effort to find more constructive means to engage young people, Kevin Donovan, a former gang member, formed the Zulu Nation in the fall of 1973. Renaming himself Afrika Bambattaa, he became the leader of the first organization to systematically celebrate all four elements of what later became known as hip-hop. Young people competed with each other by dancing at parties in public parks. Legendary DJs like DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambattaa became local celebrities of the new music, which relied heavily on disco, rhythm and blues, rock music, and funk for instrumentals as an MC rapped over the beats created by the DJ. B-boys and b-girls danced in acrobatic styles as various crews vied for creative
dominance and status as the best at whatever element they practiced. In 1979 the first rap songs were released commercially. “Rappers Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang was the first hit rap song. Between 1982 and 1986 several hiphop-related movies were released to moderate success. Such films such as Krush Groove (Schultz, 1985), Breakin’ (Silberg, 1984), and Beat Street (Lathan, 1984) introduced the art to a wider audience in the United States and abroad. In 1983 Afrika Bambattaa and the Soul Sonic Force went on a world tour, visiting France and establishing the first international chapters of the Universal Zulu Nation (UZN). The UZN operated as a creative force that promoted the four elements of hip-hop in local communities. By 1986 RUN DMC had become the first rap group to sell over a million albums and an international hit, “Walk This Way.” As hip-hop spread internationally, non-American hip-hop communities expanded. Few countries have developed as sophisticated hip-hop communities as has France. In the early 1980s DJ Dee Nasty was one of the first French hip-hop artists to enjoy celebrity in France. By the late 1980s, French hip-hop groups enjoyed local and national celebrity in the growing hip-hop community. No French rapper has had as much international exposure and success as MC Solaar, who released his first album in 1991 and joined the American group Gang Starr in various collaborations. Like most of the major French hip-hop artists, Senegalese-born MC Solaar was born in a former French colony. Artists such as M.A.M. (Ivory Coast), INTIK (Algeria), Red One (Morocco), 113 (Senegal, Morocco, and Martinique), or Tana-Cergy
HIPPOLYTE, HECTOR
(Madagascar) typify the immigrant pattern in France’s hip-hop scene. Collaborative efforts such as those between American Wu Tang Clan and French N.T.M. have had limited success in the United States, but more success in France. Throughout the past twenty years, the French hip-hop community has cultivated its own style and sensibilities while staying closely connected to American artists via music videos, concerts, radio, and other media. French hiphop magazines, Radikal and Groove, cover artists from both countries in glossy style. Hip-hop words such as “dis” (“to disrespect” or “to insult”), “bling bling” (an ostentatious display of wealth), or “wack” (“undesirable,” “inadequate,” or “worthy of ridicule”) have entered the American lexicon, transcending the urban communities of African American youth. Some words, such as “phat” (reference to an inanimate object as “very good”) have entered the French hip-hop lexicon as well. Expressions of hip-hop from France have emerged as a powerful means of cultural and political expression, sometimes fusing African, French, and American musical styles and structure in powerful articulations of Atlantic world exchange. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Language; Music (Pop). References Cannon, Steve. “‘Paname City Rapping’: B-Boys in the Banlieues and Beyond.” Post-Colonial Cultures in France. Ed. Alec Hargreaves and Mark McKinney. London: Routledge, 1997. Durand, Alain-Philippe. Black, blanc, beur: Rap Music and Hip Hop in the Francophone World. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 2002. Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
571
Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: HipHop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Prevos, André J. M. “Hip Hop, Rap, and Repression in France and the United States.” Popular Music and Society (summer 1998). http://articles.findarticles.com/p/ articles/mi_m2822/is_2_22/ai_54504607 (accessed June 28, 2004).
HIPPOLYTE, HECTOR (1894–1948) Haitian painter and houngan (Vodun priest), whose magic-realist works blend the thematic, formal, and symbolic lexicon of Vodun iconography and the “naïve” aesthetic of secular popular art, in a distinctive style that epitomizes modern Haitian art of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in the small town of Saint-Marc, some 50 kilometers from Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, Hippolyte was discovered in 1945 by the Haitian novelist Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904–1975) and the American teacher and watercolorist Dewitt Peters. They came upon a small bar in a seaside village, the door of which was decorated with birds and flowers vividly painted in a dreamlike “naïve” style. This serendipitous discovery led to an invitation to the Centre d’Art, an artists’ collective founded by Peters in Port-au-Prince. In the three years of his association with the Centre d’Art, from 1945 to his death in 1948, Hippolyte produced a series of works on canvas as strikingly fresh, imaginative, and magical as the earlier creations that had decorated the walls of regional temples, homes, and commercial establishments. His script signature and the double H initials authenticate scores of
572
HOCQUENGHEM, GUY
paintings of Vodun deities, historical figures, religious symbols, natures mortes (still lives), and scenes of daily life found in private collections and in museums around the world. The variety of his subjects notwithstanding, Hippolyte is first and foremost a religious artist, for the Vodun ethos illuminates both the creative process and the very facture of his paintings. He often said he painted only when directed by the lwa, the Vodun deities, and the ancestral religion remains the primary semantic frame of reference of his works. Hippolyte’s Vodun paintings are emblematic of one of the dominant trends in Haitian art, not only because of their religious subjects but because they exemplify in a superlative way an aesthetic that has become recognizably Haitian in its blending of Vodun symbolism and the formal conventions of Haiti’s renowned “naïve” art (simplified drawing, skewed perspective, distorted proportions, bold colors). Hippolyte remains arguably primus inter pares, the most famous among the socalled first generation of Haitian artists, which include the Vodun priest André Pierre, Wilson Bigaud, Rigaud Benoit, and Castera Bazile. Their creative success was due to the nurturing of the Centre d’Art, as well as to the favorable cultural climate established since the 1930s by the writers of the indigenist movement, to which novelist Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, Hippolyte’s mentor, belonged. After the indigenist poets and novelists, such elements of traditional Haitian culture as the Vodun religion, the Creole language, and popular art and music would rightfully be perceived by most Haitians as essential Afro-Creole expressions of the genius of their people. Hippolyte’s oeuvre thus marks a key moment in the history of Haitian art, the
emergence of an aesthetic tradition independent from Western models. The significance of Hector Hippolyte struck such keen observers as Wilfredo Lam, Truman Capote, and André Malraux, who concluded about him and his cohort of the first generation that their art was simply “l’expérience la plus saisissante et la seule contrôlable de la peinture magique de notre temps” (the most impressive and verifiable experience of magical painting of our times). Asselin Charles See also: Haiti; Lam, Wilfredo; Painting; Vodun. References Alexis, Gerald. Peintres Haïtiens/Haitian Painters. Paris: Cercle d’Art, 2000. Becoulet, Philippe. La Peinture haïtienne: Dialogue du réel et de l’imaginaire. Strasbourg: Association franco-haïtienne pour la promotion des arts et de la culture, 1990. Lerebours, Michel-Philippe. Haïti et ses peintres de 1804 à 1980: Souffrances et espoirs d’un peuple. Port-au-Prince: Imprimeur II, 1989. Lusardy, Martine, ed. Haïti, anges et démons. Paris: Hoebeke/La Halle Saint-Pierre, 2000.
HOCQUENGHEM, GUY (1946–1988) French writer, gay activist, and theorist. Active in the far-left student movement of May 1968 in Paris, Hocquenghem was subsequently influenced by the counterculture and by the emerging gay liberation movement in the United States. In 1971 he was one of the founders of the modern French gay movement, which initially adopted a distinctly leftist revolutionary language (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire/Homosexual Front of Rev-
HOLLYWOOD’S FRENCH CARIBBEAN
olutionary Action). In turn, his theoretical work Homosexual Desire of 1972 was influential in U.S. academic circles, its English translation republished by Duke University Press in 1993 at the height of the visibility of Queer Theory in the academy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hocquenghem questioned the fate of left-wing and gay politics in the increasingly consumerized France of Giscard and Mitterrand and came to emphasize novel and travel writing as the most appropriate media for his subtle and challenging analyses of identity politics. His Le Gay Voyage of 1980 includes an evocation of the pre-AIDS New York gay scene of the late 1970s, transposed to some degree in his novel L’Amour en relief/Love in Relief (1982) and even present in the portrait of ancient Rome in his life of Saint John, La Colère de l’agneau/The Wrath of the Lamb of 1985. Uneasy with what he saw as the tradition in French literature of centering the work on a national project, Hocquenghem adopted the nomadic American road movie format for many of his works: in Love in Relief, his characters journey to the Chelsea Hotel in New York, the military installations of Alaska, San Francisco, Hollywood (in a satire of the civilization of the image and the spectacle in its very capital), and the beaches of California; in Eve (his 1987 “AIDS novel”) crucial action takes place in Argentina and Uruguay around the River Plate (a South American Nazi subplot) and includes an Atlantic voyage; in Les Voyages et aventures extraordinaires du frère Angelo/The Extraordinary Voyages and Adventures of Brother Angelo, his sixteenth-century hero journeys to the New World as Hocquenghem explores the origins of our Atlantic modernity. Bill Marshall
573
See also: AIDS; Argentina; Counterculture; Gay Movement; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Literary Relations; Mitterrand, François; Theory. References Hocquenghem, Guy. Love in Relief. Trans. M. Whisler. New York: Seaview, 1986. ———. Homosexual Desire. Trans. D. Dangoor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Marshall, Bill. Guy Hocquenghem. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
HOLLYWOOD’S FRENCH CARIBBEAN The most famous Hollywood film about the French Caribbean is probably Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944). Based on a story by Ernest Hemingway and with a script cowritten by William Faulkner, it is set in Fort de France, Martinique, in 1940, shortly after the German armistice with France and with the collaborationist Vichy regime in power on the island. A variation on the highly successful Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) but with an extra dose of American war commitment, it stars Humphrey Bogart as a U.S. boatman who is gradually educated into helping the Free French, firstly through money and then through his friendships with the bar owner Frenchy (Marcel Dalio) and the sassy young American Slim (Lauren Bacall). The colonial nature of the French regime is not questioned, and the black characters remain secondary, if sympathetic. Haiti has been represented in Lydia Bailey (Negulesco, 1952), about the revolutionary period, and an adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Comedians, set in the Duvalier period (Grenville, 1967), a coproduction between MGM and France. In 2003 Jonathan Demme made a featurelength documentary, The Agronomist,
574
HOLLYWOOD’S FRENCH CARIBBEAN
about a human rights activist. However, Hollywood’s treatment of that nation is overwhelmingly bound up with the exoticizing power of genre cinema. Stories of piracy, black magic, and Vodun (voodoo) that lurk in the American popular imagination seem to contain all the necessary elements for box-office success. The zombie movie genre, in particular, which focuses on the mystifying religious culture of Haiti without ever naming it, holds to this day a special fascination for American film audiences. The idea of the zombie was introduced to the U.S. public through literature with William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929). This novel, published during the U.S. military occupation of Haiti, inspired White Zombie (Halperin, 1932), the first film of a long series that consistently presented a distorted view of the African-born religion of Vodun. Films such as King of the Zombies (Yarbrough, 1941), I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), Zombies of the Mora Tau (Cahn, 1957), Orgy of the Dead (Apostolof, 1965), The Plague of the Zombies (Gilling, 1966), Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), to name a few, represent Afro-Caribbean natives as primitive and wicked, engaged in necromancy, sorcery, blood sucking, lustful activities, and other carnivalesque antics. Hollywood’s demonization of Haiti reveals, in part, fantasies and anxieties born out of nineteen years of U.S. occupation (1915–1934). These movies were based on novels written by naval officers eager to relate their supposed observations and experiences of Haitian culture. It also tapped into the Americans’ uneasiness with a country run by former African slaves who had reportedly gained their freedom by savagely
killing their white masters. From the time the first black republic was founded (1804), Americans spread terrifying stories that depicted Haitians as barbaric and bloodthirsty, thus contributing to the linkage of Vodun with debasing images. In the 1980s, movies such as Revenge of the Zombies (Reed, 1981), Angel Heart (Parker, 1987), The Believers (Schlesinger, 1987), The Serpent and the Rainbow (Craven, 1988)—the latter after the book by anthropologist Wade Davis—and Michael Jackson’s music video for “Thriller” (1989) continued to mock and vilify the Vodun religion by depicting zombies perversely engaged in deadly activities. These films, adding to the body of grade B horror movies, have played a central role in conveying evil images of Haiti. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the long-standing tradition of the Hollywood zombie movie genre continues to thrive. The 2003 release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Verbinski) recovers the legacy of piracy tales spiced with a renewed zombie plot. The accursed zombified buccaneers have flesh that melts when touched by moonlight; they are doomed to live forever as the undead. Although some recent popular movies, such as Eve’s Bayou (Lemmons, 1997), are starting to portray Vodun in a positive fashion, the Hollywood film industry has produced over the years such distorted stereotypical images of the Caribbean that they cannot be easily eradicated from the public’s imagination. Marie-Agnès Sourieau See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Dalio, Marcel; Haiti; Hemingway, Ernest; Piracy and Privateers; Vodun.
HOLLYWOOD’S PARIS References Aizenberg, Edna. “I Walked with a Zombie: The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity.” World Literature Today 73, no. 3 (1999): 461–466. Fortune, Leasa Farrar. “Hollywood’s Haiti: The Genesis of ‘Voodoo Movies.’” http://www.cbmr.org/confer/2001ab6.htm (accessed July 24, 2003). Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Women Possessed: Eroticism and Exoticism in the Representation of Woman as Zombie.” Sacred Possessions. Vodou, Santeriá, Obeah, and the Caribbean. Ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth ParavisiniGebert. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997: 37–58.
HOLLYWOOD’S PARIS Hollywood has cast its eyes on two French regions: Normandy for war films set around D day and Provence–Côte d’Azur for glossy comedies and thrillers, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) and Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s novel Bonjour Tristesse (1958). However, it is overwhelmingly Paris that has claimed most attention. Hollywood representations of Paris draw upon a set of conventions and assumptions derived from history, literature, and art. From La Boheme (Vidor, 1926) to Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, 2001), “Paris” has provided the mise-en-scène for a Catholic rehearsal of living and loving and an antidote to the vicissitudes of American puritanism. Hollywood on Paris has revealed more about the United States than about the French capital. In the silent era, Paris was the setting for two prestige historical epics, but more typically a cycle of musical comedies capitalizing on prized import Maurice Cheva-
575
lier’s Parisian manners and mores. D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921) was an ambitious re-creation of the revolutionary period featuring star siblings Lillian and Dorothy Gish as innocents caught up in the swirl of history. Reputedly authentic down to the champagne at an aristocrat’s ball, the film’s dramatic, albeit studio-constructed, set piece was the storming of the Bastille. Offsetting the tragedy of Mimi with an agreeably Gallic piquancy, King Vidor’s La Boheme brought a comedic note that would become entirely characteristic of Hollywood’s Paris. Showcasing the archboulevardier Maurice Chevalier, routine 1920s fare such as Innocents of Paris (1929) and Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1927)—“Hear and see the idol of France!”—appealed to the era’s relaxation of standards with a cheeky portrait of “Gay Paree.” Lubitsch made his reputation with a subtly visual and witty negotiation of sexual etiquette and cast his shadow over decades of Hollywood excursions to Paris. Meanwhile, Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923) remains an often powerful meditation on the frenzy of Parisian high life, while most emphatically an inventive dissection of mainstream comedic and melodramatic conventions. With the coming of sound in 1927, the risqué remained good for business, and Chevalier mugged his way through trifles such as Playboy of Paris (Berger, 1930), Love Me Tonight (Mamoulian, 1932), and Folies Bergère de Paris (Del Ruth, 1935). But by 1939 the mantle of sophisticated comedy had passed from Lubitsch to his Viennese disciple Billy Wilder, whose Parisian scenes introduced acid clarity to the boudoir confection and nostalgia to the atomic age. Claudette Colbert’s American
576
HOLLYWOOD’S PARIS
chorus girl brings a healthy skepticism to European excesses in the consummate Wilder-scripted Midnight (Leisen, 1939). Arriving in Paris on the Monte Carlo train in a gold lamé gown, her first words—“So this, as they say, is Paris, huh”—cast a sardonic eye on a generation of Hollywood representations. The sense in which history brought to a bitter end the dream of Paris, a heady brew of courtesans out of Gustave Flaubert’s novel L’Education sentimentale, struggling artists, and rococo art direction, is deftly captured in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939). When Princess Swana picks up the phone asking for “Balzac 2769,” we are reminded that this is not a sociologically rigorous exploration of the headquarters of French civilization but, like Honoré de Balzac’s Old Goriot, an exploration of the myth it left behind. Part scripted by Wilder, it is the American wisecrack rather than the Lubitschian innuendo that dominates this essay on the rejuvenating powers of Paris in the springtime. But the carefree atmosphere was giving way to realpolitik. “We’ll always have Paris,” Rick tells Ilsa in the flashback to their 1937 affair in Casablanca (1942). In postwar representations, the Lubitschian vision of the sunlit avenues and compromised afternoons of prewar legend retreated into memory. Where it persisted, it was in denial of the materialism and geopolitical brinkmanship of the 1950s. The mood was one of nostalgia. An American in Paris (Minnelli, 1951) and The Sun Also Rises (King, 1957) looked back to the Lost Generation of the 1920s. Moulin Rouge (Huston, 1952) turned to the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec. Gigi (Minnelli, 1958) colorfully evoked the belle époque, with Chevalier thrown in. As headlines blared the Soviet incursion in Hungary, Anastasia (Litvak, 1956) saw
white Russian exiles pass off a supposed victim of Bolshevik brutality as heiress to the imperial throne. With her gamine looks and flair for the minimal elegant look of the postwar catwalks, Audrey Hepburn became the face of Hollywood’s Paris in the 1950s. In Wilder’s Sabrina (1954), she is transfigured by a Parisian culinary and sentimental education. Wilder is at his most Lubitschian as the accordion strains of “La Vie en Rose”/“Life as Rose-Colored” drift through Sabrina’s bedroom window, becoming the theme for a young woman’s growing selfawareness. In Paramount on Parade (Azner/ Brower, 1930), Chevalier had played a gendarme taking down details of lovers in a Parisian park. In Love in the Afternoon (1957), Wilder has Chevalier play a detective spying on lovers in a divorce case. His daughter, Hepburn’s eighteen-year-old ingenue, becomes the innocent foil to Gary Cooper’s jaded American businessman in a scenario singularly out of place in the Hollywood of Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. A more contemporary sensibility could be detected in Vincente Minnelli’s Funny Face (1956), in which Hepburn played a fashion publicist’s unsuspecting find among the beatniks and existentialists of the postwar rive gauche. In its corny way, The Last Time I Saw Paris (Brooks, 1954) sounded the death knell for the unselfconscious parading of rose-tinted clichés on the eve of the jet age. There is something truly poignant about Charles Lindbergh’s barnstorming 1927 descent over the floodlit boulevards in Wilder’s The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). In the 1960s the risqué image took a lot of propping up. In 1963 the Hepburn caper comedy Charade (Donen) was so constructed around a screenwriter’s conceit
HOLLYWOOD’S QUEBEC
and a mod Mancini score that it resembled a Vogue fashion spread. If cheapening air travel was making “Paris” seem increasingly fraudulent, the place was better viewed in the latest Godard. Paris When It Sizzles (Quine, 1964) found another American professional turn dissolute in the City of Lights, as William Holden’s Hollywood screenwriter squanders his advance on the high life. Touting its mod aesthetics in the credits, What’s New Pussycat (Donner, 1965) was less intrigued by “continental” mores than by the possibility of a new American sexual status quo. Consonant with the coarsening of his style in the early 1960s, Wilder’s Irma la Douce (1963) was a comedy of mistaken identity set in “the stomach of Paris,” the wholesale produce market of Les Halles (reconstructed by Alexander Trauner on a back lot in Hollywood). Starring Chevalier and Louis Jourdan ladling the Gallic charm, Can-Can (Walter Lang, 1960) returned to fin de siècle “Paree,” but looked increasingly dated. Trailing Paul Newman’s American jazzman through the cellars of the Left Bank, Paris Blues (Ritt, 1961) was very picture postcard. As earnest a historical account as it was, the Franco-American war epic Is Paris Burning? (Clément, 1966) could not resist emblematic shots of the Eiffel Tower draped in Maurice Jarre’s melodic score. Paradoxically, by 1970 the myth could realistically only be animated, and Disney’s The AristoCats (Reitherman) did belle époque for grateful generations young and old. The golden age of Hollywood’s love affair with the French capital has passed, even if the nostalgia persists. Alan Rudolph’s The Moderns (1988) was a glowing tribute to the Lost Generation. For some critics, Philip Kaufman’s version of bohemia in Henry and June, his 1990 trib-
577
ute to Henry Miller’s sex life, resembled a Gene Kelly number. It took Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988) to subvert the classical hotel comedy, when Harrison Ford’s wife goes missing and Paris descends into nightmare. For all its authentic locations, Robert Altman’s dismal Prêt-à-Porter (1994) cared more for its ready-made Hollywood cast. To French Kiss (Kasdan, 1995), Paris was a touristy Montmartre and Champs Elysées, while the lovers of Forget Paris (Crystal, 1995) agreed that it was important to at least remember. Both looked as though derived from Renault commercials. Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann, 2001) depended most upon visual effects, model makers, fast cutting, and a healthy respect for the pop-cultural certitudes of old. Richard Armstrong See also: Chevalier, Maurice; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Colbert, Claudette; Dance; Fashion; Godard, Jean-Luc; Kelly, Gene; Miller, Henry Valentine. References Hake, Sabine. Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Myrent, Glenn. “Paris en scène ou Paris sur Seine?” Cinémathèque: Revue semestrielle et bilingue de l’histoire du cinéma et de la restauration 20. Paris: Cinémathèque Française Musée du Cinéma, 2001.
HOLLYWOOD’S QUEBEC The first Hollywood movie to feature French Canadians was D. W. Griffiths’s A Woman’s Way of 1908. This melodrama about a kidnapped and rescued heroine at least introduces what would become the standard iconography: the tuque, sash, and beard. As this cinema developed, its relentless search for narrative made it look to
578
HOLLYWOOD’S QUEBEC
Canada for that subgenre of the western, the northern forests movie, and with it the Mountie movie. These were of course projections of American agendas rather than engagements with Canadian reality. The French Canadian protagonists were invariably made to fit into the polarizations of Hollywood’s fundamentally melodramatic mode, villainous and/or happy-go-lucky, as inaugurated by Lon Chaney in Nomads of the North (Hartford, 1920) and The Trap (Thornby, 1922). The patterns were set for the French Canadian’s place in genre cinema of the classic era. Paul Muni is cheerful and goggle-eyed as Pierre Radisson in Hudson’s Bay (Pichel, 1940). The two versions of Rose Marie, a love triangle set in the north of Quebec, illustrate the twin connotations of the French Canadian woman: in 1928, Joan Crawford plays the role as a spitfire; in 1936, Jeanette MacDonald is a sophisticated and spoiled opera singer from Montreal. Engagements with Quebec as such were infrequent. Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw (Roy William Neill, 1944) is set in incongruous marshes near Quebec City but ends with an encomium of Canada befitting the Allied war effort. But in the immediate postwar era the Canadian Cooperation Project, a deal between the Canadian government and the Hollywood majors, promised increased publicity for Canada in movies, resulting in much tokenism but a momentary increase in the use of Canadian settings, which also included Quebec. In the 1950s this often meant conveniently using Quebec as a substitute and cheaper version of France, as in Otto Preminger’s The 13th Letter (1951), a remake of Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (“The Crow,” 1944), or The Fly (Neumann, 1958), set in Montreal, the original short
story by George Langelaan being set in Paris. But sometimes the representation was more sustained, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s exploration of Catholicism and guilt in a Gothic-looking Quebec City in I Confess (1953), the portrait of a francophone family in 1920s Ottawa in The Happy Time (Fleischer, 1952) that includes quite a nationalist speech by Kurt Kasznar, or the extraordinary concoction that is Quebec (Templeton, 1951), a historical drama set at the time of the Patriots’ Rebellion of 1837–1838, with events reduced to interpersonal longings and the revolt led by the French actress Corinne Calvet. Afterward, the representation of Quebec became extremely rare. One of the few evocations of (post–) Quiet Revolution Quebec and with political and social questions came in a double episode of the TV police series A Man Called Ironside, entitled “Check, Mate and Murder” and first broadcast—fortuitously—during the crisis of October 1970. Chief Ironside and his team travel to Montreal where the son of a former lover has become involved with “terrorists,” a situation in which American lawgiver and father figure Ironside has to play the reconciler. However, the economics of filmmaking have meant that both Montreal and Quebec City have more often than not substituted for other places, becoming generic North American and European cinematic spaces in films such as Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002). In recent years some Hollywood films have gone the whole hog and set films explicitly in Montreal, favoring picturesque old Montreal locations above all others, usually as part of a cross-border crime narrative— The Whole Nine Yards (Lynn, 2000), The Score (Oz, 2001)—and enabling the assembly of a French and American cast, as in
HOUDON, JEAN-ANTOINE
Taking Lives (Caruso, 2004, in which the distinction between Montreal and Quebec City becomes very blurred). At the more independent end of American cinema, Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow (1997) makes extensive use of the Habitat ’67 apartment buildings created at the time of the Expo in Montreal. Bill Marshall See also: Catholic Church; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Expo 67; Montreal; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Radisson, Pierre-Esprit; Television. Reference Berton, Pierre. Hollywood’s Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975.
HOUDON, JEAN-ANTOINE (1741–1828) Recognized as the greatest sculptor in the Western world of the late eighteenth century based on his gallery of portraits unparalleled in range and variety. Despite humble origins (Houdon was the son of a farmer and a Versailles gardener’s daughter) he early demonstrated an intuitive artistic ability and won scholarships to art schools at Paris and Rome in the 1760s. Houdon also studied with a surgeon to learn human anatomy, resulting in his famous statue of the flayed man, entitled Ecorché (flayed), in 1766. Houdon’s technique involved modeling in plaster, clay, or terra-cotta, rather than carving from stone, although many of his statues were later finished in marble. Realism was so important to him that he either drew from life or used life masks and even death masks of his subject. He also strove to replicate his subject’s most telling character trait. In 1771 his portrait bust of Denis Diderot, a close likeness
579
that captured the man’s humor and intelligence, was the beginning of a series of statuary portraits he was to produce of great men and women of the Enlightenment. His busts of Voltaire made his reputation. His “American Patriots” followed. Critics suggest that Houdon was the first sculptor who knew how to do eyes. His technique consisted of deeply etching the pupil of the eye, into which he carved the iris in the shape of a bowl, with a small hollow in the bottom. Then, along the edge of the iris, he left a section of material in relief. This allowed for the play of light and shadow, resulting in a glint of animation. Houdon’s work with American clients began in 1778 when he joined the Loge des Neuf Sœurs (Lodge of the Nine Sisters), a Freemasonry lodge in Paris. Benjamin Franklin joined the lodge the same year, and John Paul Jones later became a member. Houdon’s bust of Franklin shows him with a furrowed brow, without the famous spectacles, the lips partially open, emerging as a speaking likeness. It was probably through Franklin that Thomas Jefferson met Houdon after the former’s arrival in Paris in 1784. When Jefferson learned of the Virginia Assembly’s decision to have a marble statue made of George Washington, he used his influence to obtain Houdon for the project. Washington had no desire to make a trip to Paris for a sitting, so Houdon made up his mind to go to Virginia. He left France on the same ship with Benjamin Franklin, arriving in Philadelphia in September 1785. Houdon traveled directly to Mount Vernon, where he stayed more than two weeks in October, making a life mask of Washington, modeling a clay bust, and taking careful measurements for a full figure. Apparently Houdon considered the Washington commission one
580
HUGO,VICTOR-MARIE
of the most important of his career. He returned to Paris and completed the bust, à l’antique (in the antique manner), in 1786. When Houdon later sculpted the full figure of Washington, he presented Washington in military dress and had Gouverneur Morris stand in as a model. Houdon’s bust of Thomas Jefferson was made in 1789, just before the latter’s return to America. This depiction of Jefferson with a look of determination and intelligence was used for the obverse of the American nickel first minted in 1938 and still in circulation today. Before his departure Jefferson ordered several terracotta-colored plaster busts from Houdon, including portraits of Franklin, Lafayette, Washington, Voltaire, and himself. Houdon was productive up to the salon of 1812. Portrait busts of Napoléon and Josephine, and Americans Robert Fulton and Joel Barlow, are part of his oeuvre. Marlena DeLong See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Franklin, Benjamin; Jefferson, Thomas; Jones, John Paul; Lafayette, Marquis de; Sculpture; Voltaire, François; Washington, George. References Arnason, H. H. The Sculptures of Houdon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Poulet, Anne L. Jean-Antoine Houdon, Sculptor of the Enlightenment. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, in association with the University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London, 2003.
HUGO,VICTOR-MARIE (1802–1885) French romantic poet, dramatist, novelist, and visionary; born in Besançon. Hugo’s precocious talent for poetry, combined with a predilection for the exotic tableau vivant, is first illustrated in his
elegy, “La Canadienne suspendant au palmier le tombeau de son nouveauné”/“The Canadian Woman Hanging Her Dead New Born from a Palm Tree,” dated October 30, 1818. The sixteen-year-old poet, drawing inspiration from a descriptive scene in René Chateaubriand’s popular romantic tale Atala, wherein the Indian women of Louisiana are depicted as protecting their living babies by suspending them from palm trees, places on center stage a Cajun mater dolorosa (Latin: “grieving mother”), who laments both the premature death of her newborn son and her own poignant failure as a mother. Rebirth and thus hope, symbolized by the planting of the palm tree by the child’s grandfather, is lost in the realization that the tree, a symbol of safekeeping, has become the infant’s tomb. “La Canadienne,” while establishing Hugo as the “poète de l’enfance” (the poet of childhood)—a suitable epithet, given the many poems dedicated to children in Les Odes et ballades (1826), Les Feuilles d’automne (1831), and Les Contemplations (1834–1855), to name but three collections—uncannily portends the premature death of his first son, Léopold, in 1823. A second poem, a six-line apostrophe to “Amérique,” undated and possibly incomplete, is a worthy specimen of Hugo’s lyric poetry that addresses the beauty and exoticism of the New World’s flora and fauna and the harmonies of the natural world communicated by way of the blessed solitude (“solitudes bénies !”) of the landscape. Bug-Jargal, a military story based on the uprising of the slaves of Saint-Domingue in 1791, and published first in its novella form in 1818, was adapted, rewritten, and published as a novel in 1826. It is possible that France’s recognition of Haiti in 1825 as an independent republic was the catalyst that
HUGO,VICTOR-MARIE
inspired Hugo to rewrite this social, political, and historical novel. It introduces some of the dramatic strategies that are repeated in subsequent novels: antithetical imagery of good (Léopold d’Auverney, the morally sound romantic hero and narrator) and evil (Biassou, the sadistic black man) and of the grotesque (Habibrah, the mixed-blood, irredeemably vile dwarf) and the sublime (BugJargal, the black of noble blood whose moral and intellectual superiority befits a tragic hero). In the juxtaposition of Bug-Jargal, Herculean in stature and strength, high minded, well read, and speaking French and Spanish fluently, with Habibrah, physically misshapen, corrupt, and struggling to communicate by way of a mishmash of French and Spanish mixed with jargon, we have the Hugolian union of the physical with the psychological and intellectual. Hugo’s use of synaesthesia—seas of orange flames, waves of smoke, loud crackling of burning timber— helps to communicate the epic scale of the revolt of the slaves as they burn plantations and massacre the settlers in their struggle for emancipation. Hugo’s message in Bug-Jargal is clear: enslavement is a sin against humanity and God. His sympathy for the slaves’ condition extended beyond his literary arena to the world political stage. On December 2, 1859, when news of the execution of John Brown (1800–1859), the American abolitionist, reached Europe, Hugo, in an article published December 18 in La Presse, condemned the Republic of America while predicting its bloody future. The American Civil War began two years later. The epic scale of Hugo’s novels lends itself successfully to cinematic productions. Witness Hollywood’s interest: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Dieterle, 1939), Les Misérables (Lloyd, 1919), Jean-Valjean
581
Victor Hugo, photographed between 1870 and 1885. (Library of Congress)
(Boleslawski, 1935), La Vie de Jean-Valjean (Milestone, 1952), and The Man Who Laughs (Leni, 1928). Hollywood’s recognition is testimony to Hugo’s world vision, outlined in a speech at the Congrès de Paix in Paris (August 21, 1849), that foresaw the United States of America and the United States of Europe (“Les Etats-Unis d’Europe”) face-to-face, shaking hands and sharing their commerce, industry, and arts. Janette McLeman-Carnie See also: American Civil War; Antislavery Movements; Haiti; Hunchback of NotreDame/Notre-Dame de Paris; Misérables, Les; Slavery. References De Boer, J. P. Christian. Victor Hugo et l’enfant. Wassenaar: Dieben, 1933. Robb, Graham. Victor Hugo: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Roman, Myriam. Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999.
582
HUGUENOTS
HUGUENOTS The Huguenots were a religious group that emerged in sixteenth-century France, following the teachings of Calvin and his Reformed Church. They were persecuted for their beliefs throughout the early modern period, and many felt compelled to leave France for other countries in Europe and for America. The most important Huguenot migration to the New World followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, an act that reversed the religious freedoms, limited as they were, that had been granted to the Huguenots with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The Huguenots emerged as part of the Protestant Reformation that occurred in sixteenth-century Europe. The upheaval that followed the Reformation across Europe meant that the Huguenots were often persecuted for their religious beliefs, and this persecution quickly escalated into the wars of religion that plagued France in the sixteenth century. Accordingly, havens were sought outside France, and one area that was explored was the New World. The admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny, was a strong supporter of the Huguenots, and he persuaded the monarchy to support two separate attempts to establish colonies in both North and South America, in Florida and Brazil. Neither attempt was successful. The start of the seventeenth century brought more success for France in the new lands, and in 1604 a Huguenot, De Mons, was chosen as lieutenant general of Acadia. However, his appointment soon led to quarrels within the new colony and ultimately resulted in an agreement, drawn up by the Company of New France in 1627, which forbade
Huguenots from settling in the French colonies. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, thereby denying the limited freedom of worship that had been enjoyed by the Huguenots since the edict was drawn up in 1598. As a result, many Huguenots felt compelled to leave France, and many went to America. Estimates of the number of Huguenots who emigrated to the New World vary between 2,000 and 15,000. As they were forbidden to settle in the French colonies, most went to the British colonies found in and around Boston, New York, and South Carolina. Some French Protestants were also deported from France shortly after the revocation, but it is unclear what became of these people. Huguenots also attempted to found settlements of their own in the British colonies in the eighteenth century. None of these communities, however, remained for long as cohesive groups of Huguenots in America, as all became quickly assimilated within the larger society, despite a few isolated attempts to stop this process. Intermarriage with other colonists, involvement in the political life of the colony, and material success all aided the process of assimilation. Jo Edwards See also: Acadia; Brazil; Florida; Mons, Pierre Dugua de; New France. References Butler, Jon. The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1983. Grant, A. J. The Huguenots. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1934. Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America. Vol. 1, Pioneers of France in the New World. New York: Ungar, 1965.
HUIDOBRO,VICENTE
HUIDOBRO,VICENTE (1893–1948) Vicente Huidobro was born into a patrician family of great wealth and privilege in Santiago de Chile in 1893. Educated in the best schools, he began his literary studies in the Universidad de Chile, but having decided to become a writer he dropped out after the first year and set himself feverishly to his career and to raising a family. Before turning twenty-five, he had founded two literary magazines, Musa Joven (Young Muse) and Azul (Azure), written and produced three plays, and published a book of essays and literary criticism, Pasando y pasando/Passing Around, and five volumes of poetry, all in the then reigning mode of Spanish American modernista aesthetics. In 1916, having outgrown his literary possibilities in his native Chile, Huidobro decided to emigrate to Paris and sailed to Europe with his wife and two children. Within a month of arriving, he was in contact with the most advanced artistic circles. Guillaume Apollinaire helped him to find an apartment, he made friends with Picasso, Juan Gris, and Jacques Lipschitz, and he founded Nord-Sud (North-South) with Pierre Reverdy. His early poetry in France was in the new mode of literary cubism. Within a few years, he was fluent in French and well established and set out for Madrid to preach the new aesthetic, which he rebaptized as creationism and which spawned Spanish ultraism. His first book of poems in French, Horizon carré (1917), carried a frontispiece by Gris. This was followed by Poemas árticos (“Arctic Poems”) and Ecuatorial (“Equatorial,” 1918) in Spanish and Tour Eiffel (“Eiffel Tower,” 1918) in
583
French, with illustrations and design by Robert Delaunay. Edgar Varèse later set the poem to music (1922). In 1921, Huidobro decided to found his own literary group, Creationism; he also published a selection of his poetry, Saisons choisies/ Selected Stages, with a frontispiece by Picasso, issued the first number of an arts magazine entitled Création, and set off on a lecture tour of European capitals to promote the new aesthetic. His haughty personality and arrogance made this endeavor into a failure. What is more, the new aesthetic of literary cubism had morphed into dada, and surrealism and automatic writing were now in the air. Huidobro took up politics and became a militant Communist, publishing a tract against the British Empire, Finis Britannia (1923). He returned to Chile in 1925 to be a candidate in the presidential elections, founding a newspaper, Acción, to promote his ambition of being the creator of a new Chile. In the midst of his campaign Huidobro met and fell headlong in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, the daughter of Chile’s minister of foreign relations. Forced to leave the country, he abandoned his family and started a new career in New York, writing a prize-winning movie script, Cagliostro. There he bided his time until the girl turned eighteen and had a passport. He clandestinely returned to Chile and then traveled with her to Paris to begin anew. It is at this point in his career that he published what are now considered his masterworks, Altazor o el viaje en paracaídas/Altazor or the Trip in a Parachute and Temblor de cielo in 1931 and Tremblement de ciel in 1932, both “Skyquake.” He wrote a long Bluebeard
584
HUNCHBACK
OF
NOTRE-DAME/NOTRE-DAME
play, Gilles de Rais (1932), which was partially produced by Artaud in the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (1933). When deaths in the family and the effects of the Great Depression began to affect the family fortune, Huidobro was obliged to return to Chile, where he remained until he returned to Europe as a war correspondent. His later books of verse, all in Spanish, abandoned avant-garde aesthetics and were at the forefront of a still emerging mode of conversational poetry. Huidobro’s extraordinary career as a poet is marked by ambition and talent. His urge to be always in the avant-garde made him into a champion of the new, a spokesman and propagator of novelty. His influence was most felt in Spain and Spanish America, where, as Octavio Paz says, “He is the oxygen of our poetry.” For Gonzalo Rojas, “He was freedom itself, the one who gave us everything” (cited in de Costa, pp. 82–83). But for Gerardo Diego, an early recruit to Creationism, he flew too high, where the air was “unbreathable.” René de Costa See also: Avant-Gardes; Literary Relations; Paz, Octavio; Varèse, Edgar; World War II. References Canseco-Jerez, Alejandro. L’Avant-garde littéraire chilienne et ses précurseurs: Poétique et reception des oeuvres de Juan Emar et de Vicente Huidobro en France et au Chili. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994. Costa, René de. Vicente Huidobro: The Careers of a Poet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Diego Gerardo. “Vicente Huidobro.” Atenea 27 (January 1950): 295–296. Paz, Octavio. Los Hijos del limo. Barcelona: Sexix Barral, 1974.
DE
PARIS
HUNCHBACK OF NOTREDAME/NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS Novel by Victor Hugo, set in fifteenthcentury Paris. Theatrical adaptations, popular editions, and translations ensured the early passage across the Atlantic of NotreDame de Paris, primarily under the adapted English title The Hunchback of NotreDame. Personal themes of love, suffering, and death, social and political themes of the birth of freedom of expression, of law and justice, of Old World persecution, of new worlds of utopian harmony, all expressed with an unparalleled combination of epic scope and descriptive detail, made the novel an obvious candidate for transatlantic adaptation as film. By 1923 Carl Laemmle had directed the first featurelength adaptation for Universal, with Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and Patsy Ann Miller as Esmeralda. Adjusting to the Hollywood environment and with a variety of modifications to the original story, the film is conceived as both “monster movie,” building on Chaney’s reputation for the portrayal of the physically grotesque, and Cinderella love story, with the high-born Esmeralda, snatched from her cradle as a baby, restored to the aristocracy through her marriage to Prince Charming, a reformed Captain Phoebus. Simultaneously, with an eye on powerful Catholic pressure groups, the villainous priest Claude Frollo is recast as a saintly archdeacon, representative of the moral good, while his original role is transferred to his half brother Jehan. Remade for RKO with William Dieterle as director, Charles Laughton as Quasimodo, Maureen O’Hara as Esmeralda, and Cedric Hardwicke as Frollo, the 1939 Hunchback of Notre-Dame reflected and responded to the traumas of the 1930s and
HUNCHBACK
OF
the onset of war. The plight of the gypsies starkly recalled the persecutions of Jews, gypsies, and others in Europe; the mass of the truands (vagabonds) recalled the unemployed and dispossessed of the Depression, while the highlighting of Hugo’s belief in the might of the pen over that of the sword chimed with U.S. hopes of avoiding military engagement in a European war. Complementing these topical political and moral issues, the tragic pathos of Laughton’s Quasimodo and the innocent sensuality of O’Hara’s luminous Esmeralda ensured the success of the film as a combination of weepie (for Quasimodo who loses the girl) and happy-ever-after love story for Esmeralda, who in this version walks off into the sunset with the poet Gringoire. In support of their stars, Laemmle’s silent movie had effectively evoked the closed world of Quasimodo’s deafness, and black and white had been successfully exploited by both Laemmle and Dieterle to capture the Hugolian dialectic of darkness and light. In the 1996 Disney cartoon, technology itself becomes the star. Spectacular effects achievable only with IT capture some of the dramatic picturesqueness of Hugo’s narrative, but the content is simplistically reduced to sanitized, politically correct messages on disability, child abuse, and women’s rights. Responding to the more obvious visual stimuli of the original text but neglectful of its visionary qualities, this version of the novel is noteworthy primarily as a ruthless commodification of Hugo’s story, driven by commercial interests connected with the establishment of Disneyland Paris. Most recently, keeping its French title, Hugo’s novel, once banned by the church in Quebec (as late as the 1950s), has con-
NOTRE-DAME/NOTRE-DAME
DE
PARIS
585
Feebleminded Quasimodo of Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Woodcut. (Bettmann/Corbis)
tinued its popular transatlantic career through the successful 1998 musical spectacular (also staged in Paris and in London) of the Québécois Richard Cocciante and Luc Plamondon, with the Quebec singer Garou in the Quasimodo role. Rachel Killick See also: Catholic Church; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Disneyland Paris; Garou; Hugo, VictorMarie; Plamondon, Luc; Remakes. References Cambron, Micheline. “Victor Hugo au Québec.” Victor Hugo 1802–2003: Images et transfigurations. Ed. Maxime Prévost and Yan Hamel. Montreal: Fides, 2003: 107–138. Killick, Rachel. “Notre-Dame de Paris as Cinema: From Myth to Commodity.” Victor Hugo. Romancier de l’abîme. Ed. J. A. Hiddleston. Oxford: Legenda, 2002: 41–62.
586
HURONS
HURONS A confederation of four Indian tribes of the Iroquoian language family, the Hurons were at the height of their power when the French arrived in the Georgian Bay area of present-day Ontario, Canada, in the early seventeenth century. Contact with the Europeans, however, who brought with them diseases such as smallpox, as well as ongoing wars with the Iroquois, soon led to their near total destruction and subsequent dispersal by the middle of the seventeenth century. They were also known as the Wendat, Guyandot, Guyandotte, Ouendat, Wyandot, and Wyandotte; the French nickname Huron actually derives from the old French hure, meaning ruffian, or boar’s head, from the hairstyle of the Huron men. The Hurons referred to themselves as the Ouendat (Wendat), meaning people of the island or in the separated land. Surrounded by the waters of Georgian Bay, Lake Couchiching, and Lake Simcoe, as well as many rivers and interior lakes, the Hurons referred to their territory as Ouendake (called Huronia by the French). The Hurons had mastered the use of the birchbark canoe and were able to travel long distances throughout eastern North America, making them a particularly interesting trading partner to Europeans. In 1614 a formal military and trading alliance between the Hurons and the French, which ultimately implicated the French in the ongoing conflict between Hurons and Iroquois, was concluded. Champlain made the long journey to the Huron villages the following year, sealing the Huron-French alliance by participating in a HuronAlgonquin attack on Oneida and Onondaga villages to the south in upstate New York. By the 1620s, the Hurons had be-
come the most important trading partner with the French, supplying furs and forming a network as the middlemen for the French fur trade with the Nipissings, Ottawas, and Algonquins in the western Great Lakes. It is believed that the Huron confederacy began to take shape around 1300, when several clans started to organize into a political alliance. The first and largest of the tribes was the Attignawantan, whose family crest or totem was the Bear. In 1420, the Attingneenongnahac, whose totem was the Cord, joined the Attignousntan formally to establish the Huron Confederacy. Two more groups were admitted to the confederacy, the Arendahronon, whose totem was the Rock, around 1560, and the Tohonaenrat, whose totem was the Deer, who joined in about 1570. Similar in its purpose to that of the Iroquois League, the confederacy aimed to prevent blood feuds and fighting between its members. The capital of the confederacy was located at the village of Ossossane. The Hurons were a sedentary people, living in large villages with a high degree of community and tribal organization. Huron villages varied in size, and each managed its own internal matters. The larger villages were home to sometimes forty or fifty families numbering as many as 3,500 people, while only eight or ten families might live in smaller villages or hamlets. Two councils, one in charge of civil and the other in charge of war, normally presided over village affairs, and although all men over age thirty were members of the councils, the majority of decisions were reached by the elders and elected chiefs, due to their status in the communities and oratorical skills. The Hurons lived in groups of extended
HURONS
families in longhouses that averaged 7 meters wide but could reach up to 90 meters, depending on the size of the family. Individuals belonged not only to a matrilineage but also to one of the many clans named after various animals. Marriage could not occur between members of the same clan. Hunting was of relatively minor importance to the Hurons, as their subsistence economy was based on corn, beans, squash, and fish. The Hurons relocated their villages every twenty years or so as the fertility of local soil declined. Spirituality played a significant role in Huron culture and daily life, as noted by many of the French missionaries who lived and worked among them. The Hurons believed in a supreme deity, and among the religious ceremonies unique to these people was the Feast of the Dead. Every ten years, the remains of all people who had died over the decade would be dug up and reburied in a communal burial plot, in the belief that this ceremony would allow the souls of the departed to enter into the spirit realm. Both Recollect and Jesuit priests attempted to evangelize the Hurons during the seventeenth century. The new religion frequently divided the Hurons, and many priests discouraged their converts from attending tribal ceremonies. In addition, those Hurons who converted were often afforded certain advantages, such as firearms, causing further separation within communities. Most importantly, French missionaries brought with them diseases to which the Hurons had no immunity. Nevertheless, the Jesuit priests did leave behind them a particularly rich source of information on Huronia in the form of the Huron Relations. From 1635 to 1650, the superiors of the Huron mission wrote the Rela-
587
tions, which contain rich observations of geography, culture, and manners. The Recollect were the first missionaries to work with the Hurons. Father Joseph Le Caron, a Recollect, arrived in Huronia in early August 1615 and spent the next ten months there. The next missionary activity in Huronia occurred in 1623, when Le Caron returned with two other Recollects, Father Nicolas Viel and Brother Gabriel Sagard. Sagard, who spent barely a year among the Hurons, later wrote Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons/The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons, a key source of ethnological information regarding everyday life in Huronia during the first years of French contact. Jesuit priest Jean de Brébeuf also sojourned several times among the Hurons, establishing a residence at Ihonatiria (Saint Joseph) in 1634 and a second mission residence at Ossossane (La Conception) in 1637. In 1639, the mission at Saint Marie was established by Jérôme Lalemant as a central residence for Jesuit missionaries in Huronia. Throughout the 1640s, however, tensions escalated considerably with the Iroquois, and the Hurons suffered many losses. In 1649, the Iroquois attacked several villages, including Saint Ignace II and Saint Louis. Fathers Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, nephew of Jérôme, were tortured to death at Saint Ignace II. In the course of the campaign, 700 Hurons were killed, and the remaining survivors were on the point of starvation. Thousands died during the winter of 1649–1650. Forced to disperse, many Hurons sought refuge among other tribes, including the Iroquois, who replenished their population by absorbing other Iroquoianspeaking tribes. One group relocated to
588
HUSTON, NANCY
Lorette, north of Quebec City, where it has remained ever since. (The present reserve there has been known as Wendake since 1986.) Other Hurons spent years wandering as refugees through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and upper Michigan. They became known as the Wyandot by 1701 in the Ohio valley between present-day Detroit and Cleveland, where they remained until removed to Kansas during the 1840s. Many of this group remained in the vicinity of Kansas City, while others went to northeast Oklahoma after the Civil War to become the Wyandotte tribe of Oklahoma. One group of Wyandots settled in the Great Lakes, where a small band of the Canadian Wyandot in southwest Ontario were given a reserve near Amherstburg. Maureen Waters See also: American Civil War; Champlain, Samuel de; Detroit; Fur Trade; Jesuits; Michigan; Minnesota; Ohio; Ontario. References Sioui, Georges E. For an Amerindian AutoHistory. Trans. Sheila Fischman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. Tooker, Elizabeth. An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615–1649. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Trigger, Bruce G. The Huron: Farmers of the North. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990. ———. Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s Heroic Age Reconsidered. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1994.
HUSTON, NANCY (1953–) Canadian writer. Born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1953, Huston lived in the United States as a young adult, then in 1973 settled in Paris, where she has pursued a successful writing career ever since. She has won, among others, the Goncourt des lycéens (High School
Students’ Goncourt Prize) for Cantique des plaines/Plainsong in 1996, the Prix des auditeurs for Instruments des ténèbres/Instruments of Darkness in 1996, and the Prix des lectrices de Elle (Prize of Readers of Elle) for L’Empreinte de l’Ange/The Mark of the Angel in 1999; she was nominated for the Goncourt in 2001 for Dolce Agonia. Although she began to write in French following her immigration to France, inspired by the distance provided by a language other than her native tongue (her first texts were published in Sorcières and Histoires d’elles), since the publication of Plainsong, a novel first written in English and then translated by the author into French, Huston now translates each one of her novels, preparing two versions before publication. In fact Cantique des plaines won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for best novel in 1993, a controversial event for Quebec editors and intellectuals, who disputed the jury’s decision on the pretext that the work was a translation rather than an original creation. Huston herself has described it as a re-creation, a true rewriting of the English version and therefore a work in and of itself. Huston’s practice of translation and use of bilingualism are essential to her approach to writing, her conception of identity, and her reflection on the topic of exile. Since Lettres parisiennes/Paris Letters, an epistolary text written with Leïla Sebbar in which the two authors explore their particular experiences of migrancy and estrangement, Huston has published essays in which she broaches the questions of exile and foreignness, in particular that of an English Canadian relocated in the capital of France, a place of which she can never truly be a part. In Désirs et réalités (“Desires and Realities”) and Nord perdu/Losing
HYDRO-QUEBEC
North, Huston contemplates “the theater of exile” and reflects on how issues of solitude, truth, language, memory, and identity are called into question by the experience of migration and the ensuing impossibility of belonging. “Where is the real self?” she asks. In this context, writing comes to represent, for her, the unattainable motherland. In fact, motherland and motherhood are the two poles around which Huston’s work is articulated. Novels such as La Virevolte/Slow Emergencies, Instruments des ténèbres, L’Empreinte de l’Ange, and the hybrid work Journal de la création deal with various aspects of maternity: motherhood and artistic work, abortion, political engagement, marital relationships, and love. Throughout both her critical and fictional work, Huston explores the duality between body and mind or spirit, a duality that the conditions of maternity as well as exile, in the author’s imagination, serve to exemplify. Martine Delvaux See also: Language. References Halpern, Sylvie. “Cantique des plaines.” L’Actualité 19, no. 2 (February 1994): 68–72. Klein-Lataud, Christine. “Les Voix parallèles de Nancy Huston.” Traduction, terminologie, rédaction: Etudes sur le texte et ses transformations 9, no. 1 (1996): 211–231. Potvin, Claudine. “Les ‘Liaisons dangereuses’ de Nancy Huston: Exil et identité, le moi et l’autre.” Francophonies d’Amérique 11 (2001): 41–48.
HYDRO-QUEBEC Quebec hydroelectricity company. Formed from a first nationalization under Adélard Godbout’s 1944 liberal government, the company really took off in
589
1962 when a second nationalization process took place under energy minister René Lévesque, a process that had been a key platform of liberal Jean Lesage’s election campaign. By 2003 the company, whose sole shareholder is the Quebec government, had a power output of 32,661 megawatts, to which can be added the 5,428 megawatts from the main production at Churchill Falls, Labrador. Ninety-seven percent of its electricity is produced by hydroelectric means, and its assets stand at $59 billion. From an economic and historical perspective, the global nationalization of the industry and its subsequent development are generally considered to be one of the most important achievements of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. The existence of Hydro-Quebec allowed a major part of Quebec’s natural resources to be reappropriated, favoring the development of new technologies and a noteworthy international breakthrough for Quebec engineering. Hydro-Quebec’s achievements included the Manicouagan-Outardes complex (completed in 1978), where the Daniel Johnson Dam is the largest of its kind in the world and the development for hydroelectric production of the James Bay area, which is twice the size of Switzerland and generates a total of 15,300 megawatts. These large-scale accomplishments have, however, been marked, throughout the company’s history, by a series of controversies about the expropriation of Amerindian lands in the James Bay area, the damage to the environment caused by the construction of dams, and abuses by the administration, which often pitted the state-owned company against the state itself. These initially domestic conflicts acquired an international dimension unprecedented in Quebec’s history and
590
HYDRO-QUEBEC
provoked real crises from the 1970s to 1995. Because it had not initially considered the Amerindians’ land rights in the James Bay area and had neglected the impact of diverting rivers on the ecology of the region, the Quebec government faced a series of protests widely covered in the foreign media. The Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec allied themselves with various American environmentalist groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Society to force HydroQuebec simply to cancel projects like the development of the Great Whale River in 1994 or the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert complex in 2002. It should be noted, however, that since 1975 Hydro-Quebec has signed several agreements with the Crees, the most recent of which, in 2004, underlined a real political will on both sides to deal with all the territorial and environmental questions relating to present and future exploitation of the enormous hydroelectric potential of the James Bay region. Since the 1990s, most announcements concerning agreements with the Amerindian nations on hydroelectric matters are the subject of meticulous public relations exercises by Hydro-Quebec and the Quebec government in order to forestall any repeat of controversies seriously damaging to the wider Canadian and international image of Hydro-Quebec. Despite all this controversy, HydroQuebec’s historical profile would be little different from that of other nationalized hydroelectric companies in Canada, if it were not for the fact that in Quebec and even beyond it possesses very strong symbolic capital, a fact taken for granted by the Québécois as a whole and which remains a subject of fascination for its Canadian
equivalents. This symbolic capital was evident as early as the 1962 electoral campaign, which centered on the nationalization issue. Jean Lesage launched the slogan that forever crystallized the will of the people of Quebec to retake control of the province’s territory and resources, which historically had been sold off to AngloCanadian and Anglo-American cartels. Strictly speaking, the lapidary phrase, “Maîtres chez nous”/“Masters in our own house,” referred to the creation of the new Hydro-Quebec, but it also announced a program of radical decolonization and an uncompromising political assertion that found a wide response in the Quebec and even Canadian imagination. Hydro-Quebec’s first project at Manicouagan-Outardes was startling proof that the traditional destiny of the dominated French Canadian was being overturned and that the exploitation of hydroelectricity was the catalyst for a new Quebec identity that was opening up previously undreamed-of possibilities. One of the first ways in which this identity was reformulated was certainly René Lévesque’s decision to impose French as the language on Hydro-Quebec’s construction sites, as well as a purchasing policy that favored suppliers from Quebec rather than Ontario or the United States. In this way the construction of Manicouagan V crystallized the expression of an unprecedented collective euphoria and pride. The discourse of wonderment at these achievements, carefully nurtured by the company itself, can also be understood as a compensatory reaction against, and even an exorcism of, the strong feelings of inferiority held by the Québécois during the first half of the twentieth century. Remarkably, Hydro-Quebec took advantage of the identity transforma-
HYDRO-QUEBEC
tions inspired by its first achievements and was able to inextricably link its own identity as a company to that of the Québécois as a whole. In 1973, it launched an advertising campaign whose slogan—“We are Hydroquébécois”—neatly summed up this amalgamation. In 1995, one month before the second referendum on Quebec sovereignty, this identity symbiosis reached its climax and its logical conclusion in a TV commercial that made little effort to conceal its support for the “yes” vote. In 1997, Hydro-Quebec broadcast on the French-speaking state TV service SRC a six-episode series, entitled Les Bâtisseurs d’eau, which recounted the history of the company since 1952 via the portrayal of fictional characters. With the company presenting itself as the subject of a historical fiction, its status as heritage object was consecrated, sanctifying it and lifting it above the regular administrative scandals it had experienced, as well as the protests from customers and Amerindian and environmentalist groups. The ice storm of January 1998, during which 3 million people were deprived of electricity in the depths of winter, turned out to be very positive in terms of public relations. Hydro-Quebec’s constant presence on radio and television, the unequivocal support given to its directors by the Quebec government, and the dangerous and heroic exploits of engineers repairing power lines all fostered the comforting image for the Québécois of a father figure looking after the well-being of its citizens at a time of crisis.
591
Hydro-Quebec can count on the symbolic capital when it faces, like other hydroelectric companies, the particular twentyfirst-century challenges of a changing energy landscape, especially the shrinking of hydraulic reserves and the reduction of available sources due to the high demand for energy. This new context is also transforming Hydro-Quebec’s role as exporter of energy to the northeast United States to that of importer, a situation reached in 2003. In the future, the company envisages a freezing and even a medium-term reduction of its exports. Nevertheless, few other Canadian electricity producers can base their promotional material on this articulation of a historical narrative of economic decolonization with the deeper expression of a coopted collective identity: “We are HydroQuebec.” Dominique Perron See also: Language; Lévesque, René; Quebec; Quiet Revolution. References Bourassa, Robert. Power from the North. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1985. Perron, Dominique. “‘On est HydroQuébécois.” Consommateur, producteur ou citoyen? Analyse de la nationalisation symbolique d’Hydro-Québec.” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises, vol. 6, no. 2 (2003): 73–97. Williams, Susan. Hydro-Québec and the Great Whale Project: Hydroelectric Development in Northern Québec. Washington, DC: Investor Responsibility Research Center, 1993.
I IBERVILLE, PIERRE LE MOYNE D’ (1661–1706) The most prominent of the sons of Charles Le Moyne de Longueil, originally of Dieppe, Normandy, a director of the Compagnie du Nord, and wealthy citizen of Montreal. Born on July 20, 1661, in the river port of Montreal at the head of navigation on the Saint Lawrence River, at the age of twelve he accompanied the expedition that founded Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario in 1673. At fourteen he served on his father’s trading vessels on the Saint Lawrence below Montreal and Quebec, and he was later sent to France for naval training. He returned to New France in 1683 and served as a courier of gubernatorial dispatches to the French Court. In 1686 his experience of winter travel in the boreal forest ensured the success of Pierre de Troyes’s overland expedition to James Bay to reclaim the fur trade of that region from the English posts in Hudson Bay, and d’Iberville was left in charge as governor for the winter of 1686–1687. D’Iberville’s career thereafter oscillated between the roles of guerrilla captain and naval commander and fell into two phases: between 1688 and 1697 he led four naval expeditions to Hudson Bay to put into
practice his advocacy that the fur trade based on Hudson Bay should be managed and exploited directly through Hudson’s Strait rather than by extended river routes overland. Twice, in 1688 and again in the summer of 1697, he defeated superior English naval forces in the bay, the latter a remarkable victory that led to the retention of Fort York—Fort Bourbon—in French control between the Peace of Ryswick (1697) and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). During this phase he also led a winter expedition to attack Arent van Corlaer’s fur trade post at Schenectady, 23 kilometers northwest of Albany, his guerrilla tactics culminating in the notorious massacre of February 18, 1690, in which sixty townspeople were killed. The summer and fall of 1692 saw him patrolling the sealanes off New England, a campaign that he resumed in 1696 with an attack on Pemaquid on the coast of Maine. This attack was followed immediately by the most notorious guerrilla campaign in his career: the destruction of the Old English Shore settlements of the Westcountry fishery at Newfoundland. Between November 1, 1696, and May 18, 1697, he led a party of 124 men, including twenty-eight Indians, across the Avalon Peninsula from
593
594
ILLINOIS COUNTRY
Plaisance (Placentia) to Ferryland and proceeded to destroy the entire infrastructure of the planter fishery in some thirty-eight harbors, including Saint John’s. Over 100 men were killed, and well over 800 men, women, and children were captured, of which 460 were deported to England, some to France, while 109 men, women, and children were taken prisoner to Plaisance. The second phase of d’Iberville’s career ran from October 1698 until his death at Havana in July 1706, during which he led a series of naval expeditions to the lower Mississippi and initiated the process of settlement that culminated in the establishment of the Louisiana colony, of which he was the first governor-general. He received the Croix de Saint Louis for his services, the first native Canadian to be so honored. His final exploit was to command a fleet of twelve naval vessels to attack the British West Indies; the island of Nevis was destroyed, with the capture of some 1,700 men, women, and children plus 6,000 slaves. Weakened by earlier malarial attacks, he finally succumbed to yellow fever. Alan Macpherson See also: Fishing; Fur Trade; Louisiana; Maine; Mississippi River; Montreal; New France; Newfoundland; Saint Lawrence River; Treaty of Utrecht. References Crouse, Nellis M. Lemoyne d’Iberville: Soldier of New France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954. Reed, Charles B. The First Great Canadian: The Story of Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville. Chicago: McClurg, 1910. Williams, Alan F. Father Baudoin’s War: D’Iberville’s Campaigns in Acadia and Newfoundland, 1696, 1697. St John’s, NF: Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1987.
ILLINOIS COUNTRY At the heart of the immense territory claimed by the French in North America in the eighteenth century, forming a large arc that joined Newfoundland to the Mississippi delta, was the Illinois Country. The area was given this name because it represented the territories of the Illinois peoples, an area defined by the Illinois River in the north, the Mississippi to the west, the Ohio to the south, and the Ouabache River to the east. In 1673, the cartographer Louis Joliet and the missionary Jacques Marquette, on their expedition to the Mississippi, reached the Illinois Country for the first time. It was not, however, until the intervention of Governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac and the adventurer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle that a first fort was built there—on the Illinois River—in 1679. The Saint Louis fort was abandoned in 1703, following a 1696 directive that ordered the closure of the trading posts of the Upper Country. The Illinois Country was thus left to missionaries and to recalcitrant Coureurs de bois. The Jesuits had been the only religious order present in the region since 1673, but they were joined in 1699 by priests from the Séminaire des Missions étrangères (“Foreign Missions Seminary”). The latter founded the Tamaroas (Cahokia) mission on the east bank of the Mississippi, opposite the mouth of the Missouri River. This mission became the first permanent French settlement in the Illinois Country. As for the Jesuit mission (Kaskaskia), it found a quasi-permanent home in 1703, after the installation of the Kaskaskias on the east bank of the river at the mouth of the smaller river that was to take their name. In 1718, after the founding of the Compagnie d’Occident (Company of the
ILLINOIS COUNTRY
West), which had been granted a commercial monopoly in Louisiana, the Illinois Country became an administrative part of the colony of Mississippi, although it had previously belonged to Canada. The authorities, who wished to exploit the mines of precious metals that were thought to be situated there, decided to take back the post. This occurred in 1719 with the arrival of officers and troops from Lower Louisiana. The three settlements of Fort de Chartres, Prairie du Rocher, and SaintPhilippe were founded in the years that followed, some miles south of Cahokia. It was only at the end of the 1740s, however, that the sixth village of Sainte-Geneviève was founded, on the west bank of the river, opposite Kaskaskia. In 1752, the six villages had a little fewer than 1,400 inhabitants, which made it the largest French outpost of the interior. The post was also distinctive due to its grouping into villages, which was motivated by the need for defense; everywhere else, New France colonists lived on farms or plantations that were spread apart. The journey between Canada and Louisiana inevitably meant passing through the Illinois Country, a river hub between north and south, but also between east and west, with the Ohio serving as a route toward the British colonies of the Atlantic coast, and the Missouri penetrating the fur-rich territories of the West. This central crossroads location and the presence of the Illinois confederation, with whom the French built a solid and lasting alliance, gave this region an essential strategic position within the French empire in North America. In fact, thanks to the Illinois allies and the French Canadian militia, the post was able to participate in the defense of Canada and of Lower Louisiana and to block the advance
595
French habitation in the country of the Illinois. (Corbis)
of the British. The relations that the Illinois Country maintained with the two colonies were not, however, limited to military spheres, but also concerned demography and economics. French villages received migrants, in effect, from both the Saint Lawrence and lower Mississippi. Furthermore, if these villages initially developed thanks to the trade in furs exported to the metropole via Montreal and Quebec, they owed their prosperity to commercial slave-owning agriculture, which aimed to provide wheat and lard to the markets of the lower Mississippi valley. With 43
596
ILLINOIS COUNTRY
percent of its population slaves, of which 32 percent were African or Afro-Creoles and 11 percent Amerindian in 1752, the Illinois Country was part of the same multiethnic world as Lower Louisiana, which constituted a synthesis between Canada and the Antilles, between a Franco-Amerindian and a Franco-African world. Without the slaves of African origin, in particular, the Illinois Country would not have been able to produce such large quantities of flour, nor to export them to New Orleans and to the riverside outposts, which contributed to the survival of Lower Louisiana and enabled the Mississippi valley to become an integrated economic space. Alongside Europeans and Africans, Amerindians formed the largest ethnic group in the region. Before 1719, French and Illinois settlements were mixed, but they were then separated. Amerindian women, who had been slaves or who had married colons, also lived within the French villages. While miscegenation was important throughout the Mississippi valley, it was particularly remarkable in the Illinois Country because it took the shape of numerous Christian marriages conducted by the Jesuits. With the arrival of officials and the increase in the population of European origin, the women and their children were integrated within French society in exchange for Christianization and at least partial acculturation, while in other posts of the interior the Coureurs de bois who lived with Amerindian women as their concubines tended to Indianize, and their Métis children were raised as indigenous peoples. The Illinois Country thus developed original characteristics, while at the same time taking certain traits from the two colonies with whom it had contact, thus forming a junction between two models of colonization.
Following the Treaty of Paris, which ceded the territories east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, the British did not take possession of the post until 1765, due to the Amerindian rising popularly known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. Many inhabitants then left the villages of the east bank to set up home in New Orleans and particularly in Sainte-Geneviève or in Saint Louis. A new wave of migration took place after the departure of the British following the American Revolution. Those who stayed met with difficult times. In was only in 1790 that the arrival of representatives of the U.S. government meant that order could be reestablished in the region. The territory prospered, thanks to the arrival of numerous immigrants from such places as Kentucky or Virginia. In 1818, the territory became a state. Kaskaskia became its first capital, but this status was quickly transferred to Vandalia, due to the floods in the Mississippi. Little remains, today, of the French period in Illinois: the church bell in Kaskaskia, although the village itself has been at the bottom of the river since the end of the nineteenth century; a church and a house in Cahokia, which has now become an eastern suburb of Saint Louis; the gunpowder store and walls of Fort de Chartres, which have been reconstructed as they existed in the eighteenth century; and many houses in Sainte-Geneviève, now Sainte Genevieve. Cécile Vidal See also: American Revolution; Catholic Church; Coureurs de bois; Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de; Fur Trade; Jesuits; Joliet, Louis; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Louisiana; Marquette, Jacques; Métis; Mississippi; Mississippi River; Missouri; New France; New Orleans; Newfoundland; Ohio; Saint Lawrence River; Saint Louis; Slavery.
INDIAN WARS
597
References Alvord, Clarence W. The Illinois Country, 1673–1818. Chicago: McClure and Cy, 1920. Belting, Natalia M. Kaskaskia under the French Regime. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1948. Ekberg, Carl J. Colonial Ste. Genevieve. Gerald, MI: Patrice, 1985. ———. French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
INDIAN WARS The Indian wars is the collective term for the various colonial struggles between Britain and France, each allied with indigenous groups, for control of North America between 1689 and 1763. The French harnessed Amerindian support through trade and extensive exploration conducted deep within the North American wilderness. During King William’s War (1689–1696), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), and King George’s War (1744–1748), culminating in the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the French relied upon strong Amerindian alliances, especially with the Abenakis and Algonquins, to protect the colonial frontier and to retaliate against British strikes. Although the wars ended with the concession of Canada to Britain in 1763, France sustained military momentum throughout the conflict by utilizing targeted Indian raids on British frontier settlements. French governor Frontenac launched an offensive attack that ignited King William’s War (in Europe, the War of the League of Augsburg) by sending three war parties of soldiers and Amerindians to raid New England. William Phips of Massachusetts responded with 750 colonists and as many Iroquois to attack Acadia and Mon-
Indian treaty signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on July 13, 1713, and addendum signed at same location on July 28, 1714. (Library of Congress)
treal. Phips won initial success in Acadia, but a reprisal at Montreal failed when Algonquin raids on New York and Maine ensured French victory and the return of Acadia. England gained permanent control of Acadia, renamed Nova Scotia, at the conclusion of Queen Anne’s War (in Europe, the War of the Spanish Succession). The French limited the battle theater to the northeast to avoid the hostility of the British-allied Five Nations of Iroquois in New York. Commanded by Frontenac’s successor, the marquis de Vaudreuil, 500 Abenakis raided small towns like York, Maine, and Deerfield, Massachusetts. These attacks prompted a response from
598
INDIANA
the Massachusetts assembly, but the forces of the British colonists were not sufficiently organized to win any success until the summer of 1710, with the capture of Port Royal, Nova Scotia. Frontier hostilities continued with concentrated raids from French-allied Amerindians who challenged British control of the continent. The French retaliated to regain lost territories during King George’s War (the War of the Austrian Succession). Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts defended Nova Scotia and launched an offensive attack against Fort Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, which fell on June 16, 1745. By means of continued successful French and Amerindian raids, the British colonial frontier remained vulnerable to attacks because of the concentration of Shirley’s troops in the North Atlantic province. Unable to both retain control of Nova Scotia and provide adequate colonial defense, Britain conceded Louisbourg to France in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle and maintained a tenuous hold over Nova Scotia. The French strengthened Amerindian alliances and defenses in the West to prevent British expansion beyond the Allegheny Mountains. Britain won the final struggle for North America with strong Iroquois and Mohawk alliances during the French and Indian War (in Europe, the Seven Years’ War). Although France retained Abenaki and Algonquin support, and gained Cherokee support, British victories at Niagara, Crown Point, and the Plains of Abraham confirmed their continental supremacy in 1763. As a result of the Indian wars, distressed Amerindians unsuccessfully mounted Pontiac’s War, popularly known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, and were not reconciled with the British until 1764. Jeffrey W. Aubuchon
See also: Acadia; Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de; French and Indian War; Louisbourg; Maine; Montreal; Nova Scotia; Pontiac. References Hamilton, Edward P. The French and Indian Wars. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. Nester, William R. The Great Frontier War: Britain, France, and the Imperial Struggle for North America, 1607–1755. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America. New York: Library of America, 1983.
INDIANA The present-day state of Indiana was a center of the French fur trade in the early eighteenth century. Fur traders traveled up the Saint Lawrence River, into the Great Lakes region, eventually forming relationships with the native Americans who lived along the river valleys of Indiana. These rivers formed a waterway that led to the Ohio River and eventually the Mississippi River. The French claimed this entire area, though they never established political authority. Through most of the eighteenth century, the French constructed forts and trading posts along the Ohio, Wabash, and Maumee rivers. The region remained part of New France until 1763, when the British ousted the French from North America. The French were the first Europeans to settle in Indiana, but the land had been occupied by Native Americans for centuries. Their locations, however, were not fixed at the time of French contact. Native Americans had relocated throughout the Midwest, fleeing Iroquois raids from the east. By the mid-seventeenth century, Miamis, Potawatomis, Shawnees, Weas, and Piankashaws lived in Indiana. Although
INDIANA
Map of Indiana. The present-day state of Indiana was a center of the French fur trade in the early eighteenth century. While the French were the first Europeans to settle in Indiana, the land had been occupied by Native Americans for centuries. (Maps.com/Corbis)
these nations maintained autonomous cultures, there were also similarities. Most lived a semisedentary lifestyle. During the summer, groups constructed semipermanent villages near rivers, where they farmed, hunted, and fished. They grew surpluses of tobacco and corn, which could be traded with their neighbors. In the winter they formed smaller hunting bands, relying on game animals and stored food. After French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle discovered the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, the French claimed the territory along the Saint Lawrence, through the Great Lakes, and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Indiana contained several rivers and por-
599
tages that linked the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. The fur trader Jean-Baptiste Bissot, sieur de Vincennes, established a French presence in the early eighteenth century, developing close relations with the Miamis living along the Maumee. His son François-Marie followed his father’s occupation and extended their trade network from the headwaters of the Maumee to the Wabash River, which flows into the Ohio and then the Mississippi. The portage between the Maumee and the Wabash was both a transportation route and a source of trading partners among the Miamis, the Weas, and the Piankashaws. In the early 1730s, FrançoisMarie established a post, called Vincennes, on the lower Wabash. Although the French enjoyed some economic success, in the 1730s and 1740s their alliances with the Indians became threatened by British traders, who allied themselves with a Piankashaw leader named Memeskia (called “Old Briton” by the British and “La Demoiselle” by the French). This British-Indian alliance coincided with broader challenges to French authority in the Ohio valley, culminating in the French and Indian War, which broke out in western Pennsylvania in the 1750s. When the French relinquished their North American claims in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, they abandoned Indiana. Thomas J. Lappas See also: Fur Trade; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Mississippi River; New France; Ohio; Saint Lawrence River; Tobacco; Treaty of Paris. References Cayton, Andrew L. R. Frontier Indiana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Edmunds, R. David. The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.
600
INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU
INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU Fictional French police inspector, created by U.S. film director Blake Edwards, Inspector (and subsequently Chief Inspector) Jacques Clouseau of the Paris Sûreté made his first onscreen appearance in the 1963 comedy The Pink Panther, played by Peter Sellers. Since then, the instantly recognizable, bumbling, hapless investigator has turned up in a series of farcical comedies in his trademark beige mackintosh and hat. Although all of these films (from Edwards’s 1964 sequel A Shot in the Dark to the 2005 prequel, directed by Shawn Levy, The Pink Panther) are English-language productions, Clouseau speaks an inimitable version of Frenchified English that has made its way into cult film history and has cropped up in such unexpected locations as 1980s antinuclear campaigns with such slogans as “Clouseau fans against the beumb.” In the minds of most moviegoers, Clouseau is immediately associated with Peter Sellers’s depiction, although the actor actually died in 1980. He starred in only the first five Pink Panther movies, creating a character renowned for his utterly unfounded and yet boundless self-confidence. Sellers’s Clouseau is a great fan of “foolproof ” disguises, which, in turn, enables Edwards to introduce somewhat incongruous references to elements of classical French culture, with Clouseau dressing up as the Hunchback of Notre-Dame (complete with overinflating hump, which leads to Clouseau floating across a Paris nightscape and ending up falling into the Seine beside Notre-Dame) or the painter Toulouse-Lautrec. Alongside his ridiculous clumsiness and misplaced self-confidence, Clouseau is also portrayed as a would-be French lover, much along the lines of the amorous cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew. In
the first of the Pink Panther films, he is married to the beautiful and glamorous Simone, played by Capucine, and is oblivious to the fact that she is, in fact, conducting an affair with the man he is trying to capture. Instead, he seems convinced that his out-of-key violin playing will ensure his romantic success. After Sellers’s death, Edwards made Trail of the Pink Panther (1982), which was, in fact, a homage to Sellers, piecing together extracts from previous Clouseau films. Since then, Clouseau has also been played by Alan Arkin (Inspector Clouseau, directed by Bud Yorkin in 1968, and an uncredited role in the Trail of the Pink Panther), Roger Moore (The Curse of the Pink Panther, directed by Edwards in 1983), and Steve Martin (The Pink Panther, 2005). Edwards himself returned to a variation on the original character with The Son of the Pink Panther, released in 1993 and starring Italian comic actor Roberto Benigni as Detective Second Class Jacques Clouseau Jr. Clouseau has also made the transition from human to cartoon form in the DePatie and Freleng Pink Panther cartoon series, which was created when Edwards asked the animators to create a title sequence for the first of the Pink Panther films in 1963. The result was the character of the Pink Panther himself, but they also created an animated Clouseau, based very much on the iconography of the Sellers interpretation, down to the thick moustache and magnifying glass. Cristina Johnston See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Hunchback of Notre-Dame/Notre-Dame de Paris; Language; Pepe Le Pew. Reference Rigelsford, Adrian, and Kim Meffen. The Trail of the Pink Panther. London: Boxtree, 1999.
IOWA
IOWA Located in the middle of the United States, the state of Iowa was part of the vast territory sold by France to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Though few Iowans today have French ancestry— compared to, say, Louisiana, Maine, or Wisconsin—and while there is in fact scant evidence of an ongoing French cultural legacy in Iowa, the state’s French origins are at least evident in place-names such as Dubuque and Des Moines, the capital city. Several small groups of Native American people had lived in the area before French explorers arrived late in the seventeenth century. Among these initial inhabitants were the Sioux, the Winnebagos, the Potawatomis, and the Ioways—from whom the state’s name was eventually derived.
601
Though it is not altogether clear whether they were fostering grand imperial designs of Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the king’s influential minister, or were instead part of a more modest search for fur and converts, Louis Joliet and a few companions (one of whom most historians believe to have been Father Jacques Marquette) became in 1673 the first Europeans known to have visited the area that was later called Iowa. They sailed down the Mississippi, later Iowa’s eastern border, thereby stretching the boundaries of New France to 4,000 miles from Paris and almost 1,000 miles from Quebec. RenéRobert Cavelier de La Salle actually claimed the Mississippi valley for France in 1682. Though Prairie du Chien, on the river’s eastern bank in what is now the state
Map of Iowa. The state's French origins are evident in place-names such as Dubuque and Des Moines, the capital city. (Maps.com/Corbis)
602
IRAQ WAR
of Wisconsin, became an important frontier settlement for the French, there was never a comparable French outpost on the river’s western bank, in what would one day be Iowa. It has recently been discovered that in the 1750s a fur trading post did exist in Vaudreuil, on the Mississippi’s western bank. The Des Moines River and the eventual city and county of Des Moines apparently derive their name from the word Moingona, the name that Indians living along the river had given to their settlement. Shortening the word, French explorers reportedly began to call the waterway la rivière des Moines, “the river of the Moines.” La rivière des Moines also means “the river of the monks,” but apparently it was only later that the name also became linked to Trappist monks who lived for a time in the area. The French secretly transferred control of land west of the Mississippi to Spain in 1762, to help keep the area out of British hands, making the transfer public in the Treaty of Paris a year later. Spain granted a portion of this land to Julien Dubuque, a French Canadian, in 1785; part of that land grant eventually became an Iowa county and city named after Dubuque. Though he died in financial ruin in 1810, for a time Dubuque grew rich from trading and from mining lead on his land, harshly treating the members of the Fox tribe who lived there and worked for him. Spain also gave land in what would later be Iowa to two other Frenchmen, Basil Giard and Louis Honoré Tesson, who became a renowned apple grower. After the British imperial threat was checked, at least somewhat, by the American Revolution, Napoléon reclaimed the Mississippi valley from Spain in 1800, only to sell it to the United States three years
later in the Louisiana Purchase. The land that would become Iowa remained settled almost entirely by Indians for another three decades. John Ibson See also: American Revolution; Colbert, JeanBaptiste; Fur Trade; Joliet, Louis; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Maine; Marquette, Jacques; Mississippi River; New France; Quebec; Wisconsin. References Caruso, John Anthony. The Mississippi Valley Frontier: The Age of French Exploration and Settlement. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Sage, Leland L. A History of Iowa. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1974. Schweider, Dorothy. Iowa: The Middle Land. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1996.
IRAQ WAR U.S.-led toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was accompanied by an international diplomatic crisis with France. After the reelection of Jacques Chirac as French president in May 2002, and the replacement of the previous Socialist government, which had been highly critical of the United States, it seemed that French and U.S. policy toward Iraq, notably on sanctions, was converging. However, during summer 2002, as the Bush administration began to make more and more reference to preemptive regime change in Baghdad, the French government became alarmed. French policy took the view that war should be an option of last resort and that Saddam should and could be contained. France was in broad agreement with the United States on five points. Iraq under Saddam Hussein presented a danger, both to its neighbors and (especially) to the Iraqi people. Saddam personally was a
IRAQ WAR
problem, and it would be desirable if he were to leave power. Any existing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) must be declared and the weapons destroyed (in conformity with existing UN resolutions). If necessary, military force should be used to bring about this result. The global war on terrorism required the forging of a broad international coalition. However, there was real disagreement on six issues. France insisted that the West did not know whether Iraq possessed WMD. In order to find out, inspectors should return to Iraq. Despite the existence of ten previous resolutions, Iraq should be offered one final opportunity to comply with the UN. While the United States advocated a single resolution authorizing both the return of the inspectors and military action in the event of any further “material breach,” France insisted that recourse to military action should be the subject of a further—second—UN resolution. France was not opposed to preemptive war on principle, but rejected unilateral U.S. preemption unsanctioned by the UN. Regime change as a policy objective was unacceptable, since it would open a Pandora’s box in international law. The sole legitimate objective was to destroy any existing WMD. Finally, France believed there had been no significant contact between the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda. The French government was concerned respecting three objectives. It was committed to the UN inspections process, stressing that more Iraqi WMD had been destroyed by the inspectors between 1991 and 1998 than during the Gulf War. Second, while Iraqi disarmament was a legitimate objective, it had to be done in ways that bolstered rather than undermined regional stability. Third, if the international
603
community was to insist on Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions, then it must apply this rule across the board—notably with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. French strategy was largely dependent for its success both on Saddam’s rational behavior and on Washington’s willingness fully to explore avenues other than war. The French position, unlike the positions adopted in some EU member states, enjoyed widespread public and political support. Polls consistently gave Chirac 65–75 percent approval ratings. The French approach challenged the United States at every stage to stick with the international community, to eschew muscular unilateralism, to prioritize coalition building, and to engage in nation building for the long haul. It recognized the global preeminence of the United States as a political, diplomatic, and military power. France intended to articulate what it saw as an alternative approach to that of the U.S. administration. Its chosen forum—the UN Security Council (UNSC) —offered maximum leverage. Throughout October and early November 2002, Paris pursued three objectives: the organization of a genuinely intrusive inspections regime, the rejection of automatic recourse to military action, the principle of a second resolution to authorize the use of force. The ambiguous text of UN Resolution 1441 in November 2002, however, can be read both as an immediate alternative to war and as an eventual legitimization of war. That France saw it as an alternative to war is fundamental. The hopelessness of an Iraqi standoff against the entire international community gave France, along with many other nations, confidence that Saddam would back down. However,
604
IRAQ WAR
A crowd of thousands participate in an antiwar rally in Paris on the first anniversary of the Iraq War. (Horacio Villalobos/Corbis)
throughout late November and much of December, France seemed imperceptibly to be losing the battle to keep the international community focused on making the inspections work, and in early January 2003 the French Foreign Ministry became convinced that the United States was determined to go to war. France was thus faced with a clear strategic decision: either to find a diplomatic face-saver enabling her to step in line behind Washington or to be prepared to engage in—and take the consequences for—all-out opposition. The Franco-German summit of January 2003 was universally interpreted as representing a shift in the French position. France, in its capacity as a veto-wielding member of the UNSC, had become the leading opponent of the U.S.-led war effort. Not since Suez in 1956 had France
and the United States found themselves at strategic odds in the UNSC. This was France’s first diplomatic miscalculation. The problem, given the increasing evidence that the United States was going to go to war anyway, was precisely how to organize that opposition. France had three possibilities. The first was to try to mobilize outright international defiance of Washington—a position no French president could have contemplated. A second possibility was to persuade the European Union to adopt a common position. The Extraordinary European Council meeting in Brussels on February 17 did indeed produce a statement broadly reflecting the French approach, which was endorsed by all fifteen EU member states. Meanwhile, however, France selected a third course in order to keep the world’s
IRAQ WAR
focus on the inspections. This was to intensify and enhance the inspections process. It built on the specification in the EU statement calling for giving the inspections process all the “time and resources needed.” Following Colin Powell’s February 5 presentation to the UNSC of the “evidence” against Iraq, French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin proposed to the Security Council a reinforcement of the inspections regime. Over the next few days, this became a tripartite (French, German, Russian) proposal. France outlined in detail the requirements for inspections reinforcement. A massive American propaganda campaign had, however, already been unleashed, denouncing France as an objective adversary of the United States and an objective ally of Iraq. France’s case was not helped by a parallel crisis over the issue of a NATO guarantee to Ankara in the event of an Iraqi preemptive strike against Turkey as the buildup to war continued. On February 10, France, Germany, and Belgium refused to acquiesce in what they considered to be a U.S. attempt to short-circuit the UNSC process by moving closer to war. This was France’s second politico-diplomatic error, in that it was now also cast as a saboteur of the NATO alliance, although it was not alone, enjoying widespread support within the Security Council Africa and the Arab League. But the question of the timetable had become a central sticking point. De Villepin’s suggestion of March 14 as the next deadline by which the UNSC should examine the report of the inspectors was unrealistic. In any case, the French proposals were ignored by the very men to whom they were formally submitted: the arms inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed El-Baradei. The
605
last chance to avert what was now seen throughout the world as an inevitable U.S.-led war seemed to have slipped away. At this point, the spotlight focused on the proposed second UN resolution authorizing war. Tony Blair needed this second resolution for domestic political reasons. France argued that, since the inspections were still ongoing, there was no need for a second resolution. France went to extraordinary lengths to try to persuade the United States and the United Kingdom not to present a second resolution—given that this would inevitably lead to a crisis in the Security Council. This became a trial of strength between Paris, confident of the support of wide sections of the international community, and Washington, where the decision to go to war had already been taken. But the inspectors’ reports indicated that Saddam was cooperating—more or less—and French leaders saw no reason to rethink their position. This attitude was made clear in Chirac’s crucial television interview on March 10. Asked how he would vote on the second resolution, Chirac initially took refuge in confidence that it would not muster the necessary nine votes. France, along with a majority of the council, would vote no. Pressed repeatedly to say what France would do if, in fact, the U.S. text produced a majority in the Security Council, Chirac finally crossed a Rubicon. France would still vote no. Technically, he conceded, the voting system of the UNSC meant that this would amount to a veto. But in reality, France would simply be voting the same way, irrespective of the votes of other UNSC member states. This was probably Chirac’s most serious diplomatic miscalculation. It helped put an end to the increasingly futile U.S. and U.K. efforts to
606
IRAQ WAR
create a Security Council majority for war. And, unintentionally, it gave Tony Blair an alibi. On March 18, 2003, during the crucial debate in the House of Commons over war in Iraq, Blair cited France’s threat to veto a second UN Security Council resolution authorizing military action as a decisive factor that had actually rendered war inevitable. As had been the case in 1991, war temporarily muffled whatever voice France had enjoyed in the international arena. On March 19, President Chirac issued a brief communiqué regretting this “action initiated without United Nations backing.” When the Saddam regime fell on April 10, Chirac issued a new communiqué welcoming the fall of the dictatorship and noting that humanitarian assistance was now a priority. He also insisted that the United Nations should be fully involved in restoring Iraqi sovereignty as soon as possible. That position was premonitory of the attitude France was subsequently to adopt throughout the process of establishing peace, security, and transition in Iraq. France did offer an alternative strategy to that of the United States, and it was one that carried the support of most of the countries and most of the peoples of the world (including the peoples of the countries—the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland—whose leaders supported the U.S. approach). It was an alternative based on multilateral negotiations, UN legitimacy, a pragmatic process of weapons inspections, the primacy of international law, and above all the principle that war is the worst of all available options. Was the French alternative viable? In terms of establishing whether Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and, if so, destroying them, it had much going for it. The inspections regime was in-
adequate, but France proposed reinforcing it. Above all, it was far too slow for U.S. purposes. Given time, it might have achieved most of its stated objectives. Time was not available. It now seems beyond question that the Bush administration had set an internal deadline of mid-March for the shift to war. In that context, the viability of the French alternative becomes almost irrelevant. What were France’s motivations? Arguments based on material interest do not hold water. France’s trade with Iraq was minuscule. It had effectively written off the huge debt Saddam had built up in the 1980s. And if it had been genuinely interested in oil contracts, then self-interest would have dictated joining the U.S. bandwagon rather than resisting it. The motives of the French government must therefore be understood in terms of a broader and longer-term concept of interest, involving a mix of principle and praxis. France believed that, since 1989 and especially since 9/11, the world has faced a dramatic choice: either continued development of a body of international law, forged multilaterally, framed through the United Nations, and applied consensually or a return to the exclusivity of national interest. In that choice, the position of the United States was critical, since some of its leaders appeared to believe that it could benefit from the latter. One major role of the international community, in the French view, was to ensure that the United States stuck to multilateralism. France’s position was based on the fear that precipitate, illegitimate, and perhaps even illegal U.S. action in one of the world’s most volatile regions would be a major strategic mistake. Did France oppose the United States “on principle” and/or out of some attempt
IRAQ WAR
to produce a counterweight that would help create a multipolar world? This question, so often put, is doubly misleading and inappropriate. The answer to the first part (on principle) is unquestionably no. France has repeatedly been the staunchest ally whenever push really came to shove (Berlin 1958–1961, Cuba 1962, Euromissiles 1983, Bosnia 1995). But it is not an unquestioning ally. Over this crisis, France genuinely felt a major difference of opinion on an issue of fundamental substance. France does not oppose the United States on principle. It does, however, occasionally oppose the United States. These are two very different matters. As to “counterweights” and “multipolarity,” one has to distinguish between rhetoric and reality. It is almost received wisdom in the United States that France’s policy is geared to “balancing” American power. However, few of those who use this argument make any attempt to say what it means in practice. Clearly, France does not aspire to act as a systematic rival of the United States, either alone or as part of a “pole.” But Paris often speaks of rééquilibrage. To U.S. realists this sounds suspiciously like a classic case of smaller powers ganging together to “bal-
607
ance” against a hegemon. Yet balancing and rééquilibrage mean different things. Rééquilibrage in French discourse implies the creation of more equality within a community of values, either transatlantic or international. It implies the sharing of leadership rather than disputes over leadership. In advocating multipolarity, France has always been careful to insist that this would not weaken the transatlantic relationship, which remains fundamental and special— but in need of greater “balance.” Jolyon Howorth See also: Chirac, Jacques; Foreign Policy, 1945 to the Present; 9/11: Political Perspectives; World War II. References Aburish, Saïd K., et al. Inside Iraq: The History, the People, and the Modern Conflicts of the World’s Least Understood Land. New York: Marlowe, 2002. Garrels, Anne. Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War as Seen by NPR’s Correspondent. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. “Le Moyen-Orient après la guerre d’Irak.” Esprit 296 (July 2003). Sifry, Micah L., and Christopher Cerf. The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. Villepin, Dominique de. Un Monde nouveau. Paris: de L’Herne, 2003.
J JACOB, SUZANNE (SUZANNE AMOS) (1943–) Novelist, poet, essayist, and chansonnière, born in Quebec in 1943, and one of the most highly esteemed writers in Quebec. Educated at the Collège de Notre Dame de l’Assomption and the Université de Montréal, a teacher of French between 1969 and 1974, Jacob spent five years in Paris as an actress and singer before returning to Montreal. She published her first novel, Flore Cocon, in 1978, followed by a collection of short stories, La Survie/Survival, and in 1983 Laura Laur, which won the Prix du Gouverneur Général. Introduced to the Editions du Seuil by the Québécois writer Anne Hébert, she has published most of her prose with them. Her most successful recent books have been L’Obéissance (“Obedience,” 1991) and Rouge, mère et fils (“Red, Mother and Daughter,” 2001). The former was a commercial success in France, where it was severely criticized by feminist critics who saw her as a traitor to women. Both books were greeted in Quebec with unanimous acclaim by the critics. Her poetry, distinguished by the richness of its vocabulary and an impressive range of imagery, has not known quite the same success as her prose.
Her work is strongly influenced by the Bible, as is shown in the structure of Laura Laur, and more recently by the question of ancestry, particularly the role of the Amerindians in the ancestry of the Québécois. This is a subject, largely avoided by other Quebec writers, which she explores in Rouge, mère et fils. Her earlier novels and stories looked at the role, as seen by the men around them, of young women with few attachments in society. She was particularly interested in analyzing the role of the male as mother and the tender, caring side of which men are capable (Bruno in Maude, Pascal and Serge in Laura Laur). More recently she has become interested in people who find themselves involved with the law. Her later novels shift the center of attention to older women, mothers themselves, who are again surrounded by men who care for them. Part of her originality lies in her success in showing how some men look at and look after women. Her novels are distinguished by her understanding of her male characters and her ability to present their thoughts and feelings. Her short stories show her to be a mistress of the art. In addition to her prose fiction and her poetry, Suzanne Jacob is an essayist, Ah!
609
610
JAMES, HENRY
(1996) and La Bulle d’encre (“The Ink Bubble,” 1997), which won the Prix de la revue Etudes françaises (French Studies). It now features on the syllabus of schools and universities throughout Quebec. She has also won the Bourse Gabrielle Roy and other prizes. Her work is widely recognized in Quebec and France, although her appeal is to a different audience in France. The novel that made her name in France, La Passion selon Galatée (“The Passion According to Galatea,” 1987), was received less enthusiastically in Quebec. L’Obéissance recorded much higher sales in France, although well reviewed in Quebec. The novels most appreciated in Quebec are Laura Laur and Rouge, mère et fils. Peter Noble See also: Feminisms; Hébert, Anne; Montreal; Quebec; Roy, Gabrielle. References Anderson, M. Jean. “Mother, Mirror Self.” New Zealand Journal of French Studies 9, no. 1 (May 1988): 113–124. Gilbert, Paula. “Discourse of Female Criminality.” Quebec Studies 32 (fall 2001–winter 2002): 37–55. Voix et Images 21, no. 2 (62) (winter 1996): 216–299.
JAMES, HENRY (1843–1916) American writer, born in New York. James’s father, Henry James Sr., took him all over Europe while very young, and he was educated in many European cities, including Paris. He lived again in Paris for much of 1875, where he was correspondent for the New York Tribune. Even though he settled for the rest of his life in England, his vision of writing is intertwined with France from the very first moments—he suggests that he learned to be an observer in his pram in Paris—to the
last. On his deathbed he dictated letters, believing himself to be Napoléon, demanding that the Louvre be redecorated. Although France, particularly in the form of the remnants of aristocratic and imperial Paris, is central to his fiction, it never appears without Atlantic mediation. Much of his early journalism was written for magazines that aimed to construct an American literature, independent of European inheritance, but his fictional models included, centrally, the novelists of the French tradition alongside the “romanticism” of Hawthorne and other U.S. novelists. His relationship with Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant was intense and ambivalent, as seen in his writing about them in French Poets and Novelists (1878) and elsewhere. His development of a mode of writing in which the complexities of perception and reflection mediate tense scenes of social ambition develops Flaubert’s methods and paves the way for modernism. If James is the great novelist of consciousness, his mode of writing almost always shadows forth in some way the economic, sexual, and cultural complexity of the encounter between Americans and Europeans. His travel writing, notably in A Little Tour in France (1900) and The American Scene (1907), depends on the disengagement of an internationalized observer. In his fiction, Paris functions as scene and agent—seducing, corrupting, and refining—in, for example, Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The manners and conversation of the Europeans in The Europeans (1878) profoundly unsettle their American relatives and hosts. In The American (1877), Newman’s extraordinary wealth faces off against
JAZZ
611
See also: Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Literary Relations; Travel Writing; Zola, Emile. References Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. London: Collins, 1985. Walker, Pierre A. Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995.
JAZZ Henry James, 1910. France is central to most of James’s fiction. (Library of Congress)
the glacial Catholic aristocratic disdain of the Bellegardes. American money, and the energy and capacity for reinvention that it channels, is finally unable either to insulate him from or to master the depth of their cultural identity. There is no position in the melodrama of international culture in which a consciousness synthetic of the two positions can rest, except in James’s narration. Strether, in the late novel The Ambassadors (1903), appears to be able to occupy this position, learning to “live” freshly through psychosexual and cultural openness to Paris, but even he has to acknowledge that the lesson has come too late. James died, a British citizen, in 1916, profoundly invested in the war raging in France, about which he wrote in Within the Rim (published 1919). Geoff Gilbert
France is often seen as one country that afforded jazz a particularly favorable reception, with French intellectuals and critics being among the first anywhere to take the music seriously as an art form. The first jazz musicians arrived in France with the American army in 1917, sparking a fascination with the music that continued into the interwar years and beyond. The circumstances of jazz’s arrival in France exerted a determining influence on the way the music’s cultural significance was to be understood by successive generations of French commentators. Unsurprisingly, jazz became associated with liberation, thanks to the role played both by improvisation in the music itself and by the American army in liberating France, first in 1917–1918 and then again in 1944. Moreover, as a recognizably American musical form, jazz appeared to be an expression of the most modern, advanced, and industrial of societies, with all the potential for both dynamism and dislocation that implied. At the same time, as a music performed predominantly by African Americans and whose rhythmic
612
JAZZ
and melodic structures were so clearly distinct from the Western classical tradition, jazz seemed also to be an expression of a troubling, if seductive, primitivism. Critical reactions to jazz in France inevitably involved engaging with one or all of these connotations of modernity, primitivism, and liberation. In the promise of liberation it seemed to hold, as in its potentially contradictory combination of the most modern with the most primitive, jazz proved irresistible to a generation of young French fans seeking alternatives to a European culture whose decadence had been so tragically revealed in the slaughter of Flanders. Enthusiasm for jazz in 1920s France formed part of a more generalized “negrophilia.” Artists and intellectuals, from the author Jean Cocteau and the classical composer Darius Milhaud to the anthropologist Michel Leiris and the thinker Georges Bataille, sought in the music not merely an expression of primitive authenticity, but a means of healing the rift between the modern and the primitive, of achieving their synthesis in a manner characteristic of modernism more generally. Such early enthusiasm for jazz was thus marked by a continuing, if benevolent, ethnocentrism and was frequently characterized by a rather sketchy knowledge of the music itself. By the 1930s, enthusiasm for jazz had distinguished itself from the generalized “negrophilia” of the 1920s to become a more specialist affair. In 1932 the Hot Club de France was founded in Paris, with a mission to educate a new audience in jazz appreciation, and by the 1940s a network of affiliated clubs had spread out from Paris to the provinces. The Hot Club’s magazine, Jazz Hot, founded in 1935, remains France’s premier jazz magazine, and the
Club’s Quintet featured the first two indigenous French jazz musicians to achieve international recognition, Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Hugues Panassié, cofounder of the Hot Club, published what is widely recognized as the first critical study anywhere to have identified jazz’s specificity as musical form, Le Jazz Hot (1934). Translated into English for an American readership in 1936, it remains a primary point of reference for jazz criticism. If, however, Panassié was more knowledgeable than earlier French commentators, his analyses manifested an equivalent ethnocentrism, albeit of a less benevolent kind. For in jazz apprenticeship and performance, he found a microcosm of the kind of corporatist society that, as a member of the extreme right-wing Action française and subsequent supporter of the Vichy regime, he saw as the necessary corrective to the decadence of the egalitarian, democratic French Republic. Jazz was again being promoted as an expression of primitive authenticity and a solution to modernity’s ills, but this time in support of the most reactionary politics. In the postwar period, Panassié’s particular brand of ethnocentrism manifested itself in his virulent opposition to modern jazz, to the be-bop of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonius Monk, of which, during the long years of war and occupation, French audiences had been deprived. Panassié’s opposition to the new music provoked a split in the Hot Club de France, the so-called “guerre du jazz” (jazz war), which pitted Panassié against critics and be-bop enthusiasts such as André Hodeir, Charles Delaunay, and Boris Vian. Hodeir’s defense of modern jazz fed into his Hommes et problèmes du jazz/Jazz, Its Evolution and Essence (1954), which, like
JAZZ
613
Django Reinhardt (1910–1953), on guitar, and Stéphane Grappelli (1908–1997), on violin, of the Quintet de Hot Club de France, ca. 1934. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Panassié’s earlier Le Jazz Hot, was rapidly translated into English to become a standard work of reference in jazz criticism. Delaunay, the son of modernist painters Sonia and Robert Delaunay and author of a seminal jazz discography in the interwar years, personified the close links between high culture and jazz in France, and his wartime activities attested to the association between jazz and liberation. Delaunay’s autobiography is replete with tales of his smuggling of jazz records between the zone libre (free zone) and the zone occupée (occupied zone), of being arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, and of his involvement with a Resistance network code-named “Cart,” in homage to Benny Carter. The association between jazz and freedom was given a new twist in the immedi-
ate postwar years in the novels, poetry, and jazz criticism of Boris Vian. Vian did more than anyone else to popularize the image of the heady mix of jazz and existentialism on offer in the bars of Saint Germain-des-Prés. Jean-Paul Sartre famously met Miles Davis and Charlie Parker in the Club Saint Germain in May 1949, according them a respect Davis found sadly lacking on his subsequent return to unemployment and heroin addiction in New York. Already in his first novel, La Nausée (1938), Sartre had showed his interest in jazz: his protagonist Roquentin could only escape his feeling of nausea, only transcend the absurdity of his sterile bourgeois surroundings, when listening to the blues “Some of These Days,” sung by the Negress Sophie Tucker. Later, in an account of his visit to a New York jazz club published in 1947, Sartre
614
JAZZ
claimed jazz should be seen as an expression of existential freedom. Yet Sophie Tucker was not a Negress as Sartre assumed, but a Russian émigré, who regularly blacked up for her performances. His article “Nick’s Bar” opened with a line that, in the association it drew between jazz, bananas, and the jungle, unwittingly rehearsed some of the most damaging racial stereotypes about jazz music and African American musicians: “Jazz is like bananas, it’s best consumed in situ.” In Sartre also, then, it is possible to identify the same problematic appropriation of jazz as a figure for liberation, an appropriation based on both an ignorance of the music’s specificities and an enduring ethnocentrism. The recurrence of this kind of ethnocentrism among even the most apparently progressive of French intellectuals should give pause for thought. The myth according to which France, as “the country of human rights,” was naturally predisposed to be more open both to jazz and to African American jazz musicians clearly needs to be treated with caution. Rather, as jazz traveled across the Atlantic from the New World to the Old, and as seminal works of jazz criticism traveled in the opposite direction, it is evident that both the music and the critical literature it generated were caught up in peculiarly overdetermined networks of cultural and political exchange. To argue that such networks merit critical scrutiny, and that jazz’s enthusiastic reception in France should therefore not be mythologized, is by no means to suggest that all the French musicians, critics, and fans who engaged with the music should therefore be found guilty of an irremediable ethnocentrism. Such a suggestion would enclose jazz within an essentially “other,” non-French, American, or African
American identity, an identity to which the French then reacted with varying degrees of sensitivity or political correctness. This approach would imply the French attitude to jazz was purely reactive and would hence ignore the contribution generations of French jazz musicians have made to the music’s development, from Grappelli and Reinhardt to Martial Solal, Michel Portal, Michel Petrucciani, and Didier Lockwood. It would also ignore the extent to which jazz was always already marked by its involvement in the networks of colonial power, capital, and culture that have characterized the French Atlantic. Jazz’s putative place of origin is the former French colonial city of New Orleans, while French Creoles like Jelly Roll Morton are widely credited with having played a key role in its genesis. Jazz has thus always borne within itself the traces of France’s role in the political, economic, and cultural forms of modernity, and accordingly its reception in France is a microcosm of the issues of ethnicity, geography, culture, and national and imperial power at the core of FrancoAmerican relations. Jeremy Lane See also: Bataille, Georges; Cocteau, Jean; Davis, Miles; Grappelli, Stéphane; Leiris, Michel; Music (Classical); New Orleans; Petrucciani, Michel; Primitivism; Reinhardt, Django; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Vian, Boris; World War I; World War II. References Hodeir, André. Jazz, Its Evolution and Essence. Trans. David Noakes. London: Jazz Book Club, 1958. Panassié, Hugues. Hot Jazz. Trans. Lyle Dowling and Eleanor Dowling. London/New York: Cassell, 1936. Tournès, Ludovic. New Orleans sur Seine: Histoire du jazz en France. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Vian, Boris. Ecrits sur le jazz. Paris: Livre de poche, 1999.
JEAN, RAYMOND
JEAN, RAYMOND (1925–) Novelist, university teacher at Aix, critic, literary and political journalist (including Cahiers du Sud and Le Monde), born in Marseilles. Raymond’s fiction has three stages: existentialist commitment, the formalism and optical realism of the nouveau roman (new novel), and, since his association with Hubert Nyssen and the publishers of Actes Sud at Arles, shorter, simpler récits (tales). From 1953 to 1959 he worked in the United States, Vietnam, and Morocco. His assistantship at the University of Pennsylvania underlies Les Ruines de New York (1959), a sympathetic view of American life, though it includes a castigation of McCarthyism. His time in Saigon gave rise to Le Village (1966), which depicts the bloody reality of war and proclaims his pacifist hopes and beliefs for the United States. In Morocco, in 1959, he supported Algerian independence and was abruptly recalled from his post as cultural attaché and demoted as a teacher. His experience in the Resistance and of Communism, first as a sympathizer, then as an active, if insubordinate, party member from 1968, his work for the Mouvement de la Paix, and his extensive travels have shaped his sense of social justice and human rights: his preface to the Lettres de prison of Gabrielle Russier (1970) attacks prejudice and legalism; Les Deux Printemps (“The Two Springs,” 1971) compares the struggle for freedom in Paris, 1968, and Prague, 1969; La Ligne 12 (1973) highlights immigrant labor and racialism, La Femme attentive (“Attentive Woman,” 1974) the condition of women; La Fontaine obscure (“The Dark Fountain,” 1976) relates a seventeenthcentury witchcraft trial in Provence and his preface to Ecrits de Victor Hugo sur la peine
615
de mort (“Victor Hugo’s Writings on the Death Penalty,” 1979) emphasizes the atrocious physical reality of the guillotine. Two novels are set in South America: Photo-Souvenir (1980), in Chile on the eve of Salvador Allende’s death, and Le Roi de l’ordure (“The King of Rubbish,” 1989), in a country near Cuba. L’Attachée (1993) describes a young woman in a Middle Eastern country at the time of the first Gulf War, a researcher into “érographie” who concludes that the only real pornography is war. Jean has twice mapped his relations with Communism, in La Singularité d’être communiste (“The Oddity of Being a Communist,” 1979) and Le Clou: Dialogue en sept journées (“The Nail: A Seven-Day Dialogue,” 1995). With the fall of Communism and the demise of ideologies, his writing has become more liberated, more erotic: Un Fantasme de Bella B. (“One of Bella B.’s Fantasms,” 1983); La Lectrice (“The Reader,” 1986), turned into a film by Michel Deville; Un Portrait de Sade (“A Portrait of Sade,” 1989); and Le Dessus et le Dessous ou l’érotique de Mirabeau (1997). His collected critical essays, La Littérature et le réel (“Literature and the Real,” 1965) and La Pratique de la littérature (“The Practice of Literature,” 1978), discuss novelists (Claude Simon and Michel Butor) and poets (Jean Tortel, Eugène Guillevic, René Char, and Francis Ponge); he has also written on Gérard de Nerval and on surrealist poets, notably Paul Eluard, and on Char (2001). Jean is a writer of the Mediterranean who rejects parisianisme without being regionalist, a visual writer from his early belief in “la prégnance du regard” (“the pregnant gaze”) to his books on Paul Cézanne and his interest in cinematographic techniques. The lucidity, balance, and detachment of his fiction and criticism
616
JEANMAIRE, ZIZI
ensure readability; he also writes children’s books and is a moraliste in the French sense of a tolerant recorder of the human condition, not a moralist in the English sense, sometimes angry but tolerant overall. Peter Sharratt See also: Butor, Michel; Chile; Iraq War; Remakes; World War II. References Jean, Raymond. Belle Clarté, chère raison. Paris: Brouwer, 1985. Lire, écrire autour de Raymond Jean. Aix-enProvence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1998.
JEANMAIRE, ZIZI (RENÉE) (1924–) Star of French ballet and music hall, best known for her role as Carmen for the Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit, influenced in part by American musical comedies. Born in Paris, Renée Jeanmaire studied at the Paris Opera, where she was regarded as a petit rat (most junior level of dancer), training with the Russians Alexandre Volinine and Boris Kniaseff. Famed choreographer Serge Lifar launched her career in the ballet Aubade (Dawn Song), presented in Monte Carlo in 1946, a choreographic concerto to music by Francis Poulenc, originally choreographed by Nijinska in 1929, then by Balanchine in 1930. In 1950, Jeanmaire performed in the musical review, L’Œuf à la coque/“The Soft Boiled Egg,” revealing that she had, in addition to her talent for dance, a sensual raucous voice that evoked a flirtatious presence onstage. Jeanmaire married avantgarde dancer and choreographer Roland Petit in 1954 and became the muse for whom he created many of his most impor-
tant ballets. Jeanmaire’s name and flirtatious dance style soon became synonymous with Petit’s artistic imagery and stance as leader of “the rebels” of classical dance. Jeanmaire performed with classical companies such as the Nouveau Ballet de Monte Carlo in 1946 and frequently performed in galas, such as in the London season of the original Ballets russes. Her presence onstage was dominated by a singular look, one that endeared her to audiences. Composed of a pixyish coiffure, sharp angular extensions, and a spectacular presence and achievement in demi-caractère roles such as that of Carmen, she projected humor and coquettishness that assured her success. Her exceptional individuality onstage was seen in her portrayal of an unforgettable Carmen (with the company Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit in 1949), first passionate, then seductive, then vindictive, and always commanding the stage. Other dramatic roles created for her by Petit included L’Œuf à la coque, a music hall review choreographed in 1949, and La Croqueuse de diamants (“The Gold Digger,” 1950), miniature musicals designed by Petit to demonstrate her vitality and verve. Just as Jeanmaire excelled in dramatic roles that Petit created and so was lured away from more classical roles, so did the movies lure her away from a career in dance. She later performed on Broadway in Pink Tights, choreographed in 1953 by Agnes De Mille and in the musical comedy Patron, choreographed by Petit and presented in Paris in 1959. She appeared in films such as Hans Christian Andersen (Charles Vidor, 1952), 1–2–3–4 ou les Collants noirs/Black Tights (Terence Young, 1960), and Folies Bergère (Decoin, 1956), all choreographed for her by Petit.
JEFFERSON,THOMAS
617
Jeanmaire appeared as guest artist at the Paris Opera Ballet in 1975 and 1979 and at the London Contemporary Dance Theater Gala at Covent Garden in 1985. She was a recipient of the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1974 and was named Officier de l’Ordre national du mérite. Perhaps her most convincing role was Carmen, for which she received a prestigious Prix d’Interprétation from the French government in 1949. Pamela Gay-White See also: Avant-Gardes; Carmen; Dance. References Kochno, Boris. Le Ballet. Paris: Hachette, 1957. Lidova, Irene. “Zizi Jeanmaire.” Les Saisons de la danse (January 1975): 16–22. Pitt, Freda. “Jeanmaire, Zizi (Renée).” International Dictionary of Ballet. Vol. 1. London: St. James, 1994: 707–710.
JEFFERSON,THOMAS (1743–1826) American statesman, revolutionary leader, and political philosopher. Jefferson served as governor of Virginia (1779–1781), minister to France (1784– 1789), secretary of state under President George Washington (1789–1794), vice president of the United States during John Adams’s presidency (1797–1801), and president of the United States of America for two terms (1801–1808). Jefferson played a significant role in the American Revolution for independence from the British Empire, authoring the Declaration of Independence, revising the legal code in Virginia, and formulating many of the political ideals of the American republic. Principles of liberty, democracy, individual rights, equality, and freedom of speech,
Thomas Jefferson envisioned the French and American republics as the vanguard of republican government in an eighteenth-century world dominated by monarchical and aristocratic regimes. (Library of Congress)
press, and religion were most effectively articulated by Jefferson; so, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “Jeffersonian Democracy” became the prevailing creed of American society. His integration of popular sovereignty, religious liberty, economic freedom, and public education formed the “American System” of democracy. Drawn from a variety of philosophical sources (classical Greece and Rome, Christianity, Scottish moral sense philosophy, John Locke’s British liberalism, and the French physiocrats), Jefferson’s political thought formed a coherent whole and encapsulated modern democratic capitalism. International free trade and the encouragement of democratic revolutions around the world emerged from Jeffersonian ideology. His intellectual leadership extended to the
618
JEFFERSON,THOMAS
authoring of the Statute for Religious Freedom in Virginia (which informed the religious freedom clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) and the founding of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (1819). Thus Jefferson’s thought, which included writings on science, art, music, architecture, biology, meteorology, ethics, religion, and law, rendered him the archetypal Enlightenment figure and classic Renaissance man; his ideas continue to be cosmopolitan, controversial, and contemporary. Jefferson possessed a strong affinity and affection for France, especially its culture, art, politics, and culinary tastes, and throughout his public career he worked for positive relations between the United States and France. Jefferson’s political philosophy derived from a rich variety of thinkers. From the natural rights philosophy of John Locke he drew notions of personal liberty, private property, and limited representative government. From the ancient writers Aristotle and Cicero he acquired ideas about political participation, civic virtue, and community. French economists taught him the vital importance of agriculture and free trade to a healthy and prosperous economic system, while Scots’ moral sense philosophy reinforced Jefferson’s belief in the ethics of Jesus. Freedom of religion, for him, meant the completely free social expression of all religious beliefs in a tolerant political environment. No legal restrictions should exist on the freedom of religious expression, practice, or belief that was not injurious to others. From such total religious liberty, Jefferson hoped, the simple Christian ethics of the Gospels (love, forgiveness, humility, forbearance, reverence to God) would emerge and civilize the nation. Such
a moral underpinning was necessary to political and economic liberty. As the democratic system was the most “social” of all communities, Jefferson reasoned, it required an ethics that best developed positive social relationships, and that, for him, was Christian morality. Jefferson’s association with France and French culture was long and complex. Like most of the revolutionary colonists of British North America, Jefferson was exceedingly grateful for the financial, political, and military assistance provided by France during the American War of Independence. With the subsequent crossfertilization of modern republican ideals between the United States and France, Jefferson hoped for a permanent and close alliance between the two countries. He envisioned the French and American republics as the vanguard of republican government in an eighteenth-century world dominated by monarchical and aristocratic regimes. He was able to play a personal role in this relationship when he became minister to France at the conclusion of the American War of Independence (1784–1789). Jefferson had many friends among the leading liberal French aristocracy who were advancing republican ideals in their country. The Marquis de Lafayette, Dupont de Nemours, and the philosophers Morellet and Condorcet had close intellectual and social relationships with Jefferson. While serving as ambassador to France under Louis XVI, Jefferson accommodated himself to royal customs and fashion (participating in salon society, with opulent residences, carriages, and dress); he was appalled by the moral decadence, economic stratification, political oppression, and vanity of the ancien régime. Marital infidelity was especially distasteful to Jef-
JEFFERSON, THOMAS
ferson, as he considered a loving marriage and family essential to human happiness and social justice. Still, Jefferson appreciated greatly French art and architecture, music, and manners, and his years in Paris affected his style and attitudes for the rest of his life. He particularly admired French scientific advances, including aerial balloons, phosphorous matches, the Argant cylinder lamp, and the screw propeller, all of which he envisioned facilitating numerous technological innovations. This enthusiasm for French inventiveness was tempered by suspicion of what he regarded as bizarre developments, such as spiritualist séances, the occult, and mesmerism. So, on balance, Jefferson embraced the progressive social, philosophic, and political aspects of the Enlightenment, while rejecting its excesses and happily denouncing the Old World establishment of monarchy, feudalism, and Catholicism. Most of Jefferson’s early years as U.S. minister to France were devoted to commercial negotiations on behalf of U.S. produce and trade. He continually lobbied the French government for free international trade against the restrictive prevailing mercantilist system. Making a classic free trade argument, Jefferson asserted that unregulated international trade would benefit all nations and increase global prosperity. Regardless of his limited success in achieving a major transformation of the world economic system, Jefferson did accomplish an important shift in U.S. commerce from exclusive dependence on the British mercantile system to some opening of FrancoAmerican business, especially in exchanges of such commodities as oils, wine, and fruit. Much of this commerce, however, was with the French West Indies rather
619
than with France directly. But, after 200 years of exclusive Anglo-American trade, credit, and culture, it was difficult to alter completely the British monopoly on North American commerce. The other diplomatic issue occupying much of Jefferson’s time as minister to France was neutral shipping in the Mediterranean. For centuries, the Muslim countries of North Africa had exacted tribute from European states trading in their region. Jefferson attempted to form a military alliance between the United States and other European nations trading in that region to force the end of Islamic piracy, enslavement of Western sailors, and payment of tribute (which he considered extortion). Jefferson failed to secure such an alliance, and the United States continued to pay ransoms for captured seamen, until Jefferson as president, ten years later, forced North African nations to cease their hostilities through the War of Tripoli. During his period in France, Jefferson took a ten-week tour of the country, investigating the agricultural, social, economic, and familial conditions in rural areas. He found the beauty of the French countryside and villages inspiring, but the poverty, ignorance, and oppression of feudalism enormously troubling. The wines, gardens, and olive trees of rural France so impressed Jefferson that he attempted to transplant them to America. French public improvements (such as canals for commercial transport) and architecture (especially the Maison Carrée—after which he designed the Virginia capitol building) found favor with Jefferson. He was grieved by the common misconceptions about his country as a uniformly primitive and barbaric land, though his own sophistication helped to alleviate some of these negative prejudices
620
JESUITS
toward the United States among the French elite. Early in the French Revolution, the liberal nobility consulted Jefferson for advice on republican political reforms. Messrs. Lafayette, Dupont, Condorcet, and others sought information and encouragement from this American revolutionary leader and icon of modern democracy. Jefferson responded with recommendations for moderate reform in France: a constitutional monarchy, increased power of the representative assembly, free market economic policies, due process of law, and liberty of speech, press, religion, and association. Given the country’s cultural bases in monarchy, aristocracy, feudalism, and Catholicism, Jefferson advised gradual liberalization in France, along the constitutional lines of Great Britain (limited monarchy, parliamentary sovereignty, industrialization, and Protestant Christianity). He advised restraint and patience in social change, as Jefferson feared the potential excesses of a too rapid liberalization for the poor, ignorant masses unaccustomed to self-government. Although he assisted in the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Jefferson hoped for a classical mixed regime in France, with the nobility and king providing checks to the popular Third Estate. Viewing with alarm the radical upheavals of the Estates General sessions in May 1789, Jefferson nevertheless departed France for America in September 1789, optimistic that rational counsels would prevail. He was later disappointed by the excesses of the Red Terror and horrified by Napoléon’s autocratic and militaristic rule. As U.S. president (1801–1808), Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase with the French government. This resulted in the United States acquiring the French ter-
ritory in North America between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, effectively doubling the size of the country for $15 million (approximately 13.5 cents per acre). This geographic expansion fulfilled one of Jefferson’s dreams for an “Empire of Liberty” in the Western Hemisphere. Although ambivalent at times about French politics and society, and French Atlantic relations, Jefferson preserved a strong affinity and affection for France. Once asked where he would most like to make his home in the world, he replied, first, Virginia, second, France. Garrett Ward Sheldon See also: Adams, John; American Revolution; Architecture; Ballooning; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Catholic Church; French Revolution; Lafayette, Marquis de; Louisiana Purchase; Mississippi River; Republicanism; Theory; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Washington, George; Wine. References Burstein, Andrew. The Inner Jefferson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Peterson, Merrill D. Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Shackelford, George Green. Thomas Jefferson’s Travels in Europe, 1784–1789. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Sheldon, Garrett Ward. The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
JESUITS The members of the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order that was instrumental in French colonization in North America. Founded in the 1530s by Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits quickly became a presence throughout Europe, where they established schools, universities, and religious mis-
JESUITS
sions. Their educational philosophy was codified in the 1580s and 1590s in a document called the Ratio Studiorum, which provided guidelines for a proper Jesuit education. The Jesuits spread throughout Europe and the rest of the world, beginning a tradition of Jesuit priests traveling to Asia, Africa, and the Americas in order to convert people to Christianity. The challenges of maintaining worldwide missions led to the adoption of a hierarchical leadership structure, headed by a central figure known as the general superior. In the midsixteenth century, Jesuits from Spain became the first of the order in North America. Although their work in the Spanish colonies was significant, especially in places like Paraguay, they are most often noted for their prominence among the French in Canada, where the first French Jesuits arrived in 1611. They remained an important presence among the Native Americans in New France until 1763, when their position became untenable after the British conquest of New France in the French and Indian War. Francis Xavier, one of the movement’s founders, set the standard for the tradition of the roving priest. Xavier traveled to Portugal, India, southern Africa, Japan, and China to set up missions. By the midsixteenth century, Jesuits had begun their involvement in the Americas as well. A group of Spanish Jesuits attempted to construct missions in the 1560s along the Atlantic coast of what is now the United States. The leader of this enterprise, Father Juan Baptista de Segura, was killed in Florida by Native Americans, thus ending the Spanish Jesuits’ efforts in the region. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many French Jesuits attempted to convert the Native Americans
621
of the Saint Lawrence River valley and the Great Lakes region to Christianity. Their first attempts were nearly as unsuccessful as the Spanish efforts. The French Jesuit Pierre Biard arrived in North America in 1611 in order to establish a mission to the Micmac and Maliseet Indians of Acadia, in what are now the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Their mission lasted only two years, when Englishmen from Virginia destroyed their settlement. A second attempt lasted from 1625 until 1629, when the French were forced to leave New France after the Englishman David Kirke and his brothers captured Quebec. In 1632, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye returned the region to French control. When they returned, the Jesuits began a new era of mission building, establishing villages from Tadoussac, at the confluence of the Saguenay and Saint Lawrence rivers, to the land of the Huron Indians on the Great Lakes. Led by the superior in New France, Paul Le Jeune, the Jesuits constructed missions based on a Spanish method of conversion, which proposed that priests must change Indian social structures and economies in order to make them Christians. Many Native Americans lived nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles. Instead of living in a fixed location year-round, they moved seasonally in order to hunt, fish, or grow crops. Missionaries found it difficult to convert Indian people who were absent for months at a time and therefore decided to try to change Indian economic patterns in order to make conversion more effective. The missionaries in New France tried to create sedentary villages, where Indians would live year-round and adopt European styles of housing, dress, and family structure. These changes, according to the missionaries,
622
JESUITS
would make religious conversion easier. One of the largest of these settlements was the village of Sillery, founded near Quebec in 1639. Here, many Montagnais and Algonquin Indians settled and began to adapt to the lifestyles encouraged by the Jesuits. Many Indian people accepted the Jesuits’ message and began to live like European farmers. The climate north of the Saint Lawrence, however, made agriculture difficult. This, as well as other factors, contributed to the failure of the Sillery mission, and by the 1670s the village was abandoned. The Jesuits of New France faced different challenges among the sedentary Huron of Ontario and Iroquois of New York State. The Jesuits targeted the Huron Indians for conversion because they already lived in villages. Unfortunately for the Huron, the missionaries brought with them epidemic diseases such as smallpox, which killed large numbers of Native Americans, leaving their communities searching for remedies. Many Indian people looked to Christianity and baptism as possible cures to the physical devastation they experienced. The Indians’ willingness to seek out new solutions aided the Jesuits in their quest to convert the Huron. The Iroquois had long been enemies of the Huron and had also become enemies of the French in the early seventeenth century. Therefore, the Jesuit missionaries became likely targets for the Iroquois warriors who attacked Huron villages throughout the 1640s. Jesuits Isaac Jogues, FrançoisJoseph Bressani, Gabriel Lalement, Jean de Brébeuf, and several others were killed during the wars between the Iroquois and Huron during the 1640s. The Iroquois were successful in pushing the Huron further west, to the upper Great Lakes, where many of them settled near the straits between Lakes Michigan and Huron.
In the 1670s and 1680s the Jesuits began pushing further into the interior of North America. The trailblazer for the Jesuits was Father Jacques Marquette, who, along with the explorer Louis Joliet, descended a section of the Mississippi River as far south as the mouth of the Arkansas. During this period, the Jesuits established missions in the upper Great Lakes region as well as the Mississippi and Illinois valleys. The Jesuits served an important function in the French empire, helping to unite the relatively small population of Frenchmen in North America with the much more populous Native Americans. These alliances allowed the French to make a stand against the English, who outnumbered them by about twenty to one. Although most Jesuits adhered to their own religious mission, many caved into increasing pressure from civil authorities to foster alliances rather than to focus on the religious lives of the Indians. Although they always remained a presence in New France, the Jesuits began to lose influence with the French civil authorities in the eighteenth century. When the French lost North America to the Protestant British, the conquerors initiated a ban on the arrival of new Jesuits. This restriction was minimal compared to the ruling of Pope Clement XIV, who officially dissolved the order in 1773. Despite these challenges, the Jesuits were reinstated in the nineteenth century, and they reestablished missions in Canada and the United States In both countries they founded numerous high schools and universities. The Jesuits today continue the traditions of education begun by Loyola and continue to participate in missionary activities throughout the world. Thomas J. Lappas
JEUNET, JEAN-PIERRE See also: Catholic Church; Florida; French and Indian War; Hurons; Illinois Country; Joliet, Louis; Marquette, Jacques; Mississippi River; Montagnais; New Brunswick; New France; Nova Scotia; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Tadoussac. References Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Eccles, W. J. The French in North America, 1500–1783. Rev. ed. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. Ronda, James P. “The Sillery Experiment: A Jesuit Indian Village in New France, 1637–1663.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3, no. 1 (1979): 1–18. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Document: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. 73 vols. Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1901.
JEUNET, JEAN-PIERRE (1953–) French filmmaker born in Roanne, France. Unlike many of his French counterparts, Jeunet did not train at film school. As a self-taught professional, he learned the ropes by directing commercials for French television and video clips. In the late 1970s, he met his longtime collaborator Marc Caro, a talented visual designer. Together, they started to work on short films, L’Evasion/The Escape (1978), Le Manège (“The Merry-Go-Round,” 1980), and Le Bunker de la dernière rafale/The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981). Jeunet’s interest in fantasy and science fiction and his taste for subterranean worlds already manifested themselves in these early works. Without Caro, Jeunet directed two shorts, Pas de repos pour Billy Brakko (“No Rest for Billy Brakko,” 1984) and Foutaises/Things I Like, Things I Don’t Like (1989).
623
Jeunet joined forces with Caro again (who acted as an artistic director) in 1991. They codirected their first feature film Delicatessen, a delirious tale of cannibalism occurring in a derelict building set in a postapocalypse France. His trademark was already present: tongue-in-cheek, oblique sense of humor; strong visuals; a narrative that is almost secondary to the film atmosphere. The film was a big success in France and was noticed in many others, including the United States. Whereas Delicatessen had been in the pipeline for no less than ten years, La Cité des enfants perdus/The City of Lost Children was released “only” four years after their first project. As in Delicatessen, Jeunet and Caro depicted a nightmarish fantasy world, where references to 1940s French cinema cohabited with allusions to Jules Verne’s science fiction. The film was a visual extravaganza: it was riven with special effects and relied on original talents such as famous French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier and American music composer Angelo Badalamenti. American actress Sigourney Weaver then suggested Jeunet’s name for the fourth installment of the mythical horror/sci-fi Alien series, Alien Resurrection (1997). Credited as the sole director for the first time, Jeunet nonetheless used Caro as a design supervisor (their last collaboration to date); he also imposed his usual team (acteur fétiche [favorite actor] Dominique Pinon, Iranian cinematographer Darius Kondji, and editor Hervé Schneid, to name but a few). The filming was punctuated with tensions due to linguistic and communication problems between the director and his mainly American cast. Then was released his most personal work so far, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain/Amélie (2001), which catapulted
624
JOAN
OF ARC
Jeunet to international stardom. The most successful French film of all time abroad, it tells the story of wide-eyed Amélie (Audrey Tautou), who decides to dedicate her life to the happiness of others. For the first time, Jeunet departed from the depiction of claustrophobic eerie underworlds ridden with extraordinary and often monstrous protagonists and focused on a less oblique and more positive character: the success of the film was due to a combination of Audrey Tautou’s lightheartedness and joyous ways, a nostalgic and idealized depiction of Paris, and an unrestrained, fast-paced screenplay. The film was seen by almost 9 million viewers in France; it also attracted more than 3 million people in the United States alone and gathered $33 million, the greatest success for a French film on North American soil. His fifth feature film, Un Long Dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement, with Audrey Tautou and Jodie Foster in the lead roles, was released in 2004. Florian Grandena See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Fashion; Language; Verne, Jules. Reference Jeunet, Jean-Pierre. Le Fabuleux Album d’Amélie Poulain. Paris: Arènes, 2001.
JOAN
OF ARC The United States is second only to France in its attachment to the medieval warrior and saint of the Roman Catholic Church, Joan of Arc (1412–1431). Although the presence of the heroine is expected in the Catholic countries of the Americas, her ubiquity in the Protestant United States is another matter. The visionary Joan of Arc, who burned at the stake to defend her direct access to the divine and the wearing of
Equestrian statue of Joan of Arc in armor, ca. 1915. (Library of Congress)
androgynous clothing, has been an exemplary figure throughout U.S. history, despite her monarchist and Catholic origins. Joan of Arc first appeared in the United States in 1798 in a play called Female Patriotism, or The Death of Joan of Arc by the Irish-born author John Daly Burk. In suggesting an analogy between the peasant Joan of Arc’s victory at Orléans and the battles of the Revolutionary War, this Joan of Arc proclaimed that monarchy is merely a stage in the transition to crowning each person free and equal. By the midnineteenth century, the American Joan of Arc was less a warrior than the innocent devised by Jules Michelet in 1841 in his Histoire de France. Through a steadily increasing number of books, culminating in Mark Twain’s 1896 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by the Sieur Louis de Conte (Her
JODOROWSKY, ALEJANDRO
Page and Secretary), Joan of Arc found herself ever more envisioned as a moral reformer representing groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Joan of Arc’s value in U.S. culture reached its apotheosis in the twenty-year period concluding with the end of World War I and her canonization in 1920. She appeared in countless venues, from civic sculpture to popular culture phenomena such as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1916 film, Joan the Woman. In this time of rapid modernization and the concomitant rise of consumer culture, images of Joan of Arc were part of a pervasive medievalism in American life, used to recall the ideals of sincerity, integrity, authentic spirituality, and divinely ordained success. Joan of Arc’s presence faded after 1920, due to exhaustion with tales of war and rising tensions concerning women’s social roles. Never gone for long, the selfwilled Joan of Arc was revived in American culture in subtle but suggestive ways during World War II in films such as Joan of Paris (Stevenson, 1942) and Joan of Ozark (Santley, 1942). Only after the war did the heroine appear undisguised, however transformed. Although it featured the substantial actress Ingrid Bergman in the lead role, Victor Fleming’s eponymous film of 1948 reconfigured Joan of Arc’s self-sacrificing attributes in order to encourage women to leave their jobs for home. Otto Preminger’s 1957 Saint Joan did little to recover Joan of Arc’s potency in casting the inexperienced, eighteen-year-old Jean Seberg in her first film role. The media extravaganza in which Seberg was chosen to play Joan of Arc from 18,000 similar applicants is only the most extreme case of the peculiar and telling methods used to cast the role throughout film history. In the social upheavals of the
625
1960s and 1970s, Joan of Arc’s visions of the divine in the natural world made her a popular subject once again, with Leonard Cohen’s 1971 song “Joan of Arc” imagining the heroine as a pacifist flower child. By the end of the twentieth century, the female warrior could no longer function as an abstract symbol of war, since women had entered combat. In 1999, Luc Besson launched Joan of Arc into the next century with a French-American coproduction entitled The Messenger, which was followed in 2003 by the first U.S. television show, Joan of Arcadia. In what appears to be yet another Joan of Arc vogue, the medieval heroine’s self-determination, visionary spirituality, and personal intensity are once again speaking in and to U.S. culture. Robin Blaetz See also: Besson, Luc; Catholic Church; Cinema, 1895 to the 1945; Cinema, 1945–Present; Seberg, Jean; World War I; World War II. References Blaetz, Robin. Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. New York: Vintage, 1982.
JODOROWSKY, ALEJANDRO (1929–) Chilean-born film director, actor, writer, and bande dessinée (comic strip) author, born to a Russian father and an Argentinean mother. Jodorowsky began his career as a puppeteer and clown in Chile before leaving his home country for Paris, where he studied mime, first with Etienne Decroux, and then with Marcel Marceau, for whom he wrote sketches for six years. His first film,
626
JODOROWSKY, ALEJANDRO
the short Les Têtes interverties/The Severed Heads (1957), was released during this period and was a mimed adaptation of a play by German author Thomas Mann. During these early years in Paris, Jodorowsky also met regularly with the Spaniard Fernando Arrabal and the Franco-Polish Roland Topor in the Café de la Paix in Paris to discuss their conception of art, life, and philosophy. The trio decided that the term panique (panic) best summed up their views without, nevertheless, forming a true artistic movement or current. It was a term that recurred in the work of all three through the decades, with Arrabal, for instance, contributing five récits paniques (panic narratives) to André Breton’s journal La Brèche in 1962 and Jodorowsky, in 2001, directing his own play Opéra panique at the MC93 theater in Bobigny. It was ten years before Jodorowsky directed his next film, this time the featurelength Mexican production Fando y Lis (1967), which signaled what became Jodorowsky’s trademark style: a mixture of dark surrealism, melancholia, and the macabre, encapsulated in the film’s tagline—“See this film before it sees you.” In 1970, Jodorowsky directed and starred in El Topo/The Gopher, again a Spanishlanguage, Mexican production and again a bizarre allegorical tale of misfits, with Jodorowsky’s own son, Brontis, playing the central character’s son onscreen. El Topo mixes elements from a series of sources as diverse as westerns, religious imagery, Eastern fables, and comic strips. It is also typical of Jodorowsky’s work in that he was involved in almost every aspect of the production from directing and starring in the lead role to co-composing the music and designing the costumes.
Since then, Jodorowsky has directed a number of films in various countries and languages but has retained throughout a desire to present the bizarre onscreen and to challenge the preconceptions of his audiences: The Holy Mountain (1973, United States/Mexico in English and Spanish); Tusk (1980, France, but with dialogue in French and English); Santa Sangre (1989, an Italo-Mexican coproduction shot in English); and the slightly more tame The Rainbow Thief (a 1990 U.K.made, English-language production with Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif ). He also started work on an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (which was later filmed by David Lynch), which would have been made in France and would have starred such figures as Orson Welles and Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. Since the early 1980s, Jodorowsky has become particularly well known in France for his bandes dessinées, working with some of the leading contemporary BD artists and creating a string of characters and series: John Difool for the Incal series created with Moebius, Alef Thau with Arno, Le Lama blanc with Georges Bess, and Face de lune (“Face of the Moon”) with François Boucq. Like his film work, Jodorowsky’s bande dessinée creations create a bizarre, almost surreal atmosphere, delicately balanced between violence and melancholia. In Face de lune, for instance, the eponymous hero is a mute who speaks with his hands and seems to be able to tame the ferocious waves that lash the island he lives on. L’Incal, on the other hand, takes a private detective (John Difool) and transfers him to the world of science fiction, but mixes this with a dreamlike quality. Cristina Johnston
JOLIET, LOUIS See also: Breton, André; Chile; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Comic Strips; Surrealism. References Larouche, Michel. Alexandro Jodorowsky: cinéaste panique. Montreal, Paris: Presses de l’Université de Montréal/Albatros, 1985. Neustadt, Robert Alan. (Con)fusing Signs and Postmodern Positions: Spanish American Performance, Experimental Writing, and the Critique of Political Confusion. New York: Garland, 1999.
JOLIET (JOLLIET), LOUIS (1645–1700) Born in Quebec of European descent, Louis Joliet is remembered as one of the most important explorers of North America. He pursued studies to become a priest and accomplished organist at the Jesuit
627
seminary in Quebec. He left the order for unknown reasons in 1667 and traveled to France, where he most likely studied cartography. He then returned to Canada to work in the fur trade, and his name is linked to several major events in the history of New France. In 1669, he traveled eastward from Sault Sainte Marie with an Iroquois guide and made the first recorded voyage through Lake Huron, the Saint Clair River, Lake Saint Clair, the Detroit River, and Lake Erie before crossing the Niagara portage and reaching Lake Ontario near what would later be the site of Fort Niagara. His name also appears on the formal declaration of French sovereignty of the lands of the western interior by Simon Daumont de Saint-Lusson on June 4, 1671, at Sault Sainte Marie. In 1673, in the company of Father Jacques Marquette,
Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet descend the Mississippi River. (Library of Congress)
628
JONES, JOHN PAUL
he embarked on an expedition to the Mississippi River. Joliet unfortunately lost his account and maps of the journey in the Lachine Rapids in 1674, yet managed to recompose them from memory. Following his Mississippi voyage, Joliet sought in vain for royal permission to set up a trading station in the Illinois. He did receive a grant of the Mingan Archipelago in the Saint Lawrence and of Anticosti Island, allowing him to take the title of seigneur. In 1679, he was commissioned to travel overland to Hudson Bay in order to assess the English presence in the region. English raids in 1690 and 1692 caused Joliet a significant financial blow from which he never completely recovered. In 1694, Joliet undertook another major expedition in Labrador and produced an extensive journal with descriptive sketches of the regions and peoples encountered. He was appointed to the College of Quebec in 1697 as king’s hydrographer and teacher of navigation. Louis Joliet mysteriously disappeared and is believed to have died on one of his two estates during the summer of 1700. Various locations in present-day North America bear his name, and his life story was immortalized by the French Canadian author Alain Grandbois in the 1933 publication Born in Quebec: A Tale of Louis Jolliet. Maureen Waters See also: Catholic Church; Fur Trade; Grandbois, Alain; Illinois Country; Jesuits; Marquette, Jacques; Mississippi River; New France; Saint Lawrence River. References Eifert, Virginia Louise Snider. Louis Jolliet, Explorer of Rivers. New York: Dodd, 1961. Grandbois, Alain. Born in Quebec: A Tale of Louis Jolliet. Trans. Evelyn M. Brown. Montreal: Palm, 1964.
JONES, JOHN PAUL (1747–1792) Known as the Father of the U.S. Navy, John Paul (he added Jones later) was born in Arbigland Estate, Kirkbean, Scotland, July 6, 1747. From his humble Scottish beginnings (his father was a gardener), Jones rose through the naval ranks and sided with the Patriot cause during the American Revolution. With French support Jones led the fledgling American navy in some of the most daring exploits in nautical history. He first went to sea as an apprentice at age thirteen and sailed to Barbados and later to Fredericksburg, Virginia, the home of his brother. By age twenty-one he had risen to captain and was entrusted with merchant vessels sailing to America. In 1773 he killed a crewman while putting down a mutiny in the West Indies. The local population did not support his version of events, and Paul fled to Virginia, where he assumed the name John Paul Jones. When the revolution broke out, Jones received a commission in the new American navy as a first lieutenant on December 7, 1775. Jones gained fame as a commerce raider and seaman, serving first on the Alfred and later rising to command the Ranger. On February 14, 1778, Jones sailed into Quiberon Bay, France, where Admiral La Motte Piquet returned Jones’s military salute with a cannonade. This event marked the first time the flag of the United States had been recognized by a foreign nation. In France Jones befriended Benjamin Franklin, then representing the interests of the United States in the French court. Louis XVI gave Jones the Duc de Duras, and Jones refitted it and renamed it after Franklin’s almanac sage, Bonhomme Richard.
JONES, JOHN PAUL
629
Etching depicting a Revolutionary War naval battle between John Paul Jones of the Bonhomme Richard and Captain Richard Pearson of the British naval vessel Serapis on September 23, 1779. (Library of Congress)
Jones’s most famous engagement occurred September 23, 1779, off Flamborough Head, England, as the Richard engaged the British frigate Serapis in one of the bloodiest ship-to-ship duels in history. Although outgunned and severely battered, Jones and his crew continued the fight as the Richard caught fire and began to sink. The British commander, observing the devastation of Jones’s vessel, inquired if Jones wished to strike his colors and surrender, whereupon Jones replied, “I have not yet begun to fight!” and the battle continued. Jones used marines stationed in his topsails to clear the decks of the Serapis and in time forced the British ship to surrender. The men of the Richard were not, however, out of danger. The Richard had been so severely damaged that it sank the next day, forcing
Jones to transfer his flag to the Serapis. Jones went on to win renown as a raider along the coast of Great Britain. After the war he served as an admiral in the Russian navy and died in Paris July 18, 1792, at the age of forty-five. In 1905 his body was discovered in an unmarked Parisian grave, and he was returned to the United States to be reinterred in the U.S. Naval Academy chapel in Annapolis, Maryland. Thomas D. Mays See also: American Revolution; Franklin, Benjamin. References Morrison, Samuel Eliot. John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999. Thomas, Evan. John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
630
JOSEPHSON, MATTHEW
JOSEPHSON, MATTHEW (1899–1978) American author and historian. Josephson was an advocate for and mediator between American and French avantgarde circles (particularly dada) and later achieved prominence as a writer of popular biographies. As a student at Columbia University and a participant in the Greenwich Village literary scene from 1916 to 1920, Josephson made the acquaintance of other emerging writers like Edmund Burke, Hart Crane, and Malcolm Cowley. In 1921, Josephson joined the growing colony of American writers in Paris, where he was introduced to the French dadaists. Josephson formed close associations with Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, and especially with Louis Aragon, who became a lifelong friend. Soon Josephson was an active participant in the dada movement and, with fellow Brooklynite Man Ray, one of its two chief American representatives. He also became a propagandist for dada among young writers in the United States. As coeditor of two transatlantic reviews, Broom and Secession, Josephson wrote articles on the French avant-garde under his own name and under the pseudonym Will Bray and translated French poets like Apollinaire, Aragon, Eluard, and Tzara. Shortly after his return to New York from his first Parisian sojourn, Josephson published his translation of Apollinaire’s Le Poète assassiné/The Poet Assassinated (1923), as well as Galimathias (1923), a collection of poetry. From 1924 to 1925 the writer led a brief revival of the New York dada movement, which had been dormant since the departure of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in 1921. Meanwhile, as André Breton’s
Matthew Josephson was an American literary scholar close to the early surrealist movement. (Library of Congress)
faction of Paris dada evolved into surrealism, Josephson felt little sympathy for this developing French movement, and he aligned himself with Aragon, Soupault, and others expelled by Breton over the years. In 1927 Josephson returned to France to conduct research for what was to be the first of four influential biographies of French writers: Zola and His Time (1928), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1931), Victor Hugo (1942), and Stendhal, or, The Pursuit of Happiness (1946). These highly praised examples of the art of popular biography became an important vehicle for conveying French history and culture to the general American public. Most of Josephson’s works on American subjects written during the same period treat prominent politicians and businessmen from a decidedly leftist viewpoint; his selection of politically engaged French writers and his
JOURDAN, LOUIS
emphasis on their public lives and on the social and historical contexts of their careers complement the approach he takes in his American biographies. Josephson also continued his work as a translator, sometimes in collaboration with his wife Hannah (Geffen) Josephson. In the 1960s, Josephson wrote two volumes of memoirs, Life among the Surrealists (1962) and Infidel in the Temple (1967). The earlier volume in particular deals extensively with the author’s time in France and is the most important account of French dada and early surrealism from the point of view of an American participant. Timothy Shipe See also: Avant-Gardes; Breton, André; Duchamp, Marcel; Literary Relations; Ray, Man; Soupault, Philippe; Surrealism; Zola, Emile. References Shi, David E. Matthew Josephson, Bourgeois Bohemian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Tashjian, Dickran. “American Dada against Surrealism.” Dada/Surrealism 14 (1985): 44–51.
JOURDAN, LOUIS (LOUIS GENDRE) (1919–) French screen and television actor, born in Marseilles, France. Louis Jourdan received a multicultural and multilingual education thanks to his father’s profession of hotelier, which took the family to Great Britain and Turkey. Jourdan developed an interest in acting at a young age and studied drama under the supervision of René Simon at the Ecole Dramatique in Paris. The actor made his screen debut in 1939 at the age of twenty, where his dark stunning good looks and suave de-
631
meanor made him an obvious romantic lead. During the war years, Jourdan appeared in five films directed by Marc Allégret. He also worked with directors Marcel l’Herbier (La Comédie du bonheur, “The Comedy of Happiness,” 1940; La Vie de Bohème, “The Bohemian Life,” 1945), Henri Decoin (Premier Rendez-vous/Her First Affair, 1941, with Danielle Darrieux), and Julien Duvivier (Untel Père et Fils/The Heart of a Nation, 1943). Jourdan refused, however, to star in Nazi propaganda films and eventually joined the Resistance after his father’s arrest by the Gestapo. Scouted in Europe by David O. Selznick, he was offered a contract and arrived in Hollywood in 1947. His Hollywood debut was in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1948), as the handsome, brooding lover of Alida Valli. Jourdan made another remarkable appearance the same year in Letter from an Unknown Woman, opposite Joan Fontaine, one of German-French exile Max Ophüls’s greatest productions. The beautiful French actor quickly became a favorite among female audiences, particularly in the United States, where he could revive the myth of the French lover, previously embodied by Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer, and, to a lesser extent, Jean-Pierre Aumont. Indeed typecast as the typical Frenchman, Jourdan was offered many projects with a French theme, such as Madame Bovary (1949, his first encounter with Vincente Minnelli), Bird of Paradise (Daves, 1951), Ann of the Indies (1951, directed by fellow Frenchman Jacques Tourneur), The Swan (Charles Vidor, 1956, opposite Grace Kelly), Gigi (1958, again with Minnelli and also starring budding French actress Leslie Caron and mature beau Maurice Chevalier), Can
632
JOUVET, LOUIS
Can (Walter Lang, 1960), and Made in Paris (Sagal, 1966). The musical Gigi was a huge international success, giving Jourdan and Caron a strong position at the box office. A French actor in Hollywood, Jourdan had the aura of a Hollywood star in Europe, where he returned regularly to try and broaden the range of his roles. Jourdan’s last notable screen parts were in Swamp Thing (1982), one of Wes Craven’s very first films; James Bond’s Octopussy (Glen, 1983), with compatriot Carole Bouquet in one of her first roles; and Year of the Comet (Yates, 1992). Also a television actor, Jourdan can be spotted in episodes of Columbo, Charlie’s Angels, and The Name of the Game, to name but a few. He also featured in a television series called The French Atlantic Affair (1979), alongside Jean-Pierre Aumont, José Ferrer, and Horst Buchholz. Since the mid-1980s, the actor has increasingly concentrated on stage and television parts. Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Boyer, Charles; Caron, Leslie; Chevalier, Maurice; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Dalio, Marcel; Darrieux, Danielle; Duvivier, Julien; Florey, Robert; Hollywood’s Paris; Madame Bovary; Tourneur, Jacques; World War II. References Katz, Ephraim. The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia. London: Macmillan, 1994. Lebrun, Dominique. Paris-Hollywood. Paris: Hazan, 1987. Servel, Alain. Frenchie goes to Hollywood: La France et les Français dans le cinéma américain de 1929 à nos jours. Paris: Veyrier, 1987. Vincendeau, Ginette, ed. Encyclopedia of European Cinema. London: Cassell/BFI, 1995.
JOUVET, LOUIS (1887–1951) French stage and cinema actor, producer, and stage manager, born in Crozon, France. Jouvet will probably remain for film fans the mysterious bishop of Marcel Carné’s Drôle de Drame (1937) whispering “Bizarre, bizarre. . . .” His significant contribution to French theater during the interwar period should, however, prevent us from limiting our vision of the great actor to the sole domain of cinema, even if there are some thirty-two films to be considered. His real importance in theater is mainly due to the place he gave to the author’s text, the actor being only an intermediary between the play and the public, and to his rich and friendly collaboration with author Jean Giraudoux. Born into a strict Catholic family, he graduated from the Ecole de Pharmacie de Paris in 1913. Meanwhile, he created the Groupe d’Action d’Art in 1908, the same year he was admitted as observer at the Conservatoire after being refused three times for stuttering. Later on, he joined Jacques Copeau for the creation of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier where he became the very soul of the theater. In 1914, Jouvet volunteered for service on the Somme, but a bad heart condition sent him back to Paris in 1916, before going to New York when Copeau decided to take Le Vieux-Colombier there. Jouvet designed and prepared the stage of the famous Garrick Theatre on 35th Street. Les Fourberies de Scapin/The Impostures of Scapin opened a series of more than fifty performances spread over two seasons of plays by French authors. After the huge success of Giraudoux’s Ondine in May 1939, Jouvet realized that the outbreak of war in September meant
JULIEN, PAULINE
that he would have to keep his theater closed. The Germans occupied Paris, and he would no longer be able to stage Giraudoux or Jules Romains. After a few months of preparation, the company left for Rio de Janeiro in June 1941. Expecting to be back in October, they were gone four years. In Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, the first season in South America was a tremendous success, but the company’s finances were soon depleted. Furthermore, the second season was a disaster; no subscribers, and theaters were half empty. But the company persisted, and the performances of Molière’s L’Ecole des femmes/The School for Wives in Santiago de Chile were a triumph. The tour continued to Peru, Colombia, and then to Venezuela and Cuba before ending in Haiti by the end of 1943. But they soon went to Mexico and then to Martinique. The troupe reached Fort-deFrance on August 5 for a series of performances that took place in September. Paris had been liberated, so the company returned to France in February 1945 to reopen the Athénée Theatre in December with Giraudoux’s posthumous work The Madwoman of Chaillot. On August 14, 1951, during rehearsals for The Power and the Glory, Jouvet fell ill and was kept in his dressing room for two days before he died. Roger Bourdeau See also: Argentina; Brazil; Catholic Church; Chile; Cinema, 1895–1945; Haiti; Martinique; Mexico; Molière; Romains, Jules; Theater; Venezuela; World War I; World War II. References Jouvet, Louis. Ecoute mon ami. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. ———. Le Comédien désincarné. Paris: Flammarion, 2002. Loubier, Jean-Marc. Louis Jouvet, le patron. Paris: Ramsay, 2001.
633
JULIEN, PAULINE (1928–1998) Singer born in Trois-Rivières, who was among the singers from Canada to have an international career. Her repertoire borrowed from European poets and respected composers from France (“Les 400 coups” [The 400 Blows] by Léo Ferré and Louis Aragon), Italy (“Balade du suicidé” [The Suicide’s Stroll] from a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini), Germany (“Bilbao Song,” by Bertolt Brecht), as can be seen in her live LP from 1965, entitled Pauline Julien à la comédie canadienne. Her powerful voice and universal style could be compared with modern singers such as Juliette Gréco, Catherine Sauvage, or even Joan Baez. From 1951, Julien lived in Paris for six years, as did many artists from Quebec (for various periods) during the 1950s, such as Félix Leclerc, Raymond Lévesque, and later painter Paul-Emile Borduas, songwriter Claude Léveillée, filmmaker Claude Jutra, and novelist Anne Hébert. She studied acting for the stage, and after a few minor roles, began her career as a diseuse in various cafés, such as L’Ecluse, in SaintGermain-des-Prés, by 1955. Julien’s two children were born in France (in 1952 and 1955). In the following decades, she often returned to France for long periods. Back in Montreal, Julien was the opening act for French superstar Gilbert Bécaud in 1961 for a Canadian tour, as she was later for Gilles Vigneault. Julien released her debut LP in 1962, although she had recorded two songs in Montreal in 1958 (“Moi j’en ai marre”/“I’m Fed Up,” “La Folle”/“The Madwoman”). In the 1960s, her tour de chant (singing tour) also included songs by Gilles Vigneault and other
634
JUNEAU, LAURENT SOLOMON
songwriters from Quebec, such as Claude Léveillée, Jean-Pierre Ferland, and Raymond Lévesque. As an artist, Julien was at her best in the 1960s. In 1965, she released an LP (her fourth) made of songs that Raymond Lévesque wrote for her (Pauline Julien chante Raymond Lévesque). In 1966, she recorded in Paris a whole LP made of songs written by French poet Boris Vian (Pauline Julien chante Boris Vian). On this LP, her obscure version of the satirical song “Fais-moi mal, Johnny”/“Hurt Me, Johnny” even surpasses the adaptation made famous by French singer Magali Noël. Among others, Julien created in 1969 a French version of the famous song “Suzanne,” written by Montreal-born composer Leonard Cohen, in a translation by poet Gilbert Langevin. In October 1970, she and her companion poet Gérald Godin were imprisoned for a week by Pierre Trudeau for their political opinions when the War Measures Act was invoked. As a singer in the 1960s and 1970s, Julien toured in various countries, including France, Switzerland, Niger, the USSR, Cuba, and Belgium. From the 1970s, she began composing and cowriting songs. Apart from some twenty-five LPs, she also wrote three books and appeared regularly in various plays and some feature films. In 1987, Julien created a whole conceptual show in duet with French singer Anne Sylvestre (b. 1934), in which they both sang songs with minimal instrumental accompaniment. Both chanteuses, along with Denise Boucher (b. 1935), published a short book titled Gémeaux croisées (“Crossed Twins,” 1988) and a double live LP.
Julien won various distinctions, including the French prize Prix Charles-Cros for the best francophone record of the year (twice, in 1970 and 1985); she was also named Chevalier des arts et des lettres in France (1994) and Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec (1997). Film director Dorothy Todd Hénaut produced an insightful biographical documentary titled A Song for Quebec, about Julien and her husband poet/politician Gérald Godin. Novelist Louise Desjardins wrote the definitive biography about Pauline Julien, having access to her personal diaries covering almost forty years. Yves Laberge See also: Bécaud, Gilbert; Borduas, Paul-Emile; Hébert, Anne; Jutra, Claude; Leclerc, Félix; Music (Pop); Trudeau, Pierre Elliott; Vian, Boris; Vigneault, Gilles. References Boucher, Denise, Pauline Julien, and Anne Sylvestre. Gémeaux croisées. Paris: Beba, 1988. Desjardins, Louise. Pauline Julien: La vie à mort. Montreal: Leméac, 1999. Hénaut, Dorothy Todd. A Song for Quebec. From the series Canada True North, PBS, 1988.
JUNEAU, LAURENT SOLOMON (1793–1856) Alsatian French Canadian fur trader Solomon Juneau and his Métis FrenchMenominee spouse Josette Vieau Juneau founded the city of Milwaukee, one of her family’s seasonal trading posts since 1795 on Lake Michigan’s western shoreline, later in the state of Wisconsin. The site previously had been held by Alexis Joseph La Framboise (Fafard in France) and famed Métis fur trader Marguerite Magdelaine
JUNEAU, LAURENT SOLOMON
Marcotte La Framboise of Michilimackinac (Mackinac Island). Juneau was born in 1793 to François and Marie Theresa Galarneau Juneau in Repentigny near Montreal; his wife was born in 1803 to Jacques and Angelique Roy Vieau (also Métis and described as a stepmother) at their base in Green Bay, formerly Fort La Baye in New France but by then under British rule, if officially in Michigan Territory. A voyageur at sixteen, Juneau served as far west as the Mississippi River to Michilimackinac, where he met Jacques Vieau. Juneau joined him as an agent for the American Fur Company in 1818, when he met the Vieaus’ eldest daughter. After their marriage in 1820, the Juneaus moved to the Milwaukee post, soon moving it to a site on the Milwaukee River, center of the city’s present downtown. They settled permanently in 1825 as the Erie Canal opened the Great Lakes area to other settlers from the East. Her fluency in French and native dialects, as well as some English, ensured success, as she ran the post alone in his frequent absences and literally acted as midwife to Milwaukee. His promotion of the site after federal land sales in 1835, on the eve of territorial status for Wisconsin in 1836, brought both profit and population growth—as did their own progeny of fourteen surviving children. Their already crowded home hosted the first town meeting, and when “Juneautown” merited a postmaster, the prestigious and lucrative federal post went to him. So did the elective post as the village’s first president in 1837, when he also founded the Milwaukee Sentinel (the state’s oldest newspaper, still in existence as the Milwau-
635
kee Journal Sentinel ). Juneau merged his village with others as Milwaukee in 1838 and was elected its first president in 1839, then was the first mayor when Milwaukee won city status in 1846 with almost 10,000 residents, including an influx of German and Irish settlers as well as thousands more immigrants through its harbor. His legendary generosity, however, such as deeding the city its first public lands despite fiscal panics on the boomand-bust frontier, had bankrupted him. But the formerly footloose, scarlet-sashed voyageur and his Métis wife were bothered less by busts than by the population boom. Fifty miles northwest, near Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he had established a store decades before. He added sawmills, a gristmill, and a summer home (now a historical site) in 1847 and founded Theresa, named for his mother, in the same year that Wisconsin won statehood, 1848. The Juneaus moved to Theresa in 1852, but they returned to their first home when her failing health required medical care in Milwaukee, where she died and was buried in 1855. Before the first anniversary of her death, in 1856, he had also died and been buried—but far from either home, after a final trading trek to a federal Menominee reservation, where he told another old trader that he wanted to retire and return to the city. On his deathbed, he said, “It is hard to die here. I had hoped to lay my bones in Milwaukee,” followed by his final words: “I come to join you, my wife” (Lawson, p. 123). His hopes were realized. Their heirs had Solomon’s body reburied next to Josette’s grave site, after the largest funeral that had ever been seen in the city founded by the Juneaus. Genevieve McBride
636
JUTRA, CLAUDE See also: Fur Trade; Language; Métis; Michigan; Mississippi River; New France; Wisconsin. References Gurda, John. The Making of Milwaukee. Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999. Lawson, Marion. “Solomon Juneau: Milwaukee’s First Mayor.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 41 (winter 1957–1958): 113–123.
JUTRA, CLAUDE (1930–1986) Québécois film director and actor distinguished by his direction of the two most important films in Quebec cinema and by his complex, radical, and playful approach to questions of national and sexual identity. Qualifying at the age of twenty-two as a doctor to fulfill the wishes of his middleclass Montreal family, he sought to pursue his interest in cinema, making short amateur films with Michel Brault in the late 1940s and entering the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada in 1954. He codirected NFB short documentaries with Brault (and others) in 1961 (La Lutte/ Wrestling, about professional wrestling and influenced by Roland Barthes’s essay on the subject) and in 1962 (Québec USA ou l’invasion pacifique/Visit to a Foreign Country, about American tourists in Quebec City). Jutra’s development in these years was marked by crucial encounters: with the Scottish-Canadian NFB animator Norman McLaren, in whose stop-action animated short A Chairy Tale Jutra starred in 1957; with François Truffaut, whom he met in Paris in 1958 and with whom he made a short film based on a Jean Cocteau poem, Anna la bonne (“Anna the Maid,” 1959); and with Jean Rouch, a big influence on
Quebec direct cinema, with whom he developed his project of a documentary, Le Niger, jeune république/The Niger: Young Republic (1961). Jutra’s first feature film, A tout prendre/Take It All (1963), the first to be made in the private sector in Quebec and the first largely autobiographical piece, is dedicated to McLaren and Rouch and includes a cameo appearance by Truffaut. Formal playfulness, autobiography, and (prolonged) adolescence characterize this portrait as Claude (Jutra playing himself ) engages in an identity-shattering relationship with a black model, who also provokes the revelation of his own homosexuality. After making several documentaries in the 1960s, including Wow (1969), about disaffected adolescents, Jutra directed the most famous Canadian film, Mon Oncle Antoine/My Uncle Antoine, in 1971. With his scriptwriter Clément Perron, Jutra portrayed a Quebec provincial town of the 1940s, in which the adolescent “nephew” observes an adult world of masculine failure, sexual unhappiness, and death. The success of this film led to the commission of a film adaptation of Anne Hébert’s modernist historical novel Kamouraska (1973), a lavish coproduction with France with a record budget for the time and starring Geneviève Bujold and Philippe Léotard. The cutting of the running length by the producers, however, resulted in an uncomprehending critical reception. This setback, the negative reception given to his radical dismantling of the institution of marriage in Pour le meilleur et pour le pire/For Better or for Worse (1975; a relative hit, however, in France), and the financial difficulties of Quebec cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s led Jutra to
JUTRA, CLAUDE
Toronto. The films he made there continued his exploration of gender and of alternative sexual arrangements. Surfacing (1980) is an adaptation of the novel by Margaret Atwood. By Design (1981) portrays the project of a lesbian couple to have children. Returning to Quebec, Jutra’s final film, La Dame en couleurs (“The Lady in Colour,” 1984), portrays orphans in the 1940s confined to a mental hospital. Jutra committed suicide in 1986 following a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. He is commemorated by a monument in Montreal’s plateau district and gives his name to
637
a screen at the Cinémathèque québécoise and to the Quebec equivalent of the Oscars. Bill Marshall See also: Barthes, Roland; Brault, Michel; Bujold, Geneviève; Hébert, Anne; Rouch, Jean; Truffaut, François. References Green, Mary Jane. “Toward Defining a Postcolonial Quebec Cinema: The Films of Claude Jutra.” Quebec Studies 35 (spring/summer 2003): 89–98. Leach, Jim. Claude Jutra Filmmaker. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
K KAPLAN, NELLY (1934–) Argentine filmmaker and writer. Born in Buenos Aires to Argentine parents of Russian Jewish descent, as a girl Kaplan challenged educational restrictions imposed on her but not her brother. As a teenager, she became an avid moviegoer, and at age eighteen her passion for film won out over her studies in economics. Knowing no French, in 1954 she traveled alone to Paris as a representative of the Argentine Cinémathèque. For the next ten years she worked with Abel Gance (1889–1981) on four of his last film projects, as assistant editor, director, actress, promoter, defender, and more. In 1955, for example, she published a manifesto introducing Gance’s Magirama, in 1960 a journal on the filming of Gance’s Austerlitz, and in 1994 a BFI Film Classics guide on Napoléon. She boasts many television writing and acting credits as well. In the early 1960s, Kaplan joined Claude Makovski’s production company, Cythère Films, and began to direct documentaries about artists she admired, among them Gustave Moreau (1961), Victor Hugo (Dessins et merveilles/“Drawings and Marvels,” 1961), Rodolphe Bresdin (1962), Abel Gance (Abel Gance, hier et demain [Abel Gance, Yesterday and Tomor-
row], 1963; Abel Gance et son Napoléon [Abel Gance and His Napoléon], 1986), André Masson (A la source, la femme aimée/ “At the Source, the Beloved Woman,” 1966), and Pablo Picasso (Le Regard Picasso/The Picasso Look, 1967). In 1969 she finished her first feature film, La Fiancée du pirate/A Very Curious Girl. She then directed four other features and one madefor-TV movie: Papa les petits bateaux/Papa the Little Boats (1972), Néa (1976), Charles et Lucie (1979), Pattes de velours (Velvet Paws) (for Antenne 2, 1986), and Plaisir d’amour/The Pleasure of Love (1990). (Only Abel Gance et son Napoléon, La Fiancée du pirate, Néa, and Charles et Lucie are available on video in the United States.) In addition to her work in cinema, moreover, Kaplan pursued a journalistic career, contributing, for example, a regular column on literature, film, and art to Le Magazine littéraire and collaborating regularly on a program for France Culture. In 1966 she published a collection of surrealist short stories with illustrations by André Masson, Le Réservoir des sens, and in 1974 an erotic novel, Un Manteau de fou-rire ou les mémoires d’une liseuse de draps, both under the pen name “Belen.” In 1971 she brought out a ciné-roman (cine-novel), Le Collier de ptyx (“The Ptyx Necklace”),
639
640
KASSAV’
under her own name. In 1966 Kaplan was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur for the ensemble of her work. Kaplan plays with pornographic and erotic traditions, which some feminists find devoid of humorous or political promise. Emblematic of Kaplan’s happily heterosexual stance is her punning embrace within her own work of classic and avantgarde texts by male authors and artists. For example, in Plaisir d’amour Kaplan targets one of the most notorious womanizers of all time, Don Juan. Recasting a classic that haunted her Argentine youth, Kaplan again produces her own hybrid myth. Filmed on a tropical island replete with wild animals and exotic flowers, the color and composition of many shots again, as in Néa, evoke painterly predecessors, here Gauguin and Le Douanier Rousseau. Though her tastes are eclectic to say the least, much of Kaplan’s work is characterized by a dual fascination with sexuality and surrealism, and, as in much surrealist work, high art traditions are undermined through references to pornography, pulp fiction, and popular film. Christine Holmlund See also: Argentina; Bresdin, Rodolphe; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Gauguin, Paul; Masson, André. References Colaux, Denys-Louis. Nelly Kaplan: Portrait d’une filibustière. Paris: Dreamland, 2002. Giukin, Lenuta. “Demystification and Webtopia in the Films of Nelly Kaplan.” Cinema Journal 42, no. 3 (spring 2003): 96–113. Holmlund, Chris. “The Eyes of Nelly Kaplan.” Screen 37, no. 4 (1996), 351–367. Sebbag, Georges. Le Point sublime: André Breton, Arthur Rimbaud, Nelly Kaplan. Paris: J-M Place, 1997.
KASSAV’ The Caribbean pop group Kassav’ enjoyed major transatlantic success throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, when they were one of the most influential acts of the world music boom. Highly successful in their homeland and among the Caribbean population in France, they also toured extensively in Africa, where their mix of languid rhythms and exuberant dance music proved extremely popular. Above all, they are known as pioneers of a musical style known as zouk, which has joined salsa and reggae as international forms of Caribbean music. Their Caribbean origin is indicated in their name, which refers to la kassave, a dish made of manioc mixed with coconut. The music of Kassav’ is situated at the crossroads of an extremely hybrid set of cultural influences from both sides of the Atlantic. Zouk combines the rhythms of the Guadeloupean beguine with those of Haitian and Latin American dance music. It also intertwines melodic forms adapted from American jazz and funk with French waltzes of the bal populaire tradition, as well as traces of West African pop music styles (especially that influential combination of the early 1980s, synthesizers and brass sections). The group forged this musical hybrid in France, where they originally made their name among the migrant populations of France’s Caribbean départements d’outre-mer (“Overseas Departments,” DOMs). For many commentators, the hybridity of zouk owed much to the Parisian location of its birth: as joint capital of the world music scene (alongside London), Paris was an international musical crossroads where musicians from all parts of the globe were gathered.
KATTAN, NAÏM
The fact that Kassav’ sang in Creole and brought together previously disparate elements of French Caribbean culture was seen as politically significant by some militants in the islands. They saw zouk as a music that was representative of the islands’ hybridity but also of a fundamental Caribbean unity. The group themselves, however, shied away from direct political commentary. If Paris had acted as a musical crossroads at the beginning of their career, Kassav’ later became the catalyst for a new fusion of musical styles, particularly in Africa, where they toured extensively in the 1980s. Due to their phenomenal success in Africa, their sound was copied by many local musicians, spawning an “African zouk.” Eventually, however, this highly creative and fruitful exchange of influences became formulaic both in the Caribbean and in Africa, where the prevalence of this style had become rather monotonous by the early 1990s. The popularity of Kassav’ had declined by the mid-1990s as young popular music fans turned their attention to other musical forms. Nevertheless, the group, originally formed in the late 1970s by Jacob Desvarieux and the Decimus brothers, still tours and makes records, and their influence on world music continues to be felt. David Murphy See also: Cuisine; Guadeloupe; Jazz; Language. References Conrath, Philippe. Kassav’. Paris: Seghers, 1987. Warne, Chris. “The Impact of World Music in France.” Post-Colonial Cultures in France. Ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney. London/New York: Routledge, 1997: 133–149.
641
KATTAN, NAÏM (1928–) Québécois essayist, critic, and novelist, born in Baghdad, Iraq. As a migrant, Kattan is interested in the cultures of both East and West. After studying law in Baghdad from 1945 to 1947, he went to Paris, studying literature at the Sorbonne until 1951. In 1954 he emigrated to Canada. He began his journalistic career at the Nouveau Journal, where he wrote on international affairs, and also obtained a teaching post in the Social Sciences Faculty at Laval University. As secretary of the francophone Jewish Circle of Montreal, he founded the Bulletin du cercle juif (Bulletin of the Jewish Circle). His knowledge of many countries means that he has been invited to contribute to many publications in the Middle East, Europe, and Canada: Le Devoir (Montreal), Liberté, La Quinzaine littéraire (Paris), Tamarack Review (Toronto), and Canadian Literature (Vancouver). His high profile in Quebec cultural life meant that he was appointed for two years in the 1960s as reporter for the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Kattan is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, the Compagnie des cent associés, and since 1983 the Académie canadienne-française. In 1983 he became Officer of the Order of Canada and in 1989 was appointed Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government. He is a member of the Arts Council of the Urban Community of Montreal and president of the city’s Literary Prize, and he belongs to the Union of Quebec Writers. He has been prolific in various genres. His essays appear in Ecrivains des Amériques (Writers of the Americas), in the first volume on the United States
642
KELLY, GENE
(1972), the second on English Canada (1976), the third on Latin America (1980), as well as in books of his collected essays: Le Désir et le pouvoir (“Desire and Power,” 1983), Le Repos et l’oubli (“Rest and Forgetting,” 1987), La Réconciliation (“The Reconciliation,” 1993), and Idoles et images (“Idols and Images,” 1996). His collections of short stories and novellas include La Traversée (“The Crossing,” 1976), Le Rivage (“The Shore,” 1979), Portraits d’un pays (“Portraits of a Country,” 1994), and La Distraction (“The Entertainment,” 1994), and he has written three novels: La Fortune du passager (“The Passenger’s Fortune,” 1993), Farida (1991), and La Célébration (“The Celebration,” 1997). Kattan thus writes in French, although his first language is Arabic and his culture Jewish. His experience takes him in his writing to the theme of the encounter between cultures, living as he has in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. In his first collection of essays, Le Réel et le théâtral (1970), which won the France-Canada prize in 1971, he discussed the relations between Eastern and Western culture. Through the themes of desire and forgetting, Kattan explores in his work problems of collective and individual life and adaptation to new places. In the early work Adieu Babylone (“Farewell, Babylon,” 1975), which re-creates his Baghdad childhood, Kattan bathes the reader in a climate of daily life characterized by affection, solitude, and desire. His protagonists ponder their destiny in often dramatic circumstances. Jérôme Ceccon See also: Language.
References Bensoussan, Albert. “Introduction et contribution: Identité, exil et mémoire des langues dans l’æuvre littéraire de Naïm Kattan.” Présence francophone, no. 44, 1994. http://www.limag.refer.org/ Pagespersonnes/DugasPublications.htm. Rahimieh, Nasrin. “Naïm Kattan, Le Discours arabe, and His Place in the Canadian Literary Discourse.” Canadian Literature, no. 127 (winter 1990). Simard, Sylvain. “Naïm Kattan romancier: La promesse du temps retrouvé.” Voix et images 11, no. 1 (autumn 1985): 33–44.
KELLY, GENE (EUGENE CURRAN KELLY) (1912–1996) American dancer, actor, and director who revolutionized camera technique for filming dance; he influenced several important French nouvelle vague directors. In his collaborations with directordesigner Vincente Minnelli and codirector Stanley Donen, the spectacular aesthetic of the Ballets russes was extended to the cinematic genre of the musical, culminating in the final sequence of An American in Paris (Minnelli, 1951); in the 1960s, Kelly choreographed Pas de Dieux for the Paris Opéra-Ballet, and he reprised his brash-but-sensitive all-American guy persona in Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), a tribute to the Hollywood musicals Kelly himself had largely helped to define. Kelly was the third of five children born to a working-class Irish family in the steel town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Although money was always tight, Harriet Kelly was determined that her children
KELLY, GENE
643
Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan dances with Leslie Caron as Lise Bouvier in An American in Paris. (John Springer Collection/Corbis)
would be educated in the arts. The undersized Gene was nevertheless always athletic and competitive and played high school football and hockey. While studying economics at Penn State College, Gene and younger brother Fred helped the family make ends meet by dancing in shows and teaching dance—the Gene Kelly Studio of the Dance became so successful that they had schools in Pittsburgh and Johnstown. Kelly graduated from college but left law school after one semester to pursue dance. Kelly staged local shows and developed a reputation for “fixing” vaudeville numbers as acts passed through town; that success encouraged him to try his luck on Broad-
way at the relatively advanced age of twenty-six. Kelly’s success was swift, both as a dancer and a choreographer. In William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1939), a dramatic play, Kelly created the role of Harry the Hoofer, in which he said he learned to act a character in dance, and in 1940 Kelly was cast as the heel hero of Pal Joey, a part he was to play with variation throughout his musical career. An immediate sensation, Kelly was soon put under contract to David O. Selznick, but since Selznick did not make musicals, Kelly was lent out to MGM to costar with Judy Garland in the World War I musical For Me
644
KELLY, GENE
and My Gal (Berkeley, 1942), in which Kelly plays a draft dodger who eventually becomes a hero. MGM bought Kelly’s contract from Selznick, and he made both dramatic and musical films. Disappointed by his onscreen projection in For Me and My Gal, he swiftly began to experiment with more effective ways of filming dance. His big leap forward artistically, however, came when he was loaned to Columbia to costar with Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (Vidor, 1944). Not only was he an effective partner for Hayworth, but his choreography and camera direction for two street dances was revolutionary. “Make Way for Tomorrow,” with Hayworth and Phil Silvers, was the prototype of the “buddy trio” dance numbers that became a Kelly trademark, including movement through a realistic street space marked by verticals to project distance and matched shots to change camera angles unobtrusively and naturalize the movement. More astonishing was the darkly psychological double-exposure “Alter Ego” dance, in which the emotionally torn character dances with his reflection. Back at MGM, Kelly was given greater room for experimentation, which he immediately exercised by dancing with the animated mouse Jerry in Anchors Aweigh (Sidney, 1945). (Jerry was an MGM “contract player” and therefore available when Disney refused to lend out Mickey Mouse—in part because the Disney animators did not believe such complicated integration of live action and animation was possible.) The peak years of Kelly’s output were 1948–1952, during which he made The Pirate (Minnelli, 1948), an extravagant fantasy that re-teamed Kelly with Judy Garland and was the first Kelly-Minnelli collaboration); Take Me Out to the Ball-
game (1949; Kelly and Stanley Donen, his dance assistant from Cover Girl, staged the dances, though the film was nominally directed by Busby Berkeley); On the Town (1949; the first full-fledged Kelly-Donen musical, with its exhilarating opening sequence shot guerrilla fashion on location on the streets of New York); An American in Paris (Minnelli, 1951); and Singin’ in the Rain (1952; another Kelly-Donen collaboration widely considered one of, if not the, greatest musicals of all time and one of the great movies of the studio era). Kelly collaborated once more each with Minnelli (Brigadoon, 1954) and Donen (It’s Always Fair Weather, 1955), but although these films have their strengths, economic and industrial changes in the studio system and the arrival of television and rock and roll as competition for movies meant that the Hollywood musical was losing its audience. Kelly moved behind the camera as a director of comedies; and as a dancer, to television for variety show appearances, his own documentary Dancing: A Man’s Game (NBC, 1957) in which he compared dance to sports, and specials, including the award-winning animated Jack and the Beanstalk (Kelly, 1967). Late in his life, Kelly was an adviser for such projects as Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982) and Madonna’s 1993 Girlie Tour. In the early 1950s, changes at MGM and in the tax laws, as well as the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, led to Kelly and his wife Betsy Blair decamping for Europe. While there, Kelly was allowed to pursue his dream project, an all-dance film called Invitation to the Dance, composed of three dance stories and featuring many of the most prominent dancers of the
KENTUCKY
day; the film, however, was shelved until 1956. In 1960, Kelly was commissioned by the Paris Opéra; his French influences had always been notable, from the Ballets russes (a young Kelly had once auditioned for Colonel de Basil’s reconstituted company) to An American in Paris, a post–World War II, GI Bill–based musical that drew its inspiration from an earlier period in which young American artists had flocked to Paris—the post–World War I 1920s. “American” concert music was, in a sense, created by composers who studied in Paris (among them Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Roy Harris), and popular songwriters like Cole Porter and George Gershwin also spent time there. Gershwin’s symphonic poem was a valentine to the city, and the seventeen-minute ballet at the end of the film was stylistically based on a Ballets russes production, with the intense collaboration of design, music, and choreography amplified by Kelly’s camera direction. Pas de Dieux was set to Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F (which also featured in the film) and was also a tribute to French baroque ballet with a modernist twist. Kelly was also talking to Jean-Luc Godard about a collaboration, though Kelly felt that the appropriate infrastructure was not in place to make a musical (he was always adamant that the support of the studio system made the highly collaborative and craft-intensive musical possible). Godard was not the only new wave director who cited Kelly as an influence, as seen in his Une Femme est une femme/A Woman Is a Woman (1961); François Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine/Day for Night (1973) is in part an homage to Chantons sous la Pluie, to give Singin’ in the Rain its French title. In 1961, Kelly was honored by the Cinématheque Française (an honor that had
645
been given to only two other foreigners, Alfred Hitchcock and Fred Zinnemann). Kelly’s most visible contribution to French cinema was in Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, a tribute to the Kelly-Donen musicals with their emphasis on dance over song and expansive, outdoor choreography. Robynn Stilwell See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Dance; Demy, Jacques; Godard, Jean-Luc; Hollywood’s Paris; Madonna; Music (Classical); Porter, Cole; Truffaut, François; World War I; World War II. References Hirschhorn, Clive. Gene Kelly: A Biography. Chicago: Regnery, 1974. Knox, Donald. The Magic Factory: How MGM Made An American in Paris. Foreword by Andrew Sarris. New York: Praeger, 1973. Stilwell, Robynn J. “Le Demy-monde: The Bewitched, Betwixt, and Between French Musical.” French Popular Music. Ed. Hugh Dauncey and Steve Cannon. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003: 123–138.
KENTUCKY Few French settled in Kentucky, but their activities were important to the state, from the seventeenth-century explorations of its rivers through the development of its modern institutions. Although conflicting French and British claims in North America, including those to the Ohio River valley, had only been resolved in 1763, by the British victory in the French and Indian War, Kentucky place-names of the late eighteenth century show gratitude for French help against the British in the American Revolution. Settlers, fleeing France for political and religious reasons in the wake of the French Revolution and the ensuing upheavals in the first third of the nineteenth century, came to the Bluegrass
646
KENTUCKY
area of the state. Second and third generations of Huguenots, who had fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and settled in the eastern part of the country, migrated to central Kentucky from 1790 to 1840, especially from the Manakin settlement in Virginia. French settlers, many with names already anglicized, contributed to the Bluegrass area’s reputation as a center of culture in cities, towns, and rural communities. Kentucky affection for the French after their help in the Revolutionary War shows in names like Fayette County, named in 1780 for General Lafayette, as well as Bourbon County, Paris, Versailles, and Louisville, all named in honor of Louis XVI and the Bourbon kings. When Lafayette returned at the invitation of President Monroe for a year’s stay in the United States in 1825, Kentuckians welcomed him upon his visit to their state with every honor and celebration. In 1790, the year of the first U.S. census, the entire French population of the United States was at 0.2 percent, with fewer than 200 French in Kentucky. The state’s French population never increased beyond a small percentage. Yet Kentuckians of French descent assumed leadership roles out of proportion to their small numbers. Fathers Badin and Flaget, who fled France in 1791, established the Catholic Church in central Kentucky and the Northwest Territory. Augustus and Victorie Mentelle, who left France in 1791 because of their Loyalist sympathies, became important educators in Lexington. French immigrants in Lexington helped establish and operate churches, schools, a library (1795), businesses, and Transylvania University. Mathurin Giron’s confectionery, restaurant, and ballroom, a Lexington so-
cial center, accommodated Kentuckians’ admiration for French style and custom. A Huguenot community of attractive homes developed in the 1790s in Woodford County. In 1773, Captain Thomas Bullitt, a descendant of Huguenot immigrants whose son became Kentucky’s first lieutenant governor, surveyed 2,000 acres below the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. The first settlers of the area that was named Louisville in 1780 were led there in 1778 by General George Rogers Clark to build Fort Nelson. These pioneers were entertained in the fort at Christmas of 1778 by Jean Nickle, a French fiddler on his way to Kaskaskia. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, French immigrants established Shippingport and Portland. Businesses in these two French communities just below the Falls of the Ohio and a half mile apart from each other performed the portage operations necessary for getting river traffic around the falls at that time. The Tarascon brothers developed Shippingport and worked to improve transportation in the area. Nineteenth-century Louisville citizens of French descent led in the city’s civic, industrial, banking, and charitable institutions. Louisville attorney, newspaper editor, public library president, and historian Robert Durrett founded the Filson Club. Anna Morton See also: Catholic Church; French Revolution; Huguenots; Lafayette, Marquis de; Language; Ohio. References Burnett, Robert A. “Louisville’s French Past.” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 50, no. 2 (April 1976): 5–27. Dupre, Huntley. “The French in Early Kentucky.” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 15 (1941): 78–104.
KEROUAC, JACK Harrison, Lowell H., and James C. Klotter. A New History of Kentucky. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. Olivier, Phillipe. Souvenirs et presence de la France sur le territoire actuel des Etats-Unis: Les Francophonies américaines. Introduction—Alabama à the Great Lakes— Maryland à Wyoming. Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990. Vol. 4, part 1, of Bibliographie des travaux relatifs aux relations entre la France et Les Etats-Unis. 4 vols. 1990–1992.
KEROUAC, JACK (JEAN LOUIS KEROUAC) (1922–1969) American writer. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, of French Canadian heritage, Kerouac grew up speaking a mixture of French, English, and joual, the Franco-American Québécois vernacular. According to some critics, Kerouac’s inventiveness in writing may partly stem from his bilingual upbringing. However that may be, Kerouac’s seminal role as the voice of the beat generation has tended to overshadow his individual accomplishments as a writer of lyrical self-exploration, as seen in his first novel, The Town and the City (1950). Instead, Kerouac’s international reputation has continuously been linked to the success of On the Road (1957), the story of the cross-country travels of the quintessential rogue Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, narrator of the book. As Kerouac’s literary persona became intertwined with that of his fictional protagonists, his use of a selfprofessed unedited, expository style—On the Road was allegedly written on a roll of teletype—quickly became synonymous with a vision of beat writing as predominantly about a fast-paced bohemian lifestyle.
647
Kerouac’s literary persona was abetted as well through his much-publicized friendships with Alan Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs, whom he met in the 1940s. Although Kerouac’s writing differs widely from the work of these writers, they shared a fascination with drugs, jazz music, and alternative poetics. While Kerouac did not wish to be seen as a figurehead for any particular literary movement, his demise from alcoholism at the age of forty-seven was nevertheless seen as having been accelerated by his status as a countercultural icon. Since then, critics have shifted the focus on Kerouac’s writing from his thematic concerns to his stylistically experimental style, in particular his spontaneous prose, which often follows a jazz analogy in its improvisatory quality and its use of sounds and alliteration. Likewise, Kerouac’s attraction to Zen Buddhism in his later years prompted an increasing tendency toward incantation and mysticism in works such as The Dharma Bums (1958), Mexico City Blues (1959), Doctor Sax (1959), and Satori in Paris (1966). Satori in Paris details Kerouac’s ten-day trip to France to research his family heritage. Although the narrative insists that satori was achieved, the nature of Kerouac’s transfiguration oftentimes appears more alcoholic than spiritual. In 1972 the complete version of Visions of Cody was posthumously published, containing what many consider his best lyrical writing. In Visions of Cody the idea of America as paradise lost is tied in to a desire actively to reconfigure language through bop prosody and spontaneous prose. Though Visions of Cody charts a redemptive and spiritual quest, it is also— like most of Kerouac’s work—about the
648
KERRY, JOHN
increasingly untenable idea of America as a pastoral safe haven in the twentieth century. Caroline Blinder See also: Burroughs, William S.; Jazz; Language. References Hunt, Tim, and Ann Charters. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Jones, James T. Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction. Urbana: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Kerouac, Jack, and Ann Charters. Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters: 1940–1956. New York: Penguin, 1996.
KERRY, JOHN (1943–) U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, 2004, who lost to the Republican George W. Bush by 48 percent to 51 percent. Kerry, born on December 11, 1943, attended a number of boarding schools, including two in Switzerland, before attending Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Following graduation from Yale in 1966, Kerry volunteered for the U.S. Navy. Sent to Vietnam in 1967, he became commander of a swift boat in the Mekong Delta in 1968. After two tours, and having received Bronze and Silver stars alongside three Purple Hearts, Kerry returned home disillusioned with the U.S. presence in Vietnam. Kerry became a leading light of Vietnam Veterans against the War and gained national recognition when he famously testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1972. His testimony earned the begrudging respect of President Richard Nixon. This
performance catapulted Kerry to national status, and he hoped to capitalize on this in the 1972 congressional elections. Voters in the fifth Massachusetts congressional district, however, suspected political opportunism and rejected Kerry’s candidacy. During a ten-year period away from political life, Kerry was married for the first time, became a father, and after attending Boston College Law School, became a prosecutor in 1976. In 1984, after two years in the relatively obscure position of lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, Kerry was elected to the U.S. Senate to serve alongside the ranking senator Edward Kennedy. Kerry returned to the site of his 1972 national performance as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that investigated the Iran-Contra scandal. Kerry has an internationalist outlook, with an abiding faith in the United Nations as an instrument of foreign policy. Kerry remarried in 1995 to the independently wealthy Teresa Heinz, after his first marriage to Julia Thorne ended in divorce in 1988. Kerry spent a notable amount of his younger days abroad, in particular in France. Many summer holidays were spent in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a resort town in Brittany in northern France where his maternal grandparents—the Forbes—had built an estate. The Forbes, an established Massachusetts family, arrived in 1908 and had eleven children, including Kerry’s mother. During World War II the occupying German forces used the estate as a headquarters before destroying it as they retreated. The estate was rebuilt by the 1950s, and Kerry would summer there with a number of his French cousins. One of these, Brice Lalonde, went on to be a
KLEIN,WILLIAM
Green politician and is now mayor of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer. Kerry’s political opponents tried to paint him as a “haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat” who vacillates in the face of tough decisions. In light of the Iraq War in 2003, Kerry downplayed his French connections: his official website makes no mention of his fluent French, and he rejected an invitation to a family reunion in Saint-Briacsur-Mer in 2003. J. Simon Rofe See also: Brittany; Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Iraq War; Vietnam War. References Brinkley, Douglas. Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. New York: William Morrow, 2004. Kranish, Michael. John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.
KLEIN,WILLIAM (1928–) American artist. A native New Yorker, William Klein currently lives and works in Paris. Klein first experienced Europe as an eighteenyear-old radio operator for the U.S. Army in Germany and France. After his tour, he returned home to finish a sociology degree at City College, New York, before leaving the city for Paris. In 1948, Klein enrolled at the Sorbonne, painting in a style largely influenced by the geometrical abstraction of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and the development of the interdisciplinary Bauhaus aesthetic in Weimar. With his career as an artist, and with a French wife, Jeanne Florin, Klein decided to settle in Paris. Before he did, he returned
649
to New York, where he photographed the city, beginning a series of city explorations that soon spanned the globe—New York, Rome, Moscow, Tokyo, and, only lately, Paris. The book Life Is Good and Good for You in New York (1956) revolutionized the way street photographers approach their subject matter, both technically and ideologically. The dissections of cities, produced in four books between 1956 and 1964, rocketed him to the forefront of the photographic world and earned him the misleading label of street or documentary photographer. This may be the case, but he is also a fashion photographer, a painter, a filmmaker, and a sculptor, employing a mixture of media to achieve his own, often politically satirical, ends. His New York book was followed closely by his first film, Broadway by Light (1957), and his career as a photographer-filmmaker was begun. In 1956 Klein also began work for Vogue as a fashion photographer. For ten years, until 1965, Klein photographed models for Vogue, earning him a reputation as one of the elite fashion photographers. He established a tradition of taking models into the streets, photographing them in the midst of city life. As so often in his work, this experience informed his filming of Who Are You Polly Magoo (1966). Klein has never been just a photographer. Although his grainy and often blurred photographs have paved the way for a new snapshot aesthetic in street reportage, he has also contributed kinetic sculptures—involving light-sensitive glass —and design murals as well as films to the art world. His documentary filmmaking supplanted photography between 1965 and 1980, when he produced Mr. Freedom (1969), Muhammad Ali the Greatest
650
KOKIS, SERGIO
(1969), The Little Richard Story (1980), and The Messiah (1999). As with his street documentary, Klein makes films as political commentaries. Several of them, like Mr. Freedom, Far From Vietnam (1967), and Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (1970), were banned for their anti-American content, but Klein has not restricted himself to events that concern the United States of America. In the May uprising in Paris in 1968, Klein also filmed footage that, ten years later, formed a satirical but sympathetic commentary on the events, Grands Soirs et petits matins (1978). In hindsight, this little-known film was the beginning of a growing body of work, in still and moving images, on the French people and French culture. Kelley Wilder See also: Anti-Americanism; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Fashion; Painting; Photography; World War II. References Clouzot, Claire, and William Klein. William Klein: Films. New York: Powerhouse Cultural Entertainment, 1999. Daudelin, Robert, and William Klein. William Klein: entretien. Montreal: Cinémathèque québécoise/Musée du cinéma, 1975.
KOKIS, SERGIO (1944–) Québécois writer of Brazilian origin. Kokis was born in Rio de Janeiro on May 6, 1944. He had an eventful childhood, sent to a reform institution at the age of nine for being a vagabond. Nevertheless he went on to attend the School of Fine Art in Rio and then studied philosophy. Like
many young Brazilians he took part in clandestine political activity after the 1964 military coup and was even involved in oppositional paramilitary movements. He was arrested and sentenced to prison for action against “national security.” In 1966, however, he got his philosophy degree. He managed to leave Brazil secretly because of a job at the airport and a study grant from the French authorities. He studied in France at Strasbourg University, obtaining a masters in psychology in 1969. That same year he decided to emigrate to Canada, and he worked as a psychologist at a hospital in Gaspé, Quebec. In 1970 he moved to Montreal, where in 1973 he obtained a doctorate in clinical psychology and took a post in that capacity at SainteJustine hospital. Kokis was, however, equally interested in the arts and trained at the School of Art and Design at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, as well as the Sadie Bronfman Center in Montreal. He is a painter as well as a writer. His literary output is prolific and widely translated. He won four prizes for his Le Pavillon des miroirs/Funhouse (1994), and this novel was followed by Negao et Doralice (1995), and L’Art du maquillage/The Art of Deception (also 1995) about the world of art forgers. Errances (“Wanderings,” 1996) is a portrait of modern consumer society. Un Sourire blindé (“An Armored Smile,” 1998) is the story of a fatherless Salvadorian child striving for adulthood. Le Maître du jeu (“The Gamemaster,” 1999) is the story of a theologian who has lost his faith and who refuses a teaching post in order to write a book about a torture victim in his country. La Danse macabre du Québec appeared the
KOKIS, SERGIO
same year. The hero of Saltimbanques (“Acrobats,” 2000), Circus Alberti, journeys across Latin America. Kokis’s next two novels were Le Magicien (“The Magician,” 2002) and Les Amants de l’Alfama (“The Lovers of the Alfama,” 2003). Kokis’s style is characterized by colorful, vivid images. The theme of death is often
651
present in his work, as well as a painstakingly evoked climate of violence. Jérôme Ceccon See also: Brazil. Reference Dubois, Christian. “La Raison des passions: les discours de l’identité dans quatre romans d’auteurs immigrants au Québec.” M.A. thesis, Université Laval, 2002.
L LA CONDAMINE, CHARLESMARIE DE (1701–1744) French naturalist, born in Paris in 1701 and died there in 1744. La Condamine first undertook a military career but abandoned it to become a geodesist and naturalist. He was admitted to the Royal Academy of Science in 1730 and was part of René Duguay-Trouin’s scientific journey to the Mediterranean. Between 1735 and 1744, he accompanied the scientific expedition to Quito, Ecuador, a region that, at the time, belonged to Spain and was part of Peru. The aim of the expedition was to measure the length near the equator of a degree of the meridian. Among the members of the expedition were the mathematicians and astronomers Louis Godin and Pierre Bouguer, Joseph Jussieu (naturalist and doctor), Couplet (geographer), Hugot (watchmaker), Verguin (engineer), the technicians Morainville and Godin des Odonnais, and Seniergues (surgeon). In 1738, during this voyage, he gave the first description of the tree quinquina, whose root was then used for medicinal purposes in France. While exploring the River Esmerelda, he discovered rubber. He traveled down the Amazon with the cartographer and mathematician Pedro Vi-
cente de Maldonado. During this expedition, the two scientists observed the Amerindian populations, as well as the native flora and fauna. Among other things, they discovered freshwater dolphins, or manatee, as well as the poison curare, which was used by Amerindians on their arrow-tips. The report on La Condamine’s trip to South America entitled Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique méridionale, depuis la côte de la mer du Sud jusqu’aux côtes du Brésil et de la Guyane, en descendant la rivière des Amazones; lue à l’assemblée publique de l’Académie des sciences le 28 avril 1745/Succinct Abridgement of a Voyage Made within the Inland Parts of South America; from the Coasts of the South-Sea to the Coasts of Brazil and Guiana, down the River of the Amazon, published in Paris in 1745 and London in 1747, signaled a period of great interest in scientific expeditions to the New World in Europe. Ana Lucia Araujo
653
See also: Brazil; Guiana. References La Condamine, Charles Marie de. Voyage sur l’Amazone. Paris: Maspero, 1981. Pratt, Marie Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London/New York: Routledge, 1991.
654
LA HARPE, JEAN-BAPTISTE BÉNARD
LA HARPE, JEAN-BAPTISTE BÉNARD DE, SIEUR (1683–1765) French explorer and entrepreneur, born in 1683, in Saint-Malo, Brittany, the second son of Pierre Bénard de La Harpe and Jeanne Le Breton. In a family of eleven children, JeanBaptiste, who soon took the name of La Harpe, considered it prudent to seek his fortune abroad. As ensign in the navy, La Harpe ended up in Peru, where he courted and married Doña Maria de Rokafull, twenty-two years his senior and possessed of a fervent desire to spend the rest of her days as a courtesan in Paris. The couple quarreled constantly; Rokafull hired a clever lawyer, and the resulting settlements, combined with the actions of Rokafull’s heirs after her death in 1709, virtually bankrupted La Harpe. Almost immediately upon this misfortune, La Harpe married Jeanne-Françoise Prigent, but his accounts make little mention of her, and she died in 1714. Experiencing financial stress, La Harpe decided to try his fortunes again in the New World. He obtained a concession from the Company of the Indies on land on the Red River. In 1718 he established a trading post, which he christened Fort Malouin, among Nasoni Indians (of Caddoan affiliation) near present-day Texarkana. The stated purpose of his mission was to oppose any Spanish advances in the region and to organize contraband trade with New Mexico. The latter goal was thwarted by worsening relations between the French and Spanish, so La Harpe sought other outlets for exchange. He determined to try his luck with distant relatives of the Caddo who lived on the eastern plains. If successful, this contact might re-
DE, SIEUR
sult in a permanent French presence in a region in which no European power had established itself. So it was that, in 1719, La Harpe and ten men ventured northwestward to the Alcansas River in present-day Oklahoma, where they encountered a large village of Tawakoni Indians (a Wichita-related tribe). This visit lasted ten days and established relations between the two peoples, but the Tawakoni custom of vacating entire villages for bison hunting during large portions of the year squelched French plans to maintain a presence in the region. La Harpe and his men accordingly returned to their post. Along with a visit in the same year to another Wichita village by Claude-Charles Dutisné from the Illinois settlement, this was the last organized French excursion to the American plains. La Harpe continued to Louisiana, where he boarded a ship for France. Returning a year later, he was made Commandant of Saint Bernard (probably Matagorda) Bay, but did not establish a presence there, as the natives were decidedly unfriendly. In 1722 he was given sixteen soldiers and orders to explore the Arkansas River, but treacherous conditions on the river caused one of his supply-laden pirogues to capsize; near Little Rock, Arkansas, he was forced to abort the journey. Although La Harpe was given a few more assignments, his health deteriorated, and he eventually returned to France. He spent two years petitioning for another position in the New World, but his political allies were out of favor in the corridors of power. He spent his waning years consulting and writing and died in Saint-Malo in 1765. George H. Odell
LA PÉROUSE, JEAN-FRANÇOIS See also: Brittany; Louisiana; Saint-Malo. References Villiers du Terrage, Baron Marc de. An Explorer of Louisiana: Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe. Trans. Sammual Dorris Dickinson. Hope, AR: Etter, 1934. Wedel, Mildred M. “J.-B. Bénard, Sieur de La Harpe: Visitor to the Wichitas in 1719.” Great Plains Journal 10 (1971): 37–70.
LA PÉROUSE, JEANFRANÇOIS DE GALAUP, COMTE DE (1741–1788) With the exception of James Cook, La Pérouse is arguably the best-known eighteenthcentury navigator. His reputation as a naval officer was established in North America during the French and Indian War and the War of American Independence. Born at Gô Castle, near Albi, on August 23, 1741, La Pérouse joined the navy at fifteen and became an officer in 1756, when Britain and France were at war over their North American colonies. La Pérouse sailed in the Célèbre on May 3, 1757, for Fort Louisbourg (Cape Breton) with supplies and troops. Back in France, he returned to Cape Breton in the Zéphyr in February 1758, landing at Port Dauphin in June. La Pérouse was wounded and taken prisoner on the Formidable in May 1759 near Belle-Isle; he was released on parole in November. In 1762, he joined Ternay’s expedition in the Robuste to regain control of North America; as a result, British fishing settlements were destroyed at Saint John’s. Promoted to ensign in 1764, La Pérouse further distinguished himself in the Indian Ocean and India (1772–1776); while based in Isle de France, he met LouiseEléonore Broudou and married her in Paris in July 1783.
DE
GALAUP, COMTE
DE
655
During the American War of Independence, La Pérouse joined La MottePicquet’s squadron bound for the West Indies in May 1779 and took part in the capture of Grenada (July 3) and in the siege of Savannah, Georgia (September 1779). La Pérouse personally seized the Ariel, towing her into Charleston, South Carolina (September 10). Sent back to request 5,000 additional troops, he captained the Amazone in Ternay’s large expedition that sailed on May 2, 1780. In early 1781, La Pérouse patrolled the Massachusetts and Saint Lawrence areas, capturing a small British convoy at Aspy Bay. Appointed post captain in 1781, La Pérouse witnessed French victories at Saint Kitts (January 13, 1782) and the Iles des Saintes (April 1782). During the Hudson Bay campaign, he captained the Sceptre and helped capture Forts Prince of Wales (Churchill River) and York (Nelson and Hayes rivers) on August 8 and 21, 1782. For these glorious deeds, La Pérouse was granted 800 livres annually. In early 1785, he was chosen to lead a scientific expedition with the Boussole and the Astrolabe. Leaving Brest on August 1, he reached Brazil in November and Chile in February 1786. He also explored the Canadian coastline, putting in at Mount Saint Elias (June 1786) and Lituya Bay, Alaska (July 1786), and discovering Necker Island (November 1786). His last dispatches were sent from Botany Bay in early 1788, before the expedition was lost. Following d’Entrecasteaux’s failure to locate the wrecks (1791–1793), Peter Dillon discovered relics of the expedition at Vanikoro in 1826. Cenotaphs to La Pérouse were erected at Botany Bay by Hyacinthe de Bougainville (1826) and at Vanikoro by Dumont d’Urville (1826). The Lycée La
656
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD-LIANCOURT, FRANÇOIS-ALEXANDRE-FRÉDÉRIC
Pérouse in San Francisco, monuments at Albi and Petropavlosk, and La Pérouse Bay, near Big Beach, Hawaii, commemorate the ill-fated expedition. Serge Rivière See also: Brazil; Chile; French and Indian War; Saint Lawrence River. References Bellec, François. La Généreuse et Tragique Expédition Lapérouse. Rennes: Ouest France, 1985. Bicentenaire du Voyage de Lapérouse: Actes du colloque d’Albi, Mars 1985. Albi: Association Lapérouse, 1988. Dunmore, John. La Pérouse: Explorateur du Pacifique. Paris: Payot, 1986.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULDLIANCOURT, FRANÇOISALEXANDRE-FRÉDÉRIC DE, DUC (1747–1827) An early advocate of social reform, born in La Roche-Guyon, France. Eldest son to the master of the royal wardrobe, François-Alexandre-Frédéric, duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, usually referred to simply as the duc de Liancourt, engaged in a first career as an officer in the king’s carbineers. He married young in 1764, then happened to visit England, where he was introduced to systems of education and animal husbandry different from those he knew. He dedicated some of the family estate at Liancourt to experimental farms, working with cattle breeds imported from the Swiss Alps and England. He dedicated further tracts of his land to two experimental cloth-spinning shops and initiated the country’s most advanced school of arts and craftsmanship for children of his king’s soldiers. Louis XVI
DE, DUC
granted the school his protection in 1788, with the title of School for Children of the Nation. Liancourt’s views were well accepted by his peers, and when the king summoned the national convention of the Etats Généraux (Estates General) the following year, the duke was elected as a representative of the nobility. There he pressed for social reforms and public welfare on a grand scale, short of which the monarchy that he served might well crumble, he feared. Through many visits to Louis XVI, he tried to warn the king of the depth of the dissatisfaction toward the regime. On July 12, 1789, he brought news of such serious unrest in the streets of Paris that the king asked him: “Is this a revolt?” The duke gave him the ever-famous reply: “No, Sire, this is a revolution!” The Bastille fell two days later to rioters. On July 18, the duke became president of the hastily gathered Constituent Assembly. After the monarch fell, Liancourt went into exile in 1792 in England, where he visited the writer and agronomist Arthur Young, then lived in the United States from 1794 to 1797, where he tried to persuade Washington to help Lafayette, then imprisoned in Europe. There, he wrote eight volumes of his impressions of the country, Voyage dans les Etats-Unis d’Amérique fait en 1795, 1796 et 1797, par La RochefoucauldLiancourt (“Voyage in the United States of America Made in 1795, 1796, and 1797 by La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt,” 1799) and developed new ideas on education and agriculture, which he attempted later to apply in France. In particular, he wrote a book on the prisons of Philadelphia, Des Prisons de Philadelphie par un Européen (1796), which was meant to initiate penal reform in France. Indeed, after the Restoration of
LA ROCHELLE
1814 he became inspector of one of the twenty-eight penitentiary subdivisions of France. Napoléon, however, had little esteem for the duke and pressed him to engage only in social reforms. After Napoléon fell and Louis XVIII was restored to power, the duke was elected to the House of Peers and continued his work in favor of philanthropic, educational, economic, and health reforms. He was so instrumental in broadening the medical use of vaccination that he was recognized and honored by the academy of medicine in spite of pressures from official bodies, and he continued for many years to direct the school of arts he had founded in his early days. Marc H. Journoud See also: French Revolution; Lafayette, Marquis de. Reference Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. La Rochefoucauld, Jean-Dominique de. Le duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt: 1747–1827: De Louis XV à Charles X, un grand seigneur patriote et le mouvement populaire. Paris: Perrin, 1980.
LA ROCHELLE Located on the Bay of Biscay and founded in the tenth century as a fishing village, La Rochelle grew to become a major Atlantic port by the twelfth century and played a significant role in the triangular trade between France, the West Indies, and North America by the seventeenth century. In addition, mutual interests permeated and reinforced relationships between merchants in La Rochelle, Nantes, Bordeaux, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg,
657
and other important commercial towns between which capital, goods, information, and people flowed. At any given time between the 1660s and 1780s, La Rochelle’s high-seas fleet ranked among the most important in France, its strength peaking between 1682 and 1686 under the patronage of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. As a stronghold for Protestantism and Protestant merchants, La Rochelle asserted its independence and built its power on the trade of salt and wines. In the midsixteenth century, a majority of Rochelais joined the Calvinist Reformation. In 1573 the city successfully resisted the siege of the duke of Anjou, brother of Charles IX. La Rochelle remained the chief fortress of the Huguenots in France for many decades thereafter, and in 1610 three of four Rochelais were Protestant. The town posed a particular threat to Cardinal Richelieu’s attempts at unification, and fearing an invasion by Richelieu, the townspeople of La Rochelle appealed to the English in 1627, who landed on the Island of Re. In spite of the nearby English presence, La Rochelle witnessed a dramatic siege when the Royal Army, commanded by Louis XIII and Richelieu, stormed the city and cut off access from the sea by constructing a huge dike in 1628. After more than thirteen months of the siege, the starving citizens of La Rochelle finally capitulated, and the town was destroyed. By 1645, the Protestant population had dropped to less than 50 percent. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 forced many prominent Huguenot merchants of La Rochelle to liquidate their business and flee to England or Holland and resulted in the foundation of New Rochelle, New York, by Protestant refugees. By 1730 only one in four residents was of a reformed religion.
658
LA ROCHELLE
Hotel de ville, La Rochelle, France. La Rochelle played a significant role in the triangular trade between France, the West Indies, and North America by the seventeenth century. (Library of Congress)
This small percentage continued, nevertheless, to provide most of the city’s entrepreneurial leadership and dominated the maritime sector. Various documents and archaeological finds affirm that Rochelais fishermen frequented the shores of Newfoundland as early as the fifteenth century. Jacques Cartier makes mention of meeting a Rochelais ship off the coast of Labrador in 1534. In 1542, Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval sailed from La Rochelle with three ships to found a settlement in Canada. By 1550, La Rochelle sailors began to explore the West Indies. During the second half of the sixteenth century, activity between La Rochelle and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence greatly increased. Various merchant companies were formed that partici-
pated directly in the funding of overseas colonies and expeditions. One-fifth of the capital of the company founded by Sieur Mons in 1604 for the settlement of Port Royal came from La Rochelle alone. At the same time, many Rochelais participated in contraband activities outside of the organized companies. By 1630, there was a regular transport of emigrants to New France and return of fish and furs to La Rochelle. Of any French port, La Rochelle saw the highest number of emigrants to Canada, who generally left on ships in June and took two months to cross the Atlantic. Emigrants took very few possessions with them, and a great majority of the supplies needed in New France were imported from the mother country. Cargoes destined for the French colonies included foodstuffs, textile
LA ROCHELLE
products, pitch and tar, soap, lard, candles, and a wide variety of manufactured items. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, French finance minister in the 1660s, encouraged the great commercial companies of the North, of Senegal, and of Guinea to locate their headquarters in La Rochelle. He also upgraded facilities for state-sponsored firms, authorizing public expenditures to deepen the channel, improve the docks and wharves, and modernize the dry docks. La Rochelle served as a staging point for convoys destined for the French colonies during the War of the Austrian Succession and the French and Indian War, due to its strategic and protected location. The years 1744 and 1748 to 1756 were two periods of particular prosperity for La Rochelle. The triangular trade of furs from North America and sugar from the West Indies restored La Rochelle to its former state before the great siege. Ships continually left and arrived from such faraway destinations as Newfoundland, Mobile, Saint Louis, Santo Domingo, and New Orleans. Between 1731 and 1738, Rochelais ships accounted for 45 percent of all vessels calling at New Orleans. During the two decades of 1740 to 1769, Canada and Louisiana accounted for 34 percent of all Rochelais ventures, and the cession of those colonies constituted a severe loss to La Rochelle. As Canada remained the preferred destination for emigrants and a source of furs, the West Indies played a significant role in the importation and trade of sugar and other more exotic products such as indigo. La Rochelle also participated in the slave trade during the eighteenth century. In 1763, merchants of La Rochelle protested in vain against the abandonment of Canada. La Rochelle’s links to the New
659
World did not, however, come to a complete end with the fall of New France. John Gay, one of the coauthors of the American Declaration of Independence, was in fact the son of a La Rochelle minister. Many Rochelais also had friends in the United States. Furthermore, in order to increase their trade with the new country, Rochelais merchants fought hard but failed to make La Rochelle a port of free trade for the United States. In 1796, fifteen vessels from the United States arrived in La Rochelle bringing cotton, tobacco, corn, rice, and alcohol. Although the port continued to receive U.S. ships loaded with trade goods, including timber, cotton, and tobacco, throughout the nineteenth century it did not manage to establish the significant trade links needed to make up for the loss of Canada and Louisiana. Since World War II, several industrial plants have located at La Rochelle in the sectors of naval, aircraft, and automobile construction. Present-day La Rochelle has become a haven for tourists on the Atlantic seaboard. The city also boasts one of the largest marinas in Europe, a modern fishing harbor, a major commercial port, and a university. The foundation of the Museum of the New World in 1978 attests to La Rochelle’s enduring pride in its Atlantic history and its ties with former French colonies. Maureen Waters See also: Cartier, Jacques; Colbert, JeanBaptiste; Cotton; Fishing; Fur Trade; Huguenots; Louisiana; Mobile; Mons, Pierre Dugua, de; Nantes; New France; New Orleans; Newfoundland; Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de; Roberval, Jean-François de La Rocque, Seigneur de; Saint Lawrence River; Saint Louis; Santo Domingo; Sugar; Timber; Tobacco; World War II.
660
LA SALLE, RENÉ-ROBERT CAVELIER
DE, SIEUR
References Clark, John G. La Rochelle and the Atlantic Economy during the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Delafosse, Marcel. Histoire de La Rochelle. Toulouse: Privat, 1985. Robbins, Kevin. City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530–1650. New York: Brill, 1997.
LA SALLE, RENÉ-ROBERT CAVELIER DE, SIEUR (1643–1687) La Salle explored many areas of North America, including the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers, claiming for France the lands that he named Louisiana. Born in Rouen in November 1643, René-Robert de La Salle was the son of a wealthy merchant. He was educated at a Jesuit College in Rouen and later entered the Society of Jesus, but soon realized he was cut out not for a religious life but for one that was filled with adventure. In 1666, La Salle sailed for Canada, where he was granted lands near the La Chine rapids, above Montreal. Full of ambition, La Salle established a fortified village, acquired a substantial interest in the fur trade, and started to learn the local indigenous languages. He dreamed of finding a passage to the East and the riches of the mythical city of Cathay. Conversations with the indigenous people led La Salle to hear about the mighty rivers in the area, and keen to explore the region, he sold his holdings in 1669 and set off on his first voyage, which led to discoveries of both the Ohio and Illinois rivers. It was at this point that his men deserted him, behavior that was to be repeated throughout his career, forcing him to stop short of the Mississippi. Thus,
Robert La Salle, late seventeenth-century French explorer and founder of Louisiana. (Library of Congress)
claims that La Salle was the first European to discover the Mississippi River are false, that honor instead going to his fellow Frenchman, Louis Joliet. La Salle, however, was not deterred and traveled to France in 1674 and 1677, where he was granted a patent to establish a fort on Lake Ontario (Fort Frontenac) and explore the surrounding area. The fort was not only a profitable venture but more importantly represented the first step of his main scheme—to traverse the mighty Mississippi to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. Setting off in 1682, La Salle traversed the Illinois River to the Mississippi, reaching its mouth in April 1682. It was here that he claimed the lands surrounding the Mississippi for France, naming them Louisiana, after the French king Louis XIV. These lands were much vaster than present-day Louisiana, stretching from the Alleghenies to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the southern shores of
LABAT, JEAN-BAPTISTE
Lake Erie. His discoveries were therefore a major victory for France. Returning to France once more, La Salle was granted the patent to explore the mouth of the Mississippi further, this time approaching it from the sea. The voyage left La Rochelle in July 1684, but failed in its attempts to locate the Mississippi, instead landing much further west. In the face of this failure, La Salle attempted to make his way back to New France, but the journey was beset with dangers. His followers became so dissatisfied with the hardships they faced that La Salle was murdered in 1687. Jo Edwards See also: Fur Trade; Illinois Country; Jesuits; Joliet, Louis; La Rochelle; Louisiana; Mississippi River; Montreal; Ohio. References Hennepin, Louis. A Description of Louisiana. Trans. John G. Shea. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1880 and 1996. Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America. Vol. 3, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. New York: Ungar, 1965. Terrell, John Upton. La Salle: The Life and Times of an Explorer. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968.
LABAT, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1664–1738) Dominican priest, mathematician, agronomist, and naturalist, born in Paris in 1664. As a missionary, Labat took part in the evangelization of the French West Indies. As a scientist he studied the islands’ botanical, zoological, and ethnographic characteristics and applied his knowledge of agriculture to contribute to their economic improvement. Desiring to join in the evangelization of the New World, Labat obtained permission from his order in 1693 to embark for
661
Guadeloupe, a territory included in the royal domain of France since 1674. A man of action, endowed with a strong personality, Labat effectively founded the BasseTerre colony and its capital city. He labored intensely for thirteen years to develop the island’s agricultural production (cane, cacao, tobacco, and manioc), the sugarcane industry, and its commercial relations. He designed and built houses, irrigation canals, and roads and established the first sugar refineries. He so efficiently improved the distillation and maturation techniques of cane alcohol that the amber-colored rum produced became the craze of Europe as a therapeutic beverage. To this day, a distillery in Marie-Galante, a small island off the coast of Guadeloupe, produces a renowned rum brand, named Père Labat. Labat also contributed to the military defense of the island against the English, building watchtowers and fortifications, and in 1703 he armed the black slaves with weapons. Labat traveled extensively in the Antillean islands, especially in Martinique and Saint-Domingue, where he observed people’s ways and customs and studied fauna and flora. He recorded scores of anecdotes and scientific observations, traced maps, drew thousands of illustrations, and wrote descriptions of agricultural, manufacturing, and construction techniques. During his sea travels he encountered pirates several times and found his life in danger. In 1706, he returned to Europe to attend a meeting of the Dominican order in Bologna and give a report on his work. As he prepared to return to the West Indies, he was denied permission and had to stay in Rome for several years. It appears that his adventurous and unconventional religious life generated hostility in his order’s
662
LABRO, PHILIPPE
superiors. Thus, he began to work on his six-volume Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique (New Voyage to the Isles of America), a chronicle of his personal adventures, often related with a touch of humor and an account of historical facts and ethnographic observations of the Caribbean. Originally published in Paris in 1722, the book was followed by several reeditions, the latest in 1956. Labat’s work remained for a long time the only authoritative reference for the region. It constitutes today an invaluable account of the beginnings of colonization in the French Antilles. Labat was never to return to the West Indies. He fulfilled his desire for adventure and discovery by publishing several books on western Africa, drawing information from missionaries to the region. He died in Paris in 1738. His legend still lives on in the Antilles. Marie-Agnès Sourieau See also: Catholic Church; Guadeloupe; Martinique; Piracy and Privateers; Santo Domingo; Sugar; Tobacco. References Chatillon, Marcel. “Le Père Labat à travers ses manuscrits.” Bulletin de la société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe (4ème trimestre) 1979. Eaden, John, ed. and trans. The Memoirs of Père Labat. London: Cass, 1970. Le Bris, Michel, ed. Voyages aux isles: Chronique aventureuse des Caraïbes, 1693–1705. Paris: Phébus, 1993. Radford, Daniel, ed. Voyage aux îles de l’Amérique, Antilles (1693–1705). Paris: Mémoire vive/Seghers, 1979.
LABRO, PHILIPPE (1936–) Journalist, author, and film director Philippe Labro’s works have always reflected his unwavering love of and fascination with the United States and the Amer-
ican way of life. In 1985 he was awarded the French literary prize, the Prix Interallié, for his novel entitled The Foreign Student, an autobiographical work of his university days spent in the United States. Labro was born in 1936 in Montauban, France. Fascinated by the United States and with a passion for literature, he crossed the Atlantic for the first time at the age of eighteen to spend four years studying at the University of Virginia and to discover all that the American continent had to offer. Upon his return to France in 1957, he became a news reporter with the French radio station Europe 1, before taking a position with the women’s magazine Marie France, then with the national French daily, France Soir. In 1960 he published his first novel, Un Américain peu tranquille (“An Unquiet American”), which clearly reflects his enthusiasm for the United States. That same year, he left for war-burdened Algeria to carry out his military service, an experience that led him to publish Dark Tunnel, White Night in 1967. Returning to France at the end of the Algerian War, Labro energetically pursued his dual career of author and journalist: he wrote for the French weekly magazine, Paris Match, wrote news bulletins for the national radio station RTL, and presented the prime-time midday news on national television channel France 2 between 1982 and 1983. He later went on to become program director at RTL in 1985, then vice president of the radio station in 1996. Labro has also directed several films, the first of which was Tout peut arriver (Anything Can Happen), produced in 1969. His enthusiasm for directing became all the more apparent when he directed three more films during three consecutive
LACAN, JACQUES
years in the early 1970s: the murder mystery Sans Mobile apparent/Without Apparent Motive, L’Héritier/The Inheritor, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the drama Le Hasard et la violence/Chance and Violence. In 1976, he once more worked closely with French film producer Bébel, for whom he wrote the script for the film L’Alpagueur/Hunter Will Get You. Today Labro continues to write for the press and other media, although on a strictly independent basis. He also continues to enchant his readers with heartwarming adventures of the “Frenchy” in America. Claudia Wolosin See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Television. References Pruvost, Valérie. “The Image of America as Portrayed through Three Contemporary French Novels.” The Image of America in Literature, Media, and Society. Ed. Will Wright and Steven Saplan. Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, University of Southern Colorado, 1999: 169–173. Salinger, Pierre. Je suis un Américain: Conversations avec Philippe Labro. New York: Stock, 1975.
LACAN, JACQUES (1901–1981) The most famous—not to say notorious— psychoanalyst since Freud. Lacan’s work constitutes a rigorous rereading of his master based on structural linguistics, German philosophy, and neosurrealist plays on words. This heterodox amalgam emphasizes the necessary incompleteness of subjectivity, grounded as it is on the absences and silences that are the very stuff of language and on the triangular relationship between the Imaginary (the infant’s recollected experience of the pleni-
663
tude of fusion with the mother), the Symbolic (connected with the intervention of the “Law of the Father” and the simultaneous acquisition of language), and the Real (that which forever eludes schematization and articulation, making any full mastery of the self by the self constitutively impossible). Lacan’s work is thus at the antipodes of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as they have traditionally been practiced in the United States, regarding the restoration of a self-aware and fully functioning ego as a delusive impossibility. According to Lacan, Freud said, on first arriving in the United States, that he was “bringing the plague”—not an attested statement, but one that magisterially articulates Lacan’s view of the disruptive, nonconciliatory nature of the analytic process. In such papers as “L’Agence de la lettre dans l’inconscient”/“The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan set forth his view of the ineluctable need for analyst and analysand to engage with the shifting and unstable relationship between signifier and signified that is at the core of human subjectivity. That engagement, for his own patients, took the form of extremely expensive and often stunningly brief sessions, which contributed to his notoriety and indeed helped to make him one of the most fashionable figures of the intellectual Paris from the 1960s on. His Ecole Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris) was distinguished by fierce internal schisms and regular expulsions, in which Lacan’s stress on the importance of the Law of the Father received practical expression. In his later years his work became increasingly convoluted and drew on mathematical and geometrical theory, with the same magpielike combination of originality and selectivity that had always characterized him. His
664
LACHAISE, GASTON
weekly Parisian seminars, conducted in highly dramatic style, attracted large crowds and form the basis of his later published work. Encore, an attempt to answer Freud’s famous question “What does woman want?” is the most influential of these. The impact of Lacan’s work is felt at least as much outside the world of therapy as within it, particularly in film, cultural, gender, and postcolonial studies. Lacanian analysis has also crossed the Atlantic, having become very widespread in Brazil and Argentina. In the United States, because of his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytical Association and the demand that analysts be physicians, Lacan has largely been taken up in the universities rather than in clinical practice. He gave a series of lectures in America in 1974. Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian views had a certain impact on Frantz Fanon’s work. It was during his training as a psychiatrist in France in the early 1950s that Fanon learned about psychoanalysis and Lacan’s teachings, as he was doing his internship at Saint Alban’s psychiatric hospital. Saint Alban’s was then run by François Tosquelles, a Spanish civil war refugee and one of the founders of “institutional psychotherapy” predicated on Freud’s and Marx’s analyses. Moreover Fanon read Lacan’s entry in Henri Wallon’s Encyclopédie familiale and the first version of his essay on the mirror stage. This helped him theorize how the white’s gaze dissociates the black’s body. In Black Skins, White Masks (1952), he contended that Blacks represented “the real Other for the Whites,” who then see them as “the prop for their preoccupations and desires.” He pleaded for the historical and economic realities of the colonized peoples to be taken
into account. Although psychoanalysis is not the only theory Fanon used to deconstruct white hegemony, its impact cannot be denied, especially as he paved the way for postcolonial studies. Lacan remains one of the most significant—indeed symptomatic—figures in twentieth-century French intellectual life, above all for his renewal of Freudian thought and challenge to received ideas of subjectivity. Furthermore, his audacious crossing of disciplinary boundaries, drawing alike on Dalí and Heidegger, Holbein and Edgar Allan Poe, Kant and the Marquis de Sade, put him in the vanguard of the 1960s and 1970s revolution in the human sciences not only in France, but across Europe and America. Keith Reader See also: Fanon, Frantz; Language; Poe, Edgar Allan; Theory. References Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. London: Fontana, 1991. Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. New York/London: W. W. Norton, 1985. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan: His Life and Work. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
LACHAISE, GASTON (1882–1935) American sculptor of French birth; a pioneer of modernism in the United States. Lachaise’s oeuvre is characterized by monumental, voluptuous female nudes, often said to embody the ideal woman. He was the first living artist to be honored with a retrospective exhibition by the New York Museum of Modern Art.
LACHAISE, GASTON
Lachaise was born in Paris, the son of a talented cabinetmaker. Interested in sculpture from an early age, he was admitted to the Académie nationale des beaux-arts at sixteen. An exceptionally gifted student, he exhibited a bust of his sister in the 1899 Paris salon, even though underage. While still a student he fell in love with Isabel Dutaud Nagle, a married woman of French Canadian descent whom he followed to Boston in 1905. To pay for his passage, he worked for René Lalique, the jeweler and glassmaker, for a year. Once in Boston, Lachaise worked for the sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson. He then became an assistant to Paul Manship. Lachaise became a U.S. citizen in 1916, and in 1917 he married Isabel, who had divorced her husband. In 1918, having participated in several group exhibitions (notably the historic 1913 Armory Show, where he exhibited a statuette entitled Nude with a Coat), Lachaise had his first one-man exhibition at the Stephan Bourgeois Gallery in New York. Among the forty or so sculptures and drawings displayed was his Standing Woman (Elevation), a life-sized plaster nude of Isabel. Later cast in bronze, this is perhaps the best known of Lachaise’s pieces. Although massively monumental, the figure—poised on tiptoe, torso slightly turned, arms gracefully raised—possesses an astonishing weightlessness. Its simplified forms—a major characteristic of Lachaise’s work—constitute a fundamental break with his classical training. As Lachaise himself acknowledged, Isabel was the primary source of his inspiration. From the series of portrait heads of her that followed Standing Woman to later pieces such as In Extremis (1934), notable for their expressionistic exaggeration and
665
overt sexuality, hers is a dominating presence in his work. During the 1920s, however, Lachaise did produce a number of compelling portraits of other people. Many of his sitters were associated with the Dial, the avant-garde magazine that habitually championed Lachaise. They included Scofield Thayer, e. e. cummings, Henry McBride, Marianne Moore, and Edgar Varèse. Apart from their intrinsic merit, these portraits offer a valuable record of the intelligentsia of the period. Lachaise also tried his hand at the male nude portrait. However, perhaps only his Man Walking (1933)—a portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet—can be said to match his female figures. Although his figurative sculpture was ultimately at variance with the all-pervading trend toward abstraction, Lachaise’s simplification of anatomical form, direct carving, and expressionism (together with his absorption of Paleolithic and non-Western art) were undoubtedly influential in the development of American modernism. A major exhibition of Lachaise’s work toured the United States in 2001–2002. Greatly augmented, it then went to Europe, opening in France, where, despite his ancestry, the sculptor is little known. Christopher Rolfe See also: Avant-Gardes; cummings, e.e.; Dance; Sculpture; Varèse, Edgar. References Carr, Carolyn Kinder, and Margaret C. S. Christman. Gaston Lachaise: Portrait Sculpture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985. Nordland, Gerald. Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work. New York: Braziller, 1974. Wasserman, Jeanne L. Three American Sculptors and the Female Nude: Lachaise, Nadelman, Archipenko. Cambridge: William Hayes Fogg Art Museum, 1980.
666
LAFAYETTE, MARIE-JOSEPH-PAUL-YVES-ROCH-GILBERT DU MOTIER, MARQUIS DE
LAFAYETTE, MARIE-JOSEPHPAUL-YVES-ROCH-GILBERT DU MOTIER, MARQUIS DE (1757–1834) French military leader and statesman who fought on the side of the colonists as a general in the American Revolutionary army, and close friend of numerous American leaders, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and Benjamin Franklin. The Marquis de Lafayette also played a prominent role in the French Revolution of 1789, the abdication of Napoléon, the restoration of the French monarchy, and the French Revolution of 1830. Lafayette was born September 6, 1757, in Auvergne, France. He was orphaned at age two when his father, Michel Roche Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was killed in the Battle of Minden. In 1768, his mother, Marie Louise, took him to Paris, where he entered the Collège du Plessis. In 1770, upon the death of his mother and grandfather, he was left with a very large fortune. In 1771 he became lieutenant in the King’s Musketeers, and in 1773 he moved to Versailles, where he became a protégé of the Duke d’Ayen. The following year in 1774, he married Anastasie Adrienne de Noailles (1759–1807), second daughter of the duke. In 1777, sympathizing with the American cause in the American Revolution, Lafayette purchased a ship and set sail for America to fight against the British. He soon joined the ranks as a major general and was assigned to the staff of George Washington in the Continental army. He returned to France for several months in 1779, persuaded the French government to send military and financial aid to the Americans, and presented his recommen-
dations concerning an expeditionary force. On March 20, 1780, Lafayette set sail for America aboard the Hermione, constructed in the arsenal town of Rochefort, arriving in Boston on April 27, 1780. During the battles of the American Revolution, he helped lead American forces to several victories, serving as field officer at Brandywine where he was wounded, at Gloucester, and at Monmouth. He also held important commands at Albany, Barren Hill, and Rhode Island. His last military assignment in America was in the Virginia campaign that ended with the surrender of the British general Lord Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. After Yorktown, Lafayette returned to France and assisted American commissioners in the peace negotiations. From 1783 to 1790, much of his time was devoted to developing commercial concessions between Europe and the United States. He cooperated closely with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in particular regarding U.S. interests abroad. Lafayette also presided over the French officers who had served in the American army and who constituted a distinct branch in the American membership of the Society of the Cincinnati. Founded in the spring of 1783, the society sought to preserve the friendships that the war had fostered among the officer corps. Louis XVI granted the society special honors by permitting its badge the distinction of being the only foreign decoration that French subjects could wear publicly. Lafayette also set about campaigning for the American ideals in France. In 1784, Lafayette returned to the United States and was given a hero’s welcome. Harvard University bestowed upon him an honorary degree. Recognizing the
LAFAYETTE, MARIE-JOSEPH-PAUL-YVES-ROCH-GILBERT DU MOTIER, MARQUIS DE
need to strengthen the union, Lafayette addressed the state legislatures of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey. He also successfully met with Iroquois nations to help promote a peaceful settlement of hostilities between the United States and the Iroquois. Upon his return to France, Lafayette took strong measures to support the young colony. In 1785, the proposal to buy U.S. whale oil to light Paris was made in direct response to Lafayette’s efforts. He also urged the suppression of the French tobacco monopoly to aid U.S. merchants and the abolishment of the export duty on French alcohol shipped to the United States. He encouraged the French navy to purchase U.S. timber and hemp. He also toured the south of France and promoted U.S. trade at Nîmes and Lyons. Lafayette’s “American dinners,” weekly Monday evening gatherings devoted to discussing America and American ideas, became famous. As a benefactor to U.S. citizens throughout Europe, Lafayette promoted educational exchanges and offered personally to superintend the education of Americans abroad. Lafayette became more and more absorbed, however, with questions of reform in France. He worked to establish the National Assembly, and at the start of the French Revolution in 1789, he began drafting a French declaration of rights inspired by the Declaration of Independence and the American Bill of Rights. He submitted his text to the new National Assembly, which incorporated most of it into the basic text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. In 1790, Lafayette sent Thomas Paine to deliver personally the key of the Bastille to President Washington.
667
Marquis de Lafayette directing American troops during the battle at Yorktown. (Library of Congress)
Events took a turn for the worse in 1792, however, when the monarchy was overthrown and the assembly impeached Lafayette, denouncing him as a traitor. Lafayette fled France to the Austrian-held Netherlands. Here Lafayette was arrested by a patrol and taken to Francis II, Holy Roman emperor, who condemned Lafayette as a republican. Lafayette spent the next several years of his life, from 1792 to 1797, in Prussian and Austrian prisons. In 1795 he was joined at Olmutz by his wife Adrienne, who had narrowly escaped the guillotine in France thanks to the intervention of the U.S. ambassador Gouverneur Morris, who had argued that her death would lessen sympathy in the United States for the French cause. Adrienne was eventually released from prison with the help of Morris’s successor, James Monroe.
668
LAFERRIÈRE, DANY
In 1799 Lafayette was released and returned to France, where he found that most of his personal fortune had been confiscated. Disapproving of the policies of Napoléon Bonaparte, he played little part in politics until the time of Napoléon’s downfall. In 1815 Lafayette was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. As one of its vice presidents, he worked for Napoléon’s abdication after the Battle of Waterloo and later became a focal point of resistance to the Bourbon kings. Lafayette once more revisited the United States from 1824 to 1825 on the invitation of President James Monroe and Congress, who voted him a gift of $200,000 and a large tract of land. His triumphal tour in company of his son, George Washington Lafayette, included stops in all twenty-four states of the Union, from Maine to Georgia and from New Jersey to Missouri. In the July revolution of 1830, Lafayette served once more as commander of the National Guard and closely participated as a leader of the revolution that dethroned the Bourbons. Popular demand asked that he become president of the new republic, but he declined and instead helped make Louis Philippe the constitutional monarch of France. Lafayette died in Paris on May 20, 1834, but is remembered by over 600 villages, towns, cities, counties, mountains, lakes, rivers, educational institutions, and other landmarks in the United States that bear his name. As a man of dual loyalty and a symbol of Franco-American friendship, Lafayette held strong influence over the leaders of both countries throughout his lifetime. He is known favorably on both sides of the Atlantic as the “emblem of liberty” and a “hero of two worlds.” Maureen Waters
See also: American Revolution; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Franklin, Benjamin; French Revolution; Jefferson, Thomas; Paine, Thomas; Rochefort; Timber; Washington, George. References Bernier, Olivier. Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds. New York: Dutton, 1983. Idzerda, Stanley J., ed. Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected letters and Papers, 1776–1790. 5 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977–1983. Unger, Harlow. Lafayette. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2002.
LAFERRIÈRE, DANY (1953–) Writer of Haitian origin. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1953, Dany Laferrière was only four years old when François “Papa Doc” Duvalier came to power. In the early 1970s, Laferrière worked as a journalist for the radio station Haïti Inter and for the newspapers Le Nouvelliste and Le Petit Samedi Soir, as part of a group of young reporters broadly opposed to the Duvaliers. After the murder of one of the group in 1976, Laferrière went into exile in Montreal. Laferrière stands somewhere between the 1960s generation of Haitian exiled authors (Franck Fouché, Paul Laraque, Roger Dorsinville, Roland Morisseau, Anthony Phelps, and Emile Ollivier) and a newer group with no direct experience of the violence and tension of the Duvalier years, which includes Joël Des Rosiers, Stanley Péan, and Edwidge Danticat. After five or six years of doing odd jobs in Montreal, Laferrière began work on a novel, which was finally published in 1985 as Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer/How to Make Love to a Negro. The novel’s irreverent presentation of inter-
LAFORGUE, JULES
racial sex assured it a sensational media and critical reaction and effectively established Laferrière as an important new voice. Laferrière’s standing has subsequently been confirmed by the publication of a further nine works, which together constitute what he calls an “Autobiographie Américaine.” The ten books narrate the life of “Vieux Os”/“Old Bones,” the pet name given to Laferrière by his grandmother, Da. The narrative cycle begins with the early childhood experiences in Petit-Goâve of L’Odeur du café/An Aroma of Coffee (1991), passes through the movement, just after the death of Papa Doc, to the chaos of Port-au-Prince in Le Goût des jeunes filles/Dining with the Dictator (1992), narrates Vieux Os’s last night in Haiti before going into exile in Le Cri des oiseaux fous (“The Cry of the Mad Birds,” 2000), and comes full circle with Pays sans chapeau/Down among the Dead Men (1996), which sees Vieux Os finally return to Haiti after twenty years’ absence. The books are not, however, “straight” autobiography; they have much in common with the contemporary hybrid mode that has been termed auto-fiction, in that Laferrière mixes the real with invented passages. In this way, his work shares the contemporary fascination in French metropolitan literature with writing the self, with defining and redefining the relationship between autobiography, biography, and fiction. Laferrière’s authorial playfulness marks a break with the ideologically charged high seriousness of previous generations of Haitian writers. Now living in Miami, Laferrière rejects all collective movements in Caribbean writing, from négritude to créolité, and francophonie (the community of French-speaking areas around the world) in general, as neocolonial traps. He is tracing an idiosyncratic trajectory, eluding all
669
attempts to classify and attach labels while at the same time producing one of the most important bodies of work of all contemporary Haitian-born authors. Martin Munro See also: Créolité; Danticat, Edwidge; Des Rosiers, Joël; Haiti; Montreal; Ollivier, Emile; Péan, Stanley. References Coates, Carrol F., ed. “Dany Laferrière, Fiction Writer.” Callaloo 22, no. 4 (1999): 903–949. Dash, J. Michael. Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. Basingstoke, UK/London: Macmillan, 1997. ———. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
LAFORGUE, JULES (1860–1887) French poet, one of the inventors of vers libre, admirer and translator of Walt Whitman, and major early influence on T. S. Eliot. Born in Montevideo to young French parents, Laforgue returned to France at age nine. An avid reader of works of literature, biology, medicine, religion, and philosophy, from 1881 to 1886 he held the position of reader at the Berlin court of the German Empress Augusta. Seen as a decadent avant-gardiste, by 1886 he was an important figure in French literary circles, and although many readers are put off by his self-referential hermeticism, frivolous tone, syntactical complexities, and lexical obscurity, an admiring Ezra Pound saw in him one of the most sophisticated of all French poets.
670
LAHONTAN, LOUIS-ARMAND
DE
LOM D’ARCE, BARON
In 1908 T. S. Eliot’s early poetry was transformed by his discovery of Laforgue’s ironic self-deprecation, his many voices and masks articulating intensely personal concerns, and his juxtaposition of everyday trivialities with metaphysical reflections. Eliot himself identifies Laforgue’s direct influence on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Conversation Galante,” and “La Figlia Che Piange,” and typically Laforguian echoes can also be found in the colloquial speech of “Humoresque,” the disdainful tone and lunar imagery of “Nocturne,” the cynical final twist of “On a Portrait,” the Sunday setting of “Spleen,” and the details of daily life in “Preludes.” Laforgue was one of the most influential in making Walt Whitman known to a French literary public, and having published the first official French translations of his work, “Inscriptions,” “O Star of France,” and “A Woman Waits for Me” in the revue La Vogue (1886), eventually abandoned plans to translate Leaves of Grass in its entirety. Translating Whitman’s long, irregular lines may have played an important role in Laforgue’s own development of vers libre, and it is possible that “Albums,” an enthusiastic fantasy on life in the Far West, might have been inspired by Whitman. Following early poems for the unpublished volume “Le Sanglot de la terre”/The Grief of the Earth, cosmic meditations expressing the anguish of man alone in a godless universe, Laforgue found a more sophisticated poetic voice in Les Complaintes/Street-Ballads (1885), with their inventive neologisms, playful religious imagery, and references to music and popular song. Influenced by the contemporary pes-
DE
simistic philosophy of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, he explored the struggle between a revulsion against nature’s reproductive laws, which only perpetuate human suffering, and a sentimental yearning for tenderness and love. Although “L’Imitation de Notre Dame la lune”/The Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon, where the poet is cast as Pierrot the clown, and “Des Fleurs de bonne volonté”/Some Flowers of Good Will went unpublished, they provided raw material for the formally revolutionary vers libre of Derniers vers/Last Verse (1886–1887), hailed as Laforgue’s masterpiece. Equally admired are the Moralités légendaires (“Legends of Morality,” 1887, posthumous), six short prose rewritings of the stories of familiar subjects such as Salomé and Hamlet, the quintessential Laforguian character. David Evans See also: Avant-Gardes; Literary Relations; Pound, Ezra Loomis. References Arkell, David. Looking for Laforgue: An Informal Biography. Manchester: Carcanet, 1979. Collie, Michael. Jules Laforgue. London: Athlone, 1977. Holmes, Anne. Jules Laforgue and Poetic Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
LAHONTAN, LOUIS-ARMAND DE LOM D’ARCE, BARON DE (1666–1715) French officer and writer. Born into a family of impecunious aristocrats, Lahontan set out for Quebec in 1683 and remained there as a military officer for the next ten years. After a series of
LAKE CHAMPLAIN
disputes with Brouillan, the governor of Newfoundland, he departed abruptly for France. In order to avoid arrest as a deserter, he wandered between Denmark and the Low Countries. After a period in the court of Hanover, where he became a friend of the philosopher Leibnitz, he died in 1715. Lahontan’s account of his travels, New Voyages to North America, was first published in 1703. By all accounts, the book was a best-seller, with ten editions between 1704 and 1741; it was translated into English, German, Dutch, and Italian. Its success is easy to understand, given its lively and occasionally apocryphal accounts of adventures at sea, its portraits of the colonial society of New France and of the culture of native Canadian groups, its recounting of native traditional stories, and its racy descriptions of marriage and courtship, not only among the French settlers but also among Canadian Indians. The most interesting feature of this text is Lahontan’s dialogue with Adario, a fictional native chieftain. Lahontan characterizes the indigenous peoples of Canada as essentially innocent and good, lacking in laws because there is no need for them. From Adario’s perspective, Europeans are unhappy because of their obsession with money, their religious intolerance, and their repressive sexual mores. Lahontan’s representation of Adario as Noble Savage, and his vision of social structures as inherently coercive and of man as innately good but corrupted by society and its institutions, was to find full expression in the work of later thinkers such as Rousseau. Susan Castillo See also: Newfoundland; Noble Savage.
671
References Coulet, Henri. “Deux confrontations du sauvage et du civilisé: ‘Les Dialogues de Lahontan et le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville de Diderot.’” Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Ed. HansGunther Schwartz. London, Ontario: Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1990. Scruggs, Charles Eugene. “La Hontan: Precursor of the Enlightenment and the Myth of the Noble Savage.” The Language Quarterly 19, nos. 3–4 (spring–summer 1981): 23–31. ———. “The Evolution of Primitivism in the Writings of La Hontan.” University of Ottawa Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1984): 55–62. Wolfart, H. Christoph. “Lahontan’s Bestseller.” Historiographia Linguistica: International Journal for the History of the Language Sciences 16, nos. 1–2 (1989): 1–24.
LAKE CHAMPLAIN Lake Champlain straddles the CanadaU.S. border. The lake lies in a valley bounded by the Green Mountains (in Vermont) and the Adirondacks (in New York State). The lake is 177 kilometers long from its southernmost tip at Whitehall, New York, to its northern extremity, Mississquoi Bay in Quebec (Canada). At its widest point, it measures 18.1 kilometers with an overall average of 6.2 kilometers. The presently recorded deepest depth is 250 meters. The islands on Lake Champlain are Grand Isle, North Hero, Isle la Motte, Schuyler, Juniper, Valcourt, and Four Brothers, named Four Winds by the French explorers. From Lake George, named Lake Saint Sacrement by the French (at the southern tip of Lake Champlain), the water flows
672
LAKE CHAMPLAIN
Defeat of the Iroquois by Samuel de Champlain and Algonquin warriors in 1609 at what is now Lake Champlain, New York. (Corbis)
northward into Lake Champlain, and thence into the Richelieu River (Quebec), joining the Saint Lawrence at Sorel, Quebec, to eventually flow into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean. The man-made canal at Waterford, New York, connects the lake with the Hudson River, leading to New York City. These interconnected waterways make up the present-day Quebec–New York corridor. On the eastern shores of the lake, the Vermont side, the area from the southernmost tips to southeastern Canada was inhabited and controlled by the Algonquin nation, in an alliance with the Abenakis nation further east. The western portion of the lake (in New York State) was inhabited and controlled by the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, which was present from Lake Champlain to the Great Lakes in the West and South to Virginia and the Carolinas. One of the six nations, the Mo-
hawks were master of the Adirondacks and southwestern Quebec along the Saint Lawrence River. Lake Champlain served as the boundary between the Algonquin/ Abenakis nations and their enemies the Iroquois. The alignment of the native people on either side of the lake eventually became extremely important in the constructing of alliances between themselves and the French and British colonies vying for the control of the northeastern part of North America. French exploration began in 1609 under Samuel de Champlain, founder of New France and Quebec City, who gave his name to the lake. The French presence marked Lake Champlain as the most historic body of water in the Western Hemisphere, given the role it played in forging the destiny of France and Britain in America and later of the United States and Canada.
LAKE CHAMPLAIN
Champlain, mariner, explorer, and warrior, was on a two-day war expedition to the south against the Iroquois with his native allies the Hurons, the Montagnais, and the Algonquins. Lured by the stories his allies told of a “large lake filled with beautiful islands,” he arrived, via the Richelieu River, at the entrance of the lake on July 4, 1609. Champlain continued his exploration to the southern end of the lake, which was later named Fort Frederic (under British occupation, Crown Point). The French did not colonize the shores of the lake, except for Windmill Point on Grande Isle, but within the next sixty years they built a series of forts (for protection against their archenemies at the time, the Iroquois). The first was Fort Richelieu, later rebuilt and renamed Fort Chambly, supported by Fort Saint Louis 6 kilometers south, followed by Fort Theresa at the mouth of the lake, Fort Saint Anne on Isle la Motte, and Fort Frederic at Crown Point. By 1666 the English had occupied Fort Orange (Albany), south of Lake George on the Hudson River, and they became preoccupied by French activity against the English Iroquois allies. In 1689 war between France and England extended to the North American colonies, when Chevalier de Callières, then governor of Montreal, presented a plan for the conquest and colonization of New York. By 1750 land grants given by the French Crown occupied all of the land surrounding the lake. Meanwhile the British governor of New York issued a proclamation offering liberal terms to settlers to occupy the region between the Hudson River and Lake Champlain. At this point there were frequent skirmishes between the French and the British and their native allies along
673
the Saint Lawrence–Lake Champlain basin, with the focal point being Crown Point (Fort Frederic for the French) as the gateway to the lake and New France. In 1755 the French built Fort Carillon (known as Fort Ticonderoga under the British) at the convergence of Lake George and the Hudson River. For the British this was a violation of the 1748 Treaty of Aixla-Chapelle, which forced a truce (supposedly ending skirmishes and building of forts) between the French and the British. The same year saw the arrival of a French force under General Dieskau, later to be commanded in 1756 by Marquis de Montcalm, who in 1757 led a French force from Fort Carillon and attacked and captured Fort William Henry on the southern tip of Lake George. In 1756 very little military activity occurred in the Lake Champlain basin, but in 1757 with William Pitt vowing to rid America of the French, the British began military operations and attacked Fort Carillon without success. Governor Vaudreuil, jealous of Montcalm’s successes, constantly undermined him and weakened his military position in the field. In the spring of 1759, Vaudreuil replaced Montcalm with Bougainville, giving the latter express orders to abandon Forts Carillon and Frederic if the British attacked, which they did under Amherst in late June 1759. This abandonment of the forts opened the way for the British to take over the Lake Champlain basin and control the waterways to New France, as the French troops had now retreated to Fort Saint Jean on the Richelieu River. Montcalm, called back to Quebec by Vaudreuil, was now in charge of French defenses, while Wolfe and the British Atlantic fleet sailed up the Saint Lawrence to begin the siege of Quebec. The Battle of the Plains of
674
LALEMANT, JÉRÔME
Abraham (just outside the fortifications) decided the fate of New France, as well as of Montcalm and Wolfe (who both died on the field of battle); in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris, Britain now controlled half of the North American continent. While most of the French nobles returned to France, 40,000 French Canadian habitants remained under British rule. Lake Champlain continued to play a role as a waterway for invading armies, also providing refuge and escape to freedom. Benjamin Franklin traveled Lake Champlain on his mission from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to Montreal to try to convince the Scottish merchants to join the American Revolution. Similarly, the ragtag American revolutionary forces came via Lake Champlain to attack Quebec and eventually occupy Montreal and the Richelieu valley in the winter of 1776. The naval battle of Valcourt Island in Lake Champlain was the largest in the American War of Independence. The War of 1812 (between the Canadian colonies and the young U.S. republic) saw battles along the Saint Lawrence–Lake Champlain basin, with the final Battle of Plattsburgh (on Lake Champlain) in 1814. Joseph Papineau, leader of the failed 1837–1838 rebellion in Lower Canada, escaped via Lake Champlain to Plattsburgh, New York, and eventually found his way to New York City and Paris, where he lived in exile until the 1840s. Prior to the American Civil War, Lake Champlain was one of the routes in northern New York State used by slaves in the Underground Railroad in their flight to Canada. During the American Civil War, Confederate spies stationed in Montreal would travel the Lake Champlain waterway to their targets in the northern states.
Since 2001, with free trade between Canada and the United States, the Quebec– New York corridor along Lake Champlain is once again revitalized as a focal point of cross-border trade and nanotechnology agreements, as well as a haven for tourism. Donald Cuccioletta See also: American Civil War; American Revolution; Bougainville, Louis Antoine de; Champlain, Samuel de; Franklin, Benjamin; Hurons; Montagnais; Montcalm, Louis-Joseph, Marquis de; New France; Quebec; Quebec City; Saint Lawrence River; Slavery; Treaty of Paris; Vermont. References Belico, Russell. Sails and Steam in the Mountains: A Maritime and Military History of Lake George and Lake Champlain. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain, 2001. Crockett, Walter Hill. A History of Lake Champlain: A Record of More Than Three Centuries, 1609–1936. Burlington, VT: McAuliffe, 1909. Muller, H. N. “The Commercial History of the Lake Champlain–Richelieu River Route.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Rochester, 1969.
LALEMANT, JÉRÔME (1593–1665) Born in Paris on April 27, 1593, Lalemant entered the Jesuit order in 1610 and served in French North America from June 25, 1638, until his death in Quebec on November 16, 1665. In France he studied at Pont-àMoussan and Collège de Clermont. Lalemant served as boarding-school prefect, Collège teacher, principal, or rector at various institutions associated with the Jesuits at Verdun, Amiens, Clermont, and Blois.
LALEMANT, JÉRÔME
In New France he served as a missionary, priest, Huron mission superior (1638– 1645), and superior of the Jesuit mission in Canada (1645–1650 and 1659–1665). Lalemant’s career in North America can be divided into two distinct phases. Throughout his career in New France, Lalemant appears to have been well respected by his peers and many of his Indian converts. The first phase of his career coincided with the heroic age of the Huron mission. As mission superior, Lalemant undertook the first census of the Huron, established Sainte-Marie-des-Huron, and introduced the donnés (given men) system of lay assistants from France. While in charge of the Huron mission, Lalemant was christened Achiendassé, which eventually became the title of all Jesuit superiors for Canada who resided in Quebec. Sainte-Marie-desHuron became the headquarters of the Jesuit mission, which was the first important European establishment west of Quebec. Both Sainte-Marie-des-Huron and the donnés became very important to the Jesuit efforts to convert the Huron. For example, in 1649 there were sixteen priests, four lay brothers, and twenty-two donnés working at Sainte-Marie-des-Huron. Lalemant understood that to effectively convert the Hurons he and his missionaries must learn their language, customs, and manner of living while seeking to undermine all that was perceived to be the work of the devil. In many ways Lalemant was a cultural relativist, accepting local customs when they did not contravene biblical teachings. Yet he, like other Jesuits unable to find social systems comparable to Europe, began a program designed to impose Western notions of authority, punishment, justice, and religion upon the mission Indians.
675
The second phase of Lalemant’s career began in 1645 when he was appointed superior to all missionary activity in New France. As superior, Lalemant wrote the constitution of the Ursulines of Quebec; established the Jesuit Church, residence, and Collège; helped resettle Huron refugees at Beauport; acted as spiritual adviser to the Ursuline mystic Marie de l’Incarnation; and also venerated the remains of the martyrs Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, the latter his nephew. From 1656 to 1658 Lalemant served as rector of LaFléche Collège in France. He returned to America at the request of Bishop Laval as Jesuit mission superior in 1659. Until his death in 1665, Lalemant developed a new program of studies at the Jesuit Collège and worked to convince Laval of the necessity to recruit Jesuit priests from the local population. Lalemant is also important for his authorship and editorship of the Jesuit Relations and the surviving Journal des Jésuites. Not only do these documents serve to tell us about the Jesuits in New France, they are an invaluable source of information on aboriginal people in the seventeenth century. Karl Hele See also: Hurons; Jesuits; Laval, François de Montmorency; New France; Ursulines. References Blackburn, Carole. Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Campeau, Lucien. “Lalemant, Jérôme.” Biographical Dictionary for the Jesuit Missions in Acadia and New France: 1602–1654. Trans. William Lonc, S.J., and George Topp, S.J. Midland, ON: William Lonc, 2001: 235–237.
676
LAM,WILFREDO
LAM,WILFREDO (OR WIFREDO) (1902–1982) Cuban artist. An important link between the Caribbean and the avant-gardes of Paris and New York, Wilfredo Lam was the only major non-European surrealist artist. Born December 8, 1902, to a Chinese father and an African-Latin-Indian mother, in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, Lam’s prodigious creative sensibility fed off the cultural fusion and tensions of his homeland. From 1918 to 1923, he studied art in Havana, where his work was first exhibited. In 1923, he left for Madrid to study with Fernando Alvárez de Sotomayor. The early 1930s saw an increasing gravitation toward surrealism, and when Lam encountered the works of Pablo Picasso in 1936, he was inspired both politically and artistically. Wounded in 1937 in the defense of Madrid against the Nationalists, Lam moved to Paris in 1938, where Picasso adopted him and introduced him to the surrealist circle. Lam’s work was clearly influenced by Picasso’s neoprimitive style, though it also showed traces of the influence of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, and Henri Rousseau. In 1938, Lam’s paintings were exhibited at Pierre Loeb’s gallery in Paris, and the following year at the Perls Gallery, New York City. Lam left Marseilles in 1940 with 300 other French intellectuals, including André Breton, André Masson, and Claude LéviStrauss. A short stay in Martinique was followed by a return to Havana in 1941. It was here, away from the influence of Picasso, and newly initiated in the ideas of Jung, that Lam produced his own idiosyncratic, Caribbeanized fusion of surrealism and cubism. His best-known work, The Jungle (1942–1943), is infused with his
fascination for the primordial, the irrational, and the mythical and caused a sensation when it was revealed at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in 1943. In 1946, Lam became part of the cultural and political ferment in Haiti. Lam, Breton, Masson, and Aimé Césaire were greeted enthusiastically in Haiti by young intellectuals such as Jacques-Stephen Alexis and René Depestre, and their presence was instrumental in the ultimate downfall of the pro-American Haitian president, Lescot. Lam illustrated the Spanish translation of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, and in return Césaire devoted poems to the Cuban. Between 1947 and 1952, Lam traveled widely, before settling in Paris for three years, after which he traveled to Sweden and Brazil. In 1960, Lam set up a studio in Abisola, near Genoa. During his more abstract later period, Lam experimented with Ernst- and Miró-influenced bronze masks and with creating ceramic talismans of birds, fish, and snails. Lam maintained a good rapport with Castro’s regime, and one of his last public appearances was at the 1980 May Day celebrations in Havana. After a long illness, Lam died in Paris in 1982. Martin Munro See also: Alexis, Jacques-Stephen; AvantGardes; Breton, André; Césaire, Aimé; Depestre, René; Ernst, Max; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; Masson, André; Painting; Surrealism; Tanguy, Yves. References Day, Holliday T., and Suzanne Garrigues. “Wifredo Lam 1902–1982.” Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987. Bloomington: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1987: 103–106. Fouchet, Max-Pol. Wifredo Lam. New York: Rizzoli, 1976.
LAMOTHE, ARTHUR
LAMBERT, CHRISTOPHE (1957–) French film actor and producer, born in Great Neck, Long Island, New York. Lambert’s father was a diplomat who worked for the UN in Geneva and, as a result, although he was born in the United States, Lambert was educated at private schools in Geneva and remained in Europe to attend the Paris Conservatory. He began his career as an actor with a series of bit parts in relatively low-key, unremarkable French films of the early 1980s such as Le Bar du téléphone/The Telephone Bar (Barrois, 1980) and Asphalte (Amar, 1981). His real break came with his role as John Clayton, otherwise known as Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (Hugh Hudson, 1984), a big-budget Hollywood adaptation of the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. Here, Lambert’s sullen good looks were ideal, and he carved out a niche for himself as a brooding action hero of few words. The following year, he returned to work in France, playing the lead role as Fred, a marginal character who lives in the Paris Métro system, in Luc Besson’s Subway, opposite Isabelle Adjani. Lambert returned to the United States after the success of Subway (he won the French César for Best Actor for his role) and created what, in many ways, became his signature role as the immortal Connor MacLeod, the kilted Scottish Highland warrior born in the sixteenth century but still battling in the streets of 1980s New York, in Highlander (Mulcahy, 1986). He subsequently reprised the role in Highlander II: The Quickening (Mulcahy, 1991) and Highlander III: The Sorcerer (Morahan, 1994).
677
Since finding success, first as Tarzan and then as Highlander, Lambert has continued to work both in Europe and the United States in such diverse works as Michael Cimino’s The Sicilian (a 1987 Mafia movie adapted from a novel by Mario Puzo); Agnieska Holland’s FrancoAmerican coproduced biopic, set during the Solidarity years in Poland, To Kill a Priest (1988); Mortal Kombat (Anderson, 1995), based on the martial arts video game of the same name; Beowulf (Baker, 1999), a fantasy sci-fi adaptation of the epic poem; and Resurrection (Mulcahy, 1999), in which he was cast as a Cajun detective investigating a brutal murder in Chicago. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Lambert has also started to work as a producer and executive producer, both in the United States and in France. He worked, for example, as producer on Patrick Braoudé’s mainstream comedy hit Neuf mois in 1994 and was also executive producer on the American remake of the film, Nine Months (Columbus, 1995). Lambert continues to work as both producer and actor in Hollywood and in France. Cristina Johnston See also: Besson, Luc; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Remakes. References Deriaz, Françoise. Christophe Lambert. Lausanne: Favre, 1986. Gressard, Gilles. Christophe Lambert. Paris: J’ai lu, 1989.
LAMOTHE, ARTHUR (1928–) Canadian director, editor, producer, and scriptwriter, of French origin; born in Saint-Mont (France) in 1928.
678
LAMOTHE, ARTHUR
Lamothe emigrated to Canada in 1953. After working as a lumberjack in Abitibi, he enrolled in the Department of Economics at the University of Montreal. From this period on, Lamothe became interested in cinema, as both critic and researcher, notably for the journals Images and Cité libre. In was in 1961 that he dedicated himself professionally to cinema, at the Canadian National Film Board (NFB), as a researcher and scriptwriter. In 1962, he directed Les Bûcherons de la Manouane/ Manouane River Lumberjacks, his first work as director, which became a classic and won a prize at the 1963 Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. A socially engaged documentary, this film offered a respectful look at the world of the lumberjack, underlining the difficult conditions under which they had to work. In 1964, in an attempt to preserve his freedom of expression, Lamothe founded the Société générale cinématographique (General Cinematographic Society), which specialized in the production of pedagogical and sociopolitical films. In 1965, Lamothe made his first fiction film, La Neige a fondu sur la Manicouagan (“The Snow Has Melted on the Manicouagan”), a minor work that recounted a couple’s emotional problems. That same year, he repeated the experience and directed a gloomy adaptation of André Langevin’s novel Poussières de la ville/Dust from Underground (1965). Following these unconvincing attempts at fiction, Lamothe left the NFB in 1966 and returned to documentary filmmaking with Ce soir-là Gilles Vigneault . . . (“That Evening . . . Gilles Vigneault,” 1967) and Le Train du Labrador (“The Labrador Train,” 1967), in which he again showed an interest in the
realities of Amerindian life. From 1967 to 1973, financed by Quebec trade union central offices, he made documentaries about the problems of workers. It was during this period that he made another classic of Quebec cinema, the very committed Le Mépris n’aura qu’un temps/Hell No Longer (1969). From 1973 to 1983, Lamothe produced a series of thirteen documentaries on the Amerindian peoples of the northeast of Quebec. These films, of great anthropological value, earned him international renown and were awarded numerous prizes. This pronounced interest in Amerindian culture, which was to become the mark of Arthur Lamothe’s cinematographic oeuvre, culminated in Mémoire battante (1983), a film on the spiritual universe of the Montagnais (Innus) that is considered by many specialists as the strongest work of his career. Returning to fiction with Equinoxe/ Equinox (1986) and Le Silence des fusils/Silencing the Guns (1996, a coproduction with France), Lamothe continued, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, to make documentaries on the Amerindians, taking an interest in, among other subjects, the effects of modern life on their culture (Le Rêve et le libéralisme, 1999). Considered as a master of Quebec cinema, Lamothe became the first recipient of the Prix Albert-Tessier in 1980, awarded by the government of Quebec to a figure of renown in the domain of culture and the arts. Then, in 1999, to underline his life’s work, he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec, the logical conclusion of a career that has made a significant contribution to the elaboration of the collective memory of Québécois. Yanick Farmer
LANCTÔT, MICHELINE See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Montagnais; Quebec; Timber. References Garel, Sylvain, and André Paquet, eds. Les Cinémas du Canada. Paris: Les Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1992. Lever, Yves. Histoire générale du cinéma québécois. Montreal: Boréal, 1988.
LANCTÔT, MICHELINE (1947–) French Canadian actress, director, and scriptwriter, born in Montreal in 1947. Lanctôt started her career in a classic of Quebec cinema, La Vraie Nature de Bernadette (“The True Nature of Bernadette,” 1972), by Gilles Carle. She played the role of Bernadette Bonheur, a rather morally loose bourgeois woman who leaves her urban life for the countryside and a return to nature. From this first film onward, the characteristics of Lanctôt as an actress were visible: a curious mixture of femininity and virility that expresses itself in her husky voice and intense eyes. Lanctôt then continued her career with other key roles, most notably in Souris, tu m’inquiètes (“Smile, You Worry Me,” 1973) and in Les Corps célestes/The Heavenly Bodies (1973), once again directed by Gilles Carle. Equally at ease in English-language roles, Micheline Lanctôt appeared in a film adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), as well as in Blood and Guts (1978). Her career as an actress has also been punctuated with films by renowned metropolitan French directors. In 1973, she appeared in Jean-Claude Tacchella’s Voyage en grande Tartarie/Voyage to Grand Tartarie, and in 1977 she worked with Claude Chabrol in Les Liens de sang/Blood Relatives.
679
A woman of many talents, Lanctôt has also directed several animated films, such as Genèse/Genesis (1968), The Selfish Giant (1971), and A Token Gesture (1976). Encouraged by this experience, she abandoned her acting career for a time and went behind the camera. In 1980, the producer René Malo entrusted her with the direction of the film L’Homme à tout faire, based on a script that she had written, and that subsequently received an award at the San Sebastian Film Festival. It was, however, her second film, Sonatine (1983), which she made with a young Pascale Bussières, which became her defining work and which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. This rigorously structured film, which follows the movements of a sonata, tells the touching tale of two Montreal adolescents who decide to plan their suicide and then to put their plan into action. In the 1990s, Lanctôt once more became a well-known figure for Quebec audiences thanks to her television roles in series and soap operas. Having embarked upon a television career in 1977 with Guy Fournier’s soap opera Jamais deux sans toi (1977–1980), she pursued her career on the small screen from 1990 to 1992 in the sequel to Fournier’s series. She was then to be seen in numerous successful television series in diverse roles that are a testament to the range of her acting talents, in Scoop III and IV (1994, 1995), in Les Héritiers Duval (“The Duval Heirs,” 1995), and in Omertà II (1998). An accomplished and polyvalent artist, Micheline Lanctôt is, without doubt, one of the great figures of Québécois cinema and television history. The Prix du Gouverneur Général, which she received in 2003 for her career, along with the Prix
680
LANG, JACK
Albert-Tessier, which she was awarded in 2000, serve as eloquent evidence of a career that is far from finished. Yanick Farmer See also: Carle, Gilles; Chabrol, Claude; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Television. References Pérusse, Denise. Micheline Lanctôt: La vie d’une héroïne. Montreal: L’Hexagone, 1995. Reid, Malcolm. “Formidable! A Profile of Micheline Lanctôt.” Quest (November 1980): 60–68.
LANG, JACK (1939–) French politician. Jack Lang came to prominence in French public life when the Socialist Party was elected to power in May 1981. Lang held the offices of minister of culture from 1981 to 1984 and minister of culture and communication from 1984 to 1986 and from 1988 to 1992. In 1992–1993 and 2000–2002 he held the office of minister of education. He was a popular but frequently controversial minister, known for his flamboyance and celebrity entourage, who sought to promote and defend French cultural interests on the world stage. He is credited with reinvigorating, democratizing, and internationalizing French cultural life in the late twentieth century: his cultural policy famously embraced activities as diverse as comic strip art, television production, popular music, and street theater. Even before his political debut, Lang had a venerable history as an outwardlooking cultural activist. In the 1950s Lang was the general secretary of the National Federation of University Theaters and launched the Nancy International Festival
of Student Theater in 1963. By the 1970s, this festival attracted theater groups from all over the world and audiences of more than 170,000. As minister of culture, he made festival culture part of government policy, inaugurating the Fête de la Musique (Festival of Music) in 1982. His other achievements included investment in the French film industry, the deregulation of the French broadcasting industry, an ambitious construction program in Paris throughout the 1980s (les grands projets), and the management of the French bicentennial celebrations in 1989. Significantly, one of Lang’s first acts as minister of culture was to boycott the annual U.S. festival of cinema in Deauville; he thereby made public his trademark hostility to the U.S. cinema industry and what he perceived as the relentless march of U.S. cultural imperialism and initiated the conflictual relationship with Anglo North America that characterized his period in office. As a counterpoint to this stance, Lang aligned himself with francophone and South American cultural personnel and events, visiting Cuba and attending political conferences in Cotonou, Cancún, and Mexico City. Indeed, it was during the UNESCO Mexico City conference of international culture ministers in July 1982 that Lang most fully laid out his defensive cultural policy, arguing for a “cultural resistance” against U.S. dominance; the vocabulary employed by Lang was deliberately inflammatory and made use of a militaristic frame of reference: “decolonization,” “imperialism,” “allies,” and “collaboration.” His very public condemnation of U.S. culture as an example of inauthentic “multinational” culture was tempered with an appeal to new kinds of international cultural practice based on the rhetoric of “tiers-
LANGUAGE
mondisme” (Third Worldism). His intervention was inevitably poorly received by the U.S. delegates, while his provocative stance split leading French intellectuals. This event thus laid the foundations on which François Mitterrand and Lang launched the defense of the exception culturelle, or “cultural exception,” invoked by France in GATT negotiations to defend its protection of its cultural industries a decade later; it also led to vigorous and lasting reassessments in the international press of the nature of French cultural production and its relation to American mass culture. By 1984, when France held the presidency of the EU, Lang was much more conciliatory in his assessment of the need to counter the impact of U.S. culture, calling for Europeans to adopt “American” attitudes of enterprise, competition, and adventure in cultural activities; this nuanced position signaled Lang’s movement away from his aggressive beginnings and characterized much of the rest of his time in office. In September 1985, he finally attended the Deauville Festival and began to build bridges with some aspects of American culture (popular action hero Sylvester Stallone was a controversial choice for the award of Chevaliers des arts et lettres by Lang in the 1980s). By the end of the 1980s, Lang’s success and impact were no longer in doubt: the culture budget in France was at an unprecedented level, amounting to close to 1 percent of national spending, and the landscape of French cultural production had been significantly modified. Although considerably attenuated, Lang’s vigorous defense of French cultural interests nevertheless continued unabated; this culminated in the exception culturelle argument of 1993, in which it was agreed that audiovisual products
681
would be exempt from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Sue Harris See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; GATT; Mitterrand, François. References Looseley, David. “Jack Lang and the Politics of Festival.” French Cultural Studies 1 (1990). ———. The Politics of Fun: Cultural Policy and Debate in Contemporary France. Oxford: Berg, 1995.
LANGUAGE Language can symbolize colonial authority or resistance to that authority, either by subjugated peoples or by rival imperial powers. In postcolonial situations, the struggle for linguistic supremacy often continues, and all surviving parties carry a cultural legacy from the past. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, French colonial expansion was rivaled by Britain, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and, to a lesser extent, by Sweden and Russia. Although its transatlantic control never quite matched governmental aspirations and was much reduced after the Treaty of Paris (1763), France has both left and acquired an important, if unquantifiable, linguistic, social, and cultural inheritance through interaction with the New World, the other European interested parties, and Africa, the reservoir of transported slave labor. This legacy is largely due to the resistance to assimilation shown by francophone communities that, thanks initially to the Catholic Church, often survive today in territories ceded after 1763. Particularly in the nineteenth century, their numbers were sometimes swollen by the arrival of migrant French or francophone workers, soldiers on foreign campaigns,
682
LANGUAGE
and refugees from repressive regimes in metropolitan France. Today the New World’s preoccupation with its Old World ancestry is as strong as ever, and mass media and information technology allow the free trade of ideas and the loanwords to express them. Colonization inevitably damaged the innumerable languages of the native peoples of the Americas, as their communities were threatened and destroyed. Linguistic exchange in the New World has also considerably influenced the development of metropolitan French, initially through transmission by traders, returning missionaries, and repatriated ex-colonials, and subsequently through cheap travel, student and cultural exchanges, and technological innovation. In the last half century, the emergence of code mixing and hybrid varieties of French (franglais/Frenglish and fragnol/ frañol) among francophones on either side of the Atlantic has offended Frenchspeaking “purists,” who—notwithstanding intermittent Franco-American alliances since 1775, notably in both world wars— are alarmed mainly at the prospect of losing their linguistic identity and heritage to the perceived cultural imperialism of the anglophone world led by the United States. In France and Quebec, this fear has led to linguistic legislation intended to preserve linguistic and cultural identity against depredations by Anglo-American commercialism and technology. In Quebec since 1977, Camille Laurin’s Bill 101 has controversially awarded French primacy over English in advertising, education, and the workplace, while in France Jacques Toubon’s law of 1994 imposed fines of between F 5,000 and F 25,000 on individuals or firms guilty of violating 1975 legislation making French obligatory in written or
spoken publicity, sales material, and maker’s instructions for use of articles or products. To stiffen the resistance of French speakers and maintain the prestige of French worldwide, some thirty international francophone organizations and associations have been created, based mostly in Paris, but also in Belgium, Quebec, or Africa. Even so, French is now only ninth in the league of world languages in terms of the number of regular or occasional speakers (roughly estimated at 173 million or 2.95 percent of the global population in 1998, when two in every three francophones lived outside France). A modern linguistic atlas of North America predictably shows the greatest number of francophones as living in Canada, particularly in the Northeast, but with a French-speaking diaspora in Ontario and the Prairie Provinces. The United States has numerous francophone communities in Louisiana and some in former Greater Louisiana (i.e., the Midwest, the Great Lakes region, and eastern Texas), New England, New York, and Florida, as well as on the West Coast. Paradoxically, the United States has over twice as many citizens claiming French descent as Canada (13,156,333 against 6,136,600 in 1990– 1991), even though a far lower proportion of the U.S. population uses French daily in the home (1,930,404 U.S. citizens against 6,288,435 Canadians, representing 0.685 percent and 20.45 percent of the respective populations). Consequently, officially bilingual Canada accords far higher status to French than does the United States, which has only one officially bilingual state in fifty (Louisiana), in contrast to two out of eleven Canadian provinces (New Brunswick and Quebec, the latter actively promoting French). In this context, the
LANGUAGE
linguistic significance of the tiny French overseas département (department) of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (population under 7,000), off the Newfoundland coast, is not negligible. Further south, at least nine Caribbean islands are entirely or partly francophone, Martinique and Guadeloupe (with its offshore dependencies, including Saint Martin and La Saint-Barthélemy) being French départements d’outremer (overseas departments), as is French Guiana. Former French colonies in the Caribbean where French and French-based Creole are still spoken include western Hispaniola (Haiti), Dominica (Dominique), and Saint Lucia (Sainte-Lucie), while French toponyms survive in Saint Kitts (Saint-Christophe), Tobago, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Many Latin American countries, too, have their francophone communities. Throughout the Americas, the sense of cultural cohesiveness and linguistic identity is preserved by French-language media, cinema, theater, singers and entertainers, societies, clubs, academic conferences, and university courses, many private initiatives being supported by national and international francophone organizations. Admittedly, the vast French-language press and publishing industry in Quebec and Canada have no match elsewhere in the Americas following the decline of Franco-American publishing in the nineteenth century. But U.S. francophones are still served by newspapers such as the weekly France-Amérique, based in New York, available online, and styling itself the international edition of the Parisian daily Le Figaro. In 2003, a university press, Les Editions Tintamarre, was founded at the Centenary College of Louisiana with the aim of producing, in its
683
first year of activity, twelve titles—the highest output of printed books in French by local writers since the Louisiana Purchase. There are also signs of a new French literary revival in the region, drawing largely on surviving oral tradition in the manner of Haitian oraliture (writing based on oral culture). Again, the dynamic publishing company Ibis Rouge, founded in Matoury (French Guiana) in 1995, has branches in the Antilles and Paris and currently offers 186 titles. In many places outside Canada, however, French struggles to survive. A 1987 Quebec government report by Calvin Veltman and Benoît Lacroix sees a dire outlook for French in the United States, where English is the prime language of work for potential role models in francophone communities. Disowning their cultural heritage, some Franco-Americans have anglicized their family surname from Boulanger to Baker, Le Blanc to White, Boisvert to Greenwood, or Poisson to Fisher. Since 1945, mutual phobia has led anglophone and francophone communities in Louisiana to bandy terms like “Coonass” (for Cajuns) and Cou-Rouge (literally “Neck-Red,” for WASPs; cf. “redneck”), and recently, Franco-American relations and linguistic tolerance on both sides of the Atlantic have been strained by U.S. commercial protectionism and the Iraq War of 2003. Nevertheless, in autumn 2003 the intake grew (by between 6.4 percent and 19.7 percent) at all thirtytwo U.S. French-language schools recognized by France, their reputation for high academic achievement outweighing often sizable fees. This general increase saw 8,319 new pupils enrolled at infants and primary grade and 3,268 at secondary level.
684
LANGUAGE
The idioms peculiar to transatlantic French ex-colonies and départements d’outremer are mostly derived from, and based on, a linguistic amalgam. Depending on local social circumstances, this amalgam may be one of two things: a koine incorporating the various social and regional dialects of the early settlers (many of whom came from the Paris basin and western or northern France) as they communicated with their fellow countrymen or a rudimentary pidgin, which first evolved when two or more mutually unintelligible speech communities attempted to communicate for trade and which then developed into a more elaborate Creole upon becoming speakers’ first language. Even today, despite improvements in human rights since 1800, in colonial and postcolonial societies with a history of linguistic, racial, or ethnic tension, choice of language is often politically loaded. Eventually, however, diglossic imbalance may diminish as code switching and code mixing are tolerated, or as “interlects” or “inbetween languages” evolve to bridge the gap between high and low speech varieties and form a linguistic continuum. In the Americas, the leveling process has been assisted, firstly, by settlers’ secondary, tertiary, and subsequent migration (especially within the continental mainland) and, secondly, by modern globalization, heralded in the nineteenth century by transatlantic capital projects and political exile, both of which led European migrants to deal with people whose ancestors had long since settled overseas. In New France a distinction developed between the koine of Quebec, an area populated by an assortment of middle- and lower-class settlers, mostly from towns in the northern half of France, and Acadia,
whose settlers often came from south of the Loire and spoke dialects still colored by the Occitan spoken in Poitou and Saintonge in the twelfth century. The preservation of European French (EF) regionalisms in modern Canadian French (CF) suggests that even the former townsfolk could switch codes and slip into a lower sociolect in informal contexts. Whether a low register was normal for the 770 or so filles du roy, mostly disadvantaged inmates of the Hôpital Général in Paris, is hotly debated. If CF and other ex-colonial varieties diverged from EF after 1763 and especially 1789, they did not fossilize. Early twentiethcentury Quebec, for example, saw the emergence of popular urban “horseFrench,” joual (from cheval ), which in the 1960s some perceived as having unacceptably deviant pronunciation, syntax, and anglicisms, while others embraced it as a symbol of national identity. Already, successive immigrations from France, Quebec, Acadia, Haiti, and Santo Domingo had lent Louisiana French a complex diversity tending toward hybridization. The philological consequences of twoway transatlantic travel and intercultural exchange have been particularly important for French vocabulary, especially as the influence of the Académie Française is inversely proportional to distance from metropolitan France. Features of transatlantic French include the following: (1) the preservation of archaic vocabulary (including French dialect expressions), (2) gallicisms that have acquired a special sense in the American context, (3) direct, and (4) possibly indirect borrowing from the vocabulary of native peoples; borrowing from the vocabulary of (5) U.S., Canadian, and Caribbean English, (6) American Spanish, (7) Brazilian Portuguese, and
LANGUAGE
(8) creolized French, and (9) loanwords whose transmission is uncertain. Many, but not all, such loanwords and American gallicisms have been assimilated into European French. In turn, varieties of colonial and nonmetropolitan French have (10) sometimes influenced Amerindian languages, as well as English, Spanish, and Portuguese in the Americas and Europe, and (11) impacted on local toponymy and anthroponymy. Furthermore, FrancoAmerican and Canadian French have (12) certain distinctive features of pronunciation and grammar. To illustrate each of these categories briefly: (1) Like Regional European French (REF), New World French preserves archaisms long vanished from Standard European French (SEF). Quebeckers see them as lending prestige to their language. Thus in CF, Franco-American (FA), and Caribbean French (CARF), habitant means “inhabitant” (as in SEF), but it also retains its archaic sense of “farmer” (SEF fermier). American semantic variation occurs, e.g., achaler, meaning “to tire, bore, vex” in CF (SEF fatiguer, ennuyer, agacer), in Louisiana French (LF) means “to overcome by heat” (SEF accabler par la chaleur), and levée, “excavated earth” in CF (and REF), in LF means “embankment, levee, dyke” (cf. SEF remblai ). Cognate English words underpin some CF or LF archaisms, such as breuvage, “beverage, (now mainly nonalcoholic) drink,” char, “car, wagon,” and barbier, “barber, hairdresser” (coexisting with SEF terms boisson, voiture, and coiffeur). (2) Some EF terms have New World meanings, for example, CF chaudière, “bucket” (“boiler” in SEF, but possibly “cauldron, pot” in western REF, whence Newfoundland “chowder”), and CARF
685
biguine, “beguine,” which has reentered EF. (3) Direct French borrowings from the vocabulary of native peoples include innumerable place-names (e.g., Canada, from Iroquoian kanata, “village”; Québec, from Micmac gepèg, “strait”; and Gaspé, from Micmac gespeg, “extremity”) and terms for local flora, fauna, food, dress, customs, and geographical features, for example, CF caribou (1605: from Micmac xalipu, “digger” for food, in snow), CF and FA ouaouaron, “bullfrog” (1632: from an Iroquoian language, probably Huron), LF bayou(k), “marshy river offshoot, sluggish watercourse” (1699: from Choctaw bajuk, “river”), and CF and FA mocassin (footwear: 1707: mekesen, 1615, from Algonquian [Ojibwa] makisin: vowel change by analogy with Virginian English mockasin, 1612, from Powhatan mockasin, Narragansett mokússin). (4) To judge by the dates of their earliest known written attestations (admittedly an imperfect way of assessing transmission), many loanwords from aboriginal languages have passed into French via the languages of other colonial powers, for example, Inuit igloo or iglou (English 1660; French 1865), kayak or kayac (English 1662; French cayac, 1829; kaiak, 1837), and Aleut purka, “skin” > parka (Russian 1741; French 1761, revived 1932 after English 1852). American and Canadian English (AE and CE) probably gave French the amerindianisms wigwam (English 1628; French 1688: from Algonquian wikiwam [Ojibwa wigwaum; Delaware wiquoam], “their house’), and LF mocassin (English 1765; French 1876: from Creek and Choctaw mockasin, makisin), “moccasin snake, water moccasin,” as distinct from its homophone, the footwear previously mentioned.
686
LANGUAGE
Latin American and Hispano-Caribbean amerindianisms assimilated by French again refer mainly to local flora, fauna, food, drugs, landscape, and climate. Those acquired via Mexican Spanish include pulque or pulqué (1765: from Nahuatl puliúhki, “decomposed”), “pulque, fermented sap of the maguey”; mescal (1874; mezcal, 1873: from Spanish mezcal, from Nahuatl mexcalli ), “agave, maguey, peyote cactus” and its derivative mescaline (1934); and guacamole (1988: from Nahuatl ahuacamolli from ahuacatl, “avocado” plus molli, “sauce”). From the vast Arawak language group via Spanish comes French cannibale (1515: Spanish caníbal, 1492, from Arawak caniba), “cannibal(istic),” designating initially the fierce Carib Indians and perhaps cognate with Arawak cariba, “wise, brave, strong,” whence “Caribbean.” French amerindianisms probably acquired via South American Spanish draw mainly on Quechua, but also Aymara, possibly Araucanian Mapuche, and arguably Guaraní, also spoken in Portuguesespeaking southern Brazil. They include coca (1558: Quechua koka, Aymara kuka); chinchilla (1789: chincille, 1598: Aymara); condor (1598: Quechua kuntur); puma (1633: Quechua); pampa (1716: Quechua, Aymara), “pampas”; and gaucho (1826; gaoucho, 1822: from Argentinian Spanish gaucho, 1782, from Quechua or Mapuche cachu, “friend”). French amerindianisms from Tupí and arguably Guaraní via Brazilian Portuguese (BP) include: tatou (1553: Tupí tatu), “armadillo”; iarnare (1575, janowara, 1722: from Tupí januare), later replaced by jaguar (1754: from Tupí variant jaguara); and piranha (1795; piraya, 1817: both in Latin, 1648: Tupí piray, piranha).
(5) The many CF and FA anglicisms include technical terms and work-related vocabulary—e.g., switch (for EF interrupteur), clutch (for embrayage)—and are often thinly disguised by gallicized spelling or pronunciation, for example, CF bécosse, “back-house, WC” (for EF cabinets), CF/ LF smatte, “smart” (EF chic, gentil, rusé ), and LF estimbotte, “steamboat.” CARF and now EF have blaff (1967; bloff, 1937), fish and pepper “broth.” Anglicized constructions include CF annonces classées, “classified advertisements” (EF petites annonces); centre d’achat, “shopping center” (EF centre commercial ); fonds de pension, “pension fund” (EF caisse de retraite); and bureau chef, “head office” (EF siège social, bureau principal ). Semantic loan shifts, which extend the meaning of an existing French word through influence from a similar English word, include the following: CF record, “file, record” (SEF dossier) and “(sporting) record”; CF trépasser, “to trespass” (SEF empiéter sans autorisation sur la propriété de quelqu’un) and “to die”(!), as in archaic EF; and FA éventail, “(mechanical) fan” (SEF and CF ventilateur) and “(hand-held) fan.” (6) The French hispanism moustique (1654: metathesized from mousquitte, 1603, by analogy with tique, “tick”), “mosquito,” may well be of Caribbean provenance given the Costa de Mosquitos, although Spanish mosquito (diminutive of mosca, “fly’) predates Columbus, being recorded circa 1400. For many years French reserved moustique for the tropical insect, indicating the European gnat by cousin (from Vulgar Latin *culicinu(m) for CULICEM) or simply mouche, “fly.” Creole morne, “round, isolated hill” (Martinique, 1640, before Haiti and elsewhere), is probably a corruption of Spanish morro
LANGUAGE
(1591, same sense: from Vulgar Latin *murrum designating any round feature or protuberance). (7) A few BP terms of Romance origin denoting features of the local landscape have passed into French unchanged: campo (1857), “high savannah”; sertaõ (1822 as sertaon: cf. DESERTUM), “a semi-arid area in Brazil used for extensive farming of livestock”; favela (ca. 1950), “Brazilian shantytown, slum district” (cf. French bidonville). (8) French-based Creole grammar and vocabulary often influence CARF and LF, for example, molé, “I want” (EF je veux); mocouri, “I go” (EF je vais); zombi, “zombie, corpse revived by witchcraft”; and hoodoo, a Lower Louisiana variant of voudou, vaudou, “Vodun,” transmitted, mainly via Haiti, from Benin and Dahomey—cf. Fon vodu—and, chiefly via LF, to AE. (9) Loanwords whose transmission is debated include LF chaoui, “raccoon,” LF raca(t)chas, “(long) spurs,” and the SEF (and English) terms poncho, fétiche, “fetish,” and banane, “banana.” (10) Colonial gallicisms in AE include the following: (1) “prairie” (1682, frequent after 1773: from twelfth-century French praerie, a variant of praiere, “tract of meadow land,” 1150, from *prataria, from Latin PRATA, plural of PRATU(M), “meadow”); (2) “bureau,” i.e., (U.S.), “an office or (esp. governmental) department for transacting specific business” (1720), as distinct from (GB) “writing desk” (1742), whence (U.S. alternative sense) “chest of drawers” (1819); (3) “chowder” (1762: see §2). One explanation for the nickname “Dixie” applied to the eleven Confederate states is that Louisiana still allowed old tenfranc (dix francs) banknotes to be used as legal tender in 1812.
687
(11) The countless North American French toponyms include Vermont (Green Mountain), Maine and Louisiana (named after the French province and Louis XIV respectively), five Louisvilles, two Saint Louis, and a host of Bayous. AngloNorman gives (New) Jersey (from CÆSAREA) and Delaware, after its English governor, Lord de La Warr. Illinois, Des Moines, and Baton Rouge inter alia recall Franco-Amerindian contact, and a kind of whiskey is named after Bourbon County (Kentucky). Even so, numerous French toponyms have disappeared. Thus, the Mississippi recalls Algonquian Meschac(h)ébé, not le fleuve Colbert of French pioneers; La Belle Rivière is the Ohio; Mobile (Alabama) evokes Spanish La Mobilia, not Fort Louis de la Louisiane. Many of the original New Orleans street names have gone (Bourbon Street and the Vieux Carré notwithstanding). Yet, despite some anglicization of surnames, New England still has families called Dantin, Girouard, Lamoureux, Pelletier, Péloquin, Perrault, Poirier, Port-Joli, and Quintal. A French-based Creole survives in several officially anglophone Caribbean islands; the capitals of Saint Kitts (Saint-Christophe) and Saint Lucia (Sainte-Lucie) are respectively Basseterre and Castries (formerly (Le) Carénage or Félicité); Dimanche Gras (Fat Sunday) crowns the Trinidad and Tobago carnival; and Saint Lucia has its flower festival of La Rose. French provides the Spanish name for the long disputed and variously dubbed Falkland Islands, first settled by sea-lion hunters from Saint-Malo (1698–1720), whence les îles Malouines (1721). Hispanicized as las islas Malvinas, this name triumphed over five alternatives, as Spain
688
LANGUAGE
thanked France for selling it the islands in 1767. (12) CF and FA pronunciation and grammar have features that are not standard in EF (although some are still found in REF), including a tendency toward assibilation of /t d/; LF djeule from EF gueule, “mouth,” “throat”); metathesis (e.g., CF/ LF chesser from EF sécher, “to dry”); the loss or substitution of some final consonants offset by the addition or retention of others (e.g., LF chéti, fem. chétite from EF chétif, fem. chétive, “puny”); laxing of /i y u/ (e.g., CF [pIp] (EF [pip]), pipe); and diphthongization of vowels (e.g., CF [kowt] (EF [kot]), côte, “coast”). Some CF anomalous verb forms are archaisms, reflecting the uncertainty in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century REF about infinitive and past participle endings, for example, conviendre (also western REF; SEF convenir), “to suit,” or taiser (also western REF; SEF taire), “to hush up.” However, LF has much analogical leveling of irregularities, for example, promesser (SEF promettre), “to promise”; vi (SEF vécu), “lived”; or the anglicism promoté (SEF promu), “promoted.” English has subverted CF and LF syntax less than is often supposed. Some divergences from SEF are due to archaisms and dialect expressions; for example, CF cependant que (for tandis que), “whereas.” But popular spoken CF and LF simplify, for example, by using avoir instead of être as an auxiliary verb (e.g., J’ai parti instead of SEF je suis parti, “I have left”), or an infinitive instead of a conditional clause, for example, Avoir de l’argent, je partirais bien vite (SEF Si j’avais de l’argent . . .), “If I had money, I’d leave at once.” Peter Davies
See also: Acadia; Alberta; Argentina; Atlanticism; Basques; Baton Rouge; Brazil; Brittany; Cajuns; Catholic Church; Champlain, Samuel de; Chile; Compagnie d’Occident; Cotton; Créolité; Cyberculture; Florida; Francophonie, La; French and Indian War; Grenada; Guadeloupe; Guiana; Haiti; Huguenots; Hurons; Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’; Illinois Country; Indiana; Iowa; Jesuits; Kentucky; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Louisbourg; Louisiana; Maine; Manitoba; Martinique; Métis; Mexico; Michigan; Minnesota; Mississippi; Mississippi River; Missouri; Mobile; Montagnais; Music (Folk); New Brunswick; New France; New Orleans; Ohio; Ontario; Panama Canal; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Saint Louis; Saint Lucia; Saint Martin; Saint-Malo; SaintPierre et Miquelon; Saskatchewan; Slavery; Tadoussac; Television; Texas; Theater; Theory; Tobacco; Tourism; Treaty of Paris; Vermont; Wisconsin. References [Anon. collective]. “Maine’s French Communities.” http://www.francomaine .org (accessed March 7, 2003). CEFAN (Chaire pour le développement de la recherche sur la culture d’expression française en Amérique du Nord, Université Laval. “La Francophonie nordaméricaine.” http://www.cefan.ulaval.ca (accessed July 23, 2003). Dalby, Andrew. Dictionary of Languages. London: Bloomsbury, 1998. Griolet, Patrick. Mots de Louisiane: Étude lexicale d’une Francophonie. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1986. Haden, Ernest F. “French Dialect Geography in North America.” Current Trends in Linguistics 10, no. 1 (1973): 422–439. Massignon, Geneviève. Les Parlers français d’Acadie. Paris: Klincksieck, 1962. Plourde, Michel, ed. Le Français au Québec: 400 ans d’histoire et de vie. Quebec: Fides/Gouvernement du Québec, Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française, 2003. Vanackeren, Guy. “Le Livre des francophones du Pérou.” http://www. perou.net (accessed August 8, 2003).
LANOIS, DANIEL Veltman, Calvin, and Benoît Lacroix. L’Avenir du français aux Etats-Unis. Gouvernement du Québec, Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française, 1987 (revised 2003 web edition: http://www.cslf.gouv.qc.ca/ Publications/PubD127/D127ch1.html). Walter, Henriette. French Inside Out: The Worldwide Development of the French Language in the Past, Present and the Future. Trans. Peter Fawcett. London/New York: Routledge, 1994. Originally published as Le français dans tous les sens. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988.
LANOIS, DANIEL (1951–) Québécois singer and musician. Described by Rolling Stone as “the most important record producer of the ’80s,” Daniel Lanois is also the most renowned record producer of Canadian and more specifically Quebec origin. He was born on September 19, 1951, in Gatineau, Quebec, where he lived until 1963, before moving to Ontario, where he later opened the Grant Avenue studio. He began to work with Brian Eno in 1980 and went on to coproduce U2’s record Unforgettable Fire with him, a successful production that brought Peter Gabriel to ask Lanois for his collaboration on the soundtrack of the film Birdy. Lanois and Gabriel continued to work together, producing Gabriel’s record So, a million-selling album. A year later, Lanois and Eno joined forces again to produce U2’s The Joshua Tree, which won a Grammy Award. By 1989, Lanois’s work, carried out in his New Orleans studio, had become a success: he worked on Bob Dylan’s comeback album Oh Mercy as well as on Yellow Moon by the Neville Brothers, singers of francophone origin. In 1991, he produced U2’s Achtung Baby and Peter Gabriel’s US, going on to produce the
689
records of various artists such as Luscious Jackson, Brian Blade, Scott Weiland, Jon Hassell, and Willie Nelson’s 1998 Teatro— named after Lanois’s favorite workshop, an old cinema in a Chicano city northeast of Los Angeles where Lanois also wrote the music for Sling Blade. His following great achievements include the production of soundtracks for a number of films, which include Until the End of the World (Wenders, 1991), Last of the Mohicans (Mann, 1993), Philadelphia (Demme, 1993), Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996), Sling Blade (Thornton, 1996, for which he wrote and played the music), and Good Will Hunting (Van Sant, 1997). As music composer, he has also recorded Lost in Mississippi (1996) and Sweet Angel Mine (1996). Lanois is also known as a singer and songwriter. His Kingsway Studio in New Orleans is where he recorded his first solo album, Acadie, which was chosen as Disque de la décennie (record of the decade) in 1989 by a French jury of ten music critics brought together by the music magazine CD-Mag. Composer, songwriter, musician, and singer, Lanois’s debut album was followed in 1993 by The Beauty of Winona and in 1994 by Cool Water. In February 2002, he won the Record of the Year award for his work on U2’s Walk On with Brian Eno and was inducted in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the Juno Awards the following April. Described as a blend of pop, folk, and rhythm and blues, Lanois’s music presents delicate songs, in both French and English, flavored with nuances of Quebec folk music and patois. For the first time in July 2002, he gave a performance at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Martine Delvaux
690
LARA, CHRISTIAN See also: Dylan, Bob; Jazz; Music (Pop). References Brunet, Alain. “Après la musique de Sling Blade Lanois retourne à la case solo.” La Presse (May 25, 1997). Quill, Greg. “The Man behind Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, the Neville Brothers, U2 . . . Multitalented Producer Daniel Lanois Boosted These Artists’ Careers. Now He’s Gone Back to the Music—His Own.” Toronto Star (February 23, 2002).
LARA, CHRISTIAN (1939–) Born in Guadeloupe, the first filmmaker from the French West Indies to reach success in France and worldwide with films deeply rooted in his culture. Christian Lara’s projects are political and not commercial, and he always uses Creole, his mother tongue, as the vehicle for his opinions. Proud of his nation’s history, Lara likes to recall his origins. His great-grandfather was a slave emancipated in 1848 who became a journalist before founding a newspaper, Le Progrès, and his grandfather was author of a history of Guadeloupe. Coco Lafleur, candidat (1979), his first feature film, was released in Paris with advertisements presenting it as “The first West Indian film.” The film quickly became a success, and the advertisement changed to “A real political French film, at last!” With all dialogue in Creole, this comedy pictures a naïve candidate winning an election. But under the laughs real political questions are raised, such as whether West Indian French are French or not. In 1980, three very different films were released, Mamito, Chap’la, and Vivre libre ou mourir (“To Live Free or to Die”). Mainly due to distribution difficulties,
these simultaneous releases gave the opportunity to discover the quality of Lara’s work and the wide spectrum he covered. Mamito is a popular comedy with a touch of social consciousness, delivered in a simple and straightforward manner, to show the life of an old lady lost in an administrative labyrinth. Chap’la uses an archetypal detective story, very much in the style of the American blaxploitation films of the seventies. Turning things upside down, it is a brilliant statement about colonization and how it deeply marked people’s minds. These two films naturally used Creole to be close to their audience, but also as a cultural attitude. Vivre libre ou mourir concentrates on Guadeloupe’s history and poses the question: how can a hero from Guadeloupe exist on the screen? Using Creole and French to emphasize the colonial process by which one language is supplanted by another, the drama is built around the trial of a commander in Bonaparte’s army in 1810. Ignace, a legendary figure in the history of Guadeloupe, led a rebellion against the restoration of slavery, which had been abolished in 1794. Dissatisfied with the low budget of the film, Lara chose to do a remake. Shot in 1998, Sucre amer was only released four years later. The film, one of Lara’s most inventive films, is of real historical significance that still resonates today. The film contrasts the high ideals of liberty and equality expressed by the French Revolution and Napoléon with the horrible reality of slavery. Major figures from the history of Guadeloupe are brought together today to reexamine the “Ignace case.” The story line includes fact and drama, both political insight and courtroom theatrics. It is a dense and gripping film, with the evident intention of restoring Guadeloupean
LAROCHE, MAXIMILIEN
memory obliterated by the cultural imperialism of metropolitan France. Further, it has the ambitious project of showing that a better understanding of Guadeloupe’s history contributes to a better understanding of France’s history. Roger Bourdeau See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; French Revolution; Guadeloupe; Slavery. Reference Cham, Mbye B. Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1992.
LAROCHE, MAXIMILIEN (1937–) Haitian intellectual. One of the foremost academics working at the interface of Haitian, Quebec, and American studies, Maximilien Laroche has produced an eclectic, highly original body of work that is essential reading for students of New World cultures. Born in Cap-Haïtien, Laroche gained a law degree in 1958 from the Université d’Haïti. From 1960 to 1962 he worked on a bachelor of arts and a master’s in Spanish literature at the Université de Montréal. Still in Montreal, Laroche gained a Diplôme d’études supérieures (advanced studies diploma) in 1968. Three years later, he earned a doctorate in comparative literature from the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail. His wide-ranging studies, coupled with his multilingualism (he speaks Haitian, French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese), effectively laid the foundations for his subsequent broad academic analyses of New World cultures at the Université Laval in Sainte-Foy, Quebec, where he has taught since 1971.
691
Laroche is the author of numerous important studies, including La Double Scène de la représentation: Oraliture et littérature dans la Caraïbe (“The Double Scene of Representation: “Oraliture” and Literature in the Caribbean,” 1991), La Découverte de l’Amérique par les Américains (“The Discovery of America by the Americans,” 1989), Le Patriarche, le marron et la dossa (“The Patriarch, the Maroon, and the Dossa,” 1988), Contribution à l’étude du réalisme merveilleux (“Contribution to the Study of Magic Realism,” 1987), and L’Avènement de la littérature haïtienne (“The Emergence of Haitian Literature,” 1987). Typically, Laroche’s Haitian work focuses on questions of literature, language, oral culture, exile, and the collective imagination. His 1993 study, Dialectique de l’américanisation (“Dialectics of Americanisation”), is an analysis of what “American” means that takes in works from Quebec, the Caribbean, Brazil, and China, while works such as Le Miracle et la métamorphose (“The Miracle of Metamorphosis,” 1971) and Marcel Dubé (1970) demonstrate his interest in Québécois culture. The originality of his work lies as much in the diversity of his critical approaches as in his breadth of focus: he is as much at ease with sociological analyses of popular culture as with questions of modernity and postmodernity in the Caribbean. His knowledge of New World cultures has enabled him to make telling comparisons across the Americas, bringing out, for example, the various occurrences of “Bad John” figures in cultural imaginations in Haiti, the anglophone Caribbean, and Latin America. Laroche’s complete works are currently being republished in Haiti by Editions Mémoire as part of a project to make his work
692
LASSALLE, EUGÈNE
available to Haitian students. Despite his long separation from Haiti and his Canadian citizenship, he has retained a very strong bond with his country of origin, notably in his promotion of Haitian Creole both as a living, evolving language and as an idiom of academic discourse (his 2000 work Teke is written entirely in Haitian). This continued close bond with Haiti and his importance as a cultural historian, critic, and commentator were both confirmed in the nomination of Laroche in 1999 as Chevalier de l’Ordre national Honneur et Mérite de la République d’Haïti. Martin Munro See also: Haiti; Language. References Laroche, Maximilien. La Découverte de l’Amérique par les Américains. Quebec: GRELCA, 1989. ———. Bizango. Quebec: GRELCA, 1997. ———. La Double scène de la représentation, oraliture et littérature dans la Caraïbe. Quebec: GRELCA, 1997; Port-au-Prince: Mémoire, 2000. ———. Teke. Port-au-Prince: Mémoire, 2000.
LASSALLE, EUGÈNE (1859–1929) Actor and teacher, born in Saint-André-deCubzac in the Gironde region of France in 1859. Lassalle studied at the Bordeaux Seminary, then became an actor in 1877 and appeared onstage in Paris, across France, and abroad. In around 1892, he toured Europe, Asia Minor, and Central Asia, traveling as far as Tibet. In 1906 he was employed as an actor at the Théâtre des Nouveautés in Montreal, although it is unclear how he ended up in Canada. He became artistic director of the theater the following year.
In 1907, Lassalle and his wife, the actress Marie-Louise Doelling, opened a Conservatory of French Elocution in order to teach children how to “speak correctly,” but using theater as a context for recitation. The conservatory was an instant hit with the Montreal bourgeoisie, who saw in it a way of ensuring a more upscale pronunciation for their offspring, but also with actors from amateur dramatics circles who sought a means of deepening their knowledge of their craft. The institution, which quickly became known as the Conservatoire Lassalle, was recognized as a school of public interest, and it obtained government funding in 1908. For several decades, the Conservatoire Lassalle was one of the main training grounds for actors in Quebec. Lassalle was also a professor of spoken eloquence at the Collège de Montréal, and he published his first work, Comédiens et amateurs (“Actors and Amateurs”), in 1919, in which he recounted part of his travels, as well as defining his (classical) aesthetics of theater and offering a brief summing up of his experiences in Montreal. Two further works followed, Aimons, rions, chantons en France et au Canada (published in Paris in 1924) and Ce que je vois? Ce que je pense (published in Montreal in 1925), which were both collections of songs, verse, and witticisms. Furthermore, he staged an adaptation of La Passion (“The Passion”) that was a huge hit in the 1920s. He was made Officier d’Académie in 1898 and Officier de l’Instruction Publique in 1911 and was a member of the Alliance Française and the Union nationale française de Montréal. Lassalle died in Montreal on March 1, 1929. Lucie Robert See also: Montreal; Theater.
LAURE, CAROLE Reference Bélanger, Reine. “Comédiens et Amateurs, essai d’Eugène Lassalle.” Dictionnaire des Oeuvres littéraires du Québec. Vol. 2, 1900–1940. Montreal: Fides, 1982: 262.
LAURE, CAROLE (1948–) Québécois film actress and singer. If the Quebec cinematic context is not conducive to the emergence and sustenance of the extraordinary personae required of major film stars, Carole Laure, like Geneviève Bujold, has managed to retain a very Québécois identity at home while enjoying international success. Unlike Bujold, however, she has found her success limited to the French film industry and star system. Born in the small town of Shawinigan, Quebec, Laure qualified in Montreal as a primary school teacher and also pursued theater, landing small roles in films of the early 1970s such as Jacques Godbout’s IXE-13 (1971). It was above all her collaboration with Gilles Carle, with whom she made six films, that laid the foundations for her career. After a secondary role in Les Corps célestes/The Heavenly Bodies (1973), Carle cast her as a modern Maria Chapdelaine in La Mort d’un bûcheron/The Death of a Lumberjack (1973) and as the psychologically fragile heroine of La Tête de Normande Saint-Onge/The Head of Normande Saint-Onge (1975). The persona that emerged in these films was one centered on her dark-haired physical beauty and modern if sometimes anxious and vulnerable sensuality, unashamedly put into spectacle by Carle. After the parenthesis of the blackand-white quasi-experimental L’Ange et la femme (“The Angel and the Woman,” 1977), it was therefore a logical develop-
693
ment to cast her as a member of a musical theater troupe in Fantastica (1980). In the 1970s and 1980s, Carle’s status in France, together with the development of coproductions between Quebec and European cinemas, paved the way for Laure’s transatlantic career. Perhaps in reaction to the use made of her in Yugoslav director Dusan Makavajev’s Sweet Movie (1974), in which she notoriously rolls around in melted chocolate, her subsequent roles became more serious or at least on the borders of genre and auteur cinema: most notably she appeared opposite Yves Montand in Alain Corneau’s La Menace/The Threat (1977) and in Bertrand Blier’s Préparez vos mouchoirs/Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), in which she played the frigid wife of Gérard Depardieu. By 1983 she was sufficiently established to be the linchpin of the cast of Carle’s lavish coproduction remake of Maria Chapdelaine. While she was arguably too old for the role, her link to the cinema of Quebec modernity meant that she rendered the character of Maria more complex, bringing to her more active and autonomous—if not feminist—elements, which offered a new perspective on the tale. Laure’s only film with a U.S. director was for John Huston in the POW drama Escape to Victory (1981), in which she played a member of the French underground during World War II. Since the late 1970s and her relationship with the anglophone musician and film director Lewis Furey, who wrote the music for Fantastica and Maria Chapdelaine, Carole Laure’s gift for spectacle has often expressed itself in the musical domain. She took the lead role in his Night Music (1985), written in collaboration with Leonard Cohen, and with Furey has produced a series of albums in which her
694
LAUTRÉAMONT, COMTE
DE
singing voice expresses itself in a variety of styles, including tango, country and western, and techno. In 2002 she directed her first feature film, Les Fils de Marie/Marie’s Sons, and her second, CQ2/Seek You Too, in 2004. Bill Marshall See also: Bujold, Geneviève; Carle, Gilles; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Depardieu, Gérard; Godbout, Jacques; Maria Chapdelaine; Montand, Yves; Quebec. References Coulombe, Michel, and Marcel Jean, eds. Le Dictionnaire du cinéma québécois. Montreal: Boréal, 1999. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
LAUTRÉAMONT, COMTE (ISIDORE DUCASSE) (1846–1870)
DE
French poet. The son of French émigrés in Uruguay, educated in both South America and southern France, and producing his major works in Paris, Lautréamont is of uncertain national status. Born in 1846 in Montevideo, Uruguay, the “comte de Lautréamont” (a pseudonym inspired by a character in Eugène Sue’s fiction) is celebrated for his monumental prose poem Les Chants de Maldoror (1868): an uncategorizable exploration of isolation, madness, and evil, it recounts the violent fantasies and adventures of an ever-metamorphosing antihero. Eulogized by the French surrealists for his hallucinatory imagery, and canonized by the Tel Quel brigade as the quintessence of faceless, authorless textuality, Lautréamont has also been claimed by some Uruguayan scholars as an exiled Latin American poet. His birth in Montevideo
was a typical result of the mid-nineteenthcentury phenomenon of large-scale emigration to Uruguay and Argentina by French paysans (peasants) of the Southwest. Leaving the Americas for France in 1859 at the age of thirteen, Ducasse became a boarder at Tarbes, then at the lycée in Pau, returning to Uruguay in 1867 for some months, before finally settling in Paris. He died in 1870, at the age of twenty-four, in his Paris apartment, during the Prussian siege of the city. Nothing is known about the cause of his death, and recorded details of his short life between two continents are scarce. Lautréamont’s “French Atlantic” significance is not merely a matter of biographical anecdote: it is manifested in numerous ways in his writing. The setting of some of Maldoror’s most violently erotic assaults, and itself the object of a painful desire, the (Atlantic) Ocean, crossed by Ducasse at key moments of childhood and adolescence, is, throughout the Chants, the unsettled site of outlandish witnessing, traumatic fragmentation, and radical transformation. The dry land in the narrative is equally fluid: Maldoror’s amply described territories encompass not only specific streets in the beaux quartiers or posh areas of Paris but also the galloping horse terrain of the South American pampas. Jaguars are as familiar figures in the text as Parisian grave diggers, all occurring naturally within the free-floating mindscape of a protagonist as otherworldly as he is specifically Franco-Uruguayan. The language too is speckled with by-products of cultural mixing, an oddly hispanicized French vocabulary and syntax being the frequent result. Most noteworthy of all, Maldoror’s world is one almost entirely peopled by outcasts, hybrids, and unnamable subjects: her-
LAVAL, FRANÇOIS
maphrodites and revolting animal-men are just two of the monstrously confused figures that recur in the narratives with disturbing insistence. With a far greater violence even than Sade, Lautréamont’s displaced and unhinged text explodes categories of signification, identity, power, and sexuality, its speaking subjects instead undergoing constant psychic disintegration and reconfiguration and dwelling in an unfixed and unreadable space between orders, realms, and identities. Andrew Asibong See also: Argentina; Language; Surrealism; Tel Quel. References Lefrère, J.-J. Isidore Ducasse, auteur des Chants de Maldoror par le Comte de Lautréamont. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Winkelmann, Klaus. Lautréamont Impersonator: A Study in Poetic Autobiography. Ottawa: Naaman, 1974.
LAVAL, FRANÇOIS MONTMORENCY (1623–1708)
DE
First bishop of Quebec; born FrançoisXavier de Montmorency-Laval de Montigny at Montigny-sur-Avre, April 30, 1623; died May 6, 1708, at Quebec. Laval’s family was an illustrious one, whose ancestor is said to have been baptized with the Frankish ruler Clovis at Reims in 496. Initially a pawn in the Jesuit struggle against the French Crown and the state church of France, Laval quickly became known as the colony’s most formidable cleric, laying the foundations, in two periods in Canada, for the Roman Catholic Church in France’s North American colonies.
DE
MONTMORENCY
695
After a strong Jesuit education at La Flèche and Clermont, and despite inheriting the family title and estate after the death of two older brothers, Laval was ordained in 1747. He was sent to Quebec for the first time in 1659, but as bishop of Petraea, as there was not yet a diocese of Quebec. His arrival was both the result and the instigator of power struggles. His nomination was in direct opposition to a Crown-controlled Sulpician candidate, Gabriel de Queylus. The Jesuits, with the support of the queen-regent and various high-placed friends, were able to place Laval. Despite swearing allegiance to the French king, Laval was without a doubt the representative of the pope in Canada. Upon landing in Quebec he asserted his precedence over de Queylus, as well as over the governor himself in religious matters. Despite his attempts to centralize church matters in Quebec, through the creation of church courts and the Quebec Seminary (1663), the lack of a true Quebec diocese due to royal conflict with Rome limited his ambitions. Laval left Canada in 1671, stating that he would not return until he could truly be called bishop of Quebec. Rome created the diocese of Quebec in 1674, and Laval returned to the colony as its bishop. His diocese was vast, comprising all of North America from the Atlantic coast, with the exception of New England, to the western Spanish colonies. In Canada, he oversaw the construction of churches and schools, and numerous good works were accomplished under his episcopacy. His ambition of subjecting all of the colony’s Catholics to his power was somewhat contained by royal hindering. The Crown continued to protect the Sulpicians, and the Franciscans, very loyal to the king, were reintroduced into the colony.
696
LE BRIS, MICHEL
Nonetheless, upon his resignation in 1685 due to sickness and age, his church appeared firmly implanted in the colony. Laval’s stubborn and incompetent successor, Jean-Baptiste de La Croix de SaintVallier, spent twelve years undoing his work, so much so that after his removal Laval was forced to assume the role of bishop until his own death. Laval’s legacy includes two major points. Firstly, the formation of priests in Canada at the Quebec Seminary led to a highly “indigenous” clergy, which was to remain so even after the British conquest. Secondly, his attachment to Rome rather than to France paved the way for the politics of the later Quebec church. Brian Brazeau See also: Catholic Church; Jesuits; Quebec. References Eccles, W. J. France in America. Rev. ed. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1990. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Document: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. 73 vols. Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1901.
LE BRIS, MICHEL (1944–) French novelist, travel writer, R. L. Stevenson specialist, and cultural activist, Le Bris has been active since the early 1980s in producing French editions of works of North American literature (e.g., Mark Twain, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Henry James) and introducing contemporary American authors to the French reading public. Born in Finistère, he is one of a number of Bretons for whom this region at France’s western extremity is to be seen not
as a marginal but as a liminal zone, a threshold for transatlantic journeys to the Americas. Traditional understandings of France as a Mediterranean (i.e., classical) culture, relegating this European Far West to a Celtic, nonfrancophone periphery, are disrupted by the privileging of a FrancoAmerican dialogue and associated reassertion of the Atlantic as a space central to more open, dynamic understandings of French identity. Le Bris’s early career was marked by political engagement, with his editorship of La Cause du peuple (The Cause of the People) leading to an eight-month period of imprisonment in the period following 1968. Le Bris was an unlikely revolutionary, however, contributing to Jazz hot magazine and actively promoting U.S. detective fiction to a French readership. His interest in North American culture became more apparent as his career developed. As one of the principal French scholars of Robert Louis Stevenson’s work, Le Bris became fascinated, for instance, by the Scottish author’s stay in California, a subject that underpins his own account of a West Coast journey, La Porte d’or (“The Golden Gate,” 1986). Le Bris’s interest in this area of the United States has led also to work on the gold rush (La Fièvre de l’or [The Gold Rush], 1988), a study of the Californian exile of French revolutionaries in the period after 1848 (Quand la Californie était française [When California Was French], 1999), and a photo-essay inspired by travel there (L’Ouest américain, territoires sauvages, “The American West, Wild Territories,” 1999). Since 1990, when he also launched the periodical Gulliver (a French-language equivalent of the Anglo-American publication Granta), Le Bris has organized the an-
LE CLÉZIO, JEAN MARIE GUSTAVE
nual Etonnants voyageurs (Astonishing Travelers) festival in Saint-Malo. Devoted initially to travel writing, this international event has grown to encompass other genres, especially the roman noir (dark police thriller) (the French version of which he sees as a striking example of literary transculturation). Through the regular meeting of authors from both sides of the Atlantic, Le Bris has encouraged a dialogue with contemporary authors from North and South America as well as from the Caribbean, authors such as James Crumley, Mary Crow Dog, Jim Harrison, Ed McBain, Francisco Coloane, Alvaro Mutis, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Edouard Glissant. A satellite festival was launched in Montana, and the themes of the Saint-Malo event have regularly reflected its transatlantic preoccupations: the Caribbean in 1993, North America in 1997. Le Bris’s activity—as author, editor, and organizer—reveals his commitment to a literature that eschews national boundaries and is open to a more complex understanding of world culture. His reflection on the French Atlantic reveals an awareness of the long-standing and complex nature of that space, seeing transatlantic trajectories not in terms of influences but of more dynamically creative dialogues. Charles Forsdick See also: Brittany; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Crime Fiction; Glissant, Edouard; Jazz. References Forsdick, Charles. “Fin de siècle, fin des voyages? Michel Le Bris and the Search for une littérature voyageuse.” French Prose in 2000. Ed. Michael Bishop and Christopher Elson. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2002: 47–55. Le Bris, Michel. Fragments du royaume: Conversations avec Yvon Le Men. Vénissieux: Paroles d’Aube, 1995.
697
LE CLÉZIO, JEAN MARIE GUSTAVE (1940–) French writer, born in Nice. Le Clézio’s father was a British doctor in colonial Africa, and his mother was French. His literary breakthrough came in 1963, at the age of twenty-three, when he published Le Procès-verbal/The Interrogation, the first of more than thirty novels. His specialized diploma at the University of Aix-en-Provence was based on a study of solitude in the works of Henri Michaux, and this painful emotional dimension dominates his 1965 short story collection, La Fièvre/Fever. Le Clézio’s many travels have included Mexico, where he stayed in 1967, with frequent visits to Panama, and where he was fascinated by native Indian culture, and also New York, where he developed an aversion to the anonymity of life in modern industrial cities, a major theme of his 1966 novel Le Déluge (The Flood). The Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo are at the center of Diego et Frida (1993). The islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues are the inspiration for Le Chercheur d’or/The Prospector (1986) (which is also about origins, as it recounts the adventures of his paternal grandfather) and for Voyage à Rodrigues (“Voyage to Rodrigues,” 1986), about his own itinerary. The wanderings of the Jewish people are the theme of Etoile errante (“Wandering Star,” 1992). Family narrative is at the center of Onitsha (1991), about a young boy’s quest for his father. La Quarantaine (1995) tells the story of passengers on a ship stricken by a smallpox epidemic who are confined to an island. Deserts, which he and his wife enjoy traveling in, also play an important role in Le Clézio’s works, most obviously in Désert
698
LE CORBUSIER
(1980), which celebrates the blue-clad nomads of the Sahara and which won the Prix Paul Morand, and La Fête enchantée (“The Enchanted Feast,” 1997). Le Clézio’s later novels include Poisson d’or (“The Goldfish,” 1997), a tragic tale of a dispossessed girl, and Gens de nuages (“Cloud People,”1997). Révolutions (2003) is an account of the revolutions of various kinds that marked the lives of his ancestors on Mauritius and also his own in Algeria, Britain, and Mexico, all lands lost and sought after, in what he considers to be his primal relationship to exile. In 2002 Le Clézio was elected member of the Prix Renaudot jury. Jérôme Ceccon See also: Mexico; Michaux, Henri; Travel Writing. References Le Clézio, J. M. G., and Pierre Lhoste. Conversations avec J.-M.G. Le Clézio. Paris: Mercure de France, 1971. Onimus, Jean. Pour lire Le Clézio. Paris: PUF, 1994.
LE CORBUSIER (CHARLESEDOUARD JEANNERET-GRIS) (1887–1965) Swiss-born French architect, painter, and urban planner. A major leader in modernist architecture and urban planning, Le Corbusier made three trips to South America, in 1929, 1936, and 1962, and two to the United States, in 1935 and 1946, during which he promoted his conception of the international style. His first trip in 1929 was a lecture tour spanning Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay and resulted in Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et
de l’urbanisme/Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and Urbanism (1930), with its site-specific city plans for Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Montevideo. In 1936, when he returned to Rio de Janeiro, Le Corbusier met with architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to advise them on the construction of the National Ministry of Education and Public Health (1937–1943). With this project, as well as their architectural designs for the Cidade Universitária and the Brazilian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Costa and Niemeyer borrowed from and transformed Le Corbusier’s Socialist utopian ideas to form what became known as the “brazilian style.” Le Corbusier’s La Ville radieuse/The Radiant City (1935) had an influence on Costa’s plans for Brasilia (1956–1960) and public housing plans in New York City, yet in both cases other factors, such as preexisting demolition practices in New York, had a negative impact on modernism’s reputation. Where New York public housing projects borrowed from Le Corbusier’s cruciform and Y-shaped residential towers, Costa’s more ambitious plan for Brasilia adopted the superquadras (apartment blocks) but remedied flaws such as the lack of services and local cultural and leisure facilities. However, only ten of Costa’s planned ninety-two original superquadras were completed, no public support ensued for low-income housing or jobs, and later privatized construction neglected public spaces and pedestrian zones and resulted in poorly planned satellite cities. In 1935, Le Corbusier visited the Ford plant in River Rouge, Michigan, and promoted his concept of the Radiant City on a lecture tour. In Quand les Cathédrales étaient blanches: Voyage au pays des
LE FRANC, MARIE
timides/When the Cathedrals Were White: Voyage to the Land of the Timid (1937), he praised U.S. public projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority but criticized the timidity of the United States in relation to ambitious urban plans. In 1946, he returned to the United States to collaborate on designs for the UN headquarters, influencing the choice of a Manhattan site and much of the final design. On the same trip, he lectured in Bogotá, for which he drafted a site-specific urban plan. In 1957, he collaborated again with Costa on the Maison Brésil (Brazil House) at the Cité Universitaire in Paris and, in 1962, traveled to Brasilia to work on a proposed French embassy. Although his only realized buildings in the Americas are the ministry in Rio, the Maison Curutchet (1949) in Buenos Aires, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (1961–1964), his visits advanced the cause of the promoters of the international style, urban centralization, and public housing. Maureen Shanahan See also: Architecture; Argentina; Brazil. References Bacon, Mardges. Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Deckker, Thomas. “Brasília, City versus Landscape.” The Modern City Revisited. Ed. Thomas Deckker. London: Spon, 2000: 167–193.
LE FRANC, MARIE (1879–1964) Novelist, short story writer, and poet, born October 4, 1879, in Sarzeau (Brittany), died December 29, 1964, in SaintGermain-en Laye (Paris region).
699
Well before the high profile taken at the end of the twentieth century by the figures of migrant literature, Marie Le Franc from the 1910s followed a triangular itinerary that included Brittany, France, and Quebec. Her work takes its inspiration, therefore, from a multiplicity of cultures. Le Franc grew up in Brittany on the Atlantic coast. At the age of seventeen she obtained the diploma, from the Ecole normale at Vannes, qualifying her for the teaching profession. She was, however, invited to Montreal by Arsène Bessette, editor of Canada français. Finding herself in January 1906 alone in the city, to make ends meet she started writing for the newspapers Le Nationaliste and La Patrie and taught French. Her life and works from then on are testimony to a constant coming and going between Brittany and Quebec. Her first work, a collection of poetry entitled Voix du cœur et de l’âme (Voice of the Heart and the Spirit), was published in 1920 in Montreal, but her career really took off with the publication in France in 1927 of her first novel, Grand-Louis l’Innocent/The Whisper of a Name, which won the Prix Femina. From 1920 to 1961, she published seventeen works, including eight novels and five short story collections, as well as writing for various magazines. Her writing activity, inspiration, and publishers were to be found on both sides of the Atlantic. From the 1930s to the 1950s she gave many lectures and frequently appeared on radio programs, where in general she discussed topics relating to rural Breton and French Canadian life. Despite a solitary existence in which she tended to steer clear of literary networks and salons, throughout her life Le Franc kept up many relations, including
700
LE HAVRE
epistolary ones, with writers in Quebec and France. Her works were received in a dual manner, reminiscent of the difficulties mainstream literary histories have of categorizing works that are attached to more than one national literature. The tendency has been to label her novels either romans de la neige or romans de la lande, the first (novels of snow) associated with Quebec literature, the second (novels of moor, or heath) with French and Breton literature. Nevertheless, the consecration of her works occurred rapidly in all three territories. Besides the Prix Femina, she was awarded in 1931 the Académie Française’s Prix Montyon for Inventaire (“Inventory”), a collection of essays. In 1937 she helped found the Académie de Bretagne. After World War II she received the Légion d’honneur and in 1952 was admitted to the Société des gens de lettres. Her important role in the cultural life of Quebec was recognized as early as 1934, when the Quebec government named a lake in the Laurentian Mountains after her. Daniel Chartier and Dominic Marcil See also: Brittany; Literary Relations; Quebec; World War II. References Boivin, Aurélien, and Gwénaëlle Lucas, eds. Marie Le Franc: La rencontre de la Bretagne et du Québec. Quebec: Nota Bene, 2002. Ducrocq-Poirier, Madeleine. Marie Le Franc: Au-delà de son personnage. Montreal: La Presse, 1982.
LE HAVRE Le Havre was from the start a departure point for the great expeditions of the early explorers of the New World: it was from here that Giovanni da Verrazzano set sail
for North America in 1524, Villegagnon for Rio de Janeiro in 1555, Jean Ribaut and René de Laudonnière for Florida in 1562, Champlain for Canada in 1604, Belain d’Esnanbuc for the West Indies and South America in 1620, to name a few. At the same time, Le Havre thrived on cod fishing off the coast of Newfoundland. The Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) transformed Le Havre from a trading port into a military one, and it was not until 1627 that it was once again open to trade, with the founding of the Saint Christopher Company, created to trade with the West Indies. Soon after, Richelieu became governor of Le Havre and invested greatly in reinforcing the port’s trade and military capacities. By 1669, it had been transformed into France’s largest military port and arsenal under the reign of Louis XIV. The East India Company, founded by French statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was set up in Le Havre in 1664, opening the first maritime trade routes with India, China, and Madagascar. By the eighteenth century, Le Havre had become one of France’s largest ports specializing in the slave trade. Le Havre also played a vital role in the uprising of the American colonies against Great Britain. In 1775, officers of the French army embarked from the port for Santo Domingo and, from there, on to Boston to aid the colonialists in their siege of the city. In 1776, Beaumarchais went to Le Havre to equip those vessels destined to assist the American colonialists with weapons, ammunition, and military personnel. In March 1798, the merchants from Le Havre sent ninety-eight fully loaded merchant vessels to assist their New World allies.
LE MOYNE
The revolution did little to disturb local trade, including trade with the West Indies up to 1793. Later on, the wars with Britain, the various rebellions, the loss of Santo Domingo, the abolition of slavery in 1794, and the increasingly severe ban on the slave trade progressively brought about the downfall of Le Havre as a major trading town. The empire was greeted with a sigh of relief from local traders, who were longing for quieter times for the sake of business. However, despite Napoléon’s reestablishment of the slave trade in 1802, overall economic activity had slackened significantly as early as 1803 and had almost stopped altogether between 1807 and 1809. During the nineteenth century, Le Havre became a major European trading port for cotton and coffee and experienced a boom in passenger traffic. At the same time its shipbuilding activities increased greatly, especially in the construction of cruise ships. In the twentieth century, Le Havre became the temporary seat of the Belgian government during World War I (1914–1915). During World War II, the port was occupied by German troops (1940–1944). Today, the port is one of the largest in the world in terms of cargo traffic. It is the leading French port in terms of general cargo and container traffic, transiting over 20 million tons of merchandise annually. The port of Le Havre is also France’s secondlargest oil port, handling over 40 million tons of crude oil and derivatives. In terms of passenger traffic, nearly a million passengers pass through Le Havre annually to and from the United Kingdom. In addition, over 40,000 passengers a year call into port from thirty-nine cruise liners. Claudia Wolosin
DE
MORGUES, JACQUES 701
See also: Champlain, Samuel de; Coffee; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Cotton; Fishing; Newfoundland; Ribaut, Jean; Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Verrazzano, Giovanni da; World War I; World War II. References Gibory, Eric. Normandie. Paris: Hachette, 2003. Herval, René. Normandie. Grenoble: Arthaud, 1971.
LE MOYNE DE MORGUES, JACQUES (CA. 1533–1588) French artist who accompanied René de Laudonnière’s expedition to Florida in 1564 and whose pictures of the Timucua Indians of northeastern Florida provide one of the most important visual records of North America during the period of discovery. Beyond the fact that he was born in Dieppe, a Huguenot, nothing is known of Le Moyne’s background and early career. His later work, however, suggests he may have trained as a miniaturist, and his terms of engagement when recruited by Laudonnière indicate that he had by that time established himself as an accomplished cartographer and draftsman. Le Moyne spent fifteen months in Florida at the colony centered on Fort Caroline and was one of the lucky few to escape with their lives when the Spaniards under Menéndez overran the settlement and butchered most of its inhabitants in September 1565. Once back in France, Le Moyne reported to Charles IX, who advised him to put together an illustrated account of what he had seen. Nothing at all is known of him subsequently until, a refugee from the religious strife in France, he settled in London in or about 1580. Within a few years, Le Moyne
702
LE MOYNE
DE
MORGUES, JACQUES
Florida Indians planting seeds of beans or maize, 1591. Engraving by Theodore de Bry after watercolor by Jacques Le Moyne. (Library of Congress)
had been drawn into English colonizing circles and was enjoying the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh. He came into contact with the artist-explorer John White, and the two may well have worked together after White’s return from the 1585 expedition to establish an English colony on Roanoke Island. By then, with his own American adventure well behind him, Le Moyne’s interests had widened to include botanical painting. In 1586 he published a pattern book of woodcuts of flora and fauna entitled La Clef des champs/Portraits of Plants. Upon his death, his illustrated account of life among the Timucua was acquired by Theodore de Bry, the engraver and publisher. De Bry’s copperplate engravings after Le Moyne’s pictures, together with the
written account, were published in 1591 as part 2 of his monumental Historia Americae. (Part 1, in defiance of the chronology, consisted of de Bry’s engravings after John White’s Virginia drawings.) Le Moyne’s forty or so pictures thus became a major component of the first books to illustrate with any accuracy or sophistication the world being opened up across the Atlantic. Only one original by Le Moyne, a delightful miniature featuring the son of the Timucuan chief and Laudonnière (New York Public Library), is known. It must be assumed that, apart from a few pieces sent back to France earlier, his Florida work did not survive the 1565 catastrophe and that the elaborate pictures subsequently used by de Brie—also lost—were produced from memory back in Europe. This re-
LEBEL, JEAN-JACQUES
liance on memory may partly account for the fact that the engravings are not always ethnographically authentic and tend to be rather mannered. Portraits of a Timucuan man and woman, which exist only in copies by White (London, British Museum), provide evidence that his studies from life must have been rather more accurate and realistic. Christopher Rolfe See also: Florida; Huguenots; Painting. References Hulton, Paul. The Works of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a Huguenot Artist in France, Florida and England. 2 vols. London: British Museum Press, 1977. ———. “Images of the New World: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues and John White.” The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480–1650. Ed. K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978: 195–214.
LEBEL, JEAN-JACQUES (1936–) Artist and writer. He was born in Paris in 1936, but he spent part of his childhood, during the war years, in New York, where he met the leader of the surrealist movement, André Breton, and the dadaist Marcel Duchamp. Both men were major influences on the young Lebel, leading him to embrace art, poetry, and left-wing politics. He published a magazine of art, poetry, and politics, Front Unique, in Florence in 1955; was briefly associated with the Paris surrealists (1956–1959); and in 1960 launched the first European happening in Venice with L’Enterrement de la chose (“The Burial of the Thing”), soon followed by L’AntiProcès (“The Anti-Trial”), a collective
703
protest exhibition, involving some sixty artists, against the Algerian war and the use of torture by the French army, which toured until 1961 in the cities of Paris, Venice, and Milan. One of the works exhibited in Milan was the Grand Tableau anti-fasciste collectif (“Great Anti-Fascist Collective Tableau”), a large (4x5m) painting decrying the war that he produced with Enrico Baj, Roberto Crippa, Erró Gianni Dova, and Antonio Recalcati, which was, unsurprisingly, seized by the authorities and hidden from public view for twentyfour years. Lebel’s role as mediator between the avant-garde in Europe and the avant-garde in the United States stemmed from this political activism, and he acted as an important vector for countercultural activity between Europe and the States. He founded the Festival de la Libre Expression (Festival for Free Expression) in Paris in 1964, a workshop that ran until 1967, and acted as an international forum for artists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers, bringing the art of Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, the Living Theater, and the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, and others to new European audiences. His publications—notably his Anthologie de la poésie de la Beat Generation (Anthology of the Poetry of the Beat Generation) and Le Happening (1966) and Entretien avec le Living Theatre (“Interview with the Living Theatre,”1968)—were equally influential. In 1968, Lebel joined the Mouvement du 22 mars (Movement of the Twenty-Second of March) and the anarchist groups Noir et Rouge (Black and Red) and Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières (“Workers’ Information and Correspondence”) and was an activist in the student and workers’ uprising of May.
704
LECLERC, CHARLES-VICTOR-EMMANUEL, GENERAL
Lebel befriended Gilles Deleuze in the mid-1950s and Félix Guattari in the mid1960s, and in 1975 he made a trip to the United States with both men, introducing them to the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, Big Sur, Burroughs and Ginsberg, and the musicians Patti Smith, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. In 1979 Lebel founded the international Polyphonix Festival, again bringing artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers together; its fortieth anniversary was celebrated at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in October 2002. His return to art practice in 1988 was marked by exhibitions in galleries and museums in Europe, the United States, and Japan and was documented in a major retrospective at the Museum Moderner Kunst, 20er Haus, in Vienna in 1998. His more recent polymorphic, evolutionary installation Reliquaire pour un culte de Vénus (“Reliquary for a Cult of Venus,” begun at FRAC in 2001 and most recently exhibited at the Galerie Louis Carré and Cie, Paris, in February 2004) signifies his continued importance as a provocative artist who fuses erotic and political obscenity to make audiences think. His role as a curator of international exhibitions reinforces this agenda— from Jardì d’Eros (“Eros’s Garden,” Barcelona and Bergen, 1999–2000) to Picasso Erotique (Paris, Montreal, Barcelona, 2001–2002). Alyce Mahon See also: Breton, André; Burroughs, William S.; Deleuze, Gilles; Duchamp, Marcel; Dylan, Bob; Guattari, Félix; Music (Pop); Painting; Surrealism. References Baj, Enrico, et al. Grand Tableau Antifasciste Collectif. Paris: Dagorno, 2000. Jean-Jacques Lebel: Exhibition catalogue. Milan: Mazzotta, 1999. Lebel, Jean-Jacques, and Arnaud LabelleRojoux. Poésie Directe: Happenings, Interventions. Paris: Opus International Edition, 1994.
LECLERC, CHARLES-VICTOREMMANUEL, GENERAL (1772–1802) A successful career soldier whose fortunes were helped by his marriage to Napoléon’s sister. Charles Leclerc commanded the French corps in Spain, then the expeditionary corps in Haiti against revolutionaries Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines. The venture turned disastrous for the French forces and their general, who died of yellow fever like many of his subordinates. Born in Pontoise, near Paris, Leclerc was seventeen at the time of the French Revolution. He volunteered in 1791 into the ranks of the army and moved rapidly up the chain of command, getting a commission as a first lieutenant within a year. Given the responsibility of a division chief of staff at the siege of Toulon in 1793, he was noticed by Bonaparte, who kept him close to himself and to his general staff. Leclerc thus met Pauline, Bonaparte’s sister, whom he married in 1797. In the meantime, both men had campaigned on the Rhine and in Italy, and Leclerc won praise for his behavior at Castiglione and Rivoli. He was a brigadier general in 1797 and a divisional general two years later, when his brother-in-law seized power through the coup of 18 Brumaire, with the support of Leclerc’s forces. He again followed Bonaparte in Egypt, then commanded the force sent to Spain against Wellington and campaigned in Germany in 1800. The Peace of Amiens (1802) made him available for yet another command, which was to be his last. In Haiti, slavery had been first disputed, then officially banned during the turmoils of the French Revolution, and the
LECLERC, FÉLIX
island was in total revolt against the motherland. Toussaint L’Ouverture’s regime was virtually autonomous, to Napoléon’s chagrin. Leclerc departed on February 5 with a large force of 20,000 troops to end Haitian independence in the eastern half of Santo Domingo and to help assess French influence in the New World. His opponents put up strong resistance, but after three months had to resort to guerrilla warfare. Ultimately the invaders prevailed, and Toussaint negotiated a truce. One of Leclerc’s assistants, General Brunet, tricked him, and Toussaint was seized and deported to France on June 8, 1802. His followers, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Alexandre Pétion, rebelled again and took advantage of a surge of yellow fever that decimated French troops. Leclerc died of the fever himself on Santo Domingo’s Tortuga Island on November 2, 1802. His contingent, in spite of the support given by a U.S. naval embargo, was soon unable to sustain the fight and surrendered a year later (November 18, 1803). Claudia Wolosin See also: Antislavery Movements; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Christophe, Henri; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; French Revolution; Haiti; Santo Domingo; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François. References Haythornthwaite, Philip. Napoleon’s Commanders. Vol. 1, c. 1792–1809. Elite, 72. Oxford: Osprey, 2001. Mézière, Henri. Le Général Leclerc (1772–1802) et l’expédition de SaintDomingue. Paris: Tallandier, 1990.
LECLERC, FÉLIX (1914–1988) Quebec novelist, playwright, and singersongwriter.
705
Leclerc’s successful music career in the francophone world, from the 1950s to the 1970s, helped assert Quebec national identity on the international stage. He explored in his songs the myths of a Quebec identity, the supposed natural “authenticity” of the country’s vast landscape and the fraternal “simplicity” of its people. Leclerc was born in 1914 in Quebec, in a francophone family in the timber business. In his twenties, he started working as a writer for a Montreal radio station and created a series, broadcast from 1939 to 1945, in which he explored issues of Quebec national identity. These texts were quickly published, along with a collection of stories dealing with folk legends, the beauty of nature, and animals. On air, he also sang songs treating similar themes. While local producers neglected Leclerc, the French impresario Jacques Canetti heard him in 1950 during a trip to Quebec and offered him a contract to record an album in Paris. In France, Leclerc promoted this first album by opening for different French bands, and his popularity grew gradually, in and outside the French capital. He accompanied himself on the guitar and influenced the style of various French singer-songwriters. His performing career thus started in France, but it was not long before the success he had there spread to Quebec. Leclerc, who wore a checked logger’s jacket onstage, and sang about nature, friendship, and love, appealed to French audiences, who saw in him a certain Quebec “exoticism,” at the same time as the expression of natural “authenticity” and universal kindness. His most famous song is perhaps “Le P’tit Bonheur” (“The Little Happiness,” 1951), a song about a simple
706
LECLERCQ, CHRÉTIEN
man falling in and out of love and finding solace in his freedom. Leclerc managed to stamp his originality on this rather hackneyed theme through the use of a jaunty guitar rhythm, as well as through the celebration of an independent spirit, which echoed Quebec’s growing desire for national and political autonomy. Leclerc collected many prizes for his songwriting skills. The song “Moi, mes souliers”/Me, My Shoes, which won the first prize at the Charles-Cros Awards in 1951, set a precedent for a long list of other prestigious honors. He toured in francophone Europe and Quebec throughout the 1950s and 1960s and kept on writing novels, short stories, and plays. In the late 1960s, he settled in Quebec and started playing a prominent role in the struggle for political independence that was by then shaking the province. In 1974, he recorded a song written by the “new generation” band Beau Dommage and took part in the Superfrancofêtes Festival, supporting political autonomy alongside Gilles Vigneault and Robert Charlebois. Leclerc gathered yet more prizes for his musical oeuvre, until his name was given to the Quebec award for new artists. Leclerc died in his sleep in 1988. Barbara Lebrun See also: Beau Dommage; Charlebois, Robert; Dion, Céline; Music (Pop); Quebec; Timber; Vigneault, Gilles. References Baillargeon, Richard, and Christian Côté. Une Histoire de la musique populaire au Québec, Destination Ragou. Montreal: Triptyque, 1991. Bertin, Jacques. Félix Leclerc, le roi heureux. Paris/Montreal: Arléa-Boréal, 1988. Sermonte, Jean-Paul. Félix Leclerc, roi, poète et chanteur. Paris: Le Rocher, 1989.
LECLERCQ, CHRÉTIEN (?–CA. 1698) Recollet missionary to the Micmac tribe of the Gaspé region of Canada; one of the earliest historians of New France. Leclercq was born in Flanders and then moved to Artois to join the province of the Recollets of Saint Antoine. He set sail for the Gaspé region of Canada in 1673, and on October 11 of that year he was put in charge of the Micmac mission by Monsignor de Laval. Leclercq believed that he needed to learn the language of the Micmac tribe in order to devote himself fully to its evangelization. He spent twelve years of his life ministering to the Micmac tribe, as well as other tribes along the Gaspé coast, which he collectively called the “Gaspesians.” Upon his return to France in 1686, Leclercq published two rare works that are considered vital to the early history of New France: Premier établissement de la foy dans la Nouvelle-France (The First Establishment of the Faith in New France) and Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésie (New Account of Gaspésie). In the first volume of Premier établissement de la foy dans la Nouvelle-France, Leclercq recounts the early history of New France, the introduction of Catholicism to the colony, and the labors of the Recollet order, who were the first missionaries in Canada. This volume ends in 1629 after Quebec was taken over by the English. The second volume of this work spans the years 1632–1670 and further elaborates on the history of the colony and the spreading of Catholicism among the native tribes, especially by the Jesuit fathers. The third and final volume relates the travels and discoveries of de La Salle and ends with the victory of the French over the English at the siege of
LEFEBVRE, JEAN PIERRE
Quebec in 1690. An English translation of this work was published in 1881 by John Gilmary Shea. Leclercq’s Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésie in part recounts the process by which Leclercq invented a series of hieroglyphics that he used to teach the Micmac tribe to read its own language. During his second year among the Micmacs, Leclercq realized that very little progress had been made in evangelizing the tribe because they were simply learning prayers written in Roman characters by rote memorization. One day, after observing some children making marks on a piece of birch bark and, after seeing them repeat a given word and then point to the mark representing it, he felt that a similar system might be an easy technique for the Micmacs to learn their prayers in a short period of time. This method, which is still in use, was so prized by the Micmac people that they preserved their papers in bark cases adorned with wampum, beads, and porcupine quills. The Nouvelle relation was translated into English by W. F. Ganong in 1910. Unfortunately, very few details exist on the life of Chrétien Leclercq. The actual date and cause of his death are unknown, but he is reported to have been alive in 1698. It is said that until his demise he filled various positions of authority in the Artois province of the Recollet order. Stephanie Longo See also: Catholic Church; Jesuits; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Laval, François de Montmorency; New France; Quebec. References Cuoq, Jean André. Lexique de la langue iroquoise: Avec notes et appendices. Montreal: Chapleau, 1882. Ferland, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine. La Gaspésie. Quebec: Côté, 1877.
707
Maclean, John. Canadian Savage Folk: The Native Tribes of Canada. Toronto: Briggs and Coates, 1896.
LEFEBVRE, JEAN PIERRE (1941–) Québécois film director, born in Montreal. Lefebvre is generally perceived as a film auteur with high humanistic concerns. He is credited with a deep concern with creating and preserving independent film in Quebec. Although commentators usually associate Lefebvre auteur films with politically committed cinema, he does not accept that his work belongs to any particular side in the ideological debate; rather they live within their own society. His films are interested in human experiences and the representation of society. Through his films he has sought to connect thematically with his own and younger generations. Lefebvre worked as a critic for the film magazine Objectif and during the 1960s, in the transition period associated with the Quiet Revolution, made films with the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada. At the same time he was working for the NFB, he produced a series dedicated to first-time filmmakers called “Premières oeuvres” (First Works). His vision of films in the 1960s refused to accept the film industry’s established practice of imposed cultural and production control. He was interested in the creation of a national space for film, outside the media flows of the United States. As a result, Lefebvre sought to find his own production space outside the main industrial frame. Although pessimistic about the cultural values of the mass media, his vision of independent Quebec cinema led Lefebvre to create in the early 1960s an alternative production space by
708
LEGRAND, MICHEL
establishing his own production companies, Les Films J. P. Lefebvre and subsequently studio Cinak in 1969. As well as producing Lefebvre’s own films, Cinak produced such films as Denys Arcand’s Réjeanne Padiovani (1973). Lefebvre’s authorial work combines minimalist aesthetics with an eye for Quebec’s social environment, depicting with lucidity and affection the transgenerational intimate nature of human existence. In his early films Le Révolutionnaire (“The Revolutionary,” 1965) and Jusqu’au Coeur/ Straight to the Heart (1968), he shares characteristics with the French nouvelle vague and particularly with Godardian alienation, yet he retains his own distinctive author’s signature. Both films reflect on political and human conflicts and power struggles in Quebec and internationally (with the U.S. war in Vietnam). Underpinning these external conditions is the depiction of a “national people” equally alienated from their representatives and from their own engagement with political national consciousness. His 1970 film Les Maudits Sauvages/Those Damned Savages relates to nature and native people within the broader cultural context of tension between representation of people as part of a creation of a Quebec national cinema space and a deconstruction of myth and media images. Lefebvre’s films in the 1970s and early 1980s have been widely recognized and achieved international acclaim. Lefebvre won a number of awards for the film Les Dernières Fiançailles (“The Last Engagement,” 1973) and the Prix de la critique internationale au Festival de Cannes for Les Fleurs sauvages/Wild Flowers (1982). His films Il ne faut pas mourir pour ça/Don’t Let
It Kill You (1967) and Le Vieux Pays où Rimbaud est mort (“The Old Country Where Rimbaud Died,” 1977) are preoccupied with the Quebec-France relationship, France having an important influence on Quebec popular culture. In 1998 he made Aujourd’hui ou jamais (“Today or Never”), completing this trilogy, though without much success with the audience. His themes and concerns with a distinctive society belonged to the past. In the 1990s, Lefebvre chiefly focused his creativity on video art, completing a five-part series of episodic subjective experiments and meditations on the cinematic environment called L’Age des images (“The Age of Images”). His latest film is See You in Toronto (2000). Aleksandar Dundjerovic See also: Arcand, Denys; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Godard, Jean-Luc; Quiet Revolution; Vietnam War. References Harcourt, Peter, ed. Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Vidéaste. Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival, 2001. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
LEGRAND, MICHEL (1932–) Versatile French musician, virtuoso piano and jazz performer, arranger, conductor, and movie score composer, Legrand has had an outstanding international career, especially in the United States, where he has obtained considerable success and numerous awards. Brought up in a musical family and playing several instruments, Legrand was a student at the Paris Conservatoire in the
LEGRAND, MICHEL
1940s and began his musical career in the 1950s working as an accompanist for various French pop singers (Henri Salvador, Catherine Sauvage). He contributed to Marcel Carné’s Terrain vague/Wasteland, became Maurice Chevalier’s musical director on his American tour, and released a hit record with Columbia-EMI in the United States, I Love Paris (1954), followed by Legrand Jazz (1958), which marked the start of his friendship with Miles Davis. Legrand started composing at the time of the new wave, working with Agnès Varda for Cléo de 5 à 7 (“Cleo from 5 to 7, 1960), Jean-Luc Godard for Une femme est une femme (“A Woman Is a Woman,” 1961), and Jacques Demy for Lola (1961). His scores for the musicals films Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, 1964), featuring the Oscarnominated hit song “I Will Wait for You,” and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort (Demy, 1967) gained him a worldwide reputation and a place in the history of cinema. Since the 1950s, Legrand has had many connections with the United States, and he spent several years in Hollywood in the late 1960s composing movie scores and performing in jazz clubs. Often nicknamed “the man in the hurry,” he contributed to a variety of music-related projects, including the Oscar-winning theme of The Thomas Crown Affair (Jewison, 1968), “Windmills of Your Mind.” He worked with Gene Kelly, Ray Charles, and Quincy Jones, and his songs were performed by prestigious artists such as Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand. He won an Oscar for Summer of 42 (Mulligan, 1971) and composed the scores of four Joseph Losey films, including The Messenger (1971), which won the Palme
709
d’or in Cannes. He wrote the music for Breezy (Eastwood, 1973) and collaborated with Henry Mancini in the Pink Panther series. After he worked on Barbra Streisand’s French album Je m’appelle Barbra (My Name Is Barbra) in 1966, she asked him to compose the score for Yentl (1983), which was rewarded by another Oscar. Legrand’s career took a turn in 1989 when he directed his first film, Five Days in June, followed by a musical stage adaptation of Marcel Aymé’s 1943 short story “Le Passe Muraille”/“Walker-Through Walls” in Paris in 1997. His recent scores include La Bûche/Season’s Beatings (Thompson, 1999) and Ladies and Gentlemen (Lelouch, 2002). His own musical, Amour, was performed on Broadway for several months in 2002. With over 100 records produced, hit songs like “What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life,” “Pieces of Dreams,” “Brian’s Song,” and “Watch What Happens,” numerous movie scores, and Oscars and Grammy Awards, Legrand is an impressive example of solid cultural links between France and America, someone who has contributed to the development of the musical film genre. Isabelle Vanderschelden See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Davis, Miles; Demy, Jacques; Godard, Jean-Luc; Jazz; Kelly, Gene; Losey, Joseph. References Gimello-Mesplomb, Frédéric. “La Musique dans le cinéma de la Nouvelle Vague.” http://cinema.chez.tiscali.fr/musique_ vague.html (accessed April 19, 2004). Lerouge, Stéphane. “Musique et cinéma français.” http://www.diplomatie .gouv.fr/label_france/FRANCE/DOSSIER/ musique/10cinema.html (accessed February 17, 2004).
710
LEIRIS, MICHEL
LEIRIS, MICHEL (1901–1990) One of the twentieth century’s most radical autobiographers and an important figure in the development of reflexive ethnography. Leiris’s initial adherence to surrealism (from 1924 to 1929) and subsequent contributions to Georges Bataille’s dissident journal Documents led him to become a “secretary-archivist” on the 1931–1933 Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic expedition under Marcel Griaule, an experience recorded in his reflective ethnographic journal L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa). On returning from Africa, Leiris joined the Trocadéro ethnographic museum (later to become the Musée de l’Homme), where he worked professionally until retirement, producing a series of expert monographs and protopostcolonial essays. His social ideals led him to support such key postwar journals as Temps Modernes, Présence Africaine, and Gradhiva, while his more phenomenological preoccupations generated personal appreciations of artists such as Picasso, André Masson, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and Wilfredo Lam. But it is for his remarkable collection of autobiographies that Leiris is best known. The abstract and analytical one-volume L’Age d’homme/Manhood (1939) constructs its methodological and ethical framework from ethnography, psychoanalysis, and existentialism; the more sinuous and labyrinthine four-volume La Règle du jeu (“The Rules of the Game,” 1948–1976) situates and suspends the autobiographical subject within a micrological linguistic sensitivity and an immense temporal suspension. Throughout this broad practice, the transatlantic context forms an important and enduring theme in Leiris’s work as the
occasionally phantasmagoric site of personal and social liberation. Both his critical and ethnographic practice began with his experience, in the twenties, of exported black American shows and groups like the Revue Nègre, the Blackbirds, Mitchell’s Jazz Kings, and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. His delirious record, in Documents, of this “black crisis,” together with sentimental appreciations of American cinema and such icons of sophisticated modernity as Fred Astaire, focus almost desperately on their transgressive sexual and political potential. During the 1930s, Leiris came under the influence of Alfred Métraux and his work Vaudou haïtien and was commissioned by Métraux to produce both the 1951 Race et civilisation and the 1955 Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, both of which focus positively on hybridity. Leiris’s postwar interest in the Caribbean in particular championed a poetry, including that of Aimé Césaire, and an ethnography that were actively involved in shaping postcolonial traditions; this brought him more than once into conflict with the political authorities. The same idealist solidarity saw Leiris participate in the 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana, where he claimed Picasso, Kafka, and Bataille for revolutionary art, and the goal of such art as the nurturing of “l’homme intégral” (the whole man). Finally, Leiris’s appreciation of Wilfredo Lam, clearly based in part on the artist’s “super-transplanted” condition (being a Cuban of Chinese and mulatto-Indian parentage), celebrates the painter’s synthesis of forces as emblematic of both Caribbean identity and the revolutionary impulse toward universalization. Seán Hand
L’ENFANT, PIERRE-CHARLES
711
See also: Bataille, Georges; Césaire, Aimé; Lam, Wilfredo; Masson, André; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Surrealism; Vodun. References Glissant, Edouard. “Michel Leiris, ethnographe.” Les Lettres nouvelles 43 (1956): 609–621. Hand, Seán. Michel Leiris: Writing the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Alter Ego: The Critical Writings of Michel Leiris. Oxford: Legenda, 2004.
L’ENFANT, PIERRE-CHARLES (1755–1825) The brilliant mind behind the overall design of Washington, D.C., Pierre L’Enfant mixed French aristocratic genes with true American Revolutionary spirit. He left the potential fame and riches of the French Court for the uncertainties of the American battlefield, where he won military honors, then gained such recognition for his engineering and design talents that his plan for the future seat of the U.S. government was retained, at least until L’Enfant quarreled with two presidents, was forgotten, and died more or less a pauper. But his design ultimately materialized into the construction of the federal capital 100 years later. L’Enfant’s father worked in Louis XVI’s palace and gardens in Versailles, remarkably designed by André Le Notre and ever present in the paintings that the father was commissioned to do. When he was sixteen, his father enlisted him in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris (1771 to 1776), where L’Enfant won an engineering degree. At age twenty-two, L’Enfant turned away and crossed the At-
Pierre L’Enfant, French-born architect and planner of Washington, D.C. (Circer, Hayward, ed. Dictionary of American Portraits, 1967)
lantic in 1777 to volunteer as a private in Lafayette’s unit in Washington’s army. His engineering talents won him the ranks of captain a year later, then of brevet major in 1783. As the war ended, L’Enfant designed the insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati, which caught the attention of George Washington; then he went back to France for about a year. Upon his return to America in 1784, he went to work remodeling older official buildings in New York (1787) and Philadelphia. Then in 1789 President Washington asked L’Enfant to prepare a city design for a new federal site. L’Enfant’s plan is truly inspired by Le Notre’s Versailles, with long avenues intersecting, important monuments at main intersections, and an overall radiation pattern that brings the eye
712
LEPAGE, ROBERT
toward the center. Congress voted in 1791 to build the federal capital on the banks of the Potomac, and L’Enfant’s plan was selected. L’Enfant, however, insisted on complete control, which antagonized Congress, and Washington and Jefferson had little patience with the man’s short temper and endless quarrels with the three commissioners for the project. L’Enfant was dismissed in March 1792. Congress offered him an appropriation for his design work on the Capitol and an appointment as professor of engineering at the new military academy at West Point, both of which L’Enfant refused. He worked again briefly for the federal government reinforcing defenses around Washington in 1812, but again quarreled endlessly with his superiors and left the service. Back in the capital, L’Enfant haunted Congress for financial rewards for his services. He was finally given a mere $3,800 and retired poor, forgotten, and bitter in Bladensburg, Maryland, where he died in 1825. His plan, however, was reactivated in 1889, some fifty years later, and the city was developed along the lines of his original design after 1901. In 1909, the same U.S. Congress passed an act to reinter L’Enfant’s remains in the National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, with full military honors. Claudia Wolosin See also: Architecture; Jefferson, Thomas; Washington, George. References Caemmerer, Hans Paul. Life of Pierre Charles L’Enfant. New York: Da Capo, 1970. Stephenson, Richard W. A Plan Wholly New: Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s Plan of the City of Washington. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993.
LEPAGE, ROBERT (1957–) A film and theater director, designer, playwright, actor, and stage performer, Robert Lepage has been since the early 1990s one of the most original creators in North America, with an approach that is always collective, multidisciplinary, and cross-cultural. Born in Quebec City on December 12, 1957, Lepage attended the Conservatoire d’art dramatique in Quebec City from 1975 and studied in Paris at Alain Knapp’s Ecole de théâtre in 1978. Lepage’s creative plays were a huge success in Quebec City and then in Canada and Europe. He founded the Théâtre Repère in 1980, in Quebec City, dedicated to research and avant-garde shows, such as the widely acclaimed Circulations (1984). La Trilogie des dragons/The Dragons’ Trilogy (1985) was an innovative six-hour play about the presence of Chinese culture and population in three Canadian cities, Quebec City, Toronto, and Vancouver, at three different historical moments. That celebrated collective work was multinational, multilingual (half of it was in English, some parts were bilingual, others were in Chinese), and multimedia; the scenery borrowed from cinema and included many visual effects onscreen. With various teams, The Dragon’s Trilogy was acclaimed in many countries. An artist fascinated with research and the whole creative process, Lepage did not hesitate to present some of his works even at early stages of conception, admitting these were works in progress that would change through the years. Among countless international awards, Lepage received prizes at theater festivals (Quebec City, Avignon, Nyon) for a oneman show entitled Vinci (1986). In 1987, his play Le Polygraphe received a prize from
LESUEUR, CHARLES ALEXANDRE
the magazine Time Out, in London, and the Prix de la Critique Française. Incidentally, Lepage’s works found their most dedicated audiences in Britain and Japan. In fact, Lepage was the first North American director to stage his own revisited vision of a play by William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the Royal National Theater in London in 1992. As a film director, Lepage’s contribution is important and original, beginning with Le Confessionnal (1995), a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1952); both films were shot in Quebec City. He also adapted his play Le Polygraphe in a film version (1996). His scripts (Nô, 1998, drawing on the epic production The Seven Streams of the River Ota) included many references to Asian culture, its places, art, and spiritual thought. His recent films include Possible Worlds (2000), filmed in English, and La Face cachée de la lune/The Dark Side of the Moon (2003). Lepage’s own film performances as an actor include Jésus de Montréal (Arcand, 1989). Lepage also directed operas, such as La Damnation de Faust, presented at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan and again at the Opéra de la Bastille in Paris in 2001. Rock singer Peter Gabriel asked him to conceive and direct the visual and stage conception of his 1994 world tour, Secret World. The artists collaborated again for a conceptual show, Zulu Time, in 2002. Lepage was one of the artists to declare openly that he was for the independence of Quebec before the referendum campaign in 1995. Among many distinctions, Lepage became Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France (1990), and received the Légion d’honneur in 2002. Yves Laberge
713
See also: Arcand, Denys; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Language; Quebec; Quebec City; Theater. References Bovet, Jeanne. “‘Une Impression de décalage’: Le plurilinguisme dans la production du Théâtre Repère.” M.A. thesis, Université Laval, 1991. Brassard, Marie, et al. La Trilogie des dragons. Quebec City: L'Instant même, 2005. Dundjerovic, Aleksandar. The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory. London: Wallflower, 2003. Pavlovic, Diane. “Reconstitution de la Trilogie.” Jeu: Cahiers de théâtre 45 (1987): 40–82.
LESUEUR, CHARLES ALEXANDRE (1778–1846) French artist and naturalist who spent much of his eventful life in the United States, notably at the New Harmony colony; among his many accomplishments was his groundbreaking work as an ichthyologist. Lesueur was born into a naval family in Le Havre. In 1800, having started out on a military career, he sailed with the scientific expedition sent by Napoléon to explore the coasts of Australia and Tasmania. During the voyage, his artistic skills—he must have learned drawing as a cadet—became apparent, and he was invited to join the scientific staff. In particular, he collaborated with François Péron, a student of zoology, who became his close friend. Lesueur and Péron, having survived the ordeals of the four-year venture, brought back 100,000 zoological specimens, including, astonishingly, 2,500 new species. Péron provided accurate descriptions, and Lesueur made 1,500 drawings of their finds. These were subsequently published in two volumes, despite the tragic death of Péron in 1810 from tuberculosis.
714
LETTRES D’UNE PÉRUVIENNE
In 1815, with his reputation firmly established, Lesueur met William Maclure, a wealthy and enthusiastic geologist, who offered him a post as his assistant and artist on a voyage to the United States. They arrived in 1816 and, after a journey of exploration through New England, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, and Delaware, settled in Philadelphia. Lesueur was welcomed by the scientific community there and elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences. He became its curator in 1817: his tenure was significant for the channels of communication he was able to open up with French naturalists. Over the next few years Lesueur was active in teaching drawing and painting, and engraving and printing plates: he was responsible, for example, for many of the illustrations of Thomas Say’s American Entomology. He was one of the pioneers of lithographic book illustrations in the United States. From 1819 to 1822 he worked as a cartographer for the United States and Canada Boundary Commission, mapping the northeastern boundary between the two countries. In 1825, Lesueur accompanied Maclure, Thomas Say, and others on the so-called Boatload of Knowledge to New Harmony, Indiana, where Maclure and the philanthropist Robert Owen established their utopian colony. Lesueur spent over ten years in New Harmony. In addition to working as surveyor, architect, and teacher, he continued to produce plates for scientific books, including his own never completed Fishes of North America. Lesueur was, in fact, the first scientist to study the fishes of the Great Lakes and published twenty-nine papers on American fish. The most important of these is his monograph on the family of suckers (Catostomidae). He
also published papers on reptiles, amphibians, and crustaceans. In 1837, Lesueur returned to France. For a time, he earned a precarious living teaching drawing in Paris. Shortly before his death, he was appointed conservateur of the newly established natural history museum in Le Havre. The many drawings and specimens from his various travels became the basis of the museum’s collection. His specimens were lost when the building was destroyed in World War II, but his superb drawings survive in the rebuilt museum. Christopher Rolfe See also: Indiana; Le Havre; Painting; World War II. References Chinard, Gilbert. “The American Sketchbooks of C. A. Lesueur.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93 (1949): 114–118. Hamy, Ernest Théodore. Les Voyages du naturaliste Charles Alexandre Lesueur dans l’Amérique du Nord (1815–1837). Paris: Au siège de la Société des Américanistes, 1904.
LETTRES D’UNE PÉRUVIENNE In 1745 a French expedition returned from Peru. In 1747 Françoise de Graffigny, a middle-aged widow living precariously on the fringes of Parisian literary life, published Lettres d’une Péruvienne. The eponymous Peruvian is Zilia; her letters relate how, captured by conquistadores and embarked for Europe, she falls captive to the more benevolent French, who seize the Spanish ship at sea. Thus she arrives in Paris, where she finds much to wonder at and also to criticize. In providing a critique of French life from a foreign standpoint and alluding in her introduction to Montesquieu’s Lettres
LÉVESQUE, RENÉ
persanes, Graffigny inscribes her novel in an important eighteenth-century French literary tradition. But unlike Montesquieu’s Persian observers, Zilia belongs to a people whose stock is not high in France. Graffigny refers to the prejudice that she expects to encounter in endeavoring to persuade her readers that much may be learned from Peru. The meshing of social critique with an exotically tinged love interest—Zilia’s love for her now distant Peruvian prince, the Frenchman Déterville’s love for her—met with immediate success. An enhanced edition (1752) boasts an “Introduction historique,” which, complementing footnotes to the novel itself, provides more information about Incan culture, based on the writings of the half-Incan, half-Spanish Garcilaso de La Vega. His work, Comentarios reales de los incas/The Royal Commentaries of the Inca, had first appeared in French in a seventeenth-century translation, with a later translation appearing in 1744. Graffigny’s decision to incorporate more information about the Incans may be read as a riposte to her friend Turgot (later a minister of state). He advised her in a letter of 1751 to present her Incan heroine as ultimately assimilated to French life. Graffigny declined, and Zilia persists, in the second edition, in declining the hand of the admirable Déterville, offering him instead companionship predicated on mutual exchange. As a vehicle for educating French readers about contemporary Peru, Graffigny’s novel was seriously flawed, being based on a gross anachronism. Zilia is captured at the sack of Cuzco (1533) but somehow ends up in Enlightenment France. Nevertheless, Incan history is sympathetically mediated:
715
the benevolence of Incan rulers toward even their poorest subjects is set against the harshness of the French regime; the Incan religion stands up well in comparison with Christianity. Above all the novel envisages the possibility of reciprocation between two very different cultures. Before learning to write, Zilia records her thoughts by using the Incan system of knotting colored threads (quipus). Her learning to speak, write, and read French makes available to her the treasure store of the French Enlightenment. The library she acquires is financed by the sale of Incan treasures. But in more than merely its artifacts, Peru has much of value to impart to France. Its homespun moral values—a Peruvian never lies, for example—are needed to temper French love of show and artifice. As Zilia tells Déterville in conclusion, they may each in turn enjoy superiority over the other, he by educating her in Enlightenment learning, she by instructing him in virtue. Heather Lloyd References Altman, Janet Gurkin. “Making Room for “Peru”: Graffigny’s Novel Reconsidered.” Dilemmes du roman: Essays in Honor of Georges May. Ed. Catherine Lafarge. Stanford: Anma Libri, 1989: 33–46. Miller, Nancy. “‘The Knot, the Letter, and the Book’: Graffigny’s Peruvian Letters.” Subject to Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 126–61. Robb, Bonnie Arden. “The Easy Virtue of a Peruvian Princess.” French Studies 46 (1992): 144–159.
LÉVESQUE, RENÉ (1922–1987) Journalist, politician, writer. The cofounder of the Parti Québécois (with Gilles Grégoire), René Lévesque was
716
LÉVESQUE, RENÉ
René Lévesque, premier of Quebec, 1976–1985, launched an unsuccessful referendum on sovereignty. (Bettmann/Corbis)
premier of Quebec between 1976 and 1985 (he was reelected in 1981). Before that, Lévesque had many jobs: columnist for Le Clairon and some other newspapers, journalist for Radio-Canada, and minister for Premier Jean Lesage. During World War II, Lévesque was foreign correspondent for the U.S. Office of War Information; by the end of 1943, he went to England, where he was based for two years. In his Memoirs published in 1986, he recalled that although he liked Paris and France, his favorite city outside Quebec remained— surprisingly—London. Lévesque did not want to be a soldier in the Canadian army, in a period when francophone conscripts were treated with contempt by their anglophone superiors. As an employee for the U.S. government, Lévesque realized he could learn his job as a reporter with respect and dignity. He followed the U.S.
forces in France, Germany, and Austria until 1945. He was war correspondent again in 1952, this time for Radio-Canada, in Korea. When he was twenty, Lévesque wrote an unpublished play, Aux Quatre Vents (“To the Four Winds”), which was published posthumously in 1999. The spirits of three French discoverers appear in it (Samuel de Champlain, Robert Cavalier de La Salle, Pierre-Esprit Radisson). From 1968, Lévesque published many essays and political manifestos. As a journalist and later politician, Lévesque had many contacts with French politicians; he knew Charles de Gaulle from 1944, and Lévesque was a few meters from the general in 1967 when he said the famous “Vive le Québec libre!” (Long live free Quebec!). Lévesque considered France’s prime ministers Raymond Barre and Jacques Chirac (who was also mayor of Paris for more than a decade) as allies of the Quebec cause, while François Mitterrand was not. Lévesque also received a doctorate honoris causa (an honorary doctorate) from the Sorbonne in 1980. For a whole generation of Quebeckers during the 1950s, Lévesque was one of the first television figures in Canada: his weekly program Point de mire was a serious and educational chronicle of international affairs on foreign continents, explaining political crises such as the Algerian civil war in the late 1950s. Although he was hated by many English Canadians, Lévesque was very popular and a well-known public figure in Quebec and also quite respected in France. When Lévesque was first elected as premier of Quebec on November 15, 1976, the French newspaper Le Monde ran the headline on its front page: “Victoire des nègres blancs” (Victory of the White Negroes).
LÉVIS, FRANÇOIS GASTON
After he retired from politics in 1985, he returned to television to cover international affairs such as the francophone summit. Yves Laberge See also: Champlain, Samuel de; Chirac, Jacques; Gaulle, General Charles de; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Mitterrand, François; Quebec; Radisson, Pierre-Esprit; World War II. References Bélanger, Yves, and Michel Lévesque, eds. René Lévesque: L’homme, la nation, la démocratie. Quebec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1992. Lévesque, René. Memoirs. Trans. Philip Stratford. Toronto: McClelland Stewart, 1986. ———. Aux Quatre Vents. Montreal: Leméac, 1999.
LÉVIS, FRANÇOIS GASTON DE, DUC (1720–1787) A French career officer. François Gaston de Lévis was involved in many European battles under Louis XV, had a distinguished service record, and served as second in command to Montcalm’s expeditionary forces in Canada. After Montcalm’s death in 1761, he was forced to leave Quebec under pressure from the British fleet, then surrendered his Montreal garrison to General Amherst. He sailed back to France in 1760, where he continued his career, being made marshal and duke. Born in Languedoc, Lévis joined the army at fifteen. He had a distinguished service record in the War of the Austrian Succession for his outstanding bravery at Clausen, then at Prague and Dettinghen in 1743. He fought on the Rhine in 1745, then in Provence, and was an “aide-major” at the sieges of Montauban, Valence, Villefranche, and Vintimille. Montcalm and
DE, DUC
717
d’Argenson called upon him in 1756 to be second in command of the expedition to New France and had him promoted to brigadier general at age thirty-six. Lévis sailed from Brest on March 26 as vanguard. On the mainland, Montcalm and Lévis set forth toward Carillon, over Lake Champlain, and reached their objective on July 3, 1756. Lévis won a reputation as a hardened warrior from both Canadians and natives. Montcalm left Lévis to winter quarters. Montcalm and Lévis were together again in 1757 to march against the British through difficult terrain. In late July and early August, the French troops arrived at Northwest Bay on Lake George, and Lévis maneuvered his units to block possible retreats for the British. The French victory was spectacular. After a second winter, at the battle of Carillon on July 8, 1758, Lévis distinguished himself by leading the charge of the right flank. The following year, Lévis came to the rescue of Montmorency, a fort mastering access to Quebec, and planned an offensive until June 10. The ambushes lasted until July 31, 1759, when Saunders’s single warship and two transport ships brought in 2,000 men and considerable gun power. Lévis took them by storm. Lévis was absent at the first battle of Quebec in 1759, which resulted in the death of the commanding general, Montcalm. He was put in charge of the expedition and himself directed the skirmish near Saint Foy, where Murray lost many troops. Nevertheless, he had to retreat to Quebec and Montreal because of a rising number of British reinforcements. The expedition turned to disaster the following year, near Quebec, on May 11, 1760, when the British contingent so
718
LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE
outnumbered the French that Lévis had to retreat to Montreal. The colony was again essentially in British hands. In September, the French king’s envoy, Vaudreuil, had negotiated a capitulation that Lévis hotly disputed. Forced to comply, however, he burned his flags and surrendered personally in Quebec to Murray. He was given a boat and departed for France on October 18, 1760. Upon his return, he was made lieutenant general by Louis XV, then in 1762 was the decisive force in Condé’s victory over Brunswick at Johannisberg. In 1783, he was made marshal and appointed duke and peer of France in 1784. He died three years later on his estate. Claudia Wolosin and Marc H. Journoud See also: Lake Champlain; Montreal; New France; Quebec. References Brumwell, Stephen. Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gallay, Alan. Colonial Wars of North America, 1512–1763: An Encyclopedia (Military History of the United States). New York: Garland, 1996.
LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE (1908–) The transatlantic relations of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss are essential to an understanding of the history of French anthropology in the twentieth century and, more generally, the development of French thought in the postwar years. Geographically, there are two points of focus, North and South America. The young Lévi-Strauss’s first important contact with the New World was the period he
spent teaching sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, from 1935 to 1938. This position allowed him to undertake his first fieldwork expeditions in the Mato Grosso, visiting the Bororo and Caduveo Indians and later the Nambikwara, Mundé, and Tupi-Kawahib. Lévi-Strauss’s experience of Brazil and its native populations is immortalized in the pages of Tristes Tropiques (Sad Tropics), an autobiographical account published in 1955 that provided inspiration to a new generation of French anthropologists and that was also to become something of a classic—it is still in print and has been translated into numerous languages. Fieldwork is normally taken to be the defining experience for the anthropologist, both an initiation into the discipline and the empirical foundation of future work, and to an extent, the younger Lévi-Strauss is no exception to this rule. There is, however, a strong case for arguing that his second point of contact with the New World, the period spent in North America from 1941 to 1947, was of much greater importance, both in shaping his intellectual development and defining the role he was to play in the subsequent development of French anthropology. Fleeing what would have been almost certain capture and deportation in 1941 (his family was of Jewish descent), he was offered a teaching post at the New School for Social Research in New York, which he held until 1944, returning to the United States in 1945 as cultural attaché for the French Embassy. This period of exile from France was to offer unprecedented opportunities to the anthropologist. First, it allowed him access to the vast anthropological archives deposited in the New York museums and libraries: on his
LEVY, RAOUL J.
own admission, virtually everything he came to know about anthropology was learned during this period. Second, he was able to participate in a large and dynamic research community, meeting the most eminent American anthropologists of the time. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, he met the Russian-born linguist Roman Jakobson in 1942. Jakobson was one of the leading proponents of structural linguistics, and it was under the inspiration of Jakobson’s work that Lévi-Strauss went on to apply structuralist methods in anthropology, first in his work on kinship in the late 1940s and subsequently in his studies of myth and systems of classification from 1950 onward. Lévi-Strauss’s introduction of structural analysis to anthropology had an immense influence on the discipline both in France and internationally. Beyond anthropology, this work inspired a whole new generation of French thinkers and in the 1960s produced the intellectual movement called structuralism. In conclusion, therefore, it could be said that Lévi-Strauss’s transatlantic relations—the North and South American episodes combined—established him as the leading figure of French anthropology and created the conditions for the discipline, newly theorized as a structural anthropology, to aspire to a truly international profile. As such, they represent an important staging post in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. Christopher Johnson See also: Brazil; Language; Serge, Victor; Theory; World War II. References Eribon, Didier. Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Trans. Paula Wissing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 (1988).
719
Johnson, Christopher. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
LEVY, RAOUL J. (1922–1966) Belgian-born French film producer, director, and scriptwriter of Eastern European origins who, between 1955 and 1965, occupied a position in the French film industry comparable to that of a Hollywood mogul, taking advantage of the increased U.S. investment in European films to produce American-financed French-language international productions through independent releasing deals with small U.S. distributors and major Hollywood companies. After being discharged from the British Royal Air Force after the war, Levy entered the film industry as a production assistant for RKO in Mexico. On his return to France in 1947, he first worked for Trans Mondial Films, then as a director of Edward Small’s European production program for United Artists, before founding his own production company, Iena Productions. In 1956, the production of Et Dieu créa la femme (“And God Made Woman, Vadim) heralded a new and successful form of transatlantic collaboration for Levy. Its international success was a landmark that set him up as a leading producer and star maker, and his next films were financed through a six-picture deal with a major American studio, Columbia Pictures, with additional ad hoc arrangements with Italian coproducing companies. The most international in outlook and one of the first French producers to forge alliances with the United States, Levy followed the Hollywood model of the “creative” producer, closely involved in all
720
LEYRAC, MONIQUE
stages of script development, working with established French directors and casting popular stars such as Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Arnould, and Jean Gabin. In 1962, his ambition to rival Hollywood tycoons in extravagance and to conquer the U.S. market led him to embark on an expensive international superproduction, La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo (Howard/de La Patilleère), directing and producing the film in color and Franscope, with stars Alain Delon, Anthony Quinn, Orson Welles, and Omar Sharif in the leading roles. Levy also employed Cliff Lyons, an experienced Hollywood technician, as a second-unit director, but with its production costs soaring, the film was abandoned and started again with a new cast and director. Eventually released in 1965, the film was a disappointment at the box office and a financial disaster from which Levy never recovered. Shortly before he died, Levy directed two films as a small independent producer, Je vous salue Mafia/Hail Mafia (1965) with Eddie Constantine and L’Espion/The Defector (1966) with Montgomery Clift in his last role. He appeared as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle/Two or Three Things I Know about Her in 1966, playing John Bogus, a rich American recently returned from Vietnam. Leila Wimmer See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Constantine, Eddie; Godard, JeanLuc. References Bauby, Jean-Dominique. Raoul Levy: Un aventurier du cinéma. Paris: Lattés, 1995. Lev, Peter. The Euro-American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, and Steven Ricci. Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity, 1945–95. London: BFI, 1998.
LEYRAC, MONIQUE (MONIQUE TREMBLAY) (1928–) During the 1960s the most respected female singer in Quebec. Monique Leyrac was the first songstress from Quebec to have an international career, performing at Expo 67, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, and at the Olympia in Paris, followed by a tour in the USSR. She also recorded in English and performed on television on shows such as the Ed Sullivan Show, the Rolf Harris Show (BBC), and on many Canadian programs. Born in Montreal, Leyrac benefited from the advice given by her friend Charles Aznavour in 1948 and began to sing after her debut in movies (Les Lumières de ma ville [The Lights of My City], Bigras, 1949). She later starred in Paul Almond’s feature film The Act of Heart (1971) and twice onstage in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (in Montreal and at the Stratford Festival). She recorded ten albums, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, with a debut album of twelve songs made for her by composer Claude Léveillée to lyrics by Gilles Vigneault (Monique Leyrac chante Vigneault et Léveillée, 1963). Two years later, her performance of Vigneault’s song, “Mon Pays” (My Country), at the Sopot Music Festival (in Poland) gave her the Grand Prix in 1965. The same year, she also won the Grand Prix du Festival de la chanson in Ostende (Belgium). As Vigneault, Leclerc, and Léveillée did before her, Leyrac also recorded in France (an entire LP titled Monique Leyrac à Paris, in 1967), with luxurious arrangements and strings, including “Mon Pays,” “La Manikoutai,” and other songs written by various teams of French composers of that era, such as Michel Conte and
LIBERALISM
Françoise Dorin. Parts of her LPs Monique Leyrac en Concert (1966) and La Joie de vivre (1969) were also recorded in France, where she lived for a few years during the 1960s and 1970s. Recorded in London, “Les Emigrants” (by Lomballe, Ferrari, Baselli), from the LP La Joie de vivre, is an epic, touching story of the first European families that went to Quebec City and the Saint Lawrence valley to find a better life. She created conceptual shows based on poems by Emile Nelligan and later from songs by her friend Félix Leclerc between 1975 and 1978; these tours were presented in Quebec and France. She published an autobiography titled Mon Enfance à Rosemont (My Childhood in Rosemont, 1983), on which she sang French songs from 1900, in 1989. In retrospect, Leyrac had the richest and most beautiful voice of all the female singers who have emerged from Canada. Yves Laberge See also: Aznavour, Charles; Expo 67; Leclerc, Félix; Mathieu, Mireille; Music (Pop); Nelligan, Emile; Quebec City; Saint Lawrence River; Vigneault, Gilles. Reference Jutra, Claude. Félix Leclerc, Troubadour. Montreal: National Film Board, 1958.
LIBERALISM Political liberalism in France has never been incorporated into a mainstream political party or structured the political debate as it did in the English-speaking world and in particular the United Kingdom and the United States. Regime change, invasion, and instability in the nineteenth century made the political cleavages more intricate and confused than in the United Kingdom, and as a result French liberalism was more
721
protean and fragmented across the spectrum of political parties and movements like the monarchists, Catholics, and Republicans at the same time that liberalism was less enduring than in the “AngloSaxon” world. Liberalism in its purest form as the freedom from interference by outsiders (and especially the state) has found few advocates in France, although the bundle of liberal ideas from self-government through human rights to the parliamentary regime and the free market have been incorporated into mainstream debate (many would say that the French Revolution was its greatest expression). In the nineteenth century the political debate on the state moved to defining the activity of the state in a range of areas that were hardly touched on in the United Kingdom, but this had a more ancient precedent. In France the position of the state is more dominant, and the supporters of the ancien régime emphasized the importance of the state in building France as a nation, as well as in economics and production. France was endowed with a bureaucracy that believed that it was the guardian of the national interest and that the national interest was more than just the aggregate of individual interests. French kings had established a centralized administration and had launched the production of goods (like glassware and porcelain and, of course, military hardware) that were widely admired. This “Colbertist” tradition (after the minister of finances to Louis) continues on the Right as on the Left and was adopted by movements like Bonapartism as well. In fact Napoléon I contributed as much as the kings to centralizing France and building a modern bureaucracy, completing the work that they had been unable to complete,
722
LIBERALISM
and in this he also continued the revolution’s aspirations. François Guizot, influential political leader under Louis Philippe (r. 1830– 1848) (known for his admonition to the French, “Enrichissez-vous,” “Get rich!”), is the nearest to the liberal leaders of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, but the July Monarchy, as Louis Philippe’s reign is known, proved shortlived. Napoléon III also used the state to unify France and to develop the backward industrial and financial base of midnineteenth-century France. In France, in contradistinction to the United Kingdom and United States, development was associated with the active state and not with the apparent withdrawal of the state. At the liberation from the Nazis, France’s industrial backwardness was remedied using all the instruments available to the state to constrain the market and to get it to meet political purposes, and these means included a plan and directive action through subsidies and credit allocation. Such action is the role of what has been known as the “developmental state,” at odds with the purest liberalism. Yet it was in France that the ideas of liberalism (laissez-faire, laisser-passer) were advanced with vigor against the ancien régime, and from France the ideas were taken up by Adam Smith and other English-speaking philosophers. It was, of course, Montesquieu who gave the doctrine of the separation of powers and the separation of civil society from the state— put into effect in the United States with most effect—its most eloquent and solid formulation, although it was not followed in his own country. Other French-language writers such as the Swiss national Benjamin Constant, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Tocqueville, and Frédéric Bastiat made formidable contributions to liberalism, but they never produced the overall work that J. S. Mill did, nor did they attain quite the same iconic status as “liberal philosophers.” (Nor did they have a “school” like the utilitarians.) French liberalism owed a good deal to Rousseau’s view that there should be no barrier between the individual and the state. Moreover French liberalism never developed the strong accent on individualism and rights that liberalism in the English-speaking world did, and collective action is never far from the core of the doctrine as expressed in French politics. French politics has often expressed a hostility to political parties and has been attracted to dirigisme (economic planning and control by the state) in a way that the English or American traditions have not. Moreover, the “liberal” parties in politics had only a weak social base. Catholic social thinking, with its positive view of the role of the state, was dominant on the right, and the rising Socialist movement saw in the state the way to redress the social balance and the instrument to effect social transformation. In the center the state was seen as the way to improve France’s position in the world and to promote French interests. French industry was backward and fearful of competition from the bigger industrial states and backed protectionism (as did the small peasant farmers). Gaullism and other conservatisms took the same stance, although there were small (usually right-wing) liberal parties advocating a smaller state and the reduction of bureaucracy, lower taxes, and competition. In the contemporary political spectrum, liberalism was promoted by President Giscard d’Estaing and his small party (the Independent Republicans) and is currently best
LISPECTOR, CLARICE
represented by Alain Madelin, who ran a small circle of liberal clubs promoting free market liberalism, a circle dependent to a great extent on translations of Englishlanguage works (mainly American). Madelin’s Parti Républicain set out on a determined neoliberal direction in 1998, but it had no success and his presidential campaign of 2002 found no echo for liberal ideas. His party was merged into the Union pour la majorité presidentielle, where it still forms a liberal faction. David Bell See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Catholic Church; French Revolution; Gaulle, General Charles de; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Republicanism; Theory; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Voltaire, François. Reference Aron, Raymond. Main Currents in Sociological Thought. Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books, 1965. Kelly, George Armstrong. The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Plamenatz, John, ed. Readings from Liberal Writers. London: Allen and Unwin, 1965.
LISPECTOR, CLARICE (1920–1977) Brazilian writer of Russian-Jewish origins. Lispector, considered Brazil’s foremost twentieth-century writer and claimed as an existentialist philosopher, a phenomenologist, and a poststructuralist ahead of her time, has been claimed by French feminist Hélène Cixous as one of the finest practitioners of l’écriture féminine (“feminine writing”). Trained as a lawyer, Lispector started work as a journalist in Brazil before she married a diplomat whose career led her to live in Italy, Switzerland, England, and
723
Washington, D.C., between 1943 and 1959. Lispector’s first novel, Perto do Coração Selvagem/Close to the Wild Heart (1944), was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize by the Brazilian Academy of Letters and was first published in French in 1954 with a cover designed by Henri Matisse. Its introspective, semiautobiographical portrayal of a young woman indicated Lispector’s debts to Heideggerian philosophy, the writing of James Joyce, and the Cabalist model of thought. She discovered the work of Jean-Paul Sartre while writing her second novel, O Lustre/The Chandelier (1946), about a woman’s progressive self-consciousness in relation to herself and her family. Her collection of short stories, Lacos de familia/ Family Ties (1960), has been compared to the work of Albert Camus and Sartre. Earl Fritz argues that her novels revolutionized Brazilian literature with a new model of narrative that is less about storytelling than identity, female subjectivity, communication, language, and being, such that A maça no escuro/The Apple in the Dark (1961) and A paixao Segundo G.H./The Passion According to G.H. (1964) are about the impossibility of transcendent truths and the instability of language. Lispector’s writings appeared in French as early as 1952, and in the 1970s and 1980s the feminist publishing house Des Femmes published translations of her stories and novels, including The Passion According to G.H. (translated 1978), Água Viva/Stream of Life (1973; translated 1980), and A hora da estrela/Hour of the Star (1977; translated 1984). Cixous, who developed her theory of l’écriture féminine in the 1960s and 1970s, “discovered” Lispector in 1978 when she read Stream of Life, making Lispector along with Borges a rare example of a Latin American author
724
LITERARY RELATIONS
claimed as an important model by a prominent French writer. Since then, Cixous has written several books and essays about Lispector’s work, most importantly Vivre L’Orange/To Live the Orange (1979), L’Heure de Clarice Lispector/The Hour of Clarice Lispector (1989), and Reading with Clarice Lispector (1990). Cixous shares Lispector’s interest in writing across categories of fiction, philosophy, prose and poetry, her use of poetic metaphors of birthing, themes of female sexuality and self-realization, and motifs such as the egg, rose, orange, or apple. While some scholars such as Fritz see Cixous as sharing Lispector’s aim to produce an antiphallocentric text, others, such as Marta Peixoto, claim that Cixous has arrested the play of meaning of Lispector’s writing and mistranslated Portuguese. Maureen Shanahan See also: Borges, Jorge Luis; Brazil; Camus, Albert; Feminisms; Sartre, Jean-Paul. References Alonso, Cláudia Pazos, and Claire Williams, eds. Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2002. Fritz, Earl. Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector: The Différance of Desire. Austin: University of Texas, 2001. Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
LITERARY RELATIONS Over the past two centuries, French, Anglo-American, and Latin American writers (including those from the Caribbean) have exerted considerable literary influence on one another.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, French authors voyaging in the New World found a renewed source of inspiration in the wildness of its nature and the youthful vigor of its people. As U.S. intellectuals emerged in the early nineteenth century, the French were intrigued by their literary representations of individualism and democratic values combined with a mix of puritanism and materialism. Similarly, Anglo-American writers found in French writers “an intellectual discipline, a critical curiosity, and a civilized demeanor not easily discovered in American writers” (Braun and Seymour 1978, p. 13). Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the literatures of France and the United States have regularly, if intermittently, enlivened and enhanced each other. Over the same period of time, Latin American and Spanish Caribbean writers encountered in Paris the intellectual stimulation, cultural tradition, and energizing cosmopolitanism that did not exist in their newly independent countries or in Spain. Early on, a few influential members of the Parisian literary elite recognized the talent of these writers and gave them the support to publish and promote their books. Indeed, the French were the first people of a foreign culture to recognize the value of Latin American literature. Even so, widespread awareness among general readers did not occur before the mid-1950s. As the richness of Latin American and Caribbean literature diffused into the world of letters and occupied a central position, French writers regularly tapped into their polyphonic voices. The innocence, simplicity, and tolerance of the New World, praised by French explorers, émigrés, and admirers of the
LITERARY RELATIONS
Revolution, inspired such books as Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731), Jean de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), written in English, and René de Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) and René (1802). But as the country expanded in land, population, and prosperity, and more voyagers scrutinized it, the blight of slavery, flaws in the political system, religious and ethnic prejudices against the natives, and excessive materialism soon began to form negative images. Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of the strengths and foibles of U.S. institutions in his Democracy in America (1835–1840) became an authoritative reference widely read by French intellectuals, who accepted his opinion that America had no original literature. Beginning in the 1820s, however, as the American literary scene emerged, a number of writers came to be known in France through translations and critical reviews by admiring French scholars, novelists, and poets. They saw in this new literature an original view of a completely different world: a virgin literature free from the traditions and constricting rules of old Europe, open to fresh and progressive ideas, in other words, reflective of the American genius. The first American writer to exert significant influence on French fiction was James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper’s skills as a storyteller inspired Honoré de Balzac’s Les Chouans (1829) as well as an enthusiastic essay (1840), Alexandre Dumas’s Les Mohicans de Paris (1854), and several critical essays by Charles Sainte-Beuve in the 1830s. The less talented but immensely popular Eugène Sue imitated Cooper’s exotic style in countless novels, and Victor Hugo praised him for his portrayals of the pioneer and fighting American hero as
725
well as of the fearless and loyal Indian. Cooper’s fame was soon followed by that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, thanks to the translation of his Essays (1841) by Emile Montégut in 1851. Daniel Stern (pen name for Marie d’Agoult), Montégut, and Charles Baudelaire appraised Emerson as an authentic representative of the newly independent republic, and propagated his ideas through their own writings. Emerson had a large following in France well into the twentieth century, a following that included Maurice Maeterlinck, Henri Bergson, Henri-Frédéric Amiel, and Marcel Proust. Still, during the nineteenth century it was especially the works of the American poets that exercised considerable influence on a host of prominent French literary figures. Among them, Edgar Allan Poe, neglected in his own country, was immediately recognized by a number of poets and novelists, including Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Paul Claudel, and André Gide. It was Baudelaire who relentlessly endeavored to make Poe known in France by translating five books of his tales, Histoires extraordinaires (“Extraordinary Tales,” 1856), Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires (“New Extraordinary Tales,” 1857), Arthur Gordon Pym (1858), Eureka (1863), and Histoires sérieuses et grotesques (“Serious and Grotesque Tales,” 1865), and writing three major critical essays and several short articles. Poe’s legacy proved to be significant as he not only contributed to the development of the short story, but also was instrumental in the development of the symbolist movement through his innovative style. Baudelaire saw in Poe’s oeuvre his principles of aesthetics confirmed, and his fascination with evil and rebellion against
726
LITERARY RELATIONS
materialism shared. Stéphane Mallarmé, another symbolist poet, translated Poe’s poems in a volume dedicated to Baudelaire (1887). In his celebrated poem “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe” (The Tomb of Edgar Poe) for a commemorative volume (1876), and masterful “Essay on Poe” (1894), Mallarmé showed his admiration for the American poet’s language, which was to be echoed twenty years later by Paul Valéry in his essay on Eureka (1921). Poe’s cosmological view of the world exerted a profound influence on Valéry’s poetic thought. Along with Poe, but to a lesser degree, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman were acclaimed for the originality of their subject matter and form of poetry. Whitman influenced Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Jules Laforgue, as well as the twentieth-century novelists André Gide and Jules Romains. Thoreau inspired Valéry Larbaud and Marcel Proust. As for Hawthorne, less popular than the others, he drew the attention of the spiritually tormented writers François Mauriac and Julien Green. At the time when American poetry’s influence on the French started to fade, fiction took over. At the end of the nineteenth century, American fiction acquired a prominence that came to significantly impact French novelists, especially during the years following World War II. If Paris was the capital of letters during the first half of the twentieth century, attracting American novelists seeking models and direction, the second half of the century saw French novelists turn to their American counterparts for renewed techniques and themes. Herman Melville, forgotten in his own country up to the 1920s, influenced Jean Giono, Jean Simon, and Albert Camus, who saw him as a mythmaker engaged in an essen-
tial quest for meaning. The prolific Henry James drew little interest, except from François Mauriac, who made his novels known to the general public. But William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, and to a lesser extent, Richard Wright were the literary geniuses from the United States who transformed modern French fiction. Faulkner in particular achieved recognition in France much earlier than in the United States, thanks to translations by MauriceEdgar Coindreau and reviews by the novelists André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre also wrote extensively on Dos Passos and Steinbeck. These writers, who brashly examined the multifaceted brutalities of modern existence and were obsessed with the past, have exerted a shaping influence on many French writers’ psyches up to this day. Following the postwar anti-Americanism displayed in the writings of Sartre, LouisFerdinand Céline, Georges Duhamel, and André Siegfried, the 1960s marked a shift when many French intellectuals became fascinated by the overpowering vastness and diversity of the American landscape. This fascination triggered works of poetry and critical reflections by such authors as Michel Butor, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, among others. If French writers, over a period of two centuries, have looked for vigor, new rhythms, and dramatic realism in the fiction of the United States, a large number of U.S. writers, in turn, have been drawn to the prestige of French literary tradition and critical acumen. During the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, French poetry in its great diversity of genre and form exercised a profound influence on American poets. Early on, symbolist po-
LITERARY RELATIONS
etry was acclaimed by well-informed critics such as Aline Gorren, Theodore Child, and Thomas Perry who published articles in Scribner’s (1893), Harper’s (1896), and Cosmopolitan (1892). The poets Lafcadio Hearn, Richard Hovey, Amy Lowell, and Trumbull Stickney found in their symbolist counterparts the artistic consciousness and purity of forms they were searching for. Among the great American poets of this era seeking artistic integrity and liberated imagery were Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Pound was drawn to Théophile Gautier, Tristan Corbière, Rimbaud, and Laforgue whose irony, allusiveness, and colloquialism he praised in The Little Review, published in 1917. As for Eliot, he was drawn to Baudelaire’s sense of ennui, sterile beauty, and satanic spirituality, as well as to Gautier, Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry. Eliot’s masterpiece “The Wasteland” (1922) and his essay on Baudelaire (1932) reveal the impact of the symbolist poet on his work, as well as Valéry’s. French poetry of the second part of the twentieth century, however, hermetic in nature, failed to attract contemporary U.S. poets. Apart from the American symbolists, most nineteenth-century American authors, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving, were attracted to the French literature of the past, especially the classics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among them, Emerson wrote critical reviews on Michel de Montaigne, noting the influence of the Renaissance essayist on his own Essays. Therefore, during much of this period, except for John Lothrop Motley who praised Balzac’s novels in the late 1840s, American novelists, shaped by the legacy of puritanism, considered French realist fiction as immoral. Although Henry James, Irving
727
Babitt, and Paul Elmer More wrote on Sainte-Beuve, and Ezra Pound on Rémy de Gourmont, it took years for American intellectuals to develop their taste for French realist and naturalist fiction. They eventually recognized its artistic value through Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, and Hippolyte Taine’s theory of naturalism. Taine inspired Edward Eggleston’s novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), as well as Whitman’s influential review (ca. 1871) on the importance of naturalism for the future orientation of American literature. In 1896, against the general disdain from intellectuals who viewed Zola as vulgar and animalistic, Frank Norris revealed his debt to the French naturalist novelist by praising L’Assommoir (1877), Germinal (1885), and La Bête humaine (“The Human Beast,” 1890). Following suit, the novelist and critic Henry James overcame his earlier repugnance in dealing with morally reprehensible subject matter and wrote an impressive body of essays on George Sand, Balzac, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Zola, published in his Partial Portraits (1888), Notes on London and Elsewhere (1893), and Notes on Novelists (1914). James greatly contributed to the American awareness of the French highly crafted fiction of the nineteenth century. At the time U.S. intellectuals discovered French fiction, many of them, such as Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and e.e. cummings, left for Paris to be part of the exhilarating freedom and artistic creativity that characterized the city in the 1920s. A few years later, Henry Miller also settled in Paris, where he wrote extensively on French literature, including Balzac, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Giono, Eugène Ionesco, and
728
LITERARY RELATIONS
Blaise Cendrars, whose life of “heroic” and fabulous adventures appealed to him. Cendrars’s poetry, his “simultaneous” narrative La Prose du Transsibérien/Prose of the TransSiberian (1913) and his novel Bourlinguer (1948), greatly influenced both Miller and Dos Passos. After World War II, French literary influences continued through the translations of such authors as Malraux, Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Jean Giraudoux, Jean Genet, and Jean Anouilh, whose plays were performed on and off Broadway in the 1950s and early 1960s. During the 1970s and 1980s the French literary world, locked into the neo-avantgardism of the nouveau roman or committed to hermetic poetry, would not appeal to American intellectuals. But the French exported their theories, named FreudianMarxist, structuralist, semiotic, and deconstructionist, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. These French theories were appropriated by the liberal culture of U.S. academia and found their way into literary analysis. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the French stimulated the discovery of a local culture within Latin America. As prosperous educated elites developed within the political turmoil of the newly independent countries, they traveled to Paris, then the cosmopolitan capital of arts and letters, and adopted French values as the ultimate standard. In Paris during this period, the Parnassian school of poetry was shaping a new aesthetic, with Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, José-Maria de Heredia, Stéphane Mallarmé, and others, who greatly influenced modernismo, the first artistic movement in Spanish America. Launched by the publications of
José Martí’s Ismaelillo (1982) and Rubén Darío’s Azul (1888), modernismo’s artistic sensibilities propelled new writers to journey to Paris, as though to experience the pure essence of poetry. Among the writers who, in the early 1920s, settled there more or less permanently were Rubén Darío from Nicaragua, Enrique Gómez Carrillo from Guatemala, Amado Nervo from Mexico, the García Calderón brothers from Peru, Rufino Blanco Fombona from Venezuela, Enrique Larreta from Argentina, and Francisco Contreras from Chile. If, during World War I, most of the Latin-American writers returned to their native lands, by 1918 many of them were back, while new ones arrived to study and infuse novel ideas. By the 1920s, the surrealist movement was in full sway. In its quest to express the unconscious layers of the mind, surrealism inspired many Spanish American writers to integrate in their work the genius of the Indian and African components of their identities. Among these writers, Miguel Ángel Asturias from Guatemala, Lydia Cabrera and Alejo Carpentier from Cuba, the poet Gabriela Mistral from Chile, César Vallejo from Peru, to name a few, wrote much of their work in Paris, moving in the international avantgarde circles. Two intellectuals, Alfonso Reyes, a Mexican diplomat, and Victoria Ocampo, an Argentinean and frequent visitor to Paris, were pivotal figures in the ongoing dialogues between Spanish American and French writers. And so was Roger Caillois, who during his years in Buenos Aires developed a commanding grasp of Latin American literature while promoting French literature through his articles in Ocampo’s journal Sur, as well as by editing
LITERARY RELATIONS
a small journal of his own, Lettres françaises (French Literature). Back in Paris in 1945, Caillois spent the rest of his life promoting prominent figures of the Spanish and Brazilian American literary world through the Gallimard collection, La Croix du Sud (The Southern Cross), which he created and edited from 1950 to 1970. After World War II, Paris continued to be the place where many Latin Americans came to find themselves as writers. Among them were Ernesto Sábato, Julio Cortázar, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Eduardo Manet, Severo Sarduy, Copi, Hector Bianciotti, Luisa Futoransky, and Silvia Baron-Supervielle, to name just a few. Paris’s favorable political environment and its vibrant exiles’ milieu, along with the growing interest of the French literary establishment, gave these writers the impulse to explore their own artistic individualities. Paris was especially important as a catalyst for launching the writing careers of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Afredo Bryce Echénique. For others like Paz, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Cortázar, the Parisian intellectual milieu, which engaged them in debates on political commitment and moral integrity as well as aesthetic forms and much else, provided the inspiration to pursue their oeuvre. Paz recognized that his celebrated analysis of the soul of Mexico, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), owed much to the French moralist tradition, as well as to the surrealist dissidents Caillois and Bataille, who sought to represent the sacred in order to counter the forces of modern alienation. For Cortázar, the revolutionary spirit developed in France and present in so many of its intellectuals was the “detonator” that allowed him to reclaim his Latin American consciousness in
729
such novels as Hopscotch (1963) and A Manual for Manuel (1973). The Cuban Sarduy, Argentinean Copi who wrote in French, and the Peruvian Ribeyro lived most of their lives in Paris, where they found a propitious climate for their literary experiments. Today, the Spanish American presence in Paris persists with the Argentinean Juan José Saer, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Hector Bianciotti (a member of the Académie Française), and the poet Sylvia Baron Supervielle. The prolific novelist and playwright Eduardo Manet, a Cuban exile, who like Baron-Supervielle and Bianciotti writes in French, lives in the city that welcomed him as an exile and within the literary tradition that nurtures his creativity. Marie-Agnès Sourieau See also: Anti-Americanism; Avant-Gardes; Bataille, Georges; Baudelaire, CharlesPierre; Baudrillard, Jean; Bianciotti, Hector; Bryce Echenique, Alfredo; Butor, Michel; Caillois, Roger; Camus, Albert; Carpentier, Alejo; Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Cendrars, Blaise; Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de Vicomte; Copi; Cortázar, Julio; cummings, e.e.; Darío, Rubén; Deleuze, Gilles; Derrida, Jacques; Dos Passos, John; Duhamel, Georges; Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Foucault, Michel; García Márquez, Gabriel; Genet, Jean; Green, Julien Hartridge; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Hemingway, Ernest; James, Henry; Laforgue, Jules; LéviStrauss, Claude; Miller, Henry Valentine; Montaigne, Michel de; Neruda, Pablo; Paz, Octavio; Poe, Edgar Allan; Pound, Ezra Loomis; Romains, Jules; Sábato, Ernesto; Sarduy, Severo; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Siegfried, André; Stein, Gertrude; Supervielle, Jules; Surrealism; Theory; Tocqueville, Alexis de; World War I; World War II; Wright, Richard; Zola, Emile. References Braun, Sidney D., and Seymour Lainoff, eds. Transatlantic Mirrors: Essays in FrancoAmerican Literary Relations. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
730
LOEWY, RAYMOND Fitz, Earl E. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Mathy, Jean-Philippe. Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Mehlman, Jeffrey. Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Weiss, Jason. The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. New York/London: Routledge, 2003.
LOEWY, RAYMOND (1893–1986) Pioneer of industrial design (active 1929–1986) who was responsible for some of the most recognizable and emblematic American designs of the late modernist period, including designs for Lucky Strike, Studebaker, and NASA. Born in Paris, Loewy was twice decorated while serving in the French artillery in World War I. He immigrated to New York in 1919 in search of work and fell into a job with Condé Nast, among others, with little more creative education than a flair for illustration. A career as a fashion illustrator (Loewy was known as “the French artist”) was cut short by the Wall Street crash, and a chance commission saw him move into industrial design. Loewy’s remodeling of a 1929 Gestetner duplicator prefigured his design ethos for the next sixty years. Loewy hid the unchanged workings inside a cabinet, a face-lift that turned it from machine to office furniture, and thus placed the emphasis on the aesthetic appearance. This approach—one of style rather than mechanical innovation—was seen as a mark of his Frenchness and did not immediately fit
with American industry at that time. In the suburban home, however, Loewy’s ideas of desirability were a great success, demonstrated by his radical reshaping of the 1934 Sears Roebuck Cold Spot refrigerator, whose smooth white finish suggested cleanliness and hygiene. Loewy’s continuing success in this vein stretched to transport. His remodeling of locomotives for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the GG1, S1, and SS1 in particular, led to his work being described as “streamlined.” In fact, Loewy’s style is better described in terms of simplification, and many of his commissions to remodel existing designs support this: Loewy produced the iconic red, white, and black logo of Lucky Strike cigarettes in 1941, as well as the sleeker Greyhound livery in red and blue (and the Silversides motor coach) in 1946. As Loewy’s design house grew, his long association with Studebaker saw him take on the Detroit stranglehold on car design with the Champion (1947), Landcruiser (1950), Starliner (1953), and Avanti (1962), turning the fortunes of Studebaker around in the process. In the 1960s and 1970s, Loewy’s biggest project by far was working on the habitability of NASA space projects, especially Skylab and, later, the shuttles. By the 1980s, Loewy was working on his reputation as much as anything else, a process that saw him produce a streamlined autobiography (Industrial Design, published in 1980), which left the essential workings unchanged. Damian Sutton See also: Fashion; Tobacco; World War I. References Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Jodard, Paul. Raymond Loewy. London: HarperCollins, 1992.
LOOPY DE LOOP Loewy, Raymond. Industrial Design. London: Fourth Estate, 1980.
LOOPY DE LOOP Cartoon character. As the sign on his letter box read, Loopy De Loop was “The Big Good Wolf.” Loopy, Hanna Barbera’s misunderstood, trouble-prone French-Canadian wolf, starred in about fifty episodes between 1959 and 1965. A Loopy show is typically composed of the following essential elements: an introduction to our hero, minding his own business, introducing himself grandiloquently, and professing his lupine atypicality: “I, Loopy De Loop, am different; I am truly charming, kind, and sentimental.” Loopy’s self-satisfaction is then shattered when he comes across a child or woman in distress and offers to help, only to be violently rebuffed (he is not unlike Casper the Friendly Ghost in this respect). Loopy carries on regardless in his vain attempt to convince others of his difference. Even when he succeeds in helping them, they rarely recognize his contribution. The best he ever gets are grudging compliments like, “for a no-good sneaky wolf, he ain’t a bad guy.” Loopy never really comes out on top, as he reflects ruefully: “It is the same old story; everyone gets a happy ending except for Loopy De Loop.” Loopy’s Frenchness, or more precisely his French Canadianness, is signaled in several ways. His accent, his intermittent Franglais, expertly provided by Hanna Barbera veteran Daws Butler, carries classically French suggestions of charm and sophistication. Visually, too, Loopy’s woolen hat and scarf suggest that he is from the frozen lands of Quebec. However, the most impressive aspect of Loopy’s characterization
731
is in the use of the eye area: Loopy has the most expressive eyebrows in the cartoon world. The tellingly raised eyebrow and little, knowing wink at the viewer are used to let us know that behind his do-good wolf persona there lie less-innocent, typically Gallic motivations: to charm “ze ladeez” of course. Loopy, for example, offers to help the distressed “Petit Red Riding Chapeau,” who is being assailed by the Three Little Pigs (this is a kind of pre–Angela Carter subversive fairy tale). Leaping to her defense, with eyebrows raised, he whispers that, once she is saved, he will be able to “charm her later, n’est-ce pas.” He is not averse either to using his charm on Grandma as an indirect way of seducing Red Riding Hood: he flatters the old lady with the classic line, “but no, you are the sister yes, not the grandma.” In this regard, Loopy is much like Pepe Le Pew, the amorous French skunk. Unfortunately for Loopy, his success rate is also on a par with Pepe’s: forever prone to making “ze big boo-boo,” his efforts come to nothing. His charm potential is not limitless—as he wryly reflects on his attempts to flatter Grandma, “even my charm can only go so far.” In an era where Speedy Gonzalez has been banned for its “negative images” of Hispanics, Loopy De Loop remains an example of the humor and sheer fun involved in playing on national stereotypes. Martin Munro See also: Comic Strips; Pepe Le Pew. References Hanna, William, and Joseph Barbera, with Ted Sennett. The Art of Hanna-Barbera: Fifty Years of Creativity. New York: Viking Studio Books, 1989. Markstein, Donald D. “Loopy de Loop.” www.toonopedia.com/loopy.htm (cited April 25, 2004).
732
L’ORÉAL
L’ORÉAL L’Oréal is one of the largest companies in France and the largest global player in its sector. It operates in 150 countries and owns brands including Lancôme, Garnier, and Matrix. The company is well known for its research and development, too: 3 percent of its sales revenues go into cosmetology and dermatological research. Following a merger with Elf-Aquitaine, it has a 20 percent stake in the pharmaceutical company Sanofi/Synathélabo. Liliane Bettencourt and her family own 51 percent of L’Oréal’s main holding company, Gesparal, with Nestlé owning the rest. At the end of the nineteenth century, ladies of the demimonde would not be seen without hair dyed fiery red or coal black. Eugène Schueller capitalized on the fashion by setting up Auréole to market dyes, a brand that was soon renamed L’Oréal. By 1920, its products were on sale in seventeen countries, including the United States, though it had only ten sales representatives. But L’Oréal was ready for the booming years of the Jazz Age. (By the end of the 1920s, there were 40,000 hair salons in France.) In the 1930s, Mae West’s blond hair helped sell L’Oréal Blanc, and Schueller also developed marketing strategies by commissioning famous artists to paint designs and by launching the fashion magazine Votre Beauté. World War II had little impact on growth since depressed ladies took to perming their hair and buying cosmetics. By the 1950s consumer boom, L’Oréal had new heroines: Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, who was originally a brunette. The company moved into skin-care products too, a development cemented in 1980 when Vichy joined the group. In the
1960s, L’Oréal pioneered the scientific approach to skin care, as well as developing the emerging youth markets. It was in this decade that a distribution outlet was established in Canada. L’Oréal outstripped any other French blue-chip company in earnings and grew at twice the average rate of the cosmetics industry in the 1970s. Anaïs Anaïs became the world’s best-selling perfume. In 1986, L’Oréal shares were distributed to investors outside France for the first time, not least to Nestlé, who helped the company combat fierce competition. In 1989, it stopped testing on animals. L’Oréal Retail was established in North America in 1996 and gained a 27 percent share of company sales by 1999, partly a reflection of the hugely successful “Because I’m worth it” advertising campaign. Mark Vernon See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Cosmetics; ElfAquitaine; Fashion; Jazz; World War II. References “L’Oréal: The Beauty of Global Branding.” Business Week (June 28, 1999). Sauer, Pamela. “A Makeover of Global Proportions.” Chemical Market Reporter (December 3, 2001).
LORIMIER, LOUIS (1748–1812) Born near Montreal in 1748, Pierre-Louis was the son of Claude-Nicolas de Lorimier, a French military officer. After the Treaty of Paris in 1763, ceding French Canada to Britain, Lorimier and his father moved south to the Great Miami River in Ohio, where they established a trading post, Laramie Station, and made contacts among the Delaware and Shawnee peo-
LOSEY, JOSEPH
ples. During the American Revolution, Louis Lorimier supported the British government and used his influence among the Native Americans to lead them in raids on Tennessee and Kentucky, in 1778 attacking Boonesborough and capturing Daniel Boone. In retaliation, George Rogers Clark led a party to Laramie, which he and his men looted and burned in 1781, ruining Lorimier’s business and costing him an estimated $20,000 in trade goods. Subsequently, Lake Lorimier and the trading post were named in the Greenville Treaty of 1795 as the dividing line between Indian territory and that open for settlement. After the revolution, Lorimier moved to Spanish Louisiana in 1793 and was given a land grant by the governor of Saint Louis to occupy Cape Girardeau with his Native American contacts, hopefully forming a border force against the expanding United States and the hostile Osage tribe. Established at the “Red House” as local “commandant,” administrator, judge, and diplomat, Lorimier attracted more than 1,000 settlers by 1803, managing the rowdy frontier colonists with a skill that impressed visitors, despite the fact that he was illiterate and used a clerk to transact official business. With the Louisiana Purchase, Lorimier was named Indian agent of the United States and seated as a district judge. Meriwether Lewis encountered Lorimier in 1803 and was struck by his authority as well as his long hair, which Lorimier wore in an unusual braided queue attached to his waist. Lewis, fearing a hostile reception because of his partner in the expedition, William Clark, the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, was warmly received, and Lorimier welcomed Lewis into his family’s home.
733
Lorimier married a Shawnee-French woman, Charlotte Pemanpick Bouganville (1758–1808), and had several surviving children, including Louis, an Indian trader; Auguste Bouganville; and William, who received an appointment to West Point. Lewis particularly admired Lorimier’s daughter Agatha, who was well educated and dressed in European fashions. After the death of his first wife, Lorimier married Marie Berthiaume and continued to promote American settlement of Missouri and undertake diplomatic missions to local tribes, including the Kickapoo. Lorimier died August 26, 1812, and is buried with his wife, Charlotte, in Old Cape Girardeau Cemetery. Margaret Sankey See also: American Revolution; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Ohio; Treaty of Paris. References Bakeless, John. Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark. New York: Lippincott, 1948. Lavender, David. The Way to the Western Sea. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Moulton, Gary E., ed. Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, August 30, 1803–August 24, 1804. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. WPA Writers’ Project. Missouri: A Guide to the Show Me State. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941.
LOSEY, JOSEPH (1909–1984) American film director. Joseph Losey’s career bridged widely different worlds. He began as a documentarian in the private sector during the Depression before becoming a contract director at RKO in Hollywood. Following blacklisting during the McCarthy era, he made films under assumed names in England, leading to an exacting analysis of
734
LOUISBOURG
the class system in The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1970), for which he is celebrated in Britain. In France, he is remembered for the lean and socially aware thrillers of his early career, and in 1976 he went there to work. Losey was born in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, on January 14, 1909. Following medical then philosophy studies at Dartmouth College and Harvard, he became involved in radical theater. This led to filmmaking. Among the first to recognize Losey as an auteur was Cahiers du cinéma’s political rival, Positif. After the July–August 1960 issue ran Bertrand Tavernier’s perceptive review of the British release Time without Pity (1957), the cult of Losey grew in France. Of his French films, M Klein (1977) remains perhaps the most intriguing, popular, and widely seen. Set against the milieu of Paris during the 1942 Vichy deportations of Jews, it revolves around Robert Klein (played by Alain Delon), a wealthy citizen who is mistaken for a Jew. An art dealer, Klein lives well by buying valuable works at knockdown prices from Jews anxious to flee Paris. After he mysteriously receives a copy of a Jewish newspaper, Klein is increasingly made aware of another Klein, an alter ego whom he does not meet but whose presence grows more and more apparent. The alter ego even begins to occupy Klein’s flat when he is absent. Eventually, Klein must defend himself against the charge of being Jewish and is deported. The air of the Kafkaesque in M Klein, as well as its thriller format, arguably owes something to Losey’s apprenticeship in film noir and to the cold war politics, the backdrop against which he was persecuted. The relationship between politics and the individual was a persistent thread beginning
with Losey’s first feature, The Boy with Green Hair (1948), an allegory on racism. That Klein mysteriously does nothing to evade deportation suggests the assumption of social responsibility immanent in an oeuvre in which individuals often stand for wider sociopolitical experiences. However, it also testifies to what Losey’s detractors described as a self-conscious artiness that marred his reputation. Starring Yves Montand and Miou-Miou as exiled Spanish terrorists drawn back to Francoist Spain on another mission, Les Routes du Sud (1978) also reflected on a 1960s generation grown complacent. Ironically, like much of Losey’s late work, it seemed like a film out of its time. Moving from these starry industry vehicles, Losey adapted Don Giovanni (1979), a Franco-German-Italian coproduction highly regarded among opera lovers. Again, a man is forced to take responsibility for his moral frailty. The director had wanted to make La Truite (The Trout [1982]) in the 1960s. Its tale of a woman bent on exploiting men capitalized on young Isabelle Huppert’s patina of icy cool, but arguably belonged to Brigitte Bardot. Richard Armstrong See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Cahiers du cinéma; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Montand, Yves; Music (Classical); Positif. References Hirsch, Foster. Joseph Losey. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Leahy, James. The Cinema of Joseph Losey. London: A. Zwemmer; New York: Barnes, 1967.
LOUISBOURG For most of the half century it existed, Louisbourg was the administrative center,
LOUISBOURG
735
A view taken from the entrance to Louisbourg Harbour. (Library of Congress)
military stronghold, and principal port of the French colony of Île Royale (Cape Breton Island). Founded in 1713, Louisbourg developed into an economic and strategic base for French interests in North America. Voltaire assessed the colony, after it had disappeared, as having been the “key” to overseas French possessions. While Louisbourg was still a factor on the world stage, Benjamin Franklin described the fortified town as a “tough nut” for an army of New Englanders to crack. Yet the stronghold was cracked, and twice, in 1745 and 1758. After its second capture, Louisbourg faded into obscurity. Two centuries later, beginning in the 1960s, the federal government of Canada embarked on a program to reconstruct approximately onefifth of the original French town, turning it into a major tourist attraction. European mariners were familiar with the coastline and harbors of Cape Breton
well before the establishment of Louisbourg. Dozens of French first settled on the island in 1629; the initiatives continued until 1669 when they withdrew. Ventures in that period concentrated on fishing and on trading furs with the Micmac. Cape Breton Island was reoccupied by the French in 1713 as a consequence of the Treaty of Utrecht, which transferred Acadia (mainland Nova Scotia) and Placentia, Newfoundland, from France to Great Britain. In what is now Atlantic Canada, France retained only Île Saint-Jean (later Prince Edward Island) and Cape Breton. The latter became the principal new settlement and was renamed Île Royale. Officials within the Ministry of Marine expected all French settlers on Newfoundland as well as the Acadians of Nova Scotia to relocate to the new colony. The colonists from Placentia did form the core settlers of Louisbourg—the settlement party in 1713
736
LOUISBOURG
consisted of 116 men, ten women, and twenty-three children—yet relatively few Acadians moved to Île Royale. Most preferred to remain in fertile farming areas along the Bay of Fundy. The people who arrived in Louisbourg in 1713 and after enjoyed peace, prosperity, and population increase for thirty-one years. Using dried cod as the primary export, merchants in Louisbourg and elsewhere developed trading links throughout France’s Atlantic realm. The capital of Île Royale emerged as one of the busiest ports in colonial North America. Vessels sailed to and from France, the West Indies, Canada, and Acadia (as well as the British colonies of New England), with Louisbourg as a transshipment center. Over 100 vessels a year reached the protected anchorage during the shipping season. The overall colony, especially Louisbourg, was an intriguing variant within the overall French colonial paradigm. There was no seigneurial regime established in the colony, and the fur trade was relatively insignificant. The local economy was based on a bountiful cod fishery, lucrative intercolonial and international trade, and government expenditures. While the foundation of Louisbourg’s economy was fishery and commerce, the town benefited from its role as administrative capital and strategic stronghold. Across its complete history, the town witnessed government spending of 4 million livres on fortifications and 16 million livres on other expenditures. The outlay was enormous for the era, especially since it was an era when France was attempting to reduce expenditures. During the 1720s, about 10 percent of total French spending on colonies was expended at Louisbourg; in the 1730s and 1740s, that share rose to around 20 percent
and more. The financial commitment underlines the importance French colonial authorities attached to Louisbourg and Île Royale. By the 1740s, Louisbourg had a population of an estimated 2,000 permanent civilian inhabitants. Immigration, especially from France, accounted for much of the growth, though natural increase was also a factor. In 1737, children represented 45.4 percent (664 of 1,463) of the total for civilians. As is typical in new colonies, adult males greatly outnumbered adult females, even decades after the founding. Among the civilian population, the closest the gender ratio ever came to equality was three adult males to one adult female. Because of its sea-based economy, Louisbourg was home to a population that differed from other regions of New France. The dominant elements in its civilian population came from Brittany, Normandy, and the Basque region of southwest France. Until 1745, there were up to 150 Swiss and German Protestant soldiers in the garrison, a small community of Irish, and several hundred slaves from Africa or of African descent, as well as a few Indian slaves. The heterogeneous composition of Louisbourg society meant that it had more in common with New Orleans and some AngloAmerican communities than with Quebec or Montreal. In addition, the Roman Catholic Church at Louisbourg was less well established and wielded much less influence than in Quebec and Montreal. Three examples suffice: the people of Louisbourg rejected the idea of any tithe, they refused to build a bona fide parish church (choosing instead chapels maintained by the king), and there was no clerical representation on the local Superior Council.
LOUISBOURG
While Louisbourg was the largest and most important settlement on Île Royale, there were other settled harbors on the island and still more on Île Saint-Jean. Most were involved in the cod fishery; a few had a population of several hundred. On the military side of the equation, Louisbourg came to possess some of the most elaborate fortifications erected in colonial North America and a sizable garrison. By the 1740s, there were between 600 and 700 soldiers in the stronghold. During the 1750s, there would be up to five times that figure. As a European-style fortified town, albeit erected on the edge of a wilderness, Louisbourg had masonry fortifications surrounding the main settlement; its streets were laid out on a rectilinear grid. Three decades of peace ended in 1744 when France and Britain went to war during King George’s War (War of the Austrian Succession). In the spring of 1745, Governor William Shirley persuaded Massachusetts to send an expedition of more than 4,000 men, organized in eleven regiments, to attack Louisbourg. William Pepperrell of Kittery, Maine, was in command. An armada of more than 100 vessels arrived off Louisbourg in early May 1745. The siege lasted six weeks, and when it was over the victors sent nearly all the inhabitants of Louisbourg to France. They stayed there until a peace treaty (Aix-la-Chapelle) ended the broader European war in late 1748. According to the treaty, Île Royale was returned to France. A resettlement expedition sailed to Louisbourg in the summer of 1749. The “second” period of French occupation at Louisbourg was marked by a preoccupation with the likelihood of another war with Britain and its colonies. Versailles authorized additional fortifications and
737
sent many more troops, including, for the first time, regular infantry regiments. The second siege of Louisbourg occurred during the French and Indian War, specifically in 1758. The French were in a far stronger position than they had been in back in 1745, with roughly 3,500 soldiers and militia under the command of Governor Augustin de Boschenry Drucour, but the basic weaknesses remained. One was that once enemy troops came ashore, they could establish siege batteries on hills overlooking the fortress. Another was that the port was vulnerable to blockades, cutting off any hope of supplies or reinforcements. Major General Jeffery Amherst and Admiral Edward Boscawen commanded the British attacking force of 1758, which was much larger than in 1745. The approximately 27,000 soldiers and sailors reached the Louisbourg coastline in early June 1758. An amphibious landing was made at Anse de la Cormorandière (today’s Kennington Cove) on June 8 by a flotilla commanded by Brigadier General James Wolfe. On July 25, the British burned or captured the last two French ships. The French surrendered unconditionally on July 26. Within weeks, the British transported the French soldiers and civilian population to France. The British continued to garrison the town until 1768, but with fewer soldiers as the years passed. In 1760, on orders from Prime Minister William Pitt, Louisbourg’s fortifications were destroyed, just in case a treaty handed Cape Breton back to the French as it had in 1748. That did not happen. The Treaty of Paris (1763) confirmed that along the Atlantic coast of North America, France would retain only the archipelago of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon and fishing rights along the “French
738
LOUISIANA
shore” of Newfoundland. Louisbourg disappeared from the world stage until it became a research and reconstruction project in the second half of the twentieth century. A. J. B. (John) Johnston See also: Acadia; Basques; Brittany; Fishing; Franklin, Benjamin; French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Mississippi River; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Saint Lawrence River; Saint-Pierre et Miquelon; Treaty of Paris; Treaty of Utrecht; Voltaire, François. References Balcom, B. A. The Cod Fishery of Isle Royale, 1713–1758. Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1984. Johnston, A. J. B. The Summer of 1744, A Portrait of Life in 18th-Century Louisbourg. Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1983. Rev. ed. 1991. ———. Control and Order at French Colonial Louisbourg, 1713–1758. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001. L’Eté de 1744: La vie quotidienne à Louisbourg au XVIIIe siècle. Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1983. McLennan, J. S. Louisbourg from Its Foundation to Its Fall. Halifax: Book Room, 1983. McNeill, John Robert. Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, Louisbourg and Havana, 1700–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
LOUISIANA North American colony stretching along the Mississippi River valley, under French dominion from 1682 to 1763 and from 1800 to 1803. Louisiana was purchased by the United States in 1803 and subsequently divided into several states, including the state of Louisiana (1812), whose history has been marked by continued cultural and linguistic connections with France and the francophone Atlantic world.
The lower Mississippi valley was first explored by the Spanish during the sixteenth century, but it was a French explorer, René-Robert de La Salle, who, after descending the Mississippi River, claimed the entire basin for the king of France (Louis XIV) and named the region Louisiana in his honor in 1682. Two years later, La Salle attempted to return to Louisiana by sea but failed to locate the mouth of the Mississippi. The small settlement he established in present-day Texas lay in ruins shortly after his men killed him in 1687. The colonization of Louisiana did not resume until 1699, when a small fleet led by Canadian naval officer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville reached the Gulf coast. D’Iberville’s expedition marked the beginning of permanent European settlement in Louisiana. The first permanent settlements were established at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the South, and they included Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1701), New Orleans (1718), and Natchitoches (1713), the westernmost French post in Louisiana. A few villages, missions, and forts such as Cahokia (1699), Kaskaskia (1703), and Fort de Chartres (1719) were also established in the North and formed what was known as the Illinois Country, a region formally integrated into the colony of Louisiana in 1717. The region that early eighteenthcentury European cartographers designated as Louisiana was inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Indians belonging to distinct linguistic and cultural groups. The French settlements that constituted French Louisiana during the first half of the eighteenth century occupied only a very small portion of that vast region. By 1763, after the Indian population of the lower Mississippi valley had declined dramatically from
LOUISIANA
epidemics, the main area of French colonization was still home to approximately 32,000 Indians, mostly Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Upper Creeks. The colonial population of French Louisiana at that date did not exceed 10,000, half of whom were enslaved blacks. In the early years of the colony, the small settlements of Mobile and Biloxi suffered from disease and recurring shortages of food but managed to survive thanks to the help of local Indians, who saw the French as potential allies against British North American expansionism. In Louisiana, as in New France, French-Indian commercial and military alliances remained essential to the maintenance of French imperial claims against Indian and English enemies. Louisiana governors such as JeanBaptiste, sieur de Bienville (1717–1725, 1732–1743) and Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil (1743–1752) dedicated much energy to the establishment of such alliances. In contrast with New France, however, missionary activities among Indians were quite limited in French Louisiana. Jesuits and seminarians did establish missions in the Illinois Country, but the clergy of south Louisiana, including Jesuits, seminarians, and Ursulines, carried out most of their duties among settlers and slaves. From 1712 to 1731, the colony was controlled by three successive commercial companies—the Crozat Company (1712– 1717), John Law’s infamous Company of the West (1717–1720), and the Company of the Indies (1720–1731)—before reverting to direct royal supervision. The transportation of 7,000 settlers (many of whom were convicts deported by force) and more than 5,500 African slaves under the tenures of the Company of the West and the Company of the Indies helped to ensure the fu-
739
ture of the colony, but it never became the prosperous plantation colony its promoters had envisaged. France always displayed much more interest for the development of its cash-crop colonies in the Caribbean. As a result, very few settlers or slaves were imported to Louisiana after 1731. In the 1730s, however, the plantation economy of Louisiana was slowly emerging. Slave-produced rice and tobacco began to be exported to France and the West Indies, and at the end of the French regime, the toils of enslaved blacks on south Louisiana plantations ensured the relative prosperity of the New Orleans elite. In the Illinois Country, a large proportion of the colonial population (totaling 1,380 by 1752, including 446 black slaves and 149 Indian slaves) was engaged in the production of cereal grains, some of which were exported to New Orleans. Both in upper and lower Louisiana, however, the pelt trade with Indians remained an important feature of the colonial economy. Despite the noticeable progress of Louisiana’s agricultural production, peltry still accounted for about one-third of the total value of the French-Louisiana export trade by 1750. The relative indifference of the metropolis to the economic development of Louisiana prompted colonists to rely on local and cross-cultural networks of production and distribution. The peculiar frontier exchange economy of French Louisiana fostered flexible intercultural relations between Indians, settlers, and slaves and contributed to the formation of unique cultural and linguistic patterns. Yet, the apparent social and racial fluidity of colonial life was disrupted by violent Indian wars (with the Natchez in 1729 and with the Chickasaws and Choctaws in the 1730s and 1740s) and
740
LOUISIANA
constant official anxiety over the possibility of a slave rebellion. In the early years of settlement, the efforts of missionaries and officials to control the disorderly conduct of Canadian Coureurs de bois revealed a growing anxiety around cross-cultural interactions. Informal interactions between Indians and the increasing number of slaves and poor whites arriving in the 1720s crystallized officials’ dedication to the establishment of a rigid socioracial order in the colony. In 1724, a new version of the slave law or Code Noir adopted for the French Antilles forty years earlier was proclaimed for Louisiana. The Louisiana Code Noir required all slaves to be baptized, declared them to be movable property with no legal rights, and provided specific punishments for rebellious slaves. Most significantly, the Louisiana Code Noir prohibited marriage and concubinage between whites and blacks. In 1728, the Superior Council of Louisiana took the unprecedented decision to prohibit French-Indian marriages as well. These policies did little to prevent continued intercultural relations in French Louisiana or impede the formidable resilience of people of African and Indian ancestry, but they did initiate the long history of racism that has marked the evolution of Louisiana’s politics and society for almost three centuries. Following the conquest of New France by the British during the French and Indian War, the French royal government decided to cede all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain in 1762. This decision was ratified by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, in which France also gave Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi that had officially been part of Louisiana to Great Britain. Following a short-lived rebellion
against Spanish rule (Insurrection of 1768), the French population and Spanish authorities cohabited peacefully, despite occasional tensions, especially between the Spanish and French clergy. The collaboration between Spanish authorities and francophone elites greatly facilitated the establishment of Spanish rule. The colonial government and laws of Louisiana were refashioned after the Spanish-American model, but Spanish governors were careful to name prominent French colonists to important administrative, judicial, and military posts. The colonial elite thus remained French culturally and linguistically, and many Spanish officials actually married into French families. French merchants and planters also greatly benefited from Spain’s dedication to the economic and demographic development of the colony. While the slave trade to Louisiana had virtually ceased after 1731, the Spanish government encouraged the importation of thousands of African slaves to its new colony. From 1763 to 1800, the slave population of Louisiana grew from less than 5,000 to 24,000. This development contributed to the unprecedented success of the colony’s plantation economy. At the end of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of slaves were working on recently established sugar and cotton plantations. These cash crops were relatively new to the region but played a significant role in its economic development during the next century. Spain’s government also subsidized and encouraged the immigration of white settlers. In addition to a small number of Anglo-American planters and a large contingent of Spanish-speaking Canary Islanders, approximately 3,000 Acadians, who had been displaced to various areas of
LOUISIANA
the Atlantic after their expulsion from Nova Scotia by the British, finally found a home in Spanish Louisiana. Most of these Acadians and their descendants settled in southwestern Louisiana and gave rise to the rich and now much-celebrated Cajun culture. The demographic transformation of Spanish Louisiana thus furthered rather than diminished the French-Atlantic character of the colony. Because of the massive immigration of Africans and white settlers, the colonial population, reaching 50,000 by 1800, began to outnumber Indians by the mid-1780s. The frontier exchange economy of earlier decades slowly gave way to plantation agriculture and farming, but it should be noted that Indians have had an enduring impact on Louisiana’s cultural development. Today, more than 43,000 American Indians live in Louisiana, including members of the francophone Chicimacha and Houma tribes. At the turn of the nineteenth century, political developments in other parts of the French Atlantic led to yet another dramatic shift in Louisiana history. In 1800, Napoléon Bonaparte forced Spain to return Louisiana to France, but the unfolding Haitian Revolution, which had started as a full-scale slave revolt in 1791, compelled him to abandon his dream of a renewed French North American empire. In 1803, Napoléon sold Louisiana to the United States, a decision that greatly disappointed the white francophone majority of the colony. Following the Louisiana Purchase and the creation of the state of Louisiana (1812), the region’s culture, politics, and population became increasingly Americanized. Yet, during most of the nineteenth century, the French colonial legacy and francophone cultures continued to shape
741
the regions in many ways. The 1824 Louisiana Civil Code, for instance, incorporated aspects of Spanish colonial law and of the French Napoleonic Code. Although New Orleans francophones became a linguistic minority by the 1830s and the northern parishes of Louisiana were almost exclusively anglophone and Protestant, between 50,000 and 100,000 francophone immigrants arrived in Louisiana before the Civil War. They came from France, Frenchspeaking parts of Europe, the Antilles, and various parts of North America. In 1809, for instance, some 10,000 black and white refugees from Saint Domingue (Haiti) disembarked in New Orleans, including 3,000 free people of color. This last group doubled the size of the existing New Orleans free black community and over the years merged and intermarried with native free people of color of francophone ancestry. Tens of thousands of French-born émigrés also integrated and reinforced the existing New Orleans white francophone community. Both groups were often at odds with their increasingly numerous anglophone neighbors, especially during the early part of the nineteenth century. Some white Creoles (a term used to designate people of French ancestry) rose to important political offices. Out of the sixteen governors elected before 1860, nine were of French ancestry; the last one, Paul Octave Hébert, served between 1853 and 1856. The prosperous black and white francophone families of Louisiana maintained strong ties with France and French culture. They created newspapers, schools, and numerous cultural institutions such as balls, theaters, literary circles, and mutualaid societies. Inspired in part by French Republican ideology, French-speaking members of the black creole elite such as Louis
742
LOUISIANA
An 1826 map of the state of Louisiana shows county boundaries, roads, settlements, and topographical features. (Michael Maslan Historic Photographs/Corbis)
Charles Roudanez argued against racial segregation before and after the Civil War, while some of the most ardent supporters of slavery and white supremacy could be found in the ranks of the white francophone elite of New Orleans. By the end of the nineteenth century, the growth of the Anglo-American population had led to the progressive assimilation of white Creoles into American society. Cajuns and black Creoles remained less assimilated into anglophone society, but overall fewer and fewer Louisianans spoke French, Cajun, and Creole during the twentieth century. In 1921, the Louisiana state legislature even prohibited
the use of French on public school grounds, a measure especially aimed at unassimilated Cajuns. After 1945, the development of tourism, as well as the increased sensibility for minority rights prompted by the civil rights movement, fostered efforts to promote francophone and Cajun cultures in Louisiana. In 1968, the state of Louisiana created the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL). CODOFIL’s programs, including the promotion of Frenchlanguage courses in public schools, cultural programs for adults, and cultural exchanges between Louisiana and Quebec, have primarily targeted the population of
LOUISIANA PURCHASE
Cajun ancestry in southwestern Louisiana. Because of CODOFIL’s focus on standard French, however, its programs have failed to attract native speakers of francophone dialects among Cajuns, black Creoles, and Indians of francophone ancestry. Today, about 260,000 Louisianans are francophones, and they represent a little over 6 percent of the total state population. A 1990 CODOFIL survey found that 58 percent spoke Cajun French, 33 percent spoke standard French, and 9 percent spoke Creole French. In recent years, preparations for the Louisiana Purchase bicentennial celebrations have revived scholarly and popular interest for Louisiana’s French colonial past and francophone cultures. Guillaume Aubert See also: Acadia; Bienville, Jean-Baptiste, sieur de; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Cajuns; Catholic Church; Compagnie d’Occident; Coureurs de bois; Crozat, Antoine; French and Indian War; Haiti; Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’; Illinois Country; Jesuits; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Language; Louisiana Purchase; Mississippi River; Mobile; New France; New Orleans; Nova Scotia; Slavery; Texas; Tobacco; Treaty of Paris. References Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Hero, Alfred Olivier Jr. Louisiana and Quebec: Bilateral Relations and Comparative Sociopolitical Evolution, 1673–1993. New York: University Press of America, 1995. Ingersoll, Thomas N. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Usner, Daniel H. Jr. Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1683. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
743
LOUISIANA PURCHASE On April 30, 1803, France agreed to sell Louisiana to the United States, 827,000 square miles of territory situated to the west of the Mississippi River, including New Orleans, for the sum of F80 million ($15 million). The deal was signed in Paris by James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston, President Jefferson’s representative in the French capital from 1801 onward, on the one hand, and François Barbé-Marbois, treasury minister, and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, First Consul Bonaparte’s foreign minister, on the other. Officially, Louisiana had returned to French ownership from the time of the secret Treaty of San Idelfonso, signed between France and Spain on October 1, 1800. Bonaparte wished to regain the colony with the aim of reconstituting an immense American empire on the model of that which existed under the ancien régime. Nevertheless, the transfer of sovereignty was delayed by the need to negotiate peace with Britain: following the signing of the preliminaries in October 1801, it was concluded in Amiens on March 26, 1802. One year later, Bonaparte’s colonial prefect Pierre-Clément de Laussat arrived in Louisiana to take possession of the colony. However, on August 7, 1803, Laussat learned that Louisiana had been sold to the young American republic. Bonaparte had taken advantage of the peace with Britain in order to try to regain control of Saint Domingue from Toussaint L’Ouverture. The “pearl of the Antilles” was to have constituted the heart of this new empire, which was the first consul’s dream, while Louisiana was only supposed to provide resources to the island and its slave plantations. However, the expedition led by General Leclerc became a fiasco, and a
744
LOUISIANA PURCHASE
James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston, representing the United States, finish discussing the Louisiana Purchase with France’s Minister Talleyrand. (Bettmann/Corbis)
new start to the war with Britain seemed imminent. Furthermore, President Jefferson had clearly shown his discontent at the announcement of the repossession of the colony by France, which seemed, at the time, to be a more dangerous power than Spain. Far from taking an interest in the vast western territories, the president occupied himself primarily with the fate of New Orleans, which controlled commerce on the Mississippi River. His envoys, entrusted with the purchase of the capital of Louisiana—as well as Florida—were thus extremely surprised to be offered the entire colony. Bonaparte, seeing his dream of empire evaporating in Saint Domingue, decided to abandon Louisiana. In any case, the colony would have been far too easy a
prey for the British or the Americans. Its handover to the United States increased the strength of the American ally in the face of Great Britain, which remained France’s principal adversary. On November 30, 1803, France officially regained possession of Louisiana. Three weeks later, on December 20, a second ceremony celebrated the transfer of possession of Louisiana to the United States, which thus practically doubled its surface area and pushed the western border from the Mississippi to the Rockies. In this way, a multiethnic population also came under American sovereignty, composed of approximately 50,000 colonists of European origin, black slaves, and freedmen, as well as more than 60,000 indigenous people. Cécile Vidal
LOUIS-PHILIPPE, KING See also: Florida; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana; Marbois, François, Marquis de BarbéMarbois; Mississippi River; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François. References Frey, Sylvia, ed. The Louisiana Purchase: A History in Maps, Images, and Documents on CD-ROM. New Orleans: Deep South Regional Humanities Center, Tulane University, distributed by Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Kastor, Peter J., ed. The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation. Washington DC: CQ, 2002. Kukla, John. A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. New York: Knopf/Random House, 2003. Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. The Louisiana Purchase: A Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002.
LOUIS-PHILIPPE, KING FRANCE (1773–1850)
OF
King of France (1830–1848). Louis-Philippe, like his father Philippe (Egalité), duc d’Orléans, from a different branch of the French royal family than the Bourbons, was sympathetic to the first French Revolution and fought in its army. After the guillotining of his father in 1793 and his defection to Austria, LouisPhilippe remained mostly abroad for twenty-one years. In 1796, the Directory offered to release his mother and brothers from jail on the condition that he go to America, and so he did, sailing to Philadelphia. He settled there in October and was duly joined by his brothers in February 1797. The mother stayed in France, and the three brothers, Louis-Philippe, the Duke de Montpensier, and the Comte de Beaujolais, traveled the United States, observing the new democ-
OF
FRANCE
745
racy and taking notes (Journal de mon voyage en Amérique), going back and forth from New England to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Their sister Louise married a New York tea merchant, George von Schroeppel, and remained in the country all her life. When Bonaparte seized power in 1799 (18 Brumaire), the threesome decided to return home and await events, but Louis-Philippe remained in exile, marrying the daughter of the king of Sicily. Welcomed back to France after Napoléon’s abdication and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, Louis-Philippe became the favorite of some Republicans who did not want to antagonize all reigning monarchs in Europe and hoped that Louis-Philippe would be an acceptable compromise as a “citizen king.” The July revolution of 1830 overthrew Charles X and established Louis-Philippe as king of France. However, a combination of thin popular support, growing inequalities, and corruption scandals led to widespread dissatisfaction.
Louis-Philippe, King of France (1773–1850). (Library of Congress)
746
LUCKY LUKE
One particular transatlantic incident, involving the looting of a French-owned bakery in Puebla, Mexico, erupted during his reign. This brought a naval blockade in 1838 and got the support of Texan and American ships. The Pastry War turned into an all-out invasion of Mexico, which destroyed Veracruz and the economy of the country. Louis-Philippe’s increasingly authoritarian stance led to the 1848 revolution that established the Second Republic. Louis-Philippe fled to England, where he died. Marc H. Journoud See also: French Revolution; Mexico; Republicanism; Texas. References Leris-Laffargue, Janine. Restauration, LouisPhilippe. Paris: Charles Massin, 2000. Loades, Judith. Louis Philippe: The July Monarchy. Burford, UK: Davenant, 2002.
LUCKY LUKE The bande dessinée (BD; comic strip) adventures of Lucky Luke, the lonesome cowboy who “shoots faster than his shadow,” symbolize for generations of French speakers the stereotype of the American far West. Morris (the pen name of Maurice De Bevere) created the character in 1946 for the story “Arizona 1880” in L’Almanach Spirou 1947, a spin-off of Spirou, the top-selling Belgian journal for children. Lucky Luke is still going strong, having starred in more than sixty albums, published by Dupuis (Marcinelle, near Charleroi), then Dargaud (Paris), then Morris’s own Lucky Productions, with total sales of over 250 million. He has also been the subject of cinema and television adaptations, translations into thirty languages, and national newspaper series, including front-page coverage (Libération, September 16, 1997).
Morris, the “father” of Lucky Luke, the Wild West’s best shot. (Julien Hekimian/Corbis Sygma)
LYONNAISE
From 1968, the adventures settled in France through René Goscinny’s Pilote magazine and then in their own short-lived monthly publication, Lucky Luke (1974– 1975). Indeed Morris had met Goscinny in the United States after moving there in 1949, and from 1955 the latter provided the scripts for Morris’s drawings. Since Goscinny’s death in 1977, Morris has called upon a number of scriptwriters and assistants, including Bob de Groot, Guy Vidal, and Michel Janvier. The style of the series is marked by a backdrop of incidental details that bring to life the saloons, jails, Main Streets, and other trappings of (mythical) life in the Wild West. To these, Goscinny added appearances from historical figures such as Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, and Jesse James and references to key events including the gold rush and the construction of the railroads. Nonetheless, the factual or pseudofactual elements are never allowed to overpower the buffoonery of Lucky Luke’s interaction with his steed, Jolly Jumper; the evil but brainless Dalton Brothers; and his equally dim but cowardly dog, Ran-Tan-Plan. Lucky Luke entered BD establishment circles in 1993 when Morris’s work was honored with a retrospective at the international comics festival in Angoulême. What was initially a gentle parody of the western genre has become an iconic Frenchification of the values of early America. Laurence F. Grove See also: Comic Strips. References Delporte, Yvan. La Face cachée de Morris. Angoulême/Brussels: Lucky Productions, 1993. François, Edouard, Philippe Mellot, and JeanPaul Tiberi. L’Univers de Morris. Paris: Dargaud, 1996.
DES
EAUX
747
Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. Dessins et bulles: La Bande dessinée comme moyen d’expression. Paris: Bordas, 1972.
LYONNAISE DES EAUX (LYONNAISE DES EAUXDUMEZ) The current utilities group was formed after a merger in 1990, making it one of the fifteen largest industrial groups in France. Services include national and regional development of local industries and public services, construction, real estate, and environmental protection. The original company was founded in 1880 by Crédit Lyonnais to manage public services of water and gas distribution. It played a central role in the industrialization of France. International interests were established next, in francophone Africa and Latin America, and these helped the domestic company through difficulties in the 1930s. Nationalization came with World War II, and diversification into oil and electronics followed. The next major challenge resulted from decolonization when major international contracts were often abruptly terminated. Another wave of diversification inevitably followed, which by the 1980s had focused on developments in local communities as well as the health and leisure sectors (the company is a major owner of golf courses). This also signaled the move into North America, sealed in the merger with Dumez, a company that carried out 50 percent of its construction operations in the United States and owned United Westbourne, the leading Canadian distributor of electrical materials and plumbing equipment.
748
LYOTARD, JEAN-FRANÇOIS
The merger with its long-standing owner, Compagnie de Suez, was completed in 1997. Mark Vernon See also: World War II. References Sedillot, René. La Lyonnaise des Eaux a cent ans (1880–1980). Paris: SDE, 1980. Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez. Paris: PF Publishing, 1991.
LYOTARD, JEAN-FRANÇOIS (1924–1998) French philosopher who gained recognition from anglophone intellectuals when his celebrated book La Condition postmoderne/The Postmodern Condition (1979) was translated and published in the United States in 1984. The origins of this influential book were in fact initiated in Quebec, when the Gouvernement du Québec’s Conseil des Universités (the Council of the Universities of the Government of Quebec) commissioned Lyotard, a professor from the Université de Paris VIII at Vincennes, to write a document about the state of knowledge in postindustrial societies. Lyotard produced a typewritten 121-page essay that was published as such and reprinted the following year by the Conseil des Universités under the initial title Les Problèmes du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées (“The Problems of Knowledge in the Most Developed Industrial Societies”). That obscure essay was simultaneously published in France, with a new foreword, under the catchy title of La Condition postmoderne. Although the report was easily available in Quebec from the (now defunct) Conseil
des Universités, readers used and quoted the book version published in Paris by the Editions de Minuit. But only a few endnotes referred to Canada, and the report did not find any use at the Conseil des Universités. The theoretical framework of this document referred to numerous works in philosophy and social sciences, including U.S. publications like Ihab Hassan’s The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Post Modern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello’s edited book, Performance in Postmodern Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1977). Taking his cue from cybernetics and sociology, Lyotard argues that knowledge changes as societies enter into a postmodern age. In fact, Lyotard borrowed the postmoderne term that was so often attributed to him by people who wrongly saw him as the father of postmodernism. However, many American scholars found in Lyotard’s writings a fertile ground for their own theories. By the mid-1990s, a critique of Lyotard’s approximative theory emerged from both continents. Yves Laberge See also: Quebec; Theory. References Brügger, Neils. “What about the Postmodern? The Concept of the Postmodern in the Work of Lyotard.” Ed. Robert Harvey and Lawrence B. Schehr. Yale French Studies 99 (2001). “Jean-François Lyotard: Time and Judgment.” Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 77–92. Lotringer, Sylvere, and Sande Cohen. French Theory in America. New York/London: Routledge, 2001. Rojek, Chris, and Bryan S. Turner, eds. Forget Lyotard? London: Routledge, 1998.
M MADAME BOVARY (1857) Madame Bovary, written by Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), tells the story of a provincial married woman who takes two lovers, signs promissory notes to fund her love affairs and penchant for luxury (thereby ruining her devoted and faithful husband), fails to demonstrate maternal feelings for her daughter Berthe, and then finally commits suicide by taking arsenic. The famous trial of author and text as an outrage to religious and civic morality rebounded in favor of the defense, resulting in acquittal on moral grounds. As the novel itself portrayed and criticized bourgeois double standards, so it served as a warning against the dangers surrounding gullible young women fed on romances. Indeed, the eponymous heroine’s self-delusion, fantasy, and longing for what is not is a fatal flaw apparent to some degree in all the characters in Madame Bovary. Thanks to such representations, the term “Bovaryisme” entered the dictionary, defined by Jules de Gaultier in 1902 as “the power to conceive of oneself other than one is.” The social realism of the work and its manner of representing complex psychological and emotional states reverberate beyond provincial France and the French realist novel of the nineteenth century. Influencing
other contemporary European historical novelists such as Tolstoy and Galdós, Madame Bovary also heralded the modernist novel in its traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. As a reflection on fiction and its devices, Flaubert’s stylistic experiments with multiple points of view and composite description caused Henry James to describe Flaubert as “the novelist’s novelist.” Indeed, it is Flaubert’s choreography of multifaceted detail to unmask a more complex truth that William Faulkner develops. More recently, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1965) remakes a transatlantic Madame Bovary, while the French New Novelists claimed Flaubert as a direct aesthetic precursor. The iconic status of Flaubert’s novel as high art and social critique continues to dominate its reception and adaptations in other media. Claude Chabrol’s film adaptation of Madame Bovary (1991) faithfully reuses key lines in the text in its screenplay, lovingly attends to nineteenth-century Norman costume and custom, but fails to do justice to the themes of female passion and social situation in the choice of the aloof Isabelle Huppert as Emma Bovary. It is Flaubert’s humane criticism of human passion and folly against the backdrop of social and economic change that has most marked South American novelist-critics, such as
749
750
MADONNA
Mario Vargas Llosa, and North American filmmakers, such as Vincente Minnelli. His 1949 version of Madame Bovary neatly recasts and transposes nineteenth-century French provincial culture into what is (especially in the scene of the Vaubyessard Ball) also a postwar remake of Gone with the Wind (Fleming, 1939). In its depiction of oppressive, rigidly demarcated social and gender roles (summed up by the use of the trial and courtroom as frame), predatory survivors, and the strength of female passions, Minnelli’s Madame Bovary marks the launch of the novel’s power to describe popular American, as well as European, culture and society. Thus, where Baudelaire and nineteenth-century critics engaged with Emma’s “hysteria,” American critics today read in her a representation of modern diseases of image, such as anorexia, mythomania, and shopping addiction, or the preference for virtual not economic reality. Mary Orr See also: Chabrol, Claude; Chopin, Kate; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; James, Henry. References Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Ed. Paul de Man. Trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. James, Henry. The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957. Porter, Lawrence M. A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.
MADONNA (MADONNA LOUISE CICCONE) (1958–) American pop singer, actress, writer. Madonna’s French-Atlantic credentials reside in the ethnic origins of her mother,
her transatlantic and indeed global popularity, and her status as object of intellectual, cultural, and theoretical scrutiny. Interviews and biographical accounts lay great stress on the impact of the early death of the singer’s mother from breast cancer in 1963, when Madonna was only five years old. This idealized lost mother, born Madonna Louise Fortin in 1929 in Bay City, Michigan, was in fact French Canadian, the descendant of Julien Fortin, who had sailed from Le Havre to New France in 1650. Her family originated in the Rimouski area of Quebec but in the late nineteenth century joined the diaspora of French Canadians seeking work in the industrialized zones of the United States. Her marriage in 1955 to Tony Ciccone, the descendant of an Italian immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island in 1920, was in some ways typical of that diaspora’s interaction with other groups in North America who shared the Roman Catholic religion and the same presence in blue-collar employment. While Madonna has mentioned her origins when she has given concerts in Quebec, what is more noteworthy is the proliferation of websites and other genealogical material that seek to incorporate the famous star into a narrative of French Canadian identity for the greater prestige of Quebec and indeed ordinary individual Québécois. The refusal of the local mayor on nuisance grounds to permit a concert by Madonna in the parc des Sceaux in August 1987 handed Jacques Chirac, then prime minister in a cohabitation arrangement with Socialist president François Mitterrand, an opportunity to portray himself as branché (trendy, with it) to young voters in advance of elections the following year. At the behest of his then twenty-four-year-old
MAIGRET
daughter Claude, he intervened to permit the concert (a huge spectacle attracting 100,000 people) and sang Madonna’s praises in an interview with the pop radio station NRJ. However, it is among French and French-inspired intellectuals that Madonna has engendered most public discourse. Indeed she is a good example of the transatlantic traffic of contemporary cultural theory, a French export to America that then comes back again transformed and barely comprehensible to its origins. Madonna’s feminism and, above all, capacity for self-transformation, and thus unreadability in terms of “authenticity,” have lent themselves to postmodern analysis. In The Madonna Connection, Cindy Patton convincingly analyzes “Vogue” (Madonna’s 1990s raiding of aspects of black and Latino gay culture) in terms borrowed from Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Nora on the subaltern and memory. Jean Baudrillard himself sees Madonna (as well as La Cicciolina and Michael Jackson) as exemplary of an age of proliferating images and surfaces in which the distinction between appearance and nonappearance is lost. The fit and muscular body of Madonna is a way of exorcizing the body as destiny, a “gymnastic EgoIdeal” that constantly solicits itself sexually and produces and reproduces herself and her desire. As all spontaneity is “laid off,” we witness “an ephemeral, hygienic and promotional radiance of the body,” in which ultimately we all become managers of our own appearance. Bill Marshall See also: Baudrillard, Jean; Certeau, Michel de; Chirac, Jacques; Foucault, Michel; Music (Pop); Quebec; Theory.
751
References Baudrillard, Jean. “Transexuality.” The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London: Verso, 1993: 20–25. ———. “The ‘Laying-Off ’ of Desire.” The Perfect Crime. London: Verso, 1996: 124–130. Morton, Andrew. Madonna. London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2001. Schwichtenberg, Cathy, ed. The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identity. London: Allen and Unwin, 1993.
MAIGRET Fictional head of the Paris homicide division, who appeared in seventy-six novels and collections of stories by Georges Simenon between 1931 and 1972. Reflecting the author’s travels, Maigret is called to investigate from the Mediterranean South to the Netherlands and out to the Atlantic coast and beyond. Belgianborn Simenon claimed he invented the character during a stay in the Netherlands, but Maigret could hardly be more French: born in the Allier, near the geographical center of France, occupying for almost all his career an apartment on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir between the smart center of Paris and the working-class East, then retiring to a small town on the Loire. The first series of novels (published by Fayard 1931–1934) shows him in and around Paris, but also going back to his childhood home, as well as to Belgium and the Netherlands, and along the Atlantic coast. The seafarers depicted in Au Rendez-vous des Terreneuvas/The Sailors’ Rendezvous (1931), Le Chien jaune/Maigret and the Yellow Dog (1931), and Le Port des Brumes/ Maigret and the Death of a Harbor-Master (1932) suggest France extending out into
752
MAILLET, ANTONINE
the ocean, and when, after using the character in three short story collections published by Gallimard (1943–1944), Simenon relaunched his detective under the Presses de la Cité imprint in 1947, he took him almost immediately to New York (Maigret à New York/Maigret in New York’s Underworld, 1947), where Simenon arrived with his family in 1945, and out West (Maigret chez le coroner/Maigret at the Coroner’s, 1949, written while Simenon was living in Arizona). In spite of minimal English, Maigret’s gift for empathy with victims and villains and his understanding of human nature serve him just as well abroad as at home, so that Maigret makes exotic America seem familiar to French readers. Maigret went to America, but America also came to him. In Maigret, Lognon et les gangsters/Maigret and the Gangsters (1952), in spite of repeated warnings that the hard-boiled American gangsters will be too much for him to handle, Maigret perseveres and tracks them down, finally reprimanding the assistant district attorney who was rash enough to pursue his quarry on Maigret’s territory; the two colleagues then get companionably drunk together. The story of Le Revolver de Maigret/Maigret’s Revolver (1952) turns on a pistol presented to Maigret by American colleagues, and there are other references to Maigret’s travels, as well as to the inevitable rich Americans in Paris. The Maigret novels started to be translated almost immediately, and the character became familiar to American readers, but although Maigret was much filmed and televised in France and Europe, only one Hollywood film was ever made (of La Tête d’un homme, as The Man on the Eiffel Tower, by Burgess Meredith in 1948, with Charles Laughton as Maigret). The appeal of the books, even in
translation, is chiefly in the atmospheric descriptions of French locations. Stephen F. Noreiko See also: Crime Fiction; Film Noir. References Carly, Michel. Sur les routes américaines avec Simenon. Paris: Omnibus, 2002. Eskin, Stanley G. Simenon: A Critical Biography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987.
MAILLET, ANTONINE (1929–) Francophone Canadian novelist and playwright whose work focuses on the places and people of Acadia. Maillet’s literary career began in 1958 with the publication of the novel Pointeaux-coques, and she has since published more than thirty-five texts, a varied body of work that includes plays, novels, folktales, children’s fiction, translations of English plays, a tourist guide to Acadia, and her doctoral thesis. Drawing on Acadian oral traditions, Maillet’s literary project seeks to reclaim the history and geography of Acadia from dominant representations by nonAcadians, thereby offering Acadians a space in which to reimagine their cultural heritage. In 1979, Antonine Maillet won the Prix Goncourt, a French literary prize, for her novel Pélagie-la-charrette/Pélagie: The Return to Acadie, a novel about the survival of Acadian culture after 1755. She was the first nonmetropolitan French writer to receive the award and has since been awarded numerous literary prizes and honorary doctorates in both North America and Europe. Maillet has been a member of the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie since 1987 and as such has become an unofficial ambassador for Acadians and North American francophones throughout the Frenchspeaking world.
MAINE
The success of Pointe-aux-coques (Prix Champlain, 1960) and her second novel, On a mangé la dune (“We Ate the Dune,” 1962), enabled her to fund visits to Paris in 1962–1964 and 1969–1970. Maillet’s thesis, Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie (“Rabelais and Popular Traditions in Acadia”), was completed in 1970 and was published in 1971 alongside her most innovative early work, La Sagouine. Inspired by the use of joual, the popular French of Quebec, in the literature of the Quiet Revolution, Maillet began to adopt the nonstandard French of Acadians in her work. Maillet’s early plays and novels, including Mariaagélas/Maria, Daughter of Gélas (1973), Evangéline Deusse/Evangeline the Second (1975), and Les Cordes de bois (1977), highlight and subvert the traditional social and gender divisions in Acadian society. In 1979, Maillet published her most successful novel, Pélagie-la-charrette, which simultaneously charts the return of a group of Acadians from exile in Georgia and the process by which their history enters the collective memory. The novel challenges the distinction between written history and oral memory, emphasizing the marginalization of Acadia in the Canadian narrative. Similarly, in a number of texts, such as Crache à Pic/The Devil Is Loose (1984), Les Confessions de Jeanne de Valois (1992), and Chronique d’une sorcière de vent (“Chronicle of a Witch of the Wind,” 1999), her female characters are repositioned as active historical figures rather than silent onlookers. Maillet has been criticized by fellow Acadians for her nostalgic construction of myths of Acadian community. However, in her most recent novel, Madame Perfecta (2002), Maillet focuses on the experiences of a Spanish immigrant to Quebec to ex-
753
plore notions of home, belonging, and exile beyond the borders of Acadia. Kathryn Gannon See also: Acadia; Language; Quiet Revolution. References Brière, Eloise A. “Antonine Maillet and the Construction of Acadian Identity.” Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers. Ed. Mary Jean Green et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Desalvo, Jean Luc. Le Topos du Mundus Inversus dans l’æuvre d’Antonine Maillet. San Francisco: International Scholars, 1999. O’Reilly, Magessa. “Une tradition qui célèbre la tradition orale: Pélagie-la-charrette d’Antonine Maillet.” Studies in Canadian Literature 18, no. 1 (1993): 118–127.
MAINE One of the New England states, presentday Maine was claimed by the French, the English, and several Native American tribes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was likely the English who first called the area “Maine,” although the precise origin of the term is still debated among historians. The French developed trading relationships with the Algonquianspeaking inhabitants along the coast and the interior river valleys. Jesuit priests established missions throughout Maine, in or near existing Indian villages. The English colony of Massachusetts Bay also claimed territory in Maine. The border between New France and New England was never clear, alternating between the valleys of the Kennebec, Penobscot, and Saint Croix rivers. The British clashed with the French and their Indian allies into the eighteenth century. In the late 1720s, after a series of military victories, the British settled aggressively in Maine, though most stayed south
754
MAINE
An 1826 map of Maine includes entries for rivers, cities, Native American settlements, and French settlements. (Michael Maslan Historic Photographs/Corbis)
of modern-day Portland. When the French gave up most of their claims to North America in 1763, British settlers poured into southern Maine. During the American Revolution, despite initial attempts to stay neutral, the Indians of Maine became divided, some supporting the British, some the Americans. In 1820, Maine became a state. Maine sits on a peninsula, shared by the Canadian province of New Brunswick. This area saw some of the earliest contact with the French of any North American region. The Native Americans living there were the ancestors of modern-day Micmacs, Passamaquoddies, Penobscots, and Abenakis. The explorer Jacques Cartier came into contact with the Micmacs, the easternmost nation, on his voyage to the Saint Lawrence
River in the 1530s. However, the rest of the century saw little contact between Indians and Europeans. Nevertheless, after the founding of Quebec in 1608, Samuel de Champlain established alliances with the Maine Indians, who, like the French, were enemies of the Iroquois who lived to the west in present-day New York State. An important factor in this alliance was the fur trade. The French exchanged firearms, beads, metal utensils, brandy, and other goods for valuable beaver pelts. Catholic missionaries, who often criticized the traders for giving the Indians alcohol, followed the Indians’ patterns of life, living in semipermanent villages in the summer and moving with smaller groups during the winter hunts. Both missionaries and traders brought diseases to the Indians, causing a decline in that population. The French-Indian alliance was a threat to the English/British, who fought the French and Indians in King William’s War (1688–1689), Queen Anne’s War (1703–1713), Governor Dummer’s War (1721–1726), King George’s War (1739– 1745), and finally in the French and Indian War (1754–1763). The British victory ended French political rule in Canada but did not halt the influence of people of French descent in Maine. From 1763 onward, French Canadians migrated to Maine, contributing to its culture, economy, and religious diversity. Thomas J. Lappas See also: American Revolution; Cartier, Jacques; Catholic Church; Champlain, Samuel de; French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Jesuits; New France; Saint Lawrence River. References Bourque, Bruce. Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
MALAQUAIS, JEAN Taylor, Alan. Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement of the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
MAISONNEUVE, PAUL DE CHOMEDEY DE (1612–1676) Founder of Montreal, first governor of the island of Montreal (1642–1665), gentleman, and soldier, born in Neuville-surVanne, in the Champagne region of France. Chomedey de Maisonneuve began his military career in the Netherlands at the age of thirteen. He made a name for himself thanks to his charisma and leadership of the troops. From 1636 on, he developed a plan with the help of his colleagues Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière and Abbot Jean-Jacques Olier of the order of the Pères de Saint-Sulpice to found a colony on the island of Montreal in order to convert the “infidels” of this region of New France. In order to ensure the success of the establishment of this missionary colony, La Dauversière and Olier convinced Chomedey de Maisonneuve to lead the expedition to the new continent. They established the Société de NotreDame de Montréal pour la conversion des sauvages de la Nouvelle-France, which was to be at the origin of the foundation of Montreal. On May 9, 1641, Jeanne Mance and almost forty colonists set sail from the French port of La Rochelle, under the leadership of Chomedey de Maisonneuve, in order to lead this evangelizing mission. After a three-month-long crossing, the flotilla reached Tadoussac at the mouth of the Saguenay.
755
On May 17, 1642, Chomedey de Maisonneuve founded the colony of VilleMarie (Montreal) at what is now known as Point-à-Callière. Maisonneuve’s plan was successful despite the threat it faced from the Iroquois nations. The early years of the colony of Ville-Marie were difficult, but Governor Maisonneuve continued to work to ensure that the colony grew. He then worked, as governor of Montreal, to promote the interests of the colony at the highest levels, as well as to recruit colonists to guarantee the economic development and the security of the colony. In September 1665, Lieutenant General de Tracy ordered Governor Maisonneuve to return to France. He then lived a quiet life in Paris, where he died in 1676. He was buried at the Saint-Etienne-duMont Abbey in Paris. Jean-François Béland See also: Catholic Church; La Rochelle; Mance, Jeanne; Montreal; New France; Tadoussac. References Desrosiers, Leo-Paul. Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve. Montreal: Fidès, 1967. Rousseau, Pierre. Histoire de la vie de M. Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve fondateur et premier gouverneur de VilleMarie. Montreal: Cadieux and Derome, 1983. Tard, Louis-Martin. Chomedey de Maisonneuve: le pionnier de Montréal. Montreal: XYZ, 1994.
MALAQUAIS, JEAN (VLADIMIR MALACKI) (1908–1998) Franco-Polish writer, born in Warsaw. The offspring of a nonpracticing Jewish family (his father was a literature teacher, his mother a militant in the Socialist Bund), Malacki left his homeland in 1926, working odd jobs across Europe but
756
MALAQUAIS, JEAN
settling in France, where he worked as a miner and then as a market porter in Les Halles in Paris. In the 1930s, he frequented Trotskyist circles, was in Spain at the very start of the civil war, spent evenings reading French literature at the Bibliothèque SainteGeneviève, and eventually formed a friendship with André Gide, who encouraged him in his writing. The result was Les Javanais (The Men from Java [1939]), published under his new pseudonym. The style of this sprawling, Rabelaisian novel about immigrant workers was also influenced by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and won the prestigious Prix Renaudot. This embryonic literary career was disrupted by the outbreak of World War II and Malaquais’s mobilization in the French army. His acerbic testimony on the “phony war” and the fall of France was collected in his Journal de guerre (“War Diary,” published by the Maison Française in New York in 1943). Escaping a prisoner of war camp, he and his Russian artist companion, Galy, made it to Marseilles, where they formed a part of the group of leftists and Jews awaiting escape from France with the help of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. Malaquais’s second novel, Planète sans visa (World without Visa [1947]), is a roman-àclef based on that period. In October 1942, Malaquais and Galy crossed Spain to Cadiz and sailed to Venezuela, arriving in Mexico in 1943. In Mexico City, Malaquais frequented the same leftist circles as André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Victor Serge and also contributed to Octavio Paz’s surrealist journal El hijo pródigo. The profound impression made on him by Mexico’s dramatic landscape and history is developed
in his published correspondence with Gide. After the war, Malaquais lived in the United States, with brief periods in France, until the 1980s. He was a visiting professor of European literature at various universities, wrote a thesis on Kierkegaard, frequented the German Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse and other leftist intellectuals, and acquired American nationality. His most significant American friendship was arguably that with Norman Mailer, begun in 1946. Malaquais translated The Naked and the Dead into French and made an abortive attempt with Mailer in the late 1940s to break into Hollywood screenwriting. Mailer’s 1974 preface to Malaquais’s third novel Le Gaffeur (The Joker [1953]), a Kafkaesque evocation of bureaucracy, attempts to stress its relevance to the paranoia and powerlessness of that decade. Malaquais also participated in the debates in Dissent in 1958 on “hipsterdom,” responses to Mailer’s controversial article of the previous year, “The White Negro,” which had at least the merit of awakening the possibility of countercultural renewal in American society as that conservative decade drew to a close. Malaquais settled in Switzerland in his later years, dying in Geneva. He lived to see his work begin to be republished, including a rewritten Planète sans visa. Bill Marshall See also: Breton, André; Céline, LouisFerdinand; Counterculture; Fry, Varian; Mexico; Paz, Octavio; Péret, Benjamin; Serge, Victor; World War II. References Briot, Frédéric. “Jean Malaquais.” Roman 20–50: Revue d’Etude du Roman du XXe Siècle 31 (June 2001): 129–137. Douin, Jean-Luc. “Jean Malaquais. Révolutionnaire d’instinct.” Le Monde (December 26, 1998).
MALDOROR, SARAH Mailer, Norman. Preface to Le Gaffeur (The Joker), by Jean Malaquais. New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1974; Paris: Phébus, 2001.
MALDOROR, SARAH (1939–) Caribbean-born film director who gained an international reputation as a politically committed director in the early 1970s, directing several films that depicted the anticolonial struggle in Portugal’s African colonies. Born in 1939, Maldoror’s life and career have seen her constantly crisscross the Atlantic between her native Guadeloupe, France, and Africa. She was a founding member of the theater troupe Les Griots, which brought together actors from the French Caribbean and francophone Africa (Les Griots performed in the first run of Genet’s Les Bonnes in 1959). In 1961, she received a technical apprenticeship in filmmaking at VGIK Studios in Moscow. Her marriage to the Angolan poet Mario de Andrade, leader of his country’s national liberation movement—the MPLA—saw her become heavily involved in the artistic and political struggle against the vestiges of European colonialism in Africa. Her filmmaking career began in Algeria, where she directed Monangambee in 1970 (the title is a pejorative term used to describe “the people”). Based on a short story by Luandino Vieira (then languishing in a work camp in Portuguese-occupied Cape Verde), this twenty-minute short film tells the tragicomic story of a prisoner who asks his wife for a “suit.” The prison guards overhear this and beat him, thinking he is looking for a new suit of clothes in which to escape, when, in fact, “suit” is a local word for a certain type of “fish.” The un-
757
comprehending Portuguese are shown to know nothing of the country they occupy and control. The documentary film Rifles for Banta (1971) continued the anticolonial theme. Using an Algerian film crew, Maldoror followed a group of resistance fighters through the bush in Guinea-Bissau. Her next film, Sambizanga (1972), is by far her most successful (winning the 1972 Tanit d’or in Carthage) and best-known work. Once again based on a story by Luandino Vieira, with a screenplay cowritten by Maldoror, her husband, and Maurice Pons, it tells the story of an Angolan militant arrested by the Portuguese in the mid-1960s. His wife, Maria, is unaware of her husband’s politics, and she despairingly attempts to trace him. Aided by MPLA militants, she eventually tracks him down in the capital, Luanda (the film’s title refers to the district in the city where the prison is situated), only to find that he has died under torture. Essentially, the film describes one woman’s political awakening, as she comes to realize the extent of colonial oppression in her homeland. Since Sambizanga, Maldoror has primarily worked on documentary films, none of which has achieved the critical or popular success of her early works. Interestingly, though, her later work has often taken her back across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, where she has made a number of films about some of the key figures of négritude—Aimé Césaire, un homme, une terre (“Aimé Césaire, A Man, A Land,” 1976), Aimé Césaire, le masque des mots (“Aimé Césaire, The Mask of Words,” 1987), and Léon Gontran-Damas (1994)— attempting to capture their vision of a transatlantic black culture. David Murphy
758
MALLE, LOUIS See also: Césaire, Aimé; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Damas, Léon-Gontran; Guadeloupe; Palcy, Euzhan. References Les Cinémas d’Afrique: dictionnaire. Paris: Karthala/ATM, 2000. Ukadike, N. Frank. Black African Cinema. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.
MALLE, LOUIS (1932–1995) Major contemporary French director whose film career has oscillated between Europe and America. Difficult to categorize, Malle is often regarded as an outsider, as well as an auteur making personal films. He made over twenty films falling into two categories, documentary and fiction, which have often been associated with subversion and marginality, and had a controversial reception because they addressed difficult or taboo subjects. Born into a rich industrial family, Malle received an upper-class education before enrolling at the IDHEC cinema school in Paris. His graduation placement was with Jacques-Yves Cousteau for the documentary Le Monde du silence/The Silent World, which won the Palme d’or in Cannes in 1956. As a result, Malle’s “first film” benefited from an international exposure, including in America, which facilitated his real directorial debut in the late 1950s. With Ascenseur pour l’échafaud/ Elevator to the Gallows (1957) and Les Amants/The Lovers (1958), both starring Jeanne Moreau, he launched his film career, anticipating new wave film style, even if he remained on the fringe of the movement. He has had significant international commercial successes, such as Viva Maria (1965), Au Revoir les enfants/Goodbye,
Children (1987) or Milou en Mai/May Fools (1989), while working with international stars such as Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Jeremy Irons, and Juliette Binoche. Malle is one of the few French directors to have enjoyed a successful career in America (1976–1986) while retaining control over his artistic production. He never intended to settle there, his working methods being so different from Hollywood’s. This period of his life spent mostly in Los Angeles and in New York is better understood as an experiment, after controversial films such as Le Souffle au coeur/ Murmur of the Heart (1971) and Lacombe Lucien (1974) and as the result of a lifelong attraction for American culture in its fascinating diversity, from jazz to literature and cinema. His “American” films result from his own perception of the United States and a close collaboration with a network of local artists and friends who helped to carry out his projects, including screenwriter John Guare and actress Candice Bergen, to whom he was married. Pretty Baby (1978), featuring Brooke Shields as a child prostitute, confirmed Malle’s polemical reputation. The movie was followed by Atlantic City (1980), which obtained five Oscar nominations, and My Dinner with André (1981), featuring New York artists Wally Shaun and André Gregory, which became a cult film, unlike the subsequent films, Crackers (1983) and Alamo Bay (1985), which failed to attract audiences. Malle also explored the diversity of America in two documentaries, God’s Country (1986) and And the Pursuit of Happiness (1986), before returning to France permanently in 1986 to direct his most personal film, Au Revoir les enfants. In the 1990s, Malle was in-
MALLET, MARILÚ
759
New Orleans, 1977. Louis Malle directs Brooke Shields and Keith Carradine in Pretty Baby. This was Malle’s first film made in America. (Bettmann/Corbis)
volved in international productions, such as Damage (1992) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), until his career was cut short by his premature death in 1995. The cohesion of Malle’s work is sometimes concealed by his atypical career. Throughout his life, he followed a personal trajectory, fulfilling his curiosity while exploring the borderline between fiction and documentary. He has become a major figure in European art cinema. Isabelle Vanderschelden See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Binoche, Juliette; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Jazz. References Billard, Pierre. Louis Malle, Le rebelle solitaire. Paris: Plon, 2003. French, Philip, ed. Malle on Malle. London: Faber, 1993. Frey, Hugo. Louis Malle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.
MALLET, MARILÚ (1944–) Quebec documentary filmmaker of Chilean origin. Born in 1944 in Santiago, Mallet studied architecture and also received a diploma in film studies before leaving for exile in Montreal following Augusto Pinochet’s putsch in 1973. There she studied art history and French studies at the Université de Montréal. Most of her work, in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, is concerned with the exploration of the immigrant experience in Quebec. In this, she forms part of a group of directors, including Tahani Rached and Michka Saäl from North Africa, who contributed to the “pluricultural” turn in Quebec intellectual debate, particularly following the sovereignty referendum defeat of 1980.
760
MALRAUX, ANDRÉ
Mallet’s Les Borgès (1978) rings the changes on the different attitudes of a family of Portuguese immigrants, the explanations narrated by the francophone son. Journal inachevé (“Unfinished Diary,” 1982), which won prizes at the Biarritz and Montreal film festivals, articulates the personal and public, political and gender alienation in a plural, nonauthoritative form that mixes direct cinema; improvised conversations, most notably and tensely with Mallet’s Australian-born husband (the director Michael Rubbo); brutal archive footage of the 1973 putsch; and the director’s voice narrating her diary. Mémoires d’une enfant des Andes (“Memoirs of a Child of the Andes,” 1986) portrays a village in Peru through the eyes of a little girl. In Chère Amérique (“Dear America,” 1990), Mallet returned to the subject of Portuguese immigrants in Montreal, placing in dialogue and interaction two different women: a successful immigrant property owner and a younger francophone Québécois, musician, and journalist. The more abstract and fictional 2 rue de la mémoire (1995), based on one of her short stories, places two formerly separated lovers in a dreamlike space. Mallet returned to the hybrid combination of autobiography and the immigrant context in Double Portrait (2000), which explores the filmmaker’s fraught relationship with her elderly mother, the well-known painter Maria Luisa Señoret. The two women finally come together as the film works through its decoupling of past and present voices and images in a dialogue about creativity and exile. Mallet returned to Chile for her next film. The title of La Cueca (2004) refers to a traditional Chilean dance and becomes a metonym for those women who lost their
partners in the repression of the 1970s, their solitary dance with a white cloth symbolizing the shirt of their loved one and becoming in turn a symbol for their (organized) resistance to the dictatorship. Through a portrait of five women from three generations, Mallet underlines the crucial contribution of women to Chile’s move toward democracy. Mallet’s films search for cinematic forms—documentary or fictional or a hybrid of both—that correspond to her preoccupations with memory, absence, identity, assimilation, the virtual, and the real. She is also the author of two volumes of short stories, Les Compagnons de l’horlogepointeuse (1981) and Miami Trip (1986). Bill Marshall See also: Chile; Quebec. Reference Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
MALRAUX, ANDRÉ (1901–1976) French writer, art critic, and political activist. Beginning with his politically charged voyage to Indochina in 1923, André Malraux traversed the globe to probe the enigmas of distant cultures. His journeys to the United States and Haiti, which span a forty-year time frame, mark key moments in his personal metamorphosis from political activist and novelist to cultural minister, and then to private citizen, eager to accept one final time the risk of the unpredictable. Malraux first came to the United States on February 24, 1937, to plead the cause of the Spanish Republican forces in a number of different public forums.
MANCE, JEANNE
Twenty-five years passed before Malraux returned to the United States as de Gaulle’s cultural minister in May 1962, at the invitation of President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy. During the round of formal engagements, a Washington Post reporter nonchalantly asked about the possibility of loaning the Mona Lisa to the National Gallery, to which Malraux replied affirmatively. He returned to Washington in January 1963 for the opening of the exhibit and acknowledged the importance of this cultural exchange in the light of the sacrifices American soldiers made to liberate France during World War II. Malraux’s final and, in many respects, most important transatlantic journey occurred during the last year of his life. Despite his condemnation of the Duvalier regime, he felt the urgent need to visit Haiti in December 1975 to encounter the Saint Soleil community of painters. He was fascinated by the very existence of painting in Haiti and by the freedom that characterized the efforts of Haitian artists. But Malraux also recognized the radical differences between the idyllic visions of the primitives and the absolute Otherness of Saint Soleil. In the early 1970s, two already-celebrated Haitian painters, Maud Robard and JeanClaude Garoute, otherwise known as Tiga, rejected the commercialism of the primitives. They purchased a property on the heights at Soisson-la-Montagne and gave materials to unschooled peasants, who painted spectacular figures and brought them to the community house as unsigned, untitled offerings. During Malraux’s twoweek stay in Haiti, he made a pilgrimage to the community, where he was greeted with a ceremony that was both an expression of homage and a summons. A group of individuals hidden behind enormous paintings
761
descended from the surrounding hills, while others addressed him by his first name and reaffirmed the importance of the bearing of responsibility for strangers that characterized his most inspiring fictional works. Malraux was overwhelmed by this ceremony and acknowledged the significance of his Haitian experience by including a special chapter on it in L’Intemporel, the third volume of his compendium La Métamorphose des dieux (“Metamorphoses of the Gods”). He saw in Saint Soleil the possibility of a new kind of sacred that flourished beyond the boundaries of institutions and outside the traditional framework of supplication and reward. What mattered to the Saint Soleil adepts was their eagerness to welcome the unknown unconditionally. In the months before his death in November 1976, Malraux sought to do the same and to challenge his readers to do likewise. Karen Levy See also: Gaulle, General Charles de; Haiti; World War II. References Cate, Curtis. André Malraux: A. Biography. London: Hutchinson, 1995. Madsen, Axel. Malraux: A Biography. New York: William Morrow, 1976. Malraux, André. L’Intemporel. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
MANCE, JEANNE (1606–1673) Founder of the first hospital in Montreal, the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, Jeanne Mance played an important role in the colonization of New France and the arrival in Canada of the filles du roy. Born in Langres, France, to Catherine Emmonot and Charles Mance, king’s attorney, Jeanne
762
MANCE, JEANNE
studied with the Ursulines in Langres. She went on to participate in charitable work and offered her help as a nurse in the hospitals of the Champagne area. In 1640, her cousin Nicolas Dolebeau, whose brother had just left for New France as a Jesuit missionary, informed her of the missions in Canada and of the departure, the previous year, of several nuns who had gone to found a hospital and a school in Quebec City. Jeanne thus formed the plan to go to Canada, and she appealed to pious Parisian circles in order to obtain financial support. The widow Angélique Fauré de Bullion provided her with moral support, as well as the money necessary for her expedition. At La Rochelle, where she was to embark for the New World, she met the members of the Société de Notre-Dame, whose intention was to found Montreal and who recruited her to establish a hospital there. She arrived in Quebec City in the autumn of 1641 and spent the winter there with Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve. There she met two of the founders of the Ursulines of Quebec, Madeleine de La Peltrie and Marie de l’Incarnation. In spring 1642, the “Montrealists,” accompanied by Mme de La Peltrie, continued their journey and founded Montreal on May 17. Jeanne Mance and Mme de La Peltrie contemplated founding their hospital in Huronia, as some native allies of the French had fled toward the interior in order to escape the Iroquois raids. The project was abandoned when the colonial authorities insisted that they be accompanied by soldiers. Mme de La Peltrie returned to Quebec City and Mance set up a people’s dispensary in Montreal. Under these difficult conditions, Mance obtained the support of the wives of some of the set-
tlers, including Marie Pournin, a midwife who was to run the hospital during Mance’s trips to France. Mance is said to have undertaken no fewer than seven crossings in order to ensure the future of Montreal and to recruit settlers. In 1658, Marguerite Bourgeoys, who had arrived in Canada in 1653, accompanied Jeanne Mance to France to recruit nurses from La Flèche to support the work of the hospital (which the clergy wanted to give to nurses from Quebec), as well as a number of devoted single women to set up a school. Upon their return, they were accompanied by thirty-two filles du roy, who came to consolidate Ville-Marie. These young women were to become the first pupils of the Notre-Dame Congregation founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys. The arrival of the three Hospitallers in 1659 gave rise to the official founding of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. Mance, who continued to be in charge of and to see to the running of the hospital, on many occasions voiced her opposition to the ecclesiastical powers who wished to impose tighter controls on the institution. Until her death in 1673, she succeeded in maintaining the autonomy of her foundation. Julie Roy See also: Catholic Church; Filles du Roy; Hurons; Jesuits; La Rochelle; Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de; Montreal: New France; Quebec City; Ursulines. References Daveluy, Marie-Claire. “Jeanne Mance.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1. Sainte-Foy: Presse de l’Université Laval; Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1966: 483–487. Dictionary of Canadian Biography On Line. National Archives of Canada and National Library of Canada. http://www.biographi .ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=34514 (cited August 4, 2004).
MANITOBA
MANITOBA Canadian province. Situated between Ontario and Saskatchewan, Manitoba is the gateway to the West. Nicknamed the “postage stamp province” at its incorporation into the Canadian Confederation in 1870 because of its shape and its relatively small size (36,000 square kilometers; 13,846 square miles), it has been expanded twice since then. In 1881, the province’s frontier moved north to 52°50' N and in 1912 to 60° N and the shore of Hudson Bay, giving it a territory of 650,000 square kilometers (250,947 square miles). This Prairie Province, with its network of lakes and rivers, was the site of contact between Europeans and aboriginal peoples long before the building of the transcontinental railway brought mass immigration to western Canada. The waves of immigrants to the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have made Manitoba an ethnically diverse province. Today FrancoManitobans form about 5 percent of the population. According to the 1996 census, 47,665 out of a total of 1,081,575 Manitobans designate French as their mother tongue, and a further 2,540 designate French as one of their two or more languages. This proportion is similar to that in Ontario, but the population in Manitoba is one-tenth the size of that of its neighbor. The Canadian prairies’ first inhabitants included the nomadic Cree, the Blackfoot, and the Ojibwa. At the time of first contact, the Cree and the Assiniboine had moved into the eastern prairies, and the Blackfoot had moved westward. The first contact with Europeans resulted from the search for the Northwest Passage by
763
mainly British sailors. In 1612, an exploring party reached the southern shore of the Hudson Bay. The eighteenth century saw the beginning of sustained contact with Euro-Canadian society. Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye (1685– 1749), led a number of expeditions following the network of rivers and lakes in search of the “western sea.” He, his sons, and his nephew explored the Red River and Winnipeg River in 1733 through 1738 and between them established a number of posts, including Fort Rouge at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers (the site of modern-day Winnipeg) and Fort La Reine on the site of Portage La Prairie, the portage used by fur traders traveling to Hudson Bay. Many of these seminomadic white male traders took as their partners women from the First Nations. The families established in this way were the core of a Métis population that developed in the Red River valley with its own strong sense of identity. The autonomy of the Métis population was threatened from the early nineteenth century with the establishment of a number of outposts and settlements. In 1809 through 1810, Fort Gibraltar was built as a fur-trading post for the North West Company. In 1812, Lord Selkirk began his attempts to found an agricultural settlement of dispossessed Scottish highlanders to help supply the western fur trade. In 1817, he persuaded a group of disbanded mercenaries from the Swiss De Meuron regiment to settle in the Red River colony. In the following year, a group of French Canadian settlers arrived, and a Roman Catholic mission was established, an Anglican mission arriving two years later. Fort Garry was built in 1817–1822 by the Hudson’s Bay Company, which in
764
MANITOBA
1821 merged with its rival, the North West Company. Further posts were established at Lower Fort Garry (1831– 1833) and Upper Fort Garry (1835). The region’s population grew as men discharged from the surplus trading posts settled there, often with their own Métis family. By midcentury, there was a colony of about 5,000, the majority of them Métis, and most non-Métis being former Hudson’s Bay Company employees. Separate English- and French-speaking communities had developed, cooperating in some areas but also with their own distinct cultural and religious identities. Parallel religious and educational institutions developed on the east and west banks of the Red River. Local representation and legal structures were also separately delivered in the two languages. The Métis cultivated strip farms along the Red River following the distinctive pattern established under the seigneurial system along the Saint Lawrence, allowing equal access to the riverfront. The French-speaking Métis had a particularly strong sense of nationalism, and they valued autonomy, whereas the anglophone Métis were more dependent on European support and approval. In 1867, the British North America Act, which established the Dominion of Canada, made provision for the eventual inclusion of the remaining British provinces and territories in the Confederation. The Hudson’s Bay Company sold its land, including the Red River Settlement, to Canada, and, without consulting the Métis population, the Canadian government began surveying the land with a view to administering the territory directly. It was in defiance of this attack on their autonomy that the Red River Rebellion
took place. The iconic figure at the head of the Métis was Louis Riel, grandson of the first francophone couple to settle in the Red River valley and Métis through his maternal grandmother. In December 1869, the Métis established a provisional government and under Riel’s leadership negotiated their conditions for entry into the Confederation, incorporating the main demands from a list of rights. Manitoba entered the Confederation in 1870 under the Manitoba Act. Riel went on to defend Métis rights in Saskatchewan in the Northwest Rebellion. Riel’s subsequent execution for treason after the suppression of the Métis resistance remains a potent symbol of the oppression of francophone and Métis minorities by Anglo-Canada. Riel is buried in SaintBoniface, Manitoba, and he remains a key figure in the cultural heritage of FrancoManitobans and of the Métis people. Manitoba’s constitution was drawn up when the francophone and anglophone populations were roughly equal in size. But changes in patterns of settlement over the next two decades meant that the francophone population declined dramatically as a proportion of the total population. By 1891, francophones numbered only 11,000 of a total 152,000 residents. Francophones migrating from Quebec preferred to go to Ontario or New England, partly because of negative images of the West spread by Catholic bishops in Quebec. The AngloSaxon majority was reinforced by migrants from Ontario and immigrants from Britain, and the U.S. Mennonites formed colonies in Manitoba, as did Icelanders (1870s) and Ukrainians (1890s onward). Later waves helped to transform the province in a multicultural direction. At the same time, patterns of onward migra-
MANITOBA
tion meant that the population was a shifting and mobile one. Prior to the creation of Manitoba as a province, denominational education had been the norm. In 1818, the first college was founded in Saint-Boniface by Bishop Provencher where boys of the Red River colony followed the classical course, studying Latin. At Confederation, the school system was modeled on that of Quebec, with two school sections with parallel Protestant and Catholic systems. French was the language of instruction in predominantly French-speaking areas. Two decades later, English-Canadian nationalism was on the rise, equating proficiency in English with patriotism. In 1890, widespread antiCatholicism in Manitoba led to legislation renouncing official bilingualism. The Manitoba Schools Act removed public financial support for separate schools. This was challenged in courts, and the new francophone Liberal prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919), decided that a compromise must be found for Manitoba. The Laurier-Greenway Compromise (1897) allowed religious education after the end of the official school day, the appointment of a Catholic teacher where numbers warranted it, and bilingual education for part of the day where any minority language was spoken by at least ten pupils in school. This compromise extended to all minorities. But in the wartime atmosphere of 1916, when loyalty to the British Empire was paramount and central European immigrants viewed with suspicion, bilingual education was eliminated. The response of the French-speaking population was to run a parallel, clandestine system of education in all areas where numbers permitted control at the level of the school board. While
765
complying with the official curriculum in English (all examinations had to be taken in English), teaching in French for part of the school day, with a parallel curriculum, including French language, literature, history, and religious education, continued unofficially. This parallel system was directed by the Association d’Education des Canadiens français du Manitoba, set up in 1916 and disbanded only in 1967, when pedagogical thinking and Canadian policies of multiculturalism once more recognized the right of children to be taught in their mother tongue, and French bilingual schools were reinstated in those parts of Manitoba where a sizable francophone population still existed. In 1947, teaching in French was allowed for one hour a day. A revision to the Statutes of Manitoba in 1954 recognized English as a language of instruction but allowed minority languages to be used for religious education, secondlanguage teaching, and additional teaching beyond the official hours. In the wake of the Official Languages Act of 1967, the Manitoban legislature adopted Bill 59, recognizing the special status of the French language as mentioned in the British North America Act of 1867 and confirming that 50 percent of classroom instruction could be given in French. In 1970, Bill 113 legalized 100 percent French-language instruction up to grade three. In 1972, the Institut pédagogique, affiliated with the University of Manitoba, was opened at the Collège Saint-Boniface to offer teacher training in French, finally restoring the pre-1916 situation. Francophone schools are now available in areas of francophone population. It is, arguably, only thanks to the clandestine activities of the Association d’Education des Canadiens français du
766
MANITOBA
Manitoba that one can still speak of a distinct Franco-Manitoban culture. The principle of bilingualism was also pursued in the domain of the courts. In 1976, Georges Forest contested the validity of a parking fine administered in English only, claiming that Manitoba had acted illegally in 1890 when it overruled the bilingual principle incorporated in the 1870 Manitoba Act. The case finally reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which found in Forest’s favor in December 1979. The principle of bilingualism remains a pressing political issue in Manitoba. In 1981, the Secrétariat des services en langue française (SSLF) was established. Attached to the Executive Council of Manitoba, this body plays an advisory role in the development of government services in French and general matters of French Languages Services policy, and it liaises with French-speaking organizations in the province. Services are offered in French according to the principle of the “active offer,” that is, they must be freely accessible, publicized, and of comparable quality in designated areas (those in which the francophone community is sizable enough [5 percent] or vital enough [active use of French in schools, churches, community groups, and cultural associations] to require them). The designated areas are southeastern parts of Winnipeg (Saint-Boniface, Saint-Vital, and Saint-Norbert) and areas to the west and to the south and east of Winnipeg. In 1945, Manitoban-born writer Gabrielle Roy leaped to fame with the publication of Bonheur d’occasion/The Tin Flute, a novel set in working-class Montreal. Many of her subsequent works (Rue Deschambault/Street of Riches, La Route d’Altamont/Road Past Altamont, Ces Enfants de ma vie/Children of My Heart) have featured
Manitoban settings. Though now composing a small, largely bilingual population, Franco-Manitobans continue to maintain an active cultural life promoted through schools, cultural centers, French-language television and radio, and French-language publishing. The history of the amateur theater troupe Cercle Molière is symptomatic of the evolution of Franco-Manitoban culture. Founded in 1925 by a group of enthusiasts, including a number of French and Belgian immigrants, the troupe initially looked to Europe for its cultural inspiration, rejecting the conservative Catholicism of the Franco-Manitoban establishment. But in the last twenty-five years, it has produced more and more works by the new generation of FrancoManitoban playwrights. Popular culture continues to celebrate the origins of the francophone presence in Manitoba with the annual celebration of the winter Festival du voyageur. The Métis population as a whole is now largely anglophone; however, the strength of the Métis community is still evident in Manitoba today. Since 1982, the Métis have been recognized alongside the Inuit and Indian peoples as a First Nation, and the 1996 census indicates that 10.6 percent define themselves as aboriginal in Manitoba (a figure that represents twice as many as the number of Franco-Manitobans). The growing interest in genealogical studies has produced a stronger awareness of the linked history of the francophone and First Nation populations of Manitoba. Rosemary Chapman See also: Catholic Church; Coureurs de bois; Fur Trade; Language; Métis; Riel, Louis; Roy, Gabrielle; Saint Lawrence River; Saskatchewan; La Vérendrye Family.
MARBOIS, FRANÇOIS, MARQUIS References Blay, Jacqueline. L’Article 2: les péripéties législatives et juridiques du fait français au Manitoba 1870–1986. Saint-Boniface, Manitoba: Les Editions du Blé, 1987. Flanagan, Thomas. Louis “David” Riel: “Prophet of the New World.” Rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Friesen, Gerald. The Canadian Prairies: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Wilson, Donald J., Robert M. Stamp, and Louis-Philippe Audet. Canadian Education: A History. Toronto: PrenticeHall, 1970.
MARBOIS, FRANÇOIS, MARQUIS DE BARBÉMARBOIS (1745–1837) Born in Metz, France (January 31, 1745), died in Paris (February 14, 1837). Born into a French noble family, from 1768 to 1834 Marbois served as French diplomat and public official in France and in the Atlantic area, living through the major governmental changes of the socalled age of revolutions. After a stint as junior diplomat in Saxony and Bavaria, he was appointed secretary to Anne-César La Luzerne (1741–1791), chevalier and then Marquis de La Luzerne, when the latter was sent to the United States as French ambassador (1779). Marbois visited Boston and then settled in Philadelphia, where he was appointed consul in 1781 and consul general in 1783. He became chargé d’affaires in 1784, when La Luzerne returned to France. In the same year, he married Elizabeth Moore, a member of a prestigious Philadelphia family. In 1786, he left the United States for a position as intendant of the Windward Islands (Isles-sous-
DE
BARBÉ-MARBOIS
767
le-Vent), from which in 1789 he returned to France. In Regensburg and Vienna on diplomatic business, then mayor of Metz (1794), Marbois met with political disgrace and was twice arrested (1793, 1797). On the second occasion, he was deported to French Guiana, where he spent two years. In 1799, he then returned to France and served under Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) as councilor of state (1799), director and minister of the treasury (1801–1806), and chief negotiator in the Louisiana Purchase (1803). From 1807 to 1834, he was first president and councilor of the Cour des Comptes. He well survived the fall of Napoléon (1815). Count (1808), senator (1813), peer of France (1814), Marbois became a marquis in 1817 and continued in public office until 1834. He was briefly minister of justice (1815–1816). Marbois was also a prolific writer. His best-known work is Histoire de la Louisiane et de la cession de cette colonie par la France aux Etats-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale/The History of Louisiana, Particularly of the Cession of That Colony to the United States of America, but he also wrote profusely, in his several official capacities, with regard to the West Indies, Guiana, and France. Luca Codignola See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Guiana; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase. References DeConde, Alexander. This Affair of Louisiana. New York: Scribner’s, 1976. Lentz, Thierry. Dictionnaire des ministres de Napoléon. Paris: Christian/Jas, 1999. Parker Chase, Eugene, ed. Our Revolutionary Forefathers. The Letters of François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, during His Residence in the United States as Secretary of the French Legation, 1779–1785. New York: Duffield, 1929.
768
MARCEAU, SOPHIE
MARCEAU, SOPHIE (SOPHIE MAUPU) (1966–) French film actress and director, born in Paris. Marceau’s film career began when she answered a small advertisement for someone to star in Claude Pinoteau’s La Boum (1980), which subsequently became something of a kitsch cult film, embodying the aesthetic values of early 1980s pop culture and sentimentality. She reprised her role as Vic Beretton in the sequel La Boum 2 (Pinoteau, 1982) and went on to appear in a series of French films throughout the 1980s, working with such directors as Alain Corneau (Fort Saganne, 1984), Maurice Pialat (Police, 1985), and Andrzej Zulawski (L’Amour braque, 1985, and Mes Nuits sont plus belles que vos jours/My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days, 1989). She appeared in the Franco-American Pacific Palisades (Schmitt, 1990), but her true U.S. breakthrough came with her role in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster historical epic Braveheart. In Gibson’s multi-Oscarwinning (five awards in all, including Best Director and Best Picture) retelling of the life of Scottish folk hero William Wallace, Marceau played Princess Isabelle, who, although married to the English Prince Edward (Wallace’s mortal enemy), falls for Wallace and attempts to assist and protect him. Since then, Marceau has gone on to appear in a string of Hollywood films and coproductions. In 1997, she played the title role in Anna Karenina, a U.S.-Russian coproduction directed by Bernard Rose, as well as appearing in Firelight, again a coproduction (U.K./France/U.S.) but this time a drama set in the 1830s and directed by Mike Nicholson. In 1999, she appeared
in three English-language movies. First, in Lost and Found, a gentle comedy directed by Jeff Pollack, she played Lila Dubois, a beautiful French cellist whose neighbor steals her dog in order to try to grab her attention. Then she played Hippolyta in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Michael Hoffman, alongside such Hollywood stars as Michelle Pfeiffer, Calista Flockhart, and Kevin Kline. Finally, she played the evil Bond villain Elektra King in Michael Apted’s The World Is Not Enough. Here, in true James Bond tradition, her character manages to seduce Pierce Brosnan’s secret agent before he discovers that she is, in fact, the murderer he is chasing rather than the innocent victim he had thus far been protecting. She then returned to French productions with roles in La Fidélité (Zulawski, 2000) and Belphégor—Le Fantôme du Louvre (Salomé, 2001), as well as directing and writing Parlez-moi d’amour in 2002. In 2003, she starred in Rob Reiner’s romantic comedy Alex and Emma, with Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson, where she played Polina Delcroix, a character in a novel by a cashstrapped author. Cristina Johnston See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present. Reference Marceau, Sophie. Menteuse: Récit. Paris: Editions Stock, 1996.
MARIA CHAPDELAINE Novel by Frenchman Louis Hémon about a rural French Canadian family first published in 1914. Made into feature films by Julien Duvivier (1934), Marc Allégret (1949), and Gilles Carle (1983).
MARIA CHAPDELAINE
Maria Chapdelaine is the unwed daughter of farming parents who are located on the edge of a French Canadian settlement in the Lac Saint-Jean region. Maria has to choose between three suitors: the family’s neighbor, Eutrope Gagnon, who offers her a life similar to, but slightly more settled, than that of her mother, Laura; Lorenzo Surprenant, who has emigrated to Boston; and François Paradis, a Coureurs de bois figure with whom Maria falls in love, but who dies when journeying in winter from the lumber camp to the Chapdelaine home. In the end, Maria opts for marriage to Eutrope. This novel is very much the source text for images of Quebec in France, thanks partly to the iconographic illustrations by Suzor-Côté. Its sales outstripped by far any previous work on Canada. The imperial projects of the Third Republic, coupled with the political polarizations around the Dreyfus case and the separation of church and state in 1905, had provided a context in which traditionalist, often Catholic and monarchist elites had looked to Canada as offering a model of rural, Catholic life untainted by 1789 and its aftermath. Maria Chapdelaine thus provided the exoticism of a branch of France lost or transplanted in the dehistoricized, “natural” setting of l’Amérique and also a connection with an eternal, mythical France unspoiled by modernity. The “voices” that Maria hears and that eventually guide her to the choice of Gagnon, and the construction of the novel as invoking an “eternal France,” evoke Joan of Arc. In Quebec, Maria Chapdelaine was co-opted by the clerical nationalist elites in the 1920s, particularly for the project of internal colonization, the creation and settlement of new agricultural land in Abitibi and elsewhere that would
769
perpetuate Quebec’s rural, traditional, and Catholic vocation and obviate the need for urbanization or emigration to industrial jobs in the United States. The first edition, published in Quebec in 1921, was subsidized by the government. In the contemporary period, the novel has been attacked by feminists and others for the way it perpetuates a colonized mentality among the French Canadians. Maria ends up with the destiny of a habitant’s (farmer’s) wife, against the urban (and anglophone) modernity of Lorenzo or the sexy but dangerous instability provided by François. Part melodrama, epic, and adventure story, Maria Chapdelaine is a national romance, with Maria herself acquiring the symbolic power of unifying and making coherent social contradictions around nature and “home.” Julien Duvivier’s film version in 1934 coincided with the 400th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s first voyage and the 20th anniversary of the first publication of the novel. It was produced for the Société nouvelle de cinématographie française in Paris but in cooperation with France Film, the main distributor of French films in Quebec, and stars mainly French actors such as Madeleine Renaud as Maria, Jean Gabin as François Paradis, Jean-Pierre Aumont as Lorenzo Surprenant, and Alexandre Rignault as Eutrope Gagnon. This version, though much of it was shot in rural Quebec, is very much a French view of the novel, with hints, through music, community, and festival, of the populism that so marked French cinema of the 1930s. The native peoples, rather than problematizing French Canadian identity, form a backdrop as in French colonial films of the time. The Marc Allégret version of Maria Chapdelaine is a Franco-British coproduction of
770
MARIA CHAPDELAINE
1949 entitled The Naked Heart. In the context of the Blum-Byrnes Agreement, opening the French market to Hollywood film products and a short-lived British government tax on American imported films, a French Canadian topic offered a landscape and community recognizable both to British and French audiences. Michèle Morgan plays Maria; Françoise Rosay is Laura. The script is cowritten by Allégret and Roger Vadim. The French Canadian community is portrayed as part of a universal peasantry that carries premodern spiritual values. Extra spice is added through the melodramatic recasting of Lorenzo Surprenant as a villain fleeing home after a botched bank robbery in Quebec City. A corrupt representative of modernity who mocks his family’s way of life, he is finally shot by the police as he looks back toward Maria silhouetted against the horizon. Radio versions of the novel followed in the 1940s and 1950s in Quebec. The intertextual persistence of Maria’s story manifests itself in modern rewrites. Gabrielle Gourdeau’s 1992 novel Maria Chapdelaine ou le paradis retrouvé presents Maria as an old lady in the 1970s, passionately committed to Quebec sovereignty, dying at the time of the 1980 referendum result and thus avoiding the demoralization that followed. More importantly for our purposes, Gilles Carle’s film La Mort d’un bûcheron (1973) had cast Carole Laure as a contemporary Maria, the innocent young woman arriving in the city from Chibougameau, seeking her lost (murdered) fathe, and meeting a photographer, François Paradis (Daniel Pilon). When Maria is employed in a bar, her name is first anglicized and she is then herself transformed into Mary Lasso, the first topless country and western singer.
Carle’s 1983 version of the novel is a Quebec-France coproduction, with a large budget for the time of $4.6 million. This also impelled the use of certain stars: the French actor Claude Rich as the priest and especially Carole Laure as Maria. This is the first version of Maria to be made after the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the story now told from the point of view of a modernized Quebec. Maria is more active; for example, she writes. The past community is seen not as unchanging but as in transformation, with migrants and new technologies flowing through it. The native peoples are more present and offer a line of flight away from the sedentary nature of the agricultural community. There is also an enhanced role for Samuel Chapdelaine, whose embodiment of the tension between habitant and Coureurs de bois grants him the function of reconciler, despite his admission that his choice of peripheral habitant life had contributed to the death of his wife. This Maria Chapdelaine poses searching questions as to what the national myth represented by this novel can now actually be about. As a novel, it already embodied that paradox of a transnational work serving as founding authenticity for a national discourse. The 1983 film, at the levels of both production and text, suggests new tensions between national and transnational in terms of the flows of the image industries and the nation’s external and internal differences. Bill Marshall See also: Blum-Byrnes Agreement; Carle, Gilles; Cartier, Jacques; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Coureurs de bois; Duvivier, Julien; Hémon, Louis; Joan of Arc; Laure, Carole; Literary Relations; Morgan, Michèle; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Rosay, Françoise; Vadim, Roger.
MARITAIN, JACQUES References Hémon, Louis. Maria Chapdelaine. Trans. W. H. Blake. Toronto: Macmillan, 1965. “Maria Chapdelaine: Carle versus Louis Hémon.” Cinema Canada 97 (June 1983): 17–19. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000.
MARITAIN, JACQUES (1883–1973) Philosopher and theologian who was modern France’s leading promoter of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Maritain also had the closest personal relationship with the United States of any French intellectual. A number of his books sold well in America, and Maritain valued highly his connections and friendships in that country. During the height of his fame, in the 1950s and 1960s, he was probably better known in the United States than in France. Most significantly, Maritain was all but unique among French intellectuals for his passionate pro-American stance. His book Reflections on America is unequaled in this regard. Maritain was born into a deeply Republican Protestant family in 1883. A brilliant student at Lycée Henri IV and the Sorbonne, Maritain was originally a disciple of Henri Bergson, but he was also a close friend of Charles Péguy and Henri Massis, and he wavered between being a Dreyfusard and a supporter of Action Française. The key event of his life was meeting Léon Bloy, the extremely influential lay theologian. Under Bloy’s tutelage, Maritain converted to Catholicism in tandem with his wife, Raïssa, herself born to a Russian-Jewish family. Thus alienated from their family backgrounds, the couple
771
vowed to live together as husband and wife but to dedicate their lives to Christ—in effect to take religious vows. Their life together was apparently chaste. This very personal and unusual bond is part of Maritain’s story, and he always regarded Raïssa as his intellectual superior. After her death, Maritain formalized his religious commitment by joining a quasi-monastic order. In Maritain’s earliest work, concerned with popularizing Thomism, there were no signs of his later American interests. One of his early books even detailed the negative influence of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism on modern thought. The first of his many trips to America was in the early 1930s, and this initial exposure altered whatever vestigial Action Française sympathies he held. It seems to have been love at first sight—Maritain, in contrast to much of his cohort, saw the deepest and most authentic spiritual life in the United States. He became an ardent supporter of democracy, amplified his criticism of anti-Semitism, and became a lifelong friend of American social Catholic Dorothy Day. Maritain saw in America a kind of Christian promised land and became convinced that true Christian democracy would take root there. Given his connections, America was the natural place of exile for Maritain during World War II. While in the United States, he joined fellow Frenchmen on the faculty of the New School’s Ecole libre des Hautes Etudes à New York. In the following years, he returned to America and cultivated friendships with a wide variety of Americans. Throughout the cold war, Maritain maintained that America was the healthiest and freest place in the world. This was a challenging position for a French intellectual, but Maritain’s favorable disposition toward America never wavered.
772
MARKER, CHRIS
The two major centers for Maritain studies (one at Notre Dame University in Indiana and the other at Kolbsheim in Alsace) were built with American money, and it remains in America, especially among left-of-center Catholics, that his following is strongest. In recent years, however, the Maritain Center at Notre Dame has been the focus of a bitter debate about the legacy of his thought—his traditional liberal Catholic supporters apparently having lost out to a new group who have radically reinterpreted Maritain as an apologist for capitalism. Seth Armus See also: Catholic Church; Republicanism; Theory; World War II. References Doering, Bernard. Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. ———. “Misinterpreting Maritain (A Critic of Capitalism to the Day He Died).” Notes et Documents 11 (July 1985). Maritain, Jacques. Reflections on America. New York: Scribner’s, 1954. McInerny, Ralph. The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2003.
MARKER, CHRIS (CHRISTIAN FRANÇOIS BOUCHEVILLENEUVE) (1921–) French maker of film essays who emerged from the nouvelle vague to produce works critiquing history, memory, and politics, often interpolating photography, television, installation, and multimedia. Born to Latin American parents, Marker has famously encouraged the mystery of his origins. His possible birthplaces include Neuilly-sur-Seine and Ulan Bator, and his early “lives” include being a stu-
dent of Jean-Paul Sartre and an American paratrooper during World War II. He emerged as a writer for DOC and Esprit in the 1940s and 1950s, editing DOC and later contributing to Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. His prominent role in the emerging left-wing society of the Left Bank in Paris in the 1950s brought him into further contact with film and filmmakers, especially Alain Resnais. Marker shared Resnais’s obsession with American comic strips, a visual influence detectable in the work of both. After collaborating with Resnais on Les Statues meurent aussi/Statues Also Die (1950), Marker directed his own Olympia 52 (1952), utilizing a straightforward documentary aesthetic that he described as “direct cinema.” Marker went on to film an extensive series of travelogue documentaries exploring the political and social lives of different populations in China, Siberia, Israel, and Cuba, among others. Marker’s lasting political contribution to film (and wider social) culture emerged at this time: Le Joli Mai (with Pierre Lhomme, 1962) and Loin du Vietnam/Far from Vietnam (with Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, and Claude Lelouch, 1967) seemed to prefigure many of the issues of May 1968, as well as popular resistance to the war in Vietnam. On a break from filming Le Joli Mai, Marker took a number of photographs that were to form the basis of his most famous film, La Jetée/The Pier (1962). A short fiction about catastrophe and time travel, the film is made up almost entirely of still photographs, making it a visual essay on the experience of time and memory. A prominent film in the education of many future American directors, it formed the basis for Terry Gilliam’s timetravel film Twelve Monkeys (1995). Marker
MARQUETTE, JACQUES
used the same photographic technique in Si j’avais quatre dromadaires/If I Had Four Dromedaries (1966), while later films involved the electronic decomposition of the filmic image (Sans Soleil/Sunless, 1982), and multimedia installations broke up the screen itself (e.g., Zapping Zone, 1985– 1990 and Silent Movie, 1994–1995). While Marker’s documentaries continue to meditate on the world’s changing political climate from the vantage point of the French and international Left (Vietnam again in Le Fond de l’air est rouge/Grin without a Cat [1977] and the legacy of Soviet Communism in Le Tombeau d’Alexandre/The Last Bolshevik [1993]), it is his meditations on memory that excite the greatest critical interest, especially in U.S. film studies. In 1997, Marker’s Immemory One utilized CD-ROM delivery to continue the discussion of technology and its role in public and private memory—a continuation of the project started and exemplified by La Jetée. Marker’s Le Souvenir d’un avenir/Remembrance of Things to Come (2002) did provoke popular interest in his retrospective career, yet much of his work continues to be overshadowed by that unassuming 1962 short film, described in a major U.S. magazine retrospective as the “black pearl at the heart of cinema’s crown jewels.” Damian Sutton See also: Cahiers du cinéma; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Comic Strips; Godard, JeanLuc; Klein, William; Positif; Resnais, Alain; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Vietnam War; World War II. References Almereyda, Michael, et al. “Around the World with Chris Marker: Lost Horizon.” Film Comment (May/June 2003): 31–50. Arthur, Paul, et al. “Around the World with Chris Marker: Time Regained.” Film Comment (July/August 2003): 31–50.
773
MARQUETTE, JACQUES (1637–1675) Born in Laon, France, and trained as a Jesuit, Jacques Marquette arrived in North America in 1666 at age twenty-nine. Mastering several dialects of the Algonquian language, Marquette was first sent to the trading post at Tadoussac in preparation for his missionary work in New France. He then helped to found several missions, including that of Sault Sainte Marie in 1668 with Father Claudius Dablon. The mission to the Ottawa people at Sault Sainte Marie was most likely the first permanent settlement in what is now the state of Michigan. In 1669, he reached the La Pointe mission on Chequamegon Bay (present-day Ahsland, Wisconsin). Fear of the Sioux drove the Ottawa and Huron away from La Pointe, however, and Marquette then accompanied them to the Straits of Mackinac between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron where he founded a new mission at Point Saint Ignace in 1671. Marquette’s greatest endeavor in New France, and the adventure that would forever place his name in history books, occurred when the governor of New France, Frontenac, appointed the French missionary to accompany the North American– born explorer Louis Joliet on an expedition to find the mouth of the Mississippi River. The two set out on their journey on May 13, 1673, and reached the Mississippi one month later. They turned southward and reached the present-day boundary between Louisiana and Arkansas but decided to return for fear of encountering hostile Spaniards or natives if they continued farther. Although they did not reach the mouth of the river, they did establish that the Mississippi discharged its waters into the Gulf of Mexico, and they noted the
774
MARSHALL, BILL
existence of other rivers flowing westward. In September of that same year, Marquette was sent to the mission of Saint Francis Xavier near Green Bay. On April 8, 1675, he founded the Immaculate Conception mission at Kaskaskia. He died en route to Mackinac on May 18, 1675, near presentday Ludington, Michigan. Marquette wrote his own account of his Mississippi voyage that was first published in 1681 in Thevenot’s Recueil de voyages. Numerous towns, cities, and institutions bear the name of Father Jacques Marquette in remembrance of the regions he explored. Maureen Waters See also: Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de; Jesuits; Joliet, Louis; Louisiana; Michigan; Mississippi River; New France; Tadoussac. References Donnelly, Joseph. Jacques Marquette, S. J. 1637–1675. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1968. Hamilton, Raphael. Marquette’s Explorations: The Narratives Reexamined. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Michigan Historical Center. “Father Marquette’s Journal.” Lansing: Michigan Historical Center, Department of History, Arts and Libraries, 2001.
MARSHALL, BILL (G. WILLIAM MARSHALL) (1919–1994) American actor, film producer, and handsome chancer. Born in Chicago, Marshall was brought up on a ranch in New Mexico, where his father owned oil fields. When the family business collapsed in the Depression, the father took up commercial pho-
tography and left with Bill on a wandering life through the rodeos, traveling fairs, and circuses of the American West. Alone as a teenager, Bill Marshall earned a living singing jazz and blues on Mississippi showboats and in bordellos and high-society balls in New Orleans. It was when touring with the Fred Waring Orchestra in New York in 1937 that he was signed up by mogul Jack Warner and went to Hollywood. With Warner Brothers, he had a series of minor roles in films such as The Santa Fe Trail (Michael Curtiz, 1940, with Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan), then moved to Twentieth-Century Fox where he appeared in State Fair (1945). He moved to Republic Pictures and starred in Blackmail (Lesley Felander, 1947). Marshall’s place in French-American relations lies principally in his marriages. He married the exiled actress Michèle Morgan in 1942 in California. Their son Michael, who went on to become a minor actor in French cinema and television after 1963, was born in 1944. The autobiographies of both Marshall (La Sixième Saison, published in France in 1983) and Morgan seek to settle numerous emotional scores over this relationship, and indeed Morgan was successful in getting certain passages excised from his. Certainly Morgan found American society rather alien and asserts her Frenchness in her version of events, even accusing Marshall of being unwilling to let his son learn the French language. Morgan returned to France after the war, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1949, with Marshall getting custody of Michael. Marshall’s visits to France in 1947–1948 did, however, create certain commercial opportunities, with his company gaining U.S. distribution rights for Morgan’s tri-
MARSHALL PLAN,THE
umphant return film La Symphonie pastorale (Jean Delannoy, 1946). In 1949, Marshall married Micheline Presle (b. 1922), whose breakthrough role in Le Diable au corps/Devil in the Flesh (Claude Autant-Lara, 1946) had made her the top French female star of the period. She and Marshall moved to Hollywood, where she had a contract with Fox, but her American career was unsuccessful (American Guerilla in the Philippines, Fritz Lang, 1950), and they returned to France, where Marshall began a financially disastrous production collaboration with the wayward Errol Flynn (Marshall’s 1968 novel, The Deal, is loosely based on that association), first directing him and Presle in The Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951), filmed in the Victorine studios in Nice. The couple divorced in 1953. Presle refers to Marshall in her interviewed memoirs as “a deeply possessive and jealous man.” Marshall went on to play minor roles in France (Les Impures, Pierre Chevalier, 1955), make money distributing Spanish action and costume films in the United States, write for and direct his son in a famously dire science-fiction movie, The Phantom Planet (1961), and marry and then divorce Ginger Rogers and produce a vehicle for her (The Confession, William Dieterle, 1964). His daughter by Micheline Presle, Tonie Marshall (b. 1951), is a successful film director in France (Vénus Beauté, 1999). Bill Marshall See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Mississippi River; Morgan, Michèle. References Morgan, Michèle. With Those Eyes. London: W. H. Allen, 1978. Presle, Micheline. L’Arrière-mémoire. Paris: Flammarion, 1994.
775
Sellier, G. “Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Morgan et Micheline Presle à Hollywood.” France/Hollywood: Echanges cinématographiques et identités nationales. Ed. M. Barnier and R. Moine. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002: 128–145.
MARSHALL PLAN,THE The Marshall Plan, more commonly known in America as the European Recovery Program, can be defined as American assistance for European reconstruction after World War II. In the context of the necessary restructuring of the global economic and financial situation, the Marshall Plan was aimed primarily at reducing the hunger, homelessness, illness, unemployment, economic depression, and political restlessness that plagued Western Europe after the war. The Marshall Plan was accepted by sixteen Western European nations, representing 270 million people. Its goals were both socioeconomic and political; by reducing poverty in Western Europe, the Marshall Plan aimed at limiting the advance of Communism in European societies. General Marshall (1880–1959) fought in France during World War I. In 1939, Roosevelt commissioned him to be head of staff of the U.S. Army. Marshall therefore took part in all major decisions concerning American military strategies during World War II. When Marshall replaced James Byrnes as secretary of state in 1947, the United States effectively put an end to their wait-and-see policy toward Europe. The year 1947 can also be considered as the beginning of the cold war and of the division of Europe into two antagonistic blocs, a division that endured until 1989. Not only was the Marshall Plan flatly rejected by the
776
MARSHALL PLAN,THE
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it was part and parcel of the implementation of the Truman Doctrine of “containment” and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1944, the Bretton Woods Agreement aimed at creating an international organization that would coordinate financial policies of the capitalist countries. With the still-fresh memory of the financial crises of the 1930s that contributed to the outbreak of the war, Western countries created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, whose operating purpose has been to assist nations in the reimbursement of their creditors. As this confluence of events shows, the Marshall Plan was an integral part of a very specific historical context. Marshall Plan funds were not principally oriented toward individuals or the building of houses, schools, or factories, but rather they aimed at strengthening the economic superstructure of nations, and in particular the iron, steel, and power industries that had been particularly hard hit during World War II. More precisely, the Marshall Plan aimed at increasing production, expanding European foreign trade (especially toward the United States), facilitating European economic cooperation and integration, and controlling inflation. Commercial and financial imbalances—the “dollar gap”—were so pervasive throughout Europe that American imports were difficult to purchase due to the lack of liquid assets. The Marshall Plan was therefore strategic: by helping the European industry and economy to recover, by bringing money into Europe and ensuring its financial stability, American trade increased and inflation was minimized. Furthermore, Euro-
pean countries decided themselves what their economic needs were, thereby constructing programs into which American aid was integrated. Bilateral agreements were thus signed between the United States, through the Economic Co-operation Administration, and Europe, through the European Organization of Economic Cooperation, with the principal benefactor being the former. American aid was predicated on the establishment of multilateral agreements that favored transatlantic trade, to the detriment of Europe’s former colonies (which traditionally held favored trading relationships with Europe). The plan that General George Marshall unveiled at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, was revolutionary in that it required aid recipients to organize and produce a rational and multilateral approach to common economic problems. The economic problems in 1947–1948 included not only the lack of capital to invest but also the need for Europeans to decrease the U.S. trade surplus, which was likely to encourage inflation. Marshall insisted that aid help both to stimulate the revival of European trade with the world and to increase trade between European countries. The program cost around $12 billion and was limited to four years, thereby assuring American taxpayers and their representatives that it would not be an indefinite commitment. Marshall thus carried out a nationwide campaign to convince the American people and subsequently Congress of the necessity of his plan. However, recent elections had given the Republican Party, which subscribed heavily to principles of tax cutting, economic nationalism, and government downsizing, majorities in both houses. Marshall’s speech at Harvard
MARSHALL PLAN,THE
University emphasized the esteem and high regard in which he held the American people, insisting on the essential role that fell to them to rise and meet the responsibility of reconstructing Europe. In fact, he felt that one of America’s primary goals should be to rebuild the German economy in order to block the spread of Communism. The memory of the Versailles Treaty, which they had not signed in 1919, and which contributed significantly to the circumstances leading up to World War II, was present at this time in the minds of American policy makers. At the beginning of the cold war, Stalin’s Soviet Union became America’s main enemy, and the rise of Communism in China was a major concern for Marshall, who considered that Marxists hastened China’s economic collapse as a way of furthering their political objectives. This explains why the second main objective of the Marshall Plan was to contain Communism in Western Europe by rebuilding the economy. Moreover, Washington was well aware of Britain’s growing economic weakness, and of the likely effects that would have on the Middle East. The principal worry was that a collapse in British influence would lead to the risk that the Soviet Union or its surrogates would move in to fill the power vacuum there. In February 1947, Marshall argued for giving aid to Greece and Turkey. Using what would later be called the domino thesis, Marshall asserted that a Communist victory in Greece would be a disaster, as it could herald the beginnings of Soviet domination in the Middle East and Asia. It is worth noting here that Marshall made no case for the defense of democracy everywhere or for a worldwide antiCommunist crusade—contrary to Truman—
777
but rather aimed to contain Soviet opportunism, notably in the face of British weakness. While Marshall was reluctant to provoke the Soviet Union into aggressive action, Truman believed that strong antiCommunist rhetoric was essential. Under the influence of Stalin and Molotov, Eastern European countries refused American aid, although some, such as Czechoslovakia, had initially accepted the Marshall Plan. In 1947, the Soviet Union created the Kominform, a Communist information office that functioned as a counterpart to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and that effectively split the world into two parts. Sixteen countries accepted the Marshall Plan: Great Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Turkey, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Trieste, Iceland, and Portugal. Because of pressure from other European countries, Franco’s Spain did not receive anything. The European countries that received American aid distributed the funds through the European Organization of Economic Co-operation. The final clause of the Marshall Plan was instituted at the Paris Economic Conference in July 1947, and in April 1948 President Truman signed the act that implemented the plan. France was devastated at the conclusion of World War II: the country was facing an extremely high inflation rate, as well as an acute shortage of most consumer and industrial goods. De Gaulle’s provisional government chose to implement a highly interventionist economic policy: it nationalized key sectors, imposed economic planning, and universalized social security. But the resulting institutions were far from steady, and the creation of the Fourth
778
MARTINIQUE
Republic after De Gaulle’s resignation was fraught with difficulty. Moreover, because economic and social problems persisted, major strikes were organized by Communist trade unions. The Containment and the Zhdanov Doctrine also became subjects of French public debate: after the government accepted the Marshall Plan, antagonism deepened between Communists and anti-Communists (the SFIO and the Gaullists), remaining entrenched over the subsequent twenty years. But in the end, American aid and economic growth helped France recover. The Marshall Plan—as well as the Truman Doctrine—put an end to the great alliance with the Soviet Union, from which union the United Nations and its security council was born. It strengthened bilateral cooperation between the United States and Europe in the economic and geopolitical fields. In this sense, the Marshall Plan was more an example of leadership than of hegemonic or unilateralist policy, insofar as the United States favored its own national interests through helping Europe. The Marshall Plan has had a lasting (though not permanent) structuring effect on Western Europe. Marie-Cécile Naves See also: Foreign Policy 1945–Present; Gaulle, General Charles de; World War I; World War II. References Bonds, John Bledsoe. Bipartisan Strategy: Selling the Marshall Plan. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Cohen, Warren. America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gaddis, John L. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War (1941–1947). New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. Lafeber, Walter. America, Russia and the Cold War. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.
MARTINIQUE The island of Martinique was “discovered” by Columbus in 1502 and first came under French control in 1635. Colonialism set in motion a pattern that was repeated across the islands of the Caribbean: after the annihilation of the Amerindian population and the failure of a policy to import indentured laborers from France, the colonial power turned to Africa for its workforce. The slave trade ensured a steady flow of Africans into the colony, and this in turn guaranteed the prosperity of the sugar plantation–based economy. By the late seventeenth century, the white plantation owners were far outnumbered by the growing slave population. There existed no formalized guide for the treatment of slaves until Louis XIV introduced the infamous Code Noir in 1685. In effect, the Code Noir consolidated the owners’ powers and reduced the status of slaves to the level of merchandise to be acquired and sold according to the will of the owner. Moreover, the code instituted an extremely punitive penal system and promoted the advantages of converting the slaves to Catholicism as one means of de-Africanizing and assimilating them culturally so as to ensure their continued subjugation. Given such control over the workforce, the plantations prospered economically, to the extent that at the time of the French and Indian War (1756–1763), France was ready to trade most of its North American possessions with Britain if it could maintain control of its Caribbean colonies. However, the aftershocks of the French Revolution in 1789 destabilized the rigid French colonial regime; in France, abolitionists spoke of extending the promise of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” to slaves, while in the colonies the slaves themselves grew
MARTINIQUE
779
Map of Martinique. Martinique first came under French control in 1635. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
ever more restless. Slavery was first abolished in the French colonies in 1794. In the same year, Britain quickly exploited the atmosphere of uncertainty by taking control of the French Caribbean colonies, a move that was welcomed by Martinique’s white planter or béké class, who colluded with the British to perpetuate slavery. In 1802, the French regained control of Martinique, and Bonaparte immediately reestablished slavery as a means of addressing the drastic labor shortages on the sugar plantations. Definitive slave emancipation in the French-controlled territories did not come until 1848, a full ten years after the British had freed their slaves. However, in contrast
to British emancipation, ex-slaves in the French colonies, as free men and French citizens, were able to vote in the elections of the Second Republic (1848–1851). Although these rights were withdrawn by Napoléon III’s regime, they were finally restored in the late 1870s by the Third Republic. These political rights were part of a wider policy of educational, linguistic, and religious assimilation—of eradicating difference and extending to all former slaves a sense of belonging to France. The idea of France as a benevolent mère patrie has proved to be an enduring and powerful means of perpetuating loyalty among the ex-slaves and their descendants, a fact that is illustrated in the desperation of many
780
MARTINIQUE
Rue Victor Hugo, one of the principal business streets in Saint Pierre, Martinique, 1902. (Library of Congress)
French Antilleans to enlist in the French army in both world wars. The culmination of Martinique’s generally willing attachment to France came in the 1946 loi de départementalisation, which finally transformed the colony, along with Guadeloupe, Guiana, La Réunion, and Algeria (until its independence in 1962), into fully integrated French departments. Famously backed by the Communist député and mayor of Fort-de-France, Aimé Césaire, departmentalization was promoted as the only real solution to the long-standing problems of poverty and underdevelopment. Its few opponents feared a loss of control over the local economy and more direct control from Paris, fears that were soon realized as French goods flooded the fragile local market and further weakened Martinique’s economic independence. These negative effects have been com-
pounded by the long-standing decline in local agricultural industries, and Martinique today has become more or less completely economically dependent on the metropolis. Politically, too, the first thirty-five years of departmentalization led to an even greater centralization of power in France. The process of fully extending French laws and benefits was slow and led to a sense that the départements d’outre mer (DOMs) had a secondary status and that their interests were being neglected by the metropolis. Feelings of impotence at times manifested themselves in violence: the 1959 riots in Fort-de-France were directed against white metropolitan French, who had become in the popular imagination a scapegoat for all the unfulfilled promises of departmentalization. The solution for many of Martinique’s marginalized people has been to emigrate: from 1961 to 1981, four official emigration plans sought to relieve the population surplus in the Caribbean departments and at the same time fill the labor shortages in certain sectors of the French economy (mainly in construction, the care industries, hospitals, and the metallurgical industry). Since the early 1960s, various radical groups have agitated for independence, though the more moderate policy of achieving a greater degree of autonomy has proved more popular. The French Socialist Party’s victory in the 1981 elections and its subsequent introduction of regionalist policies devolved more power to the DOMs. In the years 1999 and 2000, important talks began on a proposed bill—le projet de loi d’orientation des DOM—that ultimately may alter France’s relationship with its four DOMs and bring real autonomy to the former colonies.
MASSON, ANDRÉ
Martinique’s population (around 350,000) is not as ethnically diverse as the other DOMs: its class-color hierarchy has three important and fairly rigid divisions: the white upper class (the békés), a mulatto middle class, and a predominantly black lower class. Although, like the other Caribbean islands, waves of East Indian, Syrian, Chinese, and Lebanese immigration have increased diversity in Martinique, these new groups are not as numerically significant as in, say, Guadeloupe. Martinique is considered the “most French” of the Caribbean islands, a label that is a source of pride to some and of confusion or shame to others. One consequence of the “Frenchness” of Martinique is that its creole culture is particularly susceptible to the effects of Europeanization: perceived threats to language, cooking, costume, carnival, and dance have led to movements to protect the cultural heritage. It is no coincidence that the major contemporary thinkers and writers of the French Caribbean have come from Martinique: from Aimé Césaire’s négritude movement in the 1940s and 1950s, through Edouard Glissant’s ever-evolving theories of Antillanité, to Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s contemporary créolité movement, Martinicans have been the principal resistors to cultural assimilation. Even here, though, there is a real threat of metropolitan domestication: when Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, for instance, many reacted ambivalently, and debates were provoked over whether being accepted by the French literary establishment compromised a literature whose raison d’être was essentially based on the need to resist metropolitan influence and control. In reality, such debates and
781
paradoxes are inevitable in Martinique, a country that is not a country, a postcolonial colony, a department of France that lies thousands of miles from Paris, a Caribbean island where the Euro is the official currency, and that has yet to and may never free itself from Europe. Martin Munro See also: Bernabé, Jean; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Césaire, Aimé; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël; Créolité; French and Indian War; Glissant, Edouard; Guadeloupe; Guiana; Slavery; Sugar. References Aldrich, Robert. Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Burton, Richard D. E., and Fred Reno, eds. French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995. Sutton, Paul, ed. Europe and the Caribbean. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1991.
MASSON, ANDRÉ (1896–1987) French painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and stage designer who sought refuge in the United States during World War II. Born 1896 in Balagny-surThérain, France; died 1987 in Paris. Masson played a significant role in the development of surrealism, and his work strongly influenced American abstract expressionist painters. The artist received early art instruction at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts et l’Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels, with further training in Paris. In the mid-1920s, through his dealer, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Masson met André Breton and joined the surrealist
782
MATHIEU, MIREILLE
circle. Masson’s relationship with Breton and the surrealists waxed and waned throughout his career, but during his exile in the United States, Masson actively exhibited and worked with the group. Masson’s first solo exhibition premiered at Kahnweiler’s Galerie Simon in Paris (1923) with paintings influenced by analytic cubism. Between 1924 and 1929, Masson experimented with automatic drawing (the use of random gestures) and biomorphic abstraction, making compositions such as Battle of the Fishes (1927, Museum of Modern Art, NY) by drawing with glue directly onto canvas, then sprinkling colored sand to complete the image. After Breton expelled Masson in his second surrealist manifesto (1929), Masson, with other dissident surrealists, contributed to Georges Bataille’s journal, Documents. During the 1930s, Masson lived in the south of France and then in Spain, where he and Rose Maklès, his future wife, settled in March 1934. This period witnessed one of Masson’s most famous series known as Massacres (1931– 1933) and a collaboration with Bataille entitled Sacrifices (completed 1936). More consciously conceived than his earlier work, Massacres and Sacrifices addressed eroticism and violence, themes made pertinent by the Spanish civil war. The rise of Hitler and the occupation of France forced the Masson family into exile. Aided by Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee and by Saidie A. May, one of the artist’s major collectors, the family embarked from Marseilles and arrived in New York (via Martinique) on May 29, 1941. They soon relocated to Connecticut, remaining there until the end of World War II. Masson was already well known in New York; in the 1930s, his work had appeared in solo and group exhibitions, in-
cluding the Museum of Modern Art’s important Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936). Maintaining an active professional life in the United States, Masson participated in every surrealist exhibition (he had reconciled with Breton in 1937) and major exhibition of exiled artists. Among his most important works of this period, Meditation on an Oak Leaf (1942, Museum of Modern Art, NY) reflected the New England autumn, which looked to him “as if the sky had poured pots of paint over the vegetation.” He worked closely with American and European artists at Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17, experimenting with lithography, drypoint, and engraving. Masson also produced antiwar paintings and made public statements against fascist aggression. At the end of the war, Masson returned immediately to France, where he worked until his death. Ellen Adams See also: Bataille, Georges; Breton, André; Fry, Varian; Painting; Surrealism; World War II. References Leiris, Michel. André Masson and His Universe. Geneva: Editions de Trois Collines, 1947. Parke-Taylor, Michael. André Masson Inside/Outside Surrealism: Prints and Illustrated Books from the Gottlieb Collection. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2001. Rubin, William, and Carolyn Lanchner. André Masson. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976. Sawin, Martica. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
MATHIEU, MIREILLE (1946–) French pop singer who made her name singing on television shows in France and the United States in the 1960s.
MATISSE, HENRI
Though disparaged in many accounts of French popular music, Mathieu is one of the best-selling French singers at home and, for more than thirty years, has outsold any other French artist abroad. Her success was achieved rapidly in 1966, when she burst onto the French and international music scene, thanks in part to her interpretation of Edith Piaf ’s songs on variety programs such as Télé-Dimanche in France and on talk shows in the United States hosted by Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson, and Andy Williams. Mathieu was managed by Johnny Stark (whose other success stories included Johnny Hallyday), and at first she was marketed as a successor to Piaf, who had died in 1963. Mathieu’s humble origins (she was born in Avignon in 1946, the daughter of a stonecutter and the eldest of fourteen children) lent credence to her claim to Piaf ’s crown for a while, but eventually, when it became clear that she was no suffering diva, she adopted a persona based on her simplicity, piety, and the “fairy tale” aspect of her rise to fame. She is also known in France as the demoiselle d’Avignon (young lady of Avignon). Mathieu achieved considerable success in the United States thanks to her appearances on network television shows and, for a while, was sought out by producer Joe Pasternak with a view to making several films in Hollywood. While she never took off as a film star, she has enjoyed a lengthy singing career, mainly as a solo interpreter of romantic songs. She has also recorded with artists as diverse as Paul Anka (“You and I,” “Bring the Wine,” and “After You,” all in 1979), Charles Aznavour (“Une Vie d’amour”), Dean Martin (“Don’t Fence Me In,” 1977), Placido Domingo (“Bombom I,” 1984 and “On the Way to School,” 1985), Barry Manilow (“Don’t
783
Talk to Me of Love,” 1986), Andy Williams (“Liberty Land,” 1986), Patrick Duffy (“Something Going On?” and “Together We’re Strong,” 1983). Mathieu’s connections with Duffy also extended to an offer of a part in the soap opera Dallas in 1983, which she allegedly turned down because of the nudity involved in the part. Mathieu, now approaching her sixties, is still known as one of the major ambassadors for French music abroad, and much of her international success is due to her early conquering of the U.S. public through her television appearances. Sarah Leahy See also: Music (Pop). References Dauncey, Hugh, and Steve Cannon, eds. Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno: Culture, Identity and Society. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003. Rioux, Lucien. Cinquante ans de chanson française: de Trenet à Bruel. Paris: L’Archipel, 1992.
MATISSE, HENRI (1869–1954) French artist born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis on December 31, 1869; died in Nice on November 3, 1954. Matisse was a promoter of modernism in art. His innovations with color, line, surface, and space resulted in sensual art that is relatively disconnected from cultural and social conditions. Known as the most purely pictorial painter of his time, Matisse demonstrated through his experimentation that artistic limits are invitations to innovation. Matisse visited the United States several times, exhibited his work in many major U.S. cities, and completed commissioned
784
MATISSE, HENRI
Henri Matisse working on paper cutout. (Bettmann/Corbis)
work in the United States. His first period of transatlantic activity occurred between 1908 and 1938. Matisse’s first American shows took place at the 291 Gallery in New York in 1908 and 1910. In 1913, Matisse exhibited in the Armory Show in New York as well as in shows in Boston and Chicago. Also in 1913, art students in Chicago burned in effigy Matisse’s Blue Nude and Le Luxe. Matisse’s first one-man show took place in New York at the Montross gallery in 1915. In 1922, Albert Barnes began to acquire Matisse’s work. Matisse exhibited at the Joseph Brummer galleries in New York in February and March 1924. Pierre Matisse organized a retrospective for his father at the Valentine Dudensing gallery in New York in 1927. Henri Matisse won first prize at the 1927 Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh for his Compote and Flowers (1924). In 1930, he served on the Carnegie jury in addition to visiting the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, which resulted in a mural commission by the Barnes Foun-
dation. Matisse’s 1931 one-man show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art consisted of seventy-eight paintings. In November and December 1932, the Pierre Matisse gallery in New York held an exhibition of Matisse’s drawings. Matisse traveled to Merion to supervise the installation of the Barnes mural Dance in 1933. At his own gallery in New York in 1934, Pierre Matisse organized a series of exhibits of his father’s works. Also in 1934, Henri Matisse began illustrations for the American edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Another Pierre Matisse–organized one-man show for Henri took place at the Pierre Matisse gallery in New York in 1938. The same year, Henri Matisse also began Song, a work commissioned for Nelson Rockefeller’s apartment in New York. Henri Matisse’s second period of American collaboration occurred from 1948 until his death in 1954. In 1948, Henry Clifford organized a large exhibition of Matisse’s works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A year later, Matisse exhibited paintings and cutouts at his son’s New York gallery. In 1951, New York’s Museum of Modern Art held an important Matisse exhibition that also traveled to Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco. Two years later, Matisse exhibited his own sculptures in New York. In 1954, the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in New York mounted an exhibition of Matisse’s paintings. Also in 1954, Matisse designed the Nelson Rockefeller– commissioned rose window for the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York. Matthew Hilton-Watson See also: Painting; Sculpture. References Flam, Jack. Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869–1918. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.
MARRELART, ARMAND ———. Matisse on Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. O’Brian, John. The American Reception of Matisse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
MATTELART, ARMAND (1936–) Sociologist, born in Jodoigne, Belgium. Armand Mattelart wrote (or often cowrote with his wife Michèle Mattelart) more than twenty books, mainly on cultural imperialism, media control, and the effects of globalization on national cultures. A constant critic of U.S. imperialism, Mattelart also directed (with Chris Marker) the documentary La Spirale (1974), about the coup d’état in Chile. Now professor at the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes), Mattelart is considered to be a coherent critic of capitalism. One of Mattelart’s best analyses remains How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971), a hard-to-find book cowritten with Chilean author Ariel Dorfman (now professor at Duke University). Written in Chile, where Mattelart lived from 1962 to 1973, How to Read Donald Duck was translated into fifteen languages and underlines the ideological contents of Walt Disney’s famous comic strips as they were published in Chile and then decoded under an educational program made by the Chile Popular Unity Government two years before Pinochet’s coup. How to Read Donald Duck was even banned for a few months in the United States when it first came out in English (in 1975) and now remains out of order after four reprints in that country.
785
That same book was also banned in Chile from 1973. Nonetheless, most of Mattelart’s books were highly praised in France, rapidly translated in the United States, and often used in mass-communication courses, especially in Latin America, from Cuba to Nicaragua. Among their best works, Armand and Michèle Mattelart’s book De l’Usage des médias en temps de crise (“How to Use the Media in a Time of Crisis,” 1979) was a clear demonstration against the globalizing strategies of various multinational companies and capitalist institutions from the United States: Hollywood, the television program Sesame Street, and the McDonald’s restaurant chain. Also, the Mattelarts were among the first scholars to theorize about the Brazilian telenovelas (1987 and 1990). Mattelart’s sometimes radical positions are similar to those of Louis Althusser, Ignacio Ramonet, or Noam Chomsky. Because he studied the structure of power, popular cultures, hegemony, and ideologies, Armand Mattelart’s books were often quoted in cultural studies networks and anthologies during the 1980s, even though Mattelart himself was rather critical of this approach. Yves Laberge See also: Brazil; Chile; Comic Strips; Marker, Chris; McDonald’s; Theory. References Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. Donald l’imposteur: L’Impérialisme expliqué aux enfants. Trans. Michèle Mattelart. Paris: Alain Moreau, 1976. Mattelart, Armand, and Eric Neveu. Les Cultural Studies. Paris: La Découverte, 2003. Mattelart, Michèle, and Armand Mattelart. Le Carnaval des images: la fiction brésilienne. Paris: La Documentation française, 1987.
786
MAUROIS, ANDRÉ
MAUROIS, ANDRÉ (EMILE HERZOG) (1885–1967) French novelist, biographer, and historian. André Maurois was born in Elbeuf, Normandy. His family had moved there from Alsace following the Franco-Prussian War and owned a woolen mill. He was educated at the lycée in Rouen, where he was strongly influenced by the philosopher Alain (Emile Chartier). He worked in the mill after completing his studies and then served in World War I as a liaison with a British unit. Long interested in writing, his experiences gave him the material for his first novel, Les Silences du colonel Bramble (1918). For it, he used the pen name André Maurois, which he later legally adopted. Maurois returned to the family firm after the war but soon embarked on a career as a writer. Though continuing to produce novels, he also published biographies of writers and politicians such as Shelley and Disraeli: histories of Britain, the United States, and France, as well as travel writing, children’s books, short stories, and literary criticism. Having established a reputation in Britain, France, and the United States, he became a member of the Académie Française in 1939. During World War II, he lived in exile in the United States. He returned to France subsequently and remained a prolific author until his death. Maurois’s interest in the world beyond France first centered upon Britain. Several of his biographies focused on British personages, and his first historical work was his 1937 Histoire d’Angleterre. Maurois saw his task as a writer as one of presenting the British and French peoples to one another in a favorable light; his efforts were rewarded with some critical and much commercial success. A similar pattern emerged
regarding his outlook toward and writings about the United States. First visiting America in 1927, he returned to lecture at Princeton and Harvard from 1930 to 1931. His early writing about the United States focused on his personal experiences, but as he traveled the country more widely, his reflections, as recorded in works such as Chantiers américains (1933), broadened in scope. At a time when much French commentary on America was critical in tone, Maurois’s was regarded as being sympathetic. This sympathy intensified during World War II. Demobilized after France’s defeat in 1940, he was allowed to go to the United States to give a series of lectures in Boston, and he remained there, writing, lecturing at various universities, and making public appearances in support of the French cause. Rejoining the military in 1944, he returned to Paris in 1946. By then he had written a journal of his American experiences and his Histoire des Etats-Unis; he would later publish a multivolume parallel history of the United States and the Soviet Union (with the Soviet volumes written by Louis Aragon). Intended for a wide audience, these works presented the United States in a broadly positive light, confirming Maurois’s reputation as a friend of the “Anglo-Saxons” during the cold war era. Sean Kennedy See also: World War I; World War II. References Keating, L. Clark. André Maurois. New York: Twayne, 1969. Kolbert, Jack. The Worlds of André Maurois. Cranbury: Associated University Press, 1985. Maurois, André. Memoirs 1885–1967. Trans. Denver Lindley. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
MAXIMIN, DANIEL
MAXIMIN, DANIEL (1947–) Guadeloupean writer, teacher, and cultural administrator. Born in Saint-Claude in Guadeloupe, Maximin moved to France with his family at the age of thirteen and went to college in Paris. He started his career as a secondary school teacher, then became literary editor at Présence Africaine and the producer of the program Antipodes on France-Culture. In 1989, he returned to Guadeloupe and took up a post as “directeur régional des affaires culturelles.” Although his own literary output is not large—three novels and, more recently, a collection of poems (L’Invention des Désirades, 2000)—its complexity, originality, and ambitious scope make a significant contribution to French Caribbean literature. His first novel, L’Isolé Soleil/Lone Sun, published by Seuil in 1981, was hailed as a challenging new voice of great formal sophistication. Although the second and third—Soufrières (1987) and L’Ile et une nuit (1995)—have received less critical attention, they continue to develop the same formal and thematic concerns through the same set of characters. In their multiplelayered narratives, the mobility and instability of narrative voice, and their overall enigmatic tone and structure, Maximin’s novels are often seen as influenced more by metropolitan French literary movements such as the nouveau roman than by the predominantly realist tradition of Caribbean fiction. But they are eminently Caribbean in their restaging of the history of, for instance, Delgrès’s rebellion; in their incorporation of folktales and magic into the narrative (Maximin acknowledges the influence of Latin American magical realism here); in the prominence given to the natural features of the Caribbean, such as volcanoes
787
and hurricanes; and, above all, in their attitude to the novel as a means of exploring problems of origin and identity. All of the three texts pay elaborate homage to earlier Antillean writers, in particular the poets of the interwar period—Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, and also Suzanne Césaire. Thus, while the intertextual dimension of Maximin’s work is, as a technique, similar to that of Butor or Simon, he uses it to weave together fragments of French Caribbean literature with quotations from, for instance, Rimbaud and Michaux, and from the ambiguously Guadeloupean/ French Saint-John Perse. Music is an important theme in the novels, and here, too, he combines descriptions of French Caribbean beguines and léwoz with Cuban salsa and North American jazz—itself transplanted to the Parisian clubs of the 1930s. Equally, although the novels are all based in Guadeloupe, the characters maintain important contacts and relationships in France. The central figure of the trilogy is a woman, Marie-Gabriel, and Maximin’s emphasis on the common ground shared by feminism and antiracism (as a student he was taught and much influenced by Hélène Cixous) is another prominent feature of his work. All these various strands feed into his exploration of the multiple, open-ended, antiessentialist cultural identity of the Caribbean, seen as a point of connection between Europe, Africa, and America. Celia Britton See also: Beguine; Butor, Michel; Césaire, Aimé; Damas, Léon-Gontran; Feminisms; Guadeloupe; Jazz; Michaux, Henri; SaintJohn Perse. References Chaulet-Achour, Christiane. La Trilogie caribéenne de Daniel Maximin: Analyse et contrepoint. Paris: Karthala, 2000.
788
MCDONALD’S Kaufman, Janice Horner. Daniel Maximin, Hélène Cixous, and Aimé Césaire: Creolization, Intertextuality, and Coiled Myth. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
MCDONALD’S In any one year, 96 percent of Americans eat at McDonald’s. Canada is one of eleven major international markets that account for 87 percent of sales for the biggest quick-service restaurant in the world. McDonald’s was incorporated in 1955, and since going public in 1965, it has reported revenue increases every quarter. It all started with a restaurant in San Bernardino, California, owned by the McDonald brothers, who sold a fifteen-cent hamburger. One Ray Kroc persuaded them to set up the company’s famous franchise business model in order to spread the assembly-line-like efficiency of the original restaurant. The first franchise opened in 1955, in Des Plaines, Illinois, and by 1959 there were over 100. The rest is a tale of global conquest, with the first foreign restaurant opened in British Columbia, Canada, in 1967. In the 1960s, the golden arches marketing campaign brought a big boost in sales. The 1968 Big Mac debut was followed by the entrance in 1973 of the Egg McMuffin and the first drive-through in 1975. In 1987, one-quarter of all breakfasts eaten out of the home were in McDonald’s restaurants. The 1980s are sometimes called the burger war years in the business, but although it took McDonald’s thirty-three years to open its first 10,000 restaurants, it took them only eight years to open the next 10,000—a rate of opening of one every five hours.
The 1990s have seen ups and downs in terms of product launches, though one of the more successful moves has been the McFlurry dessert range, developed by Canadian franchisees. The company has more recently been the focus of antiAmerican feeling in many parts of the world, partly because of environmental concerns (though the company has made great efforts in this direction, replacing plastic with paper wrapping, for example) and partly because of reaction to neoconservative American politics. In France, recent history has been blighted because McDonald’s is seen as a symbolic target by angry French food producers. In 1999, the company was caught up in international tariff wars when some farmers, including the antiglobalization activist José Bové, attacked its restaurant in Millau to protest the U.S. ban on European beef. In 2001, industrial action hit several Parisian restaurants in protest against the dismissal of fellow workers. Mark Vernon See also: Anti-Americanism; Cuisine; Illinois Country. References “Delicious Irony: McDonald’s in France.” Economist, April 25, 2002. http://www. economist.com/markets/bigmac/ displayStory.cfm?story_id=1104822 (cited April 15, 2004). Love, John F. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. London: Bantam, 1995.
MCKAY, CLAUDE (1889–1948) Born in rural, working-class Sunny Ville, Jamaica, in 1889, Claude McKay became one of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance and was dubbed by Léopold Sédar Senghor the “spiritual in-
MCKAY, CLAUDE
ventor” of the francophone négritude movement. McKay was a distinctive figure in the Harlem Renaissance whose radically leftist politics set him apart culturally and politically from his more liberal contemporaries and led him to travel to Europe and the Soviet Union to seek a more satisfying engagement between politics and aesthetics. After a makeshift education in which he encountered the canonical texts of English literature through his elder brother, McKay published his first collections of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, in 1912 at the age of twenty. Unusually, the poems were written in the vernacular language of Jamaican patois and represented one of the first attempts to construct an indigenous poetic voice for the Caribbean that articulated the experience of the islands from the point of view of the working-class community. These very early poems focused on the oppression of both the rural poor and the entrenched hierarchies of racial stratification and classbased oppression that were the pernicious legacies of British colonial rule on the island. Twenty years later, younger writers from the French-speaking Caribbean—Etienne Lero, René Ménil, and Jean-Marcel Monnerot—would look to McKay’s poetic style and subject matter for both political and aesthetic inspiration in their petite revue incendiaire, Légitime Défense. The two collections of poetry won McKay a monetary prize from the prestigious Jamaica Institute of Arts and Sciences, which he used to travel to the United States. At Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and later at an agricultural college in Kansas, McKay was confronted for the first time by the vicious racism typically associated with the Ameri-
789
Claude McKay (1889–1948), Jamacia-born writer known for his contributions to the Harlem Renaissance. (Library of Congress)
can South, which he described in Pearson’s Magazine as “a manifest, implacable hate of my race.” His poem “To the White Fiends” is an audacious challenge to this bigotry, which, in its defiantly combative tone, suggests that African Americans not cower under the violence of the white community: “Think you I am not fiend and savage too? / Think you that I could not arm me with a gun?” Disillusioned, McKay left college prematurely and traveled to New York where, after a series of menial jobs, he became involved with a group of Jewish left-wing intellectuals who championed his work. In 1917, two sonnets, “The Harlem Dancer” and “Invocation,” were chosen for publication in the small avant-garde magazine The Seven Arts. These poems brought his
790
MCKAY, CLAUDE
work to the attention of Max Eastman, whose Marxist magazine, The Liberator, became an important forum for McKay’s writing. McKay eventually became an editor of the journal and was particularly active on its behalf during the violent race riots in Saint Louis in June 1917 and the “Red Summer” of 1919, about which McKay wrote his most celebrated poems: “If We Must Die,” “The White House,” and “The Lynching.” Each poem, written in his characteristic sonnet form, described the experiences of the working-class populations in urban America in a militant political tone that was quite different from the more bourgeois concerns of the burgeoning movement in Harlem. The poem “If We Must Die” would be greatly influential on the anticolonial works of Aimé Césaire in his soaring indictments of colonial violence. After the publication of two further volumes of poetry, McKay went to live in England, where he became involved with Sylvia Pankhurst’s the Workers’ Dreadnought and with British Socialist activism. Returning to the United States briefly in 1921, McKay then left his adopted homeland for a further twelve years, during which he lived in France, Spain, Morocco, and the Soviet Union. This second period of exile was intensely productive for McKay but put more political distance between his work and that of his Harlem counterparts. During his time in Europe, McKay wrote all three of his novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933), and a collection of short stories called Gingertown (1932). Significantly, McKay had chosen to absent himself from America at the height of the New Negro movement in the 1920s as he saw the politics of the movement
stagnating between the two polar positions of Marcus Garvey’s extreme black nationalism and the liberalism of W. E. B. Du Bois’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In Europe, and particularly in France, McKay encountered a far more diverse set of political and cultural views among the black diasporic communities in Paris and Marseilles. In Paris, McKay attended the literary salons of the Nardal sisters—Jane, Paulette, and Andrée—who, along with René Maran, were at the epicenter of an international black Atlanticism where students, writers, artists, and intellectuals from Haiti, Senegal, Guiana, Guadeloupe, the Antilles, and Vietnam met to exchange political and cultural ideas with black American writers like McKay, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. McKay became interested in the ideas he encountered in Paris of a pan-African matrix of black Atlantic creativity and activism, diverse in its many parts but unified by a common goal of anticolonialism and independence. Crucially, McKay’s writing refused the mythology of la France non-raciste that had developed in the popular imagination of African Americans after World War I when black doughboys returning to New York told tales of tolerance and freedom in France such as they had never experienced at home. McKay worked as an artist’s model in 1923 Paris at the height of la vogue nègre where he was prized by the artistic set for his fashionable “exotic” black physique. However, he was at night refused entry to La Coupole because he was black. These experiences in “negrophile” Paris of the 1920s resonate in his novel Banjo. Of all his novels, it was Banjo: A Story without a Plot that had the most signifi-
MELVILLE, JEAN-PIERRE
cant influence on a generation of diasporic francophone writers, not just Senghor and Césaire but also the more radical young writers of Légitime Défense, who admired the Marxist inflection of his art. The novel narrated the story of Ray, an exiled African American musician who works the beaches and bars of the tough port of Marseilles. The story focuses on the concerns of a black diasporic community who are not middle-class assimilés, like the students in Paris, but men and women working in a harsh, often violent, working-class environment rigidly circumscribed along class as well as racial lines. McKay transcribes the “real,” lived language of these communities, whose speech reveals a creolized mixture of standard French, Africanisms, and a local Marseilles argot. Banjo also describes how marginalized black communities in metropolitan France were severely divided internally along ethnic lines in a culture of “pigmentocracy”—a theme not popular among the more conservative proponents of the New Negro movement in Harlem. McKay died in 1948. Carole Sweeney See also: Atlanticism; Césaire, Aimé; Language; Ménil, René. References Ayo Langley, John. “Pan-Africanism in Paris 1924–36.” Journal of Modern African Studies 17, no. 1 (1969): 69–94. Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Fabre, Michel. La Rive noire: de Harlem à la seine. Paris: Lieu Commun, 1985. Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. LeSeur, Geta. Claude McKay’s Marxism. New York: Garland, 1989. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981.
791
MELVILLE, JEAN-PIERRE (JEAN-PIERRE GRUNBACH) (1917–1973) Postwar filmmaker, credited in French film history as the father of the new wave, born in France in 1917. During active service as a World War II Resistance fighter, he adopted the pseudonym of Melville in tribute to his literary hero Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. A fluent English speaker with extensive interests in popular culture, Melville’s postwar filmmaking career was marked by his love of classic Hollywood film. His crime thrillers Bob le flambeur (1955), Le Doulos (1961), and Le Cercle Rouge (1970), with their casts of sympathetic gangsters, loose women, and doomed villains, were explicit homages to the 1940s B-movie, and their moody film noir style, characteristic of his early work, were major influences on the filmmakers of the French new wave. An admiration of American genres, characters, and styles (the western, the heist movie, and pulp fiction) abounds in his work, and the strong moral codes of male friendship and loyalty are thematically reminiscent of the work of filmmakers like John Huston, whose Asphalt Jungle (1950) is a clear intertext for Bob le flambeur. His fascination with the masculine loner arguably reached its apogee in Le Samouraï (1967), a film that meshed the ruthlessness of the Western professional assassin with the ritualistic elegance of the Japanese warrior. Melville was an unabashed Americanophile, and this translated into his public profile as well as his film work: he famously drove a Cadillac and wore a Stetson hat. His love of American locations is clear from his affectionate depiction of a nocturnal New York in Deux Hommes dans Manhattan (1959) (in which he plays the lead
792
MENDÈS FRANCE, PIERRE
role), and his evocation of the American hinterlands in L’Aîné des Fercheaux/Magnet of Doom (1963). Although enormously in vogue in the 1950s, by the mid-1960s Melville found himself critically derided by magazines such as Cahiers du cinéma, whose writers had grown increasingly weary of what was perceived as his classicism and a seemingly unvarying diet of Americana. Although he shared many of the aims and stylistic techniques of the new wave and worked with many of the same personnel (Henri Decae, Martial Solal, Jean-Paul Belmondo), it took the advent of a new generation of Hollywood filmmakers to redeem his critical reputation. Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and John Woo have all acknowledged the importance of Melville’s work on their own and have thereby contributed to a revival of interest in the filmmaker’s work. In 1996, Cahiers du cinéma dedicated a special issue to Melville’s work, finally acknowledging his status and legacy as a major figure in postwar European cinema. Sue Harris See also: Cahiers du cinéma; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Film Noir; World War II. References Nogueria, Rui. Melville on Melville. London: Secker and Warberg, 1971. Vincendeau, Ginette. Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris. London: BFI, 2003.
MENDÈS FRANCE, PIERRE (1907–1982) French politician, expert in international economic organization, and prime minister from June 1954 to February 1955. Mendès France’s youth, political style, and rhetoric of modernization earned him a reputation as an Americanist in the 1950s,
yet his independent line in foreign policy incurred the suspicion of U.S. policy makers. In the face of American opposition, he presided over the French rejection of plans for a European Defense Community (though he would later lead an alternative plan for German rearmament within the Western alliance) and ended the French colonial war in Indochina. A social Republican, who spent most of his career on the left of the Radical Party, he was a proponent of economic planning. In the 1950s and 1960s, he became increasingly interested in development issues thanks in part to his contact with Latin American counterparts in postwar international organizations. Mendès began his career in the 1920s within the technocratic “young turks” current of radicalism. He wrote a PhD thesis on financial policy and was one of the few French experts in the 1930s to have read John Maynard Keynes, the English economist whose theories inspired Roosevelt’s New Deal and who would enjoy extensive international influence after the war. Admired across the political spectrum for his technical competence, Mendès was appointed undersecretary of state to the treasury in the short-lived Blum government of 1938, then minister of national economy in de Gaulle’s provisional government (September 1944), before resigning when his austerity measures were rejected in April 1945. Having headed the French delegation at the international monetary conference at Bretton Woods (July 1–20, 1944), he became an executive director of the Bank for Reconstruction and Development (March 1946), a governor of the International Monetary Fund (March 1946–January 1959), and a permanent delegate on the United Nations Economic and Social
MÉNIL, RENÉ
Pierre Mendès France, French prime minister 1954–1955, whose most notable achievement was ending the French involvement in the colonial war in Indochina. (Corbis)
Council (February 1947–February 1951). This experience led him to link the problems of decolonizing countries in Africa and Asia with those of Latin America, to argue for structural (i.e., economic and social) reform in what was becoming known as the Third World, and to criticize U.S. attempts to maintain conservative dictatorial regimes in these regions as a bolster against Communism. His political style was based on pragmatism, technical analysis, and effective execution of decisions. Having decided around 1950 that decolonization was inevitable, he had concluded that war in Indochina was a drain on French resources that increased the country’s dependence on the United States. In 1954, he kept his promise to end the war within a month of his appointment as prime minister. That Mendès was regarded as an Americanist
793
while pursuing such policies was symptomatic of the extent to which modernization, youth, and dynamism were identified with the U.S. model in 1950s France. The nationalist politician Pierre Poujade also famously condemned his campaign against alcoholism and his habit of drinking milk as anti-French. Under the Fifth Republic (founded 1958), of which he was a prominent critic, Mendès’s political fortunes dwindled, and following a period as member of the Parti socialiste autonome (1959–1968) and a brief mandate as deputy for Grenoble (March 1967–May 1968), he withdrew from political life in 1973. He is remembered as a pioneer whose talents were never fully exploited. Jackie Clarke See also: Foreign Policy, 1945 to the Present; Gaulle, General Charles de; Modernization; Roosevelt, Franklin D. References Girault, René, ed. Pierre Mendès France et le rôle de la France dans le monde. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1991. Lacouture, Jean. Pierre Mendès France. London: Holmes and Meier, 1984.
MÉNIL, RENÉ (1907–) Martinican political thinker and literary critic. While studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, Ménil belonged to the group of young Martinicans who produced Légitime Défense, a journal whose sole but widely influential issue in 1932 combined Marxism, psychoanalysis, and surrealism in an attack on the reactionary mentality of the Martinican elite. His early interest in surrealism—he had been in contact with André Breton in Paris—developed further when,
794
MÉRIMÉE, PROSPER
having returned to Martinique, he joined Aimé and Suzanne Césaire in founding the revue Tropiques and from 1941 to 1945 published a large number of articles in it on the relevance of surrealism to the Caribbean through the notion of le merveilleux and its implications for psychoanalysis and the need for both political and psychological liberation of the colonized. He became a prominent member of the Martinican Communist Party, as did Césaire; but whereas Césaire left the party in 1956, Ménil has remained a member, publishing in Action, the journal of the Martinican Communist Party, which he edited from 1963 to 1971, Justice, La Nouvelle Critique, and Casa de las Americas as well as Les Temps modernes. His most significant work is the body of essays on Marxist aesthetics and the problems of Antillean culture. He argues for a nonreductive approach to art, stressing its relative autonomy and the importance of not subordinating it to political factors, and for rejecting the naïve Marxist preference for populist literature in favor of “difficult” writers such as Glissant, Kafka, and Mallarmé. As this suggests, he is also firmly internationalist, as receptive to European writers as to those from the Third World. Brecht and Barthes are important reference points for him. Thus, despite his collaboration on Tropiques, he is fiercely opposed to the négritude movement, seeing it as a politically reactionary, mystical pseudoliberation that fails to challenge the basis of racism. (It is revealing that Césaire distanced himself from the Légitime Défense group in 1932 because he felt that they were not sufficiently committed to the racial question.) Ménil’s enthusiasm for surrealism also disappeared in the 1950s because he felt that it rapidly lost its initial revolutionary impact and deterio-
rated into a form of exoticism and primitivism. And, as a result, his attitude toward Césaire also changed; he became very critical of his poetry and his ideas after Césaire’s break with the Parti Communiste Martiniquais. But Ménil remains faithful to Freudian psychoanalysis, seeing it as a necessary element in the analysis of colonial alienation, which is one of his principal concerns. Rejecting the simplistic solutions offered by négritude, Ménil argues that the colonized cannot just “step outside” the framework of European values but must live in a “parodic” specular relation to them if they are to avoid falling into the trap of alienation: ostensibly opposing Eurocentrism while reproducing its structures. Ménil’s work is characterized by its combination of openness to European literary and intellectual movements and focus on the struggle against neocolonialism. He was awarded the Prix Frantz Fanon in 1999 and for six decades has been a leading Communist intellectual in Martinique. Celia Britton See also: Barthes, Roland; Breton, André; Martinique; Primitivism; Surrealism; Tropiques. References Antoine, Régis. La Littérature franco-antillaise: Haïti, Guadeloupe et Martinique. Paris: Karthala, 1992. Britton, Celia. Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French Caribbean Thought. Oxford: Legenda, 2002.
MÉRIMÉE, PROSPER (1803–1870) French author, born in Paris. His father, Léonor, was a painter, professor of arts, and later permanent secretary of the Ecole des Beaux-arts. His mother, Anne Moreau, was also a cultivated woman
MÉRIMÉE, PROSPER
and artist. At age sixteen, Prosper spoke English fluently. Chief of staff of the secretariat general of the Count of Argout, minister of navy in 1831, he was appointed inspector general of historical monuments in 1834 by the government of King LouisPhilippe. Mérimée was known for his historical novel The Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX (1829) and his numerous novellas, including Colomba (1840) and of course Carmen (1845). Tamango (1829) is a key text on the transatlantic slave trade. Its uniqueness comes from its style. Similar to the philosophical tales of Voltaire, it uses irony to highlight the economic mind-set of the preindustrial era of Europe and thus undermines the effort of the antislavery movements. Though Mérimée was well traveled in Europe, he never went to the New World; his readings on the conditions of the transatlantic slavery of Africans (with Stendhal’s literary club, which he joined in 1825) sharpened his interest in sea adventures. It also provided him with firsthand material on which to base his story when the themes of slavery and the “romantic Negro” were in vogue. The story’s two main protagonists are the one-armed French Captain Ledoux, veteran of the battle of Trafalgar, expert in navigation theories, and declared enemy of the British, and Tamango, a powerful African chief. When antislavery movements become strong in Europe and slavery is forbidden, Ledoux becomes a precious asset for the traffickers, who resort to his services to deceive French customs officials and the British patrol boats. Traffickers fund him to construct a new kind of slave ship, carrying more slaves than its normal capacity. He names it Espérance (Hope) but that hope soon turns into a
795
nightmare. Meanwhile, Tamango sold Ledoux a large number of slaves, including, while he is under the influence of alcohol, his own wife, Ayché. While the ship is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean en route to Cuba, a few miles away from Martinique, the slaves that had been loaded on the coast of Guinea, led by their captor Tamango who promised to return them safely back to Africa, revolt and massacre all the whites. But the rebels all die by drowning because of their ignorance of navigation techniques, except for Tamango himself, who is rescued by a British frigate and taken to Kingston, Jamaica. After telling his story, some plantation owners wanted him hanged for his murders but the governor spares his life, invoking selfdefense and the fact that the people he killed were French. Tamango works for the governor for a while, later enrolls in a British military marching band, and dies shortly after from alcohol abuse. Unlike other novellas by the same author, Tamango has not been widely studied. The Senegalese writer Boubakar Boris Diop rewrote Mérimée’s story and assigned a positive role to Tamango (a hero and model African leader who put an end to the transatlantic slavery), whereas the critic Léon Vignols justified Mérimée’s work as a reactionary response of the author intended to ridicule the sentimentalism of the romantics. In the movie industry, however, some filmmakers were able to take advantage of the episode of the romance between Captain Ledoux and Ayché. In 1957, the American John Berry rewrote and produced a drama based on Tamango, casting Curt Jürgens as Captain Reinker, Dorothy Dandridge as Ayché the mistress, and Alex Cressan as Tamango. The movie was
796
MERRILL, STUART FITZ RANDOLPH
banned in the United States and also in France for promoting interracial romance. Contrary to Berry, who changed the nationality of the captain to that of a Dutch man and presented Ayché as a mulatto, the recent version of the movie, directed by Jean Roké Patoudem in 2002, seems to maintain Mérimée’s original version, with the late Jean Yanne as Captain Ledoux, Gerard Essomba as Tamango, and Meskie Shibru-Sivan as Ayché. Nowadays, Tamango is an acclaimed perfume brand name for men and women that comes in different exotic fragrances, created by Leonard and commercialized across the Atlantic. In performing arts, Tamango designates the famous Broadway tap dancer Van Cayseele; originally from French Guiana, his dance has been influenced by African American revues such as Stormy Weather and stars like Gregory Hines and Buster Brown. Ibrahim Amidou See also: Antislavery Movements; Carmen; Dumas, Alexandre; Guiana; Slavery. References Diop, Boubakar Boris. Le Temps de Tamango. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1981. Fournier, Alain. “Chronologie de Mérimée.” Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle 57 (1975): 145–159. Josserand, Pierre, ed. Mérimée: Colomba et dix autres nouvelles. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Patty, James S. “Neither Black nor White: An Interpretation of Tamango.” French Literature Series 2 (1975): 65–75. Vignols, Léon. “Les sources du Tamango.” Mercure de France 12 (1927): 542–557.
MERRILL, STUART FITZ RANDOLPH (1863–1915) Born on August 1, 1863, in Hampstead, New York, the poet, critic, and translator Stuart Merrill was, following his father’s
appointment to a post at the American embassy, educated at the Lycée Fontanes (later Condorcet) in Paris, where Mallarmé taught English and where his contemporaries included the poets René Ghil and André Fontainas. Merrill spent most of his adult life in France and Belgium and looked back on the five years he spent in New York in the 1880s, a period that included a spell at Columbia Law School, as a penance. Abhorring the chauvinism of his fellow Americans, he informed T. B. Rudmose Brown, Samuel Beckett’s future professor of French and dedicatee of Merrill’s longest poem: “Ma patrie, c’est l’Amérique et je crache dessus” (America Is My Homeland and I Spit on Her). Deeming France to be “the most sacred of countries,” he wrote almost exclusively in French. He played a prominent part in the establishment of the Franco-Belgian symbolist school and, as well as poems, reviews, and essays, provided financial and editorial assistance for some of its most influential magazines. He was also involved in Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’Art. His translations of prose poems by twenty-three different French poets were published as Pastels in Prose. Although his Poems of the Symbolists remained unpublished, he contributed samples of the work of Yeats, Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson to various symbolist reviews. There followed in his revolutionary Socialist period translations of poems by William Morris. He was the first of several to help Wilde expunge some of the anglicisms present in the manuscript of Salomé and instigated the petition signed by some of the more prominent French literary figures in favor of Wilde’s release from prison. He later became embroiled with Apollinaire in a controversy over the poetry of Walt Whitman,
MÉTIS
of whose work he was a passionate devotee. Had it not been for his death, he might well have been (with Gide, Valéry Larbaud, Vielé-Griffin, and others) a contributor to the volume of Whitman translations published in 1918. Merrill’s earliest collections, starting with Les Gammes (1887), which brought together poems written during his American sojourn, are an exemplary illustration of symbolist tenets and techniques. Pride of place is given to musicality and, initially, to an exemplification of Ghil’s theory of “instrumentation.” His at-first highly alliterative poems display the symbolists’ addiction to rich colors, precious stones, medievalism, symbolic legendary universes, and Wagner’s operas, as well as to self-conscious wordplay. Yet as Merrill observed to his like-minded compatriot Vielé-Griffin: “I am not the only American who is trying to endow the French alexandrine with a little of the enchanting music of English verse.” Subsequently, his poetry evolved away from symbolism toward greater simplicity and a lyrical celebration of nature and reflected his sympathy for the poor and the oppressed. He also experimented with the vers libre. He died in Versailles on December 1, 1915. The posthumous volume Prose et vers (1925) contains an important preface by Fontainas. Michael Tilby See also: Vielé-Griffin, Francis. References Cornell, Kenneth. The Post Symbolist Period. New Haven: Yale University Press; Paris: PUF, 1958. Henry, Marjorie Louise. Stuart Merrill: La Contribution d’un Américain au symbolisme français. Paris: Champion, 1927. Richard, Noël. Profils symbolistes. Paris: Nizet, 1978.
797
MÉTIS French word used to refer to individuals of mixed ethnic origin. In the North American context, this word is more specifically used to refer to individuals of mixed European and Amerindian origin. The term métis has also been accorded a meaning that goes beyond a simple individual biological dimension and is also used to describe specific cultural groups whose origins lie in historical contact between European and Amerindian peoples. Identifying who is, indeed, métis represents a considerable challenge, since this term is polysemous. The individuals and communities referred to change depending on the meaning used. In a purely biological sense, this term refers to large portions of the North American population based on the simple fact that they have a mixed European/Amerindian lineage at different genealogical degrees. In 2004, the National American Métis Association estimated that, according to this definition of the term, there were 85 million Métis in the United States. In a cultural and historical sense, the term métis is applied to a far smaller number of communities. From the seventeenth century onward, these communities have developed a cultural milieu, a way of life, political institutions, and an identity of their own. The cultural and historical métis communities are primarily to be found in the Canadian prairies and in the North of the United States. They have approximately 100,000 members. The emergence of the first métis communities in North America is closely tied to the French colonial presence. During the seventeenth century, the authorities in New France and the Catholic Church
798
MÉTIS
encouraged unions between French people and Amerindians, in an attempt to reestablish a gender balance within the colonial population, which was composed primarily of men. A biethnic population was thus formed in this context during the first century of New France’s history. In the eighteenth century, the political and religious authorities in New France abandoned their encouragement of mixed marriages because they were no longer perceived as being necessary to the development of the colony. In fact, as the proportion of women coming from France increased, the authorities began to favor marriages between individuals of French origin and to reject métissage. This rejection of métissage is probably one of the factors responsible for the creation of the first métis communities on the peripheries of French colonial centers. The first distinct métis communities developed principally on the shores of the Great Lakes. These community members lived on fur trading, hunting, and fishing, and they developed complementary agriculture. These communities retained several cultural traits inherited from their metropolitan French roots. Notably, they remained Catholic and spoke French as well as Amerindian languages. Through the decades, some métis communities also developed their own language, “michif,” in which grammatical structures from both French and Cree coexist. When New France fell to the British in 1759, numerous métis communities existed on sites that would later become important cities, such as Detroit and Michilimackinac in Michigan, Chicago and Peoria in Illinois, Milwaukee and Green Bay in Wisconsin. The fall of New France accentuated the need on the part of the Métis to
maintain their autonomy in the face of the colonial authorities, which had newly become British and Protestant. The Jay Treaty of 1790 established the American-British border in North America at the level of the Great Lakes. Several métis communities were thus included within American borders. Shortly after, the American government opened up the lands inhabited by the Métis to colonization, which provoked their exodus toward the Northwest. This exodus was at the origin of the development of a new métis colony at Red River, in what is today the Canadian province of Manitoba. The Red River métis colony consolidated its position as intermediary in fur trading in this area, as well as developing a considerable agricultural output. It became without a doubt the main site of a concentrated Métis population and the center of development of their culture and political institutions. As the Franco-Amerindian métis colony was being established at Red River, a quite separate biethnic population was being formed in the Nordic regions of Hudson Bay. At this time, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent Scottish workers to trade furs with the Amerindians in several isolated forts in their territory. A new biethnic population emerged in this context, but it did not develop as strong a cultural cohesion as that of the Franco-Amerindian Métis. Often rejected by Amerindian and colonial societies, many Hudson Bay Métis sought refuge at Red River. Despite this demographic shift, the ever-growing Red River colony remained principally occupied by Franco-Amerindian Métis. Debates between historians concerning the precise nature of the relationship between the two Métis groups at Red River are ongoing.
MÉTIS
During the nineteenth century, the Red River colony became the site of conflicts between the Métis and the British government authorities. The first notable clash came in 1811 when Thomas Douglas, count of Selkirk, obtained permission to develop a new colony, Assiniboia, at Red River. A conflictual relationship was established between the Métis and the new colonists from Selkirk. The years that followed were punctuated with violent events that placed the two groups in opposition, for example, the battle of Seven Oaks in 1816, in which the governor of the colony of Assiniboia, Robert Semple, was killed. Despite these clashes, the colony of Assiniboia took shape, and the Métis had to share their lands with the colonists. In 1869–1870, the Canadian government tried to integrate the Red River region within the sphere of its official sovereignty. This territory belonged, at the time, to the Hudson’s Bay Company, directly answerable to the British Crown. Louis Riel, the political leader of the Red River Métis, feared a new colonization of métis lands and organized an autonomous provisional government, as well as battalions of métis resistance. In order to forestall armed conflict, the Canadian government promised compensatory lands to the Métis, on the whole outside the Red River region. This initiative led to the creation of the first Red River Métis diaspora, as they organized themselves in new communities further west, notably at Saint-Laurent in Manitoba and at Batoche in Saskatchewan. The plots of land promised by the Canadian government were, nevertheless, not all distributed to the Métis populations. Furthermore, some of the lands on which the Métis found refuge were once again handed over to the colonists by the Cana-
799
dian government. Riel and Gabriel Dumont, another influential Métis leader, organized a second armed resistance against the colonization of métis lands. This episode is known in Canadian history as the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. This resistance movement ended in the same year with the battle of Batoche when the last métis battalion was beaten and Riel captured. The execution of Riel following a controversial trial stirred up rivalries on a national scale between the anglophone majority, which had supported the efforts of the Canadian government, and the francophone minority, which generally supported the métis cause. The defeat at Batoche and the government repression that followed led to a second métis diaspora in the North American continent. Several new communities were formed at this time, mostly from North Dakota to the River Mackenzie, via Alberta. The Métis who, on the whole, have been dispersed and deprived of their institutional structures, have, over the course of the twentieth century, tended to mix with Canadian and American societies that have developed in the West. Some groups have nevertheless succeeded in retaining aspects of their culture, as well as maintaining a distinct métis identity. In the Canadian prairies, political organizations for the defense of the Métis were created in the 1930s. In Alberta, the Métis obtained the exclusive right to some territories thanks to the Métis Betterment Act of 1938. From the 1960s onward, Canadian métis organizations were strengthened and intensified their activities in order to obtain the recognition of Métis rights. They achieved a vital victory in 1982 with the official recognition in the Canadian constitution of the Métis as an aboriginal people.
800
MEXICO
This recognition led to métis peoples being granted specific rights, similar to those accorded to Canadian Amerindians. These rights were related, in particular, to the fields of hunting, fishing, and exploitation of natural resources. This situation nevertheless posed the challenge of the establishment of a legal process of identification of the Métis within a contemporary context. Métis rights could only be granted to individuals from communities with a history of métis culture, and not to individuals who had their origins in more recent métissage. As for the Métis in the United States, they have not been the object of any official recognition and have not obtained any distinct rights. Nevertheless, they have recently established organizations that fight for the recognition of these rights, based on the model of the Canadian organizations. Louis-Pascal Rousseau See also: Alberta; Catholic Church; Detroit; Fishing; Fur Trade; Illinois Country; Language; Manitoba; New France; Riel, Louis; Saskatchewan; Wisconsin. References Bakker, Peter. A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Barkwell, Lawrence, Leah Dorion, and Darren Préfontaine. Métis Legacy: A Métis Historiography and Annotated Bibliography. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 2001. Flanagan, Thomas. Métis Lands in Manitoba. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1991. Giraud, Marcel. Le Métis Canadien. 2 vols. Paris: Institut d’ethnologie, 1945. Howard, Joseph K. Strange Empire: Louis Riel and the Métis People. Toronto: Lewis and Samuel, 1974. Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer Brown. The New Peoples, Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2001.
Sprague, Douglas Neil. The Genealogy of the First Métis Nation: The Development and Dispersal of the Red River Settlement 1820–1900. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 1983. Trémaudan, Auguste Henri. Histoire de la nation métisse dans l’Ouest Canadien. Montreal: Editions Albert Lévesque, 1936.
MEXICO Relations between Mexico and France have been characterized by a predominant French influence in political and cultural domains. This influence was particularly political, not to say constitutional, in the nineteenth century, and cultural in the twentieth. After World War II, France tried to raise its visibility within Latin America and chose Mexico as a point of entry into the continent. This cultural policy, which did bear fruit, also had its limits: Mexico established, at the same time, solid links with the United States in almost every sphere. During the independence period (1809– 1821), the Mexican political elites, as was the case in most Latin American countries, turned to Enlightenment France in order to justify the project that they intended to implement: the establishment of a nation rid of the sovereign authority of the Spanish monarchy and able to welcome within itself all social classes, most notably the middle classes. The French model also helps to attain a number of other objectives: to give the population greater access to education, to install a legal system close to that of the Rights of Man, and to proclaim the sovereignty of the people. The founders of the modern Mexican state (Hidalgo and Moreno) recognized their debt to France in their writings while at the same time underlining the equally important influence of the example offered by
MEXICO
801
Archduke Maximilian (1832–1867), sent by the French to establish an empire for Napoléon III in Mexico, where he was executed. This episode, which was one of the great military failures of the Second Empire, had a negative effect on relations between Mexico and France. (Corbis)
the United States (among other things, in regard to the question of federalism). Similarly, the 1857 constitution, the founding document in Mexican history, took on board discourses of human rights from French revolutionary texts, just as much as it did the political liberalism of AngloSaxon works. This document deals with questions of individual freedom, free choice on the question of work, freedom of expression, and the inviolable home of the citizen. An unusual case in Latin America, this constitution follows the anticlerical principles of the French Revolution but does not adopt its egalitarian aspects. In 1861, Napoléon III sent troops to Mexico in order to look after French interests threatened by the decision of President
Juárez to suspend his country’s internal and foreign debt. The French political objective changed very rapidly: it quickly became a case of establishing an empire for the benefit of Maximilian of Austria. With its own Civil War over, the United States sent forces to support the Mexican government, which led a guerrilla war against the French occupier. In 1867, the French troops were chased out of Mexico by the Americans. In the meantime, Maximilian of Austria went to Mexico and was taken prisoner and murdered. This episode, which was one of the great military failures of the Second Empire, had a negative effect on relations between Mexico and France. During the same period, Gabino Barreda (doctor, philosopher, and organizer of an important educational
802
MEXICO
reform) and then a little later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Justo Sierra, were disciples of Auguste Comte’s positivism, which they nevertheless attempted to get beyond. This Mexican positivism served above all to counteract the conservatism of the clergy and anarchism, which was finding an ever-wider audience. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1919) has few similarities with the French Revolution. On the one hand, the revolutionaries tried to overthrow Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship, which was based as much on authoritarianism as on values of order and progress, which were associated with positivism, a school of thought connected to France. On the other hand, from the perspective of a return to traditional Mexican values, the instigators of the Mexican Revolution rejected the civilizing mission of the Diaz government and, in this way, the very nation that symbolized this project of the dominant class: France. The Mexican Revolution, unlike the French, is perceived by historians as a long civil war that finally led to the disintegration of national unity. Nevertheless, Francisco Madero, one of the thinkers behind this revolution and one of its main leaders, drew inspiration explicitly from the ideas of the French Revolution. Educated at the lycée Hoche in Versailles and at Berkeley University, Madero claimed, in The Presidential Succession in 1910 (an essay published in 1908), that France was the republic that should serve as an example to Mexico due to its power and the values it inherited from the Enlightenment. Once the Mexican revolutionary period reached an end, the exchanges between the two countries became primarily cultural. In the field of philosophy, for example, the independent spiritualism of
someone like Antonio Caso Andrade, rector of Mexico University and a strong character linked to the political thought of Madero, was strongly influenced by the French thinker Henri Bergson. In 1915, Andrade published La filosofía francesa contemporánea and translated De L’Idée de loi naturelle by the philosopher Emile Boutroux. José Vasconcelos also took on aspects of Bergsonism with an original twist. A major player in Latin American philosophy, director of the Ecole nationale préparatoire, and minister of public instruction, Vasconcelos contributed to the spread of French philosophy throughout the Spanish-speaking world, including the philosophical thought of Bergson, but also that of Boutroux, Alfred Fouillée, Elisée Reclus, Etienne Vacherot, and Charles Richet. On the contrary, Alfonso Reyes, writer and Mexican diplomat posted to Paris, for his part worked to make Mexican culture better known in France. He taught French intellectuals and artists about the pre-Colombian past of his country, as well as about the various modernist and revolutionary movements in the artistic sphere. At the same time, Valéry Larbaud ploughed a lonely furrow in France, translating key works (including those of Reyes) of Mexican literature. The writer Antonin Artaud traveled to Mexico in 1936 to examine the case of the Tarahumaras, an indigenous community. In a primitivist approach that countered European rationalism, he examined, in a quasi-ethnological manner, an Amerindian society in order to find within it the negation of the Occident. André Breton’s visit in 1938 had a greater impact on relations between the two countries. On an aesthetic level, Breton took the mythical aspect of Mexican culture to be a forerunner of sur-
MICHAUX, HENRI
realism. Furthermore, his friendship with Frida Kahlo and with the photographer Manuel Alvárez Bravo led to an important exhibition in Paris in 1939. Above all, these ties gave rise, in 1940, to an exhibition at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City, without contest one of the major cultural events of the decade. In 1945, Paul Rivet created the Institut français d’Amérique latine in Mexico City. This institute played a key role for two reasons: it was one of the first centers of its kind that France opened, and France chose Mexico as a point of entry in order to ensure its cultural influence across Latin America. This institute soon became one of the essential sources of cultural development in the Mexican capital. In 1955, Jaime Torres Bodet published, in Paris, the first edition of the journal Nouvelles de Mexique. This journal, published until 1990, played a considerable role in raising awareness in France of Mexican cultural activities and, more broadly, in maintaining lasting ties between the two nations. Some of the best-known Mexican artists and thinkers collaborated with the journal, notably the philosopher Leopoldo Zea and the poet Octavio Paz. Later, in the first half of the 1960s, under the impulse of André Malraux and de Gaulle’s visits to Mexico, several cultural events were held on either side of the Atlantic, proof (despite the dominant influence of the United States in Mexico) of the mutual interest between cultural milieus in both countries. Mauricio Segura See also: Artaud, Antonin; Breton, André; French Revolution; Gaulle, General Charles de; Malaquais, Jean; Malraux, André; Painting; Paz, Octavio; Primitivism; Republicanism; Serge, Victor; Surrealism; Theory; World War II.
803
References Frérot, Christine. Echanges artistiques contemporains: La France et le Mexique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Guerra, François-Xavier. Le Mexique: De l’ancien régime à la révolution. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. Guy, Alain. La Philosophie en Amérique latine. Paris: PUF, 1997. Rolland, Denis. La Crise du modèle français. Marianne et l’Amérique latine: Culture, politique et identité. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2000.
MICHAUX, HENRI (1899–1984) Belgian-born poet and artist who became a naturalized French citizen in 1954. Michaux’s work is identified with both a chronic extroversion (reflected in the extensive travels that characterize his early work) and an equally extreme introversion and exploration of self. His complex contribution to the French Atlantic depends on a series of dialogues ranging from a traveler’s direct, sustained contact with South American cultures to the more subtle transatlantic influence of an older European creator on younger American authors. Michaux’s early career was marked by a desire to escape the restrictive environment of his youth. Between 1919 and 1921, he served twice as a sailor on board French ships traveling to North and South America. Michaux moved to Paris in 1924, where he met the Uruguayan-born poet Jules Supervielle and (in the following year) the Ecuadorian poet Alfredo Gangotena. Gangotena, at that time a student in France, was one of a series of American authors to choose interwar Paris as a temporary home and wrote his most significant works directly in French. At his invitation, Michaux set sail for South America in 1927 and the
804
MICHELIN
following year undertook a long journey there, an account of which would form the basis of Ecuador (1929). This is an ironic, shapeless text, difficult to categorize, whose fragmentation often verges on disintegration: the account of this South American journey reflects, nevertheless, its author’s apprenticeship as a writer. Although Michaux’s next major journey (described in Un Barbare en Asie/A Barbarian in Asia [1931], translated by Sylvia Beach) was to Asia, transatlantic contact with America—both direct and indirect— continued throughout the next fifty years of his life. In 1936, he undertook a second South American journey, traveling with Supervielle and other European writers to attend as principal guest the Fourteenth Congress of PEN Clubs in Buenos Aires. Michaux gave a number of lectures, including one to authors associated with SUR, the literary review edited by Victoria Ocampo. His meeting during this visit with Borges signaled the beginning of a long and creative exchange, marked in particular by the Argentinean’s Spanish translation of Un Barbare en Asie in 1941. The only existing film footage of Michaux shows him attending a lecture given by Borges at the Collège de France in 1983. There was a further stay in Brazil in 1939, during which Michaux wrote Au pays de la magie (“In the Country of Magic,”1941). From the 1940s, Michaux’s work began to appear in North American translations. Although Michaux’s actual contact with the United States is eclipsed by his earlier travels in South America, his later career was marked by oblique yet highly creative transatlantic contact with the northern continent. Mescaline, the principal drug he used in his hallucinogenic ex-
periments, is a manufactured version of peyote, the substance derived from cactus “buttons” and used in religious rites by Native American tribes such as the Mexican Tarahumara. It was Michaux’s druginduced texts and works of art that attracted the attention of the beat-generation poets. Allen Ginsberg (as well as Carl Salomon, to whom Ginsberg dedicated his poem Howl [1956]) read Michaux’s early work while in the New York Psychiatric Institute in the late 1940s; he met the author while in Paris a decade later, adopting the role of disciple and describing their subsequent meetings in a number of autobiographical fragments. Charles Forsdick See also: Beach, Sylvia; Borges, Jorge Luis; Burroughs, William S.; Ocampo, Victoria; Paz, Octavio; Supervielle, Jules; Travel Writing. References Bellour, Raymond, ed. Henri Michaux. Paris: L’Herne/Fayard, 1983. Bowie, Malcolm. Henri Michaux: A Study of His Literary Works. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Michaux, Henri. Ecuador: A Travel Journal. Trans. R. Magowan. London: Peter Owen, 1970.
MICHELIN (COMPAGNIE GÉNÉRALE DES ETABLISSEMENTS MICHELIN) Michelin is the biggest tire company in the world with outlets in 170 countries and eighty manufacturing plants in 19 countries. The company, which is still controlled by the founding family, now under Edouard Michelin, also publishes 18 million maps and guides a year, of mostly promotional value to the company, notably its
MICHIGAN
Michelin Guide Rouge whose stars are sought by restaurants the world over. In the 1880s, two brothers took over a rubber business from their grandfather, which in 1889 was incorporated as Michelin et Compagnie. Pneumatic tires were first patented by Dunlop in 1845 but were at the time still rare. The brothers recognized their commercial potential, took out their own patent in 1891, and by 1893 over 10,000 bicycles in France had them. Carriages and cars soon adopted the new tires, though competition was intense for market share: by 1903, there were 150 tire companies in France alone. Michelin’s answer was branding and the invention of the Michelin Man (Monsieur Bibendum, an obscure allusion to a poem by Horace) in 1898. Diversification in the form of guides, originally on tires alone, followed in 1900. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed tremendous expansion, so much so that when Citroën went bankrupt in 1935, Michelin came to the rescue. The years of World War II did not damage the company, not least because it was untainted by collaboration: when Michelin tires made their way onto Nazi vehicles on the Russian front, they strangely disintegrated in the cold. Arguably the company’s biggest contribution to tire technology came with the 1946 invention of the radial tire, providing good road holding and durability. In 1948, a sales office was established in the United States, and a contract with Sears to replace tires on American cars saw sales rocket. By 1970, 2.5 million tires a year were sold into American outlets; that year saw the first plant built in Canada too. In 1990, the acquisition of the American tire manufac-
805
turer Uniroyal Goodrich gave the company pole position. In 2003, Europe represented 52 percent of sales, North America 35 percent, and Asia, South America, and the Middle East/Africa Zone 13 percent. The company has fourteen manufacturing plants in the United States, four in Canada, and seven in South America. Mark Vernon See also: Automobiles; Citroën; World War II. References Les Brevets Michelin ont Cent Ans. France: Michelin, 1991. Norbye, Jan P. The Michelin Magic. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Tab Books, 1982.
MICHIGAN Since the time of European arrival in the region, Michigan and the Great Lakes have been governed by three successive powers including France, Great Britain, and the United States. The earliest French presence in the Great Lakes region dates to when Samuel de Champlain explored the Georgian Bay area of eastern Lake Huron. Etienne Brûlé is the first known European to have reached Lake Superior in 1622. From the 1660s onward, the French sought to strengthen their presence in the Great Lakes for strategic and commercial reasons through the establishment of a series of outposts at Sault Sainte Marie, the Straits of Mackinac, Fort Miami (present-day Saint Joseph), Fort Saint Joseph (presentday Niles), and Detroit. Among the most famous French explorers in Michigan was Father Jacques Marquette, who helped to establish a mission at Sault Sainte Marie in 1668 with Father Claude Dablon. Marquette founded a second mission at Saint
806
MICHIGAN
Ignace three years later, the same year in which Simon François de St. Lusson proclaimed the interior of North America belonged to France on June 14, 1671. In 1673, Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet set out from Saint Ignace and traveled along the western shore of Lake Michigan to Green Bay. They then voyaged southward along the Fox and Wisconsin to the Mississippi River. René-Robert de La Salle led additional explorations of Lake Michigan and succeeded in descending the Illinois and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682. In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain du De Troit (Detroit), and in 1715 the French established Fort Michilimackinac, among the most important centers for the fur trade in New France. The name Michigan actually derives from the native words “michi-gama,” meaning large lake. Upon the arrival of Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century, there were approximately nine native tribes, totaling an estimated 100,000 people, living in the region. The largest of these tribes was the Huron, the members of which dwelled between Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Huron. The three tribes most commonly associated with Michigan, referred to as the Three Fires, are the Ojibway, the Odawa (Ottawa), and the Potawatomi. Other tribes in the area have included the Menominee, the Miami, the Fox, the Winnabago, and the Sac or Sauk. The maintenance of peaceful and close relations between French and natives on the Great Lakes was of major importance to the fur trade, and the French adopted therefore many native customs and practices, often intermarrying with native women. Although the French government tried to control the fur trade by licensing
trappers, many unlicensed Coureurs de bois, also known as woods runners, voyageurs, or independent fur trappers, traveled extensively throughout the region of the Great Lakes. With the end of New France, the transfer of power from the French to British occurred rather peacefully in the Great Lakes region. The British did not continue, however, with French fur trade traditions, nor did they continue the French policy of distributing food, guns, ammunition, and liquor to the natives. This resulted in a concerted rebellion, led by Chief Pontiac, of Great Lakes natives in 1763 during which natives captured all forts in Michigan except Detroit. Once news reached Pontiac confirming that no support in the form of arms or soldiers would come from France, he lifted the siege of Detroit at the end of October 1763. When Major Patrick Sinclair took command of the British garrison at Fort Michilimackinac in 1779, he decided to move the mainland fort at present-day Mackinaw City to Mackinac Island. Between 1779 and 1781, a new fort was built, and materials from the old French fort, including entire buildings such as the church, were transported in sections over the frozen straits to Mackinac. No fighting occurred in the region of present-day Michigan during the American Revolution, but Detroit did become the center of British power and the site from which raids on American settlements could be organized. Although the articles of peace signed at Paris in 1783 ceded the region of Michigan to the United States and obligated the British to evacuate their western posts, it took them nearly thirteen years to finally leave Detroit and Mackinac. On
MILLER, HENRY VALENTINE
July 11, 1796, the American flag was finally raised over Detroit, and in September 1796 Fort Mackinac was also under the possession of the Americans. Governor William Hull of the Michigan Territory, created in 1805, sought to secure lands for white settlement from the natives, but he met with reluctance from Michigan’s 3,000 nonnative residents, mostly French Canadians, who refused to comply with government provisions for an elaborate code of laws, registration of land titles, and uniformed militia. In addition, Michigan’s 6,000 to 8,000 natives also resisted attempts at treaty negotiation. On January 26, 1837, President Andrew Jackson signed the bill that made Michigan the twenty-sixth state of the Union, and in 1848 the state capital was moved to Lansing. Additional waves of settlers, including French Canadians, came to Michigan during the nineteenth century due to rich mining and lumbering prospects. The arrival of settlers as well as the development of mining, lumbering, and industry was further aided by the opening of the Sault Locks in 1855. Maureen Waters See also: American Revolution; Automobiles; Brûlé, Etienne; Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe; Champlain, Samuel de; Coureurs de bois; Detroit; Fur Trade; Huron; Illinois Country; Jefferson, Thomas; Joliet, Louis; La Salle, RenéRobert Cavelier de, Sieur; Marquette, Jacques; Mississippi River; New France; Pontiac; Slavery; World War II. References Cleland, Charles E. Rites of Conquest: The History and Culture of Michigan’s Native Americans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Dunbar, Willis, and George S. May. Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995.
807
Halsey, John, and Michael Stafford, eds. Retrieving Michigan’s Buried Past: The Archeology of the Great Lakes State. Bloomfield Hills: Cranbrook Institute of Science, 1999. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
MILLER, HENRY VALENTINE (1891–1980) American writer. Since the publication of Tropic of Cancer (1934), Miller has been known predominantly as either the quintessential male chauvinist writer or as a prophet of sexual liberation. From Kate Millett’s famous attack in Sexual Politics (1969) to Norman Mailer’s defense in The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Miller’s reputation as a writer in the interim war period has continuously suffered from critical neglect in favor of polemical outbursts regarding his sexual politics. The author of Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring (1936), Tropic of Capricorn (1936), and Quiet Days in Clichy (1956), among others, was, however, a keen critic as well as a self-avowed literary anarchist in the Rabelaisian tradition. From 1932 until the 1960s, Miller wrote extensive essays on French art and aesthetics, part of which were collected in The Cosmological Eye (1939) and Remember to Remember (1947). These essays range from critiques of surrealism to literary homages to close friends: Anaïs Nin, Blaise Cendrars, and the photographer Brassaï, among others. In spite of this, Miller’s unashamed use of four-letter words in his fictionalized
808
MINERAL WATER
biographies has only added to his notoriety as a primarily pornographic writer. Nevertheless, the Tropics novels can also be read as allegories of a modernism unable to cope in both a literary and psychological sense with the encroaching fascism of the period. In an attempt to break with an increasingly conformist vision of American society, Miller’s vagabond persona removes himself from the utilitarian sphere of work and bourgeois obligations by choosing Paris as the hunting grounds for a form of physical and creative expulsion, not unlike that of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932). It was in Paris, above all, that Miller created a literary persona for whom the search for creativity became synonymous with prostitution and poverty; two reasons why the French critic Georges Bataille—in an insightful and astute piece on Miller— praised Miller’s sexual forays as an allegory of literature’s desire for a radical new form of writing. For Bataille, Miller’s propensity toward sexual violence became, in effect, another way to represent the cancer of modern civilization. Miller’s writing, although a mainstay of a particular cult market created largely by the fact that most of his fiction was banned in the United States up until the mid-1960s, is therefore still marginalized in American accounts of Anglo/French literary works. While Miller’s unique brand of surrealistically inspired male adventures has influenced a large number of writers and filmmakers, from Philip Roth to Martin Scorsese and Philip Kaufman, it is still in Europe that Miller’s oftentimes Proustian take on memory and fictionalized biography is given as much, if not more, space than his descriptions of copulation. Caroline Blinder
See also: Bataille, Georges; Céline, LouisFerdinand; Cendrars, Blaise; Surrealism. References Bataille, Georges. “La Morale de Miller.” Œuvres Complètes, vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Blinder, Caroline. A Self-Made Surrealist— Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Cendrars, Blaise. Correspondance, 1934–1979: 45 ans d’amitié. Paris: Denoël, 1992. Mailer, Norman. Genius and Lust—A Journey through the Major Writings of Henry Miller. New York: Grove, 1976.
MINERAL WATER With 90 percent of the population partaking of it, French consumers are as well known for their taste for bottled mineral water as they are for their taste for wine. Consumption of bottled mineral water in the United States and Canada reached over 13 billion liters per year by 2002. While most of this water is of American origin, its consumption is partly due to the energies of French promoters, particularly Perrier, in the 1970s. The label of “Frenchness” attached to the product, and its attendant high cultural capital if not social pretentiousness, along with gender ambiguity, persisted into the 1990s. Episode 49 of the TV series Thirtysomething, aired in 1990, featured a disastrous test of a commercial in which the audience condemned the “whining yuppies,” whom they told to “shut up and drink their French water.” The vengeful high school students of Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989) incriminate with homosexuality the pair of jocks they lure to their deaths by planting bottled water on them. Perrier traces the history of its water back to the Punic wars. On his way to Rome from Carthage, after crossing Spain,
MINERAL WATER
Hannibal stopped near a spring of naturally carbonated water, which refreshed him and his elephant. However, it took over two millennia for the commercial value of the water to be realized, when at the end of the nineteenth century, Louis Perrier, a doctor from Nîmes, bought the Bouillens spring, located in the town of Vergèze, near Nîmes. However, his luck, like Hannibal’s, did not last. Due to financial difficulties, Perrier sold the company to John Harmsworth, an Englishman, in 1903. The name was preserved because Harmsworth renamed the spring after the founder of his new company, and he found a commercially successful means of distribution— the infrastructure of the British Empire. He also built up the brand, notably in the shape of the bottle in which Perrier is sold. It was inspired by the Indian clubs that Harmsworth used for his physical therapy, being a paraplegic. Perrier came back to France in 1947 when the spring was sold to Gustave Leven, a young Parisian stockbroker. Within four years, France had become its main market. The company bought Contrexéville in 1954, then launched a line of soft drinks and developed a number of regional springs before going international. Popular slogans such as “Perrier, c’est fou!” contributed to its growth. The company’s return to international business has been very successful. In the mid-1970s, Perrier took off in the United States, where the brand accounted for 80 percent of all imported water. The lowest point in the company’s history came in 1990, when regulators in North Carolina issued a report stating that Perrier’s bottled water was contaminated with benzene.
809
In a 1992 takeover bid, the company was brought into the Nestlé group. Nestlé began its entry into the water business in 1969 with a 30 percent stake in Société Générale des Eaux Minérales de Vittel. Nestlé Waters is today a leader in the bottled water sector, with a 17 percent market share, although competition is fierce as a result of cheaper brands. Its sales are split almost evenly between North America and Europe. Evian’s history also reaches back to turbulent times. Its source, the Cachet Spring near the town of Evian-les-Bain in the Alps, was found by the Marquis de Lessert at the time of the French Revolution. By 1824, the first spas had been opened on the site to accommodate Victorian health tourists. The water was bottled in 1826 when the dukes of Savoie gave their permission, and the product received no less an endorsement than that of the French government by 1878 when the French Ministry of Health validated its powers. Internationalization came in 1906. San Francisco suffered a huge fire, leading to a water shortage. Evian was instrumental in the relief effort. But industrial-scale commercialization came somewhat later. In 1965, a state-of-the-art bottling plant was opened near Evian, and by 1988 annual sales of the water had reached 1 billion liters annually. The company’s branded bottle, designed to represent the mountain peaks of the Alps, was launched in 1995. Today, Evian is available in 120 countries and sells 5 million liters a year. It is owned by Danone, who also own the Volvic bottled water brand. In 2004, Coca-Cola shelved its plans for Dasani bottled mineral water in France and Germany, a product that was regarded by the company as its most important
810
MINNESOTA
debut in France since Diet Coke. The U.S. drink company’s decision followed the recall of the brand in the United Kingdom after a health scare reminiscent of the one suffered by Perrier in 1990 due to benzene contamination. Plans for a relaunch there were dropped. Bill Marshall and Mark Vernon See also: Coca-Cola Company; Cuisine; Wine. Reference LaMoreaux, Philip E., and Judy Tanner. Springs and Bottled Waters of the World: Ancient History, Source, Occurrence, Quality, and Use. New York: Springer, 2001.
MINNESOTA A state situated in the north-central United States, with Saint Paul its capital city and Canada on its northern border. French explorers, fur traders, and missionaries were the first Europeans to enter the area. Places with French names—such as Grand Marais, Le Sueur, and Mille Lacs—are numerous, and there is also evidence of French influence in the architecture of certain older buildings, especially some Catholic churches. Though many Minnesotans today have French and French Canadian ancestry, French organizations and festivals have greatly diminished with increasing assimilation, and Minnesota’s French-language newspapers ceased publication nearly a century ago. Fur trader Pierre Radisson and his brother-in-law, the Sieur des Groseilliers, having befriended the native Sioux, reached the north shore of Lake Superior in 1659. Missionaries, notably the Jesuit Claude Allouez, followed and, if not very
successful in converting Indians, were instrumental in mapping the region. Early French exploration was likely more than part of a search for fur and Catholic converts. Louis XIV and his chief minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, may have briefly dreamed of a huge American empire. In the king’s name, nobleman Daumont St. Lusson claimed the entire midcontinent in 1671, with French aspirations fueled by reports of a great river in the region. In 1673, Louis Joliet, a talented Canadian cartographer and son of a French cartwright, reached the Mississippi River’s upper portion, in what is now central Minnesota. Father Jacques Marquette was long thought to have been among Joliet’s few companions, though some historians today question Marquette’s involvement. Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Luth (after whom the city of Duluth in northern Minnesota was named), extensively explored central Minnesota, in 1680 rescuing Father Louis Hennepin from Sioux captivity. Upon Hennepin’s return to France, he was the alleged author in 1683 of Description de la Louisiane, an account of his adventures and the first book about what became Minnesota. (Today he is thought by many historians to have authored only a portion of the book.) The French were instrumental in initial exploration and mapping of Minnesota, but beyond the ventures of fur traders and the establishment of forts, there was no extensive French settlement of the area during the time of French control. To better secure the area against British dominance and to compensate Spain for losses during the French and Indian War, France gave Spain control of land west of the Mississippi in 1763. The British gained control of the area to the east of the river, only to lose that in
MINNESOTA
811
Louis Hennepin at the Falls of St. Anthony, Minnesota, 1680. Upon Hennepin’s return to France, he was the alleged author in 1683 of Description de la Louisiane, an account of his adventures and the first book about what became Minnesota. (Bettmann/Corbis)
the American Revolution. Napoléon reclaimed land west of the river in 1800 but sold that huge area to the new United States in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. In the nineteenth century, persons from France and especially French Canadians were significant early settlers of the territory that in 1858 became the state of Minnesota. The Métis, offspring of French Canadians and Indians, were crucial in building the territory’s initial overland roads, as they transported furs from Winnipeg south to Saint Paul. When the fur trade finally diminished in the second half of the nineteenth century, many Métis became farmers. In the fur trade’s heyday, French Canadian voyageurs, skillful canoe men carrying beaver pelts and other furs
across the waterways of Minnesota and renowned for their hardiness and songs, established themselves as treasured characters in Minnesota history. The importance of the state’s French origins is well symbolized by the designation of Minnesota on its official seal as L’Etoile du Nord. John Ibson See also: American Revolution; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Catholic Church; Duluth; French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des; Hennepin, Father Louis; Jesuits; Joliet, Louis; Louisiana Purchase; Marquette, Jacques; Métis; Mississippi River; Radisson, Pierre-Esprit. References Blegen, Theodore C. Minnesota: A History of the State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963.
812
MIRANDA, FRANCISCO
DE
Holmquist, June Drenning, ed. They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State’s Ethnic Groups. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1981. Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001.
MIRANDA, FRANCISCO (1750–1816)
DE
Initiator of the struggles for independence in the Spanish colonies of the Americas, born in Caracas, in 1750. Francisco de Miranda is considered the first Creole of international historical importance due to his participation in the French revolutionary army, his many encounters with key figures of his day, and his travels across the Western world. As a soldier in the Spanish army, Miranda had his first military experiences, as captain, with the defense of Melilla (North Africa) in 1775 and at the battle of Pensacola in 1781, which enabled Spain to regain the provinces of Florida, which had been under British control, as well as aiding George Washington’s troops. However, facing problems with the Spanish judicial system, and under accusation from the Inquisition, he was forced to leave the army. He traveled to the United States, to Charleston, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, and met with the main leaders, including Washington. He then left for London from where, in 1785, while awaiting a decision on his case, he decided to travel. His journey took him to Bohemia, Austria, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Constantinople, and Russia—where he met Potemkin and established a friendship with the Czarina Catherine II—then to
Sweden, France, and Switzerland. These travels enabled him to broaden his culture, archives, and romantic conquests. He returned to London in 1789, leaving Paris a few weeks before the storming of the Bastille. In 1790, he learned that the accusations leveled against him would prevent him from continuing his military career in Spain. With less support in Britain, and given his Republican convictions, he left for France in 1792 and remained there for a short but intense period. His friends, including people like Member of Parliament Jacques Pierre de Brissot and, more particularly, the mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, suggested that Miranda should rally the revolutionary troops. He agreed and became field marshal. Miranda fought under the order of Dumouriez in the northern army and started off with a victory at the battle of Valmy in September 1792. At the same time, he started promoting his ideas to help the Spanish colonies of the Americas gain their independence. Some months later, Dumouriez was defeated by the Austrians at Nerwindem in Belgium. Miranda was, once again, accused, but political conflicts lay behind the accusations. He defended himself at his public trial in May 1793 and was acquitted. Nevertheless, he was arrested again several months later, this time by the Committee of Public Safety. Miranda’s supporters were Girondins, and the convention was dominated by Montagnards, such as Robespierre and Danton. It was the period known as the Terror, and Miranda was imprisoned until January 1795, long after the fall of Robespierre. His friends either died or were executed. Miranda became a French citizen and decided to stay in Paris. He became one of
MIRON, GASTON
the first lovers of the Marquise Delphine de Custine, a young widow he met when she visited her husband in prison. Later, she was the lover of such figures as Fouché, Talleyrand, and Chateaubriand. Miranda also met, at a dinner, Napoléon Bonaparte, who commented the following day: “Men of the greatest importance were to be found there, among whom I thought I saw a Don Quixote, except this one was not mad. It was General Miranda. He has the sacred fire in his soul.” Miranda attempted to influence French political debate, but he was always considered a foreigner, and thus, in 1797, he decided to return to England. He married Sarah Andrews, with whom he had two children: Leandro in 1804 and Francisco in 1806. His plans for political action in South America had matured. He sought in the United States the international support that he had not found in France or in Britain. He met with President Thomas Jefferson, but he received no further help. And so he launched, almost singlehandedly, in his ship the Leander, the first independentist expeditions in April and August 1806. The military failure was overwhelming, but he was the first to hoist the yellow, blue, and red flag, which still identifies several countries today. These expeditions were particularly important because of the political division they marked in Caracas society. From 1808, he settled in London and corresponded regularly with the independentist leaders in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, waiting for creole societies to take their destinies into their own hands. The first to succeed entirely was that of Caracas in 1810. A diplomatic delegation, led by Simón Bolívar, left for London to seek support, and it was there that the future Liber-
813
tador met Miranda. At the end of the year, Miranda returned to Venezuela. In 1811, he was elected to Parliament; the military struggle against Spain was only just beginning. In 1812, the congress and the executive handed full powers to Miranda, but the new national army, which was disorganized and lacked experience, was defeated by the royalist Monteverde, and Miranda was forced to surrender. His surrender was not respected, and Miranda was imprisoned and sent to Puerto Rico. In 1814, he was extradited to Spain, where he hoped to negotiate his freedom, but the Crown ignored his request, and he was kept in prison in Cadiz until his death on July 14, 1816. Pablo Aiquel See also: Argentina; Bolívar, Simón; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Brazil; Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de, Vicomte; Florida; French Revolution; Mexico; Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de; Venezuela; Washington, George. References Racine, Karen. Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Sheridan, Philip John. Francisco de Miranda: Forerunner of Spanish-American Independence. San Antonio: Naylor, 1960.
MIRON, GASTON (1928–1996) Québécois poet and publisher, born in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. Miron is sometimes labeled as Quebec’s national poet of the late twentieth century because he described in topical words and poetic images the difficult condition of being Québécois in a postcolonial society dominated by foreign power and anglophone culture.
814
MISÉRABLES, LES
After spending his childhood in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, Miron worked various jobs in his youth and studied publishing in Paris while he was just twenty. He worked for several publishers and as a bookseller. In 1953, Miron cofounded (with five friends, including Gilles Carle) Les Editions L’Hexagone, a Montreal publishing house that specializes in poetry. Miron returned to France from September 1959 until February 1961 to study graphic arts at the Ecole Etienne in Paris. While in France, by the late 1950s, Miron was influenced by the writings of Albert Memmi, who wrote Portrait du colonisé/The Colonizer and the Colonized, a critique of colonialism and decolonization, and by the Martinican essayist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), who wrote Les Damnés de la terre/The Wretched of the Earth in 1961. In 1970, Miron published his most important book, L’Homme rapaillé, at the Presses de l’Université de Montréal, after winning the Prix de la revue Etudes Françaises. This collection of poems had earlier been published in journals such as Amérique française, Parti pris, Maintenant, Liberté, Estuaire, and Possibles, as well as in newspapers such as Le Devoir. L’Homme rapaillé was reissued in various versions in Quebec and in France, including an updated version for French publisher François Maspero (1981). This new version won for Miron the Prix Apollinaire (France), awarded by the Académie des Beaux-arts française in Paris. After the first election victory of the Parti Québécois in November 1976, Miron published with the Collectif Change a thematic issue on Quebec in the French poetic journal Change. When a new version of his book L’Homme rapaillé was first published
in France, Miron was Bernard Pivot’s guest on the famous French television program Apostrophes in May 1981. In 1991, Miron created a multimedia show, La Marche à l’amour/March to Love, mixing poetry and avant-garde music onstage. It was presented in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, and Paris in 1994 and was taped and filmed (Gagné and Gagné, 1996). Among many distinctions, Miron won the Prix Duvernay (1977), given by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste (Montreal), the Prix du Québec Athanase David, the Médaille de l’Académie des lettres du Québec, the Insignes de l’Ordre des Francophones d’Amérique, and the Insignes de Commandeur des arts et des lettres de la République française. Miron received a state funeral in 1996. There is now an annual Prix Gaston Miron for graduate studies in Quebec literature. Gaston Miron remains the only poet from Quebec to be part of the prestigious series on poetry by the French publisher Gallimard (1999). Yves Laberge See also: Fanon, Frantz; Literary Relations; Quebec. References Horic, Alain. Mon Parcours d’éditeur avec Gaston Miron. Montreal: L’Hexagone, 2004. Miron, Gaston, ed. Souverain Québec, Change. Nos. 30–31. Paris: Seghers, Laffont, 1977.
MISÉRABLES, LES Social, political, religious epic novel by Victor-Marie Hugo, set in nineteenthcentury Paris and embracing important historical events such as Waterloo (tome II, book I) and the 1832 Paris Insurrection
MISÉRABLES, LES
815
Movie still from Les Misérables (1934). French citizens rallied around a flag pole, with a young child atop it. They reach to the sky in gestures of victory and celebration. (John Springer Collection/Corbis)
(tomes IV and V) and comprising five tomes in all. While it received a sound thrashing from some critics, the novel was widely acclaimed, nevertheless, by the public not only in Europe but in America, where booksellers were “reordering indefinite numbers of copies” to keep up with public demand (letter from Hugo to his wife, Adèle, August 1, 1862). America was in full-blown, bloody civil war (1861–1865), the scale of which had not been seen since Napoléon’s French era (1799–1815). Hugo’s graphically powerful imagery of the carnage of Waterloo—mountains of dead bodies, rivers of blood, millions of men “cut down, torn to pieces, throats slit,
gunned down, set on fire”—must have seemed to America a vivid journalistic report of its own battlefields where men, regardless of color, were dying in the name of freedom and equality, concepts incompatible with slavery, “the ulcer,” in Hugo’s words, “on the face of the young Republic of America.” Freed and escaped slaves fought for the Union army, while others gained their freedom, in 1865, by fighting for the Confederates governed by Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), a supporter of slavery. Having emancipated all slaves (Thirteenth Amendment, January 1865), Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, the day Hugo received the president’s letter and documents on the Civil War. If the intent
816
MISSISSIPPI
of Hugo’s compelling “Leviathan”—judged antisociety and extremist by some, including Alphonse de Lamartine—was to “condemn slavery, drive out misery, underscore ignorance and affliction,” a radical, melodramatic, and vast literary podium was required to convey the Hugolian idéal infini of a superior society that had “fraternity as its base and progress its goal” (Hugo’s reply to Lamartine, June 24, 1862). The monumental scale of this literary fresco, depicting in its various tableaux vivants the odyssey of the hero, Jean Valjean, with its many superhuman trials toward final redemption, has a potent public appeal that lends itself to the popular medium of the cinema. In France, the productions of A. Capellani (1913), H. Fescourt (1925), and R. Bernard (1933) are notably faithful adaptations. Of the three Hollywood productions—by Frank Lloyd (1889– 1960) in 1919, Richard Boleslawski (1889– 1937) in 1934, and Lewis Milestone (1895–1980) in 1952—Boleslawski’s is the most memorable thanks to sterling performances by Fredrich March and Charles Laughton as Jean Valjean and Javert, respectively. March, handsome and well proportioned, projecting the right amount of angst and the formidable strength and bravery expected of Hugo’s hero, successfully communicates Hugolian epic virtues as he struggles selflessly throughout and especially in the final stage of his journey through the dark, fetid sewers of Paris—a metaphor for society— carrying the injured Marius to safety. Laughton, maladroit in both actions and rhetoric, conveys with aplomb the odious, pathologically righteous nature of the character of Javert, unable to breathe compassion into prescriptive justice. The Paris sewers, the barricades, the heartrending scene between Cosette and Valjean, representing
in turn Hugo’s themes of Hell on Earth, heroism in the face of defeat, and the enslavement of children, are some of this production’s more remarkable sequences. In 1980, the musical version of Les Misérables (by Alain Boubil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer) opened at the Palais des Sports (Paris). Washington saw its debut at the Opera House in the Kennedy Center on December 27, 1986, followed by a Broadway debut on March 12, 1987, where it ran for sixteen years, winning seven Tony Awards (1987) and ranking it the third longest running musical in the history of Broadway. Further musical productions in Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Toronto, not to mention forty-two cities covered in the United States during the Bus and Truck Tour, begun in 1988, are proof that Hugo’s Les Misérables succeeded, as was Hugo’s intention, to reach all people everywhere. Janette Mcleman-Carnie See also: American Civil War; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Cinema, 1895–1945; Hugo, Victor-Marie; Slavery. References Behr, Edward. Les Misérables: History in the Making. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989. Brombert, Victor. “Les Misérables: Salvation from Below.” Victor Hugo. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Rosa, Guy. Hugo: Les Misérables. Paris: Klincksieck, 1995.
MISSISSIPPI Bordered on its west by the Mississippi River, what is now the state of Mississippi was coveted by the French as a gateway to the interior of North America. The Mississippi River, from preColumbian times to the present, has been a major thoroughfare in North America. At
MISSISSIPPI RIVER
the time of the European arrival, Mississippi was home to Native Americans such as the Natchez, Houmas, Biloxis, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. Except for brief contact with Hernando de Soto’s expedition, the Native Americans there did not develop close relations with Europeans until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, when Englishmen began moving west from the Carolinas. The French began extensive exploration of the Gulf of Mexico, including the southern border of Mississippi, where they established a fort at Biloxi in 1699. In the eighteenth century, Mississippi saw warfare between the French-allied Indians and the Chickasaws. Having never established firm control over the area, the French surrendered Mississippi at the end of the French and Indian War. Prior to European contact, between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries, the Mississippi valley saw the emergence of what archaeologists call the Mississippian culture. Characteristics of the Mississippians included the construction of extensive earthen mounds, a hierarchical social structure, and an expansive trading network. Although the Mississippian settlements declined after 1300, many of the traits continued among the Natchez and other nations through the time of European contact. In 1682, French explorer René-Robert de La Salle, arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi. Afterward, the French struggled to maintain control over the strategically important territory surrounding it, including the Gulf coast of Mississippi. Although controlling the river was the primary goal of French posts in the area, the French also traded for deerskins with the surrounding Native Americans. When the French North American empire was crumbling in the 1750s, they
817
sought an ally in Spain, who aided them in the latter part of the French and Indian War. Prior to the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762, which ceded the area west of the Mississippi River to Spain. Mississippi, and the rest of the coastal region east of the river, became part of British West Florida in 1763. During the American Revolution, the Spanish helped defeat the British and claimed West Florida, which included southern Mississippi. The larger northern portion of Mississippi went to the United States, which established a territorial government in 1798 and encouraged settlement of the area. Spain, however, claimed West Florida through the time of Mississippi’s admission to the Union in 1817. In the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, Spain gave up Florida and the territory of West Florida, which had already been overrun by Americans. Thomas J. Lappas See also: American Revolution; Florida; French and Indian War; Fur Trade; La Salle, RenéRobert Cavelier de, Sieur; Mississippi River; Treaty of Paris. References Eccles, W. J. The French in North America, 1500–1783. Rev. ed. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. Usner, Daniel H. Jr. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER The confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers creates the longest waterway in North America, estimated at 3,500 miles. Rich in French American history, the Mississippi River continues today as a commercial “strong brown god,” so named by Saint
818
MISSISSIPPI RIVER
Louis–born poet T. S. Eliot. It carries more than 100 million tons of goods annually. From 1534 to 1803, the French dominated the interior of the New World along the inland water routes. Guided by Native Americans, they had traveled down the Saint Lawrence River and portaged to the Great Lakes, from which, some of them through tributaries near “Checagu” (Chicago) and others over the lands of today’s Wisconsin, they accessed the Mississippi River. They descended to Arkansas by 1667 and to the Gulf of Mexico by 1682. The first to come were missionaries and explorers. They were followed by fur traders, lead miners, and farmers. From New France (Canada) came Père Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet in 1666 and Louis Bolduc in 1765. Up the river from the Gulf came the brothers d’Iberville and Bienville in 1700 and Auguste Chouteau and Pierre Laclède in 1764. The states touching the Mississippi River form three groups: the upper Mississippi valley states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa; the middle Mississippi valley states of Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee; and the lower Mississippi valley (Delta) states of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Along its banks remain many French settlements: Dubuque (1780), Cahokia (1699), Saint Louis (1763), Old Mines (1720), New Orleans (1719), the Cajun Country (1777), and Sainte Genevieve (1740), the latter preserving more than thirty French colonial vertical log houses, the largest collection in North America. The Mississippi—receiving the waters of the Illinois, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Red River, and others—became a grand thoroughfare. From the ports of Philadelphia (via the Ohio River) and New Or-
leans, it brought goods and styles from Paris to the French interior. In 1720, Africans rowed themselves upriver to slave on Jesuit Kaskaskia lands. It carried downriver the products from French colonial farms, French lead mines just west of Sainte Genevieve, and Saint Louis commercial companies. The products ranged from lead cannonballs, furs, and Indian wares to wheat, pecans, corn, pumpkins, and fruit. Flowing westward, the Missouri River dumps silt into the Mississippi from the states of Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana, occasioning the nickname “The Muddy Mississippi.” The Missouri became the fur traders’ highway, linking Saint Louis with western Indian fur trappers. When Lewis and Clark ascended the Missouri to explore the territory of the Louisiana Purchase (1804), they contracted with French voyagers who knew the lands and Indians along the banks. When Jean Jacques Audubon researched for his Birds of North America (1843), he did the same. Donna Card Charron See also: Audubon, John James; Bienville, JeanBaptiste, sieur de; Cajuns; Fur Trade; Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’; Illinois Country; Iowa; Jesuits; Joliet, Louis; Kentucky; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Marquette, Jacques; Mississippi; Missouri; New France; New Orleans; Ohio; Saint Louis; Wisconsin. References Balesi, Charles J. The Time of the French in the Heart of North America: 1673–1888. Chicago: Alliance Française, 1992. Ekberg, Carl J. French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Foley, William E. The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1983.
MITTERRAND, FRANÇOIS
MISSOURI Lying west of the Mississippi River, the present-day state of Missouri was part of the territory acquired by the United States from the French in the Louisiana Purchase. The state encompasses the eastern terminus of the Missouri River, which empties into the Mississippi at Saint Louis, a center of trade before European arrival. Missouri was the starting point for the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who traveled westward to explore the newly purchased lands between 1803 and 1806. The state of Missouri was carved out of the Louisiana Purchase and was admitted to the Union in 1821. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Missouri was home to several Indian nations including the Missouris and the Osages. These nations traded with the French, Spanish, and British, along with Indians from the plains, for firearms, horses, buffalo hides, and other goods. While the native peoples had extensive contact with whites, the territory was not a major center of white settlement until the nineteenth century. Part of Louisiana, Missouri was handed over from the French to the Spanish at the end of the French and Indian War. Through the American Revolution, Louisiana remained Spanish territory. However, in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson heard rumors that Spain was attempting to cede New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana to the French. Jefferson, fearing Napoléon’s imperial plans, preferred the Spanish to the French on the western border of the United States. In a controversial diplomatic move, Jefferson encouraged his American agents in France to attempt to purchase the port of New Orleans. Instead, the French offered the Americans all of Louisiana for a price of $15 million. On May 2, 1803, the United States
819
purchased Louisiana, acquiring all of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and the surrounding territories, including what is now the state of Missouri. In 1821, Missouri was admitted to the Union, but only after a great controversy regarding slavery. Politicians from southern states, desiring a balance between the number of slave and Free states, agreed to support the admission of Maine as a Free State only if Missouri was allowed to enter as a slave state. The agreement, which was known as the Missouri Compromise, also formed a line extending westward from Missouri’s southern boundary. South of this line, known as the 36°30" line, slavery was to be legal. North of it, residents of any new territories would not be allowed to own slaves. Although slavery was legal in Missouri through the Civil War, the state never seceded from the Union. Thomas J. Lappas See also: American Civil War; American Revolution; French and Indian War; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Maine; Mississippi; Mississippi River; New Orleans; Saint Louis; Slavery. References Fehrenbacher, Don Edward. The South and Three Sectional Crises. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Kennedy, Roger G. Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kukla, Jon. A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. New York: Knopf, 2003.
MITTERRAND, FRANÇOIS (1916–1996) President of France 1981–1995. François Mitterrand was born into the comfortably well-off provincial middle
820
MITTERRAND, FRANÇOIS
class in the cognac-producing region of Jarnac, but he went to Paris to study law and politics. He was wounded (Croix de guerre) and then taken captive in the retreat from Verdun in May 1940, only to be interned in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Thuringia. Mitterrand, in December 1940, made his way to the nonoccupied zone of France run by Vichy. Mitterrand managed to get a post as a minor official in the Vichy POW commission and was an admirer of the head of state Marshal Pétain (he was awarded the exclusive francisque medal). By late 1943, Mitterrand was leading an active resistance movement based on the POW network that he had set up, and he was in clandestinity after the summer that year. In 1944, he was briefly minister for prisoners of war in the provisional government, and in the Nièvre he ran as an anti-Communist right-winger. A minister in eleven governments until the Fourth Republic collapsed in 1958, Mitterrand opposed de Gaulle’s new regime and ran against him at the presidential election of 1965. Joining and leading the Parti Socialiste in 1971 at the Congrès d’Epinay, he forged a common electoral program with the Communists, but divisions within this alliance helped keep him out of power at parliamentary elections in 1978. By the end of that decade, the Socialists had overtaken the Communists in electoral terms and were reconciled to the institutions of the Fifth Republic. However, in 1981 the Right was also badly divided, and Mitterrand ran an efficient and united campaign around a new platform, defeating the incumbent president Giscard. Dissolution and a Socialist landslide in the general elections gave them
an absolute majority. A Socialist government was formed under Premier Mauroy, and the Communists were given four minor ministries at a crucial point in the cold war. Vice President Bush was dispatched to Paris and was apparently satisfied that Mitterrand was no Kerensky. Mitterrand had, however, come to power on a radical agenda promising to dispose of unemployment, but that proved intractable in the face of a world economic downturn, and the methods of demand expansion only served to draw in imports and to worsen the balance of payments. On the other hand, Mitterrand proved true to his Atlanticist background, and in foreign policy the Socialists proved to be strong supporters of the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles (against many on the European Left) in NATO’s response to the new Soviet threats from their SS-20 missiles. There were rhetorical declarations of support for the Third World and, despite American objections, arms sales to Nicaragua, but France’s role was more supportive of NATO and the West than the previous conservative presidents. Mitterrand may have moved closer to the United States and to NATO than previous Fifth Republic incumbents, but he maintained a prudent Gaullist façade to his foreign policy that enabled him to evade any challenges from the Right. After the failure of the “alternative” economic strategy in 1983, Europe became the principal focus of the presidency. In 1984, a new government headed by Laurent Fabius was nominated. This started the “modernization” of French industry and abandoned the priority given to employment, but it also started the climb back to popularity. But in the 1986 general
MITTERRAND, FRANÇOIS
elections, the conservative Right won a narrow victory, and Jacques Chirac became the new prime minister. Mitterrand became the first president to undergo “cohabitation” with a government of the opposite camp. Mitterrand was able to defeat his prime minister in the 1988 presidential runoffs by 54 percent to 46 percent, but the Socialist Party, following a failure to bring centrists into the coalition, was unable to win an absolute majority in the general elections that followed. Mitterrand’s attitude toward the first Gulf War was similar to the stance adopted by other French presidents: at first a reluctance to go along, then an ambiguous position, followed by a rallying at the eleventh hour. French diplomacy tried to maintain French distinctiveness in the region and to get Saddam Hussein to commit to withdrawing from Kuwait, but when this proved impossible (not before the dictator had tried to play on France’s differences from its partners), the president supported the United Nations. The Gulf War “Desert Storm” was supported with 10,000 troops and 100 aircraft, although it was conducted by the Elysée, and French independence was jealously preserved in what was an American operation. Edith Cresson, Rocard’s replacement after the Gulf War, proved ill suited to the role of prime minister, and the government’s ratings plummeted. Mitterrand, meanwhile, was preoccupied with the ending of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the reunification of Germany. He was not a major force in these events (determined in Washington, Moscow, and Bonn) and at times misjudged the position, but he did use the changed circumstances to advance European integra-
821
tion. Cresson was replaced after the disastrous local elections of March 1992 by the former finance minister, Pierre Bérégovoy. A narrow victory for the Maastricht Treaty in Mitterrand’s unnecessary referendum prevented a humiliation, but the president’s authority had been dissipated in the process. Mitterrand was slow to appreciate the implications of Serbian aggression in Yugoslavia but was more supportive of American demands for action in Bosnia than were many other states, even agreeing the preemptive dispatch of peacekeepers to Croatia and Bosnia in 1991–1992. In September 1992, Mitterrand underwent an operation for prostate cancer and was probably incapable of government after then. In 1993, the conservative Right returned in a landslide, and Prime Minister Edouard Balladur took full powers, relieving the Elysée of any need for regular intervention in governmental affairs. Mitterrand left office in 1995 a respected figure and a revered elder statesman, dying a year later at the beginning of 1996 after his long battle with cancer. David Bell See also: Atlanticism; Chirac, Jacques; Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Gaulle, General Charles de; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Iraq War; NATO; Republicanism; World War II. References Cole, Alistair. Mitterrand. London: Routledge, 1992. Friend, Julius W. The Long Presidency. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997. Maclean, Mairi. The Mitterrand Years: Legacy and Evaluation. London: Macmillan, 1998. Northcutt, Wayne. Mitterrand: A Political Biography. New York: Holmes, 1992. Tiersky, Ronald. François Mitterrand: A Very French President. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
822
MOBILE
MOBILE A city in Alabama, located on the Gulf of Mexico in North America. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, considered by some to be New France’s greatest naval hero, was ordered in the late seventeenth century to fortify the Louisiana area for France, which controlled it. After a decision by the French court in the summer of 1701 to order the colonization of the area to strengthen France’s hold, d’Iberville ordered his younger brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, to transfer supplies and men from Fort Maurepas in Biloxi Bay to Dauphin Island in Mobile Bay. In January 1702, Bienville and his men voyaged thirty-eight miles up the Mobile River, where they constructed Fort Louis de la Mobile on d’Iberville’s orders. Lack of supplies, yellow fever, and internal political intrigues threatened the early stability of the fort. In 1711, due to flooding, the settlement was moved downriver to the present location of Mobile, which became the capital of French Louisiana until 1718. The town’s name was a French adaptation of that of the local Indian tribe, Maubilian, meaning “canoe paddler.” In 1712, the French government leased the Gulf coast area to Antoine Crozat, a French financier, who returned the colony to France in 1717 due to lack of profit. The colony was then leased to Scottish financier John Law, who returned it to France in 1731 due to numerous difficulties. France’s rule over the area ended in 1763, with the Treaty of Paris at the end of the French and Indian War granting the land to Britain. During the Revolutionary War in Britain’s North American colonies, Mobile and the surrounding areas became safe
havens for Loyalists, who relocated there to take advantage of the free land grants being offered by the British government. However, British rule in Mobile ended in 1780, when the Spanish took control after mild fighting. While the official language gradually changed from French to Spanish, the settlement’s laws and culture remained French. In 1802, Spain returned the colony to France, but with the Louisiana Purchase, Mobile came under the control of the United States, although its status was not fully clarified until the United States purchased Florida from Spain in 1819. On April 12, 1865, Mobile’s mayor surrendered Mobile to Union troops approaching the city by land. In 1866, Joe Cain, dressed as “Chief Slackabamorinico,” and six friends, dressed as Chickasaws, drove a wagon through the city’s streets, openly defying the Union troops. Today, this is hailed as the beginning of modern Mobile’s Mardi Gras. Mystic societies formed in the years following, each putting on its own parade in the period before Lent. This tradition has continued, growing each year. Amber Wingfield See also: American Civil War; Bienville, JeanBaptiste, sieur de; Crozat, Antoine; Louisiana Purchase; Treaty of Paris; World War I; World War II. References Schmittroth, Linda, ed. Cities of the United States: Volume One, the South. Farmington Hills: Gall Group, 2001. Sledge, John. Cities of Silence: A Guide to Mobile’s Historic Cemeteries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Thomason, Michael V. R., ed. Mobile: The New History of Alabama’s First City. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001.
MODERNIZATION
MODERNIZATION Modernization is a concept that has been used to understand social and economic change on both sides of the French Atlantic. The process of modernization is seen to encompass such trends as urbanization, secularization, the development of mass production and consumption, the growth of bureaucracy, and the emergence of a large managerial middle class. France and Quebec underwent particularly rapid changes of this kind in the second half of the twentieth century. This has often been seen as evidence of their “late modernization” in comparison with Britain, the United States, and Anglo-Canada. This points to one of the criticisms that have been made of modernization theory: that it posits a single or normative model of social and economic development, placing all those who do not conform to such a model in a position of temporal lag. The social and economic processes associated with modernization developed unevenly and over a long period. France was among the pioneers of industrialization in the nineteenth century, but both peasant agriculture and small business remained important sectors in the French economy well into the twentieth century. The advent of the Third Republic (1870) had brought about the establishment of mass democracy and mass secular education, processes that, in the words of Eugen Weber, helped to transform “peasants into Frenchmen.” In his book by that title, Weber provided one of the classic examples of modernization theory applied to French history, emphasizing the link between urbanization, schooling, and nation building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With reference to the period since 1914,
823
the debate about French modernization— or lack thereof—has been more concerned with the question of economic growth and the development of mass production and consumption. If the interwar years were long regarded as a period of relative backwardness in this respect, recent work has emphasized the interwar roots of the new economy that would emerge after World War II. Between 1945 and 1975, France was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, its average gross domestic product growth of 6.8 percent being exceeded only by those of West Germany and Japan. Hence the label “les trente glorieuses,” coined for this period by one of the architects and ideologues of the new social and economic model, Jean Fourastié. French postwar economic growth was stimulated by a number of more or less simultaneous developments. First, a vital stimulus was provided by the money and managerial methods exported from the United States to France under the Marshall Plan (1947–1952) and by the continuing expansion of American firms and capital into France thereafter. World War II had consolidated the dominant position of the United States in the Atlantic economy, increasing Europe’s dependency on American money and military might. As Europe divided into blocs during the cold war, bolstering capitalism in Western countries such as France became an important U.S. policy objective. The French state was also instrumental in fostering economic growth, directing it from above through planning agencies that promoted strategic investment in infrastructure and technology. Population growth, encouraged by the state through family allowances and the recruitment of immigrant workers,
824
MODERNIZATION
contributed further to economic expansion in this period. The population grew from just under 40 million at the liberation to 50 million by 1969, providing an expanding pool of consumers and producers, particularly in the 1960s, when immigration was at its height and the initial wave of postwar babies reached adulthood. At the same time, the population was shifting rapidly from the countryside to the towns, so that by 1968 more than 66 percent of people lived in urban areas, compared to only 46 percent in 1946. The new economy implied changes in class structure, gender identities, and social habits. Technological advances and the implementation of new forms of managerial intervention created demand for increasing numbers of technicians, engineers, and management professionals in French industry. This, combined with the growth of the tertiary sector and the extended state bureaucracy required to support new forms of economic intervention and social welfare, produced a type of middle class defined less by inherited status and more by technical competence—or at least by the ability to turn the former into the latter. Kristin Ross has noted how the figure of the jeune cadre—a young male engineer or manager, usually an Americanophile—serves in the cultural production of this period as both a new model of masculinity and an embodiment of the values of technological dynamism that underpinned capitalist modernization. The new middle class also provided a vital market for consumer goods, and the home was an important space of consumption in this context. Domestic appliance sales, for example, rose steeply, and the new domestic technologies were heavily promoted in exhibitions, magazines, and advertising. Levels of domestic
comfort in France were often compared unfavorably with those in the United States. Women were the primary targets of these efforts to promote a new domestic ideal in which middle-class feminine domesticity became associated with the consumption of goods (from vacuum cleaners to soap powder) that would ensure an efficient and ultrahygienic home. The growth of leisure travel was another manifestation changing consumer practices. In 1958, 31 percent of French people took vacations; by 1973, the figure was 62 percent. As these figures imply, the growth of consumer spending also meant that certain sorts of leisure pursuits and domestic comforts were becoming available by the 1960s to working-class households. This was made possible not just by mass production, which made goods cheaper, but by substantial family allowances, gradually increasing wages, and an increase in the availability and uptake of credit. Thus, modernization has been seen as a process that reduces class difference and class conflict through the creation of a consumer society. On the other side of the French Atlantic, the concept of modernization has been most commonly associated with the changes brought about in Quebec since the 1950s and 1960s. Pre-1960s Quebec, and particularly its francophone population, have sometimes been portrayed as rural, Catholic, and backward. This stereotype has its roots in the historical composition of the French population that had remained in what is now Quebec when the French colonial period ended in 1760—a population largely composed of farming communities and clergy. To the extent that an industrial bourgeoisie developed, it was predominantly anglophone. Yet, while those of French origin continued to be over-
MODERNIZATION
represented in agriculture even in the twentieth century, more than half of the Frenchorigin population already lived in urban areas by 1941. Similarly, while the church continued to control most of the education and welfare systems after World War II, this authority was increasingly being disputed. One of the earliest postwar assaults on the domination of the Catholic Church in Quebec life came when the artist PaulEmile Borduas published Le Refus global in 1948. Between 1951 and 1971, the percentage of the total population of Quebec living on farms dwindled from 19.5 to 5.6. In the same period, the proportion of the French-origin population living in urban areas rose from 63 percent to 78 percent. The fastest-growing sector in the Quebec economy was the tertiary sector, which provided a major source of jobs for the growing French Canadian urban population. From the 1950s, the new urban population fueled demand for health, education, and welfare services, acting as a stimulus for the creation of still more opportunities for middle-class employment in these areas. Thus, between 1946 and 1966, the percentage of the labor force employed in the service sector rose from 37.2 to 59.7. The proportion of French-speaking to English-speaking workers in clerical, sales, and professional work also increased significantly. A new francophone middle class was emerging. Hubert Guindon has argued that urbanization and the development of a significant francophone middle class were closely linked to the secularization of social institutions in this period. The rising demand for social services put the existing Catholic infrastructure under pressure. The competence of church organizations was
825
questioned, notably by professionals who invoked specialist and technical notions of competence in social matters. The tensions between these competing value systems were evident in the 1950s, but the advent of Jean Lesage’s Liberal government in 1960 is generally seen as marking the consolidation of the secular, technocratic outlook into a state-led modernization project. This was the period of what became known as La Révolution Tranquille (The Quiet Revolution). The Lesage government sought, for example, to promote industrial development through economic planning, nationalization of the hydro industry, and the creation of a Conseil d’orientation économique under economics professor René Tremblay. It also reformed the civil service, recruiting more professionally qualified staff and cementing the ascendancy of a set of criteria for professional and social advancement that were autonomous from the church. This in turn helped to expand the ranks and reinforce the social status of the francophone middle class. In Quebec, modernization and French Canadian nationalism have been closely linked. The social and political evolution described above altered the balance of power between the francophone and anglophone communities. Both the Canadian economic elite and the federal bureaucracy were predominantly English speaking. By the 1960s, well-educated urban French-speaking Canadians were in a position to challenge such inequities, not least via the Lesage government, which sought to obtain special status for Quebec within the Canadian Confederation. In response to mounting demand, the Ottawa government endorsed the principle of bilingualism, making this a requirement for graduate
826
MODERNIZATION
entry to the federal public service. The conservative Union Nationale government that succeeded the Liberals in 1966 and the creation of the separatist Parti Québécois (1968) put the question of Quebec’s constitutional status on the agenda, where it remained throughout the 1970s. The rapid changes that were experienced in France and Quebec in the postwar period provoked resistance, or at least ambivalence, in a number of quarters. In Quebec, the success of the Créditiste movement in the early 1960s gave expression to the discontents of the members of the rural lower classes, who felt an increasing gulf between their interests and way of life, and those of the dominant urban middle class. In France in the mid-1950s, a largely rural and provincial protest movement led by shopkeeper Pierre Poujade had provided an outlet for resistance among farmers and small businesspeople to big business, Americanism, and state bureaucracy. These were right-wing movements, but in France, in particular, where Communism was strong and left-wing intellectuals had an important voice, there was also a critique from the Left. These critics denounced American imperialism and the alienating effects of bureaucratization and consumerism. Anti-Americanism in this period was in part an expression of anxieties provoked by the rapid social and economic changes that were under way. The use of the label modernization to refer to these changes originates in the period in question. Modernization theory was particularly influential among social scientists in the 1960s, notably among American-based scholars working on France. Social scientists, who were often involved in government planning and advisory bodies, were both agents and inter-
preters of the changes that were under way in France and Quebec. Not surprisingly then, modernization narratives tended to naturalize such changes as being in line with the progressive movement of history. A number of revisions and criticisms have been made of such narratives. The idea of backwardness or temporal lag has been challenged. More emphasis is now placed on the prewar roots of processes of change that became more visible in the postwar period. At the same time, the cultural assumptions that underpin the narratives of France and Quebec “becoming modern” have been subject to critique. Hubert Guindon has taken issue with culturalist accounts of Quebec’s social and economic development that posit French Catholic culture as the explanation for the province’s alleged backwardness. In relation to France, Kristin Ross has drawn on contemporary theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes to consider how modernization was constructed as a myth in everyday life in the 1950s and 1960s. Ross argues that the transformation of postwar France must be understood not only in terms of the Franco-American relationship but also in terms of France’s relationship with its colonies and former colonies. This operates in her analysis as a means of exposing the ideological function of narratives of backwardness and modernization. Despite these challenges, the term modernization continues to be used as shorthand for a complex web of social, economic, and cultural changes. Jackie Clarke See also: Anti-Americanism; Barthes, Roland; Borduas, Paul-Emile; Catholic Church; Liberalism; Marshall Plan, The; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Theory; Tourism; World War II.
MOLIÈRE References Borduas, Paul-Emile. Le Refus global. Montreal: L’Hexagone, 1991. Bothwell, Robert, Ian Drummond, and John English. Canada since 1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Fourastié, Jean. Les Trente Glorieuses ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975. Paris: Fayard, 1979. Guindon, Hubert. Quebec Society: Tradition, Modernity and Nationhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Kuisel, Richard. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France. London: Chatto and Windus, 1979.
MOLIÈRE (JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN) (1622–1673) Born in Paris in 1622, Molière became one of the greatest European dramatists, and his influence has not diminished more than three centuries after his death in 1673. His fortunes in North America are, however, curiously uneven. In universities and colleges, his plays enjoy canonical status, attracting almost as many pages as Shakespeare in undergraduate anthologies. Appreciation of his work in the professional theater has been varied. On the anglophone stage, the number of productions has not been commensurate with his literary prominence. In Quebec, however, Molière has been a key figure in the history of the development and renewal of its theater. In the United States, the French dramatist, seemingly ignored in the colonial period and after independence, came to prominence when Jacques Copeau
827
moved his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier (with his illustrious company including Charles Dullin and Louis Jouvet) to New York during World War I. With the Franco-Atlantic bond strengthened following the American decision to enter the war after the Lusitania incident, the climate was favorable to the French company. Copeau’s theatricalist technique, demonstrated in his productions of four Molière farces and two of his more sophisticated plays, was much admired. However, despite frequent visits from French companies (particularly from the Comédie Française), American directors were slow to engage with Molière’s Gallic wit. With the effective decentralization of theater in the United States after World War II and the availability of performable translations in English (notably by Richard Wilbur), Molière has been more frequently included in the American theater repertory. The first recorded attempt to put Molière on the New French stage was an amateur production of Tartuffe at the Château Saint-Louis in 1694 and sponsored by Governor Frontenac. The production provoked the kind of hostility that had led to the banning of the first two versions of Molière’s play in Paris in 1664 and 1667. The Bishop of Quebec, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier, denounced Tartuffe as “sacrilegious and impious” and threatened to excommunicate all who took part or even attended. He offered the financially extravagant governor 100 pistoles to call off the production and had Mareuil, who had been cast in the title role, imprisoned and deported to France. Molière became, ironically, the cause of the effective disruption of drama in the province (with only four theatrical activities being recorded between 1694 and 1759). With Quebec under
828
MOLIÈRE
Louis XIV and Molière dining at court, ca. 1670. (Library of Congress)
British control, Molière proved a bridge between the new colonial and the elite French population and was the most frequently performed dramatist in French and in English in Montreal and Quebec from 1789 until 1840. Residual misgivings on the part of the church and the increased output from Quebec dramatists reduced his popularity until 1937, when he became, with much wider appeal, a major influence in the rebirth of French Canadian drama. Until the 1960s, the North American Molière was generally perceived as a classical author whose every word was sacrosanct. While Molière has not received the iconoclastic treatment given by many post-1968 French directors, the myth of a reassuringly reactionary author is being exploded by Atlantic directors, not least, for example, in Jean-Louis Roux’s anarchic critique of Quebec society in 1969 (Le Misanthrope, Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Montreal); or Robert Falls’s relocation of the play in 1989 (with the La Jolla Play-
house, California, and the Goodman Theatre, Chicago) to the Hollywood hills, with Alceste as a failed screenwriter and Celimene as a starlet; or the recent performing of Tartuffe in Los Angeles with an all-black cast. Noël Peacock See also: Jouvet, Louis; Language; New France; Quebec; Theater; World War I; World War II. References Carmody, Jim. “Molière in America.” Œuvres et critiques 22, no. 2 (1997): 73–82. Fitzpatrick, Marjorie A. “Molière and the Early Years of French-Canadian Theater.” Molière and the Commonwealth of Letters: Patrimony and Posterity. Ed. Roger Johnson Jr. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1975: 385–399. Keating, L. Clark. “Molière in New York.” Molière and the Commonwealth of Letters: Patrimony and Posterity. Ed. Roger Johnson Jr. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1975: 400–409. Lafon, Dominique. “Molière au Théâtre du Nouveau Monde: du bon usage des classiques.” L’Annuaire théâtral 22 (1997): 23–41.
MONS, PIERRE DUGUA
MONS, PIERRE DUGUA (1560–1628)
DE
Protestant French trader and explorer born in Royan, Charente-Maritime, Pierre Dugua de Mons played, as the founder of Acadia, a determinant role in the establishment of New France, financing the establishments of Sainte Croix, Port Royal, and later Quebec from 1604 to 1611. Following his first voyage to North America in 1600, Mons put before Henri IV his proposal for the Seven Articles for the Discovery and the Settlement of the Coasts and Lands of Acadie in the autumn of 1603. The French king accepted the proposal, which conferred upon Mons the royal powers of political, judicial, and administrative nature necessary for the establishment of an overseas colony from the fortieth to forty-sixth degree of latitude of North America during a period of ten years. In return, Mons agreed to assume all costs involved as lieutenant general representing the king of France in Acadia and in Quebec. Among those recruited by Mons to accompany him were sixty colonizers with various specializations. Samuel de Champlain also joined the expedition as an unpaid volunteer responsible for drawing maps. On April 9, 1604, Mons embarked from the French port of Honfleur with two ships, the Good Renown and the Gift of God. He brought with him one year’s provisions plus the materials necessary to construct a permanent habitation upon arrival. An initial settlement was erected at the site of Sainte Croix Island in the summer of 1604, but the severe winter climate and the ravages of scurvy forced the colony to dismantle in the spring of 1605 and relocate to the site of Port Royal. Mons returned to France in September 1605 in response to reports that his com-
DE
829
pany was in financial distress. As a result of strong lobbying on the part of other merchants, Mons lost his monopoly in July 1607. All colonists were then forced to return to France, entrusting the care of the habitation to the Micmac chief Membertou. Mons managed however to reestablish his monopoly for a period of one year. He then armed two ships, also named the Good Renown and the Gift of God, which carried Champlain and some thirty colonists to Quebec via Tadoussac in April 1608. Although Mons did not return to New France himself in this second attempt at colonization, he did authorize Jean de Biencourt, Sieur de Poutrincourt, to return to Port Royal, and he commissioned Samuel de Champlain to proceed up the Saint Lawrence to found Quebec. On July 3, 1608, Champlain founded Quebec under the commission, vision, and financial and material means of Mons, who continued for some time to send supplies from France to Quebec, ultimately delegating his political, judicial, and administrative powers to Champlain. Mons died at the Chateau d’Ardenne at Fléac sur Seugne in Charente-Maritime on February 22, 1628. Various commemorative sites honor Mons in the United States, France, and Canada. Additional spellings of his name include Du Gua, Du Guast, du Gas, de Mons, and de Monts. Maureen Waters See also: Acadia; Champlain, Samuel de; New France; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Tadoussac. References Biggar, Mary Peck. The Bitter with the Sweet: New Brunswick 1604–1984. Tantallon, NS: Four East Publications, 1984. Grenon, Jean Yves. Pierrre Dugua De Mons Founder of Acadie (1604–5) Co-Founder of Quebec (1608). Annapolis Royal, NS: Pennisular Press, 2000.
830
MONTAGNAIS
MONTAGNAIS The Montagnais are one of the eleven aboriginal nations still inhabiting Quebec. In the last census of 2003, there were about 15,200 living in nine communities (Essipit, Betsiamits, La Romaine, Mashteuiatsh, Matimekosh et Lac-John, Mingan, Natshquan, Pakuashipi, and Uashat et Maliotenam) and towns. In comparison to the other aboriginal nations, the Montagnais are the most numerous. Linguistically they belong to the Algonquian family. Montagnais is the main language spoken by the majority of the population; French is spoken as a second language. The Montagnais now call themselves Innu. The name “Montagnais” was given to them by French explorers because of the hilly landscape of the area they lived in. Their vast territory started at the mouth of the Maurice River following the north coast of the Saint Lawrence up to La Romaine, along the Saguenay up to the Lac Saint Jean and a little further west. When they first encountered the French, the Montagnais were nomadic hunters and fishermen. They were divided into clans—families—and migrated following the seasons. Each family or clan made the most of its environment. Thus, the coastal Montagnais took advantage of the sea and its marine animals, whereas the Montagnais of the deep boreal forest hunted various animals, with caribou being their main source for food, clothing, and material for building shelters. Before the arrival of the Europeans, a network of exchanges was already in place between the various members of the Montagnais nation and between these northern hunters and the southern agriculturalists. For instance, Tadoussac had been a gathering place for
exchanges from time immemorial. Thus, it is understandable that in the sixteenth century, Tadoussac became a very lucrative place for the French, the Montagnais, and their partners. The Montagnais would bring fur they had already exchanged from tribes situated as far away as James Bay and would obtain European goods for them. In 1602 and 1603, François Gravé du Pont, a very active merchant in the fur trade at Tadoussac, invited three relatives of Montagnais chiefs to spend the winter in France. They were so well treated that, on his return, he earned the respect of the chiefs, although, from time to time, tensions and skirmishes between the French and the Montagnais occurred for cultural and strategic reasons. In 1603, Samuel de Champlain met the Montagnais of Tadoussac for the first time and sealed a pact of friendship with them by joining in the victory celebrations over the Iroquois. The French from that moment fought on the side of the Montagnais and their partners in order to protect their fur trade activity. However, after 1615, the Hurons became the main trading partners of the French, with Quebec City and then Montreal as trading posts. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Montagnais abandoned the region of Quebec City and Trois-Rivières to return north into their territory. Their population was seriously diminished by European viruses, wars, and a decrease in their food supplies. The Jesuits tried to convert them by getting in contact with them at trading posts but were not very successful due to the Montagnais nomadic life. Increasingly throughout the centuries, the Montagnais saw their territory invaded by the colonists. However, it is only in the twentieth century that
MONTAIGNE, MICHEL
the industrial revolution, notably with the spread of hydroelectricity, put an end to their nomadic way of living. The nine communities mentioned previously had their borders set by the federal government. Today, the Innu have political representatives who negotiate with the federal government the management of their natural resources, and they are very active in the development of tourism in their region. Since 1978, the Institut culturel et éducatif Innu has been working on promoting the Innu culture and its artistic representations. At the Lac Saint Jean, the Native Museum of Mashteuiatsh is one of the most important native museums in Quebec. Marion Bernard See also: Champlain, Samuel de; Fur Trade; Hurons; Jesuits; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Tadoussac. References Beaulieu, Alain. Les Autochtones du Québec, des premières alliances aux revendications contemporaines. Quebec: Editions Fides, 2000. Bouchard, Russel. Le Dernier des Montagnais, de la préhistoire au début du XVIIIe siècle, vie et mort de la nation Ilnu. Quebec: Chicoutimi-Nord, 1995. Gill, Pierre. Les Montagnais, les premiers habitants du Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean. PointeBleue: Editions Mishinikan, 1987.
MONTAIGNE, MICHEL (1533–1592)
DE
French essayist. Montaigne wrote about the New World especially in two of the most famous chapters of his Essais, “On Cannibals” (I.31) and “On Carriages” (III.8), first published in 1580 and 1588, respectively. Although these drew heavily on recent European sources, they were very distinct
DE
831
from them, not least because Montaigne adopted a largely secular perspective. Profoundly critical of Europe, these two essays have been read in many different ways, and they influenced the later ideal of the Noble Savage. The extent and nature of their own ethnocentrism continues to be debated. Steeped in Renaissance humanist rhetoric, they also demonstrate—deliberately, according to some—the partial or total incapacity of that rhetoric to represent what lies so far beyond it. Like all of Montaigne’s essays, these two self-consciously resist summary, especially “On Carriages,” with its notoriously complex structure. “On Cannibals” focuses on the Tupinambá, whom the French had been encountering for most of the century in Brazil. Montaigne claims to base his account of them largely on the testimony of a servant of his, who had lived among them for ten to twelve years. Montaigne also describes a conversation he claims to have had, through an inadequate interpreter, with three Tupinambá in Rouen in 1562. He is more disparaging about the reliability of written sources, in particular cosmography, but he himself draws on the cosmography of André Thevet as well as on other kinds of writing—by Jean de Léry, Urbain Chauveton, and Francisco López de Gómara— though without mentioning any of them. “On Carriages” is a meditation on history, memory, loss, transience, chronology, and luxury, in which Montaigne denounces the destruction, by the Spanish conquistadores, of the civilization of the Aztecs in Mexico and of the Incas in Peru. Although the essay thus participates to some extent in the anti-Spanish “Black Legend,” it makes Europeans in general responsible for the destruction. Montaigne
832
MONTAND,YVES
draws extensively on the chronicle of Gómara, secretary to Hernán Cortés: Montaigne turns Gómara’s defense of the conquista into an indictment of it. Montaigne’s comparisons of South and Central American civilization with Europe are unflattering to the latter. Even cannibalism is less barbaric than the torturing of live bodies that had recently occurred in the French wars of religion. Montaigne undermines the binary oppositions civilization/barbarism and nature/art, but in shifting ways that constantly alter the meanings of these terms. He represents Amerindians by comparing them not just with contemporary Europeans but also with the ancients. The eloquence and heroic virtue of the last Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc and of the Inca king Atahualpa, executed in 1521 and 1533, respectively, match anything found in antiquity. The splendor of Inca culture even outdoes the ancients. On the other hand, Montaigne fantasizes that if the ancient Greeks and Romans, rather than modern Europeans, had conquered the Americas, then they would have improved rather than destroyed the culture they found there: even Montaigne is not straightforwardly anticolonial. Neil Kenny See also: Brazil; Mexico; Noble Savage. References Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. B. Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986: 67–79. Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne. Trans. R. Morris. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Pot, Olivier. L’Inquiétante Etrangeté: Montaigne, la pierre, le cannibale, la mélancolie. Paris: Champion, 1993.
MONTAND,YVES (IVO LIVI) (1921–1991) French film actor, born in Tuscany, Italy. Yves Montand debuted on the stage as a chanteur “discovered” by Edith Piaf in the 1940s and had several hits with songs, such as “La Bicyclette,” enumerating the delights of simple, rural French life. His first film role was in Les Portes de la nuit/Gates of the Night (Carné, 1946), but his breakthrough role was in Clouzot’s 1953 Le Salaire de la peur/The Wages of Fear, a film set in South America that set the tone for the way in which his star persona would be interpreted: as an extension of himself, his political engagement, and his historical authenticity. Alain Rémond’s biography of Montand claims that to tell Montand’s life story is to tell the story of the French nation. As early as 1950, Montand became involved in high-profile left-wing political campaigns, such as the appel de Stockholm, calling for the ban of the nuclear bomb, and the Rosenberg affair. Montand’s identification with the French nation and left-wing politics was enhanced by his marriage to Simone Signoret: the couple were described by Paris-Match as “the solid couple of French cinema,” a (Republican) French bulwark against the uncertainties engendered by consumerism and modernity, a position reinforced by their working-class film roles. By 1960, he was a well-established star in France and was approached by the impresario Norman Granz to undertake a Broadway tour. Given the political climate of the time, he was allowed into the United States only on a limited visa but had huge success and was signed up by Dinah Shore to feature on her television show, where he was seen by 60 million viewers. This suc-
MONTAND,YVES
cess along with his wife’s Oscar led to intense interest in the couple. It is hardly surprising that Fox Studios, desperate to find a male lead for Marilyn Monroe’s next star vehicle, Let’s Make Love (Cukor, 1960), approached Montand. American reports on the filming defined him by his Frenchness, routinely describing him as “the next Maurice Chevalier.” French reports on the filming emphasized the Hollywood seal of approval: “The Montand couple have become the darlings of Hollywood.” ParisMatch went as far as to claim Monroe personally requested Montand over Gregory Peck. The Montand commercial triumph was recast as a triumph for France and French values. Throughout the filming period February–April 1960, Paris-Match and L’Express reported back from the set, inevitably comparing his “real-life” wife with his on-screen love interest. A celebrated photograph from the period shows Arthur Miller and Signoret deep in conversation, Signoret wearing a head scarf, while Monroe and Montand drink champagne. When Montand began an affair with Monroe, the French press reacted with a combination of pride and outrage. Sympathy for Signoret was expressed by favorable comparison between her authentic lifestyle, far from “false cinema kisses” and Monroe’s superficial fantasy. The film itself places Montand into the realm of historical authenticity, as one of a long line of a rich aristocratic family whose wealth was acquired through the vicissitudes of French history, whereas Monroe’s Amanda Dell is a showgirl struggling with history at night school. Montand’s brief flirtation with Hollywood and what was represented as its inherent falseness is rejected in favor of authenticity. Signoret wore the scars of her
833
betrayal, embracing her rapid aging, yet another index of her authenticity. In a limited Hollywood career, Montand continued to be used mainly in musicals, a genre whose utopian characteristics and dream resolutions epitomized Hollywood cinema’s falseness over Montand’s own Frenchness. While he played a hypnotist in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Minnelli, 1970), a joyful celebration of Vodun (voodoo), “wizardry,” and cinematic artifice, in France, in contrast, he embarked on a series of political roles such as Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) and Tout va bien (Godard-Gorin, 1972). His role as Vincent in Sautet’s Vincent, François, Paul et les autres (1974) typified his performance of a world-weary and embittered masculinity that could no longer believe in the power of the revolution. As Hollywood worked to remove Montand from his roots, so his film roles in France placed him in a position of solidarity with the working class, even as those roles problematized the relation of a successful bourgeois actor to everyday economic struggle. Montand’s excursion to Hollywood worked both to enhance his authentic Frenchness and to illustrate that the attractions of American consumer capitalism are not so easy to reject. Fiona Handyside See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; CostaGavras; Godard, Jean-Luc; Signoret, Simone. References Austin, Guy. Stars in Modern French Film. London: Arnold, 2003. Grzesiak, Nathalie. Yves Montand-Simone Signoret: Une passion engagée. Paris: Acropole, 2001. Paris-Match (Saturday, January 23, 1960–Saturday, July 23, 1960): 563–589. Rémond, Alain. Yves Montand. Paris: Veyrier, 1977. Signoret, Simone. La Nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était. Paris: Seuil, 1976.
834
MONTCALM, LOUIS-JOSEPH
DE
MONTCALM-GROZON, MARQUIS
MONTCALM, LOUIS-JOSEPH DE MONTCALM-GROZON, MARQUIS DE (1712–1759) French general. Seigneur of Saint-Veran, Candiac, Vestric, Saint-Julien, and Arpaon, and baron of Gabriac, Montcalm was born at the chateau of Candiac (near Nîmes in Provence) on February 28, 1712, into a recently ennobled aristocratic family that had been providing career officers since the seventeenth century. In 1721 at the age of nine, he received a commission as ensign in the Hainaut regiment, becoming captain eight years later. Montcalm served in Rhineland during the War of the Austrian Succession as aide-de-camp to Lieutenant General the Marquis de La Fare before being wounded during the siege of Prague in the army of the marshal of BelleIsle. After becoming a colonel in the Auxerre regiment on March 6, 1743, he fought in Italy until his capture at the Battle of Piacenza in June 1746. He was also wounded, and his regiment was wiped out. In 1744, he was created a chevalier de Saint-Louis for exceptional conduct on the field of battle. Impending war between the French and British in North America required the replacement of Dieskau, the commander of regular forces there, who had been captured in 1755. As most generals were reluctant to serve in a theater so far away, the war minister promoted Montcalm to the rank of field marshal on March 11, 1756. After a five-week Atlantic crossing, he arrived in Quebec on May 13, 1756, along with Colonel de Bougainville. Relations became quickly strained between Montcalm and the governor-general of the colony, Vaudreuil. Montcalm openly criti-
DE
cized Vaudreuil’s strategy and tactics and plotted against him, creating an atmosphere of mistrust. On the military side, Montcalm accepted the capitulation of 2,500 British troops at Fort William Henry (New York State) on August 9, 1757. In 1758, under the command of General Abercromby, the British amassed 15,000 men and attacked Fort Carillon with its 3,000 men from Montcalm’s army. Montcalm won a famous victory here on July 8, 1758, with 1,944 British dead against 377 French. On October 20, 1758, he was promoted to lieutenant general. However, although he enjoyed several tactical victories, Montcalm doubted the French were capable of victory in North America. In May 1759, the Royal British Navy transported General Wolfe to Quebec at the head of an army of 8,500 men. In Quebec City, Montcalm and his 15,000 troops had the advantage of position, in terms of fortifications and the heights on which they were located. On September 13, 1759, Wolfe had 4,500 of his men climb the cliff at l’Anse aux Foulons, attacking the French on their flanks on the Plains of Abraham. Montcalm decided to attack Wolfe immediately without waiting for reinforcements, in particular Bougainville’s 3,000 elite troops stationed at Cap-Rouge a few kilometers away. At the head of an army equivalent in size to the British, Montcalm ordered the attack, but his forces were in disarray. After only thirty minutes of fighting, the French retreated. Generals Montcalm and Wolfe were both fatally wounded on the Plains of Abraham, Montcalm dying on September 17, 1759. He was buried in the Ursulines
MONTIGNY, LOUVIGNY
DE
835
Montcalm trying to stop Native Americans from attacking British soldiers and civilians as they leave Fort William McHenry. (Library of Congress)
Chapel in Quebec City. Before expiring, Montcalm asked how long he had to live. When his doctor told him a few hours at most, he replied, “All well and good, I shall not see the British in Quebec.” The battle of the Plains of Abraham and the siege of Quebec marked the end of New France, confirmed in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Jean-François Béland See also: French and Indian War; Quebec, Battle of; Quebec City; Treaty of Paris; Ursulines. References Parkman, Francis. Montcalm and Wolfe. New York: Collier, 1962. Seguin, Philippe. Revisiter Montcalm. Montreal: Fides, 2003.
MONTIGNY, LOUVIGNY (1876–1955)
DE
Journalist, author, critic, poet (pseudonym Carolus Glatigny), and editor in Montreal, as well as translator for the Canadian Senate in Ottawa from 1910 to 1955. Born in Saint-Jérôme, Montigny studied law at Laval University at Montreal, then helped to found the Ecole littéraire de Montréal (Montreal Literary School) in 1895. He then founded and edited two newspapers, Les Débats in 1900 and La Gazette municipale in 1904. Introducing Louis Hémon’s novel Maria Chapdelaine to Canadian readers in 1914, Montigny exercised his editorial function in a way that speaks volumes about his life and times; by emending many examples of
836
MONTREAL
French Canadian speech observed by the novel’s French author, he sought to safeguard a position of respect for the French language spoken by his fellow Québécois and to provide them with a model to emulate. His lifelong interest in the state of the French language in Canada was already in evidence in his play Les Boules de neige (1903), which provoked discussion of the use of popular speech in literary works. The French Academy’s acclaim in 1937 for his novel La Revanche de Maria Chapdelaine (The Revenge of Maria Chapdelaine) is one of Montigny’s many literary honors. He served as officer of Public Instruction for the Royal Society of Canada and was named chevalier de la légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) in 1925. Montigny’s presence on the international stage as an activist for authors’ rights is of particular interest to students of transatlantic cultural and political exchange. Well before his important contribution to the founding of the Canadian Authors’ Association in Montreal in 1921 and the Société des écrivains canadiens in 1922, Montigny was a member of the Association des journalistes canadiensfrançais (AJCF, French-Canadian Journalists’ Association). From 1903 to 1905, as the president of the AJCF’s Commission on Authors’ Rights, he waged an extensive press campaign, placing some fifty articles in a dozen periodicals in Montreal, Paris, and Geneva. He argued that Canadian laws and tariffs made it more profitable for book and periodical publishers in Quebec to reprint French novels and pay no royalties rather than to publish local writers; this “literary counterfeiting” had a stifling effect on the emergence of a French Canadian national literature. Montigny con-
vinced the Société des gens de lettres de France (French Authors’ Society) to mount a challenge in Canadian court against the “pillaging” of its members’ works. The favorable decision in Mary v. Hubert, heard in the Superior Court of Quebec in March 1906, established the dominance in Canada of imperial, or British, law—which governed adherence to the international Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works—over Canadian domestic laws pertaining to book production, trade, and tariffs. Canada had been signatory to the Berne Convention as a British Commonwealth state since the accord’s creation in 1886, but it was not until 1921 that decades of legal conflict were resolved. A satisfactory Canadian Copyright Act finally passed, and Canada joined the Berne Convention under its own name. Shelley Beal See also: Hémon, Louis; Language; Maria Chapdelaine; Montreal; Ottawa; Quebec. References Hoad, Linda, Catherine J. Hobbs, and Geralyn Dionne. Un Guide des fonds littéraires à la Bibliothèque nationale du Canada. Ottawa: La Bibliothèque, 2001. Lamonde, Yvan. La Librairie et l’édition à Montréal 1776–1920. Montreal: Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 1991. Michon, Jacques. Histoire de l’édition littéraire: Vol. 1, La naissance de l’éditeur 1900–1939. Saint-Laurent: Fides, 1999.
MONTREAL The history of the origins of Montreal is closely tied to the site’s geographical and strategic position for trade and travel to the interior of the continent. Archaeologists suggest that the first signs of human life on the island of Montreal date from more than 6,000 years ago.
MONTREAL
It is, however, impossible to establish with any certainty the origin and the position of the Iroquois village of Hochelaga. According to Jacques Cartier’s accounts, the first European to set foot on the island of Montreal, the village of Hochelaga had more than 1,000 inhabitants. When Samuel de Champlain explored the island in 1603, Hochelaga had apparently completely disappeared. The name “Montreal” first appeared as a description of the island of Montreal on the map drawn by Champlain in 1613. The establishment of the Ville-Marie colony stemmed from Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière and Jean-Jacques Olier’s plan to evangelize the Amerindians. They founded the Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour la conversion des sauvages de la Nouvelle-France in order to create a missionary colony on the island of Montreal. The founding expedition was led by Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, who arrived in New France with three ships in 1641. Maisonneuve soon met with strong resistance from the Quebec authorities and above all from Governor Huault de Montmagny, who was strongly opposed to the establishment of a colony on the island. He described the plan as “a foolhardy undertaking” because of the hostile Iroquois. On May 17, 1642, in the presence of Governor Montmagny, Maisonneuve founded Ville-Marie at what is now Pointeá-Callière, and the construction of a stockade and a house was undertaken very quickly. During its first years, Montreal was subjected to violent attacks by the Iroquois that damaged its economic and demographic development. These attacks even went as far as to threaten the existence of the colony. In 1653, Marguerite Bour-
837
geoys arrived in the colony with the aim of educating the children. In 1663, the Société de Notre-Dame, which had been experiencing financial difficulties, was dissolved, leaving control of Montreal to the Saint-Sulpice Seminary in Paris. In 1701, France signed the Montreal Peace Treaty, which put an end to the region’s Amerindian wars and enabled Montreal to develop. With the territorial expansion of New France to the west, after 1673 (discovery of the Mississippi by Joliet and Marquette), consolidated by the founding of Louisiana by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville in 1699, Montreal found itself at the heart of New France and of the fur trade. After the fall of Quebec in 1759, the colony of Montreal, with its 4,000 inhabitants, fell on September 8, 1760. The French and Indian War (1756–1763) and the Treaty of Versailles (1763) marked the end of New France. The British conquest brought important economic, social, and political changes to Montreal. In economic terms, English and Scottish merchants quickly took over trade. From 1776, the town’s population grew with the arrival of the British Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the town became primarily anglophone due to immigration from Ireland and America. Montreal became the economic heart of Quebec and of Canada, overtaking Quebec City in the role of the country’s metropolis. The economy diversified to such an extent that the role of the fur trade progressively diminished. In 1825, traders successfully obtained the construction of the Lachine Canal, which allowed vessels to avoid the unnavigable Lachine Rapids. The year 1830 saw the start of the building of the port of Montreal, and, in 1836, the
838
MONTREAL
Print showing “Plan of the town and fortifications of Montreal or ville Marie in Canada” on the Saint Lawrence River, 1775. (Library of Congress)
first railway in Canada was built between La Prairie and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu in order to facilitate the transportation of goods toward the American market. The consolidation of trade favored the development of the banking and financial sector of Montreal, with the creation of the first Canadian bank, the Banque de Montréal (1817). In the middle of the nineteenth century, Montreal was the most populous Canadian city with 58,000 inhabitants, and it went on to reach 267,000 inhabitants in 1901. From 1840, Montreal went through a period of industrialization with the arrival of light industry (such as textiles, clothing, shoes, brewing, and flour mills) and heavy
industry, comprising mainly rolling stock for the two main railroad companies of the period, Grand Tronc and Canadien Pacifique. Most of this industry was found in the Lachine Canal area in the southwest of the city, which was effectively the birthplace of Canadian industrialization. During World War I, Montreal was the setting for sharp tensions between the francophone and anglophone populations, in particular around the issue of conscription in 1917. The interwar period was marked by the impact of the 1929 economic crisis on Montreal society. At its height, between 25 and 35 percent of the population was unemployed. In order to ease the misery of the working-class populations, successive
MONTREAL
governments adopted Keynesian policies, embarking on the construction of such prestigious structures as, for example, the botanic gardens. The population of Montreal reached 903,000 inhabitants at the outbreak of World War II, and the war meant that Montreal’s heavy industry grew rapidly to meet the needs of the Allied forces. The demographic and economic growth continued in the immediate postwar period with the growth of the suburbs, due to an expanded road network. Montreal reached the 1 million inhabitants mark in 1951, and the Montreal conurbation passed the 2 million mark in 1960. From the 1960s, Montreal established its place as an international metropolis under the leadership of its mayor, Jean Drapeau. In 1967, it hosted the international exhibition and, in 1976, the Olympic Games. Montreal’s economic role, in particular since the creation of the Saint Lawrence shipping route, has progressively become secondary to that of Toronto as the economic heart of Canada. The population of Toronto overtook that of Montreal in 1976. Following the recession in 1990–1991, Montreal benefited from the steady growth of the high-tech sector, becoming an international center of technological excellence. Internationally, Montreal is the third most important player in the field of aerospace science, as well as excelling in biotechnologies, communications technology, and Internet business. In 2001, for example, Quebec was responsible for 47 percent of Canadian exports in the domain of high technology, and Montreal accounts for a large part of these industries. Businesses in the Montreal region benefited greatly from
839
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Montreal’s role on the international stage, as the second-largest francophone city in the world, was confirmed in the 1990s when the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization established its headquarters there. Montreal’s role as a center of research and development, in both Quebec and Canada, has been recognized thanks to its four universities: the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec à Montréal, McGill University, and Concordia University. Montreal is also internationally recognized for its cultural life with numerous festivals (such as the Montreal International Jazz Festival or Festival des films du monde) and such important cultural centers as the Place des Arts de Montréal and the Musée des Beaux Arts. Jean-François Béland See also: American Revolution; Aviation; Cartier, Jacques; Catholic Church; Champlain, Samuel de; Cyberculture; French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’; Jazz; Joliet, Louis; Language; Louisiana; Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de; Marquette, Jacques; Mississippi River; New France; Quebec; Quebec City; Saint Lawrence River; World War I; World War II. References Drouilly, Pierre. L’Espace social de Montréal 1951–1991. Sillery: Septentrion, 1996. Germain, Annick, and Rose Damaris. Montreal: The Quest for a Metropolis. New York: John Wiley, 2000. Levine, Mark V. The Reconquest of Montreal: Language Policy and Social Change in a Bilingual City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Linteau, Paul-André. Brève Histoire de Montréal. Montreal: Boréal, 1992. ———. Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération. Montreal: Boréal, 2000.
840
MORAND, PAUL
MORAND, PAUL (1888–1976) French diplomat and writer, born in Paris. Paul Morand’s attraction to America seems at least partly inspired by a Jamesian distrust of the permissive ways of old Europe. For Morand, Berlin was in thrall to the moral decay of Weimar decadence (an interesting interpretation, given his future involvement with the Vichy government), Rome overrun by black-shirted philistines, and his home city of Paris a hotbed of “bad taste.” After surmounting his initial antipathy toward America, evoked by the SpanishAmerican War of 1898, Morand decided that America was to be the first port of call in his insatiable desire to see the world. There he encountered a “whirlwind” of colors and conflicting images all vividly documented in his U.S.A. (1928) and was even inspired to write a history of New York (1930). French curiosity in the great country across the Atlantic was beginning to awaken, and Morand saw it as his mission to “explain” America to his countrymen. The key to understanding the country for the writer was to understand her greatest city, deemed by Morand as being the “synthesis” of America. He discovers an energetic city where the dynamic inhabitants eat sur place and the only kneeling before another is done by the shoe-shine boy. Morand shows himself to be a keen anthropological observer in New York, as well as an able historian, and presages the racial violence that was to explode in the country after World War II, when black soldiers, treated as equals in the European theater of war, returned to second-class citizenry in the country they had spilled blood for. We read of a country in New York that was beginning to erect social barriers even when Europe was beginning to dismantle them. Morand also comments extensively on that
great New York tradition, violence, in which he finds a curiously redemptive quality. Typically for this capricious and elusive writer, his enthusiasm was not to last long. A mere two months after his initial sojourn, Morand’s view of the United States had radically altered again. This rather sudden change of heart had more to do with a reevaluation of his own aesthetics than with any seismic shift that could have possibly occurred in the American cultural landscape, and underlines the flighty nature of Morand’s artistic curiosity. No more were the skyscrapers a “hymn” to American ingenuity. Despite his disenchantment, however, Morand had succeeded in capturing the protean essence of the city of New York—its constant state of flux, its fulminating broth of cultures and desires that the heat of its violence never allows to drop below boiling point, and thus never allows it to take any fixed shape. Greg MacKinnon See also: Anti-Americanism; Architecture; James, Henry; World War II. Reference Guitard-Auviste, Ginette. Paul Morand, 1888–1976. Paris: Editions Ballard, 1994.
MORGAN, MICHÈLE (SIMONE ROUSSEL) (1920–) French actress. Morgan’s beauty, talent, and disturbing voice gave an interior shine to all her roles and a touch of mystery that are the privilege of great cinema stars and guarantee immortality in the heart of film lovers. Morgan first appeared on the screen at the age of fifteen in Mademoiselle Mozart (1935), directed by Yvan Noë and alongside Danielle Darrieux. Two years later, Marc Allégret gave her a more substantial
MORIN, EDGAR
role in Gribouille/Heart of Paris (1937), opposite Raimu. But things really started in 1938, with Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes/Port of Shadows, where, in a script by the poet Jacques Prévert adapted from Pierre MacOrlan’s novel, the deserter Jean Gabin, by a single line since then immortal, gave the velvet-eyed actress the chance to make herself at home in film history: “T’as d’beaux yeux, tu sais? ” Dressed in a plain trench coat and wearing a simple beret, the hair pulled back to bring to the fore the purity of her face, she had everything to give those eyes the full exposure they needed to fascinate spectators until now. Leaving France two days before the Germans entered in Paris, she was in Hollywood during the war among the French expatriates. She appeared in four films of no great interest and married American actor Bill Marshall in 1942. She often complained that her contract with RKO was uninteresting since the studio did not know what to do with her. In Robert Stevenson’s Joan of Paris (1942), she played a resistance fighter sacrificing herself for the man she loves. In the war melodrama Passage to Marseilles (Michael Curtiz, 1944), she starred with Humphrey Bogart but was not happy during the shooting, feeling alone and bored, inconsolable for having missed the leading role in Casablanca. Morgan was not at ease in Hollywood, where everything seemed superficial to her. The two other films Two Tickets to London (E. L. Marin, 1943) and Higher and Higher (Tim Whelan, 1943) have not left indelible marks in film history, and both were done without passion, only to fulfill a contract. Returning to Europe, she delivered a memorable performance in Jean Delannoy’s La Symphonie pastorale (1946),
841
adapted from André Gide. The producers wanted her to become the French Garbo and transformed her famous stare into one of a blind woman. The following period was not to bring her many roles up to her talent but was a way to show how she had become the grande dame of French cinema. From then on, she moved from film to film with the quiet assurance of a woman whose beauty is unaltered. She alternated between theater, television, and cinema, in such films as Claude Lelouch’s Le Chat et la souris/Cat and Mouse (1975), Robert et Robert (1978), and Un Homme et une femme, vingt ans déjà/A Man and a Woman: Twenty Years Later (1986). Her last film for the cinema was Stanno Tutti Bene by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore in 1990. Roger Bourdeau See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Darrieux, Danielle; Marshall, Bill; World War II. References Bouniq-Mercier, Claude. Michèle Morgan. Paris: Colona, 1983. Morgan, Michèle. Mes Yeux ont vu. Paris: Union générale d’Edition, 1965. ———. Avec ces yeux-là. Paris: France loisirs, 1977. Sellier, Geneviève. “European Actors in Hollywood—Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Morgan and Micheline Presle in Hollywood: The Threat to French Identity.” Screen 43, no. 2 (2002).
MORIN, EDGAR (1921–) Born in 1921, the son of Sephardic Jews Lena and Vidal Nahoum, Edgar Morin has published widely on aspects of twentiethcentury life in France, considering areas as varied as the modernization of a Breton village (Commune en France: la métamorphose de Plodémet/The Red and the White: Report
842
MORIN, EDGAR
from a French Village [1967]), Hollywood stars (Les Stars [1957]), the mass media (L’Esprit du temps [1962]), mass hysteria in Orléans (Le Rumeur d’Orléans [1969]), and an anthropological study of the cinema (Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire [1956]). More recent work has included a consideration of the nature of European identity (Penser l’Europe/Concept of Europe [1990]) and editing a volume addressing the future of higher education (Université, quel avenir? [2003]). He also participated in a cinema vérité project, Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (1961), with the director/ethnographer Jean Rouch and edited a journal called Arguments (1959– 1962). He continues to contribute typically incisive and unorthodox articles to Le Monde, such as a piece considering the impact of the recent invasion of Iraq. His autobiographical volume Autocritique (1959) is a classic account of the journey to the end of the (Communist) Party, whereas his second autobiographical volume, Vidal et les siens (1989), is an illuminating account of his Jewish background and was published under the name Morin-Nahoum (Morin changed his name during World War II). Morin posited that a new Americanized global mass media was creating a new cultural formation that blurred class lines and national identities in favor of a homogenous audience, all of whom located happiness in leisure time, consumption, and identification with cinema stars rather than national heroes. He further argued that this emphasis on happiness emerging from the realms of consumption and leisure, rather than those of work and production, leads to a “feminizing” of French life. This feminization is twofold: first, it places women rather than men in the van-
guard of change (it is the housewives rather than their husbands who press for change in Plodémet), and second, women become more visible than men in the media. The female image is reproduced as both subject and object of the gaze. The effects of American cultural hegemony are read by Morin as fundamentally altering French life. Despite his sympathy for the appeal of modernization, unusual among the French intelligentsia, he feared that cultural specificity of time and space were being lost in a process of homogenization. He argued that the mass media worked to disseminate and normalize the state modernization effort, exploring it in its quirkiest effects. Especially in his work on stars, he demonstrated how the powerful cultural form of Hollywood cinema could work to help reorient the French cultural imaginary from national icons to an American source of identification and projection. Admitting his own fascination with Marilyn Monroe, he argued that American cinema stars became better known than one’s neighbors. The media’s screen both introduces the spectator to the world yet cuts him or her off from it. It is not the real America serving as the focus of French aspiration, but a strange, imaginary place. Invited to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego at the end of 1969, he was able to experience the Californian dream for himself, recorded in one of his most personal and moving works, Journal de Californie (1970). Morin found himself part of the tail end of the countercultural movement, attending “park-ins” and rock concerts, as well as watching Star Trek with its “naively deep” mythology and listening to Billy Graham’s sermons. He recorded a contra-
MUSIC, CLASSICAL
dictory and chaotic America, whose interplay of order and disorder became crucial to his philosophy of science. To his own surprise, he found the experience to be one that brought him great personal peace and happiness, allowing him finally to come to terms with the death of his mother. America provided him intellectual and earthly “highs” he had not encountered elsewhere, a happiness he preserved as he returned from America via the Far East. To ask if happiness is possible in an “imperialist” or “underdeveloped” country, he concluded, is to deny the real multiplicity of all countries and cultures. Fiona Handyside See also: Brittany; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Iraq War; Modernization; Rouch, Jean. References Kelly, Mike, ed. Special edition on Edgar Morin, French Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (October 1997). Kofman, Myron. Edgar Morin: From Big Brother to Fraternity. London: Pluto, 1996.
MUSIC (CLASSICAL) The production of music associated with high cultural capital began slowly in the French Atlantic, with the period of New France (1608–1763) possessing a rudimentary musical culture that was first and foremost religious. However, beginning with the lute owned by the founder of Montreal, Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, there are records of music and dance teachers, and some seigneurs in the seventeenth century presumably owned flutes and violins. The explorer Louis Joliet was also an accomplished musician
843
and played the organ and harpsichord. An urban upper-class culture of music was well established in private houses by the 1740s, a process in fact helped by the growing militarization of the territory and the arrival of General Montcalm in 1756. After the conquest, an amateur theater group, the Théâtre de Société, created in 1790 a comedy in prose intermixed with ariettas, Colas et Colinette, written by one of their founders, Joseph Quesnel (1746– 1809). In the Caribbean, there is the exceptional case of Joseph Boulogne, chevalier de Saint-Georges (1739–1799), the “black Mozart,” born in Guadeloupe to a slave mother and French plantation-owner father. He moved to France at age ten and became a violinist and conductor, and one of the first French composers to write for string quartets. He became Marie-Antoinette’s music director in 1775, but his appointment as director of the Paris Opera was blocked because of his race. During the revolution, he helped form the Republican Légion des hussards américains in 1792, one of whose squadron leaders was Alexandre Dumas the elder. Transatlantic exchanges in the domain of classical music were frequent and almost de rigueur by the twentieth century. For example, Aaron Copland (1900–1990) was the first American student in composition of Nadia Boulanger, at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, in 1921–1924. Leonard Bernstein (1918– 1990) conducted frequently in France and created works such as the operetta based on Voltaire’s Candide (1956) and the incidental music for Lillian Hellmann’s adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s play L’Alouette (The Lark) about Joan of Arc (1955). He was made a chevalier, officier, and commandeur of the Légion d’honneur. The French composer
844
MUSIC, CLASSICAL
Maurice Ravel (1871–1937) toured the United States and Canada for four months in 1928. Franco-American classical musical connections have been characterized above all by a dialogue and mutual influence concerning modernism and also popular musical forms. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a real enthusiasm in France for such popular American dances as the cakewalk, the transatlantic, the Boston ball, and the fox-trot. American influence can be found in the music of numerous French composers, but in these works, the individuality of the musicians takes the upper hand over the popular forms they used, which led to very diverse styles. The cakewalk was a particular source of fascination for Claude Debussy and Erik Satie (1866–1925), as both composers enjoyed the world of cabaret, circus, cafésconcerts, and music halls. Their knowledge of black American music can thus be explained by the time they spent in Parisian places of entertainment. In the work of Debussy, it appears in “Golliwog’s CakeWalk” (1908) from Children’s Corner, Le Petit Nègre (1909), in “Les Minstrels” from the first book of the Preludes, and in “General Lavine Eccentric” (1910) from the second book of the Preludes. Unlike his friend Satie, however, for Debussy this influence did not throw his entire musical output into question. Satie discovered popular music while working in Parisian cabarets as a pianist and sometimes as a conductor since he composed and arranged pieces of music as well as accompanying artistes and silhouette shows on the piano. Despite its apparent simplicity, Satie’s musical language is highly calculated. The accompaniment to
his melodies reveals a strong knowledge of black American music since the cakewalk is present in some of the songs he wrote for the singer Paulette Darty, most notably “La Diva de l’Empire” (1904) and “ImperialOxford” (1905). The same influence is to be found in musical works such as Le Piccadilly (1904) and The Dreamy Fish (1901). This taste for popular music remained at the heart of Satie’s compositions since it enabled him to renew continually his sources of inspiration. Black American rhythms are, for example, present in largerscale works such as Rag-Time Parade. In the ballet Parade (1917), the prologue, written by Jean Cocteau, shows Satie and Cocteau’s fascination for Charlie Chaplin and avantgarde silent cinema. This influence can be seen particularly clearly in the routine with the little American girl since, as in silent movies, she compensates for the absence of the spoken word through action. This ballet considerably challenged the artistic world of the time, bringing with it a wind of change and placing the focus on the everyday. By abolishing boundaries between entertainment and serious music, Satie succeeded in creating a new type of musical aesthetic. World War I mobilized composers of the avant-garde. Seeking to link elitist art and popular art, the Groupe des Six admired the work of Satie while rejecting that of past masters such as Wagner or Debussy. Jean Cocteau was the catalyst for the group. American rhythms, irony, and the burlesque appear in Rhapsodie nègre (1917) by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), and the fox-trot appears in Adieu New-York (1919) by Georges Auric (1899–1983) and in Caramel mou (1921) by Darius Milhaud (1892–1974).
MUSIC, CLASSICAL
The fascination with American cinema and particularly the work of Chaplin can be seen in some of Milhaud’s compositions. In Le Boeuf sur le toit (1919), a cinéma-fantaisie, Milhaud, inspired by Brazilian popular success, uses a fox-trot. The script, written by Cocteau, is set in an American bar during the Prohibition period and involves a number of characters including a boxer, a black dwarf, a redheaded woman dressed like a boy, a bookmaker, a barman, and a policeman. Milhaud discovered jazz during a trip to New York in 1923 and was captivated by it, getting to know the music in dance halls and black theaters in Harlem. This influence can be clearly seen in La Création du monde (1923), Trois Rag-caprices, and Scaramouche (1937). Later, some members of the Groupe des Six established strong ties with the United States. In 1940, Darius Milhaud left for California in order to flee the Nazis. He taught at Mills College, Oakland, and kept his post there until 1971. Milhaud was commissioned to write several symphonic works for American orchestras: A Frenchman in New York (1962), Musique pour la Nouvelle-Orléans (1966), and Musique pour San Francisco (1971). Germaine Tailleferre, the “lady of the Six” (1892–1983), left for the New World as early as 1925 and gave numerous performances in the United States. She married the caricaturist and illustrator Ralph Barton and became friends with George Gershwin and Charlie Chaplin. The latter asked her to help him when he was working on his 1928 film Circus. Calling itself the Ecole d’Arcueil, in homage to the town in the Parisian suburbs where Satie lived, another movement was founded in 1922, bringing together Henri
845
Sauguet, Henri Cliquet-Pleyel, Roger Désormière, Maxime Jacob, and, for a while, Benoist-Méchin. Moved by this expression of sympathy, Satie presented them to the public in 1923 at a concert, which enabled them to obtain a degree of notoriety in Parisian society. Sauguet was also interested in l’art nègre and jazz, and the inspiration he drew from these areas can be heard in his Danse nègre (1919), for four-handed piano, and in the Berceuse créole, which is part of Le Plumet du colonel. The Boeuf sur le toit cabaret offered a space for the avant-garde to meet and to listen to the piano duo Clément Doucet and Jean Wiener, whose repertory featured improvisations based on blues rhythms and New York fox-trots. This influence can be found, for instance, in Wiener’s (1896– 1982) Sonatine syncopée (1921), his Deuxième sonatine (1928), and his Concerto franco-américain for piano and strings (1923). Other composers also temporarily fell under the charm of these fashionable rhythms. Influenced by jazz and blues music, Maurice Ravel composed his Concerto pour piano en ré, a Sonate pour violon et piano, and a fox-trot as part of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. Roger-Ducasse (1873– 1954), for his part, included a cakewalk, a fox-trot, and a tango in his symphonic poem Epithalame (1923), while Marcel Delannoy succumbed to the influence of jazz in the ballet cantata Le Fou et la dame (1927–1928). In a work for violin and piano entitled Impressions de music-hall (1927), Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937) presented his own memories as musical sketches. Satie’s avant-garde approach influenced several American composers, many of whom appreciated his anti-intellectualism, his humor, and his taste for collage and
846
MUSIC, CLASSICAL
quotes. Virgil Thomson defended with vigor this composer he so admired and even went so far as to introduce allusions to dance music, notably in his Deux Tangos Sentimentaux or in the Synthetic Waltzes for two pianos. Georges Antheil met Satie and some of the members of the Groupe des Six and was inspired to write Jazz Symphonietta and Transatlantic as a result. Inspired by the theories of the futurist Russolo, Satie and Cocteau made use of sound effects such as sirens and a rattle in their work Parade. Influenced by this ballet, some French and American composers turned toward machinism. Milhaud, for instance, composed Machines agricoles (1919), while Arthur Honegger (1892– 1955) paid homage to a locomotive in Pacific 231 (1923), and George Antheil used eight xylophones, two electric bells, and an airplane motor in order to create everyday sounds in his Ballet Mécanique (1923). By constantly repeating brief melodic, rhythmic cells, he thus created a static form of music. Influenced by Honegger and Antheil, Gershwin also expressed his interest in city traffic jams, using the sound of car horns in An American in Paris (1928). Ralph Flanagan linked the world of jazz with that of machines in Washing Machine. Like Honegger, Charles Williams created an industrial feel in his orchestral works such as Engine Room and Atlantic Breakers, and this influence could also be found in the music of Pierre Schaeffer, Varèse, and Boulez. In later years, Steve Reich returned to such works as Parade and Pacific 231 with his composition Different Trains (1988). In City Life, Reich includes digital samples within his orchestral music. He mixes music, voice, and concrete sounds taken from the urban world, notably car
horns. In order to celebrate the opening of the TGV Nord line, Michael Nyman composed M.G.V. (Musique à Grande Vitesse) for the Festival de Lille. John Cage paid homage to Satie many times at various U.S. festivals. In August 1948, he played piano accompaniment for the seven little monkey dances of Satie’s Le Piège de Méduse at Black Mountain College. By taking a particular interest in Satie’s furniture music, and most notably his Vexations, which was approximately eighteen hours long, Cage came closer to dadaist theory. Some of his works, indeed, stem directly from his admiration for the French composer, for example, Cheap Imitation, which was inspired by Satie’s Socrate. Furthermore, Cage himself felt the need to constantly renew himself and his output. It was probably this urge that motivated the creation of Musicircus at Les Halles in Paris. This work played on the idea of getting several groups of musicians to play whatever music they pleased in front of a promenading audience in order to re-create the familiar atmosphere of the fair. Cage believed that music was to be found where one would not expect it, and in this he was very close to the French aesthetics of entertainment. Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham also collaborated on Satie’s Socrate. In around 1947, Cage began a work for two pianos, entitled Idyllic Song, which was choreographed by Cunningham. He continued with this project, and it was performed in 1970. Influenced by John Cage, some American composers born around 1935 embarked on the path of repetitive music. For example, Philip Glass based his work on eclectic mixtures of urban avant-garde, Indian music, and popular movements. In Music in
MUSIC (FOLK)
the Shape of a Square, however, Glass referred to Satie’s Morceaux en forme de poire. The French repertory seems to have found an audience in the United States. Operas are particularly appreciated, most notably those of Bizet and Berlioz, as well as ancient and baroque music, which has been brought to prominence by such ensembles as William Christie’s Les Arts florissants, Denis Raisin-Dadre’s Doulce Mémoire, and Manuel Peres’s Organum. Twentieth-century composers have not, however, been left by the wayside, since the professional choir Accentus, led by Laurence Equilbey, went on a U.S. tour in 2000, playing works by Ravel and Poulenc. Furthermore, in 2004, numerous concerts in American universities placed the focus on such composers as Germaine Tailleferre, Léo Delibes, Jacques Ibert, Joseph Canteloube, Jules Massenet, Henri Dutilleux, Olivier Messiaen, and Henri Tomasi. Contemporary music is particularly highly regarded, and, having directed the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Pierre Boulez is extremely well known. His 1999 tour with the Ensemble Intercontemporain allowed the American audience to become familiar with a twentieth-century orchestral repertory. In order to bring contemporary aesthetics to the inhabitants of New York, the 2003 French Sounds Festival organized a series of musical performances with French and American ensembles. The program of events included about twenty French composers, including Boulez, Sclavis, Dutilleux, and Dusapin. Carol Gouspy See also: Avant-Gardes; Cocteau, Jean; Dance; Guadeloupe; Jazz; Joan of Arc; Joliet, Louis; New France; Varèse, Edgar; Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de.
847
References Archives départementales de la Guadeloupe. Le Fleuret et l’archet: le chevalier de SaintGeorges (1739?–1799), créole dans le siècle des Lumières: exposition, Bisdary-Gourbeyre, 19 janvier–30 mars 2001. Gourbeyre: Archives départementales de la Guadeloupe, 2001. Gallat-Morin, E., and J. P. Pinson. La Vie musicale en Nouvelle-France. Quebec City: Septentrion, 2003. Guédé, A. Monsieur de Saint-George: Virtuoso, Swordsman, Revolutionary: A Legendary Life Rediscovered. New York: Picador, 2003. Kallmann, Helmut, and Gilles Potvin et al. Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.
MUSIC (FOLK) In the French Atlantic, the history of folk music (defined as music learned, taught, and passed on primarily through oral tradition and originating in a specific geographic or ethnic community) reflects a synthesis from contact between groups. In Canada, contact between settlers, traders, soldiers, clergy, and native inhabitants led to a rich tradition of music for singing, dancing, playing, and worship. In the South Atlantic and Caribbean, contact between diverse ethnic groups led to different but equally rich musical styles. In both areas, multiple ethnicities, languages, and music/worship traditions yielded a wide range of genres, most of which displayed their contrasting sources; in both, the legacy of colonialism and religious conversion yielded cultural and musical responses; in both, music for singing, dancing, and worship was an essential part of daily life. In Canada, the history of Frenchinfluenced folk music dates as far back as
848
MUSIC (FOLK)
1535, when Jacques Cartier sailed into the Saint Lawrence River. With the foundation of New France in 1604, and of Quebec City at the narrows of the Saint Lawrence in 1608, trappers called voyageurs were able to move inland, questing ever westward in search of furs. As they followed the waterways inland and developed a trade between Lower and Upper Canada, they shared songs and dance tunes from rural regions of Normandy, the Loire valley, and Brittany. Missionaries played a key role in spreading sacred choral music, and in 1627, in an attempt to limit British encroachment, Louis XIII decreed that only Roman Catholics could settle in the province. Many military alliances were forged between French and Amerindians, and songs and fiddle tunes thus became a key cultural expression of the Métis, the mixed-race communities strung along the waterways. However, France ultimately lost control of much of eastern Canada, culminating in the fall of New France to the British in 1759. The resulting mass deportations of Acadians, many to other New World French colonies, led to an explosion of musical creativity in the Cajun culture of the Louisiana bayous, but a general erosion of Catholic sacred music in the northern provinces. British colonists and military garrisons in Canada continued various traditions of musical activity in addition to incorporating the tunes and songs of Scottish and Irish immigrants. Nineteenthcentury antiquarian impulses and francophone cultural preservationists led to the first collections of French-language repertoires. In the 1860s, the first collections of texts with music were printed, activities accelerated by Quebec’s becoming a province in 1867. Québécois and other researchers
have continued to collect folkloric music to the present day. Some characteristics of French Canadian folk music have remained consistent throughout this history. Among these are: the significance of music as an oral tradition often passed on through families; music conceived as a participatory process, usually part of specific social events; a relatively high degree of both retention and new composition of songs and tunes; a very strong tradition linking social dance and instrumental music (especially for the fiddle); the importance of small, highly regionalized repertoires; and folklore “revival” as a tool of cultural advocacy. Since the 1970s, French Canadian musicians have made consistent and concerted efforts to explore, preserve, and present traditional repertoires. Key players in this revival include Quebec’s Ad Vielle Que Pourra and the multistylistic La Bottine Souriante and Prince Edward Island’s Barachois (a family band emerging from the house party context). All are well represented on recordings, as are older source musicians in archival recordings. In the French Caribbean (that is, Haiti, Martinique, the Antilles, Guiana, New Orleans, and the French-speaking Cajun cultures of the Louisiana bayous), colonial history, and particularly the legacy of African slavery, had an especially strong impact on music. Most folk music shows strong “Africanisms” in terms of instruments, ensemble procedures, topics, social purpose, or use in worship. In the Caribbean, the colonizing impulse was aimed not so much at extraction of raw materials (as in Canada [especially furs and timber]) but rather at the exploitation of the region’s topography and climate for growing tobacco, sugar, rice, or cotton. All
MUSIC (FOLK)
four crops required large amounts of human labor, and African slaves provided a cheap source. In Spanish and French colonies, ideas about slavery led to a (very) comparatively lenient experience, in which (in contrast to Protestant North America) slaves were relatively free to retain African languages, worship, instruments, and musical practices. As a result, African retentions in French Caribbean music are especially strong. “Africanisms” appear in both secular music—especially dance music like merengue (Haiti), menwat (Dominican Republic), and jazz (New Orleans)—and in sacred music—especially in the syncretic/creole religions like Vodun (Haiti). Music in Africa played a key role in festivals, life-cycle events (births, deaths, marriages, and puberty), celebrations, work, and worship, and it plays an equally essential role in the French Caribbean. Cultural receptivity to outside sources, and AfroCaribbean musicians’ adaptability, led to a range of multistylistic genres, with black musicians playing both very “African” and highly “Europeanized” styles. Slave and free musicians played music for white colonists as well, including opera, chamber music, and music for dance (based in eighteenthcentury French quadrilles, for example) and for sacred ceremonies in which Catholic saints and African titular deities were worshipped together using specific combinations of drums and percussive rhythms. As in Africa, specific songs were an essential part of work (sowing, reaping, building, fishing, and sailing) and play (children’s and dance songs, riddles, etc.). Military garrisons in French colonies brought brass instruments and band music into the cultural mix, and musicians carried sacred and secular genres from one Caribbean outpost to another (particularly
849
from Haiti to New Orleans after 1804). As in Africa, music retained a practical, participatory, and functional focus: it was a principal form of social interaction; it was an essential part of worship, play, and work; it evolved and mutated very quickly with the influence of outside genres; it was often carried through oral tradition and networks of family relationships; and it was a principal area for “reconstruction” and “revival” after the colonial period ended. New Orleans, a city with a complex overlay of Spanish, French, African, English, Haitian, and Jamaican cultural influences, yielding jazz, blues, funeral music, gospel, Catholic, and “spirit church” music, epitomizes the musical diversity found in many French Caribbean cultures. Throughout the region, genres are receptive to both indigenous traditions and global pop music: in Haiti, the Jamaican reggae of Bob Marley and the rhythms and ethos of Vodun (voodoo) have been a strong influence upon Kreyól bands like Boukman Ekspereyans; in the French Antilles, the zouk music of Kassav’ and others combines elements of indigenous music, West African pop, and American disco; and so forth. Christopher Smith See also: Brittany; Cajuns; Cartier, Jacques; Catholic Church; Cotton; Fur Trade; Guiana; Haiti; Jazz; Kassav’; Louisiana; Martinique; Métis; Music (Pop); New France; New Orleans; Quebec; Quebec City; Saint Lawrence River; Slavery; Sugar; Tobacco; Vodun. References Averill, Gage. A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Berry, Jason, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones. Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music since World War II. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.
850
MUSIC (POP) Boudreau, Daniel, and Anselme Chiasson. Chansons d’Acadie 1–4. Montreal: La Réparation, 1948. Jerde, Curtis D. “Black Music in New Orleans: A Historical Overview.” Black Music Research Journal 10, no.1 (spring 1990): 18–26. Séguin, Robert Lionel. La Danse traditionnelle au Québec. Sillery: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1986.
MUSIC (POP) The relationship between France and the Americas in terms of popular music has often been viewed solely in terms of U.S. influence, even domination. Indeed, the thesis of cultural imperialism has been the focus of great debate among French politicians and intellectuals particularly since the end of World War II. Although the influence of the United States cannot be underestimated, it is nonetheless possible to discern a more dialogical relationship between France and the wider American continent. From the 1920s, France became the center of a thriving jazz scene. Indeed, the melodic, big-band sound influenced French singers like Charles Trenet, Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, and Gilbert Bécaud. Although the homegrown French chanson had always been largely the most popular style in France, its status was to some extent challenged by the arrival of Anglo-American rock and pop music, particularly la chanson yéyé. This French version of American rock ’n’ roll, which became popular during the early to mid-1960s, spawned the creation of radio programs and magazines, such as Salut les Copains (Hi mates!), aimed specifically at teenagers. The yéyé fashion was exemplified by the teenage icon Johnny Hallyday, who remains one of the most popular recording
artists in France. Hallyday helped to launch the twist dance craze in France with a French version of Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” (“Viens danser le Twist,” 1960) and recorded many French versions of songs by his own rock ’n’ roll idols, including Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” (1967). During the 1960s, French intellectuals such as Jacques Charpentreau expressed bitter resistance to American rock ’n’ roll and its French derivative, la chanson yéyé. In recent years, similar defenses of an “exceptional” French cultural identity against U.S. and especially anglophone rock-pop have been made by a new generation of intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut. His famous pamphlet La Défaite de la pensée (The Defeat of the Mind [1987]) advocated a return to the cultural and educational policies implemented during the early years of the Third Republic. Successive French governments have also continued since the end of World War II to adopt a series of conservative, protectionist measures designed to promote French culture and limit what is perceived as Englishspeaking cultural dominance. The French fear of Anglo-American cultural imperialism was highlighted by the mid-1990s General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks on film and television quotas, as well as by the radio quotas for French songs (the 1996 law known as the Pelchat Amendment). By the time of the social and political unrest of 1968, youth audiences had turned away from old-fashioned yéyé singers toward more challenging artists from North America such as Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. French artists who specialized in “skiffle” music also recorded French versions of Dylan’s songs (e.g.,
MUSIC (POP)
Hugues Aufray’s 1965 album). Building on this folk/protest-song tradition, songwriters such as Maxime Leforestier, who had spent the early 1970s traveling throughout the United States and living in a commune in San Francisco, contributed further to the development of the chanson contestataire (protest song) in France (“San Francisco,” 1973). The late 1970s in France also saw the influence of the more mainstream disco movement with former yéyé stars such as Claude François (“Alexandrie Alexandra,” 1978) and new artists/producers such as Cerrone (“Supernature” 1978). The early 1980s were marked by the arrival of hip-hop culture in France, not on the streets as it had been in the United States, but via radio and television, which introduced the cultural practices of rapping, deejaying, break dancing, and graffiti art to youth audiences. Hip-hop culture in France, by no means a pale imitation of its North American forerunner, has often represented a site of collective resistance against racism and feelings of marginalization experienced in France’s suburbs. Over the years, rap music has become more and more commercialized and mainstream in France (MC Solaar and the group IAM), which now has the second-largest market in the world. While the influence of the United States upon popular music in France has been enormous, the wider American continent has also provided French artists with a rich source of inspiration. Jean Ferrat, a French singer-songwriter known for his Communist sympathies, undertook a concert tour of the Caribbean island of Cuba as well as Mexico in 1967 that proved influential both politically and musically speaking, and also led to two successful hit singles, “A Santiago” and “Guerilleros”
851
(1967). During the 1970s, a new generation of politically aware French artists emerged who integrated popular, rock, and Latin American forms into their chansons. This group of artists included Bernard Lavilliers, who imported the styles he had discovered during his travels in South America. The 1980 album O Gringo produced hit singles including “La Salsa” and “Stand the Ghetto.” More recently, during the 1990s, a generation of successful “alternative rock” groups emerged, producing rock métissé (hybrid rock), which mixes Latin, North African, and Mediterranean influences (La Ruda Salska, Zebda). The postwar era has seen several francophone artists from Quebec gain popularity in France. Félix Leclerc, a major figure in chanson québécoise, first performed in Parisian clubs during the 1950s, followed by Gilles Vigneault and Robert Charlebois in the 1960s. The songwriter Luc Plamandon also contributed to the success of Québécois performers in France with hit musicals such as Starmania (1977), which helped to launch the careers in France of many Québécois performers such as Fabienne Thibault, Diane Dufresne, Bruno Pelletier, Céline Dion, Garou, and Isabelle Boulay. The promotion of new Québécois artists in France is currently facilitated by organizations such as the Délégation Générale du Québec in Paris. While singers from Quebec often make their French debuts at established music festivals such as the annual Francofolies in La Rochelle, the Sentier des Halles concert hall in Paris is also specifically concerned with promoting new up-andcoming talent. Although individual artists from France and the Americas have pursued careers on both sides of the Atlantic, the sales
852
MUSIC (POP)
of French popular music, particularly in the United States, have nonetheless been hampered by the hegemonic status of the English language. Anglophone audiences who are generally unwilling to listen to songs in the original French may indeed not realize that Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” (1969) actually started life in France as “Comme d’habitude” (1967), sung by Claude François. The somewhat inwardlooking French pop music industry for a long time also did little to promote French music abroad. However, producers, supported by public authorities and professional organizations representing authors and artists, created the Bureau Export de la Musique Française (French Music Export Office) in 1993, and further export offices
were set up outside France in the United States (Los Angeles) and in Brazil (Socorro). These help the promotion, export, distribution, and licensing of music produced in France or in French. Chris Tinker See also: Aznavour, Charles; Bécaud, Gilbert; Charlebois, Robert; Chevalier, Maurice; Dion, Céline; Dufresne, Diane; Dylan, Bob; Francofolies, Les; Garou; GATT; HipHop Music and Culture; Jazz; Leclerc, Félix; Music (Folk); Plamondon, Luc; Vigneault, Gilles; World War II. References Hargreaves, Alec, and Mark McKinney. PostColonial Cultures in France. London: Routledge, 1997. Looseley, David. Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
France
and
the Americas
Other Titles in ABC-CLIO’s
Transatlantic Relations Series
Britain and the Americas, by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl FORTHCOMING: Africa and the Americas, by Richard M. Juang, Kim Searcy, and Noelle Searcy Germany and the Americas, by Thomas Adam Iberia and the Americas, by J. Michael Francis Ireland and the Americas, by Philip Coleman, Jason King, and Jim Byrne
France
and
the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME III EDITED BY
Bill Marshall Professor of Modern French Studies, University of Glasgow assisted by Cristina Johnston
Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor
Santa Barbara, California
Denver, Colorado
Oxford, England
Copyright © 2005 by Bill Marshall All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data France and the Americas : culture, politics, and history / edited by Bill Marshall assisted by Cristina Johnston. p. cm.— (Transatlantic relations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85109-411-3 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 1-85109-416-4 (ebook) 1. America—Relations—France—Encyclopedias. 2. France—Relations—America—Encyclopedias. 3. America—History—Encyclopedias. 4. France—History—Encyclopedias. 5. North America—History—Encyclopedias. 6. Latin America—History—Encyclopedias. 7. South America—History—Encyclopedias. 8. America—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 9. Framce—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. I. Marshall, Bill, 1957– II. Johnston, Cristina. III. Series. E18.75.F73 2005 303.48'21812044—dc22 200500096
08
07
06
05
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an e-Book. Visit abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ . Manufactured in the United States of America
for Maria
CONTENTS Advisory Board, xvii Series Editor’s Preface, xix Editor’s Preface, xxi Topic Finder, xxiii Chronology of France and the Americas, xxxi Introductory Essays, 1 The French Atlantic, 3 France and Canada, 9 France and the Caribbean, 17 France and Latin America, 27 France and the United States, 37
France and the Americas, 47 Art Deco, 91 Art Nouveau, 92 Artaud, Antonin (1896–1948), 94 Atget, Eugène (1857–1927), 95 Atlanticism, 96 Audubon, John James (1785–1851), 98 Aury, Louis-Michel (1788–1821), 99 Auster, Paul (1947–), 100 Automobiles, 101 Avant-Gardes, 104 Aviation, 106 Aznavour, Charles (Charles Aznavourian) (1924–), 108
Acadia, 49 Adam, Paul (1860–1920), 55 Adams, Henry Brooks (1838–1918), 56 Adams, John (1735–1826), 57 AIDS, 59 Alberta, 61 Alexis, Jacques-Stephen (1922–1961), 62 Allen, Woody (Allen Stewart Konigsberg) (1935–), 63 American Civil War, 64 American Revolution, 69 Annaud, Jean-Jacques (1943–), 74 Anti-Americanism, 74 Antislavery Movements, 77 Aquin, Hubert (1929–1977), 80 Arcand, Denys (1941–), 81 Architecture, 82 Argentina, 86 Aron, Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand (1905–1983), 90
Baker, Josephine (Freda Josephine McDonald) (1906–1975), 111 Baldwin, James (1924–1987), 114 Ballooning, 115 Bardot, Brigitte (1934–), 118 Barnes, Djuna (1892–1982), 119 VII
VIII
CONTENTS
Barney, Nat(h)alie Clifford (1876–1972), 121 Barrin de La Galissonière, Roland-Michel, Marquis (1693–1756), 122 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980), 123 Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste (1834–1904), 124 Basques, 125 Bataille, Georges (1897–1962), 128 Baton Rouge, 128 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre (1821–1867), 130 Baudrillard, Jean (1929–), 131 Bazin, André (1918–1958), 133 Beach, Sylvia (1887–1962), 134 Beau Dommage, 135 Beauchemin, Yves (1941–), 136 Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–1986), 137 Bécaud, Gilbert (François Silly) (1927–2001), 140 Bedaux, Charles Eugène (1886–1944), 141 Beguine, 142 Beineix, Jean-Jacques (1946–), 143 Benezet, Anthony (1713–1784), 144 Benoît, Jean (1922–), 145 Bernabé, Jean (1942–), 147 Bernanos, Georges (1888–1948), 147 Besson, Luc (1959–), 149 Bianciotti, Hector (1930–), 150 Bienville, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de (1680–1767), 151 Bigelow, John (1817–1911), 152 Binoche, Juliette (1964–), 153 Blais, Marie-Claire (1939–), 155 Blum-Byrnes Agreement, 156 Bluteau, Lothaire (1957–), 156 Boileau-Narcejac, 157 Bolívar, Simón (1783–1830), 158 Bombardier, 160 Bombardier, Denise (1941–), 161 Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson (1785–1879), 162 Bonaparte, Jérôme (1784–1860), 163 Bonaparte, Josephine Tascher de la Pageier de Beauharnais (1763–1814), 164 Bonaparte, Napoléon (1769–1821), 165 Bordeaux, 166 Borduas, Paul-Emile (1905–1960), 169 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), 170 Bossu, Jean-Bernard (1720–1792), 172 Bouchard, Lucien (1938–), 173 Bouchard, Michel Marc (1958–), 174
Bougainville, Louis Antoine de (1729–1811), 175 Boukman, Daniel (Daniel Blérald) (1936–), 176 Boulle, Pierre (1912–1994), 177 Bourassa, Robert (1933–1996), 178 Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002), 179 Bourgeois, Louise (1911–), 180 Bourget, Paul (1852–1935), 181 Boyer, Charles (1897–1978), 182 Boyer, Jean-Pierre (1776–1850), 183 Brault, Michel (1928–), 184 Brazil, 185 Brel, Jacques (1929–1978), 188 Bresdin, Rodolphe (1822–1885), 189 Breton, André (1896–1966), 190 Brittany, 192 Brossard, Nicole (1943–), 194 Brûlé, Etienne (ca. 1592–1633), 195 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo (1939–), 196 Bugnet, Georges (1879–1981), 197 Bujold, Geneviève (1942–), 198 Burroughs, William S. (1914–1997), 199 Butor, Michel (1926–), 201 Cabet, Etienne (1788–1856), 203 Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe (1658–1730), 204 Cahiers du cinéma, 205 Caillois, Roger (1913–1978), 206 Cajuns, 208 Camus, Albert (1913–1960), 209 Capucine (Germaine Lefebvre) (1931–1990), 211 Carle, Gilles (1928–), 212 Carlson, Carolyn (1943–), 213 Carmen, 214 Caron, Leslie (1931–), 216 Carpentier, Alejo (1904–1980), 217 Carrefour, 219 Cartier, Jacques (1491–1557), 219 Cartier-Bresson, Henri (1908–2004), 222 Cassatt, Mary (1844–1926), 224 Cather, Willa (1873–1947), 225 Catholic Church, 227 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894–1961), 230 Céloron de Blainville, Pierre-Joseph (1693–1759), 231 Cendrars, Blaise (Frédéric-Louis Sauser) (1887–1961), 232
CONTENTS Certeau, Michel de (1925–1986), 233 Césaire, Aimé (1913–), 234 Chabrol, Claude (1930–), 235 Challe, Robert (1659–1720), 236 Chamoiseau, Patrick (1953–), 237 Champlain, Samuel de (ca. 1570–1635), 238 Chanute, Octave (1832–1910), 241 Charlebois, Robert (1944–), 243 Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de (1682–1761), 244 Charnay, Claude-Joseph-Désiré (1828–1915), 245 Charrière, Henri (1906–1973), 246 Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de, Vicomte (1768–1848), 247 Chauvet, Marie (1916–1973), 248 Cherbourg, 250 Chevalier, Maurice (1888–1972), 251 Chicago, 252 Chile, 253 Chirac, Jacques (1932–), 255 Chopin, Kate (Katherine O’Flaherty) (1850–1904), 257 Choquette, Robert (1905–1991), 259 Christophe, Henri (1767–1820), 260 Cinema, 1895–1945, 261 Cinema, 1945 to the Present, 265 Cirque du Soleil, 268 Citroën (Automobiles Citroën), 270 Clair, René (René-Lucien Chomette) (1898–1981), 271 Claudel, Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie (1868–1955), 272 Coca-Cola Company, 273 Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963), 274 Coffee, 276 Cohen, Gustave David (1879–1958), 279 Colbert, Claudette (Lily Claudette Chauchion) (1903–1996), 280 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619–1683), 282 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette) (1873–1954), 282 Comic Strips, 284 Compagnie d’Occident, 289 Compagnie du Sénégal, 290 Computing Technology, 291 Concorde, 292 Condé, Maryse (1937–), 294 Confiant, Raphaël (1951–), 295 Constant, Paule (1944–), 296
IX
Constantine, Eddie (1917–1993), 298 Copi (Raoul Damonte) (1939–1987), 299 Cortázar, Julio (1914–1984), 300 Cosmetics, 301 Costa-Gavras (Constantinos Gavras) (1933–), 304 Cotton, 305 Counterculture, 308 Coureurs de bois, 310 Cournand, André (1895–1988), 312 Courrier des Etats-Unis, Le (1828–1939), 314 Couturier, Marie-Alain, O. P. (1897–1954), 315 Créolité, 316 Crèvecoeur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de (1735–1813), 317 Crime Fiction, 318 Crozat, Antoine (1655–1738), 323 Cuban Revolution, 324 Cuisine, 326 cummings, e.e. (1894–1962), 331 Cyberculture, 332 Cyrano de Bergerac, 336 Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé (1787–1851), 339 Dalio, Marcel (Israel Moshe Blauschild) (1899–1983), 340 Damas, Léon-Gontran (1912–1978), 341 Dance, 342 Dangerous Liaisons, 345 Danticat, Edwidge (1967–), 346 Darío, Rubén (1867–1916), 348 Darrieux, Danielle (1917–), 349 Dassin, Jules (1911–), 350 Davis, Miles (1926–1991), 351 Deane, Silas (1737–1789), 352 Debray, Régis (1940–), 354 Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar (1834–1917), 355 Deleuze, Gilles (1925–1995), 356 Delsarte, François (1811–1871), 358 Demy, Jacques (1931–1990), 359 Deneuve, Catherine (1943–), 360 Denim, 361 Depardieu, Gérard (1948–), 363 Depestre, René (1926–), 364 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 365 Des Rosiers, Joël (1951–), 366 Desjardins, Richard (1948–), 367
X
CONTENTS
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques (1758–1806), 368 Detroit, 371 Devil’s Island, 372 Deyglun, Henry (1903–1971), 374 Dion, Céline (1968–), 375 Disneyland Paris, 377 Djian, Philippe (1949–), 381 Dorziat, Gabrielle (Gabrielle Sigrist) (1880–1979), 382 Dos Passos, John (1896–1970), 383 Doubrovsky, Serge (1928–), 385 Dreyfus Case, 386 Dubos, René Jules (1901–1982), 388 Dubuffet, Jean (1901–1985), 389 Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968), 390 Ducharme, Réjean, 391 Dufresne, Diane (1944–), 392 Dufy, Raoul (1877–1953), 393 Duhamel, Georges (1884–1966), 394 Duhamel, Marcel (1900–1977), 396 Duluth, 397 Dumas, Alexandre (1802–1870), 398 Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet (1890–1959), 399 DuPont Family, 400 Durtain, Luc (André Nepveu) (1881–1959), 402 Duvergier de Hauranne, Ernest (1843–1877), 403 Duvivier, Julien (1896–1967), 404 Dylan, Bob (1941–), 405 Ecole de Brive, L’, 409 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890–1969), 412 Elf-Aquitaine (TotalFinaElf ), 413 Elvis Gratton, 414 Ernst, Max (1891–1976), 415 Erté (Romain De Tirtoff ) (1892–1990), 417 Escomel, Gloria (1941–), 418 Etienne, Franck (1936–), 418 Etienne, Gérard (1936–), 420 Evangeline, 421 Evans, Walker (1903–1975), 422 Expo 67, 423 Exposition Coloniale (1931), 425 Exposition universelle (1900), 427 Fanon, Frantz (1925–1961), 429 Fashion, 431 Feminisms, 434
Filles du Roy, 439 Film Noir, 440 Fini, Leonor (1908–1996), 441 Firmin, Anténor (1850–1911), 443 Fishing, 444 Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896–1940), 447 Flanner, Janet (1892–1978), 448 Florence, Hercules (Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence) (1804–1879), 450 Florey, Robert (1900–1979), 450 Florida, 452 Folch-Ribas, Jacques (1928–), 455 Fonda, Jane (1937–), 456 Ford Motor Company, 457 Foreign Policy, 1776–1945, 458 Foreign Policy, 1945–Present, 464 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984), 468 France Telecom, 469 Francofolies, Les, 470 François I, King of France, 472 Francophonie, La, 473 Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790), 474 Fréchette, Louis (1839–1908), 476 French and Indian War, 477 French Revolution, 482 Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de (1622–1698), 488 Fry, Varian (1907–1967), 489 Fuentes, Carlos (1928–), 490 Fur Trade, 492 Gagnon, Clarence Alphonse (1881–1942), 497 Gainsbourg, Serge (Lucien Ginsburg) (1928–1991), 498 Gallant, Mavis (1922–), 499 García Márquez, Gabriel (1928–), 501 Garou (Pierre Garand) (1972–), 502 Gary, Romain (Roman Kacew) (1914–1980), 503 Gasnier, Louis J. (1878–1963), 504 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 505 Gauguin, (Eugène Henry) Paul (1848–1903), 507 Gaulle, General Charles André-Marie-Joseph de (1890–1970), 509 Gay Movement, 511 Genêt, Edmond-Charles (1763–1834), 514 Genet, Jean (1910–1986), 515
CONTENTS Girard, François (1963–), 516 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry (1926–), 517 Gleizes, Albert (1881–1953), 519 Glissant, Edouard (1928–), 521 Godard, Jean-Luc (1930–), 523 Godbout, Jacques (1933–), 525 Gonçalves de Magalhães, Domingos José (1811–1882), 526 Goodis, David (1917–1967), 527 Grandbois, Alain (1900–1975), 528 Grappelli, Stéphane (1908–1997), 529 Gratiant, Gilbert (1895–1985), 530 Green, Julien Hartridge (1900–1998), 531 Grenada, 532 Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des (1618–1696), 534 Guadeloupe, 535 Guattari, Félix (1930–1992), 540 Guérin, Daniel (1904–1988), 541 Guiana, 542 Guillemin, Roger (1924–), 545 Guy-Blaché, Alice (1873–1968), 546 Hagège, Claude (1936–), 549 Hahn, Reynaldo (1874–1947), 550 Haiti, 551 Hassam, Frederick Childe (1859–1935), 557 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864), 558 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961), 560 Hébert, Anne (1916–2560), 561 Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961), 562 Hémon, Louis (1880–1913), 564 Hennepin, Father Louis (1626–?; exact date of death unknown, sometime after 1701), 564 Heredia, José Maria de (1842–1905), 566 Héroux, Denis (1940–), 567 Himes, Chester (1909–1984), 568 Hip-Hop Music and Culture, 570 Hippolyte, Hector (1894–1948), 571 Hocquenghem, Guy (1946–1988), 572 Hollywood’s French Caribbean, 573 Hollywood’s Paris, 575 Hollywood’s Quebec, 577 Houdon, Jean-Antoine (1741–1828), 579 Hugo, Victor-Marie (1802–1885), 580 Huguenots, 582 Huidobro, Vicente (1893–1948), 583 Hunchback of Notre-Dame/Notre-Dame de Paris, 584
XI
Hurons, 586 Huston, Nancy (1953–), 588 Hydro-Quebec, 589 Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne Sieur d’ (1661–1706), 593 Illinois Country, 594 Indian Wars, 597 Indiana, 598 Inspector Clouseau, 600 Iowa, 601 Iraq War (2003–present), 602 Jacob, Suzanne (Suzanne Amos) (1943–), 609 Jazz, 611 James, Henry (1843–1916), 610 Jean, Raymond (1925–), 615 Jeanmaire, Zizi (Renée) (1924–), 616 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826), 617 Jesuits, 620 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre (1953–), 623 Joan of Arc, 624 Jodorowsky, Alejandro (1929–), 625 Joliet (Jolliet), Louis (1645–1700), 627 Jones, John Paul (1747–1792), 628 Josephson, Matthew (1899–1978), 630 Jourdan, Louis (Louis Gendre) (1919–), 631 Jouvet, Louis (1887–1951), 632 Julien, Pauline (1928–1998), 633 Juneau, Laurent Solomon (1793–1856), 634 Jutra, Claude (1930–1986), 636 Kaplan, Nelly (1934–), 639 Kassav’, 640 Kattan, Naïm (1928–), 641 Kelly, Gene (Eugene Curran Kelly) (1912–1996), 642 Kentucky, 645 Kerouac, Jack (Jean Louis Kerouac) (1922–1969), 647 Kerry, John (1943–), 648 Klein, William (1928–), 649 Kokis, Sergio (1944–), 650 La Condamine, Charles-Marie de (1701–1744), 653 La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de, Sieur (1683–1765), 654 La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de (1741–1788), 655
XII
CONTENTS
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, FrançoisAlexandre-Frédéric de, Duc (1747–1827), 656 La Rochelle, 657 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur (1643–1687), 660 Labat, Jean-Baptiste (1664–1738), 661 Labro, Philippe (1936–), 662 Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981), 663 Lachaise, Gaston (1882–1935), 664 Lafayette, Marquis de (1757–1834), 666 Laferrière, Dany (1953–), 668 Laforgue, Jules (1860–1887), 669 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de (1666–1715), 670 Lake Champlain, 671 Lalemant, Jérôme (1593–1665), 674 Lam, Wilfredo (or Wifredo) (1902–1982), 676 Lambert, Christophe (1957–), 677 Lamothe, Arthur (1928–), 677 Lanctôt, Micheline (1947–), 679 Lang, Jack (1939–), 680 Language, 681 Lanois, Daniel (1951–), 689 Lara, Christian (1939–), 690 Laroche, Maximilien (1937–), 691 Lassalle, Eugène (1859–1929), 692 Laure, Carole (1948–), 693 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse) (1846–1870), 694 Laval, François de Montmorency (1623–1708), 695 Le Bris, Michel (1944–), 696 Le Clézio, Jean Marie Gustave (1940–), 697 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard JeanneretGris) (1887–1965), 698 Le Franc, Marie (1879–1964), 699 Le Havre, 700 Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques (ca. 1533–1588), 701 Lebel, Jean-Jacques (1936–), 703 Leclerc, Charles-Victor-Emmanuel, General (1772–1802), 704 Leclerc, Félix (1914–1988), 705 Leclercq, Chrétien (?–ca. 1698), 706 Lefebvre, Jean Pierre (1941–), 707 Legrand, Michel (1932–), 708 Leiris, Michel (1901–1990), 710 L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles (1755–1825), 711
Lepage, Robert (1957–), 712 Lesueur, Charles Alexandre (1778–1846), 713 Lettres d’une Péruvienne, 714 Lévesque, René (1922–1987), 715 Lévis, François Gaston de, Duc (1720–1787), 717 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–), 718 Levy, Raoul J. (1922–1966), 719 Leyrac, Monique (Monique Tremblay) (1928–), 720 Liberalism, 721 Lispector, Clarice (1920–1977), 723 Literary Relations, 724 Loewy, Raymond (1893–1986), 730 Loopy De Loop, 731 L’Oréal, 732 Lorimier, Louis (1748–1812), 732 Losey, Joseph (1909–1984), 733 Louisbourg, 734 Louisiana, 738 Louisiana Purchase, 743 Louis-Philippe, King of France (1773–1850), 745 Lucky Luke, 746 Lyonnaise des Eaux (Lyonnaise des EauxDumez), 747 Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–1998), 748 Madame Bovary (1857), 749 Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone) (1958–), 750 Maigret, 751 Maillet, Antonine (1929–), 752 Maine, 753 Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de (1612–1676), 755 Malaquais, Jean (Vladimir Malacki) (1908–1998), 755 Maldoror, Sarah (1939–), 757 Malle, Louis (1932–1995), 758 Mallet, Marilú (1944–), 759 Malraux, André (1901–1976), 760 Mance, Jeanne (1606–1673), 761 Manitoba, 763 Marbois, François, Marquis de BarbéMarbois (1745–1837), 767 Marceau, Sophie (Sophie Maupu) (1966–), 768 Maria Chapdelaine, 768 Maritain, Jacques (1883–1973), 771
CONTENTS Marker, Chris (Christian François BoucheVilleneuve) (1921–), 772 Marquette, Jacques (1637–1675), 773 Marshall, Bill (G. William Marshall) (1919–1994), 774 Marshall Plan, The, 775 Martinique, 778 Masson, André (1896–1987), 781 Mathieu, Mireille (1946–), 782 Matisse, Henri (1869–1954), 783 Mattelart, Armand (1936–), 785 Maurois, André (Emile Herzog) (1885–1967), 786 Maximin, Daniel (1947–), 787 McDonald’s, 788 McKay, Claude (1889–1948), 788 Melville, Jean-Pierre (Jean-Pierre Grunbach) (1917–1973), 791 Mendès France, Pierre (1907–1982), 792 Ménil, René (1907–), 793 Mérimée, Prosper (1803–1870), 794 Merrill, Stuart Fitz Randolph (1863–1915), 796 Métis, 797 Mexico, 800 Michaux, Henri (1899–1984), 803 Michelin (Compagnie Générale des Etablissements Michelin), 804 Michigan, 805 Miller, Henry Valentine (1891–1980), 807 Mineral Water, 808 Minnesota, 810 Miranda, Francisco de (1750–1816), 812 Miron, Gaston (1928–1996), 813 Misérables, Les, 814 Mississippi, 816 Mississippi River, 817 Missouri, 819 Mitterrand, François (1916–1996), 819 Mobile, 822 Modernization, 823 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622–1673), 827 Mons, Pierre Dugua de (1560–1628), 829 Montagnais, 830 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–1592), 831 Montand, Yves (Ivo Livi) (1921–1991), 832 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de MontcalmGrozon, Marquis de (1712–1759), 834 Montigny, Louvigny de (1876–1955), 835
XIII
Montreal, 836 Morand, Paul (1888–1976), 840 Morgan, Michèle (Simone Roussel) (1920–), 840 Morin, Edgar (1921–), 841 Music (Classical), 843 Music (Folk), 847 Music (Pop), 850 Nantes, 853 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 855 Nelligan, Emile (1879–1941), 858 Neruda, Pablo (Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Bosoalto) (1904–1973), 859 New Brunswick, 860 New France, 863 New Orleans, 866 Newfoundland, 872 Niagara Falls, 874 Nicot, Jean (ca. 1525–1600), 876 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore (1765–1833), 877 9/11: Cultural Perspectives, 878 9/11: Political Perspectives, 880 Noble Savage, 883 Norman, Jessye (1945–), 885 Nougaro, Claude (1929–2004), 886 Nova Scotia, 887 Nuclear Technology, 891 Ocampo, Victoria (1890–1979), 895 Ohio, 896 Ollivier, Emile (1940–), 897 Ontario, 898 Ottawa, 900 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809), 903 Painting, 906 Palcy, Euzhan (1957–), 910 Panama Canal, 911 Parent, Mimi (1924–), 914 Parkman, Francis (1823–1893), 916 Paz, Octavio (1914–1998), 917 Péan, Stanley (1966–), 918 Peck, Raoul (1953–), 919 Pepe Le Pew, 920 Pépin, Ernest (1950–), 921 Perec, Georges (1936–1982), 922 Péret, Benjamin (1899–1959), 923 Perrault, Pierre (1927–1999), 925
XIV
CONTENTS
Perrot, Nicolas (ca. 1644–1717), 926 Petrucciani, Michel (1962–1999), 927 Peugeot—PSA Peugeot Citroën SA, 928 Photography, 929 Piazzolla, Astor Pantaleón (1921–1992), 932 Pineau, Gisèle (1956–), 933 Piracy and Privateers, 934 Placoly, Vincent (1946–1992), 936 Plamondon, Luc (1942–), 938 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849), 939 Pompidou, Georges (1911–1974), 940 Pontiac (ca. 1720–1769), 941 Pool, Léa (1950–), 943 Pornography, 944 Porter, Cole (1891–1964), 946 Positif, 947 Poulin, Jacques (1937–), 948 Poullet, Hector (1938–), 949 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885–1972), 950 Primitivism, 952 Project FAMOUS, 954 Provost, Joseph (1847–1918), 956 Quebec, 959 Quebec Act, 964 Quebec, Battle of, 966 Quebec City, 969 Quiet Revolution, 972 Radisson, Pierre-Esprit (ca. 1636–1710), 975 Ray, Man (Emmanuel Radnitsky) (1897–1976), 976 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François (1713–1796), 978 Reeves, Hubert (1932–), 979 Reichenbach, François (1922–1993), 980 Reinhardt, Django (1910–1953), 981 Remakes, 982 Reno, Jean (1948–), 984 Renoir, Jean (1894–1979), 985 Republicanism, 986 Resnais, Alain (1922–), 992 Revel, Jean-François (1924–), 993 Revue du monde noir, La, 994 Ribaut, Jean (ca. 1520–1565), 995 Richard, Nelly (1948–), 996 Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de, (1585–1642), 997 Riel, Louis (1844–1885), 998 Rivet, Paul (1876–1958), 1000
Roberval, Jean-François de la Roque, Seigneur de (1500–1561), 1001 Robin, Régine (1939–), 1002 Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de (1725–1807), 1003 Rochefort, 1004 Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917), 1005 Romains, Jules (1885–1972), 1007 Ronfard, Jean-Pierre (1929–2003), 1008 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1882–1945), 1009 Rosay, Françoise (Françoise Bandy de Nadèche) (1891–1974), 1011 Rouch, Jean (1917–2004), 1012 Roumain, Jacques (1907–1945), 1014 Roy, Gabrielle (1909–1983), 1015 Rubber, 1016 Ruiz, Raúl (1941–), 1019 Sábato, Ernesto (1911–), 1021 Saer, Juan Jose (1937–), 1022 Saint Lawrence River, 1023 Saint Louis, 1027 Saint Lucia, 1028 Saint Martin, 1029 Saint Phalle, Niki de (Catherine Marie-Agnès de Saint Phalle) (1930–2002), 1030 Saint-Amand, Edris (1918–2004), 1031 Saint-Denis, Louis Juchereau de (1684–1744), 1032 Sainte-Hélène, Marie-André Regnard Duplessis de (1687–1760), 1033 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de (1900–1944), 1034 Saint-John Perse (Alexis Léger) (1887–1975), 1035 Saint-Malo, 1036 Saint-Mémin, Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de (1770–1852), 1038 Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, 1039 Sand, George (Aurore Dupin) (1804–1876), 1041 Santo Domingo, 1042 Sarduy, Severo (1937–1993), 1045 Sargent, John Singer (1854–1925), 1046 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980), 1047 Saskatchewan, 1050 Schoelcher, Victor (1804–1893), 1051 Schuessele, Christian (1824–1879), 1052 Schwarz-Bart, André (1928–), 1053 Schwarz-Bart, Simone (1938–), 1054 Scorza, Manuel (1928–1983), 1056
CONTENTS Sculpture, 1057 Seberg, Jean (1938–1979), 1061 Segalen, Victor (1878–1919), 1062 Serge, Victor (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) (1890–1947), 1064 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques (1924–), 1065 Shuman, Mort (1936–1991), 1066 Siegfried, André (1875–1959), 1067 Sign Language, 1068 Signoret, Simone (Simone Kaminker) (1921–1985), 1070 Simon, Simone (1911–2005), 1071 Simone, Nina (Eunice Waymon) (1933–2003), 1072 Simoneau, Yves (1957–), 1073 Slavery, 1075 Sodexho, 1079 Solanas, Fernando (1936–), 1080 Soupault, Philippe (1897–1990), 1081 Space Technology, 1082 Sport, 1083 Stanton, Theodore Weld (1851–1925), 1089 Statue of Liberty, The, 1090 Steamboats, 1092 Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), 1093 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), 1095 Sudbury, 1096 Suez Company (Compagnie de Suez/Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez), 1097 Sugar, 1098 Supervielle, Jules (1884–1960), 1100 Surrealism, 1101 Swaim, Bob (1943–), 1104 Tadoussac, 1107 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de (1754–1838), 1108 Talon, Jean (1625–1694), 1109 Tanguy, Yves (1900–1955), 1110 Tanner, Henry Ossawa (1859–1937), 1111 Tavernier, Bertrand (1941–), 1112 Tel Quel, 1113 Television, 1115 Tertre, Jean-Baptiste du (1610–1687), 1118 Texas, 1119 Theater, 1121 Theory, 1126 Thériault, Yves (1915–1983), 1130 Thurber, James (1894–1961), 1131 Timber, 1132
XV
Tobacco, 1134 Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–1859), 1137 Toklas, Alice B. (1877–1967), 1140 Tourism, 1141 Tourneur, Jacques (1904–1977), 1146 Tourneur, Maurice (Maurice Thomas) (1876–1961), 1147 Toussaint L’Ouverture, François (1742–1803), 1148 Travel Writing, 1151 Treaty of Paris (1763), 1154 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 1155 Tremblay, Lise (1957–), 1156 Tremblay, Michel (1942–), 1157 Tremblay, Rémi (1847–1926), 1158 Trenet, Charles (1913–2001), 1159 Trinidad, 1160 Tristan, Flora (1803–1844), 1161 Tropiques, 1163 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott (1919–21164), 1164 Truffaut, François (1932–1984), 1165 Twain, Mark (1835–1910), 1167 Ursulines, 1169 Utopias, 1170 Vadim, Roger (1928–21174), 1173 Vallières, Pierre (1938–1998), 1174 Van Peebles, Melvin (1932–), 1175 Varèse, Edgar (1883–1965), 1176 Vattemare, Nicolas-Marie Alexandre (1796–1864), 1178 Veber, Francis (1937–), 1179 Venezuela, 1180 La Vérendrye Family, 1182 Vermont, 1183 Verne, Jules (1828–1905), 1184 Verrazzano, Giovanni da (ca. 1485 to death unknown), 1186 Vian, Boris (1920–1959), 1187 Viatte, Auguste (1901–1993), 1188 Vielé-Griffin, Francis (Egbert Ludovicus Vielé) (1864–1937), 1189 Vietnam War, 1190 Vigneault, Gilles (1928–), 1192 Vigny, Alfred de (1797–1863), 1193 Villechaize, Hervé (1943–1993), 1195 Vivendi Universal, 1196 Vodun, 1196 Voisine, Roch (1963–), 1197
XVI
CONTENTS
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de (1674–1778), 1198 Warner-Vieyra, Myriam (1939–), 1201 Washington, George (1732–1799), 1202 Westerns, 1205 Whaling, 1208 Wharton, Edith (1862–1936), 1210 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill (1834–1903), 1211 White, Edmund (1940–), 1213 Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983), 1214 Williams, William Carlos (1883–1963), 1215
Wilson, Lambert (1958–), 1216 Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924), 1217 Wine, 1219 Wisconsin, 1224 World War I, 1225 World War II, 1228 Wright, Richard (1908–1960), 1234 Yourcenar, Marguerite (Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour) (1903–1987), 1237 Zobel, Joseph (1915–), 1239 Zola, Emile (1840–1902), 1240
Index, 1243 About the Editor, 1297
N NANTES Nantes is located in western France, 386 kilometers (232 miles) from Paris. It is situated on the north bank of the Loire estuary at the confluence of the Loire and Erdre rivers, 55 kilometers (33 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean. Today, Nantes houses the prefecture of the departement of LoireAtlantique and is the administrative capital of the region of the pays de Loire. The census of 1999 recorded 277,728 inhabitants in the city and 550,000 in its agglomeration, making Nantes France’s sixth-largest city. Nantes was an oppidum of the Iron Age Namnetes tribe, then a Gallo-Roman civitas center. Here, the Loire divides around several islands, allowing for easy river crossing. A deep port was available at La Fosse, allowing for riverine and maritime trade, with access to the Bay of Biscay. From the early Middle Ages, the city was a bishopric, and an administrative and judicial center for the dukes of Brittany. In 1491, Duchess Anne married Charles VIII, then Louis XII, of France (1499), and in 1532 Brittany was formally incorporated into the French kingdom. Nantes became a royal financial center with the provincial Chambre des Comptes. A municipality was created in 1559. In 1589, Nantes joined the
Catholic League rebellion, submitting to Henry IV in 1598. Henry granted legal toleration for French Protestants in the Edict of Nantes. During the Middle Ages, Nantes became an entrepôt for the exchange of commodities produced on the Atlantic littoral. Textiles, particularly canvas, and wheat produced in Brittany, Lower Normandy, and Poitou were traded in northern Spain for bullion, iron, and exotic goods. Spanish products, along with local salt, wine, and wheat, were redistributed around the Breton coast, into France, and to the North Sea region. By the mid-sixteenth century, approximately 150 Spanish families resided in Nantes, and there were special trading agreements with Bilbao; a formal organization for Hispanic trade, the Contrataction, was formed in 1603. In the seventeenth century, trade with Holland and England became the dominant overseas commerce for Nantes, above all in wine and salt. From about 1650, Nantes’s commerce turned toward direct trade with the Antilles, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and SaintDomingue and its corollary, the slave trade. Printed cottons, liquor, and ironware were traded for slaves on the coast of Guinea who were then exchanged in the Caribbean and Americas for rum, cotton, and cane
853
854
NANTES
sugar. Approximately 350,000 slaves were sold by Nantais during the eighteenth century, representing about 45 percent of the total French traffic. The outfitting of slave ships accounted for, in different years, 10 to 30 percent of all outfitting in the port of Nantes. This trade stimulated industrial production, especially the manufacture of cotton textiles (indiennes), canvas making, and shipbuilding. From 1680, Nantes grew rapidly, from 40,000 inhabitants to 90,000 in 1780. The city profited from commercial links with the American colonies during the war against Great Britain (1775– 1783), and Benjamin Franklin passed through the city in 1776. The increasing wealth of the city’s merchants was reflected in large-scale urbanization projects. The quays of Nantes and the bed of the Loire were improved, for the river suffered from channel shift and silting. As shipping tonnage increased, outer ports such as Saint-Nazaire and Paimboeuf were developed, and a flotilla of barges transported cargoes to and from Nantes. The medieval ramparts were demolished, and the Chambre des Comptes was rebuilt. Speculative residential projects saw the building of new suburbs with fine hotels, beginning with the Ile Feydeau. New public buildings such as the theater and exchange were built in the baroque style. The French Revolution brought political and economic dislocation. The Vendée revolt threatened the city in June 1793; in October, Jean-Baptiste Carrier was sent to pacify the region, and up to 10,000 people were imprisoned or executed in Nantes, most notoriously by drowning in the Loire. Naval blockade by Great Britain (1793– 1815) reduced port traffic from 260,000 to 42,000 tons by 1807. Economic downturn
was compounded by the abolition of slavery in the French colonies (1794) and the prohibition of the trade itself in 1814. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nantes rebuilt its maritime economy and became an important industrial center, producing for a domestic French and a world market. In 1851, Nantes was linked to Paris by railway. Up to World War II, Nantes was a major fishprocessing center for sardines, tuna, and mackerel from the Atlantic fisheries. State tobacco manufacturers and commercial food processors, particularly the Lu biscuit factory from 1887, were important employers. Naval docks and private shipbuilding yards occupied the Loire estuary from Nantes to Saint-Nazaire. Nantes attracted large numbers of rural migrants and grew to 200,000 inhabitants by 1914. With the expansion of large-scale industry came the development of workers’ organizations with syndicates appearing from 1869, and labor activism for improved pay and conditions was prominent from 1890 to 1914. The author Jules Verne was born in Nantes in 1828. After World War I, the traditional manufactures continued to grow, despite the Depression of the early 1930s, and were augmented by new aviation and petrochemical industries. After the adoption of a renewal plan in 1920, there was significant urban development. The river Erdre was culverted underground, and the land between many of the Loire islands was reclaimed, allowing the city center to be remodeled with new roads and buildings. Nantes was occupied by the German army in 1940 and suffered badly from Allied bombing in 1943. Since 1945, domestic and international communications have improved,
NATO
with motorways, TGV links, and an international airport. Supported by the state, the port of Nantes-Saint-Nazaire has developed more than 5 kilometers (3 miles) of quays, and the Loire has been deepened to allow entry to larger shipping vessels. Statesubsidized shipbuilding continues: SaintNazaire recently fitted the new Queen Mary liner for P&O. Yet port activity and ship construction have declined, forcing a restructuring of industry and employment. Electronic and mechanical engineering have grown, together with food processing, information technology, and the tertiary and service sectors, which now employ 75 percent of the population. Nantes is a center for education and research, with a university of 25,000 students. Today, her inhabitants originate from many parts of France, Europe, and the wider world; while the city remains Atlantic in location and sentiment, it is now part of the global economy. Liz Tingle See also: Aviation; Brittany; Catholic Church; Cotton; Fishing; Franklin, Benjamin; French Revolution; Guadeloupe; Martinique; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Sugar; Tobacco; Verne, Jules; Wine; World War I; World War II. References Croix, Alain, ed. Nantes dans l’histoire de la France. Nantes: Ouest Editions, 1991. ———. Du Sentiment de l’histoire dans une ville d’eau: Nantes. Thonon-les-Bains: Société Présence du Livre, 1991. Martin, Gaston. L’Ere des négriers (1714–1774): Nantes au XVIIIème siècle. Paris: Editions Karthala, 1993. Pétré-Grenouilleau, Olivier. Nantes au temps de la traite des Noirs (La vie quotidienne). Paris: Hachette littératures, 1998. Pinol, Jean-Luc, ed. Atlas historique des villes de France. Paris: Hachette, 1997. Wismes, Armel de. Nantes et le temps des négriers. Paris: France Empire, 1983.
855
NATO (NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION) For a long time, the North Atlantic was the playground of the traditional European merchant seafaring nations, and subsequently, with the rise to dominance of the Royal Navy, it became the backyard of the British admiralty. During and after World War II, however, strategic and tactical naval control of the Atlantic passed from Britain to the United States, and increasingly, the term “North Atlantic” slipped rhetorically from a concrete denotation of a geographical expanse of ocean and coastlines to a metonymic designation of a geostrategic space. Since the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, the role of NATO has changed somewhat from its initial incarnation, but over forty years of the latter part of the American twentieth century, it was both a practical example of the difficulties of French-Atlantic relations and a forum for the discussion and elaboration of new ways of thinking about those relations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in 1949 by the United States and a number of Western European nations (including France) anxious to create a collective-defense agreement capable of counterbalancing the military threat of the Red Army in Sovietdominated Eastern Europe. The headquarters of NATO were for a considerable period located at Rocquencourt near Paris, until divergent opinions between John F. Kennedy and de Gaulle on the best way to provide for the defense of France and Europe provoked the withdrawal of France from NATO’s integrated military command in July 1966. During the 1950s, French governments and voters were for the most part satisfied with the nature of
856
NATO
Representatives from twelve nations convene in Washington, D.C., to sign the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949. (Library of Congress)
NATO, although the issue of the rearming of West Germany and her inclusion in the allied defense of Western Europe (as a member of the stillborn EDC or of NATO) provoked periodic unrest among the Right, the Communist Party was outraged by France’s aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union, and Gaullists fretted over the limitations on French sovereignty imposed by such a military treaty. The return to power of de Gaulle in 1958 and the acceleration he gave to France’s drive to acquire nuclear technology, space technology, and an independent nuclear capability provided the conditions for France to question her place within the organization. Although France remained a member of NATO after 1966, the later history of
NATO is the history of Franco-American disagreements over the nature of military (and other) relations between the United States and Western Europe. The collective-defense alliance instituted by the Brussels Treaty of 1948 and the Marshall Plan providing U.S. loans to the struggling economies of Western Europe were the first attempts by the wartime Allies to organize their future defense against the menace of Soviet military action. The Brussels Treaty concerned only Britain, France, and the Benelux countries and was soon superseded by NATO, which crucially included the United States (and Canada) as coguarantors of Western Europe’s military integrity. NATO and the Marshall Plan thus represented the West-
NATO
ern response to the Soviet “Iron Curtain” in Eastern Europe and reinforced the slide toward cold war. While strategists of conventional and nuclear conflict began to develop the game theories of war in Europe or war between the superpowers, NATO’s problems were mainly traditional ones, such as what to do about Germany and how to defend against the numerical superiority of the Red Army. However, when Britain and France had acquired operational nuclear weapons, the issues become more complex and concerned questions of sovereignty and European collaboration over Europe’s defense rather than simple reliance on the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Europe’s potential nuclear independence (not possible in terms of conventional forces), combined with the success of economic and political cooperation in the form of the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community) and (from 1958) the Common Market, led de Gaulle, for example, to consider a nuclear partnership with the United Kingdom that would allow Europe to provide its own protection. France’s Gaullist desire for French sovereignty untrammeled by U.S. interference, and for European sovereignty managed by France and Britain within a Europe of Nations, foundered in 1962 on the (strained) special relationship between the United States and Britain. After the United States withdrew from the development of the missile that would have made Britain’s deterrent operational, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and President Kennedy compromised by agreeing that the United Kingdom should acquire U.S. Polaris missiles, subsequently to be made available to France. But de Gaulle rejected this offer, wary of the reliance in which it would place France and confident in French space technology, and although
857
France attempted to counter the U.S.-U.K. axis with Franco-German cooperation, Germany, like the United Kingdom (but without nuclear forces), ultimately retained her dependence on the United States within NATO. In 1966, France withdrew from active participation in the organization’s operations. De Gaulle’s concerns over the American understanding of the role of Europe in a conflict with the Soviet Union—an area to be fought over as hostilities escalated to an intercontinental nuclear exchange—go to the heart of the ambiguities of the term “North Atlantic.” U.S. nuclear strategy was unacceptable to France, since it seemed to imply that Europe and France were merely expendable partners in NATO, although the treaty was intended to enshrine a community of interest across the French Atlantic between the Western allies. During the 1970s and 1980s, Presidents Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand strove to find interpretations of Euro-American nuclear solidarity that satisfied France’s traditionally Gaullist “sanctuarization” of her frontiers and the demands of cooperation within the Atlantic alliance, but NATO has always remained a problematic—if generally successful—case study of the tensions of Franco-American relations. Hugh Dauncey See also: Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Gaulle, General Charles de; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Marshall Plan, The; Mitterrand, François; Nuclear Technology; Space Technology; World War II. References Di Nolfo, Ennio. The Atlantic Pact Forty Years Later: A Historical Reappraisal. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1991. Pascallon, Pierre, ed. L’Alliance atlantique et l’OTAN, 1949–1999: un demi-siècle de succès. Brussels: Bruylant, 2000.
858
NELLIGAN, EMILE
NELLIGAN, EMILE (1879–1941) Celebrated as Quebec’s national poet. Nelligan was born in Montreal on Christmas Eve, 1879, the first child of David Nelligan, whose parents had emigrated from Dublin in the mid-1850s, and Emilie Amanda Hudon, the descendant of a French Canadian family established in the New World since the seventeenth century. Raised in a mixed anglophone and francophone environment, he favored the cultural heritage of his mother and was educated in French, though his attendance and application at school were always patchy and desultory. His writing career, like that of Arthur Rimbaud, with whom Quebec commentators have often compared him, lasted barely three years before mental illness overtook him and forced his long internment until his death in 1941. But during the brief period 1896 to 1899, he produced a substantial corpus of poetry, which he read at the weekly meetings of the literary group, the Ecole littéraire de Montréal, to which his friend Arthur de Bussières introduced him in 1897. His work, in many respects, bears a clear resemblance to that of the poets of metropolitan France. It has a melancholy cast that may reflect Nelligan’s schoolboy reading of Millevoye, André Chénier, and Alfred de Musset, but much more directly, in theme and also in form (for example, in its frequent use of the sonnet), it echoes the work of many major French postromantic poets such as Baudelaire and especially Paul Verlaine, as well as the Parnassian writing of José María de Heredia or the symbolist writing of Albert Samain or Henri de Régnier. Nevertheless, Nelligan’s search for emotional and spiritual security, his profound sense of personal uncertainty, and
his unconvincing bursts of elation shot through with despair give emotional force and a measure of individuality to his writing. Moreover, on the level of poetic taste alone, the adolescent poet shows striking independence of mind at a time when Baudelaire and Verlaine were deemed anathema in a staunchly Catholic Quebec. Poems such as “La Romance du vin” (“The Song of Wine”) and “Rêve d’artiste” (“An Artist’s Dream”) (the latter dedicated to the journalist Robertine Barry) are classic references in Quebec poetry. However, Nelligan’s status as a literary monument is arguably as much a matter of myth as of absolute and unproblematic poetic achievement. The brief period of his actual writing and his long confinement within a mental institution have allowed a series of twentieth-century writers and commentators to construct their own iconic versions of Nelligan aligned on their personal aesthetic and political preoccupations. Nelligan has thus been viewed variously and contradictorily as a victim of poetry and (as in Normand Chaurette’s play Rêve d’une nuit d’hôpital [“Dream of a Night in Hospital,” 1980]) as a conquering figure of the pure poetic imagination; as a split personality, born of and testifying to the split francophone/anglophone character of Quebec; as a collective national subject, the embodiment of francophone victimhood as defined by the defeat on the Plains of Abraham; as an independent hero (in Michèle Lalonde’s 1968 manifesto poem, “Speak White”); as a rebellious and misunderstood genius in Félix Leclerc’s poem “Nelligan” (1978) and Michel Tremblay’s opera Nelligan (1990); and in his troubled relations with his mother and with the printer le père Seers in Robert Favreau’s film Nelligan (1991). Rachel Killick
NERUDA, PABLO See also: Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre; Catholic Church; Heredia, José Maria de; Language; Leclerc, Félix; Montreal; Quebec; Tremblay, Michel. References Brissette, Pascal. Nelligan dans tous ses états: Un mythe national. Montreal: Fides, 1998. Michon, Jacques. Emile Nelligan: Les racines du rêve. Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal; Sherbrooke: Les Editions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 1983. Wyczynski, Paul. Emile Nelligan: Biographie. Montreal: Fides, 1998.
NERUDA, PABLO (NEFTALÍ RICARDO REYES BOSOALTO) (1904–1973) Writer, poet, and Nobel laureate. Neruda is a national literary icon in his native country of Chile, but he lived much of his life abroad, including periods as Chilean consul and later ambassador in Paris. He studied pedagogy and French at the University of Chile in Santiago in 1921 and as a francophile lived in France on various occasions during his lifetime. The affection appears to have been reciprocated, as Neruda’s work was, and continues to be, well received and widely read in France, with much of his work translated into French. Neruda was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Bosoalto in 1904 in the southern Chilean town of Parral. After his mother’s death, the family moved to the town of Temuco, and it was here as a schoolboy that Neftalí first met the great Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, who was the principal of the adjacent girls’ school. Neftalí Reyes’s first poem, “Enthusiasm and Perseverance,” was published in a local paper in 1917 when he was only thirteen years old. At sixteen, Neftalí adopted the name Pablo
859
Neruda in homage to the Czech writer, Jan Neruda. A prolific writer, during the 1920s Pablo Neruda published Crepusculario (1923), Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair [1924]), Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth [1925]), as well as many poems in magazines such as El Sol, Revista del Oriente, Atenea, the student magazine Juventud, and his own magazine, Caballo de Bastos. From 1927, Neruda had a series of postings as Chilean consul, in Burma, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Singapore, Argentina, and Spain, where he made friends with the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca and witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. It is this period that saw a shift away from the personal toward the political in Neruda’s poetry. Neruda returned to Chile shortly after war broke out, but in 1939 he was posted to Europe again, this time as consul responsible for Spanish refugees in Paris. During the early 1940s, when Neruda was consul to Mexico, his poetry continued to reflect his own political ideals. It was during this period that he wrote Canto General de Chile (which formed the basis for Canto General, published in 1950) and Canto de amor a Stalingrad (Love Song to Stalingrad ) after a visit to Cuba in 1942. It was his political beliefs, and more specifically his allegiance to the Chilean Communist Party, that led to Neruda being removed from his post in Gabriel González Videla’s government in 1948 and fleeing Chile. On Neruda’s various trips to France, he befriended Louis Aragon—a friendship that is recorded in Neruda’s poem “A Louis Aragon” (in Navegaciones y Regresos) and Louis Aragon’s poem “Elégie à Pablo
860
NEW BRUNSWICK
Neruda” (Gallimard). Neruda resumed his work as diplomat in Paris when, in 1970, Salvador Allende became president of Chile, backed by Neruda (who was originally the Communist Party candidate), and appointed him Chilean ambassador in Paris. Neruda died in Santiago shortly after Allende was assassinated in a military coup in September 1973, apparently heartbroken by the tragic turn in Chile’s fortunes. Scarlet Harris See also: Argentina; Chile; Mexico; World War II. References De Costa, René. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Perriam, Christopher. The Late Poetry of Neruda. Oxford: Dolphin, 1989. Poirot, Luis. Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence. Trans. Alastair Reid. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Santí, Enrico Mario. Pablo Neruda: The Poetics of Prophecy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.
NEW BRUNSWICK The Canadian province of New Brunswick is bordered by Quebec and Nova Scotia, the American state of Maine, and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Its total area is 73,440 square kilometers (44,064 miles) and is heavily forested. It has a substantial number of interlinked rivers, which created a natural transport system for the region’s original inhabitants. In 2003, its population was 750,954, one-third of which is French speaking. The French were the first Europeans to arrive in the region. In the early seventeenth century, Samuel de Champlain built on the contacts made between the indigenous Micmac people and French explorers
such as Jacques Cartier in the previous century. Champlain claimed as part of New France the area that was to become New Brunswick and was the first European to begin exploring its interior. Along with present-day Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Maine, the region became known (in English) as Acadia and was subject to limited colonization by France. Caught up in the perennial wars between Britain and France, much of it was ceded to the former country by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Two events occurred in the eighteenth century that were to radically alter the demographic structure of the region. The first, from 1755, was the expulsion by Britain of the 10,000 or so French-speaking colonists within greater Nova Scotia, the reason given being that they refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown. After 1763, some were eventually allowed to return, and many settled in the northern areas of the original Nova Scotia, but the entire region was to become a different place from the one they had been forced to leave. It was now more British and more Protestant. This was caused by the second event, the American War of Independence, which resulted in defeat for Britain in 1783 and the establishment of the United States of America. Of the thousands of people who refused to live in the new republic and made their way to the remaining British territories, including Nova Scotia, around 14,000 settled in and around the Saint John valley. Still smarting from their defeat by the Americans, the British government helped the incomers by supplying them with the essentials necessary for successful settlement, including tools and livestock. The impact of these new English speakers
NEW BRUNSWICK
861
Map of the Maritime Provinces. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
on the area was so great that in the following year, on August 16, 1784, their territory was separated from Nova Scotia and a new province was created. New Brunswick was defiantly named after George III, king of Great Britain, whose German ancestry had endowed him with a number of other titles including duke of Brunswick-Luneburg. The thirteen colonies may have been lost to Britain, but their remaining ones to the north were to remain loyal to the Crown. The new province’s capital city, Fredericton, was named after King George’s second son, and in 1785 the largest settlement in the area, Saint John, became the first incorporated city in Canada. Today,
Fredericton has a population of 47,560 while that of Saint John is 69,661. The largest francophone cities are Edmundston, in the northwestern corner of the province, and Dieppe, in the southeast. The former has a population of around 18,000 with the great majority being of Québécois origin, while Dieppe, which is de facto a suburb of Moncton, is slightly smaller, and its population is Acadian. New Brunswick prospered in the early nineteenth century through an economy based on its greatest natural resource, the forests that covered most of the province. Although farming was always important, it was the timber industry that protected New Brunswick from the postwar economic
862
NEW BRUNSWICK
difficulties that affected much of Britain and its North American colonies. Timber exports to Britain were a major source of wealth, and shipbuilding flourished, particularly in and around Saint John and, to a lesser extent, the Miramichi River. The province also benefited from the large-scale immigration from the British Isles that occurred in the years after the Napoleonic wars, with Ireland, in particular, contributing substantial numbers from both sides of its religious divide. Further economic benefits came from New Brunswick’s capitalizing on its many rivers and lakes, attracting both British and American tourists as salmon fishing for sport became fashionable. It was the successful logging industry on both sides of the border that led to a major dispute between the United States and Britain. The boundary between New Brunswick and Maine had been established after the ending of the American War of Independence, but it lacked precision. Intermittent arguments and outbreaks of violence, reinforced by American support for the rebellions of 1837, culminated the following year in conflict in the Aroostook valley, where two logging groups clashed. Eventually, following negotiations between representatives of the two countries, a permanent border was established that favored Maine more than New Brunswick. This was later to create difficulties for the building of the railroad to link New Brunswick with Quebec and the rest of Canada. In the negotiations that led to Canadian Confederation, New Brunswick was a constant participant, but, having achieved responsible government in 1854, many of its legislators saw union with the Canadas as being at best a grandiose scheme to enhance the status of the politicians of Upper
Canada and at worst a sellout to francophone Quebec. However, after two elections and a new cross-border threat in the form of “Fenian raids” by supporters of Irish independence against the British North American colonies, New Brunswick’s politicians, legislators, and electorate accepted confederation as an unwelcome inevitability. Pressure from London was also a contributory factor. After 1867 and despite the steady expansion of Canada as new provinces entered the confederation, New Brunswick consolidated its place within the political institutions of the new dominion. Although the province was clearly a product of British settlement and imperial ambition, its Acadian population had maintained a steadfast presence in a number of enclaves. By the late nineteenth century, the Acadians had consolidated their position, and with an increasing population they gradually reclaimed their place in New Brunswick society. Among their achievements was the establishment, in the 1860s, of the first Acadian institution for higher education. In 1963, it became the Université de Moncton, New Brunswick’s francophone university. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, approximately one-third (236,665) of New Brunswick’s three-quarters of a million people have French as their mother tongue, and just over 66,000 of them speak only French. Of the 465,000 people whose mother tongue is English, an extremely high proportion (406,000) can only speak that language. It is therefore overwhelmingly the francophones who can truly be described as bilingual. In the second half of the twentieth century, francophones consolidated their position within the province,
NEW FRANCE
and, since 1960, three Acadians have held the office of premier. There have also been two Acadian lieutenant governors, in 1971 and in 2003. Modern New Brunswick is one of the poorer Canadian provinces. Despite its economy having become more closely linked to those of the rest of Canada during the twentieth century, and an industrial base being developed, it suffered badly during the Depression of the interwar years and eventually found itself, once again, on the periphery as the country expanded and prospered. It still depends on its traditional natural resources such as forestry, mining, and fishing to underpin the economy, although tourism and education are increasingly important. But, in its Canadian context, New Brunswick can be regarded as a very successful province because of the way in which the historic antipathies between French and English speakers have largely been overcome. Terry McDonald See also: Acadia; Alberta; Cartier, Jacques; Catholic Church; Champlain, Samuel de; Fishing; Language; Maine; New France; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Ontario; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Timber; Treaty of Utrecht. References Andrew, Sheila M. The Development of Elites in Acadian New Brunswick, 1861–1881. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Buckner, Phillip A., and John G. Reid, eds. The Atlantic Region to Confederation: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Forbes, E. R., and D. A. Muise, eds. The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Thomas, Peter. Lost Land of Moses: The Age of Discovery on New Brunswick’s Salmon Rivers. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2001.
863
NEW FRANCE French establishment in North America begun in the sixteenth century and officially ended with the Louisiana Purchase in the nineteenth century. Sustained French power on the Continent can really be said to have begun in 1608 with the founding of Quebec. Although the French officially left Canada in 1763, defeated at the hands of the British, their influence can still be felt today, most strongly in the Saint Lawrence valley, but also in Acadia and Louisiana. New France primarily refers to the colonies in northeastern America, although by the eighteenth century it nominally spread from Quebec to the foot of the Rockies in the West, beyond Newfoundland in the North, and to Louisiana in the South. The French American adventure can be divided into several distinct eras: early failures, hope and partial success, flourishing commerce, and defeat. In general, the colony failed to meet the considerable expectations of France. France’s interest in the New World, due to domestic strife, came later than most other European powers such as Spain, Portugal, and Britain. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano followed the eastern coast of America from Florida to Newfoundland under the auspices of François I. It was Verrazzano who coined the term “New France.” Following this, Jacques Cartier made three voyages to Canada in 1534, 1535 through 1536, and 1541 through 1542. The first of these resulted in the planting of a cross and the declaration of French dominion at Gaspé. The following voyage led him to explore the Saint Lawrence River and visit both Quebec (Stadacona) and Montreal (Hochelaga). After a disastrous winter at Quebec during
864
NEW FRANCE
which he lost twenty-five men to scurvy, the remainder of the party returned to France. The final voyage reinforced much of what would come in later French involvement in the area, namely religious motives mixed with economic ones and great hopes answered by utter disappointment. Although Cartier ostensibly wished to convert natives, he stressed a desire to find the Northwest Passage to the Indies and to find the riches of the fabled kingdom of Saguenay. However, the gold and diamonds Cartier thought he was bringing home from the voyage were in fact iron pyrite and quartz. These early setbacks led France to turn its sites to the East, and Canada was essentially ignored until the end of the century. Unofficially, many Frenchmen had maintained continuous contact with North America from the earliest years of the sixteenth century. These fishermen, essentially Basques, Bretons, and Normans, established contacts with the natives and traded for furs. By the later part of the century, the fur trade began to take precedence over fishing, a practice that would only augment in the years to come. The importance of the fur trade, as well as economic and cursory religious interests, led Samuel de Champlain to establish a dwelling at Quebec in 1608. Champlain is historically viewed as the official founder of New France. His expeditions were sponsored by businessmen and sanctioned by the Crown, both of whom were interested in the lucrative possibilities of the fur trade. Despite these economic motives, Champlain’s desire to constitute a true colony and to convert natives is uncontestable. The commerce of fur took on an importance such that the colony’s administra-
tion was given over to trading companies for a substantial portion of the seventeenth century. These companies were composed of merchants from cities around France. Their contracts with the state always included obligations to bring settlers to the colony, a requirement that they rarely met. In 1627, Louis XIII’s minister, Cardinal Richelieu, established the Compagnie des Cent-Associés in order to combine commerce with colonial settlement. The results were discouraging. The population by 1663 barely numbered 3,000 individuals, half of them born in Canada. In addition, despite being the highest of any other economic endeavor in the colony, fur trade revenues remained inconsistent and disappointing. Beyond fur and colonization, religious conversion was a clearly stated goal of the French in Canada. As with trade and settlement, however, missionary enthusiasm surpassed results. Despite the efforts of the Jesuits, Recollects, and others, native acceptance of Catholicism remained disappointing. At the end of the century, the Baron de Lahontan would mock, only somewhat unfairly, that the Jesuits had “converted only a few children and dying elders.” One must also place the blame of failure in this second period to military and political events. Champlain had made enemies of the Iroquois by establishing allegiance with their enemies. Quebec fell to the Kirke brothers in 1629 and was returned to France in 1632. Upon France’s return to the colony, the Iroquois were extremely aggressive, destroying the lands of the Hurons, the principal trading partner of the French. These Iroquois wars threatened the colony’s survival.
NEW FRANCE
From here, in 1663, we enter the third of our divisions of New France’s history, that of flourishing commerce. Due especially to Louis XIV and his ministers, principally Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the colony was a relative success at the end of the century. The Carignan-Salières Regiment, led by de Tracy, defeated the Iroquois and established a temporary peace. The regiment provided settlers in the soldiers who stayed behind, and women (filles du roy) were sent from France, establishing a relative equilibrium between the sexes within a generation. In addition, New France became an official province of France, in which was instituted an administrative structure mirroring that of the metropolis. Peace, structure (a governor in charge of military and diplomatic matters, an intendant charged with legal and administrative questions, and a court system), and development followed this renewed interest in the colony. This period saw several important exploratory missions, mostly in the Mississippi region by Dollier de Casson, Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle. Economic expansion, such as shipbuilding, trade with other colonies, and commercial agriculture, was undertaken by the intendant Jean Talon under Colbert’s supervision. As with earlier attempts, however, these endeavors failed in time. The society in place by the end of the century was one of hierarchical relationships. The seigneurs, or landowners, were a class of prestigious elites, but they had little to no contact with the land, from which 80 percent of the population derived its livelihood. There was thus a clear distinction between the country and the city. The urban elite was interested in the favors of the metropolis and colonial authorities,
865
Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), French sailor and explorer who laid claim to the Saint Lawrence River area for France. The illustration depicts him with a globe; in the background a map describes the seas next to the New World. (Bettmann/Corbis)
while the rural populations cleared land and produced pioneers who expanded the size of this French colony. By this time, New France spread throughout the continent, but was highly underpopulated. The smaller British colonies counted twenty times the population of New France in the early eighteenth century. This led the British to feel surrounded by their French neighbors and the land that they possessed. The result was hostility between the two that would lead to the downfall of French Canada. A mere 70,000 French colonists found themselves up against 2 million English enemies. The formidable British military and maritime power was too much for the French, militarily reduced after the War of
866
NEW ORLEANS
the Austrian Succession. On September 13, 1759, General James Wolfe defeated the Marquis de Montcalm in the battle of the Plains of Abraham near Quebec City, and Montreal was taken the next year. The Treaty of Paris (1763) gave New France to England, sealing the fate of major French involvement in America. The history of French engagement in America is one of a struggle for survival. Perhaps due to a conflict of interest between missionaries, merchants, and settlers; to royal apathy; or to an underestimation of the means necessary to succeed, the colony never lived up to expectations. However, the cultural influence of the French in America is still highly palpable today, most notably in Quebec, but also in Louisiana, Acadia, and elsewhere. Brian Brazeau See also: Acadia; Basques; Brittany; Cartier, Jacques; Catholic Church; Champlain, Samuel de; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Filles du Roy; Fishing; Florida; François I, King of France; Fur Trade; Hurons; Jesuits; Joliet, Louis; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Marquette, Jacques; Mississippi; Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de MontcalmGrozon, Marquis de; Montreal; Newfoundland; Quebec; Quebec City; Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de; Saint Lawrence River; Talon, Jean; Treaty of Paris; Verrazzano, Giovanni da. References Eccles, W. J. France in America. Markham: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1990. Mathieu, Jacques. La Nouvelle-France: Les Français en Amérique du Nord XVIe-XVIIe siècle. Paris: Bélin, 1991. Trudel, Marcel. Introduction to New France. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. ———. The Beginnings of New France, 1524–1663. Trans. Patricia Claxton. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973.
NEW ORLEANS Major port, historic southern city, and famous tourist destination with longstanding historical associations with France and French colonies. A Catholic city of many races and ethnic groups, it was known in its earliest period as “Paris-in-the-Wilderness” and in the nineteenth century as “the American Paris.” Located near three vast bodies of water— the Gulf of Mexico, the mouth of the Mississippi River, and Lake Pontchartrain, it has been populated by many ethnic groups at different periods of colonization and subsequent Americanization. Founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, as a French fortification and named after Philip, Duc d’Orleans, regent for the child king, Louis XV, the original city— known as the Vieux Carré or French Quarter—was modeled on France’s La Rochelle. Its first center, known as Place d’Armes, became anglicized in 1849 to Jackson Square, which it remains today. The city has changed hands three times. Founded by the French, it was taken over by the Spanish following the collapse of France’s North American empire at the close of the French and Indian War in 1763. Spain then held it for nearly forty years, though in character it remained a colonial French city. In 1800, Napoléon engaged in secret negotiations with the Spanish to take back Louisiana, which he subsequently sold to the United States in the famous bargain sale, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. It has subsequently remained in American hands, though with many struggles over regional and local power from the powerful and established French creole community. Andrew Jackson famously saved New Orleans from the British in the 1815 Battle
NEW ORLEANS
of New Orleans, but very early in the Civil War, it was occupied by the Union fleet to the fury of its citizens, especially the creole elite. Its “French Quarter” architecture is often mistakenly thought to be the original French, but in fact a major fire in 1788 devastated most buildings, and the reconstruction was largely undertaken by the Spanish (though there is a mixture of Spanish and French influence to this day). The Saint Louis Cathedral, built in 1794, is the oldest in the country, and its opera house was one of the first and most successful. During the nineteenth century, it was one of the largest cities and communication and trade centers in the United States; French influence and control were strong, and it remained a largely French-speaking city. Its development from the nineteenth through twentyfirst centuries into a convention and tourist success story, featuring the Mardi Gras carnival, music (especially jazz, of which it is the birthplace), and a major cuisine and wine culture, all derive from the city’s long French-African heritage. In his famous trek through America, Alexis de Tocqueville discussed the city of New Orleans with a lawyer, Etienne Mazureau; describing it as a “patch-work of peoples,” he asked Mazureau which race dominated and gave direction to the rest. The lawyer told him it was the French who had set the tone and shaped the manners, and this is a line taken by many subsequent commentators. The city’s manners, customs, architecture, cuisine, and social events are often seen as deriving directly from the early colonial settlement. The groundbreaking work undertaken by New Orleans–based scholars, latterly members of the University of New Orleans’s Midlo International Center for New
867
Orleans Studies (notably Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Jerah Johnson), has complicated this, pointing out the enormous influence of slaves brought to the city during the French colonial period, especially between 1719 and 1731. These slaves, almost all from the Senegal River basin, brought with them a formed Bambara culture, and this assertive, confident group intermixed with local Indian populations to shape the habits of Europeans and other slaves. Thus the creolization process within this city was one mixing French and African influences, and the results may be seen in many of the city’s cultural forms, from dance and carnival to music and attitudes to work and leisure. There are many close links between New Orleans and French cities, especially Paris. Historically, one city was founded by members of the other; groups, families, and individuals crossed between the two cities from the early eighteenth century to the present day. The earliest-known work of African American fiction was published in Paris by a New Orleans–born man of color, Victor Séjour. Long after the Louisiana Purchase transformed New Orleans into an apparently “American” city, its cuisine, language, architecture, street names, and social and artistic practices have all been saturated in Frenchness and particularly owed their provenance to the Ur-city. In New Orleans streets today, Parisian-style perfumiers, fashion shops, cafés, restaurants, wrought-iron balconies, and small bookshops serve as a reminder of the profound connections. From the nineteenth century, however, it is the Vieux Carré’s French Catholic creole culture and lifestyle, infused and enriched by African cultural influences, that
868
NEW ORLEANS
Map of New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded in 1718 as a French fortification, the original city—known as the Vieux Carré or French Quarter—was modeled on France’s La Rochelle. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
have attracted writers and visitors—from Mark Twain, Lafcadio Hearn, and Tennessee Williams to Zora Neale Hurston, Jewell Parker Rhodes, and Fatima Shaik. All have sought that combination of what Walker Percy described as “an Anglo-Saxon seriousness of purpose and a Mediterranean mellowness.” Mellow and wicked, too. Tourist leaflets call it the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot, where you should laisser les bons temps rouler, a city of “naughty entertainment and an ongoing celebration of the joy of life.” Often, northern characters or references allude to “a different language down here.” This “different language,” all this wickedness, is often associated with its foundation as a French, thus feminized, city, one associated with “feminine” frivolity and pleasureloving naughtiness. Tourist brochures refer to it as “the Queen of the Mississippi” and “the Queen City,” a “carefree lady [with] a fabulous flair for gracious entertaining.”
Grace King, a Protestant writing of her native city as early as 1895, saw New Orleans as a pleasure-loving Parisian, while William Faulkner later saw the city as an aging Parisian courtesan. It is also a city renowned—like Paris— for its prominent female historical figures and especially writers and creative producers. In any examination of the transatlantic cultural exchanges and conversations between Old and New Worlds, New Orleans’s sociocultural history is associated with diasporic movements of women, be they from French and Spanish colonial families, slaves from Africa and the West Indies, or French Acadians from Nova Scotia. One of the most repeated stories of the city’s early history relates to the shipment of orphan girls brought from France in 1727 as wives-to-be for young men of the highest reputation—thus in the first instance from distinguished French families. Known as “les filles à la cassette,” because of the little trunk containing their trousseau given by the Company of the West, they became a romanticized group of women who symbolized French colonial ideals and aspirations, ensuring the continuity of national/ethnic purity. Second, Longfellow’s poetic heroine Evangeline is the myth of origin of south Louisiana, emblem of a double diaspora sending her ancestors first to colonize Acadia and then to flee south when the British expelled them from Nova Scotia—a figure symbolizing the values assigned to white women in the francophone cultures of the New World. Finally, a celebrated transatlantic traveler is Baroness Pontalba, daughter of a wealthy Spaniard who married her cousin in France then created a scandal when she had a near-fatal fight with her father-in-law, left her husband, and re-
NEW ORLEANS
turned to Louisiana in the 1840s to build, on land she had inherited, the famous Pontalba Apartments around Jackson Square to imprint Europe firmly on the center of the city. She later returned to Paris, where she is now buried. And then there are the individuals and the institutions in the city that stride the gender/race borderlands. One is the figure of Madame Lalurie, a creole hostess in the 1830s from the very distinguished Macarty family, who was prominent at a time when American immigration was growing in the city and the Creole was on the defensive. Harriet Martineau reveled in the very Faulknerian story of this socialite whose gorgeous French Quarter house was set alight in 1834 by her cook, who was chained to the fireplace area. When the padlocked doors were broken down, the house was found to contain a private torture chamber filled with slaves in various degrees of mutilation. Lalurie herself, undoubtedly involved sadomasochistically with her slaves, fled to Paris but was recognized and so moved to the Pyrenees, where she came to a fitting end, gored by a wild boar. Both Martineau and George Washington Cable see this tale as emblematic of the “haunted houses” of a city exploding with racial secrets and injustices. These “haunted houses” recur in later fiction of the city, from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), both of which gothicize New Orleans in terms of its Franco-African heritage. One of the buildings that enshrined such racial inequalities was the legendary early nineteenth-century Quadroon Ballroom, where free women of color were paraded before elite Frenchmen, who took them as mistresses in the system of
869
“plaçage,” often establishing unofficial second families and homes within the city while their legitimate French families were safely outside the city limits, on plantations. This ballroom, renowned for its beautiful women and glamorous soirees, emblem of the mixed sexual and racial congress as well as extreme hypocrisy within the French creole community, provided material for many a visitor to New Orleans and became a key element in the pioneering fiction of Cable and Kate Chopin in later decades. The ballroom was ironically later transformed into a quadroon-founded convent and school for the religious order Sisters of the Holy Family. Its earlier history is a reminder of the uneasy and muddled relationship of the city’s glamorous cultural heritage to its legally brutal racial divisions and exclusions. This symbiosis between the two cities’ nuns and prostitutes, convents and whorehouses, is demonstrated in one of the earliest and most celebrated transatlantic female narratives of a figure struggling between the two states: Manon Lescaut. The novel on which later versions are based is by Abbé Prévost D’Exile, a Jesuit novice, soldier, and priest, who spent much of his life in exile, but who never set foot in Louisiana and for whom—as for his French contemporaries—New Orleans was simply an imaginative site. Manon Lescaut (1731) is the seventh volume of a long picaresque story, Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité (1728 and 1731), of which only one volume has survived. It was published just ten years after the foundation of the city of New Orleans as capital of Louisiana (replacing Biloxi), so addressed urgent contemporary issues of colonization and the problems of ensuring a French Catholic community in an alien land.
870
NEW ORLEANS
Because of its subject matter, it was immediately banned, became a succès de scandale, and was translated rapidly into English. This is the story of the beautiful orphan girl who lives off a rich patron but loves a young impoverished Parisian student, the Chevalier des Grieux, with whom she runs away from the convent. Desperate for money, he takes to gambling and she to prostitution, and as a result she is deported to Louisiana as a fille à la cassette, while he talks his way onto her ship. They land together, claim to be married, and plan to settle into the French colony, where women are in short supply for the French colonists. Des Grieux badly injures a man who wishes to marry Manon (whose unmarried status leaves her vulnerable to the governor’s command), so they run away, and she expires on a cold Louisiana night. He is punished but rescued by a friend who returns him to Paris, a chastened man. The class and sexual brutality and hypocrisy to which the lovers are subjected in Paris is set against an America—specifically New Orleans—of apparent classlessness and freedom. In fact, Manon moves from one form of exploitation to another, victim of the crude sexual auction pertaining in the early days of the colony. The fact that Prévost gives the real New Orleans of swamps and forests an imaginary landscape of desert, mountains, and treeless plains does not obscure his understanding of the reasons vulnerable Manon has to die there while her lover survives to be recuperated by his aristocratic friends and returned to safety in France. Manon Lescaut has remained a popular text since first publication and—the first of a series of notoriously enigmatic, sexually compromised femmes fatales in European culture—proved particularly attractive to
nineteenth-century opera composers. Six productions on the theme appeared from 1836 to 1890—by Balfe (The Maid of Artois, 1836), Auber (1856), Massenet (1884 and a one-act sequel, Le Portrait de Manon, 1894), and Puccini (1890–1892). The latter is the most celebrated and frequently performed. There was a further production by Henze in 1951, Boulevard Solitude, and a film version in 1949 by H. G. Clouzot, Manon—the latter set in postliberation France, in which Manon is a collaborator, involved in the black market, who passes from man to man and ends up shot by Arabs in the Sahara desert. This story’s tragic transatlantic theme has thus been repeated in countless editions and productions to the present day. The popular histories of New Orleans itself, and certainly its fictional and musical representations, focus repeatedly on the opposition in this Catholic city between prostitute and nun. Just as the Quadroon Ballroom became a convent school, so many of the New Orleans tales focus on the centrality of nuns in elite society as educators, supporters, and sometimes betrayers of sexually vulnerable young women. One of the most revered and mythologized institutions of the nineteenth-century city was the Ursuline Convent, the oldest colonial building established in the Mississippi valley. The Ursuline sisters, called by Grace King reverentially “the spiritual mothers of the real mothers of Louisiana,” set up the convent that was the first girls’ school in America, training French colonists’ daughters, orphan deportees like Manon, and the “filles à la cassette.” Founded in 1727 under Louis XV’s auspices to educate young women, the convent also included in its brief the education of Indian and black girls. The nuns took charge of educating
NEW ORLEANS
the colonists’ daughters (so their families need no longer send them back to Paris), teaching young black and Indian girls to sew, write letters, say their catechism, and care for orphans and the sick. From the earliest days, then, French women settlers owed much to these nuns for fitting them to become well-trained wives and mothers, but also for giving rudimentary skills to women of many ethnic and racial groups. Throughout New Orleans’s early history, as Manon’s story demonstrates, it was invidious to draw clear borders between respectability and illegitimacy, wife and mistress, independent female pedestrian and woman of the streets, and of course black and white. All those terms for different levels of mixed race—mulatto, griffe, quadroon, octoroon, and so on—have deeper and more significant meanings in this city of hybridities than in any other. In its long and racially complex history, the term Creole has signified the following: someone born/naturalized in a particular country, an American-born slave, any black or white person born in Louisiana, a European aristocrat born in Louisiana, a free person of color, and in recent times anyone defined as “Other” within the city. All this testifies to a troubled passage through colonial and postcolonial cultures. Sexual relationships between the races were a key feature of this racially mixed and, in American terms, relaxed and cosmopolitan society, a city boasting more free people of color than any other before the Civil War. The roles of the French Creole and free people of color are significant in this history. Cities like Paris and New Orleans that are feminized and associated in popular memory with consumption rather than production, pleasure rather than labor, offer multiple opportunities for artists to
871
explore contradictions, secrets, the sexually and racially exotic, and the gothic—especially when populist discourses can present such cities too easily as outside history, associated with the consuming pleasures of the female body. In terms of New Orleans studies, scholars and writers in Paris and New Orleans have focused closely on the connections between the cities, notably in terms of colonial and racially mixed connections that have so complicated and enriched the makeup and history of the city—such as the role of the Paris Conservatoire in the development of jazz by black Creoles, the importance of the neglected Parisian publications by New Orleans–born nineteenthcentury black Creole poets, and the representation of prostitutes in Storyville by the (probably French) photographer, E. J. Bellocq. Since this French city was established in the Louisiana swamps, writers, photographers, painters, musicians, Vodun/hoodoo practitioners, and chefs—many of them French natives settled in the earliest period or fleeing the Haitian Revolution, Frenchspeaking free blacks, and/or artists of various kinds who have trained in Paris and sustained transatlantic connections—have ensured busy cultural traffic between France and New Orleans. Helen Taylor See also: Acadia; American Civil War; Architecture; Bienville, Jean-Baptiste, sieur de; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Catholic Church; Chopin, Kate; Cuisine; Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar; Evangeline; Haiti; Jazz; Jesuits; La Rochelle; Language; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Mississippi River; Music (Classical); Nova Scotia; Photography; Slavery; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Ursulines; Vodun; Williams, Tennessee.
872
NEWFOUNDLAND References Bellocq, E. J. Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans. London: Jonathan Cape, 1996. Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Hirsch, Arnold R., and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. King, Grace. New Orleans: The Place and the People. New York: Macmillan, 1895. Kinser, Samuel. Carnival American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: CircumAtlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Taylor, Helen. Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens. New Brunswick, NJ/London: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
NEWFOUNDLAND France’s connection with Newfoundland (Terre-Neuve) goes back to the early sixteenth century, when Norman and Breton vessels began to exploit the rich cod fisheries off the island’s coasts. By midcentury, ports on the Atlantic coast were also outfitting vessels for Newfoundland, including those in the Basque regions of France and Spain. Originally an inshore ship fishery, it now encompassed the offshore banks as well, and along the south Labrador coast, Basques established whaling stations. The region attracted more vessels annually than the Caribbean and was a major pole of European activity in the New World. By 1600, the Newfoundland fishery was effectively shared between French and English fishers, and both countries laid claim to the island. At midcentury, approx-
imately 500 French vessels were sailing to Newfoundland annually, double the size of the English fleet. The French fishery was concentrated on the northern peninsula (le petit nord), where Breton fishermen predominated, and on the south coast (la côte du Chapeau Rouge). In addition, French Basques fished on the island’s west coast, and Normans in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. In 1662, the government of Louis XIV established the colony of Plaisance at the harbor the Basques called Placentia on the southeast coast. The original inhabitants came from Île de Ré and La Rochelle. At its peak in 1710, the population was 248, with others living in nearby harbors and at Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. Plaisance became the center of a thriving fishery, in which residents were joined annually by large numbers of migratory vessels. A garrisoned fortress was built there, and the colony became an important military, naval, and privateering base during the Anglo-French wars, which began in 1689. Two expeditions from Plaisance, in 1696–1697 and 1705, brutally attacked the English settlements on Newfoundland’s east coast as far north as Bonavista. Had France been able to maintain its military advantage, the island might have had a very different history. However, by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), France agreed to abandon Plaisance and to recognize British sovereignty over Newfoundland. Almost all the French inhabitants moved to Île Royale (Cape Breton Island). The treaty also provided that French fishers could maintain a seasonal migratory fishery on the petit nord, defined as extending from Cape Bonavista to Pointe Riche. These fishing rights were renewed in 1763 at the end of the French and Indian War, and the
NEWFOUNDLAND
islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon were ceded to France as an abri for banking vessels. The French fishery, now dominated by Saint-Malo and Granville, was still a substantial industry employing between 300 and 400 ships. It was valued for training mariners and was protected and subsidized by the government. By this time, British fishers and settlers had moved into Bonavista and Notre Dame bays, the southeastern section of what became known as the French, or Treaty, Shore. The resulting disputes led the French government to claim that its right of fishery was exclusive and led to British counterclaims that it was in fact concurrent. An attempt to regulate the situation was made in 1783 when, by the Treaty of Versailles, the limits of the French Shore were changed to Cape Saint John and Cape Ray, and the British government agreed in an appended declaration that British subjects would not trouble the French fishery “en aucune manière par leur concurrence,” and that the government would “retirer à cet effet les établissements sédentaires qui y seront formés.” As a result, and with British assistance, the French were able to clear the shore and establish a de facto exclusive fishery. At the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, fishing rights at Newfoundland were restored to France on the footing of 1792, and once again French fishers were able to fish within the 1783 limits, policed by a French naval squadron, which enforced the alleged exclusive right by driving off vessels of American and even British registry. This state of affairs was much resented by the Newfoundland government—the island received colonial status in 1824, representative government in 1832, and responsible government in
873
1855—and was in any case jeopardized by the growth of a permanent population on the French Shore, particularly in the area between Bonne Bay and Cape Ray. This in turn reflected the sharp decline in the French coastal fishery after 1830, as outfitters turned increasingly to the more profitable banks fishery based at Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, whose economic heyday occurred in the later nineteenth century. There were successive attempts from the 1840s to negotiate a new fisheries agreement that would satisfy both the colonial and French governments. This proved impossible for many years because of intransigence on both sides and a series of difficult, acrimonious disputes, the most important of which involved the access of French banking vessels to supplies of Newfoundland bait fishes, and French participation in the lobster fishery. Moreover, the colonial government was increasingly concerned that fish caught by state-subsidized French fishers off Newfoundland, with local bait, was invading markets in Spain and the Mediterranean hitherto dominated by Newfoundland exporters. British naval vessels resumed regular patrols of the French Shore in the 1850s and, together with their French counterparts, were able to prevent any serious incidents—indeed, settlers (many of whom spoke French) and the French visitors generally got on well. It was nevertheless an anomalous and potentially dangerous situation. Lord Salisbury in 1890 feared that “an unlucky blow or shot” might precipitate warfare. A solution was eventually found in 1904 when, as part of the entente cordiale, France renounced its fishing rights deriving from the Treaty of Utrecht. French fishers retained the right until 1972 to fish concurrently within their former limits but not
874
NIAGARA FALLS
to build premises onshore. The right was little used. With the adoption of steam trawlers in the banks fishery, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon fell into economic decline, and the “French question” that had dominated Newfoundland politics and imperial relations virtually disappeared. From the late eighteenth century, Acadian families from mainland Nova Scotia and Cape Breton began to settle on Newfoundland’s west coast, in Saint George’s Bay, and later at Codroy. The main migration occurred between the 1820s and the 1860s. Other French settlers, usually men, came to the same area and to the Port-au-Port Peninsula, either directly from France or via Saint-Pierre. Some of them were deserters from French fishing stations. These well-defined francophone groups maintained their identity at least into the 1940s, when influence of a nearby military base, confederation with Canada, and other external pressures began to favor a process of linguistic and cultural assimilation. However, the period since 1949, when Newfoundland became a Canadian province, has seen an overall growth in the francophone population, particularly in western Labrador and in Saint John’s, the provincial capital. Interest in the province’s French heritage has increased, as have efforts to check the assimilation of the French population. James K. Hiller See also: Basques; Brittany; Fishing; French and Indian War; French Revolution; La Rochelle; Nova Scotia; Saint Lawrence River; Saint-Malo; Saint-Pierre et Miquelon; Treaty of Utrecht. References Brière, Jean-François. La Pêche française en Amérique du Nord au XVIIIe siècle. SaintLaurent: Fides, 1990.
Hiller, J. K. “The Newfoundland Fisheries Issue in Anglo-French Treaties, 1713–1904.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, no. 1 (January 1996): 1–23. Thomas, Gerald. The Two Traditions: The Art of Storytelling amongst French Newfoundlanders. St. John’s, NF: Breakwater Books, 1993. Thompson, Frederic F. The French Shore Problem in Newfoundland: An Imperial Study. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961.
NIAGARA FALLS The complex geological phenomenon on the Niagara River between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario is the second-widest cataract in the world. The falls have attracted increasing numbers of French and francophone travelers since the seventeenth century. A shifting cultural icon, reflecting paradoxical meanings that range from the threat of unbridled nature to the harnessing of that nature for human purposes, Niagara is as powerful and enduring a symbol in French culture as it is in its local North American context. It has become one of several privileged sites in the culture and geography of the French Atlantic, holding the attention of those who witness it firsthand but also serving as an encapsulation of the paradoxes of the North American continent in the imaginations of those for whom it remains in a transatlantic “elsewhere.” The importance of Niagara in the francophone imagination is not surprising, for the first written record of the falls is found in Samuel de Champlain’s Voyages (1604). The explorer never saw the falls himself and merely repeated what his indigenous guides told him during his exploration of Lake Ontario in 1603. Subsequent travelers, such as the Sulpitian Renée Bréhan de
NIAGARA FALLS
Horseshoe Falls II, Niagara, New York, ca. 1898. The falls have attracted increasing numbers of French and francophone travelers since the seventeenth century. (Library of Congress)
Galinée, the doctor François Gendron, and the Jesuit Jérôme Lalemant (who was the first to name the falls, “Onguiaahra”), similarly relied on hearsay and Champlain’s own account. The first genuine (but exaggerated) description of the falls by a European eyewitness was produced by the Belgian Recollect friar, Louis Hennepin, who reached Niagara while accompanying La Salle on his 1678–1679 Mississippi expedition. The account, in Description de la Louisiane (1683), later editions of which were accompanied by dramatic engravings of the falls, was widely disseminated throughout Europe and aroused interest in the North American interior. Niagara remained inaccessible, however, for much of the next century, but the image propagated by the early Frenchlanguage accounts changed radically when
875
Chateaubriand visited the falls in 1791. His description of Niagara at the end of Atala (1801) underlines the falls’ status as a site of an individual, romantic encounter with nature, while simultaneously linking them to images of death. The nineteenthcentury transformation of Niagara into one of North America’s busiest tourist attractions and industrial sites led to a further change of emphasis. French travelers continued to visit, and one of them, Charles Blondin (Jean-François Gravelet), was in 1859 the first man to cross the falls on a tightrope. It was, however, the development of hydroelectric power that caused the greatest transformation, and Victor Segalen’s account of a visit to Niagara in 1902 is a statement of disappointment echoed by many of his contemporary travelers. The technologization of the falls led to a series of early science-fiction narratives (such as Jules Verne’s final novel, Le Maître du monde/Master of the World [1904]) in which the falls play a central role. That Niagara continued to retain French travelers’ attention as a key North American site can be seen in Michel Butor’s “stereophonic” novel, 6810000 litres d’eau par seconde/Niagara, a Novel (1965). Charles Forsdick See also: Butor, Michel; Champlain, Samuel de; Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de; Hennepin, Father Louis; La Salle, René-Robert Cavalier de, Sieur; Lalemant, Jérôme; Louisiana; Mississippi River; Ontario; Segalen, Victor; Travel Writing; Verne, Jules. References Berton, Pierre. Niagara: A History of the Falls. New York/London: Penguin, 1998. Hennepin, Louis. Description of Louisiana. Trans. J. G. Shea. New York: J. G. Shea, 1880. [First published in French, 1683.] McKinsey, Elizabeth. Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
876
NICOT, JEAN
NICOT, JEAN (CA. 1525–1600) By his own definition in his posthumously published French dictionary, the Thresor de la langue françoyse (1606), Jean Nicot was a native of Nîmes in Gascony and the first promoter of tobacco in Europe (originally called in French nicotiane and later nicotine in his honor). Nicot never traveled to the Americas, unlike André Thevet, who disputed Nicot’s role in the popularization of the plant admired by the French for its curative powers. Until the second half of the sixteenth century, the smoking of petun (the Tupinambá term recorded by Thevet in 1558) had been noted simply as a local curiosity by early explorers like Columbus, Vespucci, Cartier, Léry, and others, includ-
ing Thevet. While French ambassador to Portugal, Nicot in 1560 experimented in Lisbon with the medical uses of tobacco (probably Floridian nicotiana rustica, not Thevet’s Brazilian nicotiana tabacum). Along with figs, lemons, and oranges, Nicot shipped tobacco seeds and plants home to the French court. Catherine de Medici herself tried it to calm her migraines. Following her usage, the popularity of l’herbe à la reine spread rapidly. Nicot’s services to the French court in various roles had begun in 1553, after law studies in Toulouse. His two-year embassy to Portugal began in 1559 after consultations with Henry II. It ended as a direct result of the failure of the Villegagnon expedition, when the French colony of Fort Coligny in the bay of Rio de Janeiro was
Jean Nicot presenting the tobacco plant to Queen Catherine de Medici and the grand prior of the House of Lorraine, 1561. (Library of Congress)
NIÉPCE, JOSEPH NICÉPHORE
captured by the Portuguese in August 1560. The ambassador was recalled, and in October 1561 he returned to France, but not principally to the court. Instead, he spent much of his time away from Paris in early retirement in Brie-Comte-Robert. There, amid the rich library he had collected in his travels, he would work for forty years on the lexicographical projects that ultimately led to the first French monolingual dictionary, his Thresor. This encyclopedic dictionary includes many references to foreign languages and cultures, occasionally those of the Americas. These he had encountered, like tobacco, not at all in his travels, limited to Europe, but through his wide readings in the literature of navigation and exploration, which knew no bounds. Roy Rosenstein See also: Brazil; Cartier, Jacques; Language; Tobacco. References Baudry, Jean. Jean Nicot. Paris: Manufacture, 1988. Rosenstein, Roy. “Jean Nicot’s Thresor and Renaissance Multilingual Lexicography.” Dictionaries 7 (1985): 32–56. Vaucheret, E. “Jean Nicot et l’entreprise de Villegagnon.” La Découverte de l’Amérique. Ed. Marcel Bataillon et al. Paris: Vrin, 1968: 89–104. Vigié, Marc, and Muriel Vigot. L’Herbe à Nicot. Paris: Fayard, 1989.
NIÉPCE, JOSEPH NICÉPHORE (1765–1833) Photographic inventor. Born in Chalon-sur-Saône to Avocat Claude Niépce and Anne Claude (née Barault), Niépce spent most of his inventing life at the family estate, Gras, in Saint Loup de Varennes. Baptized Joseph, he began to use the name Nicéphore in his early twen-
877
ties while enrolled at the Oratorian college in Angers, where he also learned the science and experimental methods that enabled him to work on topics as diverse as combustion locomotion, dyeing, and photography. He married Agnes (née Romero) in 1794, the same year he quit his military career and began life as an inventor at Gras. In 1807, he and his brother Claude (1763–1828) obtained a patent for their pyréolophore, a boat powered by internal combustion, and the unsuccessful marketing of this machine was to cost the family dearly. Niépce began his photographic experimenting no later than the spring of 1816, half a year before his search for a native lithographic stone. This suggests that his photographic experiments led him to lithography, although Isidore Niépce (1795– 1868), Nicéphore’s son, suggested the opposite sometime after his father’s death. Niépce began as many inventors did, using solutions of silver nitrate, and, in search of a satisfactory positive image, he employed many substances, among them, bitumen of Judea, lavender oil, gum guaiacum, and vapors of iodine, on supports of paper, stone, silver, and pewter. He succeeded with an impractical but functional process in the 1820s both to copy engravings and to make points de vue, images made in the camera obscura. In 1827, Niépce traveled to London via Paris, visiting Augustine Lemaître (1797–1870), a Parisian engraver, and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, the former already a colleague, and the latter soon to be his partner. Although Niépce attempted to interest the king, the Academy of Arts, and the Royal Society of London in his Héliographie, his inability to market the invention well and internecine politics in the Royal Society at the time ensured his
878
9/11: CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES
failure, and Niépce dejectedly returned home, leaving behind the famous “point de vue from a Window,” the earliest extant photographic image. In 1829, Niépce brought his experiments and chemical knowledge into a partnership with Daguerre that, with Daguerre’s recognition of the latent image, was to lead directly to the invention of the daguerreotype. Niépce died before the full realization of the process he had helped to invent, but his son Isidore was awarded a pension for life along with Daguerre in 1839. Kelley Wilder See also: Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé; Photography. References Marignier, Jean Louis. Nicéphore Niépce une nouvelle image. Chalon-sur-Saône: Société des amis du musée Nicéphore Niépce, 1998. ———. Niépce l’invention de la Photographie. Paris: Belin, 1999.
9/11: CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES The rentrée littéraire of September 2003 brought a wave of French literary works dealing with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Frédéric Beigbeder’s novel Windows on the World derives its title from the 107thstory restaurant in the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC), where protagonist Carthew Yorston is having brunch with his two young sons on the morning of the disaster. The victims’ tale alternates with the narrative of the French novelist who is writing their story in the Ciel de Paris, a restaurant on the fifty-sixth story of
Paris’s Tour Montparnasse. The parallel narratives unfold in alternating chapters, one for each minute of the two hours leading up to the north tower’s collapse. Didier Goupil’s short novel Le Jour de mon retour sur terre (The Day of My Return to Earth) recounts the fate of a tower employee who survives the attack. Too profoundly traumatized to return to his home and family, Goupil’s unnamed protagonist lives as a vagrant, “returning” to life only after meeting a similarly shell-shocked woman who gives to his son precisely one year after the cataclysm. The protagonist is only one of two men who “return to earth,” however: the second is the president, who circles the country in his airplane for an extended period after the catastrophe. Upon his return, the president promptly converts the victims’ sufferings into a justification for war in a series of devastatingly deadpan speeches on good, evil, and vengeance. Whereas Goupil and Beigbeder present the victims with compassion and express their political criticisms with moderation, Luc Lang uses the catastrophe as a springboard for an extensive anti-American screed. The book’s very title, 11 septembre, mon amour (September 11, My Love)—a nod to Hiroshima mon amour, Marguerite Duras’s screenplay about the atom bomb attacks on Japan—implies censure of U.S. violence. After a moving depiction of phone calls and voice messages from the soon-to-die victims of the attack, Lang’s narrative turns to the experiences of Lucas, a French writer who learns of the catastrophe while visiting a Native American acquaintance in Montana. Describing the United States as a nation founded on the forgotten genocide of the Native Americans, Lucas implies that the terrorist at-
9/11: CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES
tacks were justified by the history of violence in the United States. Insofar as they reflect a significant segment of French antiAmerican opinion, these views are illuminating. However, an excessive reliance on anti-American clichés blunts the impact of Lang’s otherwise keenly observed cultural and political critique. Several common themes unite the novels of Beigbeder, Goupil, and Lang. All three writers criticize the U.S. government’s efforts to transform the tragedy into a justification for war. All are preoccupied by the spectacular, unreal nature of the television images of the attacks; Beigbeder and Lang relate these images to Hollywood disaster films and, by extension, to American cultural imperialism. A critique of U.S. arrogance and economic domination is implicit in Goupil and Beigbeder’s comparison of the WTC towers to the Tower of Babel—a parallel previously sketched by Pascal Quignard in his 2002 Prix Goncourt novel Les Ombres errantes. With extensive commentary on the eleventh chapter of Genesis, Beigbeder underscores the analogy by deeming the Tower of Babel the world’s first attempt at globalization. The essentially autobiographical novelist figures that occupy a central place in Windows on the World and 11 septembre, mon amour provide Beigbeder and Lang with an opportunity to reflect on the ethics of creating art out of such a recent tragedy. Despite his discomfort at using the disaster as material for a work of literature, Beigbeder declares himself motivated by the need to counteract the media’s sanitized images of the tragedy. Consequently, he emphasizes the painful sights, smells, and bodily sensations experienced by the WTC victims, eliciting both horror and compassion. His project is also a memorial: he ob-
879
serves that books help people remember buildings that have disappeared and even shapes the double columns of his penultimate chapter into a calligram resembling the twin towers. Lang’s memorial project has a more explicitly political aim. Unlike Beigbeder, who expresses his reticence about writing a novel about the catastrophe, Lang claims that literature faces an ethical imperative with respect to 9/11. Having evoked the victims’ voices in the book’s elegiac opening section, Lang states that he must write because he could not abandon those voices to the cynical machinations of those who would recuperate them in support of war and vengeance. Treatments of the 9/11 disaster span a wide range of genres. Michel Vinaver’s play 11 septembre 2001, written in the weeks immediately following the tragedy, juxtaposes the voices of hijackers, victims, and politicians, highlighting the parallel rhetoric of George Bush and Osama bin Laden. Jean-Jacques Greif ’s Nine Eleven, a documentary fiction intended for young adults, is based on the experiences of students at P.S. 234 and Stuyvesant High School, both located near the WTC. Henrik Rehr, who was living within blocks of the twin towers, uses the techniques of the bande dessinée (cartoon strip) to recount his anguished attempts to ascertain the safety of his wife and young son in Mardi 11 septembre (Tuesday, September 11). The events of 9/11 occupy a significant but less central place in Allah Superstar and the Dictionnaire amoureux de l’Amérique (Affectionate Dictionary of America). Allah Superstar, whose author goes by the pseudonym Y. B., tells of a young Franco-Algerian stand-up comic who parodies the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. A send-up of stereotypes about
880
9/11: POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES
French youth of North African origin, Allah Superstar evokes the increased prejudice against this group in the wake of 9/11. Yves Berger’s enthusiastically pro-American Dictionnaire, which covers topics from Christopher Columbus to Marilyn Monroe, raises the WTC to the status of myth in the entry “Towers” and refutes the arguments of critics like Luc Lang in “Genocide?” and “Anti-Americanism.” Literary works dealing with September 11 made an impressive showing on the French literary prize scene in 2003: Dictionnaire amoureux de l’Amérique won the Renaudaut essay prize, Windows on the World received the Prix Interallié and was nominated for the Femina and Goncourt, and Allah Superstar was nominated for both the Femina and Interallié prizes. The events of 9/11 have also started to make their way into cinema and televisual culture on both sides of the Atlantic. The most striking example of this would probably be the Franco-American coproduction 9/11 (Hanlon/Naudet, 2002), a documentary that was initially supposed to have given viewers an insider’s view of the New York fire service but whose directors happened to have been filming on September 11, 2001, and whose film turned into a dramatic narration of the day’s events. A more critical view of the events and their political backdrop came with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which was awarded the Palme d’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Representations of 9/11 and its consequences have not, however, been limited to documentaries but have spilled over into fiction with, for example, Denys Arcand’s Oscar-winning movie Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) working in a direct reference to the terrorist attacks and the observation
that, for the first time, the “barbarians” have gotten inside the “empire.” The year 2002 saw the release of 11’9”01—September 11, a collection of eleven short films by eleven internationally renowned directors, each lasting eleven minutes and nine seconds and offering a personal reaction to September 11. The collection included segments by Sean Penn, Youssef Chahine, Samira Makhmalbaf, and Idrissa Ouedraogo, as well as one by French director Claude Lelouch, who chose to narrate his vision of 9/11 through a depiction of a deaf woman in a New York apartment, unaware of the events unfolding around her. Jocelyn Van Tuyl See also: Anti-Americanism; Comic Strips; Literary Relations; 9/11: Political Perspectives. References Longre, B[landine]. “Review of 11 September 2001/11 septembre 2001, by Michel Vinaver.” Sit’art mag (June 2002). http:// www.sitartmag.com/vinaver11septembre. htm (cited February 24, 2004). Riding, Alan. “French Feel the Anguish in Books Inspired by 9/11.” New York Times (September 3, 2003). Savigneau, Josyane. “Dernières nouvelles du chaos.” Le Monde (August 29, 2003).
9/11: POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES The French response to the events of September 11 represents an important chapter in the contemporary definition of French American relations. The political leaders of both the Left and the Right condemned vigorously the barbaric acts perpetrated by the terrorists: in other words, this tragic situation engendered a form of consensus that is quite unusual in modern French history. As a European democracy based on
9/11: POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES
the rule of law and the protection of individual rights, France was quick to assert the radical contradiction between these same principles and values and the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism that was at the source of this violence. The weeks that immediately followed these events actually allowed for a strengthening of the cooperation and traditional alliance between France and the United States. The two countries appeared to be united in their desire to fight the global threat of terrorism and the fanaticism fostering it. Nevertheless, relations between the two countries deteriorated dramatically in the period that followed. The perfect harmony that seemed to characterize the diplomatic exchanges between the French government and the Bush administration immediately after 9/11 was now replaced by a sense of profound misunderstanding and bitter acrimony. The French experienced terrorism firsthand long before Americans did. As early as the 1950s, indeed, the Algerian war forced the French colonial authorities to confront this problem through the tactics used by the local guerrillas in their fight for independence. The Battle of Algiers, in particular, involved numerous bombings that struck not only military personnel and installations but also civilian soft targets such as discos, bars, restaurants, airports, and other public places. This kind of terrorism was primarily the result of the long French tradition of colonial rule in the Arab world. It reflected a popular movement of resistance that was definitely legitimate in its political goals, if not in its means of expression. At the time, the French authorities did not hesitate to use massive force in order to crush this violent uprising. The situation on the ground led to the systematic use of torture and the on-
881
going violation of human rights by the French army. Ultimately, however, this strategy failed to deter the enemy and led to both France’s military defeat and the undoing of its colonial power in Algeria. This historical reality might explain why France has been so defiant in its opposition to the war doctrine promoted by the Bush administration and its neoconservative advisers in order to fight the roots of international terrorism. The collective trauma of the Algerian conflict definitely left numerous scars that have yet to be erased within contemporary French culture. For many French citizens, indeed, the ideology of preventive war in the Arab world looks like a neocolonial project that is doomed from the start: they remember that the French authorities of the 1950s, at least before the rise to power of Charles de Gaulle, believed in fighting the terrorists on their own soil and that their vision of things proved to be both a moral and a political fiasco. This colonial guilt has clearly influenced the attitude of the French public toward the U.S. response to 9/11. It is a phenomenon that separates the French from the American people in their general attitude toward the developing world, not just the Arab world. The United States might be the most powerful western empire of the past six decades, but the fact remains that it was never truly a colonial empire. U.S. imperialism for a long time stemmed from the global threat of Communism: in spite of its hegemonic nature, it did not entail the full political and economic subjugation of developing countries that colonial rule necessarily implied. Moreover, the irresistible evolution of France toward multiculturalism and the promotion of integration for all immigrants has created very deep bonds between
882
9/11: POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES
the French people and the Muslim community. The majority of them consider this process of integration to be an essential part of France’s democratic identity. It constitutes in many ways the legacy of both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It stems therefore from a universalist philosophy of tolerance and equality that is the very foundation of the modern French Republic. In spite of the recent surge of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, particularly in the 2002 presidential elections, most French citizens have demonstrated their strong support for this multicultural project that could not exist without the presence of millions of Arab and Muslim immigrants. One can talk, therefore, of a French philoarabism that renders any direct assault against a Muslim country such as Iraq even harder to justify. The growing power of the Muslim community in France has created a paradoxical approach to the issues of religious fundamentalism and terrorism. If most members of this community definitely reject this radical interpretation of Islam and the violence that it promotes, they are nonetheless unwilling to embrace the military occupation of Iraq: it is seen by them as a deliberate aggression against fellow Muslims. This close relation between France and its own Arab population has undoubtedly complicated the position of the French government in the war on terrorism: it has become an overwhelming cultural reality with which both the Left and the Right have to cope. Many French intellectuals, in particular the renowned philosopher and social critic Jean Baudrillard, considered the 9/11 events to be a direct consequence of U.S. arrogance as a superpower and, more precisely, of its long-standing policy in the Middle East. They considered the U.S. po-
litical establishment partly responsible for this tragedy because of what they perceive as its often biased treatment of the Palestinian issue. Historically, France has been more critical of the Israeli military presence in the occupied territories than has the United States. In this regard, the recent growth of anti-Semitism in France is largely the result of a widespread hostility toward Israel’s handling of the Palestinian crisis rather than the sign of an irresistible and overwhelming return to the fascist ideology of the Vichy era. In fact, France has enjoyed for quite a while the largest and most established Jewish community on the European continent. The striking cultural diversity of the country proves that the close relation with its Arab population is not incompatible with the well-being and the successful integration of its Jewish citizens. Today, many French Jews actually enjoy high social status and preeminent positions in business, politics, and academia. Therefore, the current political tensions between France and the United States are first of all motivated by a profoundly different perspective toward the policy of the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and of his government. French Jews (who in their vast majority consider themselves to be French before being Jewish) have therefore become the scapegoats for the heavyhanded strategy of the Israeli leadership. In the end, the events of 9/11 weakened the long tradition of friendship and cooperation between France and the United States. Nationalist concerns dictated the ultimate process of decision making on both sides: they ruined any hope of a common stance in regard to the Iraqi problem. The Bush administration opted in particular for a unilateral approach to terrorism that is essentially driven by eco-
NOBLE SAVAGE
nomic and geopolitical concerns. In conclusion, the current French American predicament is undermining the crucial fight of Western democracies against the ever-growing forces of darkness and evil: its solution constitutes therefore one of the main preconditions for the global victory of political reason in a world that is more and more subject to the law of the jungle and the power of sheer force. Pierre Taminiaux See also: Anti-Americanism; Baudrillard, Jean; Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; French Revolution; Gaulle, General Charles de; Iraq War; 9/11: Cultural Perspectives; Theory; World War II. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers. Trans. Chris Turner. London/New York: Verso, 2002. Daniel, Jean. Lettres de France: après le 11 Septembre. Paris: Saint-Simon, 2002. Virilio, Paul. Ground Zero. Trans. Chris Turner. London/New York: Verso, 2002.
NOBLE SAVAGE The idea of the Noble Savage relates to the glorification of natural man, a concept that grew out of travel accounts of the sixteenthcentury explorations to America and the people that were found there. As a way to understand such people, these accounts compared the novelty of what was seen to classical mythology, and particularly ideas of the golden age. The people of the Americas were thus seen in the terms used by Ovid in his description of the golden age and held as an example for what was seen as the corrupt and dishonest way of life in contemporary Europe. It has been argued that the myth that lies behind the concept of the Noble Savage has been largely a product of the British
883
romantic movement, but the basis behind the myth can be traced back to French roots. Travelers and thinkers in the sixteenth century had begun to explore the ideas inherent in the phrase Noble Savage. Jean de Léry, for example, traveled to Brazil in the mid-sixteenth century and produced an account of the time he spent there, L’Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil. The account describes some of the customs of the local tribe, the Tupinamba, and compares what is believed to be the horrific and barbaric practice of cannibalism to what he sees as the equally abhorrent behavior in contemporary Europe. In his essay, Of the Cannibals, Montaigne discusses similar ideas about the same Brazilian tribe, describing these people as living lives that overshadow even the classical conception of the golden age, as their lives are so in tune with nature. While he did not actually travel to the New World, Montaigne did make contact with some members of the Tupinamba tribe, as well as some people who had made the trip to Brazil, which allowed him to question and relate their observations to contemporary European life. Montaigne believed that not even their cannibalistic tendencies detracted from the moral and pleasant way they lived their life, viewed as in many ways superior to what he saw as the lies, deceit, and corruption that pervaded French society at that time. However, it was not until Marc Lescarbot produced L’Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1609), his account of the time he spent with the Micmac people in Canada, that the phrase Noble Savage was used for the first time. Lescarbot’s account describes the time he spent among the Micmac people and his subsequent reflections on life in France. He, too, highlights the positive aspects of the local
884
NOBLE SAVAGE
people, once again confirming the nobility of these supposedly savage people. However, Lescarbot’s use of the term Noble Savage is more problematic than these cultural comparisons might suggest, as he uses the term only in relation to hunting. Hunting, historically, was seen as a noble pursuit and as a way to differentiate and support the hierarchical social system, and it is for this reason alone that Lescarbot labels the Micmacs as noble. As time passed, the concept of the Noble Savage became more connected with the culturally relativistic approach to the people of America and Europe that Léry and Montaigne had used. In French, the term le bon sauvage was used more often than les sauvages nobles, as the culturally relativistic approach caught both the English and French imagination much more. For example, Lahontan can be seen as a key figure in the development of this idea of the Noble Savage in France as he discusses the features inherent in European laws and institutions with his own noble savage, Adario, in his Dialogues de Monsieur le Baron de Lahontan et d’un sauvage (1704). Adario is personified as the “naked philosopher” as he observes and then comments on certain features of life in France, thus following the tradition firmly established by Montaigne. Later writers who also explored these ideas of the Noble Savage include Diderot, in his work Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, and Chateaubriand, in Atala. Perhaps the most important figure in the historical development of the idea behind the Noble Savage, however, is JeanJacques Rousseau, as it has frequently been believed that he was the first to use the phrase. However, closer examination of Rousseau’s work reveals that this is not the
case. Rousseau uses the people of America to critique contemporary life, but, unlike others, he provides quite a pessimistic view of man in the state of nature. In the Discourse on Inequality (1754), he describes many features of this natural life, highlighting the primitive state of man in this phase of development. Primitive man is like an animal, whose wants are easily satisfied by the things found naturally around him, easily identified by his acute senses. Natural man is hardy and robust, with a perfectly developed body and far healthier and stronger than contemporary Europeans. Life in the state of nature is not miserable, as the people living that life are not aware of what they do not have. There is no real sense of good or evil in this natural state, but Rousseau does suggest that pity might have been stronger in this state, because there was a greater sense of equality and therefore identification with his fellow man. Rousseau did not call for a return to this life, as it was a life without reason. Rather, he saw the life of the indigenous American people as above this strict state of nature, since they displayed a trace of reason and therefore a trace of civilization. It is this state that Rousseau saw as the best possible way to live. In his later works, Rousseau developed a less pessimistic view of the natural state of man in which he saw germs of goodness and moral sense in natural man. Again, he saw the best possible way of life in the indigenous races found in America and used these ideas of the Noble Savage to create a vision of what natural man might become in the future. The idea of the Noble Savage is one that calls for a return to this natural life. As we have seen, Rousseau did not call for this return, but his work coincided with the rise of the romantic movement in England.
NORMAN, JESSYE
This romantic movement sentimentalized Rousseau’s ideas, linking them to the cult of the peasant and child so prevalent within that movement, and thereby produced the myth of the Noble Savage that has become so familiar today. Jo Edwards See also: Bougainville, Louis Antoine de; Brazil; Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de, Vicomte; Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de; Montaigne, Michel de; New France; Theory. References Ellingson, Ter. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Fairchild, H. N. The Noble Savage—A Study in Romantic Naturalism. New York: Russell and Russell, 1928. McGregor, Gaile. The Noble Savage in a New World Garden—Notes Towards a Syntactic of Place. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. Trans. Maurice William Cranston. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984. Todorov, Tzvetan. On Human Diversity— Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.
NORMAN, JESSYE (1945–) American soprano, born in Augusta, Georgia, who studied voice at Howard University in Washington, D.C., before going on to study further at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and the University of Michigan. Like Barbara Hendricks, Jessye Norman has developed her illustrious operatic career alongside a strong commitment to humanitarian causes, but also with a particular affection and affinity for France and French language and culture. Since her debut in Richard Wagner’s Tannhaüser in Berlin in 1969, Norman’s
885
career has seen her appear on the stage in the world’s leading theaters and opera houses, from La Scala to Covent Garden, singing classical and more contemporary works by composers such as Schubert, Berlioz, Messiaen, and Verdi. Norman’s musical output is by no means limited to a traditional operatic repertoire. She has also released recordings of spirituals and sacred music and has branched out into the world of jazz with, for example, I Was Born in Love with You, a collection of versions of songs by the French composer Michel Legrand released in 2000, with a mixture of works in English and in French. Since the early 1980s, Norman’s connections with France and with French culture and politics have become stronger. She was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1984 and was then given the Légion d’Honneur by the then president, François Mitterrand, in 1989. As well as these more “traditional” marks of recognition, the Paris Museum of Natural History also decided to name an orchid after her. It was Norman who was invited to sing La Marseillaise in Paris at the 1989 celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, which were broadcast worldwide, and she contributed to the soundtrack of the multinational coproduction La Révolution française (directed by Roberto Enrico and Richard T. Effron), with her rendition of “Hymne à la liberté.” In 1989, she also released a recording of Bizet’s Carmen with the Orchestre National de France. The preparatory work for this recording was the subject of a FrancoAmerican documentary directed by Albert Maysles and released in 1988, entitled Jessye Norman Sings Carmen. She has won countless awards for her operatic recordings and performances, including a
886
NOUGARO, CLAUDE
Grammy Award for Best Vocalist for Songs of Maurice Ravel. She continues to perform regularly onstage in France, appearing, for example, in Robert Wilson’s production of Schubert’s Winterreise at the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet in 2001. In 1990, Jessye Norman was named honorary ambassador to the United Nations, and in 2000 she received the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Award in recognition of her contribution to humanitarian and civic causes. Cristina Johnston See also: Carmen; French Revolution; Jazz; Legrand, Michel; Mitterrand, François; Music (Classical). Reference Gates, Henry Louis, and Cornel West. The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country. New York: Free Press, 2000.
NOUGARO, CLAUDE (1929–2004) French singer-songwriter. While many French pop singers from the early 1960s (Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell, Dick Rivers) were influenced by Elvis Presley, singer and lyricist Claude Nougaro found in the African American tradition the inspiration for many of his best songs. His first hit, “Le Jazz et la Java” (1962), already defined his constant stylistic hesitations and the synthesis he created between the poetry of the standard chanson française combined with the black rhythms from Africa or America. In fact, the musical theme of “Le Jazz et la Java” was inspired by a piece by Joseph Haydn. Born in Toulouse (southern France) in 1929, Claude Nougaro was fascinated by French words, poetry, and African rhythms.
During the 1960s, Nougaro echoed myths from the United States in songs like “Sing Sing Song” (a theme that also inspired Jean-Pierre Ferland); the melody was made from an American “work song” arranged by O. Brown Jr. In 1965, Nougaro composed a tribute to his idol, Louis Armstrong, putting new words in French on an old Negro spiritual, “Go Down Moses,” that became “Armstrong.” Nougaro also put lyrics on a melody by Sonny Rollins that became “Saint Thomas.” In a 1974 interview, Nougaro names his main influences, all from the United States, mostly black, and all jazzy: “Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Gillespie, King Cole, Monk, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Count Basie . . . Dave Brubeck, Kenny Clarke” (Nougaro, quoted in Giroud, p. 70). But Nougaro could also appreciate American music in other dimensions. In 1964, Nougaro put French words to the famous instrumental piece by Dave Brubeck, “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” to create a new song, “A Bout de souffle” (which has nothing to do with Godard’s film). The same year, Nougaro recorded his versions of Brazilian songs, such as “Bidonville,” on a melody by Vinicius de Moraes and Baden Powell originally entitled “Berimbau.” In 1979, he released a bossa nova entitled “Tu verras” on a gentle rhythm by Brazilian artist Chico Buarque de Hollanda. Here, Nougaro’s lyrics recall his earlier song, “Je suis sous” (1964), with the masculine character promising his lover to change for better and behave well. During his 1979 tour, Nougaro sang in English a Negro spiritual made famous by Louis Armstrong, “Nobody Knows [the Trouble I’ve Seen]” and adapted songs by Dizzy
NOVA SCOTIA
Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Quincy Jones. Nougaro went to Canada a few times and performed in Quebec City in 1984 for the celebrations of the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s first trip to New France. In 1987, Nougaro recorded in New York City with French and American musicians for his LP titled Nougayork (1987), featuring the title song on a powerful rhythm combining disco, rap, and funk. Another song from that album pays tribute to the Statue of Liberty (“Lady Liberty”), and others describe the other side of the metropolis: “Harlem” (from a melody by Charles Mingus) and “Un Ecureuil à Central Park.” The most powerful voice among all French singers, Claude Nougaro constantly adapted many musical genres from America into what became pure French songs. He died in Paris on March 3, 2004. Yves Laberge See also: Cartier, Jacques; Davis, Miles; Jazz; Music (Classical); New France; Quebec City; Statue of Liberty, The. References Giroud, Michel, Claude Nougaro. Paris: Seghers, 1974. Laborde, Christian. Claude Nougaro, l’homme aux semelles de swing. Toulouse: Privat, 1984.
NOVA SCOTIA One of ten Canadian provinces, Nova Scotia’s surface is roughly 25,000 square miles, total population count in the 2001 census was about 908,000, and nearly 18 percent of its population is of French or Acadian descent. Nova Scotia is comprised of a long peninsula, attached to New Brunswick by a narrow isthmus and many islands, the
887
largest of which is Cape Breton. Prior to 1784, when a large influx of Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution necessitated the establishment of a separate British colony, Nova Scotia encompassed much of what is now New Brunswick. The name Nova Scotia is taken from the charter of colonization rights granted in 1621 by James I of England (James VI of Scotland) to fellow Scot, Sir William Alexander. Firm boundaries were not spelled out in the charter, and the territorial extent of Nova Scotia came to include, in British eyes, an area roughly equivalent to what the French called Acadie, though that too was not clearly defined. The first Scottish settlements in Nova Scotia occurred in 1629, one at Baleine (near Louisbourg) on Cape Breton Island and the other at Port-Royal (Annapolis Royal). A French raiding party destroyed the post at Baleine, but the Scottish initiative at Port-Royal endured for several years. In 1632, however, the Treaty of SaintGerman-en-Laye handed Nova Scotia/ Acadie back to France. The French, led by Isaac Razilly, came out to La Hève (LaHave, NS) soon after. Razilly drowned in 1636, and Charles Menou d’Aulnay took over the colony, relocating it to Port-Royal. At Port-Royal, d’Aulnay took over the Scottish fort and improved it. Defensive matters aside, d’Aulnay had mills and schools constructed in the Port-Royal area, and he oversaw the introduction of diking practices that would transform marshes into productive farmland. Named governor in 1647, d’Aulnay led a colony of 500 settlers to become self-sufficient through farming and fishing. Though the region was reborn as Acadie in 1632, it continued—in British and Anglo-American eyes—to have an
888
NOVA SCOTIA
identity as Nova Scotia. That dual identity—and in fact the region had a third as the traditional territory of the region’s indigenous people, the Micmac (or Mi’kmaq)—underlines that the zone figured prominently in the strategic thinking of two European powers. Competing imperial interests, along with a lack of precision as to what was meant by either Acadie or Nova Scotia, contributed to the atmosphere of conflict that hovered over the region for 150 years. The mid-seventeenth century was a confusing and contentious period for Acadie/Nova Scotia. Rival, sometimes warring, French trading companies established posts at different harbors. The economic focus varied depending on the venture and the area settled, though in general, furs, fishing, lumbering, and farming were the principal undertakings. During the 1630s, 1640s, and 1650s, a group of families arrived that would eventually comprise the ancestors of the Acadian population. Most were from France, but there were individuals from other European backgrounds and a few Amerindian marriages as well. From 1654 to 1670, the region again came under English sovereignty, nominal though it was. The revolving door of regimes did not enhance economic development or demographic growth. In 1671, there were only about 400 to 500 Acadians; thirty years later, the total was between 1,100 and 1,500. Those totals were tiny when compared to the size of the European populations in the Anglo-American colonies to the south. In 1670, Nova Scotia returned to French sovereignty, making it again Acadie. The years that followed witnessed a number of raids and attacks by forces from New England. In 1690, Sir William Phips cap-
tured Port-Royal, which prompted the incoming French commandant to establish his headquarters up the Saint John River. It remained there for the better part of a decade. When the French later returned to Port-Royal, the Anglo-Americans launched further assaults. There was a blockade in 1704 and two separate attacks in 1707. In 1710, yet another Anglo-American expedition besieged and captured Port-Royal. The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht confirmed that British victory. No one knew it at the time, but that transition from Acadie to Nova Scotia would be the last. Ironic or not, the period from 1713 to the early 1740s, when a British administration was at Annapolis Royal (formerly PortRoyal), was the most peaceful and prosperous time for Acadians. Many twentiethand twenty-first-century authors see it as the Acadian “golden age.” Where in 1701 there had been between 1,100 and 1,400 Acadians, by the mid-1750s, on the eve of the deportations, there were roughly ten times that number, or 12,000 to 13,000. Similar expansion took place on the economic front. Commerce continued with New England, and to that activity was added new trade with the French colonies on Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) and Île Saint-Jean (PEI). The largest communities —Beaubassin, Grand-Pré, Pisiquid, Cobequid, and others in the vicinity of Annapolis Royal—took advantage of the unrivaled fertility of diked marshlands to produce large quantities of livestock, grain, and other foodstuffs. The sale of surplus production to nearby French colonies annoyed the British authorities, just as the Acadian population growth made them apprehensive. The principal worry was the uncertain loyalty of the Acadians, who professed to be neutral. Off
NOVA SCOTIA
and on for decades after 1713, the British authorities pressed the Acadians to swear the standard oath of loyalty. Yet for fortytwo years, the Acadians adroitly resisted. In 1729–1730, they swore a qualified oath for local officials, but not the standard oath demanded by authorities in Britain. Beginning in 1744, Nova Scotia became one of many battlegrounds in the overall imperial conflict between France and Britain. In May, a French expedition from Louisbourg captured Canso, one of only two British settlements in the colony. During the summer and fall, there were unsuccessful French and Amerindian attempts to capture the sole remaining British post, Annapolis Royal. The following year, 1745, New Englanders reoccupied Canso and from there launched an assault on Louisbourg. When the fortress fell, nearly every French inhabitant of Île Royale was transported to France. Back in Nova Scotia, still in 1745, there was another French and Amerindian attack on Annapolis Royal. The next year witnessed another French attempt on Annapolis Royal as well as the arrival in Nova Scotia waters of the massive d’Anville armada sent from France. Disease on board ships, storms at sea, and weak leadership turned the French expedition into a disaster. Yet the huge scale of the undertaking reminded the British that they needed to strengthen their hold on Nova Scotia. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) ended the war between France and Britain. One clause gave Louisbourg back to Louis XV. The French reoccupied the stronghold in July 1749. At the same time, the British sent 2,500 settlers and accompanying troops to establish their new bastion: Halifax, which became the new capital of Nova Scotia. Over the next few years, the British
889
constructed several new forts and established additional civilian settlements at different strategic points in Nova Scotia. Many Acadians worried about the developments. Nearly half migrated to Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean during the early 1750s. The authorities in Halifax and Governor William Shirley in Massachusetts regarded the situation as unstable and dangerous. They feared the Acadians were both aiding the Micmac in their conflict with the British and providing support and encouragement to the French strongholds at Louisbourg and Beauséjour. In June 1755, a fleet of thirty-one British transports and three warships carried nearly 2,000 provincial troops from New England and 270 British regulars to attack (and easily capture) the French fort at Beauséjour. Approximately 200 to 300 Acadians were among the defenders, forced to fight by the French commandant. The Acadian deputies of mainland Nova Scotia were called to Halifax in July 1755 to pledge an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British Crown. The British authorities used their refusal as the justification for what turned out to be eight years of deportations (and systematic burning of buildings). In the fall and winter of 1755 an estimated 6,000 Acadians were transported to the Anglo-American colonies. The years that followed saw further deportations to France, England, and the American colonies. In total, approximately 10,000 Acadians were deported, with another 2,000 to 3,000 hiding or escaping. Starting in the 1760s, the valuable agricultural land developed by Acadians began to be settled by “planters” from New England. By 1764, at which time the Acadians were allowed to return to the region provided they swore the oath of allegiance,
890
NOVA SCOTIA
View of the waterfront in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1917. (Library of Congress)
all the best Acadian farmland was in the hands of newcomers. Subsequent decades witnessed other waves of largely Englishspeaking migration to Nova Scotia: notably thousands of Loyalists at the end of the American Revolution and thousands of Scottish and Irish immigrants in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Acadians began to return to Nova Scotia, which then included what is now New Brunswick, in the late 1760s. They came back in trickles, not in a great wave, and likely more often by sea than by land. Looking exclusively at the Acadian-settled areas in what is now Nova Scotia, the major areas selected for settlement were
scattered coastal harbors in Yarmouth, Digby, Cumberland, Inverness, Richmond, Antigonish, and Halifax counties. Their widespread dispersal was desired by the British colonial authorities, who did not want them concentrated in a few areas. In only a few locations, Pubnico and Isle Madame, were Acadians able to settle in the same areas in which they or their ancestors had been before 1755. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were about 45,000 Acadians in Nova Scotia. Throughout the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, the clergy and institutions of the Roman Catholic Church were central to their religious, educational, and social life.
NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY
Father Jean-Mandé Sigogne, a refugee from the excesses of the French Revolution, came to Nova Scotia in 1799 and toiled for decades among different Acadian communities, especially on the educational front. Similarly, it was a religious order, the Eudist fathers, who founded the first Frenchspeaking institution of higher learning in the province in 1890. What they founded as the Collège Sainte-Anne at Church Point is today’s Université Sainte-Anne. The Eudist fathers also played a fundamental role in advancing education and culture in the community of Chéticamp on Cape Breton Island. The scattered nature of Acadian settlement in Nova Scotia presented many challenges, notably assimilation into the mainstream of the English-speaking population. A French-language newspaper, L’Evangéline, was founded in Nova Scotia in 1887, but in 1905 it moved to Moncton, New Brunswick, where a higher concentration of Acadians made it more economically viable. A new Acadian paper, Le Petit Courrier, began in 1937 as a news outlet for southwestern Nova Scotia. Its modern version, Le Courrier, is a weekly that aims to link the various Acadian communities throughout the province. The key Acadian organization in today’s Nova Scotia is the Fédération acadienne de la Nouvelle-Ecosse (FANE), founded in 1968. In 2004, the third Congrès mondial acadien was held in Nova Scotia. A. J. B. (John) Johnston See also: Acadia; American Revolution; Catholic Church; Fishing; French Revolution; Fur Trade; Language; Louisbourg; New Brunswick; New France; Timber; Treaty of Utrecht.
891
References Buckner, Phillip A., and John G. Reid, eds. The Atlantic Region to Confederation: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994: 78–103. Clark, Andrew Hill. Acadia: The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968. Daigle, Jean, and Robert LeBlanc. “Acadian Deportation and Return.” Historical Atlas of Canada I: From the Beginning to 1800. Ed. R. Cole Harris and Geoffrey J. Matthews. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987: 30. Griffiths, Naomi E. S. The Contexts of Acadian History, 1686–1784. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. Ross, Sally, and Alphonse Deveau. The Acadians of Nova Scotia Past and Present. Halifax: Nimbus, 1992.
NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY France is militarily a nuclear power, and it can be said that nuclear energy powers France. Over three-quarters of French electricity is generated by nuclear power stations. France’s development of military and civil nuclear technology during the postwar period is—like her acquisition of space technology and computing technology—an example of an ideologically driven industrial sector. Militarily, France’s tradition as a major player in the international system (much undermined by World War II) and Gaullist desires to restore French “grandeur” and independence of action made possession of nuclear weapons a necessity. Civil nuclear power was seen by governments (particularly after the oil crisis of the 1970s) as a means of protecting France’s independence by freeing her from reliance on exhaustible or
892
NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY
unreliably supplied fossil fuels. On a more general level, French governments have also traditionally supported domestic expertise in high-technology sectors such as nuclear energy, aerospace, and computers as a way of countering any potential technology “gap” between France and the United States. The first French atomic device was exploded at Reggane in the Sahara in February 1960, authorizing France to enter the then highly select club of countries— the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain—that were technologically and industrially sufficiently advanced to master the necessary techniques. By the time the French atom bomb was successfully tested, de Gaulle had been back in power for only two years, but the Fifth Republic had immediately seized upon the work on civil and military applications of atomic energy initiated during the late 1940s and 1950s. Since the mid-1950s in particular, French governments had been aware of the advantages of possessing atomic expertise, but it fell to de Gaulle to create explicitly a ministry of atomic and space affairs and to preside over France’s accession to the nuclear club. It was also de Gaulle who in October 1945—while France was still under the control of his provisional government—had created the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA), the powerful state technical, industrial, and commercial agency charged with developing France’s mastery of civil and military nuclear technology. Nuclear technology has almost inseparable civil and military applications, and both have, in the case of France, been harnessed to French sovereignty in the form of
France’s independence of energy sources or France’s strategic military independence. As well as contributing straightforwardly to French military independence through warheads, nuclear technology—and France’s unwillingness to be told what to do about it by the United States or United Nations—has also brought France into diplomatic conflict with the United States. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of July 1968 was not signed by France, as de Gaulle refused to join the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom in an agreement that he saw as limiting French sovereignty. France ratified the treaty only in 1992. French relations with the United States over nuclear technology have reflected the curious tension that exists between the two nations: both Western Allies in the conflict with Germany, and in the cold war opposing West against East, their community of interest has been distorted by France’s desire (especially under Gaullism) to “go it alone” and produce military and industrial/commercial applications on the basis of the sole filière nationale. Examples of U.S. refusals to help French technological programs were often emphasized by Gaullist governments, whereas American technical support of France was downplayed in order to stress the national pride the French should take in the skill and resourcefulness of their scientists and industry. “French” nuclear power stations were Gallicized during the 1970s from reactors designed by Westinghouse and developed by Framatome, owned by the Belgian industrial group Schneider. Indeed, these reactors were of the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) technology favored by the
NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY
United States, and the French adoption of them was a consequence of the abandonment of France’s own national preference for graphite-gas reactors—supported by de Gaulle but subsequently revoked by Pompidou. Hugh Dauncey
893
See also: Computer Technology; Gaulle, General Charles de; NATO; Pompidou, Georges; Space Technology; World War II. References Davis, Mary. Military-Civilian Nuclear Link— A Guide to the French Nuclear Industry. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988. Mongin, Dominique. La Bombe atomique française 1945–58. Paris: Bruylant, 1997.
O OCAMPO,VICTORIA (1890–1979) Argentine writer, born into one of the most affluent and influential Argentine families on April 7, 1890. The eldest of six girls, Ocampo had a privileged childhood growing up in Buenos Aires, educated by the best French and English governesses, and traveling often to Europe. Possessed of a fiery, proud, and rebellious nature, Ocampo became a dominant figure in Argentine literary society. She founded, published, and ran South America’s most prominent literary magazine and publishing house, Sur (1931–1970), providing a literary interface between North and South America and between the Americas and Europe. Through Sur, Ocampo published writers such as James Joyce, André Malraux, and Virginia Woolf. More a platform for cultural exchange than a mere magazine, Sur “built bridges” across continents. Ocampo never wrote fiction because she could not “invent.” Instead, she made her mark as an essayist, memoirist, and letter writer. In her ten volumes of Testimonios (Testimonies) and six volumes of Autobiografías (Autobiographies), she wrote essays, not just about books that interested her but about everything and everyone that af-
fected her. Her influential circle of friends included Jorge Luis Borges, Rabindranath Tagore, and Gabriela Mistral. Initially welcomed into the literary sphere by men as a muse because of her beauty, elegance, and wit rather than as an artistic or intellectual equal, through her talent and tenacity she brought herself to prominence. Her earliest works, “Babel” and “De Francesca a Beatrice,” were published (in French) by the prestigious Buenos Aires newspaper, La Nación. Ocampo’s “soul became acclimatized” in French. For many years, she had difficulty writing in Spanish: “I feel that Spanish words will never come to me spontaneously, especially when I am moved emotionally, when I need them most.” Ocampo felt so close to the French language and culture that she spent months at a time in Paris. It was during these trips she met Paul Valéry, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, André Malraux, and Aldous Huxley, whom she later invited to publish in Sur. Ocampo’s life is a success story, but she overcame many obstacles along the way. Initially she wanted to be an actress, a rare ambition for a woman of her class, but her conservative parents forbade it. Marriage to a man she hardly knew (Luis Bernardo de Estrada) for reasons of freedom, duty, and
895
896
OHIO
a fear of “spinsterhood” ended in a difficult divorce. And in 1953, she was imprisoned briefly under Perón’s nationalist regime, although no formal charges were ever brought against her. Through such adversities, she found her voice and vision. Ocampo was a fighter, not only for literature but for women’s rights and individual freedom. She rejected fascism, housed Jews fleeing Europe during World War II, and in 1977 became the first woman member of the Argentine Academy of Letters. She established lasting links between continents and cultures. Fiona G. Parrott See also: Argentina; Borges, Jorge Luis; Literary Relations; Malraux, André; World War II. References Meyer, Doris. Victoria Ocampo: Against the Wind and the Tide. New York: Braziller, 1979. Steiner, Patricia Owen. Victoria Ocampo: Writer, Feminist, Woman of the World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
OHIO In 1754, at a small French fort where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio River, Colonel George Washington of the Virginia militia initiated the events that would lead to the French and Indian War between France and Great Britain. By 1692, endemic Indian warfare had emptied the upper Ohio valley of its native Erie and Shawnee population. These broken tribes were absorbed as captives into Iroquoian societies, sought refuge among French-allied Indians in New France and the western Great Lakes, or fled to allies in
Pennsylvania and Carolina. For a generation, the Ohio country lay empty and ignored by the great powers. Shortly after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the Shawnees began returning to the Ohio country. Owing to the Shawnees’ prodigious deerskin harvesting, Pennsylvania traders followed. French agents slipped in from the north under orders from the governor-general of New France to attach the Shawnees and allied Delawares and Mingoes (collectively, Ohio Indians) to the French interest and to serve as a buffer between the British colonies and France’s sparsely populated interior. But most Indians had become economically and socially dependent on the deerskin trade with Pennsylvania. The French, meanwhile, offered much in the way of gifts and demands of obedience but little in the way of trade. Thus, when a French expedition traveled down the Ohio River in 1749 to remind both Indians and the British of French authority, it met distrustful Ohio Indians engaged in brisk commerce with Pennsylvania traders. Succeeding governors-general tried to strengthen France’s hand and eliminate English traders and speculators by building forts in the Ohio country at Sandusky and on the Cuyahoga River, as well as building a string of four forts beginning at Fort Presque Isle and anchored at Fort Duquesne. Virginia, however, demanded the Ohio valley. In 1753, Washington marched into Fort le Boeuf (south of the eastern end of Lake Erie) demanding that the French withdraw. He was rebuffed and sent home. Washington returned the following year to drive the French from their newly built Fort Dusquesne, but he was routed. With war not yet declared, British North Ameri-
OLLIVIER, EMILE
can commander Major General Edward Braddock led 2,200 soldiers to their inglorious demise at the hands of the Dusquesne garrison and its Ottawa, Huron, and Potawatomi allies. Most of the formal campaigning of the war took place in the Northeast and Canada, while Canadian backwoodsmen and Indian allies raided and burned the British frontier from Ohio to South Carolina. In the summer of 1758, British General John Forbes led 7,000 men into the Ohio country. Though mauled several times by Canadians and their Indian allies, Forbes’s army neared Fort Dusquesne. By October, the Ohio Indians grew weary of attacking it and withdrew from fighting. Meanwhile, Fort Frontenac, with supplies for Dusquesne, was taken by the British. Deserted by Indians, undermanned, and short of supplies, the French garrison burned the fort and withdrew north to Fort Michault-Venango, beginning their retreat from the Ohio country. Jim Fisher
See also: French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Ottawa; Treaty of Utrecht. References Downes, Randolph C. Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940. McConnell, Michael N. A Country between the Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Tanner, Helen Hornbeck, et al. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
897
OLLIVIER, EMILE (1940–) Haitian writer, born 1940 in Port-auPrince. Emile Ollivier was forced into exile in 1964 due to his anti-Duvalier activities with the Union Nationale des Etudiants Haïtiens. After studying in France, he moved to Canada, where he has remained, teaching sociology at the University of Montreal. Ollivier is one of the foremost Haitian writers of his generation, most of whom, for instance, Jean Métellus and Jean-Claude Charles, have also spent their adult lives in exile. The experience of exile is inevitably a dominant theme in Ollivier’s prize-winning work, from Paysage de l’aveugle (“Landscapes of the Blind,” 1977), through his most acclaimed work, Mère-Solitude/Mother Solitude (1983), to La Discorde aux cent voix (“The HundredVoiced Discord,” 1986), Passages (1991), Les Urnes scellées (“The Sealed Urns,” 1995), Mille Eaux (“A Thousand Waters,” 1999), and Regarde, regarde les lions (“Look, Look at the Lions,” 2001). Haitian history is another important theme, and his work suggests that, below the surface appearance of change, history is characterized by repetitions and circular motions. Haiti, to him, is a closed space, and as such, exile often constitutes an escape from the confines of the native land. As a result, exile is at once a moment of deracination and of freedom; exile involves loss of unity of identity but is also an opportunity to add new elements, to move into a more plural idea of the self. Ollivier’s work also examines the dilemmas involved in returning to the homeland and questions whether a satisfactory reenracination is possible after years in exile. Like many contemporary Caribbean
898
ONTARIO
authors, Ollivier is wary of using the term “writer,” with its persistent associations with the European culture of the “master,” to describe himself. Instead, he prefers the term conteur, or “storyteller,” because it is more directly associated with Haitian oral culture. That is not to say that Ollivier writes in Creole—he writes exclusively in French—but that his works often share technical or structural similarities with oral culture, notably in their polyphonic narratives and in their reliance on collective memory. Ollivier rejects the term diaspora to describe the Haitian population in exile, as it has connotations of nostalgia and of a fixed bond between identity and place. In his view, exile has led to a reconfiguration of Haitian space, so that now there is a Haiti in Montreal, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Paris. Haiti and Haitian identity, he argues, should no longer be thought of in terms of geography, but as imaginary spaces, flexible, constantly evolving entities that reach out into the modern world while at the same time, perhaps paradoxically, retaining their essential roots in the troubled homeland. In these ways, Ollivier has been prominent in mapping out contemporary developments and directions in Haitian literature and society. Martin Munro
See also: Haiti; Language; Montreal. References Hoffmann, Léon–François. “The Haitian Novel during the Last Ten Years.” Callaloo 15, no. 3 (summer 1992): 761–769. Lambert, Fernando. “Emile Ollivier, écrivain d’Haïti au Québec.” Notre Librairie 133 (January–April 1998): 154–159.
ONTARIO The most populous province in Canada with more than 12 million inhabitants, Ontario is also home to the largest population of francophones outside Quebec. However, francophones today make up less than 5 percent of the population. The greatest concentration is in the East, in the Ottawa area, where there are approximately 200,000 francophones, while the secondlargest group is in the North, where there are about 150,000. One francophone in five lives in the metro Toronto region, the largest urban agglomeration in the country with a population of approximately 4.5 million. While the francophone population in Ontario has actually steadily increased over the past fifty years, Ontario’s population explosion through immigration has seen the proportion of francophones steadily decline. Although Ontario is the industrial heartland of Canada, containing one-third of the country’s population and much of its wealth, initial interest in the region came from French missionaries. Jesuits first established an outpost at Sainte-Marieamong-the-Hurons in 1639. The first permanent settlement was established in 1701 much further south, near what is now the U.S. border at Detroit. Settlers began arriving in 1750 and stayed after the French colonies were ceded to the British. British settlement of the region did not begin in earnest until after the U.S. War of Independence, when colonial authorities found themselves under pressure to establish a presence as a deterrent to any American expansion plans. The Constitution Act of 1791 divided the newly acquired province of Quebec into French-speaking Lower and English-speaking Upper Canada—now
ONTARIO
called Ontario. The new law entrenched strong links to the British colonial government and carved out a special role for the Anglican Church, setting the stage for two centuries of conflicts between the Englishspeaking Protestant majority and the French-speaking Roman Catholic minority. While fur trading had attracted francophone traders throughout the region by the eighteenth century, there was little significant settlement by francophones until the nineteenth century, when the promise of work in the lumber industry attracted growing numbers across the border from Quebec. Napoléon’s successful blockade of Britain’s traditional supply of squared timbers for its navy created a bonanza in Canada. French lumberjacks poured into areas like the Ottawa valley and eventually settled. Another wave followed in the north of the province when new regions were opened by the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a transcontinental link to Britain’s colony on the Pacific coast. Politically, the new colony was not a success. Ravaged by marauding Americans during the War of 1812, some settlers sided with the United States. Rebellions in 1837 in both provinces prompted their colonial masters to change their minds, and in 1841 the two were united as the province of Canada. More than a decade of fractious politics followed, ending only with confederation and the union of British North American colonies. English-speaking Protestant disapproval of the policies of French-speaking Catholic Quebec was often felt by the francophone residents of Ontario. Larger anti-Catholic sentiments were regularly disguised as language conflicts. Systematic pressure on the Catholic community by
899
the British Protestant majority forced complex alliances between working-class Irish and francophone communities, particularly against the strength of the Orangemen that had established themselves there. However, in 1912, when the province imposed Regulation 17, forbidding the use of French as a language of instruction, it was the result of pressure from another curious alliance, this time between the English-speaking Protestant and Irish Catholic communities. A largely anti-Catholic movement, led by a group known as the Equal Rights Association, had already succeeded in abolishing a separate Catholic school system in neighboring Manitoba. The Irish, for their part, had been convinced that English alone should be the language used to convert the rest of North America to Catholicism. Fifteen years of protests followed, which saw the emergence of a strong FrancoOntarian identity. Newspapers were established, and schools and other institutions were set up. Lines were drawn for battles that continue to this day. In the 1970s, it was the struggle for French high schools, once again couched in Catholic and Protestant terms. For decades, responsibility for schooling was divided between “public” school boards, which catered to an English-speaking, secular (but largely Protestant) community, and “separate” school boards, which served equally the French- and English-speaking Catholic communities. While the public board was funded through local taxes and contributions from the provincial government, the Catholic board was often funded only through local subscription, depending on whether the provincial government of the day felt it needed to curry favor with Catholic voters.
900
OTTAWA
Most recently, the government found itself facing a storm of protests in 1997 when it attempted to close the only French-speaking hospital in Ottawa for budget reasons. Two court challenges later, the government was forced to back down in 2002. Struggles over French-language education intensified again in the years immediately following the entrenchment of the Charter of Rights in the Canadian Constitution of 1982. The charter guarantees the right of access to government services in French “where numbers warrant.” This spawned numerous struggles and court challenges to force local officials—school boards mostly—to provide services. Finally, the Ontario government interceded with a law in 1986 that specifically outlined the level of French-language services to be offered across the province. Ontario today has twelve Frenchlanguage school boards (four public and eight separate) and three French-language applied arts and technology colleges: Collège Boréal, based in Sudbury with campuses throughout northern Ontario; La Cité collégiale in Ottawa; and the Alfred College of Agriculture and Food Technology. In addition, four universities offer French-only programs. French is an official language of the courts, and since 1986 laws are tabled and adopted in the provincial legislature in French and English. Nonetheless, it is still difficult to obtain French health care or specialized community services, such as psychologists, social workers, or prenatal courses, in many parts of the province. Although the francophone population is relatively small and scattered over a geographical area almost twice the size of France, it boasts a network of cultural
centers, professional theater companies, publishing companies, weekly newspapers (and one daily, Le Droit, in Ottawa), as well as private and public radio stations. The provincial government also operates a French educational television network, TfO. Despite regular political crises—often aggravated by unhappiness over policies in neighboring Quebec, a variety of demographic and sociological indicators suggest that in fact the francophone community has never been healthier. Income, education levels, and rates of language transmission from one generation to the next all show positive signs. Kevin Crombie See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Catholic Church; Detroit; Fur Trade; Hurons; Jesuits; Language; Manitoba; Ottawa; Quebec; Timber. References Atlas de la Francophonie. Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2002. Churchill, Stacy. Official Languages in Canada: Changing the Language Landscape. Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage, 1996. Creighton, Donald G. Empire of the St. Lawrence. Toronto: Macmillan, 1956. The Francophone Community in Ontario. Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2002.
OTTAWA Ottawa was never intended to be the capital of Canada. Kingston, some 200 kilometers (120 miles) south, was the choice of colonial authorities and was laid out with wide boulevards and impressive limestone buildings. However, fearing hostilities with the United States after the War of 1812, Queen Victoria herself is said to have decreed that the capital of the newly unified
OTTAWA
colonies of Upper and Lower Canada should be moved a safer distance away to Ottawa. Scarcely more than a logging camp in a swamp at the junction of the Rideau and Ottawa rivers, the first permanent settlement was established in 1826 for the construction of the Rideau Canal, another defensive project prompted by fear of American aggression. Fur-trading posts had been established throughout the region since the 1700s, but the lucrative trade in squared timbers to supply Britain’s navy brought itinerant workers, many from Quebec, to the region in the early 1800s. The lumber industry remained the region’s economic engine until it was surpassed by the federal government bureaucracy. Ottawa in the early nineteenth century was a brawling town where rival gangs of Irish Catholics, Orangemen, and Québécois fought over scarce jobs. Most lived in the Lowertown district, where the Crown had forbidden the sale of lots to occupants, knowing that most were French Catholics. This effectively shut them out of municipal affairs when a city council was created that gave the right to vote only to mortgage-free property owners. Systematic pressure on the Catholic community by the Protestant majority forced complex alliances between the working-class Irish and francophone communities. Language conflicts were often used to mask a larger anti-Catholic sentiment, and vice versa. Discontent over proCatholic moves by the government of Lower Canada often spilled into the streets of Ottawa. A turning point was the infamous provincial Regulation 17 that forbade the use of French in Ontario schools. In 1913,
901
just months after the passage of the law, the francophone community prepared for battle by launching a newspaper, Le Droit, which took as its motto L’Avenir est à ceux qui luttent (The Future Belongs to Those Who Struggle). Backed by the Oblate order, who maintained a controlling interest until the 1980s, Le Droit became the voice that rapidly began to identify itself as a Franco-Ontarian community. Ottawa remains a locus for tensions between the Ontario government and the province’s francophone minority. For example, there were battles in the 1970s for the establishment of French-language high schools. Most recently, the cash-strapped province tried to close the only francophone hospital in eastern Ontario in 1997. A storm of protests and two successful court challenges obliged the province to finally back down in 2002. Today, less than 17 percent of the city’s population of 750,000 is francophone. The federal government’s policy of official bilingualism has forged a curious accommodation. While most government departments function with English as the lingua franca, it is common to hear conversations take place in both languages simultaneously, participants each expressing themselves in their mother tongue. Kevin Crombie See also: Catholic Church; Fur Trade; Language; Ontario; Timber. References Bush, Edward F. The Builders of the Rideau Canal, 1826–32. Ottawa: Parks Canada, Ottawa, 1981. Churchill, Stacy. Official Languages in Canada: Changing the Language Landscape. Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage, 1996. The Francophone Community in Ontario. Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2002.
P PAINE,THOMAS (1737–1809) Thomas Paine was an early champion of the special relationship between the United States and France, beginning with his role as secretary of foreign affairs for the American Congress during the American Revolution. Paine, however, is best known for his works written during the American and French Revolutions, where he offered spirited defenses of popular sovereignty, human rights, and republican government. Both Common Sense (1776) and Rights of Man (1791–1792) stand out as the most widely read political tracts of the period. Paine’s distinct international thought also serves as the foundation for liberal cosmopolitanism in international relations. His sustained belief that democratization, free trade, and respect for human rights would reduce international conflict stands as one of the earliest liberal visions of globalization. Paine was born the son of a corset maker in Thetford, England, in 1737. He left school at age twelve to become an apprentice to his father. The apprenticeship ran counter to his disposition and his lifelong strictures against tradition and inherited social standing. In Rights of Man, Paine attacked inherited privilege as a practice “as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous
as an hereditary poet-laureate.” After seven years of tedious labor, Paine stepped out of the path paved by his father and went off to sea, serving on a privateer during the French and Indian War. His experience as a seaman was followed by an assortment of positions including tax collector and shopkeeper. Each of these pursuits later informed Paine’s rather unique and wideranging political thought. His experiences on the privateer demonstrated how war damaged commerce and imposed costs for all involved. As a result of this, Paine later reasoned, trading nations would rationally oppose war due to its costs to commerce. His experiences with naval warfare also led him to write several articles on the vulnerability of large warships. One such essay, written in 1807, is Of the Comparative Powers and Expense of Ships of War, Gun Boats, and Fortifications. The frustrations met while trying to collect the excise, a much-hated tax levied in eighteenthcentury England, surely contributed to the importance Paine placed on legitimacy within state-society relations. In Paine’s view, the most efficient way to assess the potential legitimacy of any policy was through open democratic representation. With a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met
903
904
PAINE,THOMAS
Thomas Paine was an early champion of the special relationship between the United States and France, beginning with his role as secretary of foreign affairs for the American Congress during the American Revolution. (Library of Congress)
briefly in London, Paine departed for the United States in 1774. Shortly after his arrival, he began writing for the Pennsylvania Magazine, where he polished his considerable skill as a popular writer. In early 1776, he published Common Sense. Paine’s simple, direct, and often sarcastic style made the pamphlet a popular favorite. Hundreds of thousands of copies of Common Sense circulated in the first year. It was often read aloud in taverns and other gathering places. Paine’s claim that any reconciliation with Britain was impossible struck a chord among the American people and helped solidify support for the Declaration of Independence, which was signed six months after Common Sense was first published. During the Revolutionary War, Paine served as an aide-de-camp for Nathanael Greene, continued to publish pamphlets to
bolster revolutionary resolve, and served the American Congress as its secretary of foreign affairs. In this latter role, Paine played a key part in negotiations with France over assistance to the colonies. Paine’s part in negotiating French aid has been overshadowed by the events of the Silas Deane affair. While serving as secretary, Paine discovered that war materials being shipped secretly from France would bring monetary profit to Deane and others. Unable to resolve the issue privately, Paine publicized correspondence to make a case of war profiteering against Deane. Paine’s revelations, however, embarrassed French officials, who had wanted to keep this early assistance hidden to avoid provoking Britain. As a result of the Deane affair, Paine was relieved of his duties in January 1779, but French aid to the revolutionary effort continued. During his time as secretary, Paine consistently sought to cultivate a sincere FrancoAmerican friendship. This manifested itself in the Treaty of Alliance between France and the United States, signed in February 1778. This agreement not only ensured continued military assistance, it also recognized independence and thereby welcomed the United States into the society of sovereign states. In The American Crisis VI, Paine pointed to French generosity to the American cause: “In France, we have found an affectionate friend and faithful ally; in Britain, we have found nothing but tyranny, cruelty, and infidelity.” At the end of the American Revolution, Paine returned to Europe to promote his design of an iron bridge. He presented his plans for the bridge to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in the summer of 1787. Shortly afterward, he returned to England to secure financial backers and attend to manufacturing details. The events leading
PAINE,THOMAS
up to the French Revolution drew Paine back into politics. In a letter to George Washington, Paine characterized the storming of the Bastille as “the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe.” In response to Edmund Burke’s highly critical Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine published Rights of Man in two parts in 1791 and 1792. Like Common Sense, Rights met with immediate success and widespread influence. In Rights, Paine reiterated the importance of unalienable natural rights, advocated democratic government around the world, cast the framework for a modern welfare state, and criticized all positions gained by inheritance rather than by merit. One often-neglected theme of Rights was its emphasis on international politics, especially in Part II. Paine frequently shifted analysis from individual nation-states to all humanity. “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good,” he exhorted toward the conclusion of Rights. Paine also advocated international interventions to spread democracy and the promotion of free trade. He rightly predicted that democracies would remain peaceful with one another. In 1791, Paine traveled to France and was greeted by enthusiastic crowds. In Paris, Paine was awarded honorary French citizenship and played an active role in drafting the new French Constitution. In the tumult of Paris, Paine’s high standing did not endure. His position began to erode after arguing that the life of Louis XVI should be spared. Bad forms of government, Paine argued, corrupt all individuals in a society—kings and commoners alike. To hold Louis uniquely culpable for the entire corrupt institution was unjust. Paine’s position was further undermined when his native Britain joined in war
905
against France in 1793. Paine was imprisoned in Paris in December 1793. While in prison, Paine composed a seething critique of organized religion and Christianity, The Age of Reason. After nearly a year, he was released due in large part to the efforts of James Monroe, the American minister serving in Paris. Paine returned to the United States in 1802 and found that many of his acquaintances had moved away from his brand of radicalism. Others were put off by his critique of Christianity in The Age of Reason. Most, however, hardly took notice of Paine’s return. While he remained active through short writings on current events, his prominence never approached that which he enjoyed during the American Revolution. In 1809, he died and was buried in a simple grave on his farm in New Rochelle, New York. In 1819, William Cobbett, a zealous admirer of Paine’s political thought, secretly disinterred the remains and transported them back to England. Cobbett wanted to commemorate Paine’s life with a fitting monument, but it was never built, and what became of Paine’s remains has been reduced to speculation. Thomas C. Walker See also: American Revolution; French and Indian War; French Revolution; Washington, George. References Ayers, A. J. Thomas Paine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Keane, John. Tom Paine: A Political Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Paine, Thomas. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Citadel, 1945. Walker, Thomas C. “The Forgotten Prophet: Tom Paine’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations.” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 2000): 51–72.
906
PAINTING
PAINTING Since the nineteenth century, cultural relations between France and the Americas have been particularly important in the domain of painting. French artists helped create the first institutions in Latin America (Brazil, Chile, and Cuba) devoted to the teaching of fine arts. Many North American artists went to Paris to continue their training in the highly reputed art schools of France. In their turn, many French artists in the twentieth century resided in North America, particularly in New York, which became a center of artistic excellence. The French contribution to the development of Latin American painting was most important in Brazil. The transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil in 1808 brought in its wake not only an opening up to other countries but also the development of artistic and cultural institutions. In 1816, the Portuguese set up a commission in France to develop the artistic life of Rio de Janeiro, which had become the capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarve the previous year. The commission’s aim was to found a fine-arts academy and an art museum, as well as to develop official art and architecture in the neoclassical style. As the only monarchy in the Americas at the time, Brazil was attractive to the commission’s members, most of whom had been official artists under Napoléon Bonaparte. They included Joachim Lebreton, permanent secretary to the fine-arts section of France’s Institut royal; the history painter Nicolas-Antoine Taunay; and the painter Jean-Baptiste Debret. Their activity resulted in a break with the baroque religious art of the colonial period and ushered in a new period in Brazilian art in which painting played a much more important role.
Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848) made a major contribution to the dissemination of the image of Brazil in France and to the development of Brazilian painting in the nineteenth century. Born in Paris, he was the cousin of Jean-Louis David. As a student at the Fine Arts Academy in Paris from 1785, he came in second in the Prix de Rome for his work Regulus Leaving for Carthage. During the First Empire, several official commands came his way. His history paintings, with Napoléon Bonaparte as the main figure, were regularly presented at the Salon de Paris. Once in Rio, Debret taught history painting at the academy and continued to paint in this genre, as well as painting numerous portraits. In 1829, he organized the first art exhibition in Brazil, where the academy’s students displayed their work. He returned to France in 1831, after the reform of the academy’s statutes and the events that forced D. Pedro I to abdicate. Between 1834 and 1839, Debret published in Paris the three volumes of his Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil. The lithographs, made from Debret’s watercolors by Charles Pradier, his former colleague on the French artistic mission, were printed by Thierry Frères, the volumes themselves by Firmin Didot Frères. This cultural and artistic openness encouraged further visits to Brazil by French artists. François-Auguste Biard (1799– 1882) studied drawing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Lyons. As an officer in the French navy, he sailed aboard the corvette La Bayadère between 1827 and 1828. He moved to Paris around 1834, regularly participating in the salon, where his paintings enjoyed huge success. King Louis-Philippe ordered several paintings from him exalting French history to decorate the château of Versailles. Between
PAINTING
1839 and 1840, Biard took part in an expedition to the Arctic, and in 1858 he spent two years in Brazil, visiting the provinces of Espírito Santo, Bahia, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Maranhão, and Para and sailing on the Amazon. During his stay, he painted portraits of members of the Brazilian court and Brazilian landscapes and made many sketches of Amerindian tribes. He enjoyed good relations with Emperor D. Pedro II and set up his studio in the palace of the city of Rio de Janeiro. He turned down the post of replacement professor of history painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, preferring his Amazonian trip. Biard visited the United States and Canada on his way back to France. This brief visit yielded at least three paintings by Biard: Comment on voyage en chemin de fer dans l’Amérique du Nord, exhibited at the 1861 Paris Salon; Wagon américain, exhibited in 1876 in Strasbourg; and Chutes du Niagara, exhibited at the 1880 Paris Salon. In 1862, Hachette published in Paris his travel account entitled Deux Années au Brésil, illustrated by 180 engravings drawn by Edouard Riou from Biard’s sketches, the work of different engravers. Very few French artists worked in the French Caribbean. Until the foundation of the Academy in Cuba, painting was done by unknown Afro-Cuban slaves. The School of Drawing, later to become the Academy of Fine Arts of Cuba, was founded by, among others, Jean-Baptiste Vermay (1784–1832), considered by Louis Réau to be “the father of Cuban painting.” Vermay was an architect and sculptor, as well as a painter of canvases, dioramas, and frescoes. His works include the “little temple” (Templete), designed to commemorate the celebration of the first mass in Havana and decorated with three of his paintings.
907
After his death, the academy continued to be run by French artists: Guillaume Colson, who took up his post in 1836, and Joseph-Nicolas Leclerc, director between 1843 and 1848. The emergence of modernist painting in Latin America is also due to France. Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1988) adapted Brazilian themes to the cubist idiom of simple shapes, straight lines, and flat colors. She studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, and her painting The Passport was featured in the Salon de la Société des artistes français in 1922. Back in Brazil, she joined the modernist group of São Paulo. On her return to Paris in 1923, she studied with André Lhote, knew the poet Blaise Cendrars, and frequented Fernand Léger’s studio. In 1926, her first individual show took place in Paris at the Galerie Percier. In similar fashion, Anita Malfatti (1889–1964) lived in Paris between 1923 and 1928 and took part in several exhibitions. Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, after organizing the Modern Art Week in 1922 in São Paulo, went to Paris in 1923 and stayed until 1925. He studied at the Académie Ranson and met many artists and intellectuals, including Breton, Léger, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Matisse, Braque, and Picasso. The Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949) spent his adolescence in Spain and went to Paris in 1926 where he met Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. He later founded with Michel Seuphor the Cercle et Carré group, the origin of the “constructive universalism” movement, and developed an interest in pre-Columbian culture. He settled in Montevideo in 1934, creating the Asociación de Arte Constructivo. The Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam (1902–1982) went to Spain in 1923, having studied at the San Alejandro Academy. He met Picasso in Paris in 1937
908
PAINTING
and was apparently introduced by him to African art. In 1940, he fled the German occupation of Paris and lived in Marseilles, where he met André Breton and made links with the surrealist movement. French painters in Mexico were less important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than architects and sculptors. Louis Réau points out the existence of a colony of shopkeepers in Mexico called the Barcelonnettes, who came from the lower Alps region and apparently fostered cultural links between Mexico and France in the nineteenth century. The Museum of Mexico City acquired some French paintings, including a St. John the Baptist by Jean-Dominique Ingres. In 1838, the painter Henri-Léon-Pharamond Blanchard (1805–1873) took part in the expedition to Mexico and produced many drawings, which inspired his paintings. The photographer, painter, and draftsman François Aubert (1829–1906) visited Mexico to create paintings about the occupation. He accompanied the French troops and witnessed the execution of Emperor Maximilian in 1867. During his stay, he studied photography and opened a studio. In the first half of the twentieth century, links between French and Mexican painting developed further. Diego Rivera (1886–1949) was born in Guanajato in Mexico. After six years of study at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, he visited Europe in 1907 and stayed until 1921. In Paris, he became acquainted with the painting of Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, and Picasso, and he took part in several exhibitions. The cubist influence is visible in his paintings of this period, particularly in Mallorca and La Terrasse du café of 1915. It was his study in Italy of Italian frescoes of the Quattrocento that helped him to de-
velop Mexican mural art with his colleagues David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896– 1974) and José Clemente Orozco (1883– 1949) when he returned to Mexico in the 1920s. In turn, Mexican mural art, with its collectivist celebration of labor, had an important impact in France, particularly in the 1930s in the work of Fernand Léger (1881–1955) and André Lhote (1855– 1962). The latter’s contribution to the 1937 Exposition universelle in Paris was a monumental painting entitled La Houille et ses dérivés (1937). French painters were also very active in the United States and Canada. David Karel demonstrated that at least 5,000 Frenchspeaking artists came to the United States between 1860 and 1939 from France but also from Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada. In all probability, the world’s fairs held in Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), and Saint Louis (1904) played their role in attracting this artistic migration. In the twentieth century, French painters visited North America for many reasons, including a taste for an American exotic, the seeking out of an emerging art market, and an escape from a Europe ravaged by war. French painters of note who visited or emigrated to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included: Edgar Degas (1834– 1917), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Albert Gleizes (1881–1953), Fernand Léger (1881–1955), André Masson (1896– 1987), Raoul Dufy (1877–1953), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), as well as RégisFrançois Gignoux (1816–1882) and PaulDominique Philippoteaux (1845–1923), who also worked in Canada. During the nineteenth century, the lack of institutions devoted to fine-art
PAINTING
teaching in the United States led more than a hundred painters to complete their training in Paris. Most of them frequented private studios or the Académie Julian, for very few managed to get into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. These American painters in Paris included: George Catlin (1796– 1872), James Whistler (1834–1903), Winslow Homer (1836–1910), John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), and Frederic Remington (1861–1909). The gravitational attraction of Paris gradually diminished during the twentieth century, as New York’s star in the artistic firmament ascended. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, numerous French painters visited New France and Canada, including: Claude François (1614–1685), Jacques Leblond de Latour (1671–1715), Louis Dulongpré (1754–1843), Paul-Gaston Masselotte (1848–1895), Marc Antigna (1869–1941), Jean-Joseph BenjaminConstant (1845–1902), Charles-Adrien Maillard (1873–1939), Georges-Paul Leroux (1877–1957), and Marie-Alain Couturier (1897–1954). In turn, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many French Canadian painters visited France to frequent the public fine-art schools or private academies. François Baillargé (1759– 1830), born in Quebec City, was one of the first artists to establish a link between Canadian and European art. Having been initiated to sculpture by his father, Baillargé made a study visit to France between 1778 and 1781, registering at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and studying the latter under Jean-Baptiste Stouf and the former under Simon Julien. Back in Quebec City, he painted portraits and religious works, but enjoyed most success as a sculptor and architect. Raoul Barré (1874–1832)
909
studied at the Institut du Mont-Saint-Louis in Montreal. He visited Paris in 1891 where he stayed for seven years, frequenting the Académie Julian and the Ecole des BeauxArts. He took part in the Salon du printemps of the société des artistes français and published cartoons in the newspaper Le Soufflet. He continued this work on his return to Montreal in 1898, devoting himself to drawing for advertising and to painting. He then left for New York, where he stayed until 1927, working as Raoul Barry. RenéCharles Béliveau (1872–1914) visited Paris at the age of eighteen, registering at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with the painter Gérôme, frequenting the Académie Julian and traveling through Europe. In 1900, he returned to Montreal, where he took part in the Salon of the Art Association of Montreal, the annual exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1907, and the Salon de peinture et de sculpture of the SaintDenis club in 1911. The Quebec painter Rodolphe Duguay (1891–1973) worked on the decoration of churches in Quebec with Suzor-Coté, who helped him to go to Paris in 1920. Duguay frequented the Julian, Colarossi, Grande-Chaumière, and Adler academies, as well as the École des BeauxArts. He returned to Canada in 1927, where he continued to paint and exhibit until his death. Marc-Aurèle De Foy SuzorCôté (1869–1937) began as apprentice to the Quebec painter Joseph-Tomas Rousseau, decorating churches. He left for Paris in 1891, where he studied with the painter L. Bonnat and frequented the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for a year. He first took part in the Salon des artistes français in 1894, and he returned to Canada the same year. During a second visit to Europe between 1897 and 1901, he registered at the Julian and Colarossi academies. He made further visits
910
PALCY, EUZHAN
to Paris in 1904 and 1911. During his career, Suzor-Côté painted portraits and Quebec landscapes, exhibiting frequently in Canada until his death in 1937. Ozias Leduc (1864–1955), who enjoys a reputation as one of the greatest Canadian artists, was a painter, church decorator (especially in his youth), and illustrator. In 1897, he visited Paris with Suzor-Côté and stayed for eight months. Between 1891 and 1921, his still-life paintings, portraits, and landscapes were exhibited at the Art Association of Montreal and, between 1893 and 1920, at the Royal Canadian Academy. He also decorated Franco-American churches in New England. Ozias Leduc was also the mentor of Paul-Emile Borduas (1905–1960), the precursor of the automatist movement in Quebec. Ana Lucia Araujo See also: Architecture; Argentina; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Borduas, Paul-Emile; Brazil; Breton, André; Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar; Duchamp, Marcel; Dufy, Raoul; Ernst, Max; Gauguin, Paul; Gleizes, Albert; Lam, Wilfredo; Louis-Philippe, King of France; Masson, André; Mexico; New France; Quebec; Saint Louis; Sculpture; Surrealism; Travel Writing; World War II. References Castedo, Leopoldo. A History of Latin American Art and Architechture from PreColumbian Times to Present. Trans. and ed. Phyllis Freeman. New York: Praeger, 1969. Karel, David. Dictionnaire des artistes de langue française en Amérique du Nord. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992. Leenhardt, Jacques, Pierre Kalfon, Michèle Mattelart, and Armand Mattelart. Les Amériques latines en France. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Lemos, Carlos, José Roberto, Teixeira Leite, and Pedro Manuel Gismonti. The Art of Brazil. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Lucie-Smith, Edward. Latin American Art of the 20th Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.
Réau, Louis. Histoire de l’expansion de l’art français. Le Monde latin: Italie, Espagne, Portugal, Roumanie, Amérique du Sud. Paris: H. Laurens, 1931. Traba, Marta. Art of Latin America 1900–1980. Baltimore: Inter-American Development Press/John Hopkins University Press, 1994.
PALCY, EUZHAN (1957–) Born in Martinique in 1957, Euzhan Palcy is the first major international black female film director. In 1974, Palcy produced one of the first French-Caribbean television dramas, La Messagère/The Messenger. The following year, Palcy left for Paris, where she gained an arts degree and a masters in theater from the Sorbonne. At the same time, she took courses in cinematography at the Ecole Louis Lumière de Vaugirard, where she earned a doctorate. In 1982, FR3 released a short film produced by Palcy, L’Atelier du diable/The Devil’s Workshop. The same year, she started work on what was to be her breakthrough film: an adaptation of Joseph Zobel’s novel Rue Cases Nègres/Black Shack Alley. Palcy’s evocative, delicate re-creation of the rigidly stratified society of 1930s Martinique struck a chord with critics and the public alike. Following its release in 1983, audiences packed cinema theaters in Martinique for months. The Martinican public recognized in Palcy’s realistic presentation of plantation life images of themselves never seen before onscreen. European critics, too, greeted the film enthusiastically, awarding it a French César and the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival in 1983 for the Best First Film. After the success of Rue Cases Nègres, Palcy became the first black female director of a major Hollywood production when MGM hired her to adapt
PANAMA CANAL
André Brink’s novel A Dry White Season. Starring Donald Sutherland, Susan Sarandon, Marlon Brando, and Jürgen Prochnow, the 1989 film allowed Palcy once more to explore racial themes, only this time in 1970s South Africa. The film received mixed reviews, but remains a timely commentary on apartheid just as the system was about to collapse. Her 1992 Siméon saw Palcy return to Martinique for inspiration. The film, which again received a lukewarm critical response, is a playful attempt to express Martinique’s folkloric, creole culture through the story of a music teacher who dies but returns to help his pupil realize his dream to go to Paris. Much more intellectually substantial and culturally significant is Palcy’s 1994 release, Aimé Césaire, une voix pour l’histoire/ Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History, a threepart study of the life, work, and influence of Martinique’s great poet-politician. In the first part, L’Ile veilleuse, Césaire introduces Martinique and talks of the difficulties of being at once a poet and politician. Part II, Au Rendez-vous de la conquête, discusses Césaire’s move to Paris in the 1930s and the négritude movement. In Part III, La Force de regarder demain, Césaire discusses his plays La Tragédie du roi Christophe and Une Saison au Congo as prophecies of the traps of neocolonialism. There is a sense of warmth and empathy in Palcy’s treatment of Césaire, which is appropriate as their lives and careers in many ways mirror each other: both were prodigious talents, both left Martinique for Paris, their first works remain defining moments in their careers and in their genres, and both have successfully pushed back the boundaries of exclusion and marginalization in their respective fields. Martin Munro
911
See also: Césaire, Aimé; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Martinique; Zobel, Joseph. References Burton, Richard D. E., and Fred Reno, eds. French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana Today. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. César, Sylvie. Rue Cases-Nègres: Du roman au film (étude comparative). Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994.
PANAMA CANAL Officially sanctioned in 1879, begun in 1881–1882, declared bankrupt in 1888, denounced in the sensational trials of its key promoters in 1892–1893, and sold at a loss to the United States in 1904, the French Panama Canal project proved a perpetual disaster, sustained only by the energy and optimism of its author and the nineteenth century’s euphoric faith in technology and profit. Indeed if the U.S. government had not ultimately managed to realize the Panama Canal in 1914, the French project might be dismissed as an exceptionally tragic, failed effort, costing more than 20,000 lives and more than $300 million (ƒ1.5 billion). To this would have to be added the financial hardship, even ruin, of hundreds of thousands of French shareholders who had believed the unrealistic, perpetually optimistic claims of the project’s charismatic author, Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894). Scholars continue to debate whether to interpret as duplicitous or delusional Lesseps’s consistent projections of success and profit even months before his company’s declaration of bankruptcy in 1888. In either case, one can be certain that the famous builder of the Suez Canal believed in his capacity to triumph over adversity and that he never hesitated to recast facts in order to guarantee
912
PANAMA CANAL
A French excavator digs in a cut as part of the construction of the Panama Canal project, Panama. (Corbis)
his project’s success. But in Panama, Lesseps’s confidence in technology and his own rhetoric proved to be unfounded. Worse yet, Lesseps, who was neither a scientist nor an engineer, willfully ignored the advice of experts who knew better. On May 15, 1879, the Congrès International d’Etudes du Canal Interocéanique met in the Paris headquarters of the Société de Géographie. The location was not fortuitous; although the 136 delegates, many of them scientists and engineers, came from twenty-two countries, the meeting was the brainchild of Lesseps, who wanted the international meeting of experts to legitimate his plans for a sea-level canal cut across the Isthmus of Panama. Although well-informed American delegates con-
vincingly argued that the canal would be most efficiently built in Nicaragua, Lesseps triumphed, and the majority of the businessmen, engineers, and geographers voted in favor of the sea-level plan. Only eight participants voted against Lesseps’s plan, including the French engineer Gustave Eiffel, who was later asked to execute a lockbased Panama Canal. But Eiffel was not the only dissenting French delegate; no member of the French Society of Engineers voted in favor of Lesseps’s proposal. A sealevel canal, while possible in Egypt, made little sense across Panama’s mountainous isthmus. Americans and French experts knew this, but Lesseps would not retreat from a plan that he sustained for symbolic as much as pragmatic reasons. A sea-level
PANAMA CANAL
canal was simple, bold, a demonstration of man’s omnipotence, and it rhymed so beautifully with Suez. In 1879, the Panama Canal was launched but not financed. Only Lesseps’s indefatigable optimism, if not stubbornness, and his relentless energy kept the project afloat. Repeatedly, he launched shrewd fund-raising and publicity campaigns, often taking trips across France, the United States, and also to Panama itself (1879–1880) in order to dispel anxieties about its tropical terrain and climate and the diseases that were so endemic there. Officially incorporated in March 1881, the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique de Panama initiated actual digging in January 1882. A severe earthquake that September foreshadowed many disasters to come, including the decimation of the workforce by disease. Yellow fever, malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, and smallpox were all common to the region. Despite popular views to the contrary, the French were determined effectively to maintain public health, devoting, for example, over ƒ5 million to the large hospital facility in Ancon. Yet current medical practices exacerbated mortality rates. For instance, to stop the ascent of ants, pans of water were placed at the base of hospital beds as well as plants in the gardens. Mosquitoes were thereby provided with optimal breeding grounds. In addition, patients were divided into units on the basis of nationality, thereby exposing everyone to diseases they may not have otherwise contracted. Given that the mortality rate at medical facilities was about 75 percent, workers were justified in associating hospitals with certain death. Over 20,000 workers, primarily West Indians, died in Panama. At any given time, at least
913
one-third of the workforce was ill. The majority of French engineers who supervised the excavation also died; one survived but lost his daughter, son, and wife to yellow fever. Only in the first decade of the twentieth century did Americans determine that mosquitoes were the carriers that transmitted malaria and yellow fever from person to person. Elimination of mosquitoes was the only means of controlling the diseases. Lesseps’s attempt to excavate a sea-level Panama Canal was also thwarted by two allbut-insurmountable engineering challenges. First, no one had devised a means of controlling the turbulent Chagres River that slashed across the isthmus at its northern edge and frequently flooded, swelling as rapidly as ten feet in a single hour. To cut a canal across its breadth was to produce cataracts. Second, efforts to dig a sea-level channel across the mountain range at Culebra proved never-ending. Even the lowest opening at Culebra was more than 300 feet high. Most critically, the region’s geological complexity caused interminable mud slides, which progressively broadened the excavation’s width while at the same time further intensifying the problem, producing yet more mud slides that refilled the channel with slippery, soapy mud. Another factor contributing to the failure of the project was French administrators’ failure to coordinate adequately the numerous subcontractors and suppliers. Although some 65 million cubic yards of dirt had been removed by November 1887, Lesseps finally asked Eiffel to design the locks that he had so long resisted. Agreeing to a highly profitable contract, Eiffel planned to build a ten-lock liquid staircase that would carry ships up and over the Culebra mountains. In early 1888, one of his workforces began to make gigantic
914
PARENT, MIMI
69-foot-high locks in Nantes, while another managed to excavate 630,000 cubic yards of earth in Panama in preparation for their installation. At the same time, Lesseps desperately attempted to keep the failing company solvent, even conducting a promotional tour across France at the end of 1888. Until the very end, Lesseps continued to claim that the canal would open in 1890. Nevertheless, the company filed for bankruptcy in December 1888 and was liquidated in February 1889. Eiffel initially refused to believe that the project had failed; months later, he displayed a model of his locks at the foot of the Eiffel Tower during the Universal Exposition of 1889. In 1892, the Panama scandal erupted in France. Lesseps, his son Charles, and Eiffel, among others, were indicted for swindling and corruption. Along with other prominent bankers, politicians, and members of the press, half of the National Assembly’s members were accused of accepting bribes. The Panama affair also catalyzed an outburst of anti-Semitism. The name “Panama” alone served as an antiSemitic insult. Along with his son and Eiffel, Ferdinand de Lesseps was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison (only Charles ultimately served his sentence). In 1903, the United States supported the independence of the Republic of Panama from Colombia in exchange for a treaty guaranteeing the United States all rights to the Panama Canal Zone. A year later, the United States bought French rights to the Panama Canal for $40 million, $69 million less than the French had demanded. The lock-based Panama Canal opened in 1914 on the very same day World War II began. Because Americans had finally determined the causes of malaria and yellow fever, the death toll
during the American phase of the building of the Panama Canal was much lower than during the French phase. Still, over 5,600 men died, among them at least 4,500 black laborers. Every mile of the Panama Canal thus represents the loss of some 500 lives. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby See also: Nantes; World War II. References Bunau-Varilla, Philippe. Panama: The Creation, Destruction and Resurrection. New York: McBride, 1920. Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “Geometry/Labor = Volume/Mass?” October 106 (fall 2003): 3–34. Mack, Gerstle. The Land Divided. New York: Knopf, 1944. McCollough, David. The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870–1914. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977. Mollier, Jean-Yves. Le Scandale de Panama. Paris: Fayard, 1991. Peters, Tom Frank. Building the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
PARENT, MIMI (1924–) Surrealist artist of the post–World War II generation, born in Montreal in 1924. Parent has exhibited in the major international surrealist exhibitions in Milan (1960), Paris (1965), São Paulo (1967), and Prague (1968); has become known to a younger generation of spectators and artists through such themed exhibitions as Surréalisme et l’Amour (Paris, 1997) and Surrealism, Desire Unbound (London, 2001); and has had solo shows at the Galerie André François Petit, Paris (1984), the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Noyers-surSerein-Yonne (1992, with Jean Benoît, Fred Deux, and Louis Pons), and at the Galerie 1900–2000 (Paris, 1998).
PARENT, MIMI
She studied art at the Ecole des BeauxArts, Montreal, from 1942 to 1947, where she was greatly influenced by her teacher and mentor, the avant-gardist painter Alfred Pellan (1906–1988). With Pellan and twelve others, she formed the Prisme d’Yeux in 1948, issuing a manifesto that called for the liberation of art, formal multiplicity, and an avant-garde assault on bourgeois conformism. The group had two exhibitions that year: at the Art Center, an annexe of the Art Association of Montreal, and at the Librairie Tranquille. Parent also had her first exhibition the same year, at the Dominion Gallery, Montreal. Another member and signatory of the Prisme d’Yeux was fellow art student Jean Benoît (b. 1922), whom she married in 1948. Her dissidence led to her expulsion from college, but courtesy of a French government scholarship she and Benoît were able to flee Montreal, and what they perceived as its conservative, Catholic restrictions, for Paris. Parent exhibited on her arrival in Paris at the Salon de l’Art Libre, Musée d’Art Moderne in 1949. Ten years later, she became a member of André Breton’s Paris surrealist group, which was founded in 1924 with the intention of liberating art from tradition, morality, and taboo. In 1959, she played a key role in the international Surrealist Exhibition dedicated to Eros at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris: she designed the exhibition’s publicity poster and luxury catalog (entitled Boîte Alerte, with Marcel Duchamp) and a velvet-walled fetish room in the gallery, and created perhaps her most notorious object, Masculin-Feminin, a tie made of female hair. This object exemplifies Parent’s aesthetic: it played on the traditional, poetic, and painterly associations between
915
luscious female hair and sexual desirability, while subverting prescribed gender roles in hijacking a distinctively male “prop,” exposing the transgressive power of desire in the process. Parent is best known for her “boxes”: black lined boxes (typically 70 x 80 cm in size) with glass fronts and miniature worlds molded out of plaster and objects (dolls, animals, and other discarded toys found by Parent in flea markets) inside. She stages fantasy worlds, often at the moment of daybreak when lunar (female) and solar (male) powers, alchemical queen and king, meet (Diane 1977); where beautiful hybrid creatures, like a horse-woman or mermaid, roam (La Belle Cheval, 1982; Espace Bleu, 1991); or where Atlas’s globe explodes as the Earth beneath his muscular torso cracks (L’Or, 1990). These works resonate with archetypal surrealist themes (fusion of opposites, occultism, shamanism, repression, and the bizarre juxtaposition of objects). In her art, Parent promotes the surrealist view of woman as mystical femme-enfant, but she also questions the boundaries of high and low art, refutes traditional narratival strategies, and employs surrealist themes and magical-realist traditions to insist on the radical power of dream to change reality. She lives and works in Paris. Alyce Mahon See also: Benoît, Jean; Breton, André; Catholic Church; Montreal; Painting; Sculpture; Surrealism; World War II. References Colvile, Georgiana M. M. Scandaleusement d’elles—34 femmes surréalistes. Paris: JeanMichel Place, 1999. La Femme et le Surréalisme. Lausanne: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 1988. Sauvages des Villes—Sauvages des Iles. Exhibition catalogue. Noyers-sur-Serein: Centre d’Art Contemporain, 1992.
916
PARKMAN, FRANCIS
PARKMAN, FRANCIS (1823–1893) One of the first, and most widely read, English-language writers on the French colonial experience in North America. Parkman was born to wealth and social position on Beacon Hill in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 16, 1823. He was one of five children born to the Reverend Francis Parkman, a Unitarian minister, and was the first child of the reverend’s second wife, Caroline. Francis studied law at Harvard University and took the law degree in 1846. He devoted his adult life to writing about the history of early North America and penned nine major works of history. Seven of his histories, published between 1865 and 1892, dealt with the story of French and English competition for control of North America. It is this series, titled France and England in North America, that is Parkman’s great claim to fame. Parkman died November 8, 1893, of peritonitis. His books have rarely, if ever, been out of print or circulation to this day. That Parkman was able to accomplish as much as he did was surprising. He was plagued with bad health his entire life and suffered debilitating attacks of an undiagnosed condition that produced severe headaches, partial blindness, and depression. At times, he had his source material read to him and wrote out his histories on a special board with strings on it that allowed him to keep his pen in relatively straight lines. His single-minded commitment to completing a work that he conceived in his second year at Harvard, while he was in his late teens, is admirable. Like later scholars of New France, and of French colonization in North America in general, Parkman’s work highlighted the importance of religion, the fur trade, and
Francis Parkman, eminent American historian who wrote about the French colonial experience. (Library of Congress)
the military in New France’s development. A believer in the great-man theory of history, he tended to touch on these broad themes and upon the central turning points in New France’s history by focusing on the lives and actions of specific historical actors. Thus, the Jesuit missionaries, military leaders such as Governor Frontenac and General Montcalm, and explorers like La Salle loom large in Parkman’s works. Unlike modern scholars, however, Parkman was not content simply to tell the history of French development in North America. Instead, he used his histories, and the issues and themes he addressed, to make a larger point about the development of what would come to be the United States. The story of Catholic New France, lead by noblemen and religiously tied to an economy supported by “savage” Indians, was written
PAZ, OCTAVIO
as a morality tale. It was the story of a colony doomed to failure because of its ties to the Catholic, absolutist, and feudal values of Old Europe. Such a venture could never succeed in competition with the liberal and progressive Protestantism of the British colonies. Until the 1950s, Parkman’s France and England in North America, with its ethnocentric assessments, purple prose, and dated conception of history, remained required reading in many universities in English North America. José António Brandao See also: Catholic Church; Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de; Fur Trade; Jesuits; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de MontcalmGrozon, Marquis de; New France; Noble Savage. References Doughty, Howard. Francis Parkman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Eccles, W. J. “The History of New France According to Francis Parkman.” The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 18, no. 4 (April 1961): 162–175. Jacobs, W. R., ed. Letters of Francis Parkman. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960.
PAZ, OCTAVIO (1914–1998) Mexican writer, born in Mexico City in 1914. Paz’s social awareness was heightened by a trip with his first wife, the writer Elena Garro, to the impoverished region of Yucatán and to war-torn Spain in 1937– 1938. In Spain, he met antifascist French and Spanish writers, seeing his earlier experiences of fraternity with the Mexican underprivileged confirmed while at the same time intimating the sinister aspects of Soviet Communism. Henceforth, he pro-
917
fessed a reticent view of social change informed by his new understanding of modern Western history as a chaos upon which the visionary poet, through the surrealist reconciliation of opposing realities, can impose some kind of spiritual order and meaning, which he later shares with a community of readers hungry for emotional liberation. In 1938, Paz visited Paris for the first time, meeting Robert Desnos. In 1945, he returned, becoming the following year a cultural attaché in the Mexican Embassy and extending his European sojourn to 1951. In Paris, he befriended André Breton and the surrealist faction that, since Breton’s breakup with Louis Aragon in 1930, had substituted psychoanalysis for Marxism as the main liberationist epistemology behind their “revolutionary” writing. He also immersed himself in French existentialism until Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s public defense of Communism caused him to retreat into surrealism even further. While still residing in Paris, his two best-known early works were published in Mexico: Libertad bajo palabra (Liberty under Parole [1949]), and El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude [1950, rev. 1959]). After several years of residence in Mexico, in 1959 Paz returned to Paris, where he wrote a particularly successful collection of shorter surrealist poems in which language games completely overshadow content: Salamandra 1958–1961 (Salamander [1962]). He left Paris in 1962 to become the Mexican ambassador in India, resigning from that post in 1968 in protest at the infamous government-perpetrated massacre of students at Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City. The 1960s constituted a particularly productive and intellectually exciting
918
PÉAN, STANLEY
period in Paz’s career as public intellectual, poet, and essayist. Influenced by the rise of structuralism in a number of academic disciplines, he attempted several projects in which anthropology, literature, history, and religion were fused to create a sweeping cultural commentary. Two of his masterpieces that reflect this comprehensiveness are Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo (Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction [1967]), a groundbreaking study of structuralist anthropology and modernist theories of history, and the poem Blanco (White [1967])—printed on a single, folded sheet of paper—which is his first, somewhat timid exercise in the French mode of writing called écriture du corps (best represented by Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes, and such francophile authors as Juan Goytisolo and Severo Sarduy) and which explores such binary relations as East/West, past/present, feminine body/masculine text, and author/reader. This slim volume was followed quickly by the collection Ladera este, 1962–1968: Ladera este, Hacia el comienzo, Blanco (East Slope [1969]), which deals mostly with Paz’s complex cultural response to his years in India and the events of Mexico City in 1968 and which includes one poem written originally in French. Paz’s best-known contribution to art history is Apariencia desnuda: La obra de Marcel Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare [1973, based on a shorter work of 1968]), in which he pays homage to the inventor of the ready made. His brilliant poetic and literary-critical output cannot be adequately understood without taking a look at his own translations and transpositions from European and Asian languages, but especially from
such French poets as Gérard de Nerval, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Supervielle, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Eluard, André Breton, Henri Michaux, and René Char, collected for the first time in Versiones y diversiones (Versions and Diversions [1974, rev. 1979, 1990, 2000]). Paz died in Mexico City on April 19, 1998. José María Rodríguez García See also: Avant-Gardes; Barthes, Roland; Breton, André; Cocteau, Jean; Darío, Rubén; Duchamp, Marcel; Huidobro, Vicente; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; Literary Relations; Mexico; Michaux, Henri; Neruda, Pablo; Péret, Benjamin; Sarduy, Severo; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Supervielle, Jules; Surrealism. References Quiroga, José. Understanding Octavio Paz. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Wilson, Jason. Octavio Paz. Boston: Twayne, 1986.
PÉAN, STANLEY (1966–) Haitian-Québécois writer. Born in Haiti, Péan left the island at the age of eight months when his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship. Based in Jonquière, he went on to become a prolific writer, first of a comparative thesis looking at representations of Vodun in Haitian, American, and Québécois literature. He was a frequent contributor to cultural and literary magazines, including Stop from 1985 to 1999, the daily newspaper La Presse, the quarterly Libraire, which he continues to edit, and on programs of that ilk on radio and television. In 2002, he resigned from La Presse after interference over a critical review of Denise Bombardier’s latest novel. A lover of music and
PECK, RAOUL
theater, as a student Péan set up a comic troupe known as Le Groupe Sanguin. Péan has published a series, Romans 2, for adolescents, and his writings are highly readable narratives that deal with urban violence and resemble the horror and fantasy genres. His first short story collection, La Plage des songes (“The Beach of Dreams”), was published in 1988, followed in 1991 by a novel, Le Tumulte de mon sang (“The Throbbing of My Blood”). More short stories, Sombres Allées (“Dark Lanes”) in 1992, were followed in 1993 by a first “youth” novel, L’Emprise de la nuit, about conflict between gangs of blacks and skinheads in Montreal. L’Appel des loups (“The Call of the Wolves,” 1998) recounts a schoolgirl’s love for a young pop singer. Zombi Blues (1996) is an adult thriller about a young jazz musician confronted with the suffering victims of a cruel dictator. This was followed in 1997 by a murder story, Quand la bête est humaine (“When the Beast Is Human”). Péan’s love of and critical writings on music were encapsulated by his 1999 essay, Toute la ville en jazz (“The Whole City in Jazz”). The short stories of 2000, La Nuit démasque (“The Night Unmasks”), portray tormented and terrified characters in a savage world. Early in 2004 he published an article, “Mourir est beau? Vraiment?”/“Dying Is Beautiful. Really?” about the new crisis facing Haiti. Jérôme Ceccon See also: Bombardier, Denise; Haiti; Jazz; Quebec; Vodun. References Carnets d’un black en Ayiti (dir. Pierre Bastien, 1998). Desroches, Jenner. Prolégomènes à une literature haïtienne en diaspora. Montreal: Editions du CIDIHCA, 2000.
919
PECK, RAOUL (1953–) Haitian filmmaker. Born in Haiti, raised and educated in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the United States, France, and Germany, Peck has made a number of internationally acclaimed feature films that examine the impact of political violence on individuals and communities. In 2000, his award-winning film Lumumba (Best Film, Pan African Film Festival, Los Angeles, 2001; Paul Robeson Award, Fespaco, 2001, among others), about the Congolese struggle for independence from Belgian rule, the election in 1960 of the visionary leader Patrice Lumumba to the post of prime minister, and his brutal assassination in 1961, expanded Peck’s 1992 feature-length documentary Lumumba: La Mort du prophète (Lumumba—Death of a Prophet, presented at the Cannes Film Festival Directors Fortnight, awarded Best Documentary, Montreal Film Festival, 1992). In this innovative and compelling work, Peck intertwines the personal with the political as he examines the roles that Belgian, American, and Congolese officials played in this assassination. At the same time, he examines his own past in Zaire during the period that followed Lumumba’s death and that saw the rise of Mobutu Sésé-Séko’s repressive thirty-fiveyear dictatorship. Peck’s 1993 feature L’Homme sur les quais (Man by the Shore), selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and Haitian Corner (1988) treat the devastating effects of dictatorships in Haiti—from “Papa Doc” Duvalier to JeanClaude Duvalier and Jean-Bertrand Aristide—on individuals and communities. From March 1996 to October 1997, Raoul Peck served as minister of culture in Haiti under Prime Minister Rosny Smarth and
920
PEPE LE PEW
President René Préval. In his book Monsieur le ministre . . . Jusqu’au bout de la patience (“Dear Minister . . . Patience Is Running Out”), Peck explains the reasons for his departure and presents a severe critique of Aristide, who succeeded Préval as president. In 1994, Human Rights Watch awarded Peck its Nestor Almendros Prize and in 2001 its Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award. He is currently the president of the Fonds Sud Cinéma, an organization created by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture that helps fund the production of feature films from countries of the South. Peck’s latest film Profit and Nothing But! questions discourses that claim capitalism as the only solution for impoverished nations while examining the distressing realities of Haiti’s economic woes. Other films directed by Peck include the documentaries Desounen—Dialogue with Death (1994), Haïti—Silence of the Dogs (1994), Chère Catherine (1997), and Corps plongés (1998). Jeanne Garane See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Haiti. References Diawara, Manthia. “The ‘I’ Narrator in Black Diaspora Documentary.” Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video. Ed. Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999: 315–328. Garane, Jeanne. “Orality in the City: Mweze Ngangura’s La Vie est belle and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: La mort du prophète.” L’Esprit créateur 41, no. 3 (2001): 151–162.
PEPE LE PEW Animated cartoon French skunk, emanating from the Warner Bros. studio and featured in sixteen short films from 1945 to
1962. All but two of these were directed by Pepe’s creator, Chuck Jones, who was also responsible for the Road Runner series. He was assisted by the writers Michael Maltese and Tedd Pierce. Animation is not the place to look for verisimilitude, and the fact that skunks are not indigenous to France would prevent only the most literal-minded from entering Pepe’s world. The relative paucity of Pepe’s adventures is due to the rather limited premise, but this yields one of cinema’s most memorable parodies of heterosexual romance. Pepe, oblivious to the pong he gives off—and which drives most around him to flight and panic—sees himself as the irresistible Gallic lover. In most of the episodes, a black cat (the female Fifi but sometimes Sylvester from the Tweety Pie series) has an unfortunate encounter with white paint so that it comes to resemble a “belle femme skunk fatale.” Pepe’s selfdeluding pursuit always ends in failure, and Fifi often fights back. The series is relentlessly intertextual, combining in Pepe the romantic European masculinity of Hollywood imports such as Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan, but also of course the character Pépé Le Moko. Originally played by Jean Gabin in the 1936 film directed by Julien Duvivier, the character also featured in the Hollywood remakes Algiers (John Cromwell, 1938), starring Charles Boyer, and the musical Casbah (John Berry, 1948). The series is directly referenced in “The Cat’s Bah” (1953), in which the story is played out in the exotic, orientalist, and indeed touristic setting of North Africa, with nods to Ali Baba (the cat hides in a jar) and of course Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), as Pepe breaks into a rendition of “As Time Goes By.” In “For Scentimental Reasons” (1958),
PÉPIN, ERNEST
Pepe declares: “Do not come with me to the Casbah, we shall make beautiful love here.” Pepe is in part about the return of the body in relation to the high culture represented by the French language and also high art. In “Louvre Come Back to Me” (1962), the smell not only makes flowers wilt but also stiffens the watches of Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory,” puts to flight Millais’s gleaners, reduces Degas’s dancers to a paint-by-numbers canvas, and is responsible for the Venus de Milo losing her arms. His name sometimes written with a floating and unlocatable accent, Pepe’s speech, as voiced by Mel Blanc, is mellifluous, but any outbursts remotely resembling French itself are invariably tortuous, usually random, and only rarely offer a play on words (the alpine “petit village de N’est-ce pas” in “Two Scents’ Worth” of 1955 is translated as “Nasty Pass”). The point is always a Frenchness at two removes, a representation of another representation, which is Hollywood’s take on France: a waxworks Napoléon and Josephine in “Wild over You” (1952), set at the Paris Exposition of 1900 (Boyer had played the emperor in Conquest, directed by Clarence Brown in 1937); and the foreign-legion film “Little Beau Pepe” of 1951. The self-referentiality is taken to its logical conclusion in “Past Performance” (1954), set in film studios in Paris in 1913. Bill Marshall See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Boyer, Charles; Chevalier, Maurice; Cinema, 1895–1945; Comic Strips; Duvivier, Julien; Exposition universelle; Jourdan, Louis; Language; Painting. References Ousselin, Edward. “From le Moko to le Pew: Pépé’s Transmogrifications.” The French Review 77, no. 5 (April 2004).
921
Thompson, Kirsten Moana. “‘Ah Love! Zee Grand Illusion!’ Pepé le Pew, Narcissism, and Cats in the Casbah.” Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation. Ed. Kevin S. Sandler. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998: 137–153.
PÉPIN, ERNEST (1950–) French-Caribbean poet. Ernest Pépin was born on September 25, 1950, in Castel Lamentin (Guadeloupe). Like many of his fellow citizens, he left Guadeloupe to pursue higher education studies in France. After obtaining his degree, he went to Martinique, where he embarked on a career teaching French in a secondary school and then as a parttime lecturer at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (1974–1982). In 1982, Pépin returned to Guadeloupe, where he was offered a position as director of the Centre d’Action Culturelle de la Guadeloupe. In 1984, he was appointed to the committee of Culture, Education, and Environment of the Guadeloupe Regional Council. He has been working for the Regional Council of Guadeloupe since and has occupied diverse posts, including representative of Culture, Sport, and Heritage from 1985 to 1995 and deputy director to the office of the regional council president in 1996. He is currently director of Heritage and Culture. While in Martinique, Pépin produced a series of literary programs and met writers like Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and Joseph Zobel. His interest in literature and writing stems from his own immediate environment (both his parents were teachers and introduced him to the love of books at a very young age) but also from
922
PEREC, GEORGES
encountering the work of Aimé Césaire at the age of seventeen. Through reading Césaire in the late 1960s, Pépin became increasingly aware of the issues of anticolonial and antiracist struggles. As a mulatto residing in Guadeloupe, he lived a comfortable and sheltered life, and through Césaire he discovered “le monde noir” and black African culture. Césaire’s literary influence is very much present in Pépin’s work. His first collection of poems, entitled Au verso du silence, was published by L’Harmattan in 1984; a subsequent collection, Salves et salives, was published by Casa de Las Americanas in 1986. Both collections owed much to the négritude literary movement, but today Pépin is one of the key advocates of the créolité literary movement, which he sees as an extension of négritude rather than a contradiction of it. Pépin writes poems, novels, short stories, and essays. His poetry tends to express his personal experience, and it focuses on himself and his perception of the world in which he lives, while his novels depict a Guadeloupean experience, centered more on the islands and their people. He has earned many prizes for his books including Casa de Las Americanas in 1991 and Prix RFO du livre in 1997. His literary contribution earned him the title of chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite. Marie-Annick Gournet See also: Césaire, Aimé; Créolité; Glissant, Edouard; Guadeloupe; Martinique; Zobel, Joseph. References Hurley, E. Anthony. “Loving Words: New Lyricism in French Caribbean Poetry.” World Literature Today 71, no. 1 (winter 1997): 55–60.
Khordoc, Catherine. “Babel: figure de créolisation dans Tambour Babel d’Ernest Pépin.” Les Langues du roman. Du plurilinguisme comme stratégie textuelle. Ed. Lise Gauvin. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1999: 129–145.
PEREC, GEORGES (1936–1982) French writer and filmmaker. Perec was born in Paris and spent most of his life there, apart from a period as a wartime child evacuee in southern France. His work is marked by a preoccupation with formal constraints, puzzles, and mysteries, all of which serve to conceal an absence—of memories, of cultural inheritance—caused by the loss of his Polish Jewish parents in World War II: his father was killed serving in the French army, and his mother was deported to Auschwitz. In the 1960s and 1970s, Perec was a member of the French experimental literature group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), whose members included Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Harry Mathews. His membership in this group led him to create intriguing, labyrinthine, and ludic narratives, exemplified by novels such La Vie mode d’emploi (Life, a User’s Manual [1978]), whose ninety-nine chapters relate the interconnected happenings in ninety-nine rooms of an apartment block; W ou le souvenir d’enfance (W or the Memory of Childhood [1975]), whose alternating chapters chillingly juxtapose childhood autobiography with the imagined horror of a concentration camp; and La Disparition (A Void [1969]), a lipogrammatic tale of disap-
PÉRET, BENJAMIN
pearances written without the letter e. In one work, however, Perec approaches this personal theme of loss more directly, through an exploration of European migration to the United States. His documentary television film Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir (Ellis Island Revisited: Tales of Vagrancy and Hope [1980]), made in collaboration with Robert Bober, traces the history of European emigration to the United States, focusing on the then-dilapidated Ellis Island reception center at the mouth of the Hudson River as an emblem of loss and displacement. In a complex interweaving of past and present, still and moving images, Perec evokes the dystopian reality experienced by the minority of migrants refused entry to the United States but also by some, at least, of the successful majority who arrived in search of a new identity in an alien culture. There is little emphasis on the positive, aspirational aspect of arrival in the New World; rather, Perec underlines the status of the migrant as exile, with its concomitant sense of abandonment and disorientation. Perec bridges the Atlantic in contrasting the arrival of European migrants in America with the history of his own family, whose migration remained within the borders of Europe and ended at Auschwitz. He posits the impossibility of re-creating the past and the difficulty of coming to terms with that past in the present, relying instead on a terse, understated, filmic narrative and a telling juxtaposition of past and present images. In creating unsettling, allusive correspondences between the methods used on Ellis Island to sort and codify migrants, and the triage techniques employed in the extermination camps of Europe, Perec’s narrative itself
923
constitutes a displacement of personal trauma. In appropriating the multiple narratives associated with Ellis Island, he offers fresh and provocative insights into a familiar story, even as he discovers an original and affecting metaphor for the expression of a private grief. Peter Wagstaff See also: World War II. References Bellos, David. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. New York/London: Harvill, 1999. Perec, Georges. Ellis Island. Trans. Harry Mathews. New York: New Press, 1995. Wagstaff, Peter. “The Dark Side of Utopia: Word, Image, and Memory in Georges Perec’s Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir.” The Seeing Century: Film, Vision, and Identity. Ed. Wendy Everett. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000: 36–48.
PÉRET, BENJAMIN (1899–1959) A lifelong surrealist poet and militant Trotskyite, Benjamin Péret was born in Rézé, France, in 1899. In 1920, soon after being demobilized from the army, Péret met future surrealists André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and Philippe Soupault at an evening of dada poetry in Paris. During the early years of surrealism’s activities as an avant-garde movement, Péret became known as much for his incendiary public acts as for his wildly original poetry. A committed political activist, Péret’s dedication to proletarian uprising and antifascist demonstration took root not only in France, but in Spain, Brazil, and Mexico as well.
924
PÉRET, BENJAMIN
Péret’s first collection of poetry, Le Passager du transatlantique (The Transatlantic Passenger), appeared in 1921. That same year, he participated in the dada-influenced mock trial of the right-wing author Maurice Barrès, where Péret appeared as the Unknown Soldier in a German uniform; this event doubly scandalized French nationalism, both in its travesty of Barrès and in its desecration of the symbol of France’s sacrifice during the recent war. As coeditor of the surrealist journal La Révolution Surréaliste from 1924 to 1925, Péret published texts similarly conceived as radical parody, most notably his collaboration with Paul Eluard, 152 proverbes mis au goût du jour (152 Proverbs Brought Up to Date [1925]). The following year, the journal printed a photograph of Péret berating a priest. Though supported by an undercurrent of humor, Péret’s activities as a surrealist became increasingly dedicated to a leftist critique of nationalist and religious orthodoxy, including the orthodoxy of Communism itself. After surrealism’s dialogues with party Communism in the mid-1920s, Péret worked briefly for the Communist newspaper L’Humanité. Beginning in 1929, Péret and his wife, the Brazilian singer Elsie Houston, spent three years in Brazil, where his activities with the Trotskyite Brazilian Left Opposition and the Communist League resulted in his incarceration and deportation. Returning to Paris in 1932, he published several notable collections of surrealist poetry, Je ne mange pas de ce painlà (I Won’t Stand for It [1936]) and Je Sublime (I Sublime [1936]), and collaborated with a number of antifascist groups. In 1936, he traveled to Spain to represent the Communist International Party in negotiations with the Partido Obrero de Unifica-
cíon Marxista (Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification), breaking with the Stalinists in 1937 to support the Spanish anarchists. Mobilized by France in 1940, he was arrested three months later for his political activities, living secretly in Paris for several months after his release. He joined the exiled members of the surrealist movement awaiting emigration in Marseilles but was barred entry to the United States; he spent the years from 1941 to 1948 working as a teacher and journalist in Mexico, where he collaborated with Natalia (Sedova) Trotsky, the Spanish revolutionary Grandizo Munis, and other Spanish civil war refugees exiled in Mexico. After the death of his wife in 1943, he married the painter Remedies Varo and continued his political work, monitoring the war in Europe for the anti-Stalinist wing of the Fourth International. Returning to Paris in 1948, he participated in surrealist activities for the remainder of his life, adamantly supporting Algerian independence in the mid-1950s. During his final years, his interest in the relationship between myth and poetry yielded several long-term works begun in Mexico, Air mexicain (1952), a collection of poetry, and the posthumous Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique (Anthology of Myths, Legends, and Popular Tales from the Americas [1960]). Jonathan P. Eburne See also: Avant-Gardes; Brazil; Breton, André; Mexico; Surrealism; World War I; World War II. References Matthews, J. H. Benjamin Péret. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Péret, Benjamin, and the Association des amis de Benjamin Péret. Œuvres Complètes. 7 vols. Paris: Losfeld, José Corti, 1969–1995.
PERRAULT, PIERRE
PERRAULT, PIERRE (1927–1999) No filmmaker has proven such a sincere attachment to France as Pierre Perrault, who compared France and Quebec in many of his documentary films. In a recent interview, Perrault explained that Jacques Cartier was probably the main character whose spirit inspired his movies, although the sailor is never personified by an actor. In his debut documentary Pour la suite du monde/The Moontrap (1963), codirected with Michel Brault, Perrault told the real story of islanders at the Ileaux-Coudres, in the Saint Lawrence River, who tried to revive the almost-forgotten tradition of small whale fishing. In his following film, Le Règne du jour/The Times That Are (1967), we see the same islanders visiting Paris and Brittany for the first time in their lives, and the old patriarch Alexis Tremblay’s conclusion after his first trip in France is eloquent when he says spontaneously: “Le Canada serait bien sous la France” (We Canadians would be fine if France came back again). In Un Pays sans bon sens/Wake up, mes bons amis! (1970), Perrault questions the minority status of the francophone identity in Quebec, Manitoba, Brittany, and Paris, giving a strong critique of the utopian biculturalist ideology that was proposed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the late 1960s. In this provocative film, probably Perrault’s best, we see the case of a FrenchCanadian PhD student from Manitoba who was ashamed to speak French in his province and found an oasis in Montreal and then in Paris. Perrault joined Michel Brault again for another cooperative effort, the corrosive L’Acadie, l’Acadie?!? (1971). The film shocked because it showed the anglo-
925
phones’ constant aggressiveness toward the young Acadians. Feeling rejected and alienated in their own country because they are francophones, some young students from the Université de Moncton choose to emigrate to Quebec or even France. In 1977, Perrault repeated his previous cross-cultural transatlantic experience (as in Le Règne du jour) with another person who appeared in his films, the farmer Hauris Lalancette, who visits for the first time Paris, the Château de Versailles, and selected farms in rural France (in the film C’était un Québécois en Bretagne, Madame! [“That Was a Québécois in Brittany, Madame!”]). In 1981, the French Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) asked Perrault to direct in France a one-hour documentary about Jacques Cartier. The film, titled Les Voiles bas et en travers (1982), was coproduced by the NFB (National Film Board of Canada) and INA; it was shot in SaintMalo, where Cartier left to discover New France. But it becomes clear that few French people think about Jacques Cartier. The voyage that led to the discovery of New France became the subject of Perrault’s subsequent film, La Grande Allure (1985). In 1984, a group of Québécois and French men reenacted Cartier’s trip from France to Canada on a sailing ship. They were guided by Cartier’s published notes, Relations, and visited the same places described by Cartier some 450 years before on the Côte Nord and along the Saint Lawrence River. Amazingly, the landscape had not changed much since. As a tribute, Perrault received countless prizes and a few doctorate honoris causa from universities in France and Quebec. Yves Laberge
926
PERROT, NICOLAS See also: Acadia; Brault, Michel; Brittany; Cartier, Jacques; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Fishing; Manitoba; New France; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Saint-Malo; Trudeau, Pierre Elliot; Whaling. References Brûlé, Michel. Pierre Perrault ou, un cinéma national: essai d’analyse sociocinématographique. Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1974. Laberge, Yves. “Images de l’Ouest français dans trois films de Pierre Perrault.” L’Ouest français et la francophonie nord-américaine: actes du Colloque international de la francophonie tenu à Angers du 26 au 29 mai 1994. Ed. Georges Cesbron. Angers: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 1996. Perrault, Pierre. De la parole aux actes. Montreal: Hexagone, 1986.
PERROT, NICOLAS (CA. 1644–1717) Born in France around 1644, Perrot arrived in North America as a Jesuit donné in 1660. As one of the donnés, or layperpetual-servants under contract to the Jesuits, Perrot swore an oath of poverty, celibacy, and obedience, which could be terminated by the missionaries for a variety of reasons including marriage. Perrot as a quasi-religious lay servant would have performed for the Jesuit priests domestic, defense, and agricultural tasks, which allowed the Fathers to concentrate on spiritual concerns. After being freed from his service in 1665, Perrot became a trader, interpreter, explorer, seigneur, militia captain, and commandant at Baie des Puants (Green Bay). After the reorganization of the fur trade and abandonment of the interior posts in 1696, Perrot returned to the colony, where he died on August 13, 1717. Perrot began his three-decade career in 1665 when he traded guns to the Potawatomi and Fox. After his return to Que-
bec in 1666, he briefly became a domestic servant for a widow and, later, for the Sulpicians in Montreal. In 1667, Perrot entered his first joint-trading venture and set off for the upper Great Lakes. At the request of Intendant Jean Talon in 1670, Perrot joined Saint-Lusson’s mission as an interpreter to claim the upper lakes for France and search for minerals. While working as an interpreter, Perrot continued to trade with the Indians. This ended badly when Saint-Lusson ordered all of Perrot’s goods confiscated at Quebec in 1671. Based on his trade relationship with interior tribes, Governor LaBarre in 1684 asked Perrot to gather warriors to attack the Iroquois, but the attack never materialized. After his 1685 appointment as commandant of Baie des Puants, Perrot mediated a dispute between the Ojibwa and Fox, explored west of Green Bay, and established the first French outpost, Fort Saint-Antoine, among the Dakota. In 1687, prior to joining an attack on the Seneca, Perrot deposited his trade goods at the Saint-François-Xavier mission at Green Bay for safekeeping. After learning in 1688 that his property had been destroyed in a fire at the mission, he traveled to Montreal to secure more trade goods. After obtaining supplies, Perrot established Fort SaintNicolas on the Wisconsin River, took possession of the region for France, and located lead mines with Miami guidance in 1689. His most important activities from 1689 to 1696 were his efforts to prevent the western Great Lakes nations from being contacted by the English. During his many return trips to the colony, Perrot married Madeleine Viennot, fathered eleven children, and established a home at Bécancour. In 1688, Perrot attempted to improve his social standing by
PETRUCCIANI, MICHEL
purchasing the seigneury of Rivière-duLoup. Unable to make the payments, Perrot returned the property to its former owner. After his retirement from the fur trade in 1696, Perrot, plagued by creditors, unsuccessfully sought compensation and a pension from the government for his efforts among the Indians. In 1708, Perrot was elected militia captain, a post he held until his death in 1717. While at Bécancour, Perrot wrote his memoirs, which were published in 1864 under the title Memoire sur les Moeurs, Coustumes et Relligion des Sauvages de l’Amerique septentrionale (“Memoir on the Manners, Customs and Religion of the Natives of North America”). Other materials Perrot created during these years appear in Claude-Charles Le Roy Bacqueville de la La Potherie’s Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale. As a body of work, Perrot’s writings are important for historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians studying natives in the Great Lakes, FrenchIndian relations, and French exploration. Karl Hele See also: Fur Trade; Jesuits; Quebec; Talon, Jean. References Blair, Emma Helen, ed. The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes. 1911. New York: Kraus Report, 1969. Côté, Jean. “Institution of the Donnés.” The Donnés in Huronia. Trans. William Lonc Sr. and George Topp Sr. Midland, ON: William Lonc, 2001. Kellog, Louise Phelps. Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634–1699. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967. Perrot, Nicolas. Memoire sur les Moeurs, Coustumes et Relligion des Sauvages de l’Amerique septentrionale. Montreal: Editions Elysée, 1973. Sayer, Gordon M. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
927
PETRUCCIANI, MICHEL (1962–1999) The pianist Michel Petrucciani was born in 1962 with “glass” or “brittle” bone disease, osteogenesis imperfecta; but despite his growth being stunted, this native of Orange, France, was not to be denied a career in jazz—not after having seen and loved Duke Ellington on television at an early age. (He later recorded a tribute to this inspiration, Promenade with Duke, led by “Caravan.”) Petrucciani, who played his instrument with the help of a custom pedal system (and with eyes closed, tongue poking through his lips), would say that his illness was a blessing in disguise, as it kept him at the piano and off the soccer field. His spontaneity at the keys belied his training, however: Petrucciani’s ways were blisteringly lithe and rhapsodic, yielding a swirl of chords and melodies always sensitive to the value of sharp dynamic contrast, going high and low routinely. Although merry, not brooding, there was also a lot of Keith Jarrett in Petrucciani’s music, and a little Bill Evans too: witness, for example, his 1994–1995 duet, “Conférence de presse,” with Eddy Louiss (Edouard Louise), an organist of pedigree, having performed with Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, and Johnny Griffin. As of 1981, Petrucciani was a resident of the United States. He built an impressive résumé on his own and teaming with marquee musicians like Charles Lloyd and Lee Konitz, both reed players. Petrucciani’s 1995 “Flamingo,” a collaboration with Stéphane Grappelli, is a trademark achievement. Playing standards such as “There Will Never Be Another You” (by Harry Warden and Mack Gordon), with a rhythm section consisting of George Mraz and Roy Haynes, Grappelli and Petrucciani
928
PEUGEOT—PSA PEUGEOT CITROËN SA
produce sounds that call to mind the heyday of jazz, when quartets were orchestras and democracy promised equality. The take has nothing particularly vanguard about it, but then its aim is to entertain and, through interpretation, carry on an important historical legacy. Trumpeter Clark Terry and drummer Kenny Clarke claim to have discovered Petrucciani (but his father, Antoine, a guitarist and aficionado of jazz, had a hand in this development). On tour, they played with him when he was a fifteen-year-old boy. Hence, in part, Petrucciani’s legend: in addition to everything else, he was a 3-foot, 50pound prodigy. Petrucciani never did get old, dying in 1999. At the time, though New York City had become his home, he was planning to open a school of music in Paris. Johan Åhr See also: Grappelli, Stéphane; Jazz; Reinhardt, Django. Reference Goaty, Frédéric. Michel par Petrucciani. Paris: Editions du Layeur, 2000.
PEUGEOT—PSA PEUGEOT CITROËN SA Peugeot, as part of the PSA group, is one of the big six European car manufacturers and is dominant in the French marketplace with a 30 percent share, putting it ahead of Renault. The company operates in 100 countries with 70 percent of its manufacturing activity outside of France, but its chief focus is France and Europe, with the vast majority of sales there. Peugeot began in machine tools and bicycles, building its first car, a three-wheeled, steam-driven machine, in the 1880s. The switch to the internal-combustion engine was made in 1891.
Poster for Peugeot automobiles. Peugeot began in machine tools and bicycles, building its first car, a three-wheeled, steam-driven machine, in the 1880s. (Leonard de Selva/Corbis)
During the course of its history, it can lay claim to several automobile firsts: the first compact car, Le Bébé, in 1905; the first diesel engine for a domestic vehicle in 1921; the first synchromeshed gearbox in 1936. World War II was crippling for Peugeot, though its association with the bus company Pininfarina in 1955 formed part of its recovery. The company bought Citroën in the 1970s as part of global expansion plans, though the integration of the two took decades, in a way only finally complete in 1998 with the first completely integrated Peugeot/Citroën car, the Citroën Xsara. Peugeot also bought Chrysler in 1978 for $1. When PSA dissolved Peugeot
PHOTOGRAPHY
Canada and its dealer network in the early 1980s, Peugeots were sold and officially serviced only by designated Chrysler dealers. In 1998, Chrysler merged with Daimler-Benz. That year also saw Jean-Martin Folz, chair of the managing board, present plans to reorganize the automobile activities of the group, with the aim of stepping up its competitiveness and opening up new markets (for example, a new production unit in Porto Real, Brazil, to build 100,000 vehicles a year was announced, eventually to represent an investment of approximately US$600 million). Subsequent moves, which came in 1999, included opening a global customer contact center set up to handle 3 million calls a year and a deal with Ford consolidating diesel engine manufacture; the first joint engine was unveiled in 2001. With the new millennium, the company started taking a serious look at alternative car technologies: In 2000, its 5,000th electric car was produced, and a research facility with Renault began to explore the psychology of driver behavior. And in 2001, the group published its first environmental report. In the same year, annual output exceeded 3 million vehicles for the first time. The year 2002 was a milestone year: on December 1, Pierre Peugeot died at the age of 70. He had been chair of the supervisory board since 1998. The family name, though, was upheld at the top when Thierry Peugeot replaced him. The year 2003 was something of a wobbly year: Peugeot sales fell by 2.1 percent, although Citroën rose by 4.6 percent. So growth remains a central aim of the group as it moves into the second half of the first decade of the new millennium. It plans
929
to double annual production capacity in China to reach 300,000 units in the second half of 2006, and in the same year a new production plant in central Europe, costing ε700 million, is due to come on board with an annual capacity of 300,000 units. Mark Vernon See also: Automobiles; World War II. References Bardou, Jean Pierre, et al. The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Ducorray, R. Dates. 1991. http://www.psapeugeot-citroen.com/en/fonctionnelle/ automobiles.php.
PHOTOGRAPHY Atlantic photography is dominated by the relationship between France and the United States, mostly through the adaptation and refinement by American photographers of French techniques and approaches, the most pervasive of which can be described as “liberal humanism” in photojournalist photography. The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 paved the way for American artists and artisans to record the emergence of American society and the expansion of the West. Daguerre’s open publication of his process through the Académie des sciences allowed access by interested artists and entrepreneurs, among them the American painter and scientist Samuel F. B. Morse. Within a month of Daguerre’s publication, daguerreotypes were being made in the United States, and by 1840 the first daguerreotype studio in the United States had been set up in New York. The daguerreotype industry was modeled on the existing portrait industry, made popular by the
930
PHOTOGRAPHY
rapid growth of an American urban middle class. The process captured hearts and minds: an early daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln can be described as the first campaign photograph, while poets such as Edgar Allan Poe and Oliver Wendell Holmes were captivated by its charm. Holmes was to describe its highly polished surface as “a mirror with a memory.” The rapid expansion of cities and then the opening up of the West led to a huge uptake of daguerreotypy, with nearly half a million images (daguerreotypes were unique and could not be reproduced) a year being made in the United States by the mid-1850s. Refinements to the process made under this industrial expansion meant the daguerreotype was eventually described, even in France, as “the American process.” In the 1850s, the immense popularity in portraiture led to innovative techniques being used by former daguerreotypists such as Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri to capitalize on the reproducibility of the new negative processes. Disdéri’s cartes de visite process can be seen as part of a natural progression toward the family album, while Gaspar Félix Tournachon (Nadar) can be credited as one of the first portraitists to investigate the inner psychology of his sitters, often members of the emerging modern social elite. As processes offered faster shutter speeds, a continuing transatlantic scientific discourse led to first Eadwaerd Muybridge and then Etienne Jules Marey conducting studies of the metamorphoses of movement of people and animals. This “parallel” development was to reach its apogee in the race between the Lumière brothers (the Cinématographe, 1895) and Thomas Edison (the Vitascope, 1896) to develop a workable public cinema.
The effect of impressionism in French painting, and pictorialism in British photography, was already beginning to have an effect by the time Alfred Stieglitz helped found the American Photo-Secession in 1902. Members of the group, such as Edward Steichen and Gertrude Käsebier, had spent time in Paris and absorbed the romantic and elegiac theme and style of the symbolist movement. Later, Steichen sent Stieglitz works by emerging artists—such as Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso—to show in the Stieglitz’s “291” gallery in New York, heralding the arrival of European modernism to the American continent. As European modernism reached its peak in the 1920s, with Paris at its center, a community of American expatriates had established itself on the Left Bank. This included Man Ray and Walker Evans. Man Ray’s assistant in Paris was Berenice Abbott, an expatriate who delighted in the Parisian “crowd” and who took up photography in part to enjoy it all the more. Abbott photographed the lesbian beau monde in the style of German photographer August Sander, but it was her chance discovery of Man Ray’s neighbor Eugène Atget that was to have lasting effect. When Atget died in 1927, Abbott managed successfully to retrieve nearly half of the photographers’ negatives and, on her return to New York, began the painstaking process of printing them for posterity. Atget’s work had attracted the interest of the surrealists, and this was soon echoed in the interest taken by others, including Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, and Julien Levy. By the time Henri Cartier-Bresson had his first photographs exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933, American photographers such as Abbott and Evans were beginning
PHOTOGRAPGHY
to pursue Atget’s formal style and distanced subject matter. Cartier-Bresson’s influence added to this an investigative approach to the epic rhythms of the street that seemed to match perfectly the American poetry of modernity. This combination produced a photographic style self-consciously described as “lyrical photography” by the writer James Agee. Cartier-Bresson’s influence on the direction photography would take in the public eye was further enhanced in 1947 when he, with Robert Capa, David Seymour (Chim), and George Rodger, set up the Magnum agency in New York. The agency was a consolidated attempt to free photographers from the control of picture editors to whom they often felt cause to complain and to begin to establish “photojournalism” as a recognized aesthetic and critical approach. Photographers were encouraged to search for and investigate issues as well as the formal properties of the image, and assignments saw Magnum photographers in Indochina in 1954, as well as in Paris in May 1968. The agency still exists under this ethos, often casting a humanist eye over politically contentious situations of famine and war. Magnum has attracted both praise and criticism for encouraging an instinctive approach in seeking out the truth, but one that does not attempt to hide its liberalism. Yet the pictorial strength of this “subjective realism” is detectable across the work of Evans, Robert Doisneau, Marc Riboud, and Robert Frank and has been favored by publications as varied as Paris-Match, Libération, Life, and Fortune. The 1950s also saw a different agenda for which the French American style was put to use, beginning with a reaction to the postwar consumer and suburban
931
boom. New Yorker William Klein, who studied in Paris under Fernand Léger and then Swiss American Robert Frank chose to publish their work in France first, despite photographing America and its culture. Frank’s Les Américains (1958) in particular seemed to criticize a country shaped and dominated by the automobile and consumer culture, and one that had barely solved problems of urban alienation, racial conflict, and rampant jingoism. The influence of Frank’s book is still strong, echoed as it is in the photography of Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, and Nan Goldin, and yet it can trace a visual lineage back to Cartier-Bresson, Evans’s American Photographs, and thence to Atget and Abbott. The criticism is also echoed in Jean Baudrillard’s writing (America, 1984) and photography (Photographies: 1985–98, 1999). Yet by far the most lasting influence of French photographic culture on America, and one that exists today, is that of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980). Camera Lucida came at a time of renewed critical interest in the photograph, alongside works such as Gisele Freund’s Photographie et societé (1980) and Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977). Barthes’s work arguably stands above these, largely because he reunites French theory with mostly American photographs—by Klein, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Alexander Gardner, among others—to speak about the universal and personal “affect” of the photograph, particularly in relation to memorialization and remembrance. For this reason, Barthes continues to be the most cited critical source by photographers and scholars alike. Damian Sutton
932
PIAZZOLLA, ASTOR PANTALEÓN See also: Atget, Eugène; Barthes, Roland; Cartier-Bresson, Henri; Cinema, 1895–1945; Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé; Evans, Walker; Klein, William; Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore; Painting; Poe, Edgar Allan; Ray, Man; Theory; World War I. References Doty, Edward. Photography in America. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974. Newhall, Beaumont. The Daguerreotype in America. New York: Dover, 1976. Nori, Claude. French Photography: From Its Origins to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. Orvell, Miles. American Photography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Solomon Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
PIAZZOLLA, ASTOR PANTALEÓN (1921–1992) Argentinean bandoneon player, composer, and creator of the new tango, the avantgarde movement that transformed the dance-oriented tango through the musical blend of classical and jazz elements, changing its status as a sentimental, ossified tradition into concert hall music. Born in 1921, in Mar del Plata, a seaside port south of Buenos Aires, at the age of four Piazzolla moved with his family to New York; it was there that he started his studies of bandoneon and was influenced by jazz and klezmer music. On his return to Buenos Aires in 1936, he began a career as a bandoneon performer in different tango orchestras until he directed his own in 1946 and initiated his studies in composition with Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera. In the early 1950s, he resolved to devote himself entirely to art-music composition and received a scholarship to study counterpoint in France with Nadia
Boulanger. It was she who convinced him to concentrate on tango, and back in Buenos Aires in 1955 he created his first contemporary tango ensemble, the Buenos Aires octet, which revolutionized tango and generated a vast controversy within the genre. During the 1960s, Argentina was an environment favorable for the avant-garde movement, and Piazzolla started a highly creative period that lasted twenty years with some interruptions. This period was characterized by an impressive musical output mainly composed for the quintet, his quintessential ensemble formed by bandoneon, violin, electric guitar, piano, and double bass. A great part of his career developed outside Argentina due to the lack of popularity of his music among his compatriots. A restless globetrotter, he toured in many countries including France, the United States, Brazil, Austria, the Netherlands, Japan, and Italy (where he lived in the 1970s), among others. Always willing to change, he formed different ensembles like the electronic octet (influenced by the jazzfusion movement of the 1970s), nonet, string orchestra, and sextet, among others, and performed as a soloist with different orchestras and ensembles like the Kronos Quartet and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. In addition, he collaborated with different jazz musicians such as Gerry Mulligan and Gary Burton. His musical output includes film, ballet, and theater scores, songs in collaboration with poets Jorge Luis Borges and Horacio Ferrer, art-music works, and mostly tangos composed for his own ensembles. His most celebrated pieces are Adiós Nonino (dedicated to his late father), Libertango, Oblivion, Four for Tango, Le grand tango, and Bandoneon concerto, among others. His most
PINEAU, GISÈLE
important recordings are Five Tango Sensations (with the Kronos Quartet), The Central Park Concert, Tango Zero Hour, The New Tango (with Gary Burton), and Vienna Concert. In addition, Piazzolla received the César Prize for the score of the film El exilio de Gardel and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his piece Oblivion. His music is increasingly performed by musicians from diverse backgrounds including Gidon Kremer, Yo Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Al di Meola, Phil Woods, and Richard Galliano. In 1990, in Paris, he suffered a stroke and died in Buenos Aires on July 4, 1992. Gabriela Maurino See also: Argentina; Avant-Gardes; Borges, Jorge Luis; Jazz; Music (Classical). References Azzi, María Susana, and Simon Collier. Le Grand Tango: The Life and Music of Astor Piazzolla. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gorin, Natalio. Astor Piazzolla: A Memoir. Trans. Fernando Gonzalez. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, c. 2001.
PINEAU, GISÈLE (1956–) More than any other Antillean author, Gisèle Pineau seems to embody the French Atlantic. Born in 1956 in Paris into a Guadeloupean military family, she grew up in a French banlieue and was raised largely by her grandmother before the family moved back to the Antilles following the events of 1968. As an adult, she has continued to live between Paris and Guadeloupe as both a nurse and a novelist. Her experiences in both places have often been violent and restless (see L’Espérance Macadam/Macadam Dreams [1995]), a feeling that is encapsulated in the majority of her female protagonists. Many of her novels are also structured around this con-
933
tinual journey between the Antilles and metropolitan France, one that never ends in complete fulfillment for the protagonist (see Un Papillon dans la cité/“A Butterfly in the Projects/in the City” [1992], L’Exil selon Julia/Exile According to Julia [1996], and Chair Piment [2002]). Initially, Pineau was linked to movements such as créolité, yet she has since distanced herself, becoming increasingly suspicious of the overly masculine Antillean identity that is asserted by the créolistes. Pineau seeks an identity beyond the confines of her native Antillean islands and looks instead to the universal experience of her fellow black women. Throughout her fictional and critical writings, Pineau has consistently highlighted the plight of Antillean women across the centuries who often undergo a double violence—that of colonialism in the first instance but also that inflicted upon them by their Antillean men. In other words, like Maryse Condé and even Toni Morrison, Pineau focuses on the plight of “la femme noire” across the Americas. This representation of sexual violence is especially powerful in La Grande Dérive des esprits/The Drifting of Spirits (1993)—for which she won the Grand Prix des lectrices d’Elle in 1994—and in her most recent novel, Chair piment. Both novels draw on the physical space of the Antilles, highlighting the violence of the surrounding environment of the Antilles in the form of cyclones and tornados. These features mark out the terrifying unpredictability of the Americas. Pineau, like many contemporary authors, has turned to the childhood récit d’enfance in an attempt to understand the past. L’Exil selon Julia (1996) outlines the trauma of being caught between two cultures and the resulting sense of alienation
934
PIRACY AND PRIVATEERS
from each one. In this récit, France is described through the eyes of the narrator and that of the Guadeloupean grandmother (Julia) and is constructed as a place of isolation, imprisonment, and coldness. In contrast, the Antilles are represented as a nostalgic paradise lost for the grandmother and thus rendered mythic for the narrator. However, upon arrival on the islands, the narrator fails to experience the longed-for sensation of coming home, for there too she is different. Throughout Pineau’s novels, there is a constant emphasis on errance—particularly between metropolitan France and the Antilles. This turbulence creates an overwhelming sense of movement, which suggests that Pineau’s identity is negotiated through a continual state of flux between the two places. Catriona Cunningham See also: Condé, Maryse; Créolité; Gaulle, General Charles de. References Gyssels, Kathleen. “L’Exil selon Pineau, récit de vie et autobiographie.” Récits de vie de l’Afrique et des Antilles: Enracinement, Errance, Exil. Ed. Suzanne Crosta. SainteFoy: GRELCA, 1998: 169–213. Mugnier, Françoise. “La France dans l’oeuvre de Gisèle Pineau.” Etudes Francophones 15, no. 1 (spring 2000): 61–73. Vitiello, Joëlle. “Le Corps de l’île dans les écrits de Gisèle Pineau.” Elles écrivent des Antilles (Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique). Ed. Suzanne Rinne and Joëlle Vitiello. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997: 243–263.
PIRACY AND PRIVATEERS Piracy can be defined as acts of violence committed upon the sea or unappropriated lands by an individual or body of men acting independently of any state. It is as old
as exploration and trade, being a natural development of both these acts of commerce. Throughout the ages, piracy has developed along a number of cyclical stages. First, it was the act of a few outlaws who, over time, became more organized and powerful. Then, as their power increased, political states started to recognize their value, particularly when wars were being fought, as naval powers often consisted of these organizations of pirates. As wars ended, the naval forces were disbanded and the cycle began again. It is in the second phase that pirates can become defined as privateers because privateering can be seen as pirates who are sailing under the knowledge and authority of the state. In this way, privateering and, by extension, piracy were seen as legitimate practices in the early European state system, and, thus, both piracy and privateering can be seen to be a strong part of the French naval tradition, particularly with regard to America. Records of French piracy date back as far as the fourteenth century, and these activities were particularly focused on English targets. However, when the New World was discovered, this focus shifted, reflecting the changing political attitude of France. It was not only the gold and riches discovered by the Spanish in South America that encouraged piracy; the insistence that no other nation could trade with Spanish holdings in the New World and the limitations this put on the Spanish colonists living within the newly discovered lands, together with religious differences, also led to the piratical practices in the area. By the middle of the sixteenth century, French sailors from Dieppe, Brest, and the Basque coast plundered ships arriving from the West, and names such as
PIRACY AND PRIVATEERS
Jean Terrier, Jacques Sore, and François le Clerc (also known as “Pie de Palo” or “Wooden Leg”) were names feared by the Spanish. French sailors soon learned the routes the Spanish galleons would take on their way back from their American holdings, laden with gold and other items valuable in Europe, and preyed on them with some success. Piracy also influenced the American colonies in other ways. For example, the trade in goods gained from piracy helped the colonies maintain a balance of trade with Europe, particularly under the harsh conditions imposed by their ruling powers. In return for these goods, the colonies were relied upon to furnish and provision the pirate ships. Piracy also provided investment opportunities for wealthy individuals living in the American colonies and supplemented the income of the colonial officials. While the action of the pirates may not have been condoned officially, the concentration on Spanish targets definitely reflected the continuing tensions between France and Spain. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, French piracy in the New World became more organized, and a base was formed in the West Indies. French settlers began to move to Hispaniola toward the end of the sixteenth century, where they lived off the land, drying and selling the meat they caught there. However, the Spanish were concerned about a French presence amid their colonies and drove the settlers out of Hispaniola. The French “buccaneers,” so named after their practice of drying meat (or boucanier), did not go far, however, and settled instead on the small island of Tortuga, a few miles off the northwest coast of Hispaniola. While the Spanish continued to attack this new set-
935
tlement, the French were able to maintain their hold on the land, and it soon became a settlement for both French and English pirates. These buccaneers, differentiated from pirates in that they concentrated solely on Spanish targets, were highly organized and lived and worked under strict rules, the most important being the fair distribution of the spoils. The history of the buccaneers who settled in Tortuga has been recorded for posterity by a fellow Frenchman, Alexander Olivier Exquemelin. His history was first published in Amsterdam in 1678 but became such a huge success that it was translated into a number of European languages, and further volumes were soon added. His account provided the European reading public with stories that emphasized the romance of piracy, such as the story of Pierre Legrand, who, with the help of just a few men and a small boat, captured a great Spanish ship, which provided enough for Legrand and his men to retire in France. Stories were also included about other French pirates, such as François Lolonais, who decided to attack not just Spanish ships but also Spanish cities in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pierre François, who attacked the pearl-fishing fleets. While the buccaneers made themselves known in the West Indies, the French Crown also realized their potential and, as such, both welcomed and encouraged their activities, particularly as they coincided with the political concerns of the time. For example, as war raged with Spain, a fleet of ships was sent from France in 1697 to attack Cartagena in Colombia. Passing by Tortuga, the fleet was supplemented with buccaneers, who knew the region well. The combined fleet bombarded Cartagena for
936
PLACOLY, VINCENT
fourteen days, forcing it to surrender and hand over an enormous treasure. Arguments broke out, however, over the distribution of these spoils, and this highlights some of the problems of such a combined force. This raid on Cartagena also marked the end of the buccaneers, not least because wars in Europe reached resolution. The buccaneers can therefore be seen as another phase of privateers, which were no longer required at the end of the wars. As the wars of succession between France and England reached a conclusion in 1697, piracy in America began a new phase, as thousands of the privateers that had been engaged in the wars were now unemployed. Many formed bases along the North American coastline and often sailed to European holdings in the East, plundering what they passed along the way. A unique example from this period is the Frenchman Misson. Misson came from an old French family in Provence and was educated in Europe before taking to the seas in the New World, where he gathered together a group of pirates. Misson and his men set off on an incredible journey to the East, plundering ships as they went, and eventually founded an egalitarian colony in Madagascar. A further wave of piracy followed the American Revolution and the succeeding war between France and Britain, which ended in 1815, demonstrating once again how piracy is inextricably linked to privateering and thus to the state. This phase of piracy can be seen to be more violent and less idealistic than the previous phases. As such, and perhaps in recognition of this inextricable link between piracy and privateering, an international agreement was reached in Paris in 1856 forbidding the
right to authorize privateering as a wartime activity. French, British, Russian, Prussian, Austrian, Sardinian, and Turkish representatives signed the Treaty of Paris and accompanying declaration, which effectively abolished privateering. Jo Edwards See also: American Revolution; French Revolution; Treaty of Paris. References Gosse, Philip. The History of Piracy. London/New York/Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1932. Lydon, James G. Pirates, Privateers and Profits. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg, 1970. Rankin, Hugh F. The Golden Age of Piracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Sherry, Frank. Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy. New York: Hearst Marine Books, 1986. Thomson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns—State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
PLACOLY, VINCENT (1946–1992) Martinican writer and Socialist militant. Although he was not well known in Europe or the United States, Placoly’s premature death at the age of forty-five deprived Martinique of one of its most committed and active intellectuals, who was also respected in Latin America, particularly in Cuba and Venezuela. Vincent l’Américain, as he was sometimes known, was inspired by a vision of America rooted in José Martí’s concept of “Nuestra America,” that is, countering U.S. imperialism with an insistence on the nonhegemonic, multilingual creole societies of the rest of
PLACOLY, VINCENT
the continent. He had extensive contacts with Cuba, and his best-known play, Dessalines ou la passion de l’indépendance (on the Haitian Revolution) was awarded the Casa de Las Americas Prize in Havana in 1983. But he was also interested in writers from other parts of Latin America and wrote on Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz. As a student at the Sorbonne in the 1960s, he became involved in the politics of the anti-Stalinist Left, meeting the future leaders of the May 1968 movement, and was active in the Association générale des étudiants de la Martinique, becoming chairman of its Paris section. On returning to Martinique, he helped to found the Groupe Révolution Socialiste (GRS): this arose out of a split within the Martinican Communist Party, which refused to support such deviations from Communist orthodoxy as May 1968 in France, the Prague spring of 1968, Che Guevara, and independence for Martinique. Defining itself in Trotskyist terms as the “Section antillaise de la IVe Internationale,” the GRS brought together leftist intellectuals and militants from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and provided the framework for Placoly’s political activity in Martinique—for instance, writing a regular column in the organization’s newspaper, Révolution socialiste. But while he was constantly engaged in local campaigns, his main aim was an independent Socialist Martinique existing within a broader anti-U.S. “Américanité.” His plays and novels, as well as his numerous essays, are profoundly shaped by his political commitment without being in any sense propagandistic. While still in Paris, he was discovered by Maurice Nadeau, who published Placoly’s first two novels, La Vie et la mort de Marcel Gonstran (“The Life and
937
Death of Marcel Gonstran,” 1971) and L’Eau-de-mort guildive (1973) (the title puns sardonically on “eau-de-vie”; “guildive” is a very cheap form of rum). Written in a densely poetic prose that was completely new in French-Caribbean fiction— and was compared by critics to Arthur Rimbaud and the surrealists—the novels portray the chaotic violent lives of, respectively, Martinican immigrants in France and the poorest inhabitants of Fort-deFrance. His last novel, Frères volcans (“Brothers of the Volcano”), is a more soberly realist historical narrative; set in 1848, it describes the emancipation of the slaves in Martinique from the unexpectedly sympathetic perspective of a slave owner. Placoly also wrote and produced a number of plays, most of which remain unpublished but were successfully staged in Martinique, notably by the Théât’Lari (Théâtre La Rue). He also had a weekly radio program in Martinique. His essays cover many subjects—from literature to the cultural role of rum, from the status of the creole language to Third World debt—but their central focus is the political and cultural emancipation of the Antilles. Celia Britton See also: Anti-Americanism; Borges, Jorge Luis; Guadeloupe; Haiti; Language; Martinique; Paz, Octavio; Slavery; Surrealism; Venezuela. References Brossat, Alain, and Daniel Maragnès. Les Antilles dans l’impasse?: des intellectuels antillais s’expliquent: Edouard Glissant, Laurent Farrugia, Yves Leborgne, Roland Suvélor, Max Jeanne, Edouard de Lépine, Hector Poullet, Vincent Placoly, etc. Paris: Editions caribéennes, 1981. Seguin-Cadiche, Daniel. “Une explosion dans la cathédrale” ou regards sur l’oeuvre de Vincent Placoly. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002.
938
PLAMONDON, LUC
PLAMONDON, LUC (1942–) Luc Plamondon is at present the most famous song lyricist from Quebec; for thirtyfive years, he wrote lyrics for many composers and pop singers in Quebec and France and has cowritten more than 500 songs. Born in 1942, Plamondon was raised in Portneuf (a rural region between TroisRivières and Quebec City) and educated at Laval University and the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. He also spent three years in London in the 1960s. Back in Montreal, Plamondon released his first lyrics in 1970 for a car song composed by famous musician André Gagnon; that song became an instant hit for pop singer Steve Fiset (“Dans ma Camaro”). Plamondon’s major successes can be dated to his collaboration from 1972 with Diane Dufresne, for whom he wrote sixty songs, including “Chanson pour Elvis” and “L’Homme de ma vie.” He wrote for other Quebec singers such as Ginette Reno and Pauline Julien. Also in 1972, he collaborated with Monique Leyrac on an unusual concept, writing lyrics on seven famous classical melodies that were recorded as modern songs, including the patriotic “Ma Patrie” on a melody (“The Moldau”) by Smetana. Although the LP went unnoticed, it remained a true synthesis of styles, musical genres, and epochs. In 1977, Plamondon wrote with French composer and musician Michel Berger (1947–1992) the first original rock opera in French, Starmania (1978), which was a huge success as a show and double album with various individual artists. The 1989 and 1993 versions, with a new cast, gained more critical praise and awards, lasting more than six seasons onstage in Paris. The most outstanding song from the orig-
inal LP was Claude Dubois’s extraordinary performance, entitled “Blues du Businessman,” which won a Félix for the Song of the Year in Quebec in 1979. An English version of Starmania entitled Tycoon was adapted by Tim Rice in 1992, with an international cast including Cindy Lauper, Kim Carnes, Nina Hagen, and Tom Jones. Plamondon also cowrote with French singer Barbara (née Monique Serf, 1930– 1997) a conceptual show, entitled Lily Passion (1984), that she created onstage with actor Gérard Depardieu. The next year, Plamondon wrote a conceptual show for Diane Dufresne called Dioxine de carbone et son rayon rose (1985), which was presented at the Cirque d’hiver in Paris. Plamondon and Michel Berger later created another rock opera, La Légende de Jimmy (1990), which was a tribute to James Dean. The Franco-Québécois cast included singers Diane Tell and Tom Novembre. The next year, Plamondon also wrote with French singer-composer Catherine Lara an opera, Sand et les romantiques (1991), as a tribute to the nineteenth-century French novelist George Sand (née Aurore Dupin, 1804– 1876). This project again brought together French and Québécois artists. As a lyricist, Plamondon also worked for Robert Charlebois (“Je t’aime comme un fou”), the U.S.-born singer Nanette Workman (who had a huge hit in 1978 with a disco song written in French by Plamondon, entitled “Call-Girl”), and for a whole new generation of singers in Quebec, such as Isabelle Boulay and Wilfred Le Bouthillier. In France, Plamondon wrote two hits for pop singer Julien Clerc (“Cæur de rocker” and “La Fille aux bas nylon”). His greatest accomplishment was probably Notre-Dame de Paris (1997), another musical show made from Victor Hugo’s story,
POE, EDGAR ALLAN
with music composed by French singer Richard Cocciante. A studio CD and a DVD of that show were released. In 2002, Plamondon and composer Romano Musumarra created a musical show named Cindy, a modern story based on the tale Cinderella. Plamondon’s main influences are from France: Charles Trenet’s fantaisie, Charles Aznavour’s insistence on subjects related to love, and Serge Gainsbourg’s daring mixture of French and English words in his lyrics. Luc Plamondon has received numerous honors in France and Quebec. After living in Ireland for several years, Plamondon now lives in Switzerland. The writer Jacques Godbout wrote a book in tribute to his work (Godbout, 1988). Yves Laberge See also: Aznavour, Charles; Charlebois, Robert; Depardieu, Gérard; Dion, Céline; Dufresne, Diane; Gainsbourg, Serge; Garou; Godbout, Jacques; Hunchback of Notre-Dame/Notre-Dame de Paris; Julien, Pauline; Leyrac, Monique; Music (Classical); Music (Pop). References Berger, Michel, and Luc Plamondon. Starmania. Paris: Le Cherche-midi Editeur, 1995. Godbout, Jacques. Plamondon: un coeur de rocker. Montreal: Editions de l’Homme, 1988.
POE, EDGAR ALLAN (1809–1849) American writer. The illegitimate son of two actors, Poe was orphaned in 1811 and taken into the home of John Allan, a wealthy Virginia merchant. Throughout his youth, Poe’s life was marked by drinking and gambling debts—vices that were to haunt him con-
939
Edgar Allan Poe, U.S. fiction writer and poet. In France, Poe was an enormous influence on Baudelaire, who wrote three articles on Poe and translated several of his works. (National Archives)
tinuously, eventually causing his dismissal from both the University of Virginia and later West Point. He then published two books of poetry, Tamarlane (1827) and Al Aaraaf (1829), but it was not until Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) that he received some measure of acclaim. To augment his meager literary income, Poe worked for, edited, and cowrote a number of influential literary journals. The Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond Virginia became, under Poe, one of the first organs for serious literary criticism during the period. It was also here that Poe published as a serial The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837). Due to drinking, Poe was unable to hold down his editorial jobs, and in 1846 Poe’s wife, Virginia, a cousin whom he married when she was thirteen, died from tuberculosis, hastening Poe’s own descent into ill health and alcoholism.
940
POMPIDOU, GEORGES
Most of the literary notice that Poe acquired in America during his lifetime was antagonized by his use of grotesque and gothic imagery—famously extrapolated in such poems as The Raven (1845) and in his fantastical tales. While Poe’s detractors considered him debauched and overwrought stylistically, these self-same traits were considered by his admirers as a unique form of gothic romanticism. The constant interweaving in his work between acute melancholia and a belief in the importance of a highly morbid form of lyricism lent itself to a continental fascination with his aesthetic theories. In France, in particular, Poe was an enormous influence on Baudelaire, who wrote three articles on Poe and translated several of his works. This in turn led to Poe’s influence on the symbolists, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud, and by extension the surrealists, for whom Poe’s anarchical strain lent itself to a fascination with psychoanalysis and the gothic. Poe is often credited, as well, as being the instigator of the detective story, and, as such, his influence can also be traced in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Huysmans, among others. In Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and The Purloined Letter (1844), the detective M. Dupin is both the quintessential empiricist and a poet. Although Poe’s detective fiction differs from his tales of terror, both genres exhibit the characteristic heightened selfconsciousness of a narrator convinced of his own superiority. Poe’s other notable stories written between 1838 and 1843 include: Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Premature Burial. Caroline Blinder
See also: Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre; Crime Fiction; Literary Relations; Surrealism; Verne, Jules. References Baudelaire, Charles P. Fatal Destinies: The Edgar Allan Poe Essays. Trans. J. F. Mele. Woodhaven, NY: Cross Country, 1981. Bloom, Harold, ed. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Chelsea House, 2002. Hayes, Kevin J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
POMPIDOU, GEORGES (1911–1974) Second president of the Fifth Republic from 1969 until 1974, born in Montboudif, France, in 1911. Georges Pompidou played an important role in managing contemporary France’s initial transition from years of government by Charles de Gaulle, the Gaullist Party, and Gaullist governments. During most of the 1960s, Pompidou was himself (1962–1968) de Gaulle’s faithful prime minister and, as president, continued many of de Gaulle’s traditional policies and attitudes. However, Pompidou’s brief presidency served to move France forward, and, particularly, in some areas of diplomacy and foreign relations, Pompidou’s thinking can be considered to have modified French attitudes toward their place in the world. However, by pursuing a still relatively traditional Gaullist approach to France’s actions within the international system, Pompidou did not manage to make Franco-American relations any easier, and in February 1970 he met with hostile demonstrations during a visit to Chicago. Pompidou’s withdrawal of France’s veto (decided by de Gaulle) on British member-
PONTIAC
ship of the Common Market gave European integration—and France’s place within Europe—a new impetus, creating the conditions for a new balance of forces between Europe and the superpowers, particularly the United States. He was, notably, the first Western head of state to visit China, meeting Mao Zedong in Beijing in September 1973, and continued de Gaulle’s policy of visiting the Soviet Union to demonstrate to the United States that France was free in the diplomatic sphere to talk with whom it wanted. To the extent that he appeared as a man of traditional high cultural values—he was the author of a number of literary works, including Britannicus (1944), Taine (1947), Malraux (1955), and Anthologie de la poésie française (1961)—Pompidou doubtless represented a somewhat stereotypical image of what American politicians and the U.S. people might have expected in France’s head of state. The reality of Pompidou’s life was, however, interestingly meritocratic—as the son of provincial primary school teachers who succeeded brilliantly in the French educational system— and in this sense reflects the very opposite of hackneyed assumptions about France’s governing elites that may have influenced U.S. views on French politics after the Gaullist era. Similarly, in the domain of U.S. perceptions of French culture and politics, Pompidou’s incautiously ambiguous confession in the New York Times Magazine in August 1971 that he “detested” the currently innovative obsession with reassessing France’s history during the occupation revealed to the United States that France was—through the workings of the “Vichy syndrome”—still suffering under the sociocultural and political burdens of
941
past decades, however much she seemed also to be moving forward toward European integration and a strengthened place in the new international system. Georges Pompidou died in Paris in 1974. Hugh Dauncey See also: Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Gaulle, General Charles de; World War II. References Pons, Bernard, ed. Georges Pompidou: vingt ans après. Paris: La Table ronde, 1994. Rioux, Jean-Pierre. The Pompidou Years, 1969–1974. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
PONTIAC (CA. 1720–1769) Chief of the Ottawa and leader of the confederate tribes of the Ohio valley against the British from 1763–1765, Pontiac distinguished himself as a major figure in the concerted native rebellion against British power following the fall of New France. Sources differ as to the precise date and place of Pontiac’s birth, as well as to the exact identity of his parents, and he does not clearly enter history until his midforties, when he convened a native council among the Great Lakes tribes at the Ottawa village near Detroit in 1762. A bizarre meteorological phenomenon around Detroit on October 5, 1762, served as grounds to reinforce his claim that the time to attack the British and drive them from their frontier possessions had come. Pontiac then called for a second council to take place in November 1762, at which delegations of Huron, Wyandot, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Mississauga, Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware debated the question of war. Native discontent drew from
942
PONTIAC
Death of Pontiac. Pontiac (ca. 1720–1769), American Ottawa Indian chief. Pontiac distinguished himself as a major figure in the concerted native rebellion against British power following the fall of New France. (Bettmann/Corbis)
the lack of British interests in pursuing the established codes of trade and diplomacy in place since the time of the French regime. Natives also resented the incursions of British and American hunters and squatters onto their lands. The natives’ refusal to return British hostages, many of whom had been adopted by native families to replace deceased members, further aggravated tensions. Pontiac and his followers ultimately laid siege to Fort Detroit in early May
1763. Founded by the French, Fort Detroit represented one of the most strategic sites in North America and was the key bastion of British power in the Great Lakes. The native rebellion spread throughout the region, and numerous British forts were captured or destroyed, including: Fort Sandusky, Fort Saint Joseph, Fort Miami, Fort Pitt, Fort Michilimackinac, Fort Ouiatenon, Fort Venango, Fort LeBoeuf, and Fort Edward Augustus (Green Bay). In addition, many
POOL, LÉA
French Canadians living near the forts found themselves in a dilemma between their forced loyalty to the British Crown and their cultural and economic ties with the natives. In spite of the shortage of supplies, Fort Detroit, under the command of Major Henry Gladwin, resisted the long siege that finally ended on October 31, 1763. Commonly known as Pontiac’s rebellion, the native initiative to oust the British from a region that spanned the Great Lakes to the Mississippi officially came to an end in April 1765 when Pontiac agreed to peace with the British. It is estimated that about 500 British troops in all died during the war and that another 50 were taken captive and tortured. The revolt temporarily halted the westward movement of American colonists and prompted the British Crown to issue the Proclamation of 1763, an act that greatly limited settlement west of the Appalachians and angered American colonists, leading finally to the American Revolution. Pontiac was murdered for speculative reasons on April 20, 1769, by the nephew of Peoria Chief Makatachinga, who struck Pontiac from behind with a war club. Maureen Waters See also: American Revolution; Hurons; Mississippi River; New France; Ohio. References Eckert, Allan. The Conquerors: A Narrative (1970). New York: Bantam, 1981. Nester, William R. “Haughty Conquerors”: Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Parkman, Francis. The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada (1969). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Peckham, Howard H. Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (1947). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
943
POOL, LÉA (1950–) Quebec filmmaker. Pool moved to Montreal from her native Switzerland in 1975. Her stay in Quebec, planned as a temporary study stay in the Communications Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal, became permanent, an exile whose traces can be found in most of her films. Pool’s work, for the most part true films d’auteur, has been recognized as revolutionary. With her first film, Strass Café (1980), she was compared to Marguerite Duras. Like many that followed, the film has to do with landscape, in this case a person’s individual landscape found through the images of a city. Pool describes her films as the parts of a puzzle that constructs itself around things that are close to her. And indeed, her work has been described as introspective, staging the characters’ quests for identity, an approach that has created a new role for the first person in Quebec cinema. Her 1984 La Femme de l’hôtel/A Woman in Transit (International Press Prize at the Montreal World Film Festival; Prize for Excellence at the Toronto Festival of Festivals) dealt with the question of nonbelonging. In it, Pool presents a character that lives in a hotel. Although the film’s story takes place in Montreal, one scene of the movie shows Quebec City’s Clarendon Hotel, a shift noticed by critics and one that Pool has explained as her wish to film more than one city at a time—a desire to break up the city that is symbolic of her experience as an immigrant. Her next film, Anne Trister (it received a prize granted by the audience at the Festival des films de femmes de Créteil), made in 1986, also showed a displaced woman, Anne, an autobiographical character who, like Pool herself, emigrates from Switzerland to Montreal following the death of her father. Anne Trister was followed by
944
PORNOGRAPHY
the films A corps perdu/Straight for the Heart (1988), Rispondetemi (1991), La Demoiselle sauvage/The Savage Woman (1991), Mouvements du désir/Desire in Motion (1994, which was presented at the Sundance Film Festival), and Hotel Chronicles (1997). In 1998, Pool made a documentary on Gabrielle Roy, a film that won the Gémeaux Prize for best documentary. In 1999, she chose to make what has been described as a more commercial form of cinema with the successful autobiographical Emporte-moi/Set Me Free, which won the Special Prize of the Ecumenical jury at the Berlin Film Festival, received a special mention as Best Canadian Film at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, and was chosen to represent Canada for the Foreign Film Oscar. While female homosexuality has often been a part of Pool’s films— such as the relationship between Anne and Alix in Anne Trister or that between Hanna and Laura in Emporte-moi—it has become the focus of her most recent movie and her first work made in English, Lost and Delirious (2001), based on the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan. Compared by critics to Dead Poets’ Society, this film was presented at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Martine Delvaux See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Montreal; Quebec City; Roy, Gabrielle. References “Dossier: Léa Pool.” 24 Images 56–57 (1991). Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
PORNOGRAPHY Since the advent of pornography on theater and television screens, France and North America have been the stage of debates around it. Questions of censorship and leg-
islation have regularly been brought up by politicians, feminist activists, groups for the protection of children, and so forth. Pornography has been defined in multiple ways in an effort to circumscribe its object. On both sides of the Atlantic and for the last thirty years, pornography has been a controversial topic. In 1974, in France, the Culture minister Michel Guy lifted the ban on American hard-core films (that show nonsimulated sex acts), until then only shown during Cannes’s “marché du film” and on specific nights at the cinémathèque. The golden year of pornography in France was 1974, which saw films distributed in a series of regular theaters. Jean-François Davy produced Exhibitions, showing porn actors at work. This first French hard-core film was presented at Cannes and then successfully shown throughout the country. The now classic film Emmanuelle (Jaeckin, 1975) was produced and distributed worldwide (60 million people saw it in the United States), and Deep Throat (Damiano, 1972), Behind the Green Door (directed by Mitchell Brothers), and Devil in Miss Jones (Damiano, 1972) were imported in France from the United States. At this point, hardcore pornography was the sign of liberated times. A year later, the X classification appeared (modeled on the American approach), and in 1976 France imposed a tax on hard-core films, which then became confined to specialized theaters. With the advent of video, the number of theaters diminished (videocassettes replaced 35mm film), and pornography progressively appeared on the television screen: Canal+ was created in 1984; channel XXL in 1999. American pornography available on videocassettes was popular in France and con-
PORNOGRAPHY
tributed to the demise of French production —an effect of the 1975 law. Concerning print pornography, the 1970s witnessed the creation of the magazine Lui, sold by Hugh Hefner in the United States under the title Oui. Playboy was distributed in France by Daniel Filipacchi, creator of Lui. While in the United States, pornography led a healthy life, The year 1979 saw the production of French pornographic films wither due to new classifications that restricted hard-core films to specialized theaters. At the same time, debates around pornography and feminist demonstrations in France, the United States, and Canada began to emerge. In France, the presentation of Histoire d’O (Jaeckin, 1975) and in particular the advertisement for the film printed by L’Express provoked a group of women, led by Françoise d’Eaubonne, to demonstrate against the selling of women’s bodies. In Canada, the presentation of Snuff (Findlay, 1976) in a Toronto movie theater in 1977 launched Canadian feminist awareness about pornography. The first Take Back the Night walk was organized in 1978. Articles by Micheline Carrier in Quebec’s Châtelaine in 1979 underlined the penetration of the industry in Quebec and its proliferation. Bonnie Sherr Klein’s documentary This Is Not a Love Story (1981), filmed in part at L’Axe, a Montreal strip club, condemned pornography as the abuse of women. The work of the Fraser Committee in Canada (in 1983) and that of the Meese Commission in the United States (in 1984)—and in particular the effort made to define pornography—were signs of changes occurring in the way pornography was perceived and received. Questions of obscenity and censorship became impor-
945
tant. Trials took place in cases that were initiated by feminists. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, in particular, have greatly influenced the writing of legislation for various American cities. (Their position is that pornography should be repressed and punished because it subjugates and perpetuates violence against women.) As Robin Morgan wrote: “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” Dworkin and MacKinnon’s definition of pornography influenced Canadian legislation. In 1994, the Nouvel Observateur described MacKinnon as one of the fifty most influential people in the world. Since 1992, censorship of pornography in Canada, through interception of books at the border, has become the object of mockery. Among books seized: Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant, sexual education manuals, and so on. This is the object of the Canadian feature film Better Than Chocolate (Wheeler, 1999). In France, the question of pornography has been brought up in relation to recent films d’auteur: Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1998), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh’s Baise-moi (2000), and Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001). Breillat’s film and, most importantly, Despentes and Trinh’s film have generated debates around classification. Baise-moi was first prohibited to those younger than sixteen, then classified as X (under the pressure of a family association). Classical movie theaters stopped showing the film, and, since few specialized theaters exist, it disappeared from theater screens as a whole. A few months later, it was reclassified as a film that should not be seen by those under eighteen and therefore rendered available to general movie theaters.
946
PORTER, COLE
Finally, while the feminist movement has been widely antipornography, a number of women, intellectuals, and artists (performers Annie Sprinkle and Susie Bright and female cinematographers such as Candide Royalle) have fought for women’s right to pornography, something on which the Canadian documentary Bad Girls (2002) and Nathalie Collard and Pascale Navarro’s book Interdit aux femmes: Le féminisme et la censure de la pornographie (1996) shed light. This phenomenon points to one of the major differences between the way in which France and North America deal with pornography. While in Canada and the United States, the degradation of women lies at the center of the pornography debate, in France, after having largely been ignored by thinkers since Michel Foucault, pornography is now being addressed as a problem that concerns youth protection. Ruwen Ogien points out the danger of a simplistic opposition between communitarianism and individualism, which, he suggests, has succeeded in killing any critical thinking on the subject of pornography. Martine Delvaux See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Feminism; Foucault, Michel; Television. References Bier, Christophe. Censure-moi: Histoire du classement X en France. Paris: L’esprit frappeur, 2000. MacKinnon, Catharine. Only Words. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993. Ogien, Ruwen. Penser la pornographie. Paris: PUF, 2003. Procida, Richard, and Rita J. Simon. Global Perspectives on Social Issues: Pornography. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.
PORTER, COLE (1891–1964) “I Get a Kick out of You,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “Night and Day,” and hundreds of other songs reflect the musical genius of Cole Porter, who composed many of the funniest, most romantic, most clever songs that the music world has ever known. He was an unequaled composer, and his Broadway musicals set the standards of style and wit to which today’s composers and lyricists aspire. Porter was born on June 9, 1891, in Peru, Indiana, and learned to play the piano and violin at age six. He composed songs as early as 1901 and enrolled in the Worcester Music Academy in 1905. After high school, he attended Yale University and left Yale with a legacy of approximately 300 songs, including six full-scale productions. Though he went on to law school at Harvard University at the request of his wealthy grandfather, he transferred to the school of arts and sciences in order to pursue music. Eventually, he abandoned his studies, moved to New York, and began his professional musical career. Following the flop of his first Broadway show, See America First, Porter left New York for Paris in July 1917. Although Europe was engulfed in war, Porter found Paris to be a great source of inspiration, which he would return to in songs such as “You Don’t Know Paree” and “I Love Paris.” During his time abroad, Porter contributed to many musicals including Hitchy-Koo and the Greenwich Village Follies. By 1919, he was spending a lot of time with another American in Paris, a divorcée named Linda Thomas, whom he married in 1919. Porter had his first big hit with “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” which appeared in the 1928 musical Paris. A contemporary
POSITIF
of such great composers as George Gershwin and Richard Rogers, Porter brought wit and complexity to the simple sentimentality reflected in the music of his contemporaries, which won him the affection of the nation. Songs such as “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “I Get a Kick out of You,” and “Too Darn Hot” became instant hits and have remained classics. While his name was associated with many of these energetic show songs, a more melancholy side could be seen in such wonderful songs as “Miss Otis Regrets” and “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” Despite a horseback-riding accident in 1937 that crippled him for life, and Linda’s death in 1954, Porter produced much of his best work in the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote hundreds of songs for dozens of Broadway shows, movie musicals, and television specials. His most successful musical, Kiss Me Kate, which was based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, opened in 1948 and ran for over 1,000 performances. Porter died in California in 1964. Today his legacy lives on in musical productions and recordings by well-known artists. Claudia Wolosin See also: Jazz; World War I; World War II. References McBrien, William. Cole Porter: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1998. Schwartz, Charles. Cole Porter: A Biography. New York: Da Capo, 1979.
POSITIF Positif, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2002, is a leading French cinema journal of international reputation. It has
947
contributed over the years to the major critical debates on world cinema as well as the analyses of key films, directors, and more technical and stylistic aspects relating to film. It is also noted for the emphasis that it places on American cinema and its most prominent directors. Founded in 1952 in Lyons, by Bernard Chardère, Positif moved to Paris in 1954. The journal has often been opposed to its main rival Cahiers du cinéma, especially in its virulent attacks on the new wave in the 1960s. Ever since the 1950s, Positif has been noted for its strong editorial line and clear political and aesthetic positions. Its erudite contributors and editors constitute a voluntary editorial team who meet every Sunday. They have included over the years such names as JeanPierre Berthomé, Paul-Louis Thirard, Robert Benayoun, Michel Ciment, Bernard Kohn, Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Emmanuel Carrère, Jean A. Gili, Michel Sineux, and Françoise Audé. Currently under the wing of Michel Ciment, who joined the team in 1963, Positif has a circulation of 8,000 copies. Its editorial board has retained its autonomy, and it is the only financially independent cinema journal in France. Positif refuses to be directly associated with any theoretical school or movement. It has always favored an international approach and the broad coverage of current films, in-depth interviews and critical film reviews, and an emphasis on the cinematic professions. The comprehensive dossiers in each issue that provide historical retrospectives and thorough studies of individual directors and their work constitute another of its distinctive traits. Often adopting an auteurist approach, not dissimilar to that of Cahiers, Positif has helped to establish
948
POULIN, JACQUES
important directors-auteurs, many of whom were American or working in the United States including Robert Aldrich, Billy Wilder, Vincente Minnelli, Mankiewicz, David Lynch, Robert Altman, and Stanley Kubrick. Over the years, there were a number of controversies and errors of judgment, including the rejection of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, and Max Ophüls, which were later rectified. Positif has evolved over the years, toning down its polemical attacks while promoting an enthusiastic defense of the cinemas of the world, for instance the films of Wong-Kar-Wai or Abbas Kiarostami, and, not least, the representatives of American cinema’s diversity, including Tim Burton, the Coen brothers, and Quentin Tarantino. Positif has sometimes been accused of taking too little interest in French cinema, but it must be noted that it was the first film journal that supported the new generation of young French filmmakers in the 1990s by recognizing the talent of the likes of Bruno Dumont and Laetitia Masson. Positif has also emphasized the social and political roles of cinema, devoting space to political filmmakers such as Bertrand Tavernier or Ken Loach and to the documentary film. More a specialist journal than a mainstream film newsmagazine, Positif remains a reference periodical for film criticism with its own tone. Isabelle Vanderschelden See also: Cahiers du cinéma; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Tavernier, Bertrand. Reference Kardish, Lawrence, and Michel Ciment, eds. Positif Fifty Years: Selections from the French Film Journal. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
POULIN, JACQUES (1937–) Born in Saint-Gédéon-de-Beauce, Quebec, in 1937, Jacques Poulin is particularly well known for his poetic and intimate style, reminiscent of a number of other successful Quebec writers, such as FélixAntoine Savard (Menaud, maître-draveur/ Master of the River) and Anne Hébert (Les Chambres de bois/Silent Rooms, Kamouraska). He is one of a handful of Quebec novelists who have been able to make the transition from the formalist approach of the 1960s and 1970s to the more traditional and dynamic novel that has characterized the 1980s and 1990s. It is especially during his first period (1967–1984), which saw the publication of six novels (Mon Cheval pour un royaume/ “My Kingdom for a Horse” [1967], Jimmy [1969], Le Cæur de la baleine bleue/ “The Heart of the White Whale” [1971], Faites de Beaux Rêves/ “Sweet Dreams” [1974], Les Grandes Marées/Spring Tides [1974], and Volkswagen Blues [1984]), that he recognized and explored fully the American side of Quebec identity—American in this context meaning the whole of the North American continent and not solely the United States. Throughout these novels, the relationship between two brothers is explored by Poulin, who takes a critical look at the difficulties of acceptance and adaptation of French culture in North America: Théo, an uncultivated bohemian espousing the 1960s values of free love and adventure, who symbolizes the American side of the Québécois’s dual personality, and a timid, weak, albeit tender and touching individual whose name varies from novel to novel and who represents not the French side of the Québécois’s personality but rather the ambiguous nature of an individual who
POULLET, HECTOR
does not fully accept his American side. These features are particularly apparent in his 1984 novel, Volkswagen Blues, a road novel freely inspired by the beat generation and by Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece On the Road (1957). Following the receipt of a postcard from his long-lost brother (last seen in Faites de Beaux Rêves), Jack (known as Amadou in the earlier novel) and a young Amerindian called La Grande Sauterelle (Tall Grasshopper) embark on a journey that leads them from the Gaspésie, the image depicted on Théo’s postcard, to California, ostensibly in search of the lost brother. However, for all practical purposes, the journey is in reality a quest to find their own personal and social self in the huge anglophone continent that is North America. Passing through various cities and historical sites, where both protagonists discover the important role of their ancestors in settling and developing this untamed land, they make their way along the Oregon Trail, the original route taken by pioneers heading west, and finally discover Théo in San Francisco, nostalgic for the now bygone era of peace and love, for a time when beatniks and hippies reigned supreme. Théo is now in a wheelchair, memoryless and unable to speak French, a plangent symbol of a man who has been severed from his native Quebec culture. After this critically acclaimed novel, Poulin went on to explore the French (i.e., from France) aspect of the Quebec identity. He moved to a small conciergerie in Paris and has since written four more novels (Le Vieux Chagrin/Mr. Blue [1989], La Tournée d’automne/Autumn Rounds [1993], Chat sauvage/Wild Cat [1998], and Les Yeux bleus de Mistassini [2002]), wherein, using books as a
949
central motif, he reflects upon self and identity in order to explore the relationship between middle-aged men and women. Jean Levasseur See also: Hébert, Anne; Kerouac, Jack; Quebec. References Hébert, Pierre. Jacques Poulin: La Création d’un espace amoureux. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1997. Miraglia, Anne-Marie. L’Ecriture de l’Autre chez Jacques Poulin. Candiac: Editions Balzac, 1993.
POULLET, HECTOR (1938–) French Caribbean poet. Hector Poullet was born in 1938 in Anse-Bertrand, Guadeloupe, the eldest son of a family of five. Both parents were teachers, supporters of de Gaulle and the French Republic, and strongly opposed to Creole or any interference of Creole in the French language. He went to college in Paris, where he studied biochemistry at La Halle aux Vins (currently known as Jussieu). He married a white French woman, with whom he had three children, and decided to go back to Guadeloupe with his family. On his return to Guadeloupe, he first taught in a primary school in Marie-Galante in 1968. He went to teach in Gourbeyre (Basse-Terre region) in 1969, where he worked with Gerard Lauriette, the founder of the Guadeloupean Association of Popular Education (AGEP, Association Guadeloupéenne d’Education Populaire), an organization set up to help students who failed in the local authority education system. He then taught mathematics at the College de Capesterebelle-eau, and following the head teacher’s
950
POUND, EZRA LOOMIS
request, drew up a course in Creole for students with the most learning difficulties. Poullet used the experience acquired with Lauriette to train ten teachers, including Sylviane Telchid, to carry out the task. This approach to teaching was extracurricular; students participated on a voluntary basis as many parents and the local education authority disapproved of the idea. It was only following the 1982 legislation in favor of the teaching of regional languages that this method of teaching became fully integrated in the academic timetable. Poullet is known for his poetry in Creole and for his active work for the promotion of Creole language and culture. He started writing poetry in Creole while living in Paris, motivated by two events: the 1966 hurricane Inès and the riots and massacre of workers and students in Guadeloupe in March and May 1967. As a result of these events, Antilleans in Paris met informally to discuss, in Creole, these tragedies. The choice of writing in Creole was not a conscious or political choice but rather a spontaneous act, despite the challenges of not having an official system of orthography. Poullet did write some unpublished sonnets in French, inspired by writers such as Ronsard and Du Bellay; however, he did not find their style appropriate for depicting the Caribbean experience he wanted to convey. Creole, on the other hand, had a limited vocabulary; Poullet’s solution was to create neologisms often based on words borrowed from the French language and to encourage other writers to do the same—an approach very much in line with what is today known as the créolité literary movement. In 1975, Poullet published a magazine entitled Mouchach and subtitled “Bulletin de la créolité.” This magazine was short-
lived, with only five editions. In 1979, he launched an equally ephemeral journal entirely in Creole, entitled Douvan-jou, and in 1980 he commenced collaborative research on lexicography with Sylviane Telchid. This collaboration led to a series of publications of Creole grammar, vocabulary, and stories. In 1982, Poullet published his collection of poems, started while in France, under the title of Pawol an bouch. The collection contains one of the most popular hymns to créolité, “Mi zanfan péyi-la,” written in 1967. Although Poullet is mostly seen as a promoter of Creole, his early work clearly exemplifies what Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Bernabé describe as créolité in their book Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness). Marie-Annick Gournet See also: Bernabé, Jean; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël; Créolité; Gaulle, General Charles de; Guadeloupe; Language; Republicanism. References Montrand, Danièle, Hector Poullet, and Sylviane Telchid. Dictionnaire des expressions du créole guadeloupéen. Fort-deFrance: Hatier Martinique, 1984. Poullet Hector, and Sylviane Telchid. Le Créole sans peine guadeloupéen. Paris: Assimil, 1990. ———. Zayann, fables de la fontaine français/créole: Pointe à Pître: PLB Editions, 2000.
POUND, EZRA LOOMIS (1885–1972) American poet, translator, and critic whose work played a major role in the development of modernism. Ezra Pound’s poetry displays the influence of medieval romance literatures (especially Provençal poetry) through its adherence to principles of musicality, precision,
POUND, EZRA LOOMIS
and cultural engagement. Throughout his career, Pound retained his belief—derived from his studies in the European troubadour tradition—that poetry becomes both stale and tame the further removed it is from its roots in music. This idea of “Motz el Son,” the link between word and music, is evident across all his work: from early poems that translate or adapt troubadour poetry (by Lope de Vega, Bertrans de Born, and Arnaut Daniel) to Le Testament, the opera he wrote based on the work of François Villon, and Pound’s major lifework, The Cantos. Although Pound’s mature poetry is typically modernist in its complex and cosmopolitan difficulties, and in its use of techniques of fragmentation and collage, its roots lie in his early studies in the poetry of southern medieval Europe. A fragment in The Pisan Cantos sadly details this lost tradition and notes that “nothing seems less likely” than its recovery. Pound’s whole output, indeed, seems haunted by a sense of such a lost European tradition. Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. After studying at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College, he visited Europe in 1906 to research Lope de Vega. Returning to the United States in 1907, Pound worked briefly teaching Spanish and French at Wabash College before leaving in 1908 for Europe, where he lived for most of his remaining life. Before World War I, Pound lived in London, where he befriended many important avant-garde artists such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Wyndham Lewis. Pound lived in Paris between 1920 and 1924 and worked as a correspondent for the magazine The Dial. This brought him into contact with important modernist
951
Ezra Pound, American poet. Between 1920 and 1924 Pound lived in Paris, working as a correspondent for the magazine The Dial. This brought him into contact with important modernist artists. (National Archives)
artists such as Constantin Brancusi, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Cocteau. While in Paris, Pound edited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, perhaps the single most important poem of the early twentieth century, and his own poetry achieved its mature style. Pound was already working on his lasting poetic achievement, The Cantos, and this began to be published in 1925 after Pound moved to Rapallo, Italy, where he lived until 1945. In the 1930s, Pound became increasingly involved in politics, and he broadcast for Mussolini’s Rome Radio during World War II. He was removed to the United States in 1945 to stand trial for treason but declared mentally unfit and consequently spent twelve years in a hospital in Washington, D.C. Controversially, his Pisan
952
PRIMITIVISM
Cantos was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1948. Pound was released from the hospital in 1958, and he returned to live in Europe. He continued to write, but never completed, The Cantos. He died in Venice on November 1, 1972. Nick Selby See also: Cocteau, Jean; Stein, Gertrude; World War I; World War II. References Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Nicholls, Peter. Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing. London: Macmillan, 1984.
PRIMITIVISM Since the earliest conquests of the Americas, the West (broadly defined) has constructed itself both geopolitically and epistemologically against the notion of an “outside” Otherness. This Otherness has often been figured as the category of the primitive—the untutored subject of nonhistory whose customs and traditions remain untouched by Enlightenment and modernity. Interest in primitive cultures and societies has always been determined by the historical period in which writers, artists, and intellectuals engage with representing the world outside of the West. This “past” is seen as antithetical to a European present, and, as such, difference in the form of the exotic, the primitive, or the folkloric is always articulated as a reflexive category or a conduit through which the Self can be more thoroughly explored. Celts, Slavs, Native Americans, Polynesians, Africans, and African Americans
have all been framed through the discourses of primitivist Otherness at one time in the Western imagination. Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau conceived of the primitive within an evolutionary paradigm of development in which less “evolved” societies represented the childhood of humanity, hence the concept of the Noble Savage in the Discours sur l’inégalité (1755). Later, European romantic writers such as William Blake, Mary Shelley, and William Wordsworth conceived the space of the primitive as one of natural plenitude that was free from the ravages of industrialization and the relentless onward march of technology that was spreading rapidly all over Europe. At the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, anthropologists such as Franz Boas began new research into non-European cultures and established the foundations for a more complex, less Eurocentric model of the primitive that undercut evolutionary theories of culture and development. This trend toward cultural relativism would come to fruition in France with the founding of the Institut d’Ethnologie in 1925 by Paul Rivet, Marcel Mauss, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the establishment of the Musée de L’Homme. Both institutions set up new research paradigms in France, displacing older anthropological traditions and opening the way for Claude Lévi-Strauss’s post-Maussian theories of cultural difference and primitive societies in Tristes Tropiques (1955). Historically, European representations of primitive difference can be divided into two categories. First, the repository of repressed and atavistic impulses were banished from modern society. This version of primitivism is the space of the untamed, violently repressed Freudian id: the “natural”
PRIMITIVISM
state of humanity untouched by progress and history. The primitive here represents the modern subject released from cultural and religious interdiction, a model found later in the works of Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud. This version is counterpoised with the nostalgic and romantic desire for a return to origins, where the primitive is construed as a utopian, preindustrial locale of plenitude and harmonious relations with the natural world, seen in the paintings of Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. Generally speaking, the trope of the primitive as regressive and savage has been constructed around subSaharan African societies and cultures, whereas exoticism has been used to describe Oceania and Polynesia, the oriental Far East, and the Arabic Middle East. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France, a fascination with Far Eastern cultures produced the exoticism of Japonisme, Chinoiserie, and, of course, orientalism. The period between the 1880s and 1930s saw a significant shift in definition of the concept of the primitive in European art and culture and new collaborations between the social sciences and visual arts. Picasso’s “discovery” of l’art nègre in 1907 in the back rooms of the Musée de Trocadéro in Paris and his subsequent workings of Grebo and Fang masks in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) profoundly altered aesthetic paradigms and the reception of “primitive” art in Europe. Picasso’s cubist break with realism through a radically new antirepresentationalism would influence the modernist avant-garde throughout Europe for whom primitivism now assumed a central importance. This sense of the aesthetic rupture of primitivism also strongly resonated in music and dance. The complex and atonal polyrhythms of Igor Stravinsky’s
953
Sacré du Printemps (1913) and the Ballets Suédois production of Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde (1923) provided Paris with the visual and aural shock of the new primitivism. Elsewhere, in Germany, the Blaue Reiter group and the Dresden-based expressionists Die Brücke looked to primitive artifacts for formal innovation and aesthetic experimentation. In the years immediately following World War I, the depiction of modern, urban life as decrepit, degenerate, and lacking in vitality became an intellectual thematic in French intellectual life. Writers like Michel Leiris in L’Afrique fantôme (1934) began to express a number of recurrent anxieties around a perceived moral and spiritual aridity wrought by industrial modernity and the advancing technologies of capitalism. Spaces of Otherness outside Europe, both real and imagined, had become increasingly available as France’s colonial project reached its apogee in the years between the two world wars. The space of the primitive Other, brought ever closer for metropolitan consumption by rapid advancements in print and media technologies, could now function as a resource and as a spiritual alternative to the blighted postwar landscape. This turn to the outside and the search for a rejuvenating alterity coincided with the new validation of primitive art forms by modern artists such as Picasso, Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, and Maurice Vlaminck. This combination produced a shift in definition of the primitive from the debased and regressive alter ego of the West to a resource that offered new ways of thinking about the modern. In the mid-1920s, a popular phenomenon of cultural primitivism called négrophilie swept through Paris in the form of
954
PROJECT FAMOUS
American jazz, dance, musical theater, film, and advertising. The black American entertainer, Josephine Baker, became one of France’s most famous “primitive” icons as she sauntered down the Champs Elysées with her pet leopard. Baker’s performances in the Revue Nègre in 1925 and later in the Folies Bergère constructed her as an icon of modern primitivism as she staged various versions of an imaginary “blackness” predicated on illusion, spontaneity, libidinal energy, and uncensored physicality. To a certain extent, these racial stereotypes of a primitivized blackness were exported across the Atlantic from the Harlem Renaissance, in which a degree of self-exoticism was evident in the work of many writers and artists work. Interwar négrophilie in Paris privileged images and texts of a loosely imagined “blackness.” It also constituted a much broader consumption of nonWestern texts. In fact, at certain points during the interwar primitivist vogue, the term l’art nègre metonymically stood for an unspecified geographic location, and the term nègre could signify American music hall and jazz, Grebo or Dogon tribal masks, Oceanic or pre-Columbian artifacts, and Caribbean dance. In America, primitivism reoccurred in the postwar years in a variety of creative guises. The beat poets were interested in the “outsider” culture of black America as it seemed to offer the kind of improvisation and openness lacking in mainstream society. In art, abstract expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock engaged with a new language in painting that drew on preColumbian and then American Indian sources. The countercultural and antinuclear green movements of the 1960s and 1970s drew upon the energies of a new
primitivism focused on “first peoples” in the Americas and Australasia. This renegotiation of white, Western modernity has most recently been constructed in the 1980s and 1990s through a cultural engagement with the political dilemmas of indigenous peoples that remains a significant component of New Age “philosophy.” Carole Sweeney See also: Baker, Josephine; Bataille, Georges; Dance; Gauguin, Paul; Jazz; Leiris, Michel; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; Noble Savage; Painting; Sculpture; Theory; World War I. References Archer-Straw, Petrine. Negrophilia: AvantGarde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and Arts in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Thomas, Nicholas. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990.
PROJECT FAMOUS Project FAMOUS (French-American MidOcean Undersea Study) was conducted from 1971 to 1974 on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, about 700 kilometers (420 miles) southwest of the Azores. It was the world’s first research expedition to use deep-diving manned submersible vehicles to make direct observations of geological processes on a volcanically and seismically active oceanridge system. The project was conceived by Dr. James Heirtzler of the Woods Hole
PROJECT FAMOUS
Oceanographic Institution, in the United States, and Dr. Xavier Le Pichon of the Centre National pour l’Exploration des Océans, in France. Both men had done much of the definitive geomagnetic research on the seafloor that had led to the acceptance of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics as a major geophysical process. An important remaining scientific question was, how does new ocean crust form at a midocean ridge and become accreted to the separating oceanic plates? At the time (ca. 1970), France and the United States had the world’s most technically advanced deep-diving manned submarines; these unique vehicles (Archimède and Alvin) would be used to make direct observations and collect rock samples at a typical part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge system. France would develop a small, maneuverable submarine (Cyana) to complement the abilities of the large and cumbersome Archimède. Prior to the final 1974 program, joint meetings were held to select the study area, to exchange technical information, and to ensure that equipment used was interchangeable or complementary. A common plan for labeling and archiving samples was developed. Procedures and equipment were developed for mutual support and rescue in case of technical failures in one of the submarines. Few “cultural” differences arose; all of the French scientists and pilots spoke fluent English and several had lived or studied in America. The project took on an international flavor as the American and French teams were joined by British and Canadian colleagues in conducting preliminary surfaceship geophysical surveys and rock sampling, so that the anticipated detailed seafloor observations could be placed
955
within the context of broader regional studies. The Americans tested Alvin’s enhanced depth capability (to 4,000m) in the Bahamas, and Alvin made shallow dives in the Gulf of Maine to give the pilots and scientists experience with operating and sampling on rough, rocky seafloor. The newly developed Cyana completed successful test dives in the Mediterranean. In 1973, the French made seven reconnaissance dives in the selected study area with Archimède. In order to familiarize both scientists and pilots with the kind of volcanic geology anticipated on the seafloor, landbased field trips were made to Iceland, to the Afar triangle in Africa, and to Kilauea volcano, Hawaii. These shared experiences served to focus all participants on common scientific goals, improved communication between scientists and pilots, and created many lasting friendships. Project FAMOUS demonstrated that manned submersibles could indeed operate effectively on rugged ocean-ridge seafloor with no serious technical failures. Scientifically, the importance of volcanic activity as a major process in crustal accretion at an oceanic spreading center was confirmed, and the carefully mapped spatial distribution of the rock samples provided further insights into mechanisms of magma generation and eruption in the deep-sea environment. In France, Project FAMOUS was widely acclaimed as a major national triumph, a venture into “inner space” as significant as the moon landing soon to be accomplished by the United States. In America, FAMOUS had more direct competition from the public fascination with lunar rocks, but many Americans also saw it as a great achievement by the American and French “aquanauts.”
956
PROVOST, JOSEPH
By the end of the decade, manned submersibles would become another standard tool for deep-sea studies in both countries. Alvin and Cyana would make thousands of dives in the coming years, with excellent records of safety and performance. Wilfred B. Bryan References ARCYANA. FAMOUS: Atlas photographique de la Dorsale Médio-Atlantique: rift et faille transformante par 3000 mètres de fond. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1978. Ballard R. D., and J. G. Moore. Photographic Atlas of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge Rift Valley. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977. Heirtzler, James R., and Wilfred B. Bryan. “The Floor of the Mid-Atlantic Rift.” Scientific American 233 (1975): 78–90. Riffaud, C., and Xavier LePichon. Expédition “FAMOUS” à 3000 mètres sous l’Atlantique. Paris: Albin Michel, 1976.
PROVOST, JOSEPH (1847–1918) Son of a Catholic miller, Joseph Provost was born in 1847, at Ile Bouchard (Quebec). After the death of his mother, he was raised by his uncle Hilaire, since his father was unable to take care of five young children alone. Unfortunately for the family, Hilaire was having doubts at the time about his religious beliefs and soon became a Protestant. He subsequently sent Joseph to a Protestant school in Pointe-auxTrembles, where the young pupil was quickly noted for his curiosity and intelligence. In 1867, Joseph traveled to Switzerland to pursue his studies in theology. Upon his return, he worked for two summers as some sort of a traveling salesman, exploring the countryside and trying to get Catholics to read the Bible—an activity then forbidden by the Catholic Church.
He was then sent to Chillicothe, Ohio, where he became a pastor. He came back to Montreal in the early 1870s, founded a church, and, in 1878, left for the United States, where he would spend the rest of his life. In 1884, he became pastor of only the second U.S. Franco-Protestant church, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Three years later, he collaborated with two other well-known Franco-Protestants, Thomas Dorion, and T. G. A. Côté, in the founding of the French Publishing Society, a society dedicated to the publication of what would become the most important Franco-American Protestant newspaper of the nineteenth century, Le Semeur franco-américain (renamed Le Citoyen franco-américain in 1889). In the 1890s, Provost was professor at the Springfield Collège français and worked as a pastor in Torrington, Connecticut. Although he was very active in the newspaper world, he is nonetheless better known for his only novel, La Maison du coteau (“The House on the Hill,” 1881), considered by some as the first naturalist novel of Quebec literature. This short novel depicts the life of a young Protestant man who ill-advisedly decides to marry a Catholic girl and live with her family. He is soon pursued and harassed by the village priest and betrayed by his own wife before being chased away from his home. An excellent speaker, Provost was often asked to give conferences about the holy scriptures and about his second passion, history. He also wrote two partial biographies of his friend, the world-known pastor and orator, Charles Chiniquy. Unfortunately, neither was ever published; the first one was lost and, as for the second, the London publisher failed to pay for the partial manuscript he had already received, a situation
PROVOST, JOSEPH
that discouraged Provost from continuing. He died in 1918, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of seventy-one. On November 15, L’Aurore, the main Protestant newspaper of Quebec, stated that Provost “was a remarkable man in many ways. He was devoted, had superior oratory talent, could easily improvise, too easily perhaps, had a fertile pen, a bold style and an overall generous nature that put him at the disposal of all who needed him. He wasn’t a stranger to suffering. Father of a large family, earning an insufficient salary, he was in-
957
timately acquainted with poverty, worries and the kind of failures that paralyze [ . . . but] he kept his drive, his cheerfulness, his optimism until the end.” Jean Levasseur See also: Catholic Church. References Duclos, Rieul P. Histoire du protestantisme français au Canada et aux Etats-Unis. Montreal: Librairie Evangélique, 1913. Provost, Joseph. La Maison du coteau. Ed. Jean Levasseur. Sainte-Foy: Les Editions de la huit, 2000.
Q QUEBEC With almost 7.5 million inhabitants and a surface area of 1,667,441 square kilometers (594,860 square miles), Quebec represents approximately 15 percent of the total area of Canada and a little less than a quarter of its population. The size of its francophone population (about 80 percent of its total population) makes Quebec the largest francophone region in the Americas. An Atlantic society, Quebec has constructed its distinctiveness by creating an original configuration based on the diverse influences of its own environment as well as those of the other cultures that have successively left their mark on the region. Quebec continues to evolve, to spread its culture, and to receive influences to such an extent that it can be seen as constructing a Quebec originality, a “Quebecness,” based not only on fragments of American culture but also on European and ever more multiethnic aspects under the influence of the immigrant “new Québécois.” Many authors have attempted to define Quebec’s originality by trying to determine its causes. Religion, language, Americanicity, European influences, Nordicity, institutions, history, and social relations have successively been called upon in this attempt to
explain the specificities of Quebec. Since the expansion of its borders in 1912, Quebec has remained the largest of the Canadian provinces. Situated in eastern Canada, it nevertheless has only a minimal stretch of Atlantic coast because in 1927 the Privy Council in London recognized the Atlantic coast of the Labrador peninsula as belonging to the neighboring province of Newfoundland. Besides Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec is bordered by the provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island to the east, Ontario to the west, and the new autochthon province of Nunavut to the north; it shares its southern borders with the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. The province is thus located in the heart of Canada, the Canadian capital Ottawa being next to the Quebec city of Hull, on the other side of the Ottawa River, and is close to the large metropoles of the U.S. eastern seaboard; Montreal is 600 kilometers from New York and 500 from Boston. Because of Quebec’s latitude and geographic location, Nordicity constitutes one of the characteristics of the province’s specificity. Since most of its territory is situated beyond the fiftieth parallel, Quebec is subject to the differences in temperature
959
960
QUEBEC
that characterize continental climates (cold winters and warm summers, with respective seasonal average temperatures of –9ºC and 22°C in Montreal). There are big differences between the Arctic north (Nunavik, the Ungava peninsula), which is subject to cold air currents from the north and humid currents from the south and the Atlantic, and the milder south along the Saint Lawrence River and the border with the United States (Estrie, Beauce, Laurentides, Charlevoix, Saguenay, Gaspé). The climate leaves its mark on the flora and fauna and also on the distribution of the Quebec population. The fauna in the north is that of the Arctic regions (seals, bears, Arctic foxes, Arctic owls), living in tundralike surroundings (shrubs, lichen); in the center, the taiga is home, most notably, to many herds of caribou. Farther south, boreal forests of conifers and birch cover the Abitibi region, the northern Laurentian Mountains, from Saguenay-LacSaint-Jean to the northern coast of the Saint Lawrence. As for the Laurentian and Appalachian regions, their flora and agriculture is more diverse: maple forests, beech, limes, and ash are found alongside large agricultural fields of wheat and maize; southern Quebec even has vineyards, around Dunham and Estrie. The fauna is also varied, from the black bears of the Gaspesian forests to the humpback whales of the Saguenay region, the migratory birds of the Saint Lawrence (wild geese, barnacle geese) and the Virginia deer that were brought to Anticosti Island by the rich French landowner Henri Menier. This Nordicity also structures the distribution of Quebec’s population: 98 percent of Québécois live in 12 percent of the territory, and more than half the population is concentrated in the metropolitan area of
Montreal; the rest are divided mainly between the south of the province and along the banks of the Saint Lawrence. For many years, the Saint Lawrence was the main point of entry, through the ports of Quebec and Montreal, for immigration to Canada, and it has also played a decisive role in the structure of Quebec society. This migration has taken place over different periods, depending on the phases of European colonial history, and has mainly concerned, at least at its origins, the peoples living on the Atlantic shoreline: the Irish, the Scots, the Normans, the Bretons, the Basques, and those from the Aquitaine and Poitevin regions of France. Originally inhabited by numerous indigenous nations, the territory of presentday Quebec was, in the main, inhabited by the Micmacs in the east, the Cree, Naskapis, Innus, and Inuits in the north, the Attikamègues and Algonquins in the west, and the Iroquois and Hurons in the south and the center. The structure of these indigenous nations was overturned by the successive arrivals first of European fishermen, primarily Basques, as well as some from Saint-Malo, then by explorers, and finally by colonizers upon the acquisition of the territory by France and Britain. This European settlement represented a cultural shock because, as well as individual settlers, it brought a new religion, ways of life, beliefs, and modern customs to America; the settlement also brought European conflicts and illnesses, which had, thus far, been unknown, but also the dreams and expectations of peoples fascinated by the myth of a new, virgin land full of hidden riches. Colonization thus meant that some indigenous societies, such as the Beothuks in Newfoundland, were ignored; eventually, they disappeared.
QUEBEC
French rule in Quebec saw relatively modest settlements along the Saint Lawrence and around Quebec and Montreal, founded respectively by Samuel de Champlain in 1608 and Jeanne Mance in 1642. Evangelization of the indigenous peoples and control of the lucrative fur trade were the main motives behind this initial settlement. It was in particular from the period that saw Jean Talon as intendant (1665– 1672) that a real policy of agrarian and commercial colonization began to develop in New France, an expansion that would quickly conflict with that of Britain. The conflict, according to European developments, gave rise to several intercolonial wars; these would eventually lead to the progressive eviction of France, the final conquest of New France by Britain, and the taking of Quebec, and then Montreal, in 1760, leaving France with only fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland and sovereignty over the islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. The French authorities were first replaced by a military regime, and then, through the 1774 Quebec Act, a more conciliatory regime that aimed to guarantee the rights and the civil and religious organizations of almost 70,000 Canadians; by so doing, the new regime sought to appease a population that might otherwise have paid heed to appeals from other American colonies who were revolting against British colonial power. The independence of the United States led to a transformation of Canadian settlement by the arrival in the west of about 6,000 Loyalists, supporters of the British Crown, who demanded separation from Quebec. Separation was accorded through the Constitutional Act of 1791, which divided Quebec into Upper Canada (now Ontario) and Lower Canada (present-day Quebec) and
961
gave both Canadas representative government, along with an assembly, the embryo of future Quebec parliamentarism. Throughout the period referred to as “British rule” (1763–1866), the British government hesitated between conciliation, through the establishment of institutions that were adapted to the Canadian population and to their integration within British North America, and forced assimilation. Conciliation first took the form of the Quebec Act, the creation of Upper and Lower Canada, and the founding of a representative government with a parliament in both areas. An attempt at assimilation followed within United Canada, which was then primarily anglophone and Protestant: this was the Act of Union of the two Canadas; it was adopted in 1840 by the British parliament in accordance with Lord Durham’s recommendations on the necessity, for the good of the British Crown as well as for the prosperity of French Canadians, to assimilate Canadians to the British anglophone majority. After the government responsible to the parliament of United Canada was established, the concept of a confederation that would unite all the British North American provinces was put forward by John A. MacDonald and Georges Etienne Cartier. This plan gave rise to the British North America Act, thus creating the present-day Canadian Federation. Quebec then became a federal province with its own parliament and government established in Quebec City. At the same time, a Canadian state was progressively developing around the federal parliament, leading to the “repatriation” of the Constitution from London to Ottawa in 1982. From 1867, Quebec thus entered the era of federalism. The Catholic francophone elites of Quebec hoped that this
962
QUEBEC
political system would further their destiny. They dreamed of building, with the conquest of the West, a utopian “Empire of Saint Lawrence,” Catholic and francophone, which would stretch as far as the Pacific. However, with the creation of the western provinces during the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, all with an anglophone majority, as well as with the suppression and, sometimes, even the prohibition of French language teaching everywhere except Quebec, the repression of the francophone Métis in Manitoba and the execution of their leader, Louis Riel, the French Canadian elites slowly began to realize the limits of their dream of a Catholic, francophone (or at least bilingual) Canada. Their hopes began to center once more on Quebec, the only province where the francophones were in the majority and could thereby protect their institutions and their culture. The French Canadian nationalist movement developed through organizations such as the Société Saint Jean-Baptiste or semisecret societies such as the Order of Jacques Cartier, which, under the patronage of the Catholic Church and dominant ultra-Montanism, argued that in its identity and religion Quebec should look inward; in so doing, it would guarantee survival of the French Canadian population. French Canadian society thus attempted to fight against its assimilation by its willful sidestepping of the great movements of modernization. Quebec therefore modernized more slowly than elsewhere. It was not until the 1960s that francophone Quebec society began; a truly Quiet Revolution that radically transformed Quebec under the influence of a still nationalist elite, but one that
was less and less receptive to church dogma. This “Quiet Revolution,” driven forward by the liberal government of Jean Lesage, led to an upheaval of the dominant values of francophone society (secularization, an opening to modernity, the development of social policies), a transformation of the economy (the development of a francophone capitalism and of companies with capital from Quebec), and placed the Quebec state at the heart of nationalist concerns. It was around the Quebec state and the political possibilities its control offered to the francophones of Quebec that a new nationalism was created, no longer French Canadian but Québécois. Some Quebec nationalists then began to work in favor of sovereignty pure and simple under the leadership of René Lévesque, who formed, in 1968, the Parti Québécois. It is the national question that has, ever since, divided Quebec between federalists and sovereignists, as much at the time of referendums on sovereignty (1980 and 1995) as during provincial or federal elections (since the forming of the Bloc Québécois in 1990), and that places the recurring question of collective identity at the center of public debate in Quebec, that is, the existence of a Quebec nation and people that would have the right to govern itself. Beyond politics, the whole of society has evolved in contemporary Quebec. With regard to commercial exchange, Quebec is no longer content to exploit and to export its natural resources (hydroelectricity, minerals, timber). Its exports, which comprise products of high value added (in the domains of pharmacy, biotechnology, aeronautics, entertainment, new technologies, the service sector), are absorbed, above all, by its southern neighbor, but
QUEBEC
Quebec also exports throughout the world and to other Canadian provinces. With its economy, Quebec society has also opened up, while nevertheless conserving its specificity as a francophone North American society. Town planning and place-names reflect the intercultural character of Quebec: the international style of the towers at the city center, streets in a grid pattern, urban sprawl, and American architectural influences rub shoulders with a “château” style, British neoclassicism, or the Second Empire style of the towns. Place-names mix French sonorities (TroisRivières) with British (Thetford Mines) and indigenous terms (Quebec, Kanawakee). Montreal has its Chinese, Greek, Italian, and Jewish quarters and sees its cultural life moving to the rhythm of community festivals (Saint Patrick, the Quebec national day of Saint Jean-Baptiste, Canada Day, carnival, world music, and so on). The arts also reflect the varied cultural influences that continue to mix in Quebec. The nineteenth, and in particular the twentieth, centuries saw the development of a prolific body of Quebec literature, as is demonstrated by works by the Frenchman Louis Hémon, and of Gaston Miron, Anne Hébert, Michel Tremblay, Réjean Ducharme, and Gaétan Soucy. Montreal and Quebec City continue to attract authors who have found in Quebec a site of creation, among them the Haitian writer Dany Laferrière and the Acadian Antonine Maillet. Orality and Québécois storytellers have, for their own part, given rise to French-inspired folk music (Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, Robert Charlebois) but also to Anglo-Saxon music (Leonard Cohen). American-influenced pop music
963
took off in the 1980s and 1990s, most notably with Luc Plamondon’s Starmania, and in particular with the international star Céline Dion. Quebec cinema has acquired an international dimension, especially with the success of such films as Denys Arcand’s Les Invasions barbares/The Barbarian Invasions (2003). Contemporary Quebec has therefore changed. From a simple territory, or province, it became a “Quebec nation.” Its society opened up to the world on economic, political, cultural, and artistic levels, thus drawing the contours of a society that may be francophone but is also marked by a cultural diversity that always expresses itself. Christophe Traisnel See also: Acadia; Architecture; Basques; Brittany; Catholic Church; Champlain, Samuel de; Charlebois, Robert; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Dion, Céline; Ducharme, Réjean; Fishing; Hébert, Anne; Hémon, Louis; Hurons; Laferrière, Dany; Language; Leclerc, Félix; Maillet, Antonine; Mance, Jeanne; Manitoba; Métis; Miron, Gaston; Montreal; Music (Folk); Music (Pop); New Brunswick; New France; Newfoundland; Plamondon, Luc; Quebec Act; Quebec City; Riel, Louis; Saint Lawrence River; Saint-Malo; SaintPierre et Miquelon; Talon, Jean; Tremblay, Michel; Vermont; Vigneault, Gilles. References Dumont, Fernand. Genèse de la société québécoise. Quebec: Boréal [1993], 1996. Gagnon, Alain G., ed. Québec: Etat et société. Vol. 2. Montreal: Editions Québec Amérique, 2003. Lacoursière, Jacques, Jean Provencher, and Denis Vaugeois. Canada-Québec: 1534–2000. Quebec: Septentrion, 2001. Linteau, Paul-André, René Durocher, JeanClaude Robert, and François Ricard. Histoire du Québec contemporain. Vol. 1. Quebec: Boréal, 1989. ———. Histoire du Québec contemporain. Vol. 2. Quebec: Boréal, 1989.
964
QUEBEC ACT
QUEBEC ACT The Quebec Act, or An Act for Making More Effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec in North America, would later be described by the journalist Henri Bourassa as a “Charter for French Canadians.” The act, in effect, represented the recognition on the part of the British authorities, of the Canadian population, and of its rights and freedoms as “an old and great colony which has, for a long time, been populated and cultivated above all by French subjects.” The act itself, as well as its influence, cannot be understood without examining the context in which it was adopted by the British government in 1774. Following the conquest of the colony by the British in 1760, the appointed military governors (Burton at Trois-Rivières, Gage at Montreal, Murray at Quebec) sought to appease the large Canadian population, to the great dismay of the new Anglo-American colons who had hoped to draw more direct benefits from this new acquisition. The Treaty of Paris (1763) definitively sealed the fate of what was New France by handing it over to the British Crown. The Royal Proclamation adopted in October 1763 sought a temporary organization of the new “Province of Quebec” based on the interests of the new metropole. In other words, it sought to pursue objectives that were sometimes divergent: to satisfy the First Nations upon whom peace in the colony depended; to guarantee the rights of the Canadian population, which, at the time, was (over)estimated by the British authorities at 90,000 (to 600 British); and to favor colonization of the new acquisition by the British. The proclamation introduced absolute govern-
ment by the British and promised the rapid calling of an assembly similar to those in other British colonies in the Americas. The judicial system, based on the English model, was established in such a way as to allow for the application of French law while retaining the recognized supremacy of English law and the application of English criminal law. The borders of the new province of Quebec were limited to the valley of the Saint Lawrence River. New royal instructions soon aimed to submit all functionaries to the Test oath and thus led to the de facto exclusion of Catholics because it implied, on their part, the negation of papal authority and fundamental Catholic dogma. In practice, the application of this measure was avoided by successive governors because they wished, as far as possible, to appease a Canadian population whose loyalty, as much as its docility, was sought in the face of emerging protests in the colonies in the South. Conflicts emerged and Anglo-American traders submitted petitions to protest this moderation and to demand that the government of the province be reformed. There were two opposing schools of thought: that of the legal profession and of Governor Carleton, which was favorable to the Canadians and, in view of their numbers, sought to satisfy their aspirations by recognizing their laws and religion; and that of the traders and new colons, which was more intent on their assimilation, insisting on the illicit nature of the Catholic religion in Great Britain and on the necessity of reinforcing the British in relation to the Canadians by means of an effective colonization policy. With the Quebec Act, adopted by the British parliament on June 22, 1774, conciliation and moderation were the order of
QUEBEC ACT
965
Anti-Catholic print showing a British minister handing a copy of the Quebec Act to a kneeling bishop. (Library of Congress)
the day. British politicians were conscious of the advantage of ensuring the support of the Canadians in the face of protest and what was soon to become an American threat. The act was adopted and sanctioned by George III despite the shouts of “No Popery” by opponents of the project. This new constitution for the province of Quebec was almost a synthesis: revoking the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act nevertheless reproduced certain traits of the former, most notably in the organization of power and of administrative bodies (Section IV). It was also, in many regards, an act that reestablished Canadian customs and rights, in particular in
seigneurial domains, which had been sidelined between 1760 and 1774. The Canadians could once again enjoy “free exercise of the religion of the Church of Rome” but, it was stipulated, “subject to the King’s supremacy”: the Test oath was abolished and the oath of allegiance was formulated in terms acceptable to Catholics. The receipt of tithes by the clergy was once again allowed, and Catholics were officially granted free access to public duties. While maintaining the supremacy of English law, French civil laws, such as the Custom of Paris, were reintroduced, particularly in relation to laws of property and inheritance, but criminal laws remained English. The
966
QUEBEC, BATTLE
OF
actual organization of power structures remained the same: the governor still held the same absolute power over the colony, being accountable only to the Crown. He was, nevertheless, not assisted by an assembly, as the British traders had wished, but by a legislative council that, in 1775, had eight Canadian members. The legislative attributes of this council were nevertheless limited, and they were subject to the governor’s consent: the council “will have the power and authority to make Ordinances for the Peace, Welfare, and good Government, of the said Province, with the Consent of his Majesty’s Governor” (Section XII). Furthermore, borders were greatly expanded and corresponded to the old borders of the French colony. Besides the Saint Lawrence, vast territories were incorporated within the province of Quebec: the Labrador coast, the islands of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the territory of the Great Lakes as far as the Ohio valley, and the expanses of land as far as those belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Quebec Act was welcomed in different ways in different parts of North America. It satisfied the Canadians, their clergy, and the members of the “French Party.” On the other hand, it infuriated dissatisfied British traders, all the more so because they had not obtained the assembly they had hoped for; it also strengthened the discontent of the other American colonies, which were hostile to the concessions made to the Catholics and the extensions of territory that were granted in this way. The Quebec Act is not without consequence in what subsequently occurred. Shortly after it was adopted, revolts began in the American colonies. The Canadians did not give way in the face of American insurgences and remained neutral; they
were aided, it must be said, by the fact that the British mounted an orchestrated attack on the rebels with the support of the clergy, who called for Catholics to respect their oath of allegiance. This American revolt, which evolved into a revolution, led to the emigration of American Loyalists. They first sought refuge, and then settled in the thousands, in the provinces of Quebec (6,000 Loyalists settled there) and Nova Scotia; thus they strengthened protests against a policy of appeasement of Canadian interests, which had, nevertheless, been sanctioned by the Quebec Act. Indeed, the Loyalists quickly demanded the creation of a separate district within the province of Quebec and the application of French, rather than English, law. The Constitutional Act of 1791, which simply amended the Quebec Act, came into force on December 26. It sanctioned the division of the province of Quebec into Upper Canada and Lower Canada, and, along with a governor and a legislative council whose members were appointed for life, it gave these two provinces an elected assembly. Christophe Traisnel See also: Catholic Church; Montreal; New France; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Treaty of Paris. Reference Lacoursière, Jacques, Jean Provencher, and Denis Vaugeois. Canada-Québec. 1534–2000. Quebec: Septentrion, 2001.
QUEBEC, BATTLE
OF “I am like the public. I like peace much more than I like Canada, and I think France can be happy without Quebec.” This sentence, taken from a letter from Voltaire to Choiseul, French minister of
QUEBEC, BATTLE
the navy, in 1762, sums up France’s attitude toward its territories in Canada. The Battle of Quebec in 1759, a victory for some, a defeat for others, was a stage in the commercial and political war that had, for centuries, opposed two metropoles and two colonial systems on the European and world stages. It was also the final stage in a conflict of interests in the North American territories because it led France to abandon to Britain, once and for all, its main centers of colonization: the Saint Lawrence valley, the Great Lakes, the Atlantic islands, and the vast plains of Ohio. The Battle of Quebec itself, its results and its influence, cannot be understood without explaining how differently these events would affect Britain and France. The British had a clear understanding of the commercial and strategic interests, but France regarded its Canadian territories with a degree of detachment, unlike those who actually lived in Canada, such as Governor Vaudreuil. France’s ambitions were more European than colonial, its assets more continental than maritime. Consequently, in 1760, the small territory of thirteen colonies between the Atlantic and the Appalachians numbered 1,610,000 AngloAmerican colons compared to 70,000 Canadians. Furthermore, France occupied an immense area stretching from Louisiana to the Saint Lawrence valley; the expansion of the British colonies was thus threatened by a French presence that, except in Canada, lacked power and significant population numbers. Conflict was inevitable and recurrent between the French and the Anglo-Americans. As soon as the conflict resumed between France and Britain, the new British prime minister, William Pitt, made a priority of military operations against France in America.
OF
967
In 1756, after a period of relative calm, war was declared once more between Britain and France. France found itself having to face Prussia, which was allied with Britain in Europe and, at sea and in the colonies, Britain itself. In North America, the French troops responsible for defending French possessions were under the command of Governor Vaudreuil. His seconds in command were the French officers the Marquis de Montcalm, the duc de Lévis, and François-Charles de Bourlamaque. On the British side, Loudoun was held responsible for the initial defeats and was soon replaced by General James Abercromby, assisted by Wolfe and General Jeffrey Amherst, who soon replaced Abercromby as general in chief of the British forces. The balance of power was unequal. Determined to win the war in America, the British, whose numbers and the economic strength of their colonies worked in their favor, quickly sent military reinforcements, thus exceeding the number of French troops. In all, Britain had about 33,000 men, to France’s 6,800, assisted by a few thousand local militia and native fighters. The conflict in America began well for the French; they successfully raided border villages, Vaudreuil took the forts at Oswego and William-Henry, and Montcalm had a victory at Carillon in July 1758. But these successes had little effect on what was to follow. The Franco-Canadians suffered food shortages and faced the sheer numbers of Anglo-American troops as well as the British determination for a straightforward conquest of Canada. The French objective soon became simply the maintenance of a French presence in Quebec and Montreal, even a reduced presence, so that they would be able to negotiate the
968
QUEBEC, BATTLE
OF
reestablishment of French possessions when a peace treaty came to the table. In July 1758, Louisbourg was taken; this opened the Saint Lawrence to the British navy. In the Great Lakes region and Ohio, the forts were conquered or destroyed. The net tightened around the Saint Lawrence valley when the Niagara, Carillon, and Saint-Frédéric forts were taken. While Amherst was near Lake Champlain, laying siege to the French troops at l’Isle-auxNoix, Admiral Charles Saunders led an important fleet of 8,500 soldiers, under the command of James Wolfe, to Quebec and settled downstream from Quebec City at the end of July 1759. Only 2,500 soldiers, helped by militia members, were able to defend Quebec City and its weakened fortifications against these troops. The French troops spread downstream from the cliffs, which were thought to be a natural defense. Montcalm, in charge of the operation, occupied the center, Lévis took up position close to the Montmorency River, and Vaudreuil held the right half of the city. Wolfe took up position on the other side of the Montmorency. Another British garrison occupied the town of Orléans, opposite Quebec City, and British cannons were set up on the opposite bank of the Saint Lawrence, which the French forces had neglected. Quebec City was now close enough to reach with cannon fire. Although the British guns quickly destroyed part of the city, the various attempted disembarkations led to heavy losses and were fruitless. The French objective was to wait for winter and thus to force the British to abandon their siege. Wolfe also undertook the methodical destruction of the villages along the Saint Lawrence, downstream from Quebec City.
In September, Wolfe impatiently decided to try one more encroachment, but this time on the other side of the city, thanks to the discovery of a passage that enabled the British forces to occupy the plains overlooking the city. On September 12, a cunning plan allowed the British to trick the vigilant French: first a movement of shipping and then a round of cannon fire held their attention; then, at four in the morning, almost 5,000 British soldiers went ashore to occupy the Plains of Abraham. Rather than wait for the reinforcements that had been planned under General Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Montcalm engaged his 3,500 men and attacked the British forces at 9:30 in the morning. The regular French forces were assisted by militia members badly arranged on the battlefield and ill-prepared for Europeanstyle battles. The seasoned British army withstood the onslaught and took great numbers of French casualties through sustained attack. Montcalm’s troops were routed and defeated in thirty minutes. Wolfe and Montcalm were both fatally wounded. Entrenched in Quebec City, and despite the arrival of Bougainville’s reinforcements, Claude-Roch de Ramezay, who was by then in charge of operations in Quebec, decided to surrender the city on September 15. Quebec fell. Lévis, nevertheless, continued to fight while he waited for French reinforcements: it was then the French who laid siege to Quebec City after a failed British mission, led by the new commander, James Murray, on April 28, 1760. The French reinforcements Lévis had wanted failed to materialize. The French eventually abandoned their siege and instead defended Montreal, which was under threat.
QUEBEC CITY
Soon, Montreal was under siege from 18,000 men, and it, in turn, fell. The loss of Quebec City and Montreal meant that New France in its entirety had been conquered. This military conquest was expressed in diplomatic and political terms through the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ceded Canada to Britain. As far as popular history is concerned, it quickly transformed the Battle of Quebec into a legend in the Canadian collective imagination, problematic insofar as it poses the question of how the same battle can be regarded as a victory by some and a defeat by others. The Plains of Abraham monument in the heart of Quebec City invokes memories that reflect the ambiguity surrounding the commemoration of the Battle of Quebec. Christophe Traisnel See also: Lake Champlain; Lévis, François Gaston de, Duc; Louisbourg; Louisiana; Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de MontcalmGrozon, Marquis de; Montreal; New France; Ohio; Quebec City; Saint Lawrence River; Treaty of Paris; Voltaire, François. References Lacoursière, Jacques, Jean Provencher, and Denis Vaugeois. Canada-Québec. 1534–2000. Quebec: Septentrion, 2001. Mathieu, Jacques, and Eugène Kedle. Les Plaines d’Abraham. Quebec: Septentrion, 1993. Stacey, C. P, and Donald E. Graves. Quebec, 1759: The Siege and the Battle. Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 2002.
QUEBEC CITY When the first French explorers entered the Gulf of Saint Lawrence seeking a passage toward the West, they soon encountered a place where navigation was made more difficult by the currents and the nar-
969
rowing of the channel. Because the site was dominated by a promontory from which the approach could be seen, Jacques Cartier in 1535 chose to spend winter here, near the Amerindian village of Stadacona. Abandoned by the French and later by the Amerindians, the site was not reoccupied until 1608, when the French, led by Samuel de Champlain and sponsored by Pierre Dugua de Mons, set up a permanent trading post and named it “Quebec” (“where the river narrows” in Algonquin). The post had a difficult time dealing with attacks from the English colonies in America (it was occupied by the Kirke brothers in 1627) and from the Iroquois. In 1663, the administrative institutions of a French province were created (governor, intendant general, and sovereign council); they helped to consolidate the tiny colony and make it the capital of the vast French empire that was being created in North America. All summer, great sailing ships arrived; they brought instructions from the king as well as funds, people, and goods for running the colony. The ships returned to France carrying furs, letters, passengers, and government reports. For nearly a century until the British conquest of 1759, Quebec City remained a small port town with an administrative and institutional apparatus. There were only 5,000 or 6,000 inhabitants in a colony of some 60,000 French settlers, all of whom were in the process of acquiring a “Canadian” identity. The urban core consisted of a narrow strip of land along the Saint Lawrence and its tributary, the Saint Charles, and also the high promontory that was soon fortified in the hope of resisting a British attack. But the fortifications were to no avail; in 1759, the French and Canadian forces under General Montcalm were
970
QUEBEC CITY
The wharf at the city of Quebec with a ship at dock and men working in small boats, 1770s. (Library of Congress)
unable to forestall a British amphibious landing and a military defeat on the Plains of Abraham. Abandoned by France, the colony came officially under British rule in 1763, Quebec City remaining its capital. The aftermath of the conquest was marked by the departure of the French administration and military, the return to the countryside of part of the Canadian population, and the arrival of British administrators, troops, and businessmen to run the colony and city. Under military rule in a dangerous period due to the War of Independence in the American colonies, the city saw its sphere of influence drastically reduced to the area north of the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence, whereas before the 1774 Quebec Act it had extended to the Mississippi valley and the Rocky Mountains. During the winter of 1775– 1776, the city suffered siege by an Ameri-
can army under General Richard Montgomery, but its failure ensured that Quebec remained under British rule. The threat of a renewed American assault lasted until the 1860s and explains the huge investment gradually made by the British military in the fortifications and citadel that still overlook the city. The creation of a Legislative Assembly in 1792 marked the beginning of a new parliamentary constitution open to the elites of a still strong francophone majority and a British minority that sought to control it. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Quebec City took advantage of its geographical position and became the center of the timber trade with Britain, a situation impelled by Napoléon’s continental blockade in 1807 and later sustained by favorable tariffs. A British business community grew there and organized this trade for
QUEBEC CITY
importers in Britain, financing tree felling in the Saint Lawrence and Great Lakes basin, the flotation of logs downstream to the port of Quebec City, and a shipbuilding industry to transport the timber to British ports. This same community took charge of the import-export of goods and made the city an entry port to the interior of the continent, receiving large numbers of British immigrants who came to settle in the rest of Canada or the American Midwest. Some of these arrivals settled in Quebec City and went to work on the docks; by the middle of the nineteenth century, the city’s population of British origin amounted to 40 percent of the total, half of whom were Irish Catholics. The city’s culture was thus changed, and the anglicization process was accompanied by attempts to assimilate culturally and control politically the francophone community through institutions designed for this purpose; thus a paralysis set in, culminating in the troubles of 1837–1838 and a new political regime with the union of Lower and Upper Canada in 1840. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the city’s economy suffered from the marked decline of the timber trade; the recession was caused by the loss of favorable tariffs between 1840 and 1860, problems of supply, and no significant new industry to take the place of timber. The city’s population remained stagnant until the beginning of the twentieth century, the anglophone portion aging or leaving for jobs in Montreal and other parts of Canada. The character of Quebec City thus became increasingly French, francophones constituting 90 percent of the total population in the 1920s. The turn of the century had seen a strong industrialization of the city, notably in shoe manufacturing. After its status as a
971
provincial capital was established in 1867, there was an expansion of its governmental institutions; as a result, the city’s industries, businesses, and services had not only kept the established francophone population in the city, they had also attracted an influx of country dwellers. Before the 1850s, relations with France were few and far between, but the abolition of the Navigation Acts in 1849 allowed French ships to dock in the port of Quebec City. The visit of La Capricieuse in 1855 signaled this French return, which was followed in the 1880s by the visit of Quebec political leaders to France, the appointment of a Quebec agent général (Hector Fabre) to Paris in 1882, and the arrival in Quebec City of many religious communities expelled from France at the beginning of the twentieth century by the secularization of education and social services. Contacts with intellectual and academic milieus in Europe continued and expanded further from the 1960s onward. Although Quebec City has historically benefited from the transatlantic economy, it now suffers from a growing distance from continental Canadian-American exchanges, and this tends to limit its economic development to a regional dimension. This decline is especially advantageous to southern Quebec and Ontario. On the other hand, the city feels less pressure from anglophone North American culture; because its architectural and cultural heritage emphasizes its French character and status as heir to the French presence in America it attracts tourists worldwide to a remarkably well-preserved Old Town. In 1985, Quebec City was put on UNESCO’s World Heritage list, and it remains the homeland of French North America. Marc Vallières
972
QUIET REVOLUTION See also: Cartier, Jacques; Champlain, Samuel de; Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de MontcalmGrozon, Marquis de; Montreal; Quebec; Quebec, Battle of; Saint Lawrence River; Timber. References Geronimi, Martine. Québec et la NouvelleOrléans: Paysages imaginaires français en Amérique du Nord. Paris: Belin, 2003. Hare, John, Marc Lafrance, and David-Thiery Ruddel. Histoire de la ville de Québec, 1608–1871. Montreal: Boréal/Musée canadien des civilisations, 1987. Ruddel, David-Thiery. Québec City 1765–1832: The Evolution of a Colonial Town. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1987.
QUIET REVOLUTION The Quiet Revolution is the period of the 1960s during which the province of Quebec was the site of upheaval. At the institutional level, the Quebec state doubled in volume and anchored Quebec firmly within modernity. At a social level, upheaval came through the cultural, religious, political, and economic transformation of a French Canadian society that had until then been linguistically and religiously inward looking; indeed, in a decade or so, there was a profound transformation to what is now referred to as Quebec society. Despite the industrialization and urbanization of a changing society, the National Union government, under the leadership of Maurice Duplessis from 1944 onward, persisted in defending a conservative and ultramontane vision, aided by the moral and political authority exercised on French Canadians by the Catholic Church in the “grande noirceur” (the great darkness). The sluggishness of Duplessist society and the development of new ideas from Europe and America in the postwar period
led the population to abandon the National Union Party in favor of Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party, which won the 1960 elections under the slogan “C’est le temps que ça change” (It’s time for a change). And things did, indeed, change, first at the governmental level with the adoption of innovative public policies: free hospital insurance in 1961, nationalization of the electricity supply and the creation of Hydro-Québec, the creation of a ministry for education in 1964, the development of Quebec diplomatic relations with France and other francophone countries, the modernization of the electoral code, and the creation of financial institutions such as the Société générale de financement and the Caisse des dépôts et placements du Québec (1965), which enabled the Quebec state to transfer economic power, dominated by the Anglo-Montreal bourgeoisie, to the francophone majority under the Liberal slogan “Maîtres chez nous”/Masters of our own home. The changes were not only economic or institutional; they were also cultural, political, and social: society suddenly became secular and a French Canadian elite emerged, notably thanks to the important development of the civil service and the public encouragement of small and medium businesses. The suppression of the ecclesiastic and Duplessist millstone encouraged the career of figures such as Pierre Trudeau, an example of a Quebec society in total transformation and open to international intellectual influences. This transformation was to have profound political consequences for Quebec through the opposition of three major political currents. First, those in favor of an end to the reforms led by Jean Lesage; then
QUIET REVOLUTION
those led by René Lévesque, who fought for the continuation of the process of autonomization for Quebec to the point of demanding Quebec’s sovereignty; and those in favor of going beyond Quebec “tribalism,” to be accomplished through a pan-Canadian nationalism and represented by the “three Liberal doves,” Pierre Trudeau, Jean Marchand, and Gérard Pelletier, who favored the larger political space of Canada to that of Quebec. The Quiet Revolution ended in 1966 with the return to power of the National Union Party as well as the start of a new political era in Quebec marked by the national question and issues of sovereignty. The Quiet Revolution holds a special place in the collective memory of Quebec: for Quebec in general, the Quiet Revolution is the time when a collective identity blossomed. For Liberals, it is, above all, the affirmation of the Que-
973
bec state; for sovereignists, it represents a period of affirmation for a people and a new nation, the nation of Quebec. Christophe Traisnel See also: Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet; Hydro-Québec; Lévesque, René; Quebec; Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. References Bourque, Gilles, Jules Duchastel, and Jacques Beauchemin. La Société libérale duplessiste. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994. Ferretti, Lucia. “Dossier: la Révolution tranquille.” L’Action nationale, vol. 89, no. 10 (December 1999), http://www .action-nationale.qc.ca/00-1/ dossier-ferretti.html (cited Feburary 10, 2004). Gagnon, Alain G., and Mary Beth Montcalm. Quebec: Beyond the Quiet Revolution. Scarborough, ON: Nelson Canada, 1990. Thomson, Dale C. Jean Lesage et la Révolution tranquille. Saint-Laurent, QC: Editions du Tré-Carré, 1984.
R RADISSON, PIERRE-ESPRIT (CA. 1636–1710) A French voyageur, or fur trader, Radisson developed a lucrative fur-trading business with the Indians of the Saint Lawrence valley and the Great Lakes region. In his youth, he was captured by the Iroquois twice and escaped both times. With his knowledge of Native American customs and languages, Radisson worked for the French civil authorities and Jesuit missionaries as a guide and translator. He eventually found a partner in the fur trade with the older Médard Chouart, sieur des Groseilliers. Radisson and Groseilliers later abandoned the French and sought English investors to help finance the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1660s. He spent much of his life traveling between Canada, New England, France, and England, where he died in 1710. Although the exact date of his birth is unknown, Radisson was probably born in Paris around 1636 and migrated to New France in 1651, where he settled at TroisRivières. Shortly thereafter, he was captured by the Iroquois, who lived to the south of the Saint Lawrence. Radisson was ritually adopted into the tribe, but later killed his captors and escaped. He was captured a second time, subjected to torture,
and adopted again. In 1654, he escaped his second captivity and found protection at the Dutch post at Fort Orange, modernday Albany. During the winter of 1657– 1658, he traveled with the Jesuit Father Paul Ragueneau to an Onondaga village, but left the area after rumors surfaced that the Iroquois might be planning to kill the Frenchmen. In 1659, he solidified his partnership with Groseilliers and they began constructing an extensive fur-trading business with the Indians in the Great Lakes region. Plagued by a lack of French support for their trading ventures, Groseilliers and Radisson sought English support for their most ambitious plan: the establishment of fur-trading posts in the Hudson Bay region. To attract supporters, the pair went to Boston and then to London, where Radisson met his future wife, Mary Kirke. During his trip to England, he wrote four of a total of six narratives, through which historians know much of his story. After securing investors for the Hudson’s Bay Company, Radisson returned to Canada to establish connections with the Cree Indians living in the bay area. Through the 1670s, Radisson and Groseilliers worked on behalf of the company that they helped found, but later returned to New France,
975
976
RAY, MAN
where they received surprisingly little criticism for working with the English. In 1684, Radisson returned to work for the company in England and stayed there in various capacities for the next few years. He died in England in 1710, by which time he had long retired from the fur-trading business. Thomas J. Lappas See also: Fur trade; Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des; Jesuits; New France; Saint Lawrence River. References Fournier, Martin. Pierre-Esprit Radisson, 1636–1710. Trans. Mary E. Brennan. Sillery: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Trigger, Bruce. Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986.
RAY, MAN (EMMANUEL RADNITSKY) (1897–1976) American-born photographer, painter, and filmmaker who became one of the most prominent figures of the Parisian avantgarde during the 1920s and 1930s. Radnitsky was born in Philadelphia in 1897, and his family settled in Brooklyn (New York) in 1897, where he attended his first drawing classes from 1904 to 1910. During this period, he met Alfred Stieglitz. In 1913, he visited the Armory Show, the first important exhibition of European avant-garde art in the United States, and discovered the works of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Pablo Picasso. The following year, he adopted his pen name, Man Ray, married the poet Adon Lacroix, and bought a photo camera so that he could record his paintings. In 1915, he had his first personal exhibition at the Daniel Gallery (New York) and met Duchamp,
with whom he took part in New York’s dada movement. He painted The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows in 1916, a work that he withdrew from the New York Salon of Independent Artists a year later, when Duchamp’s provocative “ready-made” urinal, titled Fountain, was turned down by the organizers. He began experimenting with the “cliché-verre” technique and created a series of collages, which he published in 1926 (i.e., Revolving Doors). In 1920, he started working with Duchamp on the Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) installations, which attempted to capture the impression of three dimensionality through rotary movement and which went on to inspire Duchamp’s dada film, Anémic cinéma (1926), produced in collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret. In 1921, Man Ray arrived in Paris and met André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard, future members of the surrealist movement. The same year he started a relationship with Kiki de Montparnasse, who was to become the model for some of his best-known photographs (e.g., Le Violon d’Ingres, Noire et blanche). For his first exhibition in France, in 1921, Man Ray presented, among other works, his painting titled Admiration of the Orchestrelle for the Cinematograph and the object Cadeau (an iron with nails glued to the bottom), which he created with Erik Satie. In 1923, he produced a short dada film titled Le Retour à la raison, for Tristan Tzara’s Soirée du Coeur à barbe. Some of his earlier experiments with cameraless photography (i.e., his “rayographs”) became at this stage incorporated into his cinematic work. Another two short productions, Emak Bakia (1926) and L’Etoile de mer (1928), established Man Ray’s reputation as an avant-garde filmmaker and marked his long-lasting associa-
RAY, MAN
977
Man Ray, American-born photographer, painter, and filmmaker who became one of the most prominent figures of the Parisian avant-garde during the 1920s and 1930s. (Library of Congress)
tion with the surrealist movement. The film that Man Ray completed in 1929, Les Mystères du château du dé, was financed by the Viscount de Noailles and was jointly released with Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien andalou. During the 1930s, Man Ray’s photographs and drawings accompanied two books of poems by Paul Eluard: Facile (1935) and Mains libres (1937), respectively. In 1937, he published La Photographie n’est pas l’art, which included twelve photographs and an introductory text by Breton. Back in the United States, from 1940 to 1951, Man Ray settled in New York, then in Hollywood, where he met his second wife, Juliet Browner. In 1944, he contributed to Hans Richter’s
film, Dreams That Money Can Buy (released in 1947). Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951, where he painted and experimented with color photography until his death in 1976. Ramona Fotiade See also: Avant-Gardes; Breton, André; Cinema, 1895–1945; Duchamp, Marcel; Painting; Photography; Sculpture; Surrealism; World War II. References Kovacs, Steven. From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema. London/Toronto: Associated University Press, 1980. Lottman, Herbert R. Man Ray’s Montparnasse. New York: Abrams, 2001. Ray, Man. Selfportrait. London/Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1963.
978
RAYNAL, GUILLAUME-THOMAS-FRANÇOIS
RAYNAL, GUILLAUMETHOMAS-FRANÇOIS (1713–1796) Born April 12, 1713, at Saint-Geniez in Rouergue, Raynal received a Jesuit education at Pézenas. In 1747 he moved to Paris; there, he served in the parish of SaintSulpice, but was soon dismissed from his post. By composing a gazette à la main, the Nouvelles littéraires, and quickly cobbling together a series of commissioned works, Raynal earned a name as an efficient editor. This work paid off in the form of a coveted sinecure. In 1750, Raynal became an editor of France’s oldest literary review, the Mercure de France. Until his departure from the journal in 1755, the Mercure functioned as a platform for Enlightenment views. Connections with elite Parisian intellectual circles also afforded Raynal an important social role in the Enlightenment. Once established, he was able to introduce neophytes such as Jean-BaptisteAntoine Suard and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to prospective employers and the most important salons. Collaboration was crucial to Raynal’s greatest achievement as an editor and author. It was Raynal, after all, who shepherded into print one of the eighteenth century’s most influential collective efforts, the massive Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, a philosophical and political history of the settlements and trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. Printed in three “authorized” versions edited by Raynal (1770, 1774, and 1780), the Histoire des deux Indes was the work of a score of authors, among them Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Charles Pinot-Duclos, and the baron d’Holbach.
Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal. In 1750 Raynal became an editor of France’s oldest literary review, the Mercure de France. Until Raynal’s departure from the journal in 1755, the Mercure functioned as a mouthpiece for enlightenment views. (Library of Congress)
The Histoire des deux Indes attempted a comprehensive history of the contemporary European colonial enterprise in the Far East and the Atlantic world. Beginning with the fifteenth-century Portuguese explorations and culminating with a sweeping analysis of all colonial powers in the eighteenth century, the Histoire laid bare the progress of conquest for each European nation and its trading companies. Often this “progress” translated into the abuses made possible by the disproportionate use of force and state-sponsored trading monopolies. No colonial power was spared
REEVES, HUBERT
scathing criticism for its participation in the slavery, rapine, and general exploitation of non-Europeans. What made the Histoire des deux Indes controversial, however, was not its repetition of gruesome slaughter halfway across the world or its dry analysis of government statistics, but rather its “philosophical” attacks on the clergy, the privileged, and even European sovereigns. Diderot contributed the most strident sections of the second and third editions; indeed, he worried over the ever-growing length of the manuscript and the numerous polemical digressions that Raynal encouraged. Only with the third edition of 1780 did Raynal take credit for the project, and for this he suffered persecution and temporary exile from France between 1780 and 1784. In 1790, he was permitted to return to Paris. The closing years of Raynal’s life saw his eclipse in important intellectual and political circles. A witness to the early revolution, and by 1791 a critic of it, he survived the Terror because he was thought by then to be feeble-minded. He died on March 6, 1796, during the first phase of the Directory. The Histoire des deux Indes found a ready audience until 1793, and for a brief period it was revived in the 1820s. Sean C. Goodlett See also: Catholic Church; French Revolution; Jesuits. References Bancarel, Gilles, and François-Paul Rossi. Guillaume-Thomas Raynal: philosophe des Lumières. Toulouse: CRDP Midi-Pyrénées, 1996. Bancarel, Gilles, and Gianluigi Goggi, eds. Raynal, de la polémique à l’histoire. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000. Wolpe, Hans. Raynal et sa machine de guerre: l’ Histoire des deux Indes et ses perfectionnements. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.
979
REEVES, HUBERT (1932–) Born in Montreal, Hubert Reeves resides in France, where he has been a director of research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (French National Scientific Research Institute) since 1965. Reeves, whose specialty is nuclear astrophysics, is an expert on the origin of the light elements, such as helium, deuterium, and lithium. He is also a well-known popularizer of science and has authored many books that are best-sellers in France, including Atoms of Silence (1985) and The Hour of Our Delight (1990). Reeves attended Jesuit schools and received his baccalaureate in 1950. He earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Montreal in 1953; he went on to earn a master’s degree in science studies at McGill University, where he presented a dissertation titled Formation of Positronium in Hydrogen and Helium (1955). He continued his studies in nuclear astrophysics at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), where he obtained his PhD (1960) after presenting a dissertation titled Thermonuclear Reaction Involving Medium Light Nuclei. From 1960 to 1964, he taught physics at the University of Montreal and acted as a scientific counselor for NASA. Reeves was visiting professor at the University of Brussels in 1964–1965. In 1966, he was appointed director of research at the French National Scientific Research Institute at the Atomic Energy Commission’s site in Sarclay, France, while keeping his position as associate professor at the University of Montreal. In addition to books, Reeves publishes numerous essays, both alone and in collaboration with others, in such scientific journals as the Bulletin of American Physics, Astronomical Journal, Institute for Space Studies, Planetary and Space Physics, Physics
980
REICHENBACH, FRANÇOIS
Review, Publications de l’institut interuniversitaire de sciences nucléaires de Belgique, and the Journal de physique et de radium, Ecole de physique théorique des Houches. He also adapts his work to broader, more general audiences, and this appears in mainstream magazines and other types of publications such as the Larousse Dictionary, Ciel et Espace, Art Press, and La Recherche. He has also participated in documentary and educational films that are widely distributed by the French-speaking media around the world, including the French TV program on astronomy, La Nuit des étoiles. He appears as a scientist and father figure in Québécois director Jacques Leduc’s Trois Pommes à côté du sommeil (1988). Reeves is also highly regarded for his environmental work. Much of his writing has explored ecological issues, and he has been a principal player in numerous international conferences on the subject. He is a distinguished member of several prominent environmental associations and councils, including the Conseil pour les Droits des Générations Futures/Council for the Rights of Future Generations. A Knight of the Order of Merit (France, 1976), Reeves has also received the prestigious Prix de la Fonction de France (1982) and was named honorary professor at the University of Montreal (1983). He received the Légion d’honneur (1984) and has been an Officer of the Order of Canada since 1991. Claudia Wolosin See also: Space Technology. References Delsemme, A. H., et al. Pour Comprendre l’Univers. Paris: Flammarion, 1993. Stora, Martine. A propos du XXIe siècle: entretiens [avec] Andrée Chedid, Hubert Reeves, Daniel Sibony, Jacques Testart, Paul Virilio. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994.
REICHENBACH, FRANÇOIS (1922–1993) Film director François Reichenbach was born in Paris and raised in France, but he studied music in Switzerland. From the mid-1950s, he lived for many years in the United States, where he made many short documentaries in French: Impressions de New York (1955), New York ballade (1955), Houston, Texas (1956), Carnaval à la Nouvelle Orléans (1957), Les Marines (1957), L’Américain se détend (“The American Relaxes,” 1957), Au Pays de Porgy and Bess (1957). His first and most important feature film, L’Amérique insolite/America the Strange (1960), is a documentary showing the aspects of the American way of life that were bound to fascinate a young Frenchman who had lived through World War II. We see at the beginning of the film a group of horse-riding cowboys and old wagons, but as the film progresses, we learn that this epic reconstitution was made by urban white collars who had dressed up for the weekend and rented old equipment from an antique shop in a western state. We also see a publicity session on a Californian beach and prisoners competing in a rodeo. A constant traveler, Reichenbach returned to France in 1960, but went back to the United States to do Retour à New York (1962) and L’Amérique lunaire (1962). In addition to films about the United States, Reichenbach also directed many documentaries about Paris (and even one film about Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris). He also filmed the famous promotion tour made by Brigitte Bardot in the United States, B.B. in USA (1966), and a video for Serge Gainsbourg, “Bonnie and Clyde” (1968).
REINHARDT, DJANGO
Reichenbach also worked in French television as well as in Mexico (Mexico, Mexico, in 1967; México mágico, in 1979), Japan (Le Japon de François Reichenbach, in 1983), and Germany. He worked twice with the legendary U.S. director Orson Welles to codirect an international project titled F for Fake (known in France as Vérités et mensonges, 1975). Part of this film essay about falsification in the art market was shot in France and starred Welles himself; we also see Reichenbach briefly, behind the camera, when the film crew is shown at a Parisian train station. In 1968, Reichenbach won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for the biographical documentary that he codirected, titled Portrait d’Orson Welles (1968). Among his other documentaries about the United States are La Sixième face du pentagone/The Sixth Face of the Pentagon (1968), codirected with Chris Marker; a kinky film about sex shops titled Sex O’Clock USA (1976); and Houston, Texas (1980), a provocative film about the death penalty. Although he worked for many years in the United States, Reichenbach was known and recognized only in France. Many French spectators discovered America through the lenses of François Reichenbach. Yves Laberge
See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Chirac, Jacques; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Gainsbourg, Serge; Marker, Chris; Westerns; World War II. References Gauthier, Guy, Philippe Pilard, and Simone Suchet. Le Documentaire passe au direct. Montreal: vlb éditeur, 2003. Passek, Jean-Loup, ed. Dictionnaire du cinéma. Paris: Larousse, 1998.
981
REINHARDT, DJANGO (1910–1953) The guitarist, composer, and painter Jean Baptiste (“Django”) Reinhardt was a gypsy born in 1910—in a caravan traveling Belgium. His mother was a woman called “Négros,” his father a circus clown. When World War I ended in 1918, Reinhardt was playing music in Paris and its banlieue, where he lived, near Choisy. Reinhardt typically played something known as musette, cheerful tunes for the working classes. A record by Louis Armstrong, Dallas Blues, attracted him to jazz, which he adored in part for its improvisational play. His discovery coincided with an accident. In a 1928 fire, Reinhardt lost the use of two fingers and a thumb, each on the chord hand, and he was forced to learn a new and unprecedented way of manipulating the strings of his instrument. This he did with such panache that, by 1934, with the violinist Stéphane Grappelli, he led the Hot Club of France, an all-string quintet (no horns, piano, or drums!), that included the guitarist Roger Chaput and the bassist Louis Vola and specialized in a spry yet plaintive brand of swing. Giving and taking from each other as if by telepathy, the group became a hit not only on the rue Chaptal but also across a Europe seeking respite in entertainment from violence and the Depression. Reinhardt’s brother, Joseph, played second rhythm guitar, and the group’s fame, initially on the label Ultraphone, was such that Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins, among other wellknown musicians, joined them on gigs. Indeed, before his death from a brain hemorrhage in 1953, Reinhardt also developed a following in the United States, from where many, though not all, of his influences came (they also included the sound
982
REMAKES
of castanets and the textured, composite rhythms of Spain and India). In 1946, Reinhardt, who came to abhor amplification, toured the country with Duke Ellington and his band. A photograph from this tour shot in New York City, possibly at Carnegie Hall, shows him enjoying a card game with Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, and others. Above these players hangs a “smoking prohibited” sign, but they pay no heed. There was, to be sure, something of a rebel in Reinhardt, who left a mark of worldliness on the music of everyone from Charlie Christian to Jim Hall and Les Paul. A bizarre but explicable chapter in Reinhardt’s life is World War II, which he spent in Paris plying his trade. In 1940–1944, the French capital was occupied by Germany; yet, on one level, like the artist Jean Cocteau, Reinhardt seems not to have cared: alone or in a group, he plucked away in his virtuoso style before audiences French and German, soldiers and civilians, caring only for his sublime note accents and cascading rolls. On another level, however, he did care: Reinhardt never performed before flags of the swastika and refused an invitation in 1943 on the part of the Third Reich to tour its army bases; instead, he tried to escape to Switzerland. While in flight, he was captured, but by a fan. His punishment was a return to the “City of Light.” The Holocaust did not consume him, despite the “black” music he played and his Zigeuner origin. Johan Åhr See also: Cocteau, Jean; Grappelli, Stéphane; Jazz; World War II. References Balen, Noël. Django Reinhardt: Le génie vagabond. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2003. Delaunay, Charles. Django Reinhardt. Trans. Michael James. New York: Da Capo, 1981.
REMAKES The remake in all its forms has long been a staple feature of cinematic production. Several early silent features found themselves subject to remaking, and with the advent of sound technology in the late 1920s, the reproduction of silent movies as “talkies” became commonplace. As the industry adjusted to this new technology and the problems of language and international distribution it provoked, an initial response was the production of multilanguage versions, themselves a form of remake. The central force in the remake process has, however, long been Hollywood, and the most prominent sources for this particular form of reproduction are earlier Hollywood movies and French cinema. The remaking of French cinema has proved particularly attractive to American producers over the years. Between 1930 and 1950, around twenty French films were remade in the United States; since 1950, the practice has grown apace with more than forty films finding themselves subject to Hollywood’s reinterpretation. There are various reasons for the increase in remakes at these particular times. The specific industrial infrastructures in Hollywood (an industry dominated by a small number of powerful concerns and increases in film production and/or marketing leading to a need to limit risk) and in France (a much less organized industry, yet with a relatively buoyant production capacity supported by various forms of subsidy and quota) are key to understanding the rise and fall of the remake since the origins of sound cinema. Although the remake plays a useful role in Hollywood production strategies, it has typically met with much less enthusiasm on the part of French commentators. The “vampirization” of French cinema is repeat-
REMAKES
983
French actors André Dussollier, Michel Boujenah, and Roland Giraud star in the 1985 French film Trois Hommes et un couffin by French director Coline Serreau. The film was made into a popular American adaptation titled Three Men and a Baby. (Richard Melloul/Corbis Sygma)
edly held up as evidence of American cultural imperialism and the ever more urgent need to protect French “art” from the debased Hollywood behemoth. Without a doubt, the remake is to a large degree symptomatic of a global film industry dominated by Hollywood in which the international distribution and exhibition of non-Englishlanguage products is severely curtailed. However, to see this as a struggle between “art” on the one hand and “commerce” on the other is disingenuous. Some of those films remade in Hollywood are indeed the “classics” of French cinema (Pépé le Moko, Julien Duvivier, 1937; Algiers, John Cromwell, 1938; Casbah, John Berry, 1948; Le Jour se lève, Marcel Carné, 1939; The Long Night, Anatole Litvak, 1947; Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1954;
Diabolique, Jeremiah Chechik, 1996), but for the most part, the films selected for reproduction are themselves lighthearted popular movies, usually comedies. One of the most successful remake pairs is Trois Hommes et un couffin (Coline Serreau, 1985) and Three Men and a Baby (Leonard Nimoy, 1987). Serreau’s film was a huge box-office hit in France, and Nimoy’s remake made vast profits in movie theaters around the world; the pair are often described as the catalyst for the remakes that followed. Despite similarities of narrative and plot, the films are significantly different. The melancholic tone of the French comedy was transformed by Nimoy into an upbeat, fast-paced, rather brash affair. Nevertheless, Serreau’s film is very far from the art-house experimentation the art/
984
RENO, JEAN
popular division seems to suggest. The many remakes following this successful pair, including True Lies, James Cameron, 1994/La Totale, Claude Zidi, 1991, and The Birdcage, Mike Nichols, 1996/La Cage aux folles, Edouard Molinaro, 1978, suggest that this transformation of a French popular comedy into a different yet not entirely dissimilar Hollywood genre is typical of the remakes of the last twenty years. Lucy Mazdon See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Duvivier, Julien. References Durham, Carolyn A. Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their American Remakes. Hanover/London: University of New England Press, 1998. Forrest, Jennifer, and Leonard Koos, eds. Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. New York: SUNY Press, 2002. Horton, Andrew, and Stuart McDougal, eds. Play It Again Sam: Retakes on Remakes. California: University of California Press, 1998. Mazdon, Lucy. Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema. London: BFI, 2000.
RENO, JEAN (1948–) Moroccan-born French film actor. Reno began his acting career with small roles in such films as L’Hypothèse du tableau volé/The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Ruiz, 1979), Clair de femme/ Womanlight (Costa-Gavras, 1979), and Voulez-vous un bébé Nobel? (Pouret, 1980). His onscreen collaboration with director Luc Besson throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (Le Dernier Combat, 1983; Subway, 1985, with Isabelle Adjani and Christophe Lambert; Le Grand Bleu, 1988; and Nikita, 1990) made him a familiar face in French cinemas.
Reno began to make his mark in the United States with his starring role as a hired killer in Besson’s 1994 Léon, an English-language Franco-American coproduction. The film made more than $5 million during its opening weekend. Since then, Reno has starred in a series of American productions alongside some of the biggest Hollywood stars; along the way, he has carved out a niche for himself as a brooding action hero with a heart. In 1996, he starred as Krieger in the big-budget action picture Mission: Impossible (De Palma) with Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, and Emmanuelle Béart. His role as Philippe Roaché in Godzilla (Emmerich, 1998) saw Reno playing a French secret agent who helps Matthew Broderick’s scientist save New York from the mutant lizard, created, the film’s opening sequence leads us to believe, as a result of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The film plays on Franco-American stereotypes throughout. His colleagues bring him coffee and doughnuts for breakfast, and his response is to criticize the coffee (a running joke) and ask whether there are no croissants. Before attempting to cross the U.S. military security cordon, Reno distributes chewing gum to his fellow agents, who promptly begin chewing loudly and visibly. Reno explains to a somewhat stunned Broderick that it “makes us look more American.” When they are stopped and questioned by U.S. soldiers, Reno adopts an American accent, which his character explains was based on Elvis Presley: “He was the King.” The same year, Reno starred with Robert De Niro in Ronin (Frankenheimer, 1998), an action heist film set in the south of France. Reno played Vincent, a member of an international team of crooks brought
RENOIR, JEAN
together in an attempt to steal a briefcase and its mysterious contents. Again, the role built on Reno’s image as a kind action hero: he saves De Niro’s life, despite having been shot himself. Reno has continued to star in a variety of French and American productions from Les Rivières pourpres/The Crimson Rivers (Kassovitz, 2001) to Rollerball (McTiernan, 2002). In 2001, he reprised his role as a medieval knight in the Franco-American remake of his 1993 hit Les Visiteurs (Poiré), Just Visiting/Les Visiteurs en Amérique (Poiré). In this time-travel comedy, his character, Count Thibault, finds himself transported from medieval France to modernday Chicago, meeting, as in the 1993 original, his own descendant (played by Christina Applegate) who will, of course, come to exist only if he manages to return to the twelfth century. In 2005, he will star in Shawn Levy’s prequel to Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther series, with Steve Martin as the accident-prone French policeman Inspector Clouseau. Cristina Johnston See also: Besson, Luc; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Inspector Clouseau. Reference Hayward, Susan. Luc Besson. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1998.
RENOIR, JEAN (1894–1979) One of the greatest French film directors of the classic era and of “poetic realism” who had a considerable impact on international filmmaking. The son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Jean discovered cinema through the films of Louis Gasnier, Charlie Chaplin, and Erich von Stroheim, making his first short in 1924 and his first
985
feature in 1926. After nine silents, Renoir’s ascension was not hampered by the outbreak of sound, and in 1931 he directed his first talkie, On purge Bébé, a commercial success starring Michel Simon and Fernandel. Renoir directed sixteen films during the 1930s, almost all major titles in the history of French and international cinema. The year 1932 alone saw the release of La Chienne, La Nuit du carrefour, and Boudu sauvé des eaux, starring a most memorable Michel Simon. Early on, Renoir’s films showed his thematic and aesthetic trademarks, an attachment to proletarian characters and outcasts (prostitutes, tramps, workers, artisans), a satirical representation of the bourgeoisie, freedom of thought and movement, friendship, nature, depth of field, long takes, and naturalistic acting. Renoir’s films always mixed his humanist outlook on life and society, beyond divisions of class and nationality, with aesthetics to create a highly personal and coherent style. Some of his productions in the 1930s were indeed informed by his left-wing Front Populaire politics (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1935; La Vie est à nous, 1936; La Marseillaise, 1938) or his pacifism (La Grande Illusion, 1937), which sometimes meant they were not particularly well received by critics and public alike (La Règle du jeu, 1939). However, Renoir, while remaining faithful to his art and beliefs, was still able to show box-office drawing power with films such as Les Bas-fonds (1936), La Grande Illusion, and La Bête humaine (1938), great international successes. Renoir often worked with the same team of actors (Jean Gabin, Michel Simon, Julien Carette, Marcel Dalio, Louis Jouvet, Pierre Renoir) and personnel (Eugène Lourié, Charles Spaak, Carl Koch) and built strong friendships with most of them.
986
REPUBLICANISM
an intriguing development of Renoir’s personal style, less social, and shows a more expressive use of montage and sets. Renoir took American citizenship in 1944. In stark contrast to the restrictions and frustrations of Hollywood, India offered Renoir a creative haven for his next film, The River (1951), his first in color. Returning on and off to Europe, Renoir carried on directing, acting, and writing, making two box-office hits, La Carrozza d’Oro (1953) and French Cancan (1955). Renoir won an honorary Oscar in 1975 and the Légion d’honneur in 1977. He died in Hollywood. Catherine Hellegouarc’h Still from Jean Renoir’s 1943 film This Land Is Mine starring Charles Laughton. (RKO/The Kobal Collection)
Renoir spent the war years in exile in Hollywood with some of those who had worked with him in France, amomg them Dalio, Simone Simon, Gabin, and Eugène Lourié. Untypical of his style, his Hollywood films failed to convince the critics, especially in France. However, they typify the encounter between Renoir the cinematic auteur and the studio system. Swamp Water (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1941) is a thriller set in the Okefenokee swamp in Georgia and stars Dana Andrews. This Land Is Mine (RKO, 1943) is set in Nazi-occupied France and casts Charles Laughton as a heroic teacher. The Southerner (United Artists, 1945) portrays the tribulations of a poor farming family. The Diary of a Chambermaid (United Artists, 1946) is set in France and continues the themes of social class. The Woman on the Beach (RKO, 1947) is a manifestation of postwar Hollywood film noir and
See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Clair, René; Dalio, Marcel; Duvivier, Julien; Gasnier, Louis J.; Jouvet, Louis; Simon, Simone; World War II. References Renoir, Jean. Ma Vie et mes films. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. Sesonske, Alexander. Jean Renoir: The French Films. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
REPUBLICANISM In the United States of America and France, republicanism has proved an important and enduring concept. In both countries, its origins can be traced back to the late eighteenth century, when republican regimes were established on both sides of the Atlantic. Though the American Republic was never officially proclaimed, it was created de facto on July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence announced the separation of the colonies from Britain and renounced the colonists’ allegiance to George III. Republican constitutions were quickly drawn up in the individual states, but it was more than ten years before the
REPUBLICANISM
Constitution of the United States of America was written. Once established, however, that constitution proved extremely durable. It remains in place to this day, albeit with amendments. The history of the French Republic is a more complex story. Since the proclamation of the Republic “one and indivisible” on September 25, 1792, the French have experienced imperial and monarchical rule as well as five separate republican regimes. During the nineteenth century, republics were also established in various Latin American states and there, too, republicanism proved influential. Though the historical trajectories have been different, the history of republicanism in the United States and France is a story not just of similarities but also of mutual inspiration and influence. Republicanism is a complex term to define. It is derived from the Latin word respublica meaning “the public thing” or “public affairs.” Consequently, it has been used simply to refer to government in the interests of the public. For example, in his Contrat Social/Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained: “I therefore call any state that is regulated by laws a republic, whatever its form of administration: because then alone the public interest governs and the public thing is something. Every legitimate government is republican.” In a footnote Rousseau continued: “By this word I understand not only an aristocracy or a democracy, but in general every government guided by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the government must not be confounded with the sovereign, but be its minister. Then monarchy itself is a republic” (Book II, Chapter 6). Yet, as Rousseau implied, his definition conflicted with the more conventional understanding, according to which republi-
987
can government was contrasted with monarchy. Following this latter meaning, some scholars have described republicanism as antimonarchism. These differences in meaning have presented problems for historians of English (or more properly British) republicanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, they are less troublesome when discussing republicanism in America and France because, with a few exceptions, those who have used the term to mean “government in the public interest” have tended also to believe that this could best be achieved under a nonmonarchical regime. For republicans in the eighteenth century, knowledge of how republican governments operated came from just a handful of ancient and modern examples. Among the former, the Roman Republic was the archetype, as described in the works of ancient writers such as Cicero and Livy. Though not strictly republics, Greek city-states such as Athens and Sparta were also sometimes taken as models. During the Renaissance, the republican form of government was revived in some of the city-states of northern Italy. This revival of republican practice was accompanied by theoretical accounts of republicanism in works by such thinkers as Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Contarini, and Giannotti. Though most of the Italian republics were relatively short-lived, one was still in operation, albeit in a somewhat corrupt form, in the eighteenth century. The Republic of Venice thus took its place alongside other existing republics, including those in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Although these examples demonstrated to those accustomed to monarchy that republican government was possible, many thinkers continued to question its applicability to large modern nations. The
988
REPUBLICANISM
ancient city-states seemed particularly inappropriate models given their dependence on slavery and their apparent incompatibility with modern commercial society. However, even the modern examples were problematic because of their small size. In L’Esprit des lois/The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu declared: “It is in the nature of a republic that it has only a small territory; otherwise it can scarcely survive. In a large republic, the common good is sacrificed to a thousand considerations; it is subordinated to exceptions, it depends on accidents. In a small one, the public good is better felt, better known, is closer to each citizen; abuses are less extensive there, and in consequence less protected” (Part I, Book 8, Chapter 16). In light of this, republicans in America and France in the late eighteenth century faced the same problem. They had to find ways of making republican government workable in a large modern state. On both sides of the Atlantic, various solutions were proposed, and republicans debated and argued with one another about these issues. One key solution that was almost unanimously accepted was the use of representation. Federalists in North America cunningly drew a distinction between republican and democratic governments on precisely this issue. The true distinction between these two forms was also adverted to on a former occasion. It is that in a democracy the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently must be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region. (The Federalist Papers, XIV)
In their search for a form of republican government that would be compatible with
the circumstances of the modern world, eighteenth-century republicans, in both America and France, turned to the writings of English republicans who, more than a century earlier, had faced a similar situation. On January 30, 1649, Charles I had been executed by his English subjects. The monarchy and the House of Lords were subsequently abolished, and England was effectively turned into a republic. Although the republican regimes of the 1650s did not last, the republican works written during that period proved far more durable. The writings of John Milton, Marchamont Nedham, and James Harrington went on to influence not only opposition writers in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, but also revolutionaries in America and France. The historiographical debate over North American republicanism has been running since the mid-1960s, when Bernard Bailyn published his seminal work on the ideological origins of the American Revolution. Drawing on his detailed knowledge of the pamphlets of the revolution, Bailyn suggested that the revolutionary generation drew on an eclectic range of ideas, but that what held their arguments together was their use of the writings of seventeenth-century English radicals and their eighteenth-century British descendants. Bailyn thus challenged the traditional view, popularized by Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, that a kind of liberalism, heavily dependent on the writings of John Locke, was the key ideology on which the American revolutionaries drew. Bailyn’s arguments were picked up and developed by Gordon S. Wood in The Creation of the American Republic and by J. G. A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment. Bailyn had not used the
REPUBLICANISM
term republicanism, but Wood introduced it as a key concept; Pocock was responsible for the notion of a republican tradition originating in ancient Greece and Rome and passing by way of Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century Britain on its way to America. Pocock also placed emphasis on the notion of a republican, or civic-humanist, language—within which the key concepts were liberty (which was contrasted with slavery) and virtue (which was set against corruption). But not everyone accepted this particular vision of the American Revolution. Historians such as Joyce Appleby, Isaac Kramnick, and John Diggins have continued to emphasize the importance of liberal-capitalist ideas—and particularly those of Locke—in inspiring the revolutionary generation, and Paul Rahe has stressed the distinctively modern nature of American republicanism. Only very recently has French republicanism been associated with the broader republican tradition. Previously, it tended to be viewed as one aspect of French exceptionalism. It was seen as having been created out of nothing by the revolutionaries in the 1790s, or its origins were traced back to the works of eighteenth-century francophone thinkers—in particular those of Rousseau and the abbé Mably. However, since the 1990s, researchers have studied various aspects of French republicanism. Keith Michael Baker, Kent Wright, and others have shown that the writings of the revolutionaries themselves and the earlier sources on which they drew owed a great deal to ancient, Renaissance, and English republican texts. They have suggested that French revolutionary republicanism was far more closely connected to the broader republican tradition than had previously
989
been acknowledged. At the same time, other scholars, in particular Richard Whatmore and James Livesey, have suggested that French revolutionaries were engaged in developing a form of modern republicanism that would prove compatible with commercial society and therefore be more appropriate to the modern world. Besides facing similar problems and drawing on similar sources, there were also direct connections between French and North American republicanism in the late eighteenth century. Despite the language barrier, there was an exchange of key texts. Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois was translated into English in 1750 and exercised a considerable influence on American revolutionaries as they sought to draw up their constitutions. Similarly, French translations of the American state constitutions began to appear in 1778, and John Adams’s Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America was translated in 1792. As well as an exchange of texts, there was also an exchange of persons. Lafayette was merely the most famous of the French soldiers who fought in the American War of Independence and returned to France inspired by what they had seen across the Atlantic. Subsequently, a large number of the American founding fathers, including Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, spent several years living in Paris, where they mixed with leading French figures. These connections could not but have had an impact. Lafayette drafted a Declaration of the Rights of Man for the French that was based on the American Declaration of Independence. Moreover, the discussions within the Constituent Assembly in the summer of 1789 have been presented as a debate between anglophiles, who wanted to introduce a constitution on the
990
REPUBLICANISM
British model, and Americanists who favored an American-style constitution. The American model continued to influence French revolutionaries right through the 1790s. Brissot became a republican in the 1780s, inspired, in part, by what he saw across the Atlantic, and he and his friends continued to draw on American ideas until their executions as Girondins in 1793. Similarly, leading figures after 1794 looked to America for inspiration as to how a successful French Republic could be established. Despite the exchanges, American and French republicanism differed in fundamental ways. The American version was distinctively Federalist, even after the strengthening of the central government in 1787. By contrast, though federalism found some supporters in France, particularly among the Brissotins, it was never adopted. Similarly, the trinity of liberté, égalité, fraternité, central to the definition of French republicanism, never gained influence in North America. Moreover, even within a particular country at a particular point in time, there was never just one notion of republicanism to which all republicans subscribed. In North America, for example, the Federalists and anti-Federalists alike were republicans, but they had different views as to the form the republic should take. Similarly, in revolutionary France, Jacobin republicanism and its “republic of virtue” was challenged by various groups, including the Brissotins and members of the Cordeliers Club, each group having its own ideas about what republicanism meant and how it should be carried out. In many ways, the story of republicanism in the United States and France after 1800 presents an even more complex picture. Even among those historians who accepted the importance of republicanism to
the American revolutionary generation, there were many who believed it had died out by the nineteenth century, replaced by liberalism. However, some scholars, most notably Pocock, insisted on the persistence of republican ideology into the nineteenthcentury United States of America and its continued struggle against liberalism. Since the 1980s, other historians, particularly those on the Left and especially those engaged in labor history, have come to agree with this and have explored republicanism in nineteenth-century North America in more detail. However, one result of this has been to dilute the meaning of the term. No longer seen as incompatible with liberalism, republicanism has come to be viewed less as a language or ideology and more as an idea or theme. In many respects, nineteenth-century France saw the replaying of events of the 1790s, with the repeated swing from monarchy to republic to empire. Moreover, the establishment of the Second Republic in 1848, and of the Third Republic in 1871, were marked by the revival of republican symbols and the republication of republican tracts from the revolutionary era. At the same time, French republicanism changed in this period—through its incorporation of democratic and Socialist ideas and its opposition to liberalism. Although the histories of the United States and France in the nineteenth century were different, at least some sense of their common purpose still remained. In the 1880s, the United States and France exchanged statues of “Liberty Enlightening the World” to commemorate 1776 and 1789 and in honor of the fraternity that existed between the two nations. Finally, it must be remembered that the United States was not the only country
REPUBLICANISM
on the American continent to develop republics, republicans, and republicanism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, independence movements emerged across the American continent, bringing revolution and republicanism to nations from Mexico to the Río de la Plata. Moreover, Latin American republicanism was shaped not only by the ideology and models of the United States, but also by those of France. The revolution in North America undoubtedly offered inspiration to those in the South and unleashed the idea of gaining independence from Europe. Moreover, the documents of that revolution—its declarations and constitutions— were translated and circulated across the southern half of the continent, and North American federalism exercised some influence in the South. However, in many ways it was the French, rather than the American, Revolution that can be seen to have exercised the biggest influence in Latin America. First, politically, it was Napoléon’s invasion of Spain that prompted the calls for independence in Spanish America. Second, and more significant, the ideas of the French Enlightenment and Revolution appear to have exercised a considerable influence among the Latin American revolutionary generation. Once again there were various means by which European ideas crossed the Atlantic. Key Latin American revolutionary figures spent time in Europe—General Francisco de Miranda even fought alongside the French in their revolutionary wars. Other Latin Americans traveled or studied in Europe and brought back to the New World the ideas they had encountered there. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Spanish authorities in Latin America feared its influence among their own subjects and sought
991
to censor and stop the circulation of accounts of those events. Nonetheless, Simón Bolívar and General Miranda claimed to have read the works of the French philosophes, and a Spanish edition of Rousseau’s Contrat Social appeared in 1810—the work of another leading revolutionary, Mariano Moreno. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was also translated into Spanish, and medallions and coins commemorating the French Revolution circulated alongside pamphlets. However, some historians have expressed doubts about the extent to which these ideas influenced the Latin American revolutionaries, and it is true that they proved more influential in some areas of Latin America than in others. Rachel Hammersley See also: Adams, John; American Revolution; Bolívar, Simón; Franklin, Benjamin; French Revolution; Jefferson, Thomas; Liberalism; Miranda, Francisco de; Theory. References Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967, 1992. Baker, Keith Michael. “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in EighteenthCentury France.” Journal of Modern History 73 (2001): 32–53. Furet, François, and Mona Ozouf, eds. Le Siècle de l’avènement républicain. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Pilbeam, Pamela. Republicanism in NineteenthCentury France, 1814–1871. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Pocock, John Greville Agard. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Rahe, Paul. Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Rodgers, Daniel T. “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept.” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11–38.
992
RESNAIS, ALAIN
RESNAIS, ALAIN (1922–) Through a career spanning nearly fifty years, Resnais’s reputation as one of France’s most important filmmakers has remained unchallenged. His name was initially made by the concentration camp documentary Nuit et brouillard (1955), and he went on to work with two of the most prominent practitioners of the nouveau roman. Marguerite Duras scripted Hiroshima mon amour (1959), in which a French actor filming in Hiroshima has an affair with a Japanese woman that evokes— in the end cathartically—memories of her German lover killed during the occupation. The seductive use of editing, here cutting back and forth between the heroine’s wartime past in Nevers and her current experience in Japan, was to become a Resnais trademark, and the film was also noteworthy for its sympathetic treatment of what many had hitherto condemned as “horizontal collaboration.” Resnais then joined forces with Alain Robbe-Grillet for L’Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (1961), a sustained experiment with time and memory in which it is ultimately impossible to distinguish past from present or “real” from imagined. The film’s narrative complexity sparked off eulogy and disparagement in equal measure, and Delphine Seyrig’s performance made her one of France’s greatest stars. Clothing lines modeled on her costumes enjoyed great success in New York. Resnais went on to deal with the scars left by the Algerian war (Muriel of 1963, also starring Seyrig) and with the exhaustion of Yves Montand’s Spanish Republican exile in La Guerre est finie/The War Is Over (1966). The David Mercer–scripted Providence (1977) costars Ellen Burstyn and contains references to the Chilean military
junta’s habit of using football stadia as impromptu prison camps. Its multilayered take on the word Providence includes sequences shot in the eponymous city in Rhode Island. Resnais’s more recent work has revealed an increasing fascination with the theater, as in the Alan Ayckbourn adaptations Smoking/No Smoking (1993) and his most lucrative film to date, On connaît la chanson/Same Old Song (1997), which has elements of the musical comedy. Particularly noteworthy in a French Atlantic context is Mon Oncle d’Amérique/My American Uncle (1980), the title of which refers to a colloquial French expression for a hopedfor benefactor. The film provides a remarkably acute and sensitive treatment of the changes in French life under the Giscard presidency. This was a period marked by growing social mobility and by concomitant American influence, evident in the film’s mise-en-scène of more intensive production methods and a general speeding-up of society, with which Gérard Depardieu’s character (René Raguenau) in particular finds it difficult to cope. I Want to Go Home (1989), about an American strip cartoonist in France, bizarrely failed to secure distribution in either the United Kingdom or the United States, despite a Jules Feiffer script. Resnais’s well-merited reputation as one of the cinema’s greatest poets of memory and forgetting sometimes leads to comparative neglect of the sustained attention his work has paid to key issues in postwar French society. From the trauma of occupation in Hiroshima, through the aftermath of colonialism in Muriel, to the personal and professional dilemmas of the yuppies in On connaît la chanson, he has mapped major changes and upheavals in an invariably stimulating fashion. Keith Reader
REVEL, JEAN-FRANÇOIS See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Depardieu, Gérard; Fashion; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Montand, Yves; World War II. References Benayoun, Robert. Alain Resnais, arpenteur de l’imaginaire. Paris: Stock, 1980. Higgins, Lynn. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Monaco, James. Alain Resnais. London/New York: Secker and Warburg/Oxford University Press, 1978. Oms, Marcel. Alain Resnais. Paris/Marseilles: Rivages, 1988.
REVEL, JEAN-FRANÇOIS (1924–) Historian, chronicler, and essayist, JeanFrançois Revel’s distinguished works in philosophy, politics, and history have led him to become an elected member of the prestigious Académie Française. Revel was born on January 19, 1924, in Marseilles, in a family whose origins are to be found in the Franche-Comté region. He received his baccalaureate from the Free School of Provence; he then enrolled in preparatory school in Lyons to study for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, to which he was admitted in 1943. Revel participated in the French resistance movement during World War II; following the country’s liberation from German occupation in 1944, he was appointed counselor to the authorities of the RhoneAlps region for several months. Having received the highest French degree—the agrégation—in philosophy, he was given his first teaching position at the French lycée in Tlemcen, Algeria (1947–1948), and was then transferred to the French lycée and the French Institute of Mexico City (1950– 1952), and the French Institute and the
993
Faculty of Letters in Florence, Italy (1952–1956). After returning to France at the end of 1956, he was appointed to the cabinet of the undersecretary of state for the arts; he was appointed to the Faidherbe lycée in Lille (1957–1959) and then to the JeanBaptiste Say lycée in Paris. He left his teaching career in 1963. Revel’s dual literary and journalistic career began in 1957. He has held many positions since then, including literary counsel and collection director at publishing houses such as René Julliard, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, and Robert Laffont. In 1978, he became the director of one of the leading French weekly newsmagazines, L’Express, where he had worked as an editorialist since 1966. He resigned from L’Express in 1981 to become a chronicler in 1982 at Le Point, the other leading French news weekly, where he continues to write today. Revel has also held editorial positions with French national radio stations Europe 1 (1989–1992) and R.T.L. (1995–1998). Elected to the Académie Française on June 19, 1997, Revel holds the Etienne Wolff chair. Revel has also been appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor, Officer of the Order of the Cross of the South of Brazil, and Grand Officer of the Order of Henri the Navigator of Portugal. An astute contemporary observer of Franco-American relations, Revel’s most recent work, L’Obsession anti-américaine: Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses incoséquences/Anti-Americanism (2002), methodically unravels the passionate lovehate relationship that has been fueled by the Old World—led by France—with regard to the New World for more than two centuries. Extremely well documented, Revel’s essay examines Europe’s ambivalent
994
REVUE
DU MONDE NOIR, LA
feelings toward the United States and attempts to discern the underlying causes and the consequences these have—or run the risk of having—on the balance of international power at a time when a new world order is in the making. Other well-known works by Revel include Pourquoi des philosophes? (“Why Philosophers?” 1957), Ni Marx ni Jésus/ Without Marx or Jesus (1970), La Tentation totalitaire/Totalitarian Temptation (1976), Comment les démocraties finissent/How Democracies Perish (1983), Mémoires: Le Voleur dans la maison vide (“Memoirs: The Thief in the Empty House,” 1997), and La Grande Parade (“The Great Parade,” 2000). Claudia Wolosin See also: Anti-Americanism; World War II. Reference Revel, Jean-François. Mémoires: Le Voleur dans la maison vide. Paris: Plon, 1997.
DU MONDE NOIR, LA Founded in Paris by the Martinican sisters Paulette and Jane Nardal, the Haitian Léo Sajous, and the Guadeloupean Me JeanLouis, La Revue du monde noir marked an important step in the valorization of “black” cultures. Intellectually and culturally, Paris in the 1930s was in a state of ferment: exotic cultural artifacts, from jazz to art nègre, were voraciously consumed by the Parisian intelligentsia, its appetites whetted by the “discoveries” of ethnographic surrealism and the all-pervading desire for non-European otherness. At the same time, Paris was becoming a center for the activities of young students and authors from Africa and the Caribbean. The Nardal sisters hosted a literary salon for prominent figures from the “black world,”
REVUE
notably Alain Locke, Jacques Roumain, Félix Eboué, and the founder of the Haitian indigenist movement, Dr. Jean PriceMars, all of whom contributed to La Revue du monde noir during its short life span from November 1931 to April 1932. The aims of the journal were threefold: to provide black artists and intellectuals with opportunities to publish their work; to study and promote black, especially African civilization; and to create links between black thinkers from across the world. The imprint of Price-Mars is clear: the valorization of Africanity in the New World was the principal motivation of his own indigenist movement in Haiti. Unlike the indigenists, however, La Revue du monde noir eschewed national particularities in favor of a panAfrican vision of a collective racial identity. In this sense, the journal prefigures the later emergence of the négritude movement. Paulette Nardal’s article “Eveil de la conscience de race” in particular pre-echoes Césaire’s preoccupations with Antillean racial alienation and, drawing inspiration from Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and the Harlem Renaissance in general, calls for a rediscovery of racial identity as a means of resisting French assimilationism. During his first year in Paris, Aimé Césaire read La Revue du monde noir and through it became familiar with the authors of the Harlem Renaissance. However, Césaire did not attend the black literary salons, thinking them to be overly bourgeois, “mulatto,” and Catholic in orientation. Although the journal resisted cultural assimilation, it did aspire to creating, “along with the elites of other races [ . . .] the material, intellectual, and moral perfection of humanity in general,” and stopped short of the overt, direct challenge to “white civilization” that was to characterize Césaire’s work. The elitist un-
RIBAUT, JEAN
dercurrents of La Revue du monde noir were subsequently challenged in journals such as Légitime Défense, L’Etudiant martiniquais, L’Etudiant noir, and Tropiques. Martin Munro See also: Césaire, Aimé; Guadeloupe; Haiti; Jazz; Martinique; McKay, Claude; Roumain, Jacques; Tropiques. References Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude; The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1981. Corzani, Jack. “De l’indigénisme haïtien à la negritude parisienne: La Revue du monde noir.” La Littérature des Antilles–Guyane Françaises. Jack Corzani. 5 vols, vol. III. Paris: Editions Emile Désormeaux, 1978: 170–176. Zobel, Joseph. “Nardal,” in, Et si la mer n’était pas bleue. Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1982: 81–89.
RIBAUT, JEAN (CA. 1520–1565) Jean Ribaut led the first French voyage to Florida in 1562, which formed part of the preliminary French exploration of the New World in the sixteenth century. In 1565, he led what was the third voyage to Florida in the hope that his aid would relieve and sustain the failing colony established by Laudonnière, but instead encountered Spanish forces, who destroyed the fort and killed the French Protestants. Born ca. 1520 in Dieppe, Ribaut was to become an excellent sailor and a staunch Protestant. He was chosen by Gaspard de Coligny, admiral of France, to lead a voyage to Florida that would explore the region in an attempt to find a suitable site on which to establish a Protestant colony. Sailing from Dieppe in February 1562, Ribaut and his crew landed on latitude 29.5 degrees in
995
April of that year and proceeded to explore the coastline. The land was so appealing that he left a group of thirty men to man the newly built fort, Charlesfort. Ribaut left for France in June 1562, promising to return with supplies for the colony. On his arrival in Europe, however, he became involved in the religious wars, fighting in Dieppe before fleeing to England when the town fell. It was in England that Ribaut found time to write an account of his voyage to the New World; it survives today only in English translation, the first of which was prepared and published by Thomas Hackit in 1563. While he was in England, Ribaut petitioned Elizabeth I to support a second voyage to Florida and secured a business partner, Thomas Stukeley, but at the last moment backed out of his agreement and tried to leave England for France. However, he was captured and imprisoned. Ribaut eventually returned to France and was once again chosen to lead another expedition to Florida in the hope that he and his men could prevent the colony established in his absence by Laudonnière from failing. He set sail with seven ships and 300 men and arrived at the French fort in August 1565. However, not long after his arrival, Spanish forces threatened the fort. Ribaut made the decision to attack the Spanish by sea, but his ships fell foul of a violent storm and were wrecked. The crew were washed ashore and attempted to return to the fort, but they were trapped by the Spanish forces and killed because of their allegiance to the Protestant faith. After his death, Ribaut was described by the leader of the Spanish forces, Menéndez, as a most experienced sailor and naval commander and greatly skilled in the navigation of the New World. Jo Edwards
996
RICHARD, NELLY See also: Florida. References Lorant, Stefan, ed. The New World: The First Pictures of America. New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1946. Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America: Vol. 1, Pioneers of France in the New World. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965.
RICHARD, NELLY (1948–) The Franco-Chilean cultural critic and editor Nelly Richard was born in Caen (Calvados) in 1948. She holds the equivalent of a bachelor of arts degree in modern literature from the Université de Paris IV–La Sorbonne. Upon completion of her undergraduate studies in 1970, she moved to Santiago, Chile, where she now lives. She first achieved notoriety in the early 1980s for her daring and innovative essay Corrective Body/Cuerpo correccional (1980). In this book, she uses postmodernist writing techniques to provide a running commentary on Carlos Leppe’s photoperformances produced between 1973 and 1980, in which he variously explores the frontiers of his sexual, cultural, and familial identity with the help of makeup and costumes (“corrective interventions” in his body). Richard’s early concern with the politics of the feminine-gendered body has remained a constant in her ongoing meditation on institutionalized cultural forms. In Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 (1986), which was published in Melbourne (Australia) and includes within the same book the Spanish version Márgenes e institución: Arte en Chile desde 1973, she continues her exploration of the “rhetoric of the body” and the “eradication of the boundaries between genres” in such video artists as Leppe, Raúl Zurita (also an im-
portant poet), Diamela Eltit (also an important novelist), and Carlos Altamirano. The same concerns resurface in her influential essays The Stratification of Margins: On Art, Politics, and Cultural Policies/La estratificación de los márgenes. Sobre arte, cultura y política/s (1989) and Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s)/Masculino/ Femenino: prácticas de la diferencia y cultura democrática (1993). As a member of the Chilean neovanguard movement, Richard was instrumental in promoting, throughout the 1980s, new ways in which art, literature, political systems, and social interactions could be reconceived in the wake of totalitarian ideologies, which in turn paved the way for the reception of post-Marxist discourses in Chile and the other Southern Cone countries. In 1990, she founded the journal Revista de Crítica Cultural; the publication immediately became an influential forum for intellectual exchange between Latin American and U.S.-based cultural critics. In The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis/La insubordinación de los signos: cambio político, transformaciones culturales y poéticas de la crisis (1994), Richard collects a series of methodological essays setting forth the main features of her reading strategies, among them the emphasis placed on the role of “citation” understood as a fragment, a search for origins, a marginal yet powerfully contextualizing position, and in general a symptom of official culture’s impoverishment, the quintessential distillation of which is the university. In her major work Residues and Metaphors: Essays in the Cultural Criticism of Chile’s Transition to Democracy/Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la Transición (1998), she sets out
RICHELIEU, CARDINAL ARMAND JEAN
to show how one of the chief strategies that Latin American artists have designed for resisting appropriation and assimilation by hegemonic ideologies is the use of parody and pastiche in their treatment of genre and/or gender boundaries. This is so with Diamela Eltit’s baroque aestheticization of the political genre of testimonio in El padre mío (Chapter 2) and with Juan Dávila’s controversial painting of a transvestite and mestizoized Simón Bolívar and the queer collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis’ photoperformance parodying the feminist appropriation of Frida Kahlo throughout the world (Chapter 4). With Beatriz Sarlo, another prolific critic and editor of the Buenos Aires–based Punto de Vista (1978–), Richard has placed the Southern Cone region at the center of cultural debates on the politics of globalization, and not just as an object of study but as a producer of discourses on the intersection of postmodernism, popular culture, feminism, and political theory. José María Rodríguez García See also: Chile; Feminisms; Lacan, Jacques; Liberalism; Theory. Reference Masiello, Francine. “Gender Traffic on the North/South Horizon.” The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001: 109–139.
RICHELIEU, CARDINAL ARMAND JEAN DU PLESSIS DE (1585–1642) French statesman who dominated French foreign and domestic politics as Louis XIII’s chief minister from 1624 until his death, both directly and indirectly influencing the development of Canada and the
DU
PLESSIS
DE
997
Richelieu dominated French foreign and domestic politics as Louis XIII’s chief minister and directly and indirectly influenced the development of Canada and America. (Library of Congress)
Americas. The crusading zeal with which he set about the persecution of the Huguenots (Protestants) in his attempt to consolidate the hegemony of Roman Catholicism (and thus himself ) in France caused droves of Huguenots to flee the country in search of a land where they could practice their religion without fear of reprisal from the sphinx rouge. Many settled in America and set up puritan communities in much the same fashion as their Protestant brethren from the British Isles were also doing. However, as France was establishing her colonial empire in Canada, Richelieu, as all but the nominal ruler of France and colonial minister, was equally determined that New France should also be Catholic.
998
RIEL, LOUIS
France became the world’s foremost Catholic power largely through the cardinal’s keen political mind, astute opportunism, and calculated use of religious terror. This man was not going to allow France’s foreign domain to develop under the auspices of “heretics.” Richelieu tackled this problem by creating public companies. He proposed the formation of the Compagnie de Cent Associés in 1627, which, in hindsight, was a protostate Socialist exercise and paradoxical given the absolutist nature of Richelieu’s rule. The project was never realized because of the grandiosity and scale of the proposal: it meant that all the great manufacturers and merchants of France would monopolize and manage the trade on both land and sea. Because the venture was too costly to garner the required support, Richelieu established the more modest Compagnie du Canada, établie sous le titre de Nouvelle France ou La Société de Cent Personnes de Canada. A company composed of patriotic citizens keen to expand France’s influence throughout the world, it boasted among its members the publisher of the Relations des Jésuites, the Parisian M. Cramoisy, and other high-ranking officials holding public positions from all over France. Richelieu’s presiding over the company’s operations effectively ensured that the conversion of American natives to the Catholic credo and the peopling of the American wilderness with Catholic French patriots took primacy over entrepreneurial enterprise. Priests, mechanics, and farmers from France were duly shipped in. The paternalistic nature of Richelieu’s preferred system of government gave rise to the aphorism “Nulle terre sans Seigneur,” which reigned so successfully in France, and was applied
also to Canada. Under the autocratic theocracy of priests and seigneurs, inhabitants of the colony were discouraged from participating in public affairs and from thinking for themselves. In his Charter of the Company of the One Hundred Associates, Richelieu expressly forbade the Huguenots to settle in the new American territories, therefore nullifying Lutherian inquiry or questioning of the status quo. Richelieu’s antiquated ways would leave a longlasting impression in North America; even by the beginning of the twentieth century, civil law in Quebec was still founded on the Coutume de Paris, and priests collected their tithes by process of law. Greg MacKinnon See also: Catholic Church; Huguenots; Jesuits; New France; Quebec. References Carmona, Michel. Richelieu: l’ambition et le pouvoir. Paris: Fayard, 1983. Douglas, James. New England and New France: Contrasts and Parallels in Colonial History. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1913. Knecht, Robert. “Richelieu: Hero or Villian?” History Today 53 (March 2003).
RIEL, LOUIS (1844–1885) Political and spiritual leader of FrenchCanadian Métis, founder of Manitoba, poet. Riel successfully headed the Red River Uprising of 1869–1870, resulting in Manitoba’s becoming a province of Canada on July 15, 1870. Fifteen years later in Saskatchewan, he led the North-West Rebellion, which was subsequently quelled by a Canadian expeditionary force. Following the rebellion, Riel was put on trial and
RIEL, LOUIS
found guilty of high treason. He was hanged at Regina on November 16, 1885. Born at Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, on either October 22 or 23, 1844 (the baptismal registry at Saint-Boniface was subsequently destroyed), Louis Riel was the first child of Louis Riel Sr., and Julie Lagimodière. His paternal great-grandmother was a Montagnais-Chipewyan. Considered by Bishop Alexandre Taché a promising candidate for the priesthood, young Louis was sent to study at the College of Montreal in 1858. Riel’s education continued on course until he fell in love with Marie-Julie Guernon. The young couple’s plans to wed were quashed by the Guernon family, who would not permit their daughter to marry a Métis. This refusal, coupled with Riel’s lack of success at finding permanent employment, led to his departure from Montreal on June 19, 1866. After two years in Minnesota, he arrived back in Red River on July 26, 1868, and soon became actively involved in Métis affairs. By obstructing Canadian government surveyors, and by refusing entry to the temporary lieutenant governor, Riel, as head of the settlement’s provisional government, effectively served notice to Ottawa that the rights of the French-speaking, Catholic Métis had to be respected in the pending annexation of the Northwest Territories to Canada. Elected three times as the member of parliament for Provencher, Riel was prevented from taking his seat in the House of Commons because of the $5,000 reward offered by the province of Ontario for those involved in the provisional government’s execution of Thomas Scott. Riel was eventually pardoned for Scott’s death, but on the condition that he be exiled for five years. Following a profound religious
999
experience in a Washington, D.C., church in December 1875, Riel was convinced that he had been chosen as the Prophet of the New World. Anxious about his mental state, his family had him committed to hospital. After his release from the Beauport asylum in January 1878, Riel recuperated in the eastern United States before heading for Montana, where he led a nomadic existence with Indian and Métis buffalo hunters. There, he married a Métis, Marguerite Monet dit Bellehumeur, with whom he had three children, the youngest living only a few hours and the older two, Jean and Marie-Angélique, both dying without offspring. At the request of the Métis of Saskatchewan, Riel returned to lead them in June 1884. Well skilled in the art of French versification, Riel wrote fables, songs, love poems, and political and religious verse. Poetry allowed him to refine his ideas, strengthen his beliefs, and externalize his inner tensions. He used poetry as a vehicle to praise individuals who championed the Métis cause or, just as often, to vent his anger against those who, in his mind, wanted to thwart the legitimate aspirations of his people. Glen Campbell See also: Catholic Church; Métis; Minnesota; Montagnais; Ontario; Saskatchewan. References Flanagan, Thomas. Louis “David” Riel: “Prophet of the New World.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Savoie, Paul, and Glen Campbell. Selected Poetry of Louis Riel. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1993. Stanley, George F. G. Louis Riel. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963. Stanley, George F. G., ed. The Collected Writings of Louis Riel/Les Ecrits complets de Louis Riel. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1985.
1000
RIVET, PAUL
RIVET, PAUL (1876–1958) French ethnologist. Rivet started out as a military physician without any particular inclination for the profession. It was in this capacity that he joined the French geodesic mission in Ecuador (1901), where he quickly developed a passion for the ethnological study of South American cultures and languages. Upon his return to Paris (1906), he was appointed to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN; National Museum of Natural History) and began a brilliant career. Between 1906 and 1914, Rivet published some seventy scholarly articles on South America, received numerous prizes and distinctions, and founded the French Institute of Anthropology (1911). After being mobilized as a physician in France and Serbia (1914–1919) and honored with several military decorations, he focused his interwar scientific activities mainly on South American linguistic issues, which led him to teach, conduct surveys, and give lectures in South America, Mexico, and Africa. At the same time, he occupied such prestigious positions as secretary-general (with Marcel Mauss) of the Institute of Ethnology, created and directed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1925); chair of anthropology (MNHN, 1928–1949); director of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (1928–1935) and Musée de l’Homme (MH, Museum of Man; 1936– 1940/1944–1949); and editorial board member of Documents (1929–1930), an avant-garde journal edited by Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein, and Michel Leiris. Just before the MH’s opening (1937), a project he vigorously supported, Rivet cofounded the bimonthly bulletin Races et racisme, the antiracism of which echoed his growing political involvement.
A pacifist campaigner since 1919 and member of the League against Colonial Oppression (1927), Rivet began his political career in 1934 by cofounding the Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes (Antifascist Intellectuals’ Vigilance Committee). In the Paris municipal elections of May 1935, Rivet defeated Georges Lebecq, a right-wing candidate involved in the violent riots of February 6, 1934, thus becoming the first elected member of the emerging Front populaire. During the German occupation, his involvement with the MH’s resistance network and the three protest letters he sent to Marshal Pétain compelled him to accept President Eduardo Santos’s invitation and flee to Bogotá (1941–1943), where he founded the Colombian Institute of Ethnology (1941) and contributed to the creation of a Museum of Man based on the Parisian model. In his major work, Les Origines de l’homme américain (“The Origins of American Man,” Montreal, 1943), he argued that common linguistic roots suggested the existence of migratory contacts between Pacific cultures (Melanesia, Australia) and pre-Columbian America. Rivet’s efforts as cultural ambassador for Free France in Central and South America earned him the Medal of the Resistance. Elected as a Socialist deputy in 1945 (he resigned from the party in 1948), then vice president of the League of Human Rights (1947–1957), he gradually retired from the political stage. Rivet’s multifaceted career was dominated by an unfailing struggle against racism and colonialism (although he disapproved of Algeria’s uprising) and by a constant (albeit disappointed) will to promote peace among peoples by disseminating “objective” knowledge. Sébastien Côté
ROBERVAL, JEAN-FRANÇOIS See also: Bataille, Georges; Leiris, Michel; Mexico; World War II. References Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1988: 117–151. Dupuis, Annie. “A propos de souvenirs inédits de Denise Paulme et Michel Leiris: sur la création du Musée de l’Homme en 1936.” Cahiers d’études africaines 39, no. 3–4 (1999): 511–538. Jamin, Jean. “Le savant et le politique: Paul Rivet (1876–1958).” Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, New Series 1, no. 3–4 (1989): 277–294. Laurière, Christine. “Paul Rivet, vie et æuvre.” Gradhiva 26 (1999): 108–128.
ROBERVAL, JEAN-FRANÇOIS DE LA ROQUE, SEIGNEUR DE (1500–1561) French officer and explorer. Roberval commanded the first French expedition (1541–1543) to try to establish a colony in the Americas on the Saint Lawrence River in Canada: the expedition failed. Following Jacques Cartier’s two voyages to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and beyond, François I commissioned a third. He initially made Cartier the captain general, but then decided that because the aim was now to found a colonial settlement in the king’s name, a nobleman should take command and Cartier would be his deputy. Roberval, a childhood friend of the king, was made lieutenant general of Canada (the area around present-day Quebec City), Saguenay, and Hochelaga (presentday Montreal). Having fallen on hard times, Roberval hoped that the expedition would make his fortune. He had a proven interest in prospective mining and planned
DE LA
ROQUE, SEIGNEUR
DE
1001
to capture the metal mines rumored to be in Saguenay. Needing to finance much of the expedition, he practiced piracy in the English Channel. Unlike his crew, he was Protestant, a fact that has sometimes been interpreted as indicating that François I’s professed priority of converting Indians to Catholicism was a pretext for an essentially economic enterprise. François probably saw Roberval’s Protestantism as an advantage because it guaranteed his hostility to the Spanish, should any be encountered. Although Cartier had set sail with five ships in May 1541, only on April 16, 1542, did Roberval depart with his three, which contained about 200 people, including women and children. Having reached Newfoundland on June 7, in Saint John’s Harbor they encountered Cartier’s expedition on its way back to France after abandoning its settlement. Cartier explained that he was taking back (what he wrongly thought to be) gold and diamonds and that Iroquoian hostility had forced the withdrawal. Roberval ordered Cartier to turn around and sail with him back up the Saint Lawrence, but on June 19, under cover of darkness, Cartier’s ships slipped away toward France. His motives have been much debated: they may have included fear of a mutiny among his crew at the prospect of another dangerous winter. Whether justified or not, Cartier’s disobedience almost certainly deprived Roberval of any remaining chances of success. Roberval sailed up the Saint Lawrence past the Stadaconans and anchored off Cape Rouge, the site of Cartier’s Charlesbourg-Royal. There, Roberval built or rebuilt a settlement, calling it FranceRoy. There is no evidence that the earlier Iroquoian hostility toward CharlesbourgRoyal was repeated: if it was not, this is perhaps because Roberval’s colonists were
1002
ROBIN, RÉGINE
better armed than Cartier’s or else because the hostility had been directed at Cartier personally. Roberval enforced severe discipline. He tried to reach the fabled Saguenay by way of the Ottawa River, and he probably visited Montreal Island. But more than fifty colonists died of scurvy, which, without the knowledge acquired by Cartier, they were powerless to cure. The colony was abandoned: in September 1543, Roberval was back in France. With this failure and the renewal in 1542 of hostilities between France and the Holy Roman Empire, French colonial aspirations in Canada faded for several decades. An official firsthand account of Roberval’s voyage, perhaps by him, was printed in English translation in 1600. His pilot, Jean Alfonse, also left an account. Roberval was murdered in 1561 during religious unrest in Paris. Neil Kenny See also: Cartier, Jacques; François I, King of France; Montreal; Quebec. References Trigger, Bruce G. The Children of Aataentsic I: A History of the Huron People to 1660. 2 vols. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976. Trudel, Marcel. The Beginnings of New France, 1524–1663. Chap. 3. Trans. P. Claxton. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973.
ROBIN, RÉGINE (1939–) French-born writer. Robin’s cultural origins and her own subsequent move from France to Quebec place her between cultures. As an academic and writer, her work moves between history, sociology, literature, and the study of languages. The spheres of interest evident in her highly productive academic career both inform and are transformed in her
creative writing. Her literary works, like those of immigrants from other European countries as well as North Africa, China, and the Caribbean, are part of a growing body of writing referred to as “la littérature migrante,” a phenomenon that has helped to diversify Quebec’s literary culture since the 1980s. Born in Paris in 1939 to Polish-Jewish parents, Robin completed her studies in France. From 1968 to 1977, she taught at Nanterre University. In 1977, she emigrated to Quebec, where she is now professor of sociology at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She was awarded her doctorat d’Etat by the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in 1989. Knowledgeable about the Yiddish language and culture, about Jewish history, Jewish literature (she has written extensively on Kafka), Freud, and psychoanalysis, she is also actively involved in research into semiotics and discourse analysis. In 1990, she jointly founded CIADEST, the Centre interuniversitaire d’analyse de discours et de sociocritique des textes. Robin was awarded the Governor General’s Prize for her study of Socialist realism, Le Réalisme socialiste: une esthétique impossible/Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, in 1986; in 2001, her work Berlin chantiers (“Berlin, Building Sites”) gained the Grand Prix du livre awarded by the city of Montreal. Above all, Robin is known as the author of La Québécoite/Wanderer (1983), the title of which combines the notion of “se tenir coi(te)” with the word “Québécoise” to suggest the silencing of the migrant (or immigrante) female voice in Quebec. Through a sequence of three narratives, variations on the lives of various protagonists, the novel explores questions of cultural identification and exclusion. Differ-
ROCHAMBEAU, JEAN-BAPTISTE-DONATIEN
DE VIMEUR, COMTE DE
1003
ent patterns of relationship between the protagonists and the places they inhabit, in the present, in their memories, and in their imaginations, are interwoven and juxtaposed in the interrupted and incomplete narratives. The impact of the Jewish diaspora, the Holocaust, and of Quebec nationalism on one’s place in the world is explored. The text shows both the attractions and the dangers of rigid models of cultural and individual identity. Overcoming the nostalgic desire for a fixed relationship between oneself and a culture of origin, La Québécoite moves the reader toward a more fluid, shifting model of identity that still has resonances of postmodernist and postcolonial thinking. Rosemary Chapman See also: Quebec. References Harel, Simon. “La parole orpheline de l’écrivain migrant.” Montréal imaginaire: Ville et littérature. Ed. Pierre Nepveu and Gilles Marcotte. Montreal: Fides, 1992. Potvin, Claudine. “La (dé)construction de la mémoire: La Québécoite de Régine Robin.” In Multi-culture, multi-écriture: la voix migrante au féminin en France et au Canada. Ed. Lucie Lequin and Maïr Verthuy. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996: 261–274. Simon, Sherry, Pierre L’Hérault, Robert Schwartzwald, and Alexis Nouss. Fictions de l’identitaire au Québec. Montreal: XYZ, 1991.
ROCHAMBEAU, JEANBAPTISTE-DONATIEN VIMEUR, COMTE DE (1725–1807)
DE
French general. After attending the military academy at Saint-Cyr, Rochambeau served as a
Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807), French general who aided the Americans during the Revolutionary War. (National Archives)
French officer, rising in rank to lieutenant general. He was about to retire after thirtyseven years of active campaigning when Louis XVI summoned him to Versailles. The king wanted a commander to lead an expeditionary force of 6,000 men to aid the American colonists who were fighting for independence from Great Britain. Rochambeau was known as a consummate professional who was not given to intrigue: he not only engendered loyalty from his men but also earned the friendship of other officers. In July 1780, he landed with his army at Newport, Rhode Island. General George Washington wanted the joint forces to attack New York at once. With two-thirds of his troops in hospital recovering from scurvy, Rochambeau diplomatically replied that they simply were not yet
1004
ROCHEFORT
prepared. He needed more ships to transport troops and was expecting the arrival of another French division. When it did not appear, Rochambeau sent his son, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, back to France in October to find out what had happened. Although he would be criticized for keeping his troops bottled up at Newport, Rochambeau would not abandon the French ships. He knew that their presence kept the British army under General Henry Clinton contained at New York and the British navy in check on the coast. British encroachments in Virginia during the fall of 1780 forced the state to issue a plea for assistance, and Washington responded by sending 1,000 men under Lafayette. Rochambeau’s son returned in early May 1781 with replacements for the infantry, 6 million livres for the Americans, and a private message for Rochambeau saying that a fleet under Admiral de Grasse would be available for an operation in July or August. Rochambeau met with Washington in late May. Although he yielded again to another plan to take New York, he urged Washington to give particular thought to Virginia. On his own initiative, Rochambeau then wrote Grasse that the southwesterly winds and Virginia’s distress might suggest the Chesapeake Bay as his destination, for it was there that he could be of the greatest service. Grasse’s reply to Rochambeau arrived on August 14. He was sailing to the Chesapeake, “as you suggested,” with twenty-five to twenty-nine ships and 3,000 troops. This news at first created a dilemma for Washington. The French navy had not always been reliable, but he realized, as did Rochambeau, that a strong naval force was necessary for a successful outcome. General Charles Cornwallis refused to attend the official surrender after
the Battle of Yorktown on October 19 and sent General Charles O’Hara in his stead. O’Hara moved down the line to Rochambeau and extended Cornwallis’s sword. Rochambeau refused to accept it, compelling O’Hara to cross the road and place the sword in the hands of Washington. Before Rochambeau departed America, Congress voted him and his troops the thanks of the nation and sent him back to France with two cannon captured from the British. In 1790, he was given command of the army in the North, but he retired in 1792. Arrested during the Terror, he narrowly escaped the guillotine. He retired with a pension from Napoléon. Marlena DeLong See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Washington, George. References Kennett, Lee. The French Forces in America, 1780–1783. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de. Memoirs of the Marshall Count De Rochambeau. Paris, 1838; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1971. Whitbridge, Arnold. Rochambeau. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
ROCHEFORT Strategically located 15 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean and protected by the islands of Oléron and Aix on the Charente River, the arsenal town of Rochefort played an important role in the exploration and colonization of French overseas territories for more than two centuries. Louis XIV, desperately in need of a sophisticated naval power, founded Rochefort under the counsel of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Colbert du Terron, cousin of Jean-Baptiste, along with
RODIN, AUGUSTE
the architects François Blondel and Nicolas de Clerville, were responsible for the construction of the town, the streets of which were laid out with mathematical and military precision. The first stones of the first building constructed in Rochefort, the 374-meter-long Corderie Royale (the royal rope-making factory), were laid in 1666, and by 1680 the arsenal was fully operational. Michel Bégon, appointed administrative officer of the town in 1688, made further embellishments and gave Rochefort much of its modern allure and classical urban architecture. The “begonia” flower, brought back from the Americas at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the French monk Charles Plumier, flourished in the Rochefort climate and owes its name to Michel Bégon, who helped finance several expeditions to overseas colonies. By the end of the seventeenth century, a total of fifty-three vessels had been constructed in Rochefort’s shipyards, which employed as many as 10,000 specialized workers out of a town population of 20,000. Neighboring forests supplied the raw materials for ship construction. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Rochefort remained the departure point for many explorers. Among the most famous ships built in Rochefort were Cavelier de La Salle’s Belle and Hermione. On March 20, 1780, the Marquis de Lafayette set sail from Rochefort aboard the frigate Hermione. He reached Boston on April 28 and quickly joined General Washington to announce the arrival of French backup. While in service to the Americans between March 1780 and February 1782, the Hermione captured nine enemy ships; took part in the Battle of Chesapeake on March 16, 1781; received the American Congress on board on May
1005
4, 1781; and fired 509 cannonballs against six English vessels at the Battle of Louisbourg on July 21, 1781. Under the direction of the Hermione-Lafayette association, reconstruction of an exact replica of the vessel began in Rochefort in the 1990s with the intention of reenacting the crossing of the Atlantic upon its completion. Nineteenth-century Rochefort became famous for its thermal waters and was also home to Pierre Loti, the French writer, explorer, and marine officer. The coming of the steamship era announced Rochefort’s decline and led to the naval dockyard’s closing in 1927. Burned by the Germans in 1944, the Corderie Royale was restored in the 1980s. Through efforts to revive Rochefort’s maritime identity, the Corderie Royale reopened in 1985 and houses the International Center for the Sea. Rochefort was also the site of Jacques Demy’s 1966 musical film, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/ The Girls of Rochefort, starring Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorléac. Maureen Waters See also: Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Demy, Jacques; Deneuve, Catherine; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de Sieur; Lafayette, Marquis de; Washington, George; World War II. References Acerra, Martine. Rochefort et la construction navale française, 1661–1815. Paris: Librairie de l’Inde, 1993. Piganeau, Didier. Le Pays Rochefortais. Martel: Editions du Laquet, 2001.
RODIN, AUGUSTE (1840–1917) Born in Paris, Auguste Rodin was the most creative sculptor of the late nineteenth century. He began sculpting in the early 1860s but did not receive recognition
1006
RODIN, AUGUSTE
Rodin’s The Thinker rests in the gardens of the Rodin Museum on the grounds of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Philadelphia Museum of Art/Corbis)
until 1875, when a bust was accepted for exhibit at the Paris Salon. Five years later, Rodin received a commission from the French government to sculpt a decorative portal for a planned museum of decorative arts; The Gates of Hell, as the elaborately decorated doors came to be known, dominated his work, made his reputation as a provocative yet difficult artist, and haunted his life. He received other major public commissions, such as The Burghers of Calais (1884) and Monument to Honoré de Balzac (1891), but he is perhaps best known today for The Thinker and his sexually charged The Kiss. Interest in Rodin’s work was intense in the United States. Rodin’s sculpture was first exhibited in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In 1888, the Baltimore art agent George A. Lucas purchased Rodin’s bust of Saint John the Bap-
tist and soon afterward resold it to the New York collector Samuel P. Avery. In 1891, Montrealer George A. Drummond became the first Canadian to order a Rodin sculpture, Three Sirens, in marble—a daring purchase given the Victorian morality of most North Americans. Many collectors avoided the problem: they hired Rodin to carve their portraits rather than purchase his mythological figures. The Chicagoan Arthur Jerome Eddy was the first to pose, in 1898, followed by Mrs. Potter Palmer and Joseph Pulitzer. American women played a special role in the promotion of Rodin’s art. Sara Hallowell assisted in bringing Rodin’s sculpture to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The modern dancer Loie Fuller organized his first substantial showing in the United States at the National Arts Club of New York in 1903 and introduced him to two major West Coast collectors, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels of San Francisco and Samuel Hill of Portland, Oregon. In 1912, at the initiative of the Comité France-Amérique (founded in 1909 to encourage economic, intellectual, and artistic ties between France and the Americas), Rodin’s relief La France was incorporated into the base of the monument to Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec. Several years later, the French government gave another cast of it for permanent display in Canada’s House of Commons, thereby underscoring the historic French presence in the Americas. Rodin did not receive public commissions because of his anathema for conveying accurate likenesses in statuary. Such was the general complaint about the monument in Buenos Aires commissioned in 1894 by Argentina to honor its former president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Ilene Susan Fort
ROMAINS, JULES See also: Sculpture. References Butler, Ruth. “Rodin and His American Collectors.” The Documented Image: Visions in Art History. Ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987: 87–110. ———. “Teaching Americans about Sculpture.” Rodin the Shape of Genius. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993: 398–417. Fort, Ilene Susan. “The Cult of Rodin and the Birth of Modernism in America.” The Figure in American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with University of Washington Press, 1995: 22–53. Selz, Peter. “Postscript: Rodin and America.” Rodin. Ed. Albert E. Elsen. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963: 190–203.
ROMAINS, JULES (1885–1972) French writer, founder of Unanimism, who visited America on several occasions and wrote positively about the new continent, born in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, France, in 1885; died in Paris in 1972. Despite a disappointing first visit to New York, which Romains described as dehumanized, and in spite of criticisms regarding aspects of American policies or of American life such as puritanism, Romains celebrated America’s big cities, landscape, democracy, and its key role as a leader of the free world. Romains first came to the United States in 1924 and returned seven times between 1936 and 1962. He went into exile in New York between 1940 and 1941 after Germany invaded France. Reflections on the United States can be found in his fictional work (Salsette découvre l’Amérique/
1007
Salsette Discovers America), in his essays (for example, “Visite aux Américains” or “Passager de cette planète où allons-nous/Passengers of This Planet Where Are We Heading”), as well as the chronicles he wrote for the French newspaper L’Aurore from 1953 onward in which he regularly commented on American policies. Romains was impressed first by the big cities, in particular New York. The energetic and joyful crowd of Times Square, Coney Island, or 42nd Street, where people of all classes joined in the celebration of city life, was a perfect illustration of Unanimism, that is, the presence of a collective soul linking the individual to a group, and the sign of the vitality of U.S. democracy. Second, he saw in the technological advancements of the United States—for example, skyscrapers and trains—the supreme achievement of man’s desire and capacity to shape the world, or, as he put it, man’s Promethean spirit. Third, the landscape thrilled him because of its seemingly neverending promises, as its immensity proclaimed that a better life was always possible elsewhere. Moreover, the transformation of this huge territory into one nation fascinated this man who fought throughout his life for a united Europe. Romains, however, was less impressed by the American people. He described them as “tortured” souls, never entirely happy, prone to bouts of anxiety and sadness, unable to communicate with each other, and afflicted by masochistic selfcriticism and hypocrisy. These characteristics were explained by the immensity and monotony of the landscape and the ensuing feeling of instability and nomadism; by puritanism, as Romains experienced in the Prohibition era; and by the inferiority complex Europeans inspire in Americans.
1008
RONFARD, JEAN-PIERRE
Despite these faults, Romains remained extremely sympathetic toward the American way of life, heralding it as an alternative to the Soviet model because the United States was not only a land of freedom and democracy but its capitalism had Socialist potential. Indeed, the generalization of mass production had reduced inequalities, and with the creation of large companies and their thousands of shareholders, collective profit had become paramount. This is why Jules Romains saw the United States as the leader in the preservation of a free world against Communism. Although critical of some U.S. policies, such as the role of the United States in the Suez crisis of 1956, he always maintained a pro-Atlantic stance, criticizing Charles de Gaulle’s policies during the 1960s, in particular France’s withdrawal from NATO, and reminding his French audience of their debt of gratitude to the United States. Ariane Bogain See also: Gaulle, General Charles de; NATO. References Kornel, Huvos. Le “Mirage Americain” dans l’Oeuvre de Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, André Maurois, Jacques Maritain et Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Didier, 1972. Rony, Olivier. Jules Romains ou l’Appel au Monde. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1993.
RONFARD, JEAN-PIERRE (1929–2003) Playwright, director, actor, and lecturer, born in France in 1929. It was in France that Ronfard had his first experience of the theater, before sitting the agrégation examinations in gram-
mar and leaving to teach in, among other places, Algeria. In 1960, he was offered the post of director of the French section of the Ecole Nationale de Théâtre, which had just been founded in Montreal. He held the post from 1960 to 1965 and started working as a metteur en scène, both within the institution and elsewhere. Toward the end of the 1960s, he became secretarygeneral of the Théâtre du nouveau monde, where he directed, in 1972, Claude Gavreau’s Les Oranges sont vertes, the production of which was to mark irreversibly the landscape of Quebec’s theater. In 1975, along with Robert Gravel and Pol Pelletier, he founded the Théâtre Expérimental de Montréal, the mandate of which was to explore the art of the theater in all its forms. From then on, his motto was to be “Institutional theater in order to live, experimental theater in order not to die.” In 1979, the Théâtre Expérimental de Montréal split into two distinct entities: the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes and the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental (NTE). It was during the period of hesitation between two sites of production that the idea of a performance that would defy everything Quebec theater took for granted took root within the NTE. Thus, in 1981, each of the six plays that was to form the Vie et mort du roi boîteux cycle was created, an event that culminated in 1982 with the staging of all six parts in sequence, beginning at ten in the morning and ending at one the following morning. The creation of Vie et mort du roi boîteux signaled the beginning of the total renewal of post-1980 referendum theater in Quebec. For Jean-Pierre Ronfard, it was the start of a cycle of adaptations and exploration of modern myths: Vie et mort, a
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.
variation on the works of Shakespeare; Don Quixote by Cervantes; Machiavelli’s Mandragora; Life Is a Dream and The Great Theater of the World by Calderón; and the Titanic, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao Tse-tung. At the end of the 1980s, another cycle appeared, a cycle of theatrical studies that aimed to isolate an element of the art of theater and to explore its limits: the necessity of the actor, in Les Objets parlent; the voice, in La Voix d’Orphée; the notion of the tragic, in Autour de Phèdre; and lighting, in Lumières. In 1994, with Robert Gravel, he wrote Tête à tête, in which the two creators take stock of their experimental research and that contains the following prophetic line: “Theater people of today get themselves blessed by the Pope or by the Governor General.” In fact, in 1999, Jean-Pierre Ronfard received the Prix du Gouverneur Général for his career, and, in the same year, he was awarded the Prix Denise-Pelletier. In 2000, he started another, this time historical, cycle with Alexis Martin, which gave rise to creations such as Transit Section 20, Hitler, and La Parade du temps qui passe. He died in September 2003, having just staged a production of Oedipus at Colonus that used the translation worked on by his wife, Marie Cardinal, in the last months of her life. Caroline Garand See also: Quebec; Theater. References Garand, Caroline. “Le Monologue et les formes discursives apparentées dans le théâtre de Jean-Pierre Ronfard.” PhD diss., Université Laval, 2001. Lévesque, Robert. Entretiens avec Jean-Pierre Ronfard. Montreal: Liber, 1993. Vigeant, Louise. “Le Travail de l’interprétance dans le texte spectaculaire/Lecture de Vie et mort du roi boîteux.” PhD diss., Université du Québec à Montréal, 1985.
1009
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D. (1882–1945) Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirtysecond president of the United States (1933–1945) and the only man to be elected to the office four times, was a key figure in the Allied leadership during World War II. Although he died before the war ended, he did survive to see France liberated in August 1944. The wartime relationship between Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill was one of the most fraught of the war, with many of de Gaulle’s actions infuriating Roosevelt to the extent that he recognized de Gaulle as the leader of France only in October 1944. Born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt had a privileged background that included trips to Europe as a child. He was educated in turn at Groton, Harvard University, and Columbia Law School. Unsatisfied by a law career, he ran as a Democrat in the 1910 New York State election. In victory, he came to the attention of Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, who, upon entering the White House in 1913, appointed Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt visited Europe during World War I and was appalled at the conditions he found at the front. FDR’s years of service as assistant secretary gave him administrative experience and a host of contacts in Washington, in the Democratic Party, and, through his attendance at the Versailles conference, in international diplomatic circles. During the 1920s and while recovering from an attack of polio in 1921—which left him permanently reliant on braces or a wheelchair— FDR would continue to support the Democratic Party, especially in New York. In 1928, he ran for the governorship of New
1010
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.
General Henri Giraud, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, and Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference. (Bettmann/Corbis)
York and won; he then embarked on a progressive agenda that provided the first state relief program to counter the Great Depression. With success in New York behind him, Roosevelt was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1932 and duly defeated Herbert Hoover. His New Deal program based on reform and relief for the American people was quickly put into operation. Although it took time to improve conditions, Roosevelt was able to instill an optimistic outlook through his “fireside” radio addresses to the nation. Despite ongoing hardships, Roosevelt was reelected in 1936. In foreign affairs, Roosevelt faced the rise of the fascist dictators in
Europe and Asia. Despite the constraints of neutrality legislation and having secured hemispheric solidarity within the Americas, by 1939 Roosevelt had determined that fascism must be defeated, but he did not want to commit American troops. With the French surrender and then the establishment of the Vichy regime, Roosevelt was concerned that the still intact French fleet could be used by the Germans. To pursue U.S. influence with the Vichy regime, Roosevelt appointed Admiral William Leahy as ambassador. This decision angered Charles de Gaulle, who was leading the Free French in London. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Roosevelt
ROSAY, FRANÇOISE
would lead the United States for the next three and a half years as the Allies fought to defeat fascism in Europe and the Japanese in the Far East. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, while recuperating in Warm Springs, Georgia, and within sight of the end of the European war. J. Simon Rofe See also: Gaulle, General Charles de; Wilson, Woodrow; World War I; World War II. References Burns, James M. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. Vol. 1, 1882–1940. New York: Harvest, 1963. Dallek, Robert. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Leuchtenburg, William E. Roosevelt and the New Deal. New York: Harpercollins, 1963.
ROSAY, FRANÇOISE (FRANÇOISE BANDY DE NADÈCHE) (1891–1974) French stage and screen actress whose prolific and remarkable career spanned six decades. Françoise Rosay initially trained as an opera singer at the Conservatoire in Paris, where she also studied acting, making her stage debut in 1908. She soon became an acclaimed presence on the French stage, which was also the breeding ground for the new emerging medium of film. Rosay made the transition to the screen in 1913, when silent cinema was still considered to be just filmed theater. Her interest in cinema was also influenced by her marriage in 1917 to the Belgian director Jacques Feyder (1885–1948). After a stab at stage acting himself, Feyder started directing films in 1916; he became one of the foremost directors during the 1920s, making silents,
1011
including multilanguage versions, in European countries and the United States. Françoise Rosay, who played in many of her husband’s films, gradually retired from the stage and followed Feyder in his filmic ventures around the world. With the advent of sound technologies, European and American studios competed fiercely to retain their grasp on the international market, initially by making multilanguage versions. Feyder was sent to the United States in 1928 to make French-language versions; Rosay went along with him, working on many French versions herself. As Rosay recalls in her autobiography, the Feyders were at the center of the so-called French colony in 1920s Hollywood, itself part of the European colony, and there they mixed with such luminaries as Charles Boyer, André Luguet, Claude Autant-Lara, Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Michael Korda, and Alexander Korda. Rosay settled well in Hollywood, and Feyder wrote in his memoirs that Hollywood revealed Françoise Rosay as a great actress and made her a star. Yet, despite some success in Hollywood—such as The Kiss (1929), featuring Greta Garbo for the first time on the American screen—Feyder could not find much scope beyond French versions and felt limited, so the Feyders returned to France in 1931. It was in France during the 1930s that Rosay’s career blossomed alongside her husband’s with films such as Le Grand Jeu (1934), Pension Mimosas (1934), and La Kermesse héroïque/Carnival in Flanders (1935). Other directors were impressed by the strong presence of Rosay’s characterizations, among them Marcel Carné (Jenny, 1936; Drôle de Drame/ Bizarre, Bizarre, 1937) and Julien Duvivier (Un Carnet de bal/Dance Program, 1937).
1012
ROUCH, JEAN
The Feyders spent the war years in Switzerland and the United Kingdom. After Feyder’s death, Rosay went on enjoying a successful international screen career as a character actress until the mid-1970s, working with many of the greatest actors and directors in some 100 films in Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and the United States (Maria Chapdelaine/The Naked Heart, Marc Allégret, 1949; September Affair, William Dieterle, 1951; L’Auberge rouge/The Red Inn, Claude Autant-Lara, 1951; The 13th Letter, Otto Preminger, 1951; Le Cave se rebiffe/The Counterfeiters of Paris, Gilles Grangier, 1961; The Longest Day, Ken Annakin, 1962; and La 25ème Heure/The 25th Hour, Henri Verneuil, 1967). Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Boyer, Charles; Chevalier, Maurice; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Colbert, Claudette; Dalio, Marcel; Darrieux, Danielle; Duvivier, Julien; Florey, Robert; Hollywood’s Paris; Jouvet, Louis; Maria Chapdelaine; Morgan, Michèle; Tourneur, Maurice. References Feyder, Jacques, and Françoise Rosay. Le Cinéma notre métier. Vésenaz-Genève: Editions Cailler, 1946. Rosay, Françoise. La Traversée d’une vie. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1974.
ROUCH, JEAN (1917–2004) French filmmaker, ethnographer, and pioneer of “direct cinema” methods and the cinéma vérité style. Jean Rouch was born in Paris in 1917, and, after taking a degree in literature, he qualified as a civil engineer in the “Ponts et chaussées.” In 1941, he took up a post on
a construction project in West Africa and became increasingly interested in African culture. Inspired from an early age by documentary filmmaking, in particular Robert Flaherty’s seminal Nanook of the North (1922), Rouch made his first film, Au Pays des mages noirs (“In the Country of Black Magicicans”), in 1947. This short film about a canoe expedition came to attention in France through its distribution as a companion piece to Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), a dark, ethnographically aware tale of an isolated fishing community. By 1949, Rouch’s work was exhibited and awarded at the Biarritz “Festival du film maudit” and was highly praised by the young Cahiers du Cinéma critics (including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette) who attended the event. In 1957, Les Maîtres fous (1955) was a controversial choice for the Prix de Venise, but confirmed the importance of Rouch as a innovator in matters of cinematography and enthnographic investigation. The film depicts a frenetic ritual of bodily possession and uses unmediated violent performance as a disturbing critique of colonialist politics in particular and of Western society in general. The authentic ceremony sees the possessed natives take on the symbolic role of Western colonials and enact the ritual of their own oppression by crazed masters. The film inspired not only filmmakers but also dramatists such as Jean Genet, whose Les Nègres/The Blacks (1958) evoked a similar ritualistic ceremony of colonialist oppression and native transgression. Rouch, in turn, found himself inspired by Genet’s work and reworked the problem of racial identity in his first feature-length film, Moi, un noir/I, A Negro (1958), the recipient of the 1958 Prix Louis Delluc. The
ROUCH, JEAN
film, with its postproduction narration and critique of Western consumerism (the three African leads use the pseudonyms Eddie Constantine, Edward G. Robinson, and Tarzan), was hailed as a landmark film by the Cahiers group, and Godard in particular rejoiced in its assault on the conventions and priorities of contemporary French filmmaking. Rouch was one of the most outwardlooking European filmmakers of his generation, and his early postcolonial sensibilities prefigured the cultural changes about to be negotiated by the wider French population. At the height of the Algerian conflict, Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin turned their attention inward to contemporary France with the documentary Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (1961). The film, which received the International Critics Award at Cannes in 1961, was a sociological investigation of French life in the summer of 1960, and it quickly became a model of the cinéma vérité genre. Its use of a 16mm handheld camera, synchronized sound, location shooting, and improvised interviews was seen as pioneering by cinema critics; the film stands today as a document not only to the creativity enabled by new cinematic technologies in the early 1960s but also to the mood of French society on the cusp of decolonization. The Québécois cinematographer Michel Brault, whom Rouch had met at a seminar on the ethnographic filmmaker Robert Flaherty in California in 1959, collaborated on the production, as did the new wave favorite, Raoul Coutard. Indeed, Rouch’s collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada was extensive because he drew on the achievements of “direct cinema” in a mutual cross-
1013
fertilization. He also collaborated with Claude Jutra and Jacques Godbout (on a short film Rose et Landry, in 1963) and contributed a section to a 1966 NFB documentary on adolescents, La Fleur de l’âge/That Tender Age. Rouch was later to cement his productive relationship with the new wave directors through his contribution of a short fiction, Gare du Nord, to the collaborative Paris vu par . . ./Six in Paris (1965). Rouch’s episode was again a tour de force of cinéma vérité techniques, his story told in one mobile continuous take and overlaid with a rich soundtrack of extraneous Parisian sounds. Rouch never lost interest in African culture, filming in Senegal, Mali, and Ghana as well as Niger, and until his death he continued to record and investigate indigenous cultures and their native forms of expression. No subsequent film achieved the recognition of the earlier work, but his project remained consistent; he believed in the power of the camera to record the truth of what it found and to undermine the objectifying gaze of the “civilized other” behind the lens. During his career he held administrative positions at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (1966–1986) and at the Cinémathèque française, where he was general secretary (1985–1986) and later president (1987– 1991). He was the founder of the Comité du film ethnographique at the Musée de l’homme, and at the time of his death he was an active opponent of the proposed breakup of the museum’s collections. Rouch had an indefatigable passion for cinema, and was the creative force behind more than 120 films. He died in a car crash in Niger. Sue Harris
1014
ROUMAIN, JACQUES
See also: Brault, Michel; Cahiers du cinéma; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Constantine, Eddie; Godard, Jean-Luc; Godbout, Jacques; Jutra, Claude; Truffaut, François. References Feld, Steven, ed. Cine-Ethnography (Visible Evidence): Jean Rouch. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Stoller, Paul. The Cinematic Griot: Ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
ROUMAIN, JACQUES (1907–1945) Haitian writer, intellectual, and politician. Like Che Guevara in Cuba, or Aimé Césaire in Martinique, Jacques Roumain has become an icon of resistance, an enduring reference point for subsequent generations of Haitian intellectuals. Roumain was born into a Haitian middle class that was at once insular, and yet also dismissive of the plight of its mainly rural poor. His early education took him from Port-au-Prince to Switzerland. After traveling in Germany, England, and France, he returned to Haiti in 1927, only to find his homeland still under the yoke of the American occupation (1915–1934). He soon became involved in the activities of the nascent indigenist movement, the broad aim of which was to revalorize traditional culture in the face of creeping Americanization. Roumain was one of the founders of the Revue indigène, contributing poems, short stories, and translations from Spanish and German. Roumain had a tempestuous relationship with the Haitian authorities. He periodically held government posts, though he was imprisoned several times, notably three years for political agitation from 1934 to 1937 (he had founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934). On his release, he
spent a year in Belgium before enrolling at the Institut d’Ethnologie at the Sorbonne, where he continued to collaborate with various literary and political reviews. In 1939, he was forced to leave Paris for New York, where he continued his studies and literary work at Columbia University. After spending time in Martinique and Havana, Roumain was able to end his exile because of an improvement in the political climate; he returned to Haiti in 1941, where he founded the Bureau d’Ethnologie, and, once more in favor, he was named Haitian chargé d’affaires for Mexico. His premature death in 1945 robbed his country of its most able and passionate son. Roumain’s best-known work, Gouverneurs de la rosée/Masters of the Dew (1944), was published posthumously and remains a stirring creolized parable of peasant solidarity and the potential for political change through a fusion of Marxist collectivism and traditional practices. Most critical work on Roumain has focused on this roman paysan and neglected his earlier prose works such as La Proie et l’ombre (“The Prey and the Shadow,” 1930), La Montagne ensorcélée (“The Bewitched Mountain,” 1931), and Les Fantoches (“The Puppets,” 1931). Also, his poetry has been undervalued, which is unfortunate because poems such as “Bois d’ébène”/“Ebony Wood” (1945) offer a more internationalist vision of the black struggle. It is ultimately this vision, and its explicit break with Haitian nationalism and indigenism, that have been Roumain’s most important legacies. Those who followed immediately, such as René Depestre and Jacques-Stephen Alexis, were forever freed from the imperative to celebrate folklore, blackness, and Haitianity in a narrow, nationalistic sense. Rou-
ROY, GABRIELLE
main opened up Haiti to the world outside, and the world outside to Haiti. Martin Munro See also: Alexis, Jacques-Stephen; Césaire, Aimé; Depestre, René; Haiti. References Dash, J. Michael. Literature and Ideology in Haiti, 1915–1961. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981. Dorsinville, Roger. Jacques Roumain. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981. Ormerod, Beverly. An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel. London: Heinemann, 1985. Souffrant, Claude. Une Négritude socialiste: religion et développement chez J. Roumain, J. S. Alexis et L. Hughes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1978.
ROY, GABRIELLE (1909–1983) First Canadian author to be awarded a major French literary prize. In 1947, her first novel, Bonheur d’occasion/The Tin Flute (1945), won the Prix Femina. Her later works, such as La Petite Poule d’eau/Where Nests the Water Hen (1950), Alexandre Chenevert/The Cashier (1954), Rue Deschambault/Street of Riches (1955), La Montagne secrète/The Hidden Mountain (1961), and La Rivière sans repos/Windflower (1970), were much less successful in France. However, as the author of autobiographical work, children’s writing, essays, and fiction set throughout Canada, she won numerous literary awards in her native land. Born in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, on March 22, 1909, Roy was brought up as part of a small francophone minority in the prairies, an area of considerable ethnic diversity settled by successive waves of immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe. Her education and culture were bilingual, yet, after initial hesitation, she opted to
1015
write in French, her works subsequently being translated into English for her Anglo-Canadian readership. After teacher training, Roy worked as a schoolmistress in Manitoba; she later took leave from her teaching post to travel in Europe, where she had planned to train as an actress. Never again did she return to live in Manitoba. In Europe, she discovered that her vocation was not for the theater, but for literature. On her return to Canada in 1939, Roy became a freelance journalist in Montreal, and it was in the course of journalistic investigation that she discovered the subject of her successful first novel, life in the working-class francophone district of Saint-Henri, Montreal. Not only did the success of her first novel mark a turning point in Roy’s own life, enabling her to become a full-time writer, it is also frequently taken as signaling a major development in francophone literature in Quebec, a shift toward urban settings and the exploration of the consequences of colonialism and capitalism. Her later works became increasingly less concerned with sociopolitical realities, but she retained a strong interest in voicing the experience of the marginal, the oppressed, and the excluded, including immigrant figures. Roy married in 1947 and returned with her husband, Marcel Carbotte, a doctor, to spend another three years in France. In 1950, the couple returned to Montreal; in 1952, they moved to Quebec City. Perhaps as a consequence of her Manitoban years and the five years spent in Europe, Roy never identified fully with Quebec, despite its being her home for the second half of her life. At heart a Federalist, she was hostile to the separatism espoused by so many Quebec writers. Gabrielle Roy died
1016
RUBBER
on July 13, 1983, in Quebec City. Since her death, some of her works have been published posthumously, as have her correspondence and new editions of the fiction. In Canada she remains one of a limited number of francophone writers who are read and studied by francophone and anglophone readers alike. Rosemary Chapman See also: Language; Manitoba; Quebec. References Ricard, François. Gabrielle Roy: une vie. Montreal: Boréal, 1996. Roy, Gabrielle. La Détresse et l’enchantement. Montreal: Boréal, 1984. Saint-Martin, Lori. Lectures contemporaines de Gabrielle Roy: Bibliographie analytique des études critiques (1978–97). Montreal: Boréal, 1998.
RUBBER France played a crucial role in stimulating demand for rubber in Europe in the eighteenth century and went on to be a significant force in trading rubber across the Atlantic, particularly in the nineteenth century. Rubber is the natural product of various tropical trees and became in the nineteenth century a crucial material in numerous significant industries, including transport, electricity, and industrial machinery. The commodity generated a global trade in transporting rubber from centers of production to those of its use. Production in France’s own colonies in the Americas remained small. Nevertheless, there was an important French Atlantic trade in rubber from other parts of Central and South America and from French West Africa. The importance of rubber on French and francophone transatlantic trade routes declined as the rise of Asian rubber production in the twentieth century
shifted the global rubber trade to the Indian Ocean. The nature of the rubber trade of the French Atlantic altered, and manufactures were exported in both directions. France is a major global exporter of tires and has been a significant consumer of synthetic rubber from the United States since the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, France was itself exporting synthetic rubber westward across the Atlantic to manufacturers in the Americas. Rubber is present in varying quantities in latex, a substance produced by thousands of plant species throughout the world. Several species indigenous to the Americas produce the most rubber-rich latex. Rubber was familiar to the preColumbian inhabitants of much of Central and northern South America, and rubberyielding trees grow wild in several francophone areas. Europeans first saw rubber on Columbus’s second voyage to Hispaniola in 1493, where the local Arawak Amerindians used it to make balls for games. However, rubber was not immediately brought into European trade; during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European merchants and customers remained unconvinced that rubber had any uses that would justify the costs of transporting it across the Atlantic. Although present in the early modern period in the French part of the island, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), there is no evidence that rubber was exported before or after Spain ceded the territory to France in 1697. Instead, three French investigators— the geographer Charles-Marie de La Condamine, the engineer François Fresneau, and the botanist Jean-Baptiste FuséeAublet—were responsible for introducing rubber to European scientific and commercial audiences. In 1735, La Condamine
RUBBER
1017
The Michelin rubber factory in Clermont-Ferrand, France. (Paul Almasy/Corbis)
was sent to Ecuador by the Académie des Sciences in Paris as part of a geodesic expedition to measure the curvature of the Earth. Between 1736 and 1751, La Condamine wrote three reports discussing rubber in Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil and the possibility of producing rubber from trees in French Guiana. Unlike previous authors, he drew attention to rubber’s elasticity, a property that rubber possesses more than other naturally occurring materials, and this abruptly made rubber interesting
to manufacturers and scientists alike. François Fresneau then conducted research that made a European rubber manufacturing industry possible. La Condamine had met Fresneau in Cayenne in French Guiana in 1744, by which time Fresneau was already conducting rubber investigations. When Fresneau located the Brazilian rubber tree on the Guianese border in 1748, he brought back extensive supplies to France for experiment. By 1763, Fresneau had realized that rubber was soluble
1018
RUBBER
in turpentine, a discovery for which two other French researchers took the credit. Although it came out of the tree in a liquid state, rubber had to be dried and treated to prevent it from decaying. Finding a solvent allowed rubber to be transported in dried form and then redissolved for use in Europe. In 1775, Aublet became the first European to provide a detailed botanical description of a rubber plant. Earlier authors had given some details, but Aublet was the first botanist to give a full description in the new Linnaean style. He had seen the Guianese rubber plant, which he called Hevea guianensis, a different species from the Brazilian plant Fresneau had observed. Botanical classification of this type paved the way for scientists to identify rubber plants and bring them into cultivation. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some rubber was exported from Guiana. Despite reports recommending extended exploitation of Guiana’s rubber reserves, and despite the importance of the French manufacturing industry, Guiana never took a substantial proportion of the global rubber trade. Brazil, with its huge natural supply of the best-quality wild rubber and easy trading links down the Amazon, was the world’s dominant supplier of rubber in the nineteenth century. The government of French Guiana focused not on the wild rubber of the Tumuc-Humac foothills but instead used convict labor from Maroni and other camps to extract a more conveniently located material, balata, which became a mainstay of the Guianese economy. Balata is chemically similar to rubber but is not elastic. It was used primarily to insulate electrical and telegraph cabling and remained a major export for Guiana until the development of synthetic substitutes in the twentieth century. As de-
mand for rubber rose in the later nineteenth century, there was a rush to collect rubber from dozens of species across the world, extending to almost every tropical colony. By 1900, several species had been introduced to Martinique to supplement the island’s low-quality indigenous rubber plants. However, no island in the Caribbean, including the French Antilles, ever achieved a rubber export trade. In the twentieth century, prices fell after a massive acceleration in global cultivation and supply outside the Atlantic world. From the 1920s, almost all the world’s natural rubber was grown on plantations, mostly in Asia. Rubber is one of few flexible plastics to be found in nature, and it has been used in a wide variety of industrial and consumer applications. After Fresneau’s experiments, French manufacturers rapidly developed new applications for rubber, particularly in medical goods, laboratory equipment, and ball and balloon manufacture. By the midnineteenth century, France fell behind other industrialized countries in rubber innovation. During the twentieth century, rubber faced increased competition from other plastics and was increasingly used only in applications that required elasticity. The most important of these was in tires, which by World War I had become a global industry. In 1895, the French manufacturers André and Edouard Michelin, the heirs to a crumbling rubber business, became the first people to put rubber tires on a car. This innovation rejuvenated French rubber manufacturing, and the Michelin brothers exported tires all over the world, including across the Atlantic. Wartime shortages of natural rubber, for Germany in World War I and for the Allies in World War II, produced the political will to devise a means to synthesize rubber, and improving indus-
RUIZ, RAÚL
trial and organic chemistry techniques made that possible. From the 1950s, synthetic rubber began to erode markets for natural rubber. In the 1960s, France became a major synthetic rubber manufacturer, producing around 5 percent of the world’s supply for much of the later twentieth century. Yet although rubber remains an important industry in francophone areas on both sides of the Atlantic, it is no longer an industry consolidating French Atlantic links, nor indeed one with a uniquely transatlantic dimension. Emma G. Reisz See also: Automobiles; Brazil; La Condamine, Charles-Marie de; Guiana; Haiti; Martinique; Michelin; Santo Domingo; World War I; World War II. References Barlow, Colin, Sisira Jayasuriya, and C. Suan Tan. The World Rubber Industry. London: Routledge, 1994. Chasseloup-Laubat, François de. François Fresneau, Seigneur de la Gataudière, Père du Caoutchouc. Paris: Plon, 1942. Jumelle, Henri. Les Plantes à caoutchouc et à gutta dans les colonies françaises. Paris: Augustin Challamel, 1898. McFadyean, Andrew, ed. The History of Rubber Regulation, 1934–1943. London: Allen and Unwin, 1944.
RUIZ, RAÚL (1941–) One of the most versatile and innovative filmmakers in French cinema, Chileanborn Raúl Ruiz began his career as an avant-garde playwright during the 1950s. The successful release of his first feature, Tres Tristes Tigres (“Three Sad Tigers,” 1968), gained him an instant reputation among the most significant Chilean directors, following only two other short productions (La Maleta, 1960, and Le Retour, 1964). A committed left-wing author, Ruiz
1019
depicted the events that led to the election of Salvador Allende’s Marxist government in his second feature, Que Hacer? (“What to Do?” 1970), which he codirected and scripted. Forced into exile after the fascist coup of 1973, Ruiz settled in France, where he completed an experimental, César-winning short film, Colloque de chiens/Dogs’ Dialogue (1978), and became director of the Maison de la Culture of Le Havre. The film foreshadowed Ruiz’s distinctive style and iconoclastic approach to filmmaking in its ingenious combination of still photographs and moving images, the use of voice-over narrative, and the parodic references to Latin American photonovels. His work later prompted comparisons with Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, and Buñuel. Rising to international prominence with L’Hypothèse du tableau volé/The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978), an experimental black-and-white feature adapted from a novel by Pierre Klossowski, Ruiz pursued his exploration of still and moving images by re-creating nineteenthcentury paintings with live actors and real locations within a gripping mystery story. Several other typically unconventional adaptations of famous literary works have since consolidated Ruiz’s reputation worldwide: Bérénice (1984), Treasure Island (1985), Richard III (1986), and A TV Dante (1993), an adaptation of six cantos of the Inferno for Channel 4). The latest in this series, Time Regained (2000), featuring a star-studded cast (John Malkovich, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, Vincent Perez), won international critical acclaim and was in the official selection at Cannes. In 1990, Ruiz held a teaching position at Harvard and presented his installation, titled The Expulsion of the Moors, at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art.
1020
RUIZ, RAÚL
His first American feature, The Golden Boat (1990), shot in New York and its environs, displayed Ruiz’s characteristic use of labyrinthine narratives and alternating color and black-and-white images as part of a visually startling meditation on violence, central conflict theory, and American values. Since 1990, Ruiz has returned to Chile many times and has completed several productions there, among them the remake of one of his earlier features, Palomita Blanca (1993). Two other remakes, Elle (1995), a remake of Buñuel’s El, and A Propos de Nice (a tribute to the eponymous avant-garde film by Jean Vigo), highlighted some of the recurrent sources of inspiration and aesthetic affinities that have constantly informed Raúl Ruiz’s work. During the 1990s, the perfect blend of surreal elements and heavily textured, baroque imagery, as well as the combination of sudden temporal shifts, bewildering point-of-view shots, and dazzling colors, became a trademark of Ruiz’s experimental reshaping of film narrative. His most re-
cent films include Les Ames fortes/Savage Souls (2001), Ce jour-là/That Day (2003), Une Place parmi les vivants (“A Place among the Living,” 2003), and Vertige de la Page Blanche (“Vertigo of the Blank Page,” 2003). Three Lives and Only One Death (1996), the last film to feature Marcello Mastroianni, adopted the form of a biographical triptych, was deftly handled by the master of multiple narratives, and once again confirmed Ruiz’s widely acknowledged contribution, alongside directors such as David Lynch and Godard, to evolving postmodern filming technique since the 1970s. Ramona Fotiade
See also: Avant-gardes; Chile; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Deneuve, Catherine; Godard, Jean-Luc. References Pick, Zuzana M. The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema. Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1995.
S SÁBATO, ERNESTO (1911–) Argentinean writer, born in Rosario in 1911. It is in both Sábato’s incarnations as a scientist and as a writer that he has been influenced by and has in turn influenced French culture. Sábato lived and worked in Paris at various points in his life. As a young and outspoken Communist, chastised for questioning the party line on historical materialism and fearful of what an impending trip to Moscow may hold for him, Sábato then abandoned a Communist Party Congress in Brussels and fled to Paris in 1934. Sábato lived in Paris once again in 1938, having received a scholarship to carry out research at the Juliot-Curie Laboratory. In 1947, Sábato found himself fleeing to Paris again, having reneged on his contract with UNESCO after only two months at the post. It was during this period that he began to formulate his ideas for his best-known work, The Tunnel/El Túnel—an exploratory journey, which continues in subsequent works, into the theme of the outsider. Here Sábato posits the notion of man as essentially alone and isolated in society, a theory that has disastrous consequences when followed to its logical conclusion by the solipsistic protagonist of The Tunnel.
During his various sojourns in Paris, Sábato moved in artistic and literary circles, drinking at Aux Deux Magots and Le Dôme with friends from the surrealist movement, including André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Matta. His literary connections stood him in good stead when in 1949 Sábato was unable to find a publisher in Argentina willing to publish The Tunnel (Sur, Buenos Aires, 1948). He was resigned to having it serialized in Sur, the Argentinean literary review edited by his friend Victoria Ocampo and based on La Nouvelle Revue Française, when he received a letter from Albert Camus praising the novel and undertaking to recommend it to the French publishing house, Gallimard, for translation and publication. The success of The Tunnel marked the end of Sábato’s career as a scientist and the beginning of his career as an author. Sábato went on to write On Heroes and Tombs (1961) and Abaddón el Exterminador (1974)—translated as The Angel of Darkness—which won a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres for best foreign novel published in France. As well as enjoying a successful career as a novelist, Sábato is also an essayist. His first essay, One and the Universe (1945), was a rejection of science and
1021
1022
SAER, JUAN JOSE
rationalism. He also wrote Three Contemporary Approaches to Literature: RobbeGrillet, Borges and Sartre (1968), and Nunca Más (1985), a government-commissioned enquiry into the “disappeared” of Argentina’s “dirty war.” Sábato was awarded the Medici Prize (1977), the Cervantes Prize (1984), the XI International Menéndez-Pelayo Prize (1997), and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society (1989). Sábato received the French Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’honneur in 1979, and later, in 1987, François Mitterrand awarded him the Commandeur de l’Ordre de la Légion d’honneur. Scarlet Harris See also: Argentina; Breton, André; Camus, Albert; Mitterrand, François; Ocampo, Victoria; Péret, Benjamin. References Callan, Richard J. “Sábato’s Fiction: A Jungian Interpretation.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 51 (1974). Oberhelman, Harley Dean. Ernesto Sábato. Boston: Twayne, 1970.
SAER, JUAN JOSE (1937–) Argentinian writer, born in Serodino, Santa Fé province, and resident in Paris. His first texts appeared in the cultural supplement of the newspaper El Litoral, of which he was editor between 1956 and 1957. During that time, Saer took part in several local literary groups and, through his acquaintance with the poet Juan L. Ortíz, collaborated in Poesía Buenos Aires, a group of poets that renewed postmodernist poetic language. Saer also taught film at the Instituto de Cinematografía de Rosario, and before leaving for Europe in 1968 to
study film, he published several collections of short stories and novels: En la zona/In the Zone (1960), Responso/Prayer (1964), Palo y hueso/Sticks and Bones (1965), La vuelta completa/The Complete Turn (1966), Unidad de lugar/Unity of Place (1967), and Cicatrices/Scars (1969). Saer’s trajectory is atypical: he went directly from the province to Paris without passing through Buenos Aires, the center of cultural and literary legitimacy at the time. Although he settled in Paris, this experience was not viewed as a cultural initiation, as was so for many Argentine writers during the nineteenth century and well into the first half of the twentieth century, nor did his experience produce nostalgic aesthetic myths of Paris, as in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch. Saer’s relation to European and French cultures is complex. There is no reverence for European ideas in Saer, who rather questions the unity of so-called European culture. For him, the most significant writers of European modernity (Hölderlin, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Kafka, Celan, and Beckett) are not the representatives of cultural greatness or superiority, but rather evince a permanent conflict with the culture of their times that produces isolation, madness, and even suicide. This view that questions a monolithic, monumental, peaceful, and progressive vision of European culture also affects how Saer conceives his own literary production. He questions all forms of “Latin Americanism” that privilege an exoticist view (magical and marvelous realisms) and assert a European gaze on the Americas, as well as all forms of the “barroque” (the notion of a Latin American “permanent modernity” made up of the remains of European cul-
SAINT LAWRENCE RIVER
ture). His poetics (a “literature without attributes”) thus combines the formal rigor of modern narration with the perceptive intensity of poetic language. Saer’s narrative prose, as in Cicatrices (1969), El limonero real/The Real Paradise (1974), La mayor/A Major (1977), and Nobody Nothing Never (1980), can be situated in the context of the narrative avant-garde of the last century. He not only engages it in a productive dialogue but also solves some of its most pressing technical problems. The Witness (1983), a text that dialogues with the Chronicles of the Indies and other anthropological accounts, marks a turn in Saer’s conception of narrative fiction. This account of a sixteenth-century survivor who lives among cannibals for decades becomes a fable of both the primal scene of the River Plate area and of Saer’s own narrative project. Cicatrices, Nobody Nothing Never, Glosa/Gloss (1986), and Lo imborrable/The Unerasable (1993), being set at the time of Peronism, or during the “dirty war” of the 1970s, contain elements of the political novel. The Investigation (1995) revisits some of these issues by combining elements of the hard-boiled and the political novel and for the first time brings together Paris and the “zone,” the recurring setting of the area around the Paraná River characteristic of Saer’s fictional universe. El río sin orillas (1991) revisits the travelogues of nineteenth-century French and British travelers to the River Plate area as well as the genre known as the essay of national interpretation: it presents a personal account of Argentine culture that, at times, intersects with Saer’s own fictional prose and thus must be considered an auto-fiction. Gabriel Riera
1023
See also: Argentina; Cortázar, Julio. References Ezquerro, Milagros, ed. Rencontre avec Juan José Saer. Montpellier: CERS, 2002. Young, Richard, ed. Latin American Postmodernisms. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.
SAINT LAWRENCE RIVER The Saint Lawrence River has a double function. On the one hand, the fertile valley through which it flows constitutes the site of population and settling of the first French inhabitants of America, who settled on its banks according to a particular method of land division (the seigneurial system); this system consisted of long, slim strips of land at right angles to the river and thus ensured access for each occupant to the only means of communication that existed at the time. This river is also a place of passage that, thanks to its continuation via the Great Lakes, enables travelers to penetrate the heart of North America. Furthermore, the importance of its size and its geography has played a determining role in the history and economy of Canada, as well as in relations with its southern neighbor, the United States. The total length of the river, from its source in Lake Ontario to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence into which it empties, is 1,850 kilometers, whereas the MississippiMissouri system measures 6,200 kilometers, and the Mackenzie (including the Finlay River) measures 4,300 kilometers. If the entire Saint Lawrence River system is taken into consideration, adding the length of the Saint Lawrence itself to the lengths of the Great Lakes (from the tip of Lake Superior at Duluth to Lake Ontario
1024
SAINT LAWRENCE RIVER
at Kingston) and of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence (from Anticosti Island to Cabot Strait, which opens out onto the Atlantic), the combined length is 3,060 kilometers. The Saint Lawrence hydrographic basin is not the largest in its surface area of 1,400,000 square kilometers: that of the Mississippi-Missouri represents a surface area of 3,250,000 square kilometers, and that of the Mackenzie 1,820,000. Just as the length of the Saint Lawrence is impressive, so, too, is its width, 15 kilometers across downstream of the Island of Orleans (roughly 50 kilometers from Quebec City) and more than 100 kilometers between the town of Sept-îles and the Gaspé Peninsula. The river also includes some broader sections, which are considered lakes, most notably Lake SaintLouis and Lake Saint-François, near Montreal, and Lake Saint-Pierre, just upstream from the town of Trois-Rivières. The size of this expanse of water means that it includes a multitude of islands, including Wolfe Island at the source of the river; then, a few kilometers upstream, the Thousand Islands archipelago, which is a key tourist location; Montreal Island, which contains the city of the same name; the Island of Orleans, renowned as a holiday location and as the vegetable garden of Quebec City; and, at the mouth of the river in the gulf, Anticosti Island, which is 200 kilometers long and is a paradise for hunters. With a tide that reaches an amplitude of 4 to 6 meters at Quebec City, 600 kilometers from its mouth, and that can be felt as far as Trois-Rivières, 125 kilometers upstream from Quebec City, the river’s salt waters extend as far as the Island of Orleans. Emerging from the largest freshwater inland sea in the world, the Saint Lawrence has a huge flow, which increases along the
river’s length through tributaries: thus, although its average flow is 6, 800 cubic meters per second at Cornwall, 35 kilometers downstream from the border between the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, it increases to 8,500 at Montreal after having received the waters of the Ottawa River, the first and largest of its tributaries. With the combined waters of the Richelieu and the Saint-Maurice, the average flow rises to 10,000 at Quebec City, and it continues to grow with the contribution of other bodies of water, notably the famous Saguenay fjord. These natural conditions, which appear favorable to navigation, are nevertheless affected by various factors, most notably water currents, as well as the climate, which causes the waters to freeze during the winter months, thus markedly reducing navigation. A further important natural constraint is to be found in the difference in level between Lake Erie (174 meters above sea level) and the Saint Lawrence at Montreal (only 6 meters above sea level); this condition led to joint works carried out during the 1950s by the Saint Lawrence Seaway Authority. Even before Canada was discovered by the French explorer Jacques Cartier, the Saint Lawrence was already known to the Basques, who hunted whales there. Cartier himself, during his second attempt to find a passage to India, observed a coastal inlet that he named “the bay of Saint Lawrence.” It was August 10, 1535, the day of the feast of the martyr Saint Lawrence. The French colony founded in 1608 at Quebec offered, according to Samuel de Champlain, several advantages: the Saint Lawrence would offer the best chance of finding a route to Asia; settlers would be safer from European competition there; the area is easier to defend; settlers would benefit from the league
SAINT LAWRENCE RIVER
1025
Taking of Quebec by the British. The Saint Lawrence played a role in the political and military history of Canada, since it was via this body of water that the British army reached Quebec to lay siege to it and eventually conquer it in 1759. (Corbis)
of indigenous peoples allied to other nations living on the shores of an inland sea; and, finally, the fur trade was more profitable there than in Acadia. It was only after having sailed along the Atlantic coast and the length of the Saint Lawrence that the king’s cartographer reached this conclusion. Champlain pursued his exploration, notably by sailing up the Ottawa River as far as present-day Ottawa. He made an incursion to Georgian Bay, only to return to the Saint Lawrence close to its source in Lake Ontario, at the point where Fort Frontenac (present-day Kingston) was founded in 1673 during the rush of expeditions that led La Salle to the mouth of the Mississippi, thus opening an immense territory in the very heart of the North American continent to the French. Before Fort
Frontenac was founded to ensure a trading post, there were, of course, other settlements along the Saint Lawrence: TroisRivières, founded in 1634 at the mouth of the Saint-Maurice, and Montreal, in 1642, where the first rapids were located. The Saint Lawrence has also played a role in the political and military history of Canada because it was by way of this body of water that the British army reached Quebec to lay siege to it and eventually conquer it in 1759. When war broke out with the United States in 1812, the town of Kingston, already from 1783 an important Loyalist settlement, grew further in importance with the arrival of a British garrison and the development of the largest naval base in the Great Lakes. After resisting an American attack, Kingston was
1026
SAINT LAWRENCE RIVER
strengthened, between 1828 and 1836, by numerous military works, in particular the construction of Fort Henry. At this time, the empire constructed, at great cost, the famous Rideau Canal, which linked Kingston to Bytown (which would become Ottawa), thus enabling the British troops to provide supplies to the Canadian forces while remaining protected from American firepower. From its source at Lake Ontario to the forty-fifth parallel, the Saint Lawrence constituted at that time, and indeed still does today, the international frontier between the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York. In 1840, when London decided to link the provinces of Ontario and Quebec constitutionally, the canals reached a depth of 2.7 meters, and shortly after confederation in 1867, their depth was 4.7 meters. The Saint Lawrence has always played a crucial economic role for Canada and the northeast region of the United States; indeed, long before the modern transportation of petrol, minerals, and cereals, this artery was already used for fur trading in bark canoes. Then, and throughout the nineteenth century, the Saint Lawrence provided the transportation of timber, which represented Quebec’s principal export and had three distinct stages of exploitation: quartered timber, sawn timber, and pulp for producing paper. In the context of war in Europe, and with Bonaparte’s imposing a continental blockade, Great Britain found itself forced to turn to its main colony in the Americas for supplies of timber, particularly needed for naval construction. Thus, along the length of the Saint Lawrence’s main tributaries, large trees were felled, the trunks of which were then squared off and assembled into rafts that were floated to the Saint Lawrence, and then further along to
Quebec City where they were loaded onto ships bound for Britain. Later, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the sawnwood industry grew to meet the needs of the United States; once again, it was at the mouths of the main tributaries of the Saint Lawrence that the floating billets were recuperated and made into planks and beams and then transported by boat or by rail. At the end of the century, pulp for making paper was transported in the same way. The Saint Lawrence, combined with the Great Lakes, reached its full potential with the great projects of the 1950s; ships of 222.5 meters in length and 23.2 meters in breadth were able to sail along it thanks to the construction of fifteen locks, eight of which allowed ships to avoid the Niagara River by way of the Welland Canal for 42 kilometers. In 2003, and during the 273 days that the maritime routes were operational, almost 41 million tons of merchandise were transported, a drop of 1.3 percent compared to 2002. As with all great bodies of water, the economic exploitation of the Saint Lawrence is not without environmental problems; these have been highlighted by some ecological groups and recreational tourists who want inhabitants of the area to be granted access once again to the river for walking and bathing. Furthermore, these groups have denounced the poor conditions of the aquatic fauna, and in particular the diminution of the herd of beluga whales at the mouth of the Saguenay. It is also believed that excavating the bed of the river could have a negative effect. In recent years, opposition was voiced against a Quebec government project that aimed to explore the oil and gas potential of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Georges Labrecque
SAINT LOUIS See also: Acadia; Basques; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Cartier, Jacques; Champlain, Samuel de; Duluth; Fur Trade; Mississippi River; Montreal; Nova Scotia; Quebec; Quebec City; Timber. References Guay, Lorraine. A La Découverte des îles du Saint-Laurent. Quebec: Septentrion, 2003. Harris, Cole, et al. Historical Atlas of Canada. 3 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987–1998. Lasserre, Jean-Claude. Le Saint-Laurent: grande porte de l’Amérique. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1980.
SAINT LOUIS An American city situated on the western bank of the Mississippi River in the state of Missouri, Saint Louis has historically represented the gateway to the western United States. During the summer of 1763, the French company of Maxent, Laclede and Co. of New Orleans granted exclusive rights to the Indian trade on the Missouri and northern portion of the Mississippi rivers, sending agents Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau to the Illinois Country to establish a trading post. In February 1764, Chouteau and a party of men arrived at the site of Saint Louis and commenced the building of the first structures in the settlement, to which Laclede gave the name Saint Louis in honor of the French king, Louis XV, and the king’s patron, Saint Louis IX. Saint Louis did not remain a French outpost for long because French agents officially transferred control of Saint Louis as well as the rest of western Louisiana to Spain in the fall of 1764; this event occurred under the terms of the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, which the two nations had signed in 1762. The 1763 Treaty of Paris confirmed the transfer.
1027
Throughout its early history, Saint Louis acted as a meeting ground, bringing together various cultures through friendly as well as hostile encounters. An important trading center that helped foster mutually beneficial relations between European and Native American cultures, the community also suffered violent attacks at the hands of Native Americans throughout the late 1770s and early 1780s. Distant in the minds of most Americans during the eighteenth century, Louisiana became a region of utmost importance in 1800 when the territory again came under French control. Many Americans feared that the region, re-ceded by Spain to France on October 1 of that year in the Treaty of Ildefonso, would become part of a new French empire in the United States and that future hostilities between Napoléon’s France and the new American nation might ensue. By 1803, however, Napoléon had given up any such plans and accepted the U.S. offer to buy the whole of Louisiana for $15 million, including the vital outposts of Saint Louis and New Orleans. In May 1804, Lewis and Clark embarked on their transcontinental expedition, and Saint Louis, much as it had for the French and the Spanish of earlier generations, acted as a gateway to the West and to the peoples who inhabited it. Hugh Randall See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Illinois Country; Louisiana; Mississippi River; New Orleans; Treaty of Paris. References McDermott, John Francis, ed. The Early History of St. Louis. Saint Louis, MO: Saint Louis Historical Documents Foundation, 1952. Vexler, Robert I., ed. St. Louis: A Chronological & Documentary History. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1974.
1028
SAINT LUCIA
SAINT LUCIA Saint Lucia is the second largest of the Windward Islands in the southeastern Caribbean Sea. It was highly disputed by France and Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Independent since 1979, it has an area of 238 square miles (616 square kilometers) and a population of 162,157 (2003 estimate). Eighty-seven percent of the inhabitants are of African descent, 2.6 percent are East Indians, and 1.3 percent Europeans. The rest are of mixed origin; very few Caribs survived. The official language is English, but most of the population speaks a French patois. Roman Catholics make up 79 percent of the population. The island is of volcanic origin, its mountainous center culminating in Mount Gimie (3,146 feet/959 meters). The climate is tropical. The capital is Castries, historically known for the quality of its harbor. Unconfirmed local traditions claim that Christopher Columbus discovered the island on December 13, 1502, Saint Lucy’s day. In 1605, the island was briefly settled by the British, but colonists were either killed or expelled by the indigenous Carib population. The story was repeated, with the same result, in 1637–1640. The French Compagnie des Iles d’Amérique took advantage of the situation and founded its own colony. When, in 1648, the Compagnie went bankrupt, the island’s governor, the Sieur du Parquet, purchased Saint Lucia. The French settlement had to face constant Carib pressure, but survived until 1664. That year, Lord Willoughby purchased the island from the Caribs, expelled the French, and settled 1,000 Englishmen from Barbados and 600 Caribs from Dominica. Within three years, however, the
Map of Saint Lucia. Saint Lucia was highly disputed by France and Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
British colony was completely abandoned and the French reoccupied the island. Britain and France were both claiming ownership of Saint Lucia. This dispute led to almost permanent confrontation: by 1814, the island had changed hands fourteen times. In general, the French were its masters during periods of peace; the British captured it during almost every AngloFrench war, but had to return it when peace was concluded. The French progressively reduced the number of hostile Caribs, brought in African slaves, and developed a plantation economy. The island was finally ceded to Britain in 1814 and became a British colony for 165 years. But French influence was so strong that it is still visible. The spoken language derives from French; the main religion is Roman Catholicism; most geographical and many family names
SAINT MARTIN
are French; even the legal code contains elements of the pre-revolutionary French legal system. Present-day Saint Lucia is a Westminsterstyle parliamentary democracy and a member of the Commonwealth. It has developed offshore banking, tourism, and the manufacturing sector. Services represent 73 percent of the GDP (2002 estimate). In 1992, the poet Derek Walcott, born in Castries, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature “for a poetic œuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” Theodor Tudoroiu See also: Catholic Church; Language; Slavery. References Jesse, Charles. Outlines of St. Lucia’s History. 5th ed. Saint Lucia: Saint Lucia Archaeological and Historical Society, 1994. Momsen, Janet Henshall. St Lucia. World Bibliographic Series, vol. 185. Oxford/Santa Barbara: Clio Press, 1996. Saint Lucia Country Review 2004. Houston: CountryWatch.com, 2003.
SAINT MARTIN The northern part of a Caribbean island, located 250 kilometers northwest of Guadeloupe and 290 kilometers east of Puerto Rico. The southern part, Sint Maarten, is Dutch. Saint Martin is a commune in the Department of Guadeloupe, monitored by a subprefect who is appointed by and responsible to the national government in Paris. An elected mayor, an island council, and an executive council form the municipal government, which is located in the capital Marigot. It is responsible for subjects such as education and
1029
health. Other matters are controlled by the government in Guadeloupe or the national government. The government in Guadeloupe is chaired by an appointed prefect and consists of a General Council and a Regional Council to which Saint Martin sends a total of three representatives. As Saint Martin is a part of France, its currency is the euro and its inhabitants can vote in the French elections. During the colonial period, the mainstay of Saint Martin’s economy was sugar and livestock. As both relied heavily on slave labor, the abolition of slavery in 1848 brought about a serious depression that caused many islanders to seek work on nearby islands. To shift Saint Martin’s economy from agriculture to commerce, the government in Guadeloupe decided in 1850 to exempt it from certain fiscal and custom regulations. It was not until 1939, when Saint Martin was declared a duty-free territory, that the depression was finally lifted. In the late 1980s, the national government decided to conform Saint Martin’s fiscal status to that of other French Caribbean islands. That it has thus far not undertaken any concrete steps is partly because of increasing demands in the island for greater autonomy from Paris. Today, tourism provides the main source of income in Saint Martin. Attracted by beautiful beaches and a variety of tourist accommodations and amenities, some 881,000 cruise passengers and 460,000 stay-over tourists, mainly American, visited the island as a whole in 1998. Saint Martin’s tourist industry took off in the 1970s, some twenty years after Sint Maarten’s. Because it does not have an international airport or a cruise-ship dock, and its prices are higher than on the
1030
SAINT PHALLE, NIKI
DE
Dutch side because of a high minimum wage and social contributions, Saint Martin attracts fewer tourists than Sint Maarten. Saint Martin differs from other French Caribbean islands in that it is more Anglo-American than French. Although French is used in schools, church, and government, English is the main language spoken. This is the result of a long history of immigration. In the early nineteenth century, many English-speaking people arrived, partly as a result of trade links with North America. The development of the tourist industry brought about another wave of immigration. Migrants from Haiti and the Dominican Republic entered to take up the low-paid and unskilled jobs in the service sector as well as many European and U.S. expatriates that moved into the skilled and managerial positions. This influx caused a population increase from 8,000 in 1980 to 30,000 in 1999. In 1999, 28 percent of the population was born in the island, 9 percent in other parts of the French Caribbean, 8 percent in metropolitan France, and 55 percent elsewhere. Henrice Altink See also: Antislavery Movements; Guadeloupe; Haiti; Language; Slavery; Sugar; Tourism. References Hartog, J. History of Sint Maarten and Saint Martin. Philipsburg: Sint Maarten Jaycees Press, 1981. Jeffry-Pilot, D. 1963: A Landmark Year in St. Martin. Philipsburg: House of Nehesi, 2003. Kersell, John E. “Small-Scale Administration in St. Martin: Two Governments for One People.” Public Administration and Development 13, no. 1 (1993): 46–64. Saint-Martin’s People’s Consensus, ed. A Status for Saint-Martin: References of Hope. Philipsburg: House of Nehesi, 2002.
SAINT PHALLE, NIKI DE (CATHERINE MARIE-AGNÈS DE SAINT PHALLE) (1930–2002) Artist born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, of French and American origin. Before Saint Phalle worked as an artist, she lived in the United States, where she was a model. She returned to Paris in 1952 and gradually started to work on her art. Self-taught, like many of this generation of artists, she featured in the “nouveau réalisme” group and worked with her longtime partner, Jean Tinguely, and also with Robert Rauschenberg. Her first major works to bring critical attention were the “tir” [shot] paintings. The first of these, Portrait of My Lover, in 1961, featured darts thrown into a figure’s head, but she developed this into something at the same time more visceral and more formally realized. Saint Phalle would place bags of paint on assemblages and shoot the bags, spreading the paint in ways both reminiscent and critical of abstract expressionism. Her Tir de l’ambassade américaine (1961) incorporates an ax and a gun among the objects, and an array of bags of paint to be shot at the top of the piece, parodying the artist’s palette. She was largely based in Paris, but the majority of her early solo shows were in the United States. Her work veers between art as catharsis (later works including artist’s books comprising personal narrative and drawing) and art as popular spectacle. Her sculptures are probably the most recognizable of her works—brightly colored, often immense figures, made from a host of “unsculptural” materials such as papier-mâché, wire, and nylon. Some of these figures are outsized, simplified, and exaggerated fe-
SAINT-AMAND, EDRIS
male forms—such as the three large “Nanas” [usually titled “women” in English] built in Hanover in 1974. Uniting the work is its insistence on a childlike view of the world (as evidenced in the almost hallucinogenic colors, the scale of the works)—one that maintains the terrors and angers as well as the naïveté. Arguably her most significant late work is the Tarot Garden (1980–1994), but purposely never fully completed (although there were many commissions and shows featuring the now standard Saint Phalle sculpted figures). This garden, in northwest Italy, is heavily inspired by Gaudí’s Parc Güell in Barcelona. Saint Phalle took the idea of an outside space as sculpture park and extended it into an open-ended project. The growth of the sculptedness of the garden mirrors its organic development. The figures and forms somewhere between building and sculpture draw the viewer in, literally, to their spaces. Her last years saw a move to California, where she fought longstanding respiratory problems brought on by the material used in the figures. Paul Hegarty See also: Sculpture. References Hulten, Pontus. Niki de Saint Phalle. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1992. Saint Phalle, Niki de. Niki de Saint Phalle: My Art, My Dreams. Ed. Carla SchulzHoffmann. Munich: Prestel, 2003.
SAINT-AMAND, EDRIS (1918–2004) Native of Gonaïves (Haiti), Saint-Amand was born in 1918. He lived in exile in France for a decade (1948–1958), where he studied political science. He later be-
1031
came professor of literature and international relations in his native land. With Essai d’explication de Dialogue de mes lampes, published in 1942, SaintAmand showed himself to be a talented literary critic. In 1952, he published his first novel, Bon Dieu rit (“God Laughs”), and a second, Le Vent de janvier (“January Wind”), in 1985. The two novels are not tender; indeed, they are bitter and recall the Socialist vein: they denounce the injustices to which the working class falls victim as a result of the policies and practices of the eminent personalities and leaders of the country. Bon Dieu rit describes the state of poverty of the agricultural workforce, and Le Vent de janvier highlights the deplorable situation of the urban proletariat. In both novels, the root causes of poverty are the same: exploitation, illiteracy, and exclusion. Implicitly, Saint-Amand’s literary universe shows that the status quo created by the dominant social classes in Haiti is linked to U.S. imperialism. Basically, the two narratives are literary discourses against U.S. capitalism in Haiti’s political and economic arenas. Saint-Amand’s novels show that the working class is the backbone of the country’s economy and that its members are victims of the capitalist system. But the novelist makes the working class rebellious beings, for “L’homme n’admet pas ce qui humilie l’homme,” (Man does not admit that which humiliates him) as the narrator says in Bon Dieu rit. The same voice of conscience raises itself in Le Vent de janvier: “Il faut que cela change” (That must be changed). The two novels are weapons in the battle against the exploitation and alienation of the working class. Like Emile Zola a century earlier, Saint-Amand does not disguise his anger.
1032
SAINT-DENIS, LOUIS JUCHEREAU
DE
Rooted in different time periods, like Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée/Masters of the Dew, Saint-Amand’s Bon Dieu rit and Le Vent de janvier characterize the geopolitical situation of the writer’s homeland, where the imperialist system extends its powerful arms to the Caribbean. In 1986, Saint-Amand won the prestigious Hatier literary prize for Bon Dieu rit. From 1995 to 2002, he served as ambassador to Argentina. He died on February 9, 2004. Jean Norgaisse See also: Argentina; Haiti; Roumain, Jacques; Zola, Emile. References Berrou, Raphaël, and Pompilus Pradel. Manuel d’histoire de la littérature haïtienne. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Caraïbes, 1977. Micciolo, Henri. “Modernités dans Bon Dieu rit.” Conjonction 157 (1983): 13–20. Norgaisse, Jean. “L’Idéologie et la révolte dans l’oeuvre d’Edris Saint-Amand.” CLA XLVI, no. 3 (March 2003): 383–407.
SAINT-DENIS, LOUIS JUCHEREAU DE (1684–1744) Statesman and diplomat of the French colonial frontier, Louis Juchereau de SaintDenis founded the first permanent settlement in the Louisiana Territory in 1714. Signing an agreement with the Natchitoches Indians, he established an outpost that became the Fort Saint Jean-Baptiste where he served as commandant from 1720 until his death. His career eclipsed those of many would-be rivals, including colonial governor, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. Versed in Indian customs, Saint-Denis inspired the loyalty of tribes, a feat facilitating the establishment of trade routes to East Texas.
Born September 17, 1684, in Beaufort, Canada, Saint-Denis was educated in Paris. As cousin of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, he served as volunteer on the second exploration of the mouth of the Mississippi in January 1700. Charged with commanding a group of Canadians at Fort Maurepas in Biloxi, he later journeyed with Iberville’s brother, Bienville, up the Red River as far as Natchitoches Indian villages. In 1701, he became commander of Fort La Boulaye in the lower Mississippi, resigning his commission in 1707 to settle north of Lake Pontchartrain near Bayou Saint Jean. In 1711, a letter delivered by courier from Father Hidalgo of East Texas to Governor La Mothe de Cadillac in Mobile initiated coveted prospects for trade with East Texas Spanish settlements. Cadillac appointed Saint-Denis to explore the feasibility of commerce and to negotiate with priests because of his known familiarity with certain Indian tribes. In September 1713, with a passport from Cadillac authorizing travel into Spanish territory, Saint-Denis left Mobile to journey up the Mississippi to the Red River, arriving in 1714 at Natchitoches Indian villages, then traveling overland to Hasinai Indian villages in search of Father Hidalgo. His journey established the Camino Real and led him to the Spanish presidio San Juan Bautista. Accompanied by three Frenchmen and twenty-five Hasinai, Saint-Denis was ordered by Captain Diego Ramón to travel to Mexico City for questioning. Arriving in June 1715, he was ordered to produce his maps of East Texas, even as he convinced the viceroy that his primary interest was not trade but in christianizing the Indians. His skill as a diplomat accorded him Spanish citizenship and resulted in his being
SAINTE-HÉLÈNE, MARIE-ANDRÉ REGNARD DUPLESSIS
chosen to guide a small expedition into East Texas for purposes of reoccupation and to counteract potential illicit trade schemes of the French. In 1716, Saint-Denis returned to San Juan Bautista and married Manuela Sánchez Navarro y Gomes Mascorro. In 1717, a second voyage to Mexico City resulted in his imprisonment. Saint-Denis’s declaration persuaded his captors of exaggerated reports of his smuggling and compromise of Spain’s authority. Upon release, he returned to Natchitoches, where he assumed the post of commandant at Fort Saint Jean-Baptiste. France’s declaration of war against Spain on January 9, 1719, caused soldiers from the Natchitoches outpost to be sent to seize the Spanish mission at Saint Miguel de Los Adaes. For successfully defending the westernmost frontier of France in the New World, Saint-Denis was awarded the prestigious Croix Saint Louis. For his knowledge of tribal ritual, he was inducted into the Caddo Indian tribe and given the tribal tattoo of a “pretty leg,” which became his insignia. The descendants of Saint-Denis resided in Natchitoches for generations following his death in 1744. Pamela Gay-White See also: Bienville, Jean-Baptiste, sieur de; Mexico; Mississippi; Texas. References Jackson, Jack, Robert S. Weddle, and Winston De Ville. Mapping Texas and the Gulf Coast: The Contributions of St. Denis, Olivan, and Le Maire. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. Lagarde, François, ed. The French in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Watson Memorial Library, Cammie G. Henry Research Center (Cross Collection, Folder 42; Durand Collection, Folder 1), Natchitoches, Louisiana.
DE
1033
SAINTE-HÉLÈNE, MARIEANDRÉ REGNARD DUPLESSIS DE (1687–1760) Nun and mother superior at the HôtelDieu in Quebec City, Marie-André Regnard Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène was born in Paris to Georges Regnard Duplessis and Marie Leroy. In 1689, after her father was appointed clerk to the government treasurer in Quebec, her parents left France for New France. Marie-André was left in her grandmother’s care in Chevreuse near Paris, and she studied with the Daughters of the Cross. In 1702, she joined her family in Quebec City. Although she was approached by various suitors, she nevertheless entered the novitiate at the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec in 1707 and made her profession of faith the following year. MarieAndré took on the position of mistress of the novices from 1718 to 1721; the rest of her career was to be divided between the roles of assistant and superior in the community. Because Marie-André was recognized for her literary talent, JeanneFrançoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace chose her as secretary to write Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, published in 1751 in Montauban, France. She was also the author of the obituary letters of her fellow nuns, which were sent to France, and she maintained an important exchange of letters with French correspondents. As well as exchanges of business letters with merchants, she also corresponded regularly with the Dieppe apothecary Jacques Féret. The latter, a lover of the natural sciences and correspondent at the Académie des Sciences in Paris, exchanged his medicine for Canadian products and curiosities (northern maidenhair fern, beaver kidneys, maple sugar, ore, natives’ belts, birds, rattlesnakes), which Marie-André
1034
SAINT-EXUPÉRY, ANTOINE
DE
describes in great detail in each letter. She also corresponded with a childhood friend, Marie-Catherine Homassel-Hecquet. The detailed descriptions of the manners and customs of the native peoples by MarieAndré was useful to Marie-Catherine when she published Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage in 1755, a book that traced the life of an Inuit girl found in the Champagne region. At the end of the work, Mme. Hecquet emphasizes the collaboration of her Canadian correspondent in the ethnic identification of the demoiselle sauvage, and she quotes an extract from one of her letters. Mother Duplessis also wrote historical notes and pious works, which remained in manuscript form, among which were Sur la dévotion à la Sainte Famille, Sur la statue de Notre-Dame de toutes grâces conservée à l’Hôtel Dieu, Sur le crucifix outragé, and Sur l’association pour la bonne mort, as well as a musical treatise titled Musique spirituelle où l’on peut s’exercer sans voix. After reestablishing the Quebec City hospital, which had been endangered by the fire of 1755 and the battle of the Plains of Abraham, MarieAndré Regnard Duplessis died in Quebec in 1760 at the age of seventy-three. Julie Roy See also: New France; Quebec; Quebec City. References Asselin, Jean-Pierre. “Marie-André Regnard Duplessis.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 3. Sainte-Foy/Toronto: Presses de l’Université Laval/Toronto University Press. Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. National Archives of Canada and National Library of Canada, http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio .asp?BioId=35737 (cited August 4, 2004).
SAINT-EXUPÉRY, ANTOINE (1900–1944)
DE
French aviator, adventurer, and writer, Saint-Exupéry’s most celebrated work is Le Petit Prince/The Little Prince (1943), which has become a classic of children’s literature. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons and was educated at French Jesuit schools and at a Catholic boarding school in Switzerland. After failing his final examination at a university preparatory school, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, Saint-Exupéry started his military service in Strasbourg, where he trained to become a pilot. However, his fiancée’s family objected to his enlisting in the air force, and so he took an office job in Paris and started to write. The following years proved unlucky. Saint-Exupéry’s engagement with the writer Louise de Vilmorin was broken off, and he was unsuccessful professionally. In 1926, his first story, L’Aviateur, was published. Saint-Exupéry then took a job flying the mail for a commercial airline company, Aéropostale. He flew over North Africa for three years, and in 1928 became the director of a remote airfield in the Sahara. Saint-Exupéry used the desert’s setting for Le Petit Prince and The Wisdom of the Sands (1948). While in the Sahara, he wrote his first novel, Courrier du Sud/ Southern Mail (1929), which celebrated the courage of the early mail pilots. In 1929, he moved to South America, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina Company and flew mail through the Andes. These years of experience led to his second novel, Vol de
SAINT-JOHN PERSE
nuit/Night Flight, which became an international best-seller, won the Prix Fémina, and was adapted for screen in 1933; the film starred Clark Gable and Lionel Barrymore (Night Flight, directd by Clarence Brown). Once the airmail business in Argentina stopped, Saint-Exupéry started to fly mail between Casablanca and Port-Etienne and then he served as a test pilot for several airline companies. Severely injured in a plane crash in Guatemala in 1937, and encouraged by his friend André Gide, Saint-Exupéry spent his convalescence writing Terre des hommes/ Wind, Sand and Stars, which won the Académie Française’s 1939 Grand Prix du Roman and the National Book Award in the United States. Saint-Exupéry later joined the army after the fall of France in World War II and was ultimately awarded the Croix de guerre. Later he went to live in the Unoccupied Zone of France before escaping to the United States. He was criticized by his countrymen for not supporting de Gaulle’s Free France forces in London. In 1943, he rejoined the French air force in North Africa and published Le Petit Prince, which has been translated into nearly fifty languages. The following year, on July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry’s plane was shot down during a mission flight over southern France. He left behind the unfinished manuscript of La Citadelle/The Wisdom of the Sands and some notebooks, which were published posthumously. Claudia Wolosin See also: Argentina; Aviation; Catholic Church; Gaulle, General Charles de; Jesuits; World War II.
1035
References Cate, Curtis. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: His Life and Times. Albuquerque: Athena, 1990. Schiff, Stacy. Saint Exupéry: A Biography. New York: Da Capo, 1997.
SAINT-JOHN PERSE (ALEXIS LÉGER) (1887–1975) Poet, diplomat, winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize for literature, Saint-John Perse was a larger-than-life figure whose trajectory combined glamour, exoticism, political intrigue, famous mentors, beautiful mistresses, the extremes of fame and fortune. It is possible to read his work as one long autobiographical poem, written across sixty years and tracing the life of a narrator from childhood to old age. The path of this protagonist—child, prince, exile, lover, poet, artist—mirrors that of the poet. Born in Guadeloupe where his French grandparents owned a plantation, Léger moved to France at the age of twelve and began writing about his edenic island and lost childhood (Eloges, 1911). This Caribbean past subtly colors his work through expressions, rhythms, accumulations, and repetitions reminiscent of Creole storytellers and continues to be a presence among Creole authors, including Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. As a diplomat, Léger spent five years in China, returning with Anabase/Anabasis (1924), a hauntingly beautiful epic about the founding of a city. To separate his diplomatic and literary activities, he inaugurated the mysterious pseudonym, which combines mythological echoes of Perse, the French name of Perseus, with biblical
1036
SAINT-MALO
resonances of Saint John, whose English spelling was all the more surprising to French readers. Plato banished poets from his republic, but Perse specifically designated one to govern his city. A famous 1930 translation by T. S. Eliot earned acclaim for Anabase among English-speaking readers. Meanwhile, Léger became a key figure in French foreign affairs, rising to secretary general of the Quai d’Orsay. His anticollaborationist stance led to exile in 1940. American patrons helped him settle in Washington, D.C., where he lived for almost thirty years, writing poems set in the United States. The four poems of Exil (1945) are poignant evocations of loss and absence. Vents/Winds (1946) is an epic about the United States in the tradition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. During a century when most French poetry was about contraction, Perse stood out for his Whitmanesque breadth and encyclopedic range. His eleven major poems, ranging from 7 to 130 pages, fill 435 pages of Bible paper. Both expansive and elliptical, they invite and demand interpretation. In 1962, Saint-John Perse and Georges Braque collaborated on Oiseaux: twelve lithographs and a poem that is also an ars poetica. Here, printed birds serve as metaphors for artistic creation. Perse envisaged art as capturing time, making it permanent and eternal. What can human beings know of eternity? The closest approximations are those privileged moments of intensity when time seems to stand still: sexual love (Amers/Seamarks, 1958) and artistic creation (Oiseaux/Birds). Perse was one of the first authors to be honored during his lifetime with a prestigious Pléiade volume of his complete
works (1972). Even more astonishingly, he was allowed to edit it himself, creating the scholarly apparatus, writing his own “biography,” inventing and revising letters from illustrious correspondents. This volume is the poet’s last great creation and serves as a monument to his multiple lives and identities on both sides of the Atlantic. Carol Rigolot See also: Chamoiseau, Patrick; Condé, Maryse; Confiant, Raphaël; Glissant, Edouard; Guadeloupe. References Rigolot, Carol. Forged Genealogies: Saint-John Perse’s Conversations with Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Sacotte, Mireille. Saint-John Perse. Paris: Belfond, 1991. Winspur, Steven. Saint-John Perse and the Imaginary Reader. Geneva: Droz, 1988.
SAINT-MALO The fortified Breton town of Saint-Malo belongs to the department of Ille et Vilaine. Its current population is 52,737 inhabitants. Its characteristic rocky islet got its name in the sixth century from the Welsh evangelizer Mac Law. The town’s origins followed the Frankish and Viking invasions, which led the peoples of the neighboring areas to seek refuge in this strategic position. In the twelfth century, it became Saint-Malo-en-l’Isle and started its development. Saint-Malo, a corsair town during the Hundred Years’ War, passed successively from English to French control. From the moment it became part of France (1491), the town began to develop, becoming a large trading port. In 1534, Jacques Cartier, who was born in Saint-Malo in 1491, man-
SAINT-MALO
aged to gain the trust of François I and was thus able to equip two ships and embark upon the discovery of the “northwestern passage” toward India. Nevertheless, he discovered “only” Canada. He took possession of this territory in the name of the king of France and named it “Canada,” from the Iroquois word “Kanata,” which means “village,” and he traveled up part of the Saint Lawrence River. His second expedition, the following year, gave him the opportunity to push toward Quebec, then Montreal. The third expedition allowed the famous sailor to achieve his life’s work. François I made Jacques Cartier general captain and master pilot and entrusted him with the command of five ships, which had to prepare the settlement and arrival of the Canadian colons. In the seventeenth century, the corsairs had created such a reputation for themselves that Louis XIV decided he would recruit his navy admiral only among the sailors of Saint-Malo, but the town’s inhabitants were more than simple sea warriors: they also knew about commerce and administration. In 1714, they took over the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, which Colbert had created in 1664 and from which the central authority failed to make a profit. Under the leadership of these “Gentlemen of Saint-Malo,” the company prospered and intensified trade with India. At the end of the seventeenth century, Saint-Malo was the first port of the country, ahead of Le Havre. In the nineteenth century, the era of the corsairs was over, and the priority was for trade and fishing. Cod fishing on the Newfoundland banks had been intensifying for centuries, operating out of SaintMalo. At the beginning of the twentieth
1037
century, the Saint-Malo area counted 8,000 sailors who left each spring aboard more than a hundred three-mast ships and schooners toward the cold and misty waters of the “Grand Banks.” Destroyed during World War II and rebuilt identically, contemporary SaintMalo is a quiet seaside resort that hosts numerous literary and musical festivals. The Maison du Québec, opened in 1984 as part of the 1534–1984 celebrations, holds an important place in the town’s cultural activities. The historical building situated on the place du Québec was gifted to the town of Saint-Malo by the Quebec government. It is situated inside the ramparts, looking out to sea, and the statue of Jacques Cartier points his finger westward. In October 1984, the Délégation générale du Québec, on behalf of the government, handed the keys of the Maison du Québec to the Association Saint-Malo-Québec. The Office Franco-Québécois pour la Jeunesse (OFQJ) organizes activities there the year long as part of the France-Quebec exchange program. Since 1990, every June 24, the Fête national du Québec has been celebrated there, signaling the start of the OFQJ’s summer festival. Sophie Fesdjian See also: Brittany; Cartier, Jacques; Fishing; Mississippi River; Newfoundland; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; World War II. References Braudel, Fernand, ed. Le Monde de Jacques Cartier. Paris: Berger-Levrault; Montreal: Libre-Expression, 1995. Laurent, Catherine. Atlas historique des villes de France: Saint-Malo. Ed. Charles Higounet, Jean-Bernard Marquette, and Philippe Wollf. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1999. Renouard, Michel. Aimer Saint-Malo et la côte d’Emeraude. Rennes: Editions OuestFrance, 1991.
1038
SAINT-MÉMIN, CHARLES BALTHAZAR JULIEN FÉVRET
DE
SAINT-MÉMIN, CHARLES BALTHAZAR JULIEN FÉVRET DE (1770–1852) French émigré artist and engraver who, between 1796 and 1810, created more than 900 distinctive profile portraits of what amounts to a veritable who’s who of federal America. Saint-Mémin was born in Dijon, the son of a Burgundian aristocrat. Having trained at the royal military academy in Paris, he was briefly a member of Louis XVI’s palace guard. Forced into flight by the French Revolution, he ended up in New York in 1793. There, to support himself, his parents, and his sister, he turned to art—he would have been taught drawing at the academy and he now quickly mastered engraving—and eventually set up as a portraitist in partnership with another French émigré, Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit. Valdenuit would draw a life-sized profile of the sitter with the aid of a physiognotrace, a recently invented mechanical device that enabled an artist to trace a portrait with near-photographic accuracy. Saint-Mémin would then make a miniature engraving of the portrait. Reflecting contemporary neoclassical taste, the engravings were given a circular border, in imitation of ancient Roman coins and medallions. Each client received the original profile drawing, the plate, plus twelve prints. Valdenuit returned to France in 1797, leaving SaintMémin to continue what was by now a thriving business on his own. In 1798, he moved to Philadelphia, which was at that time the capital of the United States. As a consequence, many of his sitters were government figures. His reputation also earned him commissions from landowners, merchants, members of the military, and other French émigrés. Saint-Mémin made some
Saint-Memin’s 1804 drawing of Thomas Jefferson, used by the U.S. government on postage stamps and savings bonds, is perhaps his most accomplished portrait. (Library of Congress)
270 portraits—including memorial portraits of George Washington—in Philadelphia before, in 1803, becoming an itinerant portraitist. During the next six years he took his business to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond, and Charleston. His stay in Richmond, timed to coincide with the celebrated trial of Aaron Burr, was particularly lucrative. John Marshall, the presiding judge, was but one of many clients. In 1810, Saint-Mémin went back to France but, with the political climate still uncertain there, returned to New York two years later. His eyesight having weakened, he forsook the physiognotrace and engraving and earned a living instead from landscapes and portraits in oils. He and his family returned to France for good in 1814 when the monarchy was restored. He renounced the U.S. citizenship he had acquired. In 1817, his family recovered their property. His interest in art taking a differ-
SAINT-PIERRE
ent turn, he was named conservateur of the Musée des beaux-arts in Dijon and subsequently played a considerable role in preserving Gothic art in Burgundy. Saint-Mémin helped to inspire a phenomenal enthusiasm for profile portraits, which, by the early 1800s, had become the height of fashion. The many eminent Americans whose likeness he has bequeathed us include Paul Revere, Mother Seton, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark. He was also responsible for striking portraits of the eight American Indians who went to Washington after the Louisiana Purchase. His 1804 drawing of Thomas Jefferson, used by the U.S. government on postage stamps and savings bonds, is perhaps his most accomplished portrait. Christopher Rolfe See also: French Revolution; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana Purchase; Painting; Washington, George. References Miles, Ellen G. “Saint-Mémin in the South 1803–1809.” Southern Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1986): 22–39. ———. “Saint-Mémin’s Portraits of American Indians 1804–1807.” American Art Journal 20, no. 4 (1988): 2–33. ———. Saint-Mémin and the Neoclassical Portrait in America. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Norfleet, Fillmore. Saint-Mémin in Virginia: Portraits and Biographies. Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1942.
SAINT-PIERRE
ET MIQUELON Group of French-owned islands 242 square kilometers (93 square miles) in area lying about 25 kilometers (15 miles) off the south coast of the Canadian island of Newfoundland. Two of the islands are inhabited. Miquelon (114 square kilometers
ET
MIQUELON
1039
[45 square miles]), attached to Langlade (95 square kilometers [38 square miles]) by a sand dune formed in the eighteenth century, had a population of 698 at the census of 1999. It is on Saint-Pierre (27 square kilometers [10 square miles]) that the majority (5,618) of the population are concentrated. Discovered by Jacques Cartier in 1536, the islands for a long time had few inhabitants, only twenty-two, for example, in 1691, although fishermen from France spent time there every year at the end of winter. Saint-Pierre’s roadstead is well sheltered and always free of sea ice and is located near the “Grand Banks,” the relatively shallow area of sea where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold Labrador current. Cod are abundant in this area between March and September because of the favorable feeding conditions. Gradually Saint-Pierre became not only a shelter but also a center for supplying the fishing fleets and for the landing and processing of fish. Thousands of French, mainly Basque, Breton, and Norman fishermen, passed through. However, creating a colony on Saint-Pierre was never a priority for the French authorities, who envisaged it as a staging post for the fishing industry, itself seen as an excellent training ground for future members of the French navy. In this light, the settling of the islands in 1763 by rural Acadians expelled from their land by the British took place against the wishes of the French government. That same year, the Treaty of Paris confirmed France’s sovereignty over the islands after fifty years of British occupation. The islands were the only remaining French territory in North America. However, the period that followed was marked by great instability. Between 1763 and 1815, Saint-Pierre et
1040
SAINT-PIERRE
ET
MIQUELON
Miquelon changed hands seven times during the turbulence of the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars. The relations between the islands and its neighbors have often been characterized by conflict. The question of sovereignty was definitively settled in 1815, but disputes continued. The maritime frontier between Canada and France was established only in 1992 as a result of the decision of an arbitration panel that met in New York because there was no bilateral agreement between the two nations. The judgment awarded France an Exclusive Economic Zone, most of which consists of a narrow finger of sea heading out toward the ocean, 300 kilometers long and 19 kilometers wide. That same year, Canada began a moratorium on cod fishing within its 200mile territorial waters, thus ending a centuries-old activity. On Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, this decision severely affected the fishing sector, not only the fishermen themselves but also those servicing the hundreds of boats of different nationalities active in the area, and workers in the fishprocessing plant, the islands’ only industry. There are also maritime conflicts over oil exploration, as several deposits straddle the frontier. As with the fishing industry, the French and Canadian authorities have to set up ways of managing resources that do not fit into lines on a map. Nonetheless, the inhabitants of SaintPierre et Miquelon, despite the fishing crisis, enjoy a standard of living higher than that of their Canadian neighbors because of government aid. On Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, there are more than 800 civil servants, whose salaries are higher than those for similar positions in metropolitan France. The islands contain, for just over
6,000 inhabitants, the same administrative and institutional structures as any department in the metropole, generally a hundred times more populous. Attitudes on the islands are ambivalent both toward Canada and the authorities in Paris. A genuine sense of belonging to France is tainted by mistrust toward a central government that is often accused of defending their interests with insufficient zeal, particularly in relations with Canada, a neighbor with whom the islanders are obliged to deal for economic and geographical reasons despite the diplomatic gap between them over fishing. To put neighborly relations on a less conflictual footing, the French and Canadian prime ministers signed agreements in 1994 on “regional cooperation,” the aim of which is to develop economic, cultural, and educational links. Relations between Saint-Pierre et Miquelon and Canada are complicated by the question of which frontiers are being designated. St John’s, capital of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, is a forty-five-minute flight away and provides urban shopping facilities as well as health care. The slightly more distant maritime provinces of Canada—Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and especially New Brunswick—provide a significant source of cultural and economic contact because of their francophone elements. However, another dimension enlarges the play of boundaries and identities, for Saint-Pierre et Miquelon enjoys a particular statute within both the French Republic and the European Union. It is officially a “Territorial Collectivity,” like a department in metropolitan France, but the Conseil Général, or “County Council,” has autonomy in matters of taxes, customs, and excise. Its
SAND, GEORGE
1041
statute as “Pays et Territoire d’Outre Mer” (PTOM; Overseas Land and Territory) also allows it to develop activities in relation to the European Union. The inhabitants of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon are by rights citizens of a union of which their territory is not a part. Nonetheless, it enjoys considerable advantages in trade. Because of this, many actors in the North American economy are interested in this backwater, a tiny gateway to the EU located a few miles off the American mainland where the great transatlantic sea routes meet. Christian Fleury See also: Acadia; American Revolution; Cartier, Jacques; Fishing; French Revolution; New Brunswick; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Treaty of Paris. References Aubert de la Rue, Edgar. Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. Paris: Editions de France, 1970. Belorgey, Gérard, and Richard Chane-Tune. Saint-Pierre et Miquelon et le droit de pêche dans l’Atlantique nord-ouest. Paris: La Documentation française, 1993. Christian, William A. Divided Island, Faction and Unity, on Saint-Pierre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Guyotjeannin, Olivier. Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986. Ribault, Jean-Yves. Les Iles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon: des origines à 1814. Saint-Pierre: Imprimerie du gouvernement, 1962.
SAND, GEORGE (AURORE DUPIN) (1804–1876) Born to an aristocratic father and a plebeian mother in 1804, raised in Paris, France, George Sand became a prolific and iconoclastic writer of novels, stories, plays, essays, and autobiography, all distinguished by an easy, flowing style. In her literature she fought for the rights of women to enjoy the privileges of men. As part of her quest
Novelist George Sand. In her literature, Sand fought for the rights of women to enjoy the privileges of men. (Library of Congress)
to promote equality she wore male rather than female garb—shirts and pants, not blouses and dresses. During her youth she had been matriculated in a convent, but now donned top hats and smoked cigars. For such courage and because of her commitment to justice, Sand remains an inspiration to feminists around the world: to Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and others. Sand’s first independent novel (without the collaboration of Jules Sandeau) was Indiana, published with success in 1832. It tells the tale of a young “Creole” wife from Réunion, off the coast of Madagascar, who alternately seeks approval and separation from her aging husband, a retired colonel, pompous, violent, impetuous, jealous, and plagued by a ruinous sense of business. Playing on the incompatibility of city and country, West and East, one being corrupt, the other delightful, the book, whose protagonist ends up a hermit, argues that marriage—any union that is unequal and
1042
SANTO DOMINGO
manipulative—can turn into a form of slavery. Married and separated herself, Sand, mother of a son and daughter, spoke from experience. In her Hiver à Majorque/Winter in Majorca (1842), an account of her relationship with the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, she recommends for happiness an open, sharing partnership. Absurdly, writing of this kind, and Sand’s fondness for detailing eroticism, as in Lélia (1833), lent credence to a rumor that she suffered from nymphomania. Not every text of Sand’s was consumed with the status of women, their oppression by men, or the realm of pleasure. Inspired by Robert Lammenais and Pierre Leroux, her Compagnon du Tour de France/Companion of the Tour of France (1840), also known as the Journeyman Joiner, explores the conditions under which artisans labored, observed during travels through the provinces. The treatise’s exposure of hardship endeared Sand to Socialists of all sorts, as did her support of the 1848 revolution and the notion of a “right to work”—to basic gainful employment. Charles Baudelaire, however, found Sand’s Socialism specious, its utopianism confusing. He objected to the mist of idealism that hung over her renditions of peasants, as in La Mare au diable/Devil’s Pool (1846) and François le champi/François the Waif (1847). Sand died in 1876, content that republicanism had conquered France and pleased with abolitionism’s success in the United States, a place she was never to visit but which became the subject of her drama Les Mississipiens (1840). The play, set in the eighteenth century during the period of the Regency, chronicles the career of a man, “Leonce,” who becomes “George Freeman.” Heartbroken and insolvent, he crosses the Atlantic to escape “old” im-
morality and materialism—love and commerce—only to find them rampant and vigorous also in the New World. To make a difference, he turns abolitionist and author. Johan Åhr See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Feminisms; Mississippi. References Manifold, Gay. George Sand’s Theatre Career. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. Powell, David A. George Sand. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.
SANTO DOMINGO The island of Santo Domingo, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is the longest European-inhabited territory in the Western Hemisphere. At the time of European arrival, the island was inhabited by about 400,000 Taínos, an Amerindian people of Arawak stock who had migrated to the Greater Antilles from Venezuela and the Guianas. The complex colonial history of the island produced a rich heritage of Taíno, Spanish, African, and French traditions, reflected in many features of presentday Haitian and Dominican societies. Christopher Columbus arrived at Hispaniola, as he named the island, in December 1492. He built the fort of La Navidad on the northern coast, near the present-day city of Cap-Haïtien, Haiti. Columbus left thirty-nine men in charge of the fort before heading for Spain. When Columbus returned to La Navidad in December 1493, he found the fort destroyed and his men killed by the Taínos, probably in retribution for the abuse the Spaniards had inflicted on the Taíno women. In January 1494, Columbus established another settlement about 110 kilometers east of La
SANTO DOMINGO
Navidad and, to honor the Spanish queen, named it La Isabela. This was the first commercial outpost on the island. In 1496, Columbus returned to Spain to give the monarchs an account of his discoveries, leaving his brothers Bartholomew and Diego in charge of La Isabela. During Columbus’s absence, the workers of La Isabela revolted, and most resettled in the western areas of Hispaniola. Bartholomew Columbus moved to the south of the island, where gold had been discovered. There, where the Ozama River empties into the Caribbean Sea, he founded La Nueva Isabela, later renamed Santo Domingo de Guzmán, the present-day capital of the Dominican Republic. According to most accounts, Bartholomew Columbus founded La Nueva Isabela in August 1496. Spaniards quickly captured and distributed Hispaniola Indians among the Spanish colonists. The captured Indians were put to work in gold mines, where they were grossly mistreated. The Indian population was almost entirely decimated. By 1519, only a few hundred Indians had survived by fleeing to the mountains under the leadership of Chief Enriquillo. The gold economy and the native population became virtually extinct at the same time. Cattle raising and sugar production replaced gold mining as the main economic activities. The sugar economy relied heavily on African slave labor, and Africans soon outnumbered whites on the island. A trade monopoly imposed by Spain in 1503 made Santo Domingo the only port authorized to trade with Seville. Navigation to Hispaniola, however, became expensive and dangerous as a result of conflict in Europe between Spain, France, and England. European manufactured goods became scarce, and colonists resorted to
1043
contraband trade. To take control of this situation, Governor Osorio in 1605 decided to concentrate the island’s residents and their cattle in an area surrounding the city of Santo Domingo. The depopulated northern and western parts of the island were soon settled by the same Europeans whom Spain had tried to keep away. English and French settled on Ile de la Tortue, but conflict between them left the French in control. In December 1656, the French king granted Ile de la Tortue to Nombre Du Rausset and appointed him governor. By 1677, there were eleven French villages in Hispaniola and more than 4,000 settlers, indentured workers, and slaves. The main occupation was tobacco production. In 1678, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Nijmegen, and trade between the French and the Spanish colonists on Hispaniola intensified. The French continued to occupy greater areas of the island, reaching Santiago in July 1690. For the next few years, the French and the Spanish authorities both sought to take control of the island. In September 1697, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Ryswick, which effectively ceded the western part of the island to France. A border between the colonies was established in 1777 when the Treaty of Aranjuez was signed. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Spain was again at war with France. Spain, too weak to win this war, was forced to sign the Treaty of Basel on July 22, 1795. Under this treaty, Spain recovered territory in Europe but surrendered the eastern part of Hispaniola to France. Formal possession of Spanish Santo Domingo by the French did not take place until January 1801, when Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave now fighting for the French, entered the city of Santo Domingo and replaced Don Joaquín
1044
SANTO DOMINGO
García y Moreno as the colony’s governor. Although the western part of the island became the independent country of Haiti in 1804, the French continued to rule the eastern part until 1809. In that year, with British collaboration, Spanish colonists recovered their territory, which was reincorporated into Spain. During 1809–1821, Spain’s mismanagement of the colony allowed its economy to deteriorate. Finally, on November 30, 1821, the Spanish lieutenant governor, José Núñez de Cáceres, announced the colony’s independence from Spain and named the new country Haití Español. Independence did not last. In February 1822, the Haitian leader, Jean-Pierre Boyer, entered Santo Domingo and unified the island, which remained under Haitian control until 1844. The Haitians abolished slavery, changed the court system, and altered the traditional communal land tenure system; they imposed their French language upon the courts and schools and restricted religious fiestas and cockfighting events. Haitian policies alienated a segment of the population of the formerly Spanish part of the island. A successful coup against Haitian rule took place on February 27, 1844. The Dominican Republic was proclaimed, and General Pedro Santana was elected president. During Santana’s government, General Jean Louis Pierrot became president of Haiti. On May 10, 1845, Pierrot called on Dominicans to reunite with Haiti. After numerous battles, the Dominicans were able to stop the Haitian advance. In 1848, France recognized the Dominican Republic as a free and independent state through a treaty of peace, friendship, trade, and navigation. Haiti immediately protested the treaty, claiming that it represented a threat
to its security, and on March 9, 1849, Haitian President Faustine Soulouque decided to invade the Dominican territory. After a violent and bloody encounter, the Haitian army was defeated. In 1853, Pedro Santana was reelected to the presidency. During his term in office, President Franklin Pierce of the United States sought to lease land on the Samaná Peninsula for the purpose of establishing a naval station. Haiti was particularly sensitive to the presence of the United States, a slave power, on Dominican territory, and in November 1855 President Soulouque invaded the Dominican Republic. On December 22, 1855, in one of the bloodiest battles ever fought between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the Battle of Santomé, the Haitian army was defeated. The 1822 Haitian invasion of Spanish Santo Domingo is often considered the main cause of anti-Haitian sentiment among Dominicans. This antagonism was exacerbated during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), who made great efforts to define Dominicans as Hispanic, white, and Catholic as opposed to Afro-French, Vodun-practicing Haitians. Although anti-Haitian sentiment among Dominicans has diminished in the postTrujillo years, the level of legal and illegal immigration of Haitians to the Dominican Republic remains a contentious sociopolitical issue. Jorge Brea See also: Antislavery Movements; Boyer, JeanPierre; Haiti; Slavery; Sugar; Tobacco; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François; Vodun. References Cambeira, Alan. Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective. Armonk, NY/London: M. E. Sharp, 1997.
SARDUY, SEVERO Ferguson, James. The Dominican Republic: Beyond the Lighthouse. London: Latin American Bureau, 1992. Moya Pons, Frank. The Dominican Republic: A National History. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998. Wiarda, Howard J., and Michael J. Kryzanek. The Dominican Republic: A Caribbean Crucible. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. Wucker, Michele. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.
SARDUY, SEVERO (1937–1993) Cuban-born novelist, theorist, and dramatist, who lived in Paris from 1960 and was an important link between Tel Quel avantgarde writing and South and Central American baroque literature. He wrote important reviews in La Quinzaine littéraire on the literary “boom” emerging in the Americas (on García Márquez in 1968; on the Cuban Lezama Lima in 1971). He also presented the Cuban painter Alejandro to a European audience. Ironically, his best-known writing has little focus on Cuba, with the exception of his first novel, Gestos (1963). Though writing in Spanish, Sarduy translated his work into French, often with the help of Philippe Sollers, and serialized it in Tel Quel first (see the excerpt of Cobra in Tel Quel in 1970, not published as a novel until 1972, and excerpts from Maitreya in 1978 and 1979, published in Spanish in 1978, but not in French until 1980). Sollers’s introduction to the Cobra extract (Sollers, 1970), insisting on the “hollowing out” that Sarduy’s writing performed, hailed it as a writing typical of the new modern novel, mixing oriental figures with a parodied Spanish
1045
language. A travesty of the Genesis story, Cobra exemplifies the baroque writing in vogue at the time. Roland Barthes had already praised Sarduy’s 1967 novel Ecrit en dansant (De donde son las cantantes in Spanish, From Cuba with a Song in English) as a “hedonist text, and therefore revolutionary.” Though not at all about Cuba, Barthes insisted, the novel’s language was deeply Cuban, deploying a “verbal baroque” that pointed to the freedom of all language. Having theorized the baroque (Barocco, 1975), Sarduy then worked closely with Sollers on the latter’s ambitious Paradis, translating it into Spanish (see Tel Quel 79, 1979). In the 1970s, Sarduy became more fascinated with Eastern mysticism than with the Atlantic, especially Tantric Buddhism, and celebrated the void of Buddhist koan (Sarduy was a member of the famous Tel Quel visit to China in 1974). His work in the 1980s and 1990s is perhaps more sober, addressing homosexual culture in South America (Colibri, 1984), parental betrayal for a Chinese-Cuban boy (Cocuyo, 1990), and death through AIDS (Pájaros de la Playa, 1993). Sarduy himself was to succumb to AIDS. The longtime partner of François Wahl, editor at Seuil publishing house in Paris, Sarduy’s place in French intellectual culture is unmistakable (his writing is cited as the “text of jouissance,” alongside Sollers, in Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte/The Pleasure of the Text, and his knowledge of Buddhism is acknowledged in Barthes’s Fragments du discours amoureux/A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments). He will be remembered most as “the quintessential example of postmodern fiction in Cuba and as one of the most original contributions to a post-Boom Latin-American novel” (Hallward, 2001, p. 5). Andy Stafford
1046
SARGENT, JOHN SINGER
See also: AIDS; Avant-Gardes; Barthes, Roland; García Márquez, Gabriel; Gay Movement; Tel Quel. References Barthes, Roland. “Plaisir au langage.” Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 2. Paris: Seuil, 1994: 408–409. Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Sarduy, Severo. Cobra with Maitreya. Trans. J. Levine. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. Sollers, Philippe. “La boca obra.” Tel Quel 42 (autumn 1970): 35–36.
SARGENT, JOHN SINGER (1854–1925) Prolific American painter (active 1873– 1925), mostly of portraits, who astonished the art establishment with his sensual realism. Born in Florence to American parents, Sargent’s middle-class upbringing was itinerant and his schooling sporadic. A prodigious artistic talent from an early age, he enrolled at the Ecole des BeauxArts in Paris in 1874. He quickly developed a dramatic and passionate style in oils, producing portraits and other studies—work that drew widespread critical acclaim—for the 1877, 1879, and 1882 salons. By far his most famous early work, if not his most famous of all, was his portrait of the statuesque Virginie, Madame Gautreau. Exhibited at the 1884 Salon as Madame X, it was widely mocked; indeed, its suggestive sensuality—a slipped shoulder strap—was considered too much to handle, even though nudes were commonplace in the gallery. Sargent eventually altered the painting and, strap secured,
Madame X by John Singer Sargent, 1884. (Bettmann/Corbis)
kept it for himself until it was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sargent was an enthusiastic student of Velazquez and the Dutch school. While he was in Paris, he was greatly influenced by Edouard Manet and Claude Monet and established a friendship with the latter. Sargent was uncomfortable in being considered an impressionist or postimpressionist and was not friendly with mem-
SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL
bers of the aesthetic movement, such as James Whistler, even though he was arguably quite close to them in style. Sargent was popular, however, with public and patrons alike, at least until 1907, when he was producing the bulk of his portraits. His ease with European society meant he attracted commissions from the upper echelons of the French, British, and American social elite, who often came as patrons and then became friends— including Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Gabriel Fauré. By 1907, Sargent had grown tired of portraits, as had the public, and he turned to landscapes and quick sketches as a supplement to his largest project, murals for the newly built Boston Public Library. This massive project involved decorating the walls of the third-floor hall in a mixture of sculpture, paint, and relief depicting key religious themes that complemented the American Renaissance architecture. The project was to occupy the rest of his life. Just as his reputation as a painter was changing, the new aesthetics of modernist painting came to fruition. To young eyes, Sargent represented a tired stylist in collusion with an indolent bourgeoisie. Ironically, Sargent’s final major commissions memorialized the event that swept away this ancien régime. Between 1918 and 1922, Sargent was asked to paint four commemorative paintings of World War I. Of these, Gassed (1918) is a testimony to the scale of the tragedy and the varied fortunes of the ordinary soldier; Some General Officers of the Great War (1922) is a roll call of a defunct military order. Both paintings ably demonstrate Sargent’s vivid realism and pictorial rhythm. Damian Sutton
1047
See also: James, Henry; Painting; World War I. References Fairbrother, Trevor. John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Kilmurray, Elaine, and Richard Ormond, eds. John Singer Sargent. London: Tate Gallery, 1998. Olson, Stanley. John Singer Sargent: His Portrait. London: Macmillan, 1986.
SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL (1905–1980) French writer and philosopher, famous for his association with existentialism. Born in Paris, Sartre attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the prestigious higher education institution dedicated to literature and philosophy, where he met his lifelong partner, Simone de Beauvoir. The influence of German philosophy (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger), intensified by his studies in Berlin in 1933–1934, determined much of his intellectual development. In the novel La Nausée/Nausea (1938) and the philosophical tome L’Etre et le néant/Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre elaborated a vocabulary to describe a contingent, godless universe in which the en soi (being in itself ) of objects and the external world is queasily apprehended by the pour soi (being for itself ) of consciousness, a void of pure projection. The Sartrean idea of bad faith refers to the self-deception that seeks to deny the freedom of the pour soi and to achieve an illusory self-coincidence through the objectifying gaze of social conformism or power. His most famous play, Huis Clos/In Camera (1944), develops these notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, portraying three characters in hell who,
1048
SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL
Jean-Paul Sartre, the great French writer associated with existentialism, arriving in Berlin-Tegel from Paris, 1948. (Bettmann/Corbis)
having lived such lives of bad faith, torment each other for eternity. In La Nausée, the solution proposed is an aesthetic one in which the arrangements on a jazz record promise an autonomous world of necessity. World War II and the occupation endowed Sartre’s thought with new historical and political urgencies and new emphases on choice, freedom, and situation. Mobilized in 1939, made prisoner of war and released in 1941, he returned to Paris, wrote the play Les Mouches/The Flies (1943), an allegory of France’s wartime situation, and participated in the intellectual resistance. He emerged from the war convinced of the necessary marriage of existentialism and political commitment, expounded in the novel cycle Les Chemins de la liberté/The Roads to Freedom (1945– 1949) and essays such as Qu’est-ce que la
littérature?/What Is Literature? (1946)—in which he argues for a committed literature—and L’Existentialisme est un humanisme/Existentialism and Humanism (1946). If existence precedes essence in that neither a god nor human nature determines our being, then the human animal, condemned to be free, is the sum total of his or her acts and choices. Indeed, Sartre was to develop into one of the most intensely political of French writers, supporting the French Communist Party in the early 1950s but breaking with them in 1956. He engaged in anticolonialist struggles (prefacing Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth), visited Castro’s Cuba in 1960, and was active in the May 1968 uprising and the revolutionary leftism that followed. The immediate postwar period was also marked by Sartre’s (and Beauvoir’s)
SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL
emergence into a fashionability and kind of intellectual superstardom that extended well beyond the borders of France and across the Atlantic. In 1945–1946, Sartre made two visits to the United States as a reporter and lecturer. He had long admired many aspects of U.S. culture, not only jazz and blues but also a pantheon of writers such as John Dos Passos (Le Sursis/The Reprieve of 1945, part of The Roads to Freedom, is indebted to his unanimist techniques), William Faulkner, Herman Melville, and Richard Wright, whom he knew in Paris. (Sartre’s play, La Putain respectueuse/The Respectful Whore [1946], is a rather crude attempt to engage with American racial politics.) Fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as mainstream newsmagazines such as Time, were instrumental in introducing Sartre and Beauvoir, and their ideas, to American audiences. This personalization and image making in popular culture, partly useful in that it brought publicity to existentialism, partly an obstacle to debate, especially as the period was also marked by a bohemian youth “existentialist” culture, was to continue. The apogee was perhaps the Audrey Hepburn musical Funny Face (1956), in which the heroine flirts with a Sartre-type figure in Paris. By then, Sartre himself was in a highly anti-American phase, in the context of the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunts, and following the executions of the Rosenbergs in 1952. (Sartre worked on a screenplay of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Les Sorcières de Salem, directed by Raymond Rouleau in 1957 and starring Simone Signoret.) More serious American intellectual engagements with Sartre’s thought also took place. Paris-based Janet Flanner played a mediating role for the New Yorker, and Par-
1049
tisan Review also engaged seriously with existentialism. But the New York intellectuals were less comfortable with Sartre’s sympathies for Communism, and also with his American literary tastes. Later, many American commentators on Sartre, such as Ralph Harper and James Collins, attempted to play down his bleak atheism, and Hazel E. Barnes (who translated Being and Nothingness) emphasised a pragmatic adaptation of his thought. The influence of existentialism (via Sartre, but also Kierkegaard and German expressionism) on many aspects of twentieth-century American culture is plain: film noir, Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, even Fight Club (1999). Sartre himself was invited by John Huston to collaborate on the screenplay for his biography of Sigmund Freud, Freud (1962). The Italian film director Vittorio de Sica made an international coproduction of Sartre’s play Les Séquestrés d’Altona/The Sequestrated of Altona (1962), with roles for American actors Fredric March and Robert Wagner. Sartrean existentialism was also extremely influential in Latin America on writers such as the Cuban Alejandro Carpentier and the Argentinian Ernesto Sábato. Sartre’s funeral in Paris was attended by more than 10,000 people. However, his intellectual star had long been waning in France and the United States, where structuralism and poststructuralism had become the new French intellectual fashions. Writers such as Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault emphasised, in contrast to Sartre, the centrality of language, the end of grand narratives of historical emancipation and personal authenticity, and the undermining of the notion of a unified self. However, future debates may show a more complex and less antagonistic relationship between Sartre
1050
SASKATCHEWAN
and more recent French theory, not least in the emphasis on the constructed nature of the self and reality. The first years of the twenty-first century have seen a renewed interest in Sartre, particularly around the republication in 2004 of the attempted synthesis he made in 1960 of existentialism and Marxism, the Critique de la raison dialectique/Critique of Dialectical Reason. Bill Marshall See also: Allen, Woody; Beauvoir, Simone de; Carpentier, Alejo; Cuban Revolution; Deleuze, Gilles; Derrida, Jacques; Dos Passos, John; Fanon, Frantz; Flanner, Janet; Foucault, Michel; Hollywood’s Paris; Jazz; Sábato, Ernesto; Theory; World War II; Wright, Richard. References Barnes, Hazel E. Sartre. London: Quartet Books, 1974. Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Hayman, Ronald. Sartre: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Lehan, Richard. A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.
SASKATCHEWAN The French presence in the region now called Saskatchewan began in 1734, when the explorer Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye arrived on the prairies west of Lake Winnipeg. In the fur trade era that followed, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the Métis—people of mixed French Canadian and native heritage—were the largest French-speaking group in the West. The immigrants who arrived during the large-scale agricultural settlement of western Canada from around 1880 were mainly English speaking, so that
French speakers became a minority. Although the 2001 census showed that fewer than 2 percent of Saskatchewan residents listed French as their mother tongue, the francophone community, known as the Fransaskois, has maintained its identity through cultural organizations and educational programs that promote Frenchlanguage instruction and awareness about Saskatchewan’s francophone history and culture. British entrepreneurs took over the French fur trade business after the conquest of New France in 1760, but the laborers remained the French Canadian voyageurs who were adept at paddling, portaging, and the other tasks of the fur trade. The children of these men and their native “country wives” (mostly Cree and Ojibwa) were known as the Bois Brûlé, or Métis. Originally nomads whose livelihood depended on the buffalo hunt, the Métis of presentday Saskatchewan began to settle in villages when the buffalo herds disappeared in the mid-nineteenth century and the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway line was completed. Catholic missionaries of the Oblate order set up missions that often became the center of settlements. Many Métis settled near Duck Lake in the North after the failure of the Red River Rebellion in 1870, and these communities were the focal point of the Riel Rebellion of 1885. French and English were the official languages of Canada’s Northwest Territories (which would become the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta) from 1874, but the French-speaking population was quickly outnumbered by English-speaking immigrants once large-scale immigration began. By 1891, French was no longer an official language of the legislature or the courts. Many French settlements in
SCHOELCHER,VICTOR
Saskatchewan were founded by French missionary colonizers, some thirty of whom operated between 1880 and 1930. These included such men as Father Jean Gaire, who arrived from Lorraine in 1888, and Father Le Floch, who came from Brittany to found Saint-Brieux in 1903–1904. Immigrants from Quebec, France, Belgium, and Switzerland became known collectively as the Fransaskois, who speak a form of French strongly influenced by Québécois. The Saskatchewan Act of 1905 provided for separate schools, but no official provision was made for instruction in French. The Fransaskois community, through the Association catholique franco-canadienne de la Saskatchewan (ACFC, later changed to the Association culturelle franco-canadienne de la Saskatchewan), organized parallel private structures to protect French language and culture in the province. Anti-French sentiment in the early twentieth century and Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1930s led to the complete abolition of French-language instruction and the banning of crucifixes and religious clothing in schools. The ACFC responded by setting up two private colleges offering postsecondary training in French and by establishing private radio stations for French-language broadcasting. Kathy Durnin See also: Alberta; Brittany; Fur Trade; Language; Métis; Riel, Louis; La Vérendrye Family. References Lapointe, Richard, and Lucille Tessier. The Francophones of Saskatchewan: A History. Regina: Société historique de la Saskatchewan, 1986. Quenneville, Jean-Guy. Les Fransaskois de la Saskatchewan: Aperçu historique, démographique et linguistique. Saskatoon: Research Unit for French-Canadian Studies, 1980.
1051
SCHOELCHER,VICTOR (1804–1893) Born in Paris in 1804; died December 25, 1893, in Houilles, France. Victor Schoelcher was a statesman renowned for his contribution to the abolition of slavery in the French-speaking colonies of the Caribbean. In 1830, his father, a reputable china tradesman, sent him to the Americas in search of new markets. This is when Schoelcher first came across the atrocities of slavery. He was appalled by the lack of humanity with which the slaves were treated, and on his return to Europe he wrote many articles on the brutality of the slavery regime. He was a humanist and was more interested in human conditions, literature, and politics than in the china business. He held many political meetings with scholars and militants in the back room of the china shop, which he inherited from his father. Seeing his strong interest in political activities, his mother decided to support him by giving him an allowance that would enable him to finance his meetings and various publications. Thanks to this financial support, he was able to give up the family business and focus on his main interest. In 1845, Schoelcher promulgated a text that aimed to improve the conditions of slaves in the French-speaking Caribbean islands. He suggested reducing corporal punishment and giving some dignity back to the slaves, who were to be treated as human beings and not as objects or material goods as stipulated in the Code Noir. The slaves were also to receive some basic education. However, the text fell on deaf ears because the colonists refused to take any account of it. Victor Schoelcher had to wait until 1848 to make a real impact on improving the conditions of the slaves. He took the
1052
SCHUESSELE, CHRISTIAN
opportunity of the establishment of the provisional government to lobby for the abolition of slavery. He was entrusted with the writing of the decree for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, which he presented on April 27, 1848. Schoelcher was subsequently elected as deputy for Guadeloupe and Martinique. Slavery was finally abolished in Martinique on May 22, 1848, and in Guadeloupe on May 27, 1848. Although Schoelcher played an important role in the abolition of slavery in the French-speaking islands of the Caribbean, there is today much discussion about the amount of credit to be given to Schoelcher because of the risk of minimizing the actions of the slaves themselves in fighting for their own freedom. The abolition of slavery was not the only battle that Schoelcher had to fight. His strong allegiance to the republican doctrine, liberté, égalité, fraternité, was at the center of his commitment. He fought alongside Victor Hugo and Louis Blanc to defend freedom of expression, to gain better treatment for prisoners, and to abolish the death penalty. He was a dedicated advocate of free and lay education for everyone. His strong opposition to the monarchy resulted in eighteen years in exile during the Second Empire. His body now rests in the Pantheon in recognition of his contribution to the French Republic. Marie-Annick Gournet See also: Antislavery Movements; Guadeloupe; Martinique; Slavery. References Dorigny, Marcel, ed. The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848. New York/Oxford/Paris: Berghahn Books/UNESCO, 2003. Schmidt, Nelly. Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage. Paris: Fayard, 1994.
SCHUESSELE, CHRISTIAN (1824–1879) French émigré artist who is best known for his history paintings, many of which have become classic American images, and who helped promote the European academic art tradition in the United States. Schuessele (Schussele) was born in Guebviller, Alsace, the son of a baker. Interested in painting from an early age, he went to Strasbourg in 1841 to study lithography. Two years later, he moved to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He trained under Adolphe Yvon, the painter of battle scenes. He was commissioned to produce drawings of the paintings at Versailles for commercial chromolithographs, but the 1848 revolution put an end to his contract. Schuessele chose to emigrate to Philadelphia, where he married Cecilia Muringer, the daughter of an Alsatian lithographer. Initially, Schuessele earned a living by producing chromolithographs and designs for illustrations. However, his real interest lay in painting, and in 1851 he exhibited his first oil paintings: Lager Beer Saloon and, at the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Artist’s Recreation. A year later, again at the academy’s exhibition, he had a success with Clear the Track, a lively tobogganing scene, later engraved by John Sartain. Many of Schuessele’s subsequent paintings were to be engraved, notably by Sartain, and, as a result, his work became immensely popular. In keeping with contemporary taste, much of his work was historical. Among his many history paintings are Andrew Jackson before Judge Hall, 1815; Zeisberger Preaching to the Indians; and Franklin before the Lords in Council. Two famous paintings portray imaginary meetings of prominent Ameri-
SCHWARZ-BART, ANDRÉ
can scientists and writers. Men of Progress brings together nineteen inventors whose ingenuity had changed modern society. In the background, a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, an icon of American science, sanctifies the meeting and reinforces its symbolism. Schuessele’s equally reverential Washington Irving and His Literary Friends portrays writers representative of contemporary trends in American writing. In a different vein, his symbolic The Iron Worker and King Solomon, commissioned by the Philadelphia steel magnate Joseph Harrison, alludes to the manufacturing capacity that enabled the North to win the American Civil War and preserve the Union. The war is dealt with more directly in paintings such as Home on Furlough, which touchingly portrays a family reunion, and How We Won the Battle, which depicts a disabled veteran recounting his exploits. These works appealed blatantly, and skillfully, to popular sentiment and reached out to a wide public through Sartain’s prints. An earlier war is evoked in Schuessele’s painting of Braddock’s Defeat—shades of Yvon—but human folly of a different order inspired his striking Lady Macbeth. In 1863, Schuessele contracted palsy. The condition became so bad that he went to Europe in the hope of finding a cure. He returned to Philadelphia in 1868 and was elected to the newly established chair of drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy, a post he held, despite his worsening condition, for the rest of his life. He introduced the European academic tradition in all its rigor into the academy. Schuessele was succeeded by the great Thomas Eakins, previously his assistant, whose innovatory teaching broke with his academism. Christopher Rolfe
1053
See also: American Civil War; Franklin, Benjamin; Painting. References Michel, Bernard E. “Christian Schussele: Portrayer of America.” Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society 20, part 2 (1965): 249–267. Onorato, Ronald J. “The Context of the Pennsylvania Academy: Thomas Eakins’ Assistantship to Christian Schussele.” Arts Magazine 53 (1979): 121–129.
SCHWARZ-BART, ANDRÉ (1928–) Writer, who descends from a Polish Jewish family, most of whom died during the Holocaust. All of Schwarz-Bart’s writing takes this unspeakable and untranslatable history as its point of departure and explains why each of his novels followed a long and sinuous path. In Le Dernier des justes/The Last of the Just (1958), Jewish history from the twelfth century to the Shoah is narrated through the family chronicle of the Lévys, a name that will reappear in the first novel written with his wife, Simone SchwarzBart. This Jewish saga, which adopts a classical form, follows a chronological order, alternating between striking character portraits, which, along with the descriptive sequences, allow us to measure the antiSemitic climate of Europe. Thus, the internal monologues of the child, Ernie Lévy, whipping boy of the Hitlerjugend, and then of the adult who will leave for the concentration camp of his own accord as the “Last of the Just,” earned this novel the prestigious Prix Goncourt (1959) (and led to its republication in 2003, on the occasion of the Goncourt’s centenary). This unexpected success propelled the timid autodidact into the international
1054
SCHWARZ-BART, SIMONE
arena. Accused of plagiarism and, according to some Jewish readers, an overemphasis on the Jews as victims, Schwarz-Bart turned his attention, encouraged by his Guadeloupean wife, to a sadly similar history, that of the black Holocaust. La Mulâtresse Solitude/A Woman Named Solitude (1972) is a historical novel without comparison in Antillean literary history: structured according to the before and after of the middle passage, it draws a boundary between the Old and New Worlds, the oceanic abyss represented by a blank page, a total break. Two sections contrast the life of Diola Bayangumay with that of her daughter, conceived through a rape during the crossing, the esclave d’eau douce, Solitude. Schwarz-Bart relies on the rare historiographical traces to reinvent the life of the legendary Solitude. Belonging to the first generation of bastard children, she understands nothing of the whirlwinds of history, nor of the revolutionary events that were to lead to the first abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe (1794–1802). After these novels, which have not at all dated, André Schwarz-Bart opted for silence in the face of the innumerable pitfalls on the path to a “just” style of writing in the eyes of critics and readers. He announced his decision as early as Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (“A Dish of Pork with Green Bananas,” 1967), a novel that is little known because of its opacity, its shattered structure (an open-ended diary), its telescoping of real and dream worlds, and its ending: a gaping openness. “The disappearance” (à la Perec) of an author preoccupied by the excavatory writing of sealed histories, which would smash the taboos of the plantation and point a finger at the many scars of slavery in the
DOM-TOM societies as modern paralysis (unemployment, globalization, alienation), does not, however, signify the end of an artistic engagement or career. The Schwarz-Barts published a seven-volume encyclopedia, Hommage à la femme noire (Editions Consulaires, 1989), which has been partially translated into English. Illustrations and biobibliographical entries, legends, and proverbs bring to the fore black women who have remained invisible and inaudible in the annals of history, from the Queen of Saba to Harriet Tubman, from Sojourner Truth to Alice Walker, from the Mulatto Solitude to a generation of “warriors of the imagination,” which includes Simone Schwarz-Bart. Kathleen Gyssels See also: Antislavery Movements; Guadeloupe; Perec, Georges; Schwarz-Bart, Simone; Slavery. References Gyssels, Kathleen. Filles de Solitude: Essai sur l’identité antillaise dans les (auto)biographies fictives de Simone et André Schwarz-Bart. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Toumson, Hélène, and Roger Toumson. “Interview avec Simone et André SchwarzBart: Sur les pas de Fanotte.” Textes et Études Documents. Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1979, 13–23.
SCHWARZ-BART, SIMONE (1938–) Guadeloupean writer. Themes of migration and exile are important in Schwarz-Bart’s work, but it is the circumstances that led to her becoming a writer that best illustrate the idea of the French Atlantic. While studying in Paris, she met and married André Schwarz-
SCHWARZ-BART, SIMONE
Bart, son of Polish Jewish immigrants and author of Le Dernier des justes/The Last of the Just (1959); their life together spans periods in Senegal, Switzerland, Paris, and Guadeloupe. Together, they wrote Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967), in which the loneliness of an old Martinican woman dying in an institution in France evokes parallels with the suffering of Jewish exiles. Encouraged by her husband, Simone went on to write her most successful work, Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle/The Bridge of Beyond (1972). Set in Guadeloupe, this recounts the heroine’s struggles with poverty, male violence and infidelity, and her own crises of near-madness, emphasizing the strength she draws from her female friends and ancestors, particularly her grandmother, and from the traditional oral culture of folktales and proverbs. The firstperson narrative is heavily inflected with Creole idioms, but remains transparently intelligible to a French reader. Although some critics disapproved of its nonconfrontational, resigned attitude, it was also seen as celebrating a low-key, specifically feminine kind of stoicism and passive resistance, and it was extremely popular with ordinary readers both in Guadeloupe and in France. It was awarded the Prix des lectrices de Elle and has been translated into many other languages. The creole folktale becomes central to her next publication, Ti-Jean l’horizon/Between Two Worlds (1979), in which the realism of the first two novels gives way to magic and allegory. Ti-Jean is a major figure in Antillean folklore, and Schwarz-Bart’s novel presents itself as an addition to the existing cycle of stories about him. In a quest to find his ancestors, Ti-Jean embarks on a magic odyssey to his grandfather’s village in
1055
Africa, only to find himself rejected because of the shame of slavery that still, in the eyes of the free Africans, attaches to Afro-Caribbeans. He then goes to France, but this country proves equally hostile; finally he returns home to Guadeloupe and the realization that his cultural identity has its roots there, not in Africa or Europe. With the play Ton Beau Capitaine (1987), Schwarz-Bart moves to a different genre and a more contemporary subject; it reflects the privileged status that Guadeloupe as a département d’outre mer has in comparison with the rest of the Caribbean. Its portrayal of the relationship between a Haitian immigrant working in the cane fields of Guadeloupe and his unfaithful but remorseful wife emphasizes the pain of exile and the strain that economic hardship places on personal relations. Schwarz-Bart’s most recent publication, again in collaboration with her husband, is a history of women in Africa and the African diaspora from the ancient past to the present; this enormous project was published in six volumes, under the title Hommage à la femme noire/In Praise of Black Women, in 1989. Celia Britton See also: Guadeloupe; Haiti; Schwarz-Bart, André; Slavery. References Gyssels, Kathleen. Filles de Solitude: Essai sur l’identité antillaise dans les (auto)biographies fictives de Simone et André Schwarz-Bart. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Gyssels, Kathleen. “Simone Schwarz-Bart,” http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile /paroles/schwarz-bart.html (cited April 19, 2004). Toureh, Fanta. L’Imaginaire dans l’æuvre de Simone Schwarz-Bart: Approche d’une mythologie antillaise. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987.
1056
SCORZA, MANUEL
SCORZA, MANUEL (1928–1983) Accomplished poet, outspoken intellectual, and publisher of Populibros Peruanos. Manuel Scorza went to Paris to write novels based on peasant uprisings in Peru during the 1960s and quickly made his mark in the evolution of Peruvian “indigenista” literature. His last novel, La danza inmóvil (“The Immobile Dance,” 1979), departs in theme and style from his previous works and explores the conflict between personal needs and aspirations and the demands of the revolutionary movement. Always an activist, as a young man he was forced to leave Peru to avoid political persecution. Twenty years later, he went into self-imposed exile in France, where between 1968 and 1978 he completed his Andean novels. In 1978, he returned to Peru as a candidate for the Constitutional Assembly, only to withdraw in protest at government policy. He became national press secretary of Frente Obrero Campesino Estudiantil del Perú (FOCEP), a leftist political party with roots in the Movimiento Comunal of the 1960s. Scorza returned to France after finishing La danza inmóvil. He died in a Madrid airline crash that took the lives of other prominent Spanish-American writers. Scorza considered himself to be the spiritual heir of his fellow countryman, magical realist José María Arguedas. Yet most critics label Scorza a “neo-indigenista” for the modern narrative techniques and humor in his exposition of mistreatment and abuse of Indian communities by national institutions and foreign corporations. Scorza’s fiction includes the intertextual use of indigenous myths, including those that were translated and disseminated by Arguedas. But unlike Arguedas,
Scorza had an understanding of myth that is not cultural or metaphysical but ideological. In La tumba del relámpago/Requiem for a Lightning Bolt, for example, Scorza wants the reader to dismantle old myths and so develop a progressive understanding of Peruvian history and contemporary society. Scorza created self-conscious—or selfreflexive—novels. His overt or intrusive narrator uses irony and frequent satire to stimulate readers to develop a critical distance between themselves, the characters, and the events. The playful tone of the novels does not disguise their critical implications. A common theme of self-reflexive fiction is the act itself of literary creation. La danza inmóvil is a kind of novel within a novel where attention is given to the creative aspects of literature. As for many prominent Peruvian writers, artists, and intellectuals of the twentieth century, including contemporaries Julio Ramón Ribeyro and Alfredo Bryce Echenique, and Peru’s most notable exile in Paris, César Vallejo, before them, living in France removed Scorza from the political turmoil of his homeland and nurtured his intellectual development. It is not surprising that virtually half of La danza inmóvil evokes a Parisian environment of writers, critics, and publishers, for in that city Scorza taught literature classes, engaged in public debates and discussions on literature and politics, and developed the unique blend of modern and traditional elements that characterize his fiction. The author believed that literature, and the novel in particular, were more authentic than history in communicating historical truth. History is fiction no less than literature, and therefore it has no special claim on truth. The inspiration for Scorza’s “Silent War” cycle of Andean nov-
SCULPTURE
els was his desire to provide a historical account, through literature, of exploitation and injustice. Bradley Shaw See also: Bryce Echenique, Alfredo; Literary Relations. Reference Aldaz, Anna-Marie. The Past of the Future: The Novelistic Cycle of Manuel Scorza. New York: Peter Lang, 1991.
SCULPTURE Sculpture developed from the eleventh century in France, with a heavy Italian influence—characterized by realism, observation of nature, simplicity of pose and action, and intense religious feeling—from the mid-fifteenth century. One of the strongest periods of French sculpture began in the seventeenth century during the reign of Louis XIV. Because splendor and magnificence were sought after in every aspect of life, the chief themes of French sculpture under Louis XIV were portraits, tombs, and mythological subjects, influenced by Michelangelo and Bernini. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French sculpture shifted from continental to transatlantic because that was the period during which European overseas colonization began. The most important French colony in the New World was that of New France, which was founded in 1534 with the arrival of the explorer Jacques Cartier. The first sculpture in New France was made in wood by craftsmen who came over from France at the request of the intendant Jean Talon, who asked the French government to send him sculptors to do the decorative work on Le Canadien, a merchant vessel. This first group of sculptors was able to meet the
1057
colony’s needs and was responsible for training the colony’s first local sculptors through an apprenticeship system. The oldest sculpture in Canada is the baldachin, or ornamental canopy, in the choir loft of the church of Neuville, outside Quebec City. The baldachin was created between 1690 and 1700 for the chapel of the Episcopal palace of Monsignor de StVallier and is a scaled-down copy of the baldachin in the chapel of Val-de-Grâce in Paris; the work shows the importance of French models to the colony in the same way as Italian models were important to the continuing development of sculpture in France. One peculiarity of sculpture in New France and early Canada was the predominance of wood sculptures; this is because wood was the resource most readily available to sculptors. The wood sculptors of New France acknowledged the styles and fashions of seventeenth-century France, but because of the limitations caused by using wood as their material, the roundness of French baroque was subdued by a robustness that served as a trademark of their being made in Canada. The robustness of French Canadian sculpture lasted until about the nineteenth century, when wood sculpture gradually became obsolete. It is said that when the wood sculptor Louis Jobin died in 1928, he took traditional Canadian wood sculpture with him. Although Canadian wood sculpture was slowly losing popularity at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, sculptors were leaning more toward the use of bronze. Further adding to the relation between French and Canadian sculpture, the influence of the nineteenth-century French master Auguste Rodin was heavily present in the bronze
1058
SCULPTURE
sculptures of Emmanuel Hahn and Elizabeth Wynwood, yet their styles were uniquely Canadian. There were no specific facilities in Canada to cast bronze sculptures until the 1960s; as a result, the pieces had to be cast in the United States or Europe and then shipped back to Canada. The end of World War I further promoted Canadian bronze sculpture because of a desire for monuments to commemorate Canada’s participation in the war. One such monument was Walter Seymour Allward’s memorial in France to the Canadians who died at Vimy Ridge. Allward was sent from Canada to France to execute this realist work. “Modern” styles of sculpture were somewhat late in arriving in Canada, sometimes taking several decades to reach the Canadian artistic scene. An example of this trend can be seen in the works of Louis Archambault and Anne Kahane, who were heavily influenced by Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and Julio Gonzalez (1876–1942). During the 1960s and 1970s, the Canadian sculptor Sorel Etrog (b. 1933) became known for his signature style of knotted bronze, which he also attributed to the influence of Lipchitz. With the arrival of the 1980s came an “anything goes” attitude in Canadian sculpture; indeed, just about anything was considered sculpture. There was no “official” approach, nor was there a method or medium that could guarantee success. Works had illusion and reality, shifting points of view, and a reinterpretation of objects as their major themes. Another former French colony that continues to maintain artistic relations with France is Haiti, and it is the Haitian Slave Revolt that serves as one of the themes of the earliest forms of Haitian art.
Unfortunately, few records exist on Haitian sculpture from this period. One of the most important forms of Haitian sculpture that developed as an indirect result of the French slave trade is that of metal drum sculpture, which relied heavily on mythology from Vodun (voodoo), the religion developed in Haiti by African slaves in the sixteenth century. One of the major centers for Vodun in Haiti is Croix-des-Bouquets, a town about 10 miles away from Port-auPrince, Haiti’s capital. In the early 1950s, Georges Liautaud, a blacksmith from Croix-des-Bouquets, began working on decorative metal sculpture. Since that time, Croix-des-Bouquets has become the center of Haitian metal sculpture, the current masters being Gabriel Bien-Aimé and Serge Jolimeau. Perhaps the best-known Caribbean sculpture is that of Neg Mawon/Marron Inconnu by Albert Mangones, which was executed in 1968 and has since become the symbol for freedom and independence in the Caribbean. Mangones was a supporter of Haiti’s Centre d’Art, which promoted “naïve art,” characterized by its spontaneity, freedom of expression, and freshness. The Centre d’Art was founded in 1944 by Dewitt Peters, an American schoolteacher who wanted to found a center for Haiti’s visual arts and who, consequently, convinced Georges Liautaud to bring the mythology of Vodun to life in his metal sculpture. Interestingly, French artistic influence can also be found in Latin American sculpture dating from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. For example, the Mexican sculptor Emmanuel Tolsa studied in Spain under French artists, and Alexandre-Jean Noël spent considerable time in Mexico during
SCULPTURE
1059
Sculptor Alexander Calder in his studio. (Pierre Vauthey/Corbis Sygma)
the eighteenth century. In Brazil, Parisianborn sculptor Auguste-Marie Taumay, along with his brother Nicolas Antoine, helped spread the neoclassical style. French sculpture in Latin America was, however, most prominent in Argentina, where the architect Prosper Catelin created the facade of the cathedral of Buenos Aires. The creation of various public monuments to honor Argentine heroes and to commemorate events vital to Argentina’s history was also given to French sculptors, such as the
memorial by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) to Sarmiento and Antoine Bourdelle’s statue of General Alvear. Rodin’s influence was heavily felt throughout Latin America in twentieth-century sculpture, most especially in the works of the sculptor Jesús Contreras. French sculpture is also evident in Santiago, Chile, including Don José de San Martin, el Emancipador by LouisJoseph Daumas. France also owes some of its public sculptures to artists from Latin America.
1060
SCULPTURE
The pink marble sculpture in the cour carrée of the Forum des Halles in Paris was done by Julio Silva, and Pablo Reinoso created the bronze sculpture of a giant dragonfly that can be seen in Poitiers. Reciprocal action with regard to sculpture also marks relations between France and the United States. The first time a French sculptor visited the United States was in 1785, when Jean-Antoine Houdon came over to make the statue of George Washington that is located in the state capitol at Richmond, Virginia. Unfortunately, Houdon’s stay in the United States was brief and had little to no influence on American sculpture. Until roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, the chief influence on American sculpture was the Italian style. This gave way to the influence of Parisian art before the FrancoPrussian War, and it eventually became the predominant style in American sculpture. The first notable example of the French style in American sculpture was Howard Roberts’s La Première Pose, which debuted at the 1876 American Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Also in 1876, FrédéricAuguste Bartholdi’s Lafayette Arriving in America, commissioned by the French government in gratitude for American support during the Franco-Prussian War, was unveiled in New York City. Perhaps the most well-known sculpture in the United States is Bartholdi’s Liberty Enlightening the World or The Statue of Liberty, which was cast by AlexandreGustave Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame. The Statue of Liberty, which was unveiled in New York City in 1886, was commissioned to commemorate French-American friendship and to celebrate the centennial of American independence.
Many American sculptors spent time living and studying in France, including Augustus St. Gaudens, who was considered to be the greatest American sculptor at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. St. Gaudens was known for his mastery of low relief, possibly a result of his training as a cameo cutter while living in Paris and in Rome. Frederick William MacMonnies, a pupil of St. Gaudens as well as of Jean-Alexandre Falguière and Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié of Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was known for having an overwhelming originality in his works and an even more distinct French style than St. Gaudens. The twentieth century saw American sculptors still going to study in France as well as French sculptors coming to the United States to perfect their craft. One such American sculptor who worked in Paris was Alexander Calder, known for Calder’s Circus, a miniature version of an actual circus made from wire, cork, wood, and cloth, among other materials. Upon seeing Calder’s Circus, the French painter Marcel Duchamp called it a collection of “mobiles” because Calder’s forms were suspended in the air, and only the wind or a slight touch could provoke their movement. One prominent French artist who found success in the United States was Louise Bourgeois, who emigrated from France in 1938 and dedicated herself primarily to painting. However, in 1949, Bourgeois debuted her sculptures in a show held by New York’s Peridot Gallery. Since that time, Bourgeois has continued to exhibit her sculptures, receiving her first public commission, Facets to the Sun, for the Norris Cotton Federal Building in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1978.
SEBERG, JEAN
One reason for French artistic migration to the United States was because of World War II, as was the case with Lipchitz. But another possible explanation is the shift in world artistic centers from Europe to the North American continent, mainly to New York City. This shift in artistic centers can only continue to highlight the continuing importance of transatlantic relations between sculptors from France and sculptors in the “New World,” and, most likely, modern art and sculpture will take on new styles and techniques stemming from this change. Stephanie Longo See also: Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste; Bourgeois, Louise; Brazil; Cartier, Jacques; Chile; Haiti; Houdon, Jean-Antoine; Mexico; New France; Painting; Slavery; Statue of Liberty, The; Talon, Jean; Vodun; World War II. References Arthur, Charles. “Haiti’s Vodou Blacksmiths.” Raw Vision (October 1995). Burnett, David, and Marilyn Schiff. Contemporary Canadian Art. Edmonton, AB: Hurtig, 1983. Butler, Ruth. Western Sculpture: Definitions of Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Christensen, Eleanor Ingalls. The Art of Haiti. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1975. Elsen, Albert E. Origins of Modern Sculpture. New York: George Braziller, 1974. Fowler, Harold H. A History of Sculpture. New York: Macmillan, 1921. Hammond, O. M. Painting and Sculpture in Canada. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1943. A History of Haitian Art, http://www.discoverhaiti. com/artsynop.htm (cited June 25, 2004).
SEBERG, JEAN (1938–1979) Film actress born in Marshalltown, Iowa, in November 1938. Seberg first rose to prominence when she was selected from an
1061
audition of some 180,000 unknown hopefuls to star in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957). Her very first film role thus placed the American teenager into an overdetermined French cultural and cinematic context. Despite the film’s poor performance at the box office in both France and the United States, Seberg reprised the role of the young American girl in France in Preminger’s next film, Bonjour Tristesse (1958). Based on the Françoise Sagan novel of the same name, this film was shot on location in the south of France. Both these performances of French cultural icons occurred in the context of a Hollywood film, financed by U.S. studios and starring British and American anglophone actors. Preminger’s films thus developed a potential star persona for Seberg that emphasized a cross-cultural exchange between Hollywood and France. Seberg’s star image thus laid bare a paradox concerning the American female star in France. The American star’s presence in French visual and textual culture speaks of the powerful economic and cultural hegemony of Hollywood practice, encapsulated in her sheer visibility and mobility. Yet, at the same time, her gender leads to her fetishization as a still, contained image. This tension between stillness and mobility inherent in the image of the Hollywood star in France is self-reflexively performed by Seberg in A bout de souffle/Breathless (Godard, 1960). This is a film in which she plays not only the traditional Noir role of the gangster’s moll, she also plays her own pre-established star image of the American girl in France. Although her gender constrains her performance to that of a sexualized young woman, her nationality allows her claim to culturally powerful discourses
1062
SEGALEN,VICTOR
of information and “truth,” encapsulated in the T-shirt she wears proclaiming her role in selling the U.S.-sanctioned view of the world via the New York Herald Tribune. In this film, Seberg functions both as traditional cinematic woman in an economy of mysterious/dangerous desire, but also as a peddler of American cultural forms. Seberg’s nationality allows Godard to explore Hollywood cultural hegemony through her star image. Although Americanized modernity promised greater social, financial, and sexual mobility for France, stifling moral codes attempted to preserve old (nationalized) hierarchies and identities. Seberg herself commented that apparently for the French, at least, she seemed to express a basic melancholy, a sense of loss that said something about all contemporary young women. This pull between tradition and modernity eventually became unlivable for Seberg. Mark Rappaport’s film From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995) examines this condition, arguing that her sexual vulnerability was exploited by the male directors she worked with and that the use of closeup in her films worked to emphasize her loneliness and isolation while knowingly playing with and distorting her image and private persona. Seberg’s most successful late film role, Lilith (Rossen, 1964), shows her descent into madness, uncannily echoed in her private life. Following FBI accusations that she had an affair with a Black Panther, she gave birth to a stillborn baby that she had buried in a glass coffin to prove it was white. Always mentally fragile, she never fully recovered from the trauma and died under mysterious circumstances (probably suicide) in Paris in 1979. Fiona Handyside
See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Film Noir; Gary, Romain; Godard, Jean-Luc; Joan of Arc. References Ginna, Robert Emmet. “On Screen: Jean Seberg.” Horizon 4, no. 5 (May 1962): 38. Handyside, Fiona. “Stardom and Nationality: The Strange Case of Jean Seberg.” Studies in French Cinema 2, no. 3 (October 2002): 165–176 Marie, Michel. “It Really Makes You Sick! Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960).” French Film: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge: 159–174. Rivette, Jacques. “Sainte Cécile.” Cahiers du cinéma (April 1958): 52–54.
SEGALEN,VICTOR (1878–1919) Naval doctor, traveler, poet, novelist, and theorist of exoticism, Segalen was born in Brest, Brittany. Although primarily associated with Polynesia (where he served 1903–1904) and China (where he traveled widely throughout the final decade of his life), the United States, which he crossed in 1902, played a major if rarely explored role in his life and work. In his attitude to the country, Segalen contributes to a specifically French tradition of anti-Americanism, seeing in the United States not only a New World culture inferior to the supposedly more firmly established traditions of metropolitan France but also a burgeoning global presence threatening to engulf other cultures. Indeed, preempting claims about globalization made by later twentiethcentury French cultural commentators, Segalen identifies an embryonic “Americanization” (manifested in cultural forms such as jazz) as one of a series of forces—
SEGALEN,VICTOR
including tourism, colonialism, and feminism—contributing to the entropic erosion of what he dubs “le Divers” [Diversity]. Segalen employs his knowledge and actual experience of the United States to explore issues relating to French culture, at the same time articulating concerns about exoticism and the decline of variation in global culture. Segalen spent most of his adult life either traveling outside France or preparing for the next of a series of journeys. The first of these involved a transatlantic and then a trans-U.S. itinerary, for to reach his posting in Tahiti, Segalen sailed on the steamer La Touraine from Le Havre to New York before crossing the continent to reach San Francisco by train. The accounts of this journey—in the Journal des îles and “Quelques musées par le monde”—illustrate contemporary French attitudes to the United States. He was struck, for instance, by the composite, heterogeneous nature of American architecture. Visiting museums in New York and San Francisco, Segalen saw in these institutions a performance of national identity that is at the same time an attempt to compensate for the lack of a tangible national past. His commentary presents the museum as the epitome of a society in which spectacle, exhibition, and the stage management of culture are privileged to the detriment of accuracy and good taste. This analysis might be read as the reflex reaction of an inadequate French traveler faced with the unexpected dimensions of the United States, and his account of his train journey across the continent certainly reflects a sense of expansiveness unavailable in Europe. Having met the French ethnologist and pre-Columbian specialist Léon Lejeal, Segalen nevertheless
1063
remained sensitive to precolonial American culture, showing an interest in Mexican and Peruvian artifacts and questioning Columbus’s “discovery” of America. It is in San Francisco, however, that Segalen discovered the multiethnic identity of the United States, for his visit to Chinatown represents an initial contact with Chinese culture and, more important for his later work, with Chinese writing materials. Incapacitated with typhoid and forced to convalesce on the West Coast, Segalen became familiar with San Francisco, discovering constant traces of the early French presence there during the gold rush and associating with the French diasporic community. It was on hearing the “Marseillaise” in this American context and experiencing a consequent sense of disorientation that Segalen described for the first time the exoticization of the familiar that informs much of his later work. Although apparently fleeting, Segalen’s contact with North America forms the foundation for much of his subsequent literary production and theoretical reflection; although his response is predominantly negative, it nevertheless casts the United States as the Other whereby the familiar is itself explored and defined. Charles Forsdick See also: Anti-Americanism; Brittany; Feminisms; Le Havre; Mexico; Travel Writing. References Forsdick, Charles. “Victor Segalen and Museology: Stage-Management of the Exotic in an Age of Entropy.” French Cultural Studies 6 (1995): 385–412. Manceron, Henry. Segalen. Paris: Lattès, 1991. Segalen, Victor. “Quelques musées par le monde.” Oeuvres complètes. 2 vols. Paris: Laffont, 1995: 1:723–733. [First published in La Revue européenne, 1931.]
1064
SERGE,VICTOR
SERGE,VICTOR (VICTOR LVOVICH KIBALCHICH) (1890–1947) Franco-Russian revolutionary novelist, born 1890 in Brussels, died 1947 in Mexico City. Serge’s itinerary took him from individualist anarchism in pre–World War I Paris, commitment to Bolshevism in Petrograd from 1919, to persecution and internal exile as a Left oppositionist to Stalinism from 1928. The “affaire Victor Serge” of 1935, in which his case exploded to the fore of the International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture held in Paris, eventually enabled him to leave the USSR. Serge is also the author of a volume of memoirs and seven novels that document the fate of the revolutionary movement, the most famous of which is L’Affaire Toulaév/The Case of Comrade Tulayev, published posthumously in 1948 but written on the run from the Nazis in 1940–1942. Serge’s transatlantic passage began in Marseilles after the fall of France in 1940, where he was helped by Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. On March 25, 1941, Serge, his son Vlady (born 1921), André Breton and his family, Wilfredo Lam, and Claude Lévi-Strauss set sail on the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle. Serge was refused a U.S. visa; after internment in a former leper colony in Martinique, passage through the Dominican Republic, and incarceration in Cuba, he reached Mexico. Serge was joined by his daughter, Jeannine (born 1935), and his companion, Laurette Séjourné, later to become a prominent anthropologist. The six years of Serge’s Mexican exile were marked by only relative security and well-being. He was surrounded by a community of exiles, including the writer Jean
Malaquais, the French Socialist Marceau Pivert, and members of the Spanish workers’ party, the POUM, persecuted by Stalin during the Spanish civil war. However, the Mexican Communist Party and Soviet Embassy, already implicated in the death of Trotsky in 1940, stirred up implacable hostility against the anti-Stalinist revolutionaries: Serge suffered physical assault at some political meetings, and in general feared for his life. His writings, essays and fiction, had difficulty finding publishers, but his contacts with American leftists such as Dwight and Nancy MacDonald, who had materially supported him after the fall of France, opened doors at journals such as New International, Politics, and Partisan Review. Serge’s novel Les Derniers Temps/ The Long Dusk was first published in French in 1946 in Montreal. During this period the history, and especially landscape, of Mexico began to play an important role in his writings. In his notebooks (Carnets) and the short story Le Séisme, the metaphor of eruption and earthquake establishes a mental unity between all the landscapes of Serge’s life ravaged by historical cataclysm. The final section of his last novel, Les Années sans pardon (“The Unforgiving Years”), published only in 1971, traces the journey of the dissident Soviet agent Daria across the Atlantic and then the United States to be reunited with former comrades on a Mexican hacienda. They are poisoned, however, by a Stalinist agent, and the last word at the funeral is given to a boorish, uncomprehending, and unreflecting American character. Serge’s final political assessments of American society were, unlike those of his revolutionary colleagues, often positive because of the living standards of the American worker and the egalitarian aspects of the New
SERVAN-SCHREIBER, JEAN-JACQUES
Deal. Hoping that Americans would see the advantages of a planned economy because of the wartime experience, and in favor of decolonization but against a confrontation with the West, he nevertheless continued to criticize U.S. capitalism and bellicosity. Bill Marshall See also: Breton, André; Lam, Wilfredo; LéviStrauss, Claude; Malaquais, Jean; Mexico; World War I; World War II. References Debray, Régis. “Le Beau Métier de vaincu.” Preface. Victor Serge: Carnets. Arles: Actes Sud, 1985: 7–17. Marshall, Bill. Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent. Oxford: Berg, 1992. Sontag, Susan. “Cases of the Comrades: Why Victor Serge Should Be as Famous as Koestler and Orwell.” Times Literary Supplement, (April 9, 2004): 12–15. Weissman, Susan. Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope. London/New York: Verso, 2001.
SERVAN-SCHREIBER, JEANJACQUES (1924–) Journalist and cofounder of L’Express. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber was born on February 13, 1924, into a family of German Jewish immigrant origin that had rapidly established itself as an integral part of elite French society. His father, Emile, was a successful journalist who in 1908 had founded Les Echos, the country’s first financial newspaper. During World War II, the young Servan-Schreiber left France to join General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French. He fought in the air force, where his bravery led to the award of the Croix militaire in 1943. Following his demobilization, he studied at the Ecole Polytechnique, the most prestigious of France’s highly selective grandes écoles. On graduating in 1947,
1065
Servan-Schreiber followed his father into the world of newspapers. Employed as foreign affairs editor by Le Monde, he also reported on European questions for American journals. This involvement was the first indication of the long-term influence that the United States would have on his thinking. In 1953, with Françoise Giroud, he founded France’s first weekly newsmagazine, the left-of-center L’Express. It was as editor of this influential publication, consciously modeled on Time and Newsweek, that Servan-Schreiber denounced France’s colonial war in Algeria (1954–1962). As a recalled reservist, Servan-Schreiber had experienced firsthand the brutal reality of France’s self-appointed “civilizing mission” in North Africa. The account of the conflict that he provided in his book Lieutenant en Algérie (1957) became one of the most significant statements of the antiwar case. Although sharply criticized by the French government of the day, Servan-Schreiber’s telling observations may have informed de Gaulle’s own analysis when he was brought back to power in the summer of 1958 to resolve the deepening Algerian crisis. In the late 1960s, ServanSchreiber himself entered politics, when he began a highly personalized campaign that led some commentators to talk of him as “the French Kennedy.” Three tools were used by “JJSS,” as he now styled himself, in his bid for national office: the reformed, and temporarily reinvigorated, Radical Party; a solid political base in the Lorraine region; and, most of all, American-style electioneering both paid for and facilitated by his now extensive media holdings. Servan-Schreiber’s ideological project was mapped out in his best-selling essay Le Défi américain/The American Challenge (1967), in which he described the “American
1066
SHUMAN, MORT
challenge” to France and, indeed, Europe as a whole. Central to this perceived threat were the closely linked technological preeminence and commercial superiority of the United States. For France and the rest of (Western) Europe to compete, and thus to retain their endangered independence, it would be necessary to decentralize, to invest in new technology, and to adopt modern U.S. business methods. While JJSS never made the Kennedy-style political breakthrough that he undoubtedly hoped for, he did rise to become minister for reform under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1974. However, he had one of France’s shortest ministerial careers, being removed from office after just twelve days for criticizing the resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific. A political adventurer as much as a journalistic entrepreneur, JeanJacques Servan-Schreiber made a distinctive contribution to French social thinking that foreshadowed, to some extent, more recent analyses of the U.S.-led globalization of commercial and cultural exchanges. Philip Dine See also: Anti-Americanism; Gaulle, General Charles de; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Nuclear Technology; World War II. References Rustenholz, Alain, and Sandrine Treiner. La Saga Servan-Schreiber. Vol. 2, Le Temps des initiales. Paris: Seuil, 1993. Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques. Le Défi américain. Paris: Denoël, 1967.
SHUMAN, MORT (1936–1991) Brooklyn-born singer, actor, and composer of songs and film music whose career started in the United States, continued in France, and finished in London.
He studied at the New York Conservatory, but his real musical education (R&B, blues) came from the Harlem black community, where he felt happier than in his own. He started to write music at eighteen; in the 1950s he met with Doc Pomus, an experienced songwriter and blues singer. The two of them formed a successful partnership that lasted from 1958 to 1965; they created more then 500 songs, among them many hits for celebrities such as Dion and the Belmonts (“A Teenager in Love”), The Drifters (“Save the Last Dance for Me”), Andy Williams (“Can’t Get Used to Losing You), and Elvis Presley (“Viva Las Vegas,” “His Latest Flame”). Shuman then collaborated with other lyricists and composed for British artists. Jacques Brel’s songs, which Shuman discovered in 1966, deeply impressed him; in 1968, he translated thirty of them into English with the help of Eric Blau. This collaboration resulted, in the early 1970s, in the off-Broadway musical Brel wrote, directed, and acted in: Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. It turned out to be one of the three longest-running offBroadway musicals (seven years and about 1,800 performances). The show also toured in major cities of the United States and Canada and elsewhere abroad. A film version followed in 1975 in which Shuman acted (Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, directed by Denis Héroux). The 1970s also brought a turn in Shuman’s career. He established himself in Paris as a performer and singer in French, scoring six gold albums. Etienne Roda-Gil wrote songs for Shuman, and he, in turn, composed for the French artist Johnny Halliday. His first album, Amerika (1971), brought to the French the richness and variety of New York City, Puerto Rico
SIEGFRIED, ANDRÉ
(“Puerto Rico en el corazón”), Asia (“Shami-sha,” “Petite pomme de chinois”), as well as Jewish American culture (“Brooklyn by the Sea”). Some of his hits, “Le Lac Majeur,” “Papa Tango Charlie,” “Imagine,” and “Sorrow,” remain among the most popularly loved French songs. The lyrics of these songs, though poetic and humorous at times, are often nostalgic, just as most of Shuman’s work in French deals with the theme of love. The musical accompaniment, a rock rhythm at times, is more often that of long orchestral melodic and sentimental phrases. After fifteen years of success in France, he moved to London where he produced his final album, sung in English, Distant Drum (1991). In October 1989, he produced the musical Budgie and wrote several other shows not yet staged. Mort Shuman also composed music for fifteen movies and/or acted in them; a few include A Nous les petites Anglaises/Let’s Get Those English Girls (Michel Lang, 1976), La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Swaim, 1977), L’Hôtel de la plage/The Beach Hotel (Michel Lang, 1978), and Rue Haute/High Street (Ernotte, 1976). Schuman died in London at the age of fifty-four. Anne-Marie Obajtek-Kirkwood See also: Brel, Jacques; Héroux, Denis; Music (Pop); Swaim, Bob. References Bogdanov, Vladimir, et al., eds. The Definite Guide to Rock, Pop and Soul. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2002. Brel, Jacques, Eric Blau, and Mort Shuman. Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Production conception, English lyrics, and additional material by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman; music by Jacques Brel. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2000.
1067
SIEGFRIED, ANDRÉ (1875–1959) Author and academic, one of France’s most enduring interpreters of North America during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Le Havre, he was the son of Jules Siegfried (1836–1922), an influential liberal politician, and Julie Siegfried (née Puaux, 1848–1922), a prominent figure in France’s feminist movement. Having failed to be elected as a deputy four times between 1902 and 1910, Siegfried turned to teaching and writing. He was a professor at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques and the Collège de France, was elected to the Académie Française in 1944, and became the first president of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in 1945. He was a contributor to the daily Le Figaro and published more than thirty books on subjects ranging from French electoral geography to various studies of foreign lands, including works on the United States, Canada, and Latin America. In France itself, but also in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere, Siegfried was regarded as a perceptive observer of French politics and international affairs. Siegfried’s work on the Americas did much to shape his thinking about national identity and the prospects for French civilization in a world where the influence of the United States was growing. Though he had already published a book on Canada and articles about his journeys to the United States before World War I, it was his 1927 work Les Etats-Unis d’aujourd’hui/America Comes of Age that cemented his position as a commentator on the United States. In it, Siegfried argued that the United States was undergoing a profound ethnic transformation as its white
1068
SIGN LANGUAGE
Protestant elite found itself challenged by mass immigration from southern and Eastern Europe. But even as, in his view, America’s identity was being dangerously eroded, the country had become the epitome of industrial modernity. Its techniques of mass production and emphasis on mass consumption had created a dynamic new civilization. Though more balanced in tone than other critics, such as Georges Duhamel, Siegfried was disquieted by the U.S. model and its growing influence throughout his career. To him, Canada illustrated how Americanization corroded national identities, and in Latin America the materialist ethos of the United States threatened to undermine French cultural influence on the local elite. Above all, European, especially French, emphasis on humanist values, high culture, and artisanal production sharply contrasted with U.S. capitalism and mass culture. Siegfried’s belief that polyglot immigration threatened national identities—a belief derived in part from his view of development in the United States—was expressed in more racist tones during World War II. However, he kept the Vichy regime at arm’s length and came to support resistance activities. After World War II, Siegfried’s worries about Americanization eased somewhat because of the cold war. But as his 1954 Tableau des EtatsUnis/America at Mid-Century makes clear, he continued to insist on a gap between European and U.S. civilization, believing that the latter’s collective orientation and materialism remained inimical to European individualism. Sean Kennedy See also: Anti-Americanism; Duhamel, Georges; Feminisms; Le Havre; World War I; World War II.
References Birnbaum, Pierre. “La France aux Français”: histoire des haines nationalistes. Paris: Seuil, 1993. Favre, Pierre. Naissances de la science politique en France 1870–1914. Paris: Fayard, 1989. L’Oeuvre scientifique d’André Siegfried. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977. Strauss, David. Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.
SIGN LANGUAGE The historical relationship between French Sign Language and American Sign Language is a little-known but important aspect of the historical contact between France and the United States, especially for the hundreds of thousands of French and American deaf people who use these languages. Linguistic research on American Sign Language began in the early 1960s. By the latter part of the 1960s, linguists were reporting various stories told to them by American deaf people about the origins of American Sign Language. While the stories varied in some details, the recurring theme throughout every story was that American Sign Language was much more closely related to French Sign Language than it was to British Sign Language and that American signers found it much easier to communicate with French signers than they did with British signers. In many versions of the stories, it was claimed that American deaf people did not have a sign language. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a hearing American, spent time at the Institution Internationale des Sourds-Muets in Paris. He then brought one of its deaf faculty members, Laurent Clerc, to the United States
SIGN LANGUAGE
and started the first permanent school for deaf people in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. Gallaudet and Clerc supposedly used a modified version of French Sign Language to teach American deaf people, and this modified version of French Sign Language over time changed naturally into American Sign Language. Because the first few linguists working on American Sign Language were first preoccupied with describing the grammatical structure of American Sign Language, questions about the historical origins of American Sign Language were shelved until a later time. It was not until 1975 that the first comparative data on modern French Sign Language and modern American Sign Language were collected and analyzed. This showed that 61 percent of the basic vocabulary (family terms, colors, etc.) in modern French Sign Language and modern American Sign Language were cognates, historically related items that probably came from the same source (older French Sign Language). The standard interpretation of this percentage of cognates classified French Sign Language and American Sign Language as two distinct but closely related languages that belong to the same language family. Although this study confirmed the historical relationship of French Sign Language and American Sign Language, it also showed that the differences between modern French Sign Language and modern American Sign Language were much greater than the kind of change that occurs naturally over time in one language. The changes between French Sign Language and American Sign Language are brought about by the contact of two or more languages with each other. Therefore, before French Sign Language was brought to the United States, one or
1069
more indigenous sign languages must already have existed there. The idea of indigenous sign languages existing among deaf people prior to the formal education of deaf people was a radically new idea for those involved in deaf education but a perfectly natural idea for the field of linguistics. But how could it be proved? All the deaf people living in 1817 were now dead, and there was no record of sign languages. However, in 1980, a paper in Natural History (Groce, 1980, later expanded into a book in 1985) reported on an anthropological study in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, that proved through historical documents as well as interviews of older residents that there was a sign language on Martha’s Vineyard long before 1817. This sign language developed out of natural contact between hearing and deaf people on Martha’s Vineyard where the ratio of deaf to hearing people had been roughly 1:150, compared to a normal ratio of 1:100. Historical records also show some of the first deaf students at the school established by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc were from Martha’s Vineyard; undoubtedly they brought their sign language to school, where it was mixed with French Sign Language among the deaf pupils. Taken together, the studies by Woodward and Groce have empirically verified the historical relationship of French Sign Language and American Sign Language as one of language contact and mixture. The answers to questions about the structure and history of sign languages lie in unique aspects of the histories and cultures of deaf people, which may be quite different from the histories and cultures of hearing people living in the same national communities. James Woodward
1070
SIGNORET, SIMONE
See also: Language. References Groce, Nora. “Everybody Here Spoke Sign Language.” Natural History 89, no. 6 (1980): 6–12. ———. Everybody Here Spoke Sign Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Woodward, James. “Historical Bases of American Sign Language.” Understanding Language through Sign Language Research. Ed. Patricia Siple. New York: Academic Press, 1978: 333–348.
SIGNORET, SIMONE (SIMONE KAMINKER) (1921–1985) Simone Signoret is recognized as a major French film star and a public figure of international stature. She was also a writer and a left-wing militant involved in the political debates of the postwar period. From 1951, her public image became associated with that of her husband, Yves Montand, an exponent of the chanson française and an actor. Signoret grew up near Paris and started her career with small parts in classic popular films such as Boléro (Boyer, 1941), Les Visiteurs du soir/Visitors of the Night (Carné, 1942), Les Démons de l’aube/Dawn Devils (Allégret, 1945), and Dédée d’Anvers (Allégret, 1947). She mixed with the Left Bank intellectuals of the Café de Flore, where she met Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Prévert, Alberto Giacometti, and the director Yves Allégret, her husband from 1944 to 1949 and the father of her only daughter. Signoret met Montand in Saint Paul de Vence in 1949; their lives and careers became connected, as well as their political engagement. Signoret became an established French actress in the 1950s with memorable parts in La Ronde/Roundabout (Ophüls, 1950),
Thérèse Raquin (Carné, 1953), and Les Diaboliques (Clouzot, 1954). Her favorite and most famous role was Marie in Casque d’or/Golden Mary (Becker, 1952), a film that was not well received initially. During those years, she sometimes put her career on hold to follow Montand on his musical tours and controversial political journeys in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Room at the Top (Clayton, 1958) gave her a key role often seen as a turning point in her career, bringing international fame as well as an Oscar in 1959 and a prize at the Cannes Festival. She then spent time in Hollywood and Europe, where she performed in films and on the stage. Signoret has worked with major directors, including Constantinos Costa-Gavras, Sidney Lumet, and Stanley Kramer, sometimes alongside Montand and with international stars such as Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Jean Gabin in Le Chat/The Cat (Granier-Deferre, 1971), and Alain Delon in La Veuve Couderc (GranierDeferre, 1971) and Les Granges brûlées/The Burned Barns (Chapot, 1972). Signoret was an important figure in French cinema for forty years, and her screen image became more striking as her career progressed. A glorious blonde beauty in her youth, she was paradoxically less in demand during those years than in the 1960s and 1970s, when her looks declined, and she was offered powerful roles depicting aging strong-minded women, such as Mona in La Vie devant soi (Mizrahi, 1978). Signoret’s personal life was scarred by illness—she became blind and died of cancer at sixty-four in 1985. Some would add that the publicized short-lived affair between Montand and Marilyn Monroe during the shooting of Let’s Make Love (Cukor, 1960) was the major crisis of their thirty-
SIMON, SIMONE
1071
five years of marriage. In the 1970s, she turned to writing, first her memoirs, Nostalgia . . . (1976), then a novel, Adieu Volodia (1985). Her star image was always paradoxical, oscillating between classical film star and committed citizen, beauty and aging, glamorous myth, and intellectual courage. Isabelle Vanderschelden See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; CostaGavras; Montand, Yves; Sartre, Jean-Paul. References Austin, Guy. “Politics and Glamour: Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.” Stars in Modern French Cinema. London/New York: Arnold, 2003. David, Catherine. Simone Signoret. Paris: Laffont, 1990. Hayward, Susan. Simone Signoret: The Star as Cultural Sign. London/New York: Continuum, 2004.
SIMON, SIMONE (1911–2005) French film star who led a successful international career, mainly between France and the United States, and who achieved cult status through her role in the horror classic Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942). Simon was born in Béthune, northern France, to a French father and an Italian mother. She enjoyed a cosmopolitan life from her early childhood, which was spent between several towns and countries before she came to Paris in 1929 to work in fashion. Soon after, she turned her attention to singing and acting onstage and in film. Simon quickly became noticed in the profession and was taken under the wing of French film director Marc Allégret, who cast her in several films, most memorably as Puck in Lac aux dames/Ladies Lake (1934) opposite Michel Simon and an-
Simone Simon in a publicity still for Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942). (RKO/The Kobal Collection)
other young budding actor, Jean-Pierre Aumont. The part of Puck represented Simon as a wild child-woman close to nature and animals, highly sensual and innocent at the same time. This equivocal combination of vulnerability and almost animal-like sexuality, teamed with her pouting, gamine look, would characterize her star image and most of her future roles from then on. Lac aux dames was a box-office hit, launching the careers of Simon and Aumont overnight in France and abroad. American studios immediately showed great interest in the French actress, and although MGM and Fox offered Simon lucrative contracts in Hollywood, she was not easily lured. Simon finally, but still rather reluctantly, agreed to leave France for a salary of $2,000 a week with Fox in 1936. Although her U.S. films were successful with the
1072
SIMONE, NINA
public and critics in the United States (Henry King’s Seventh Heaven, 1937), Simon was not particularly happy with the material, the working conditions, or, indeed, the Hollywood lifestyle. The French actress was a target of the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who latched on to her image as a difficult, retiring star à la Garbo and saw her as the perfect vehicle for stereotypes on the sexual decadence and debauchery of French women and society. After her professional relationship with the studio started deteriorating as well, Simon returned to France after just two years and six films in Hollywood. The actress was then cast as Séverine in Jean Renoir’s version of La Bête humaine (1938) by Zola, where she appeared as a kind of early femme fatale opposite Jean Gabin. This was another international success, which clearly displayed Simon’s image as both vulnerable and predatory. When the war broke out, Simon returned to Hollywood where, once again, she was cast successfully as a female lead in six films by William Dieterle (The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1941), Robert Wise (Mademoiselle Fifi, The Curse of the Cat People, both 1944), and, most famously, as a Serbian émigré in Cat People. Simon returned briefly to European films after the war, but by this time she was somewhat jaded by the media on both sides of the Atlantic; despite enduring critical acclaim—especially after the success of her films with Max Ophüls (La Ronde/Roundabout, 1950; Le Plaisir/Pleasure, 1952)—she retired from acting and public life prematurely. Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Darrieux, Danielle; Fashion; Hollywood’s Paris; Jourdan, Louis; Morgan, Michèle; Renoir, Jean; Tourneur, Jacques; World War II; Zola, Emile.
References Katz, Ephraim. The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia. London: Macmillan, 1994. Lebrun, Dominique. Paris-Hollywood. Paris: Hazan, 1987. Servel, Alain. Frenchie Goes to Hollywood: La France et les Français dans le cinéma américain de 1929 à nos jours. Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1987. Vincendeau, Ginette, ed. Encyclopedia of European Cinema. London: Cassell/BFI, 1995.
SIMONE, NINA (EUNICE WAYMON) (1933–2003) American jazz singer, pianist, and composer, born in Tryon, North Carolina. Coming from a poor background, Simone possessed musical talents that were recognized at an early age, and a fund was set up for her that enabled her to study at the prestigious Juilliard Academy in New York. Simone’s musical career began in the 1950s when she started playing in nightclubs, and legend has it that she changed her name in tribute to the French actress Simone Signoret. She made her first recordings in the late 1950s with Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club (1958) on the Bethlehem label, which included the unmistakable “I Loves You, Porgy” from the Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess. Although she may perhaps be associated in the minds of many with her highly successful “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” which was used by the perfume company Chanel in their advertising campaigns, she was, in fact, an accomplished singer not only of jazz standards, but also of blues, gospel, and works from classic musicals. She recorded in English and French throughout her career and earned
SIMONEAU, YVES
Singer Nina Simone made a point of singing in French, both her own compositions and works by renowned French-language singer-songwriters. Legend has it that she changed her name in tribute to the French actress Simone Signoret. (Bettmann/Corbis)
herself the nickname “the high priestess” of jazz. Simone was also closely associated with the black civil rights movement in the United States and recorded such protest songs as “Mississippi Goddam” and a version of Billie Holliday’s chilling “Strange Fruit.” Unable to cope any longer with the racism she experienced, Simone left the United States in 1974 and lived in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, Trinidad, and Britain; finally, she moved to Carry-leRouet, near Marseilles. As well as the dozens of recordings she released in English, Simone also made a point of singing in French, both her own compositions as well as works by renowned French-language singer-songwriters. In 1965, she made her first French-language recording with a version of Jacques Brel’s
1073
love song “Ne me quitte pas” on the album I Put a Spell on You. Three years later, in 1968, she recorded a version of “My Way,” the song that was originally written, in French, by Claude François, Jacques Revaux, and Gilles Thibault as “Comme d’habitude,” but which, of course, gained international success thanks to Frank Sinatra’s rendition. Following her departure from the United States, her 1982 album Fodder on My Wings was recorded in Paris and reflected her feelings about this “exile” from her home country in a series of compositions in English and French. In 1993, on the album titled Single Woman, she recorded her version of the melancholic composition by Georges Brassens and Louis Aragon, “Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux.” Nina Simone died in Carry-le-Rouet in 2003. Cristina Johnston See also: Brel, Jacques; Cosmetics; Jazz; Signoret, Simone. References Mellers, Wilfrid Howard. Angels of the Night: Popular Female Singers of Our Time. New York: Blackwell, 1986. Monceaux, Morgan. Jazz: My Music, My People. New York: Knopf, 1994.
SIMONEAU, YVES (1957–) Québécois film director and scriptwriter. Born in Quebec City in 1957 where he obtained a diploma in film studies from Laval University, Simoneau from an early stage showed an interest in genre cinema. His first feature, Les Yeux rouges ou les vérités accidentelles/The Red Eyes or Accidental Truths (1982), a comparatively rare cinematic—and sinister—representation of his home city, is a suspense thriller about a
1074
SIMONEAU, YVES
serial killer. The following year, he won the Canadian Oscar equivalent (Genie) for his documentary on comic strips incorporating a police narrative, Pourquoi l’étrange Monsieur Zolock s’intéressait-il tant à la bande dessinée?/Zolock. It was in New York while studying film noir that he wrote with the actor Pierre Curzi the script for the film on which his reputation really rests, Pouvoir intime (“Intimate Power,” 1986). This heist movie with its intimations of the postmodern and its radical sexual politics devotes more than a third of its running length to the struggle at their hideout by the thieves to get the surviving guard out of the locked security van. By the end, the conspirators and the thieves are all dead except for the androgynous woman: she meets with the guard’s young gay lover before they separate with the loot. Recalling Simoneau’s involvement in the 1980s with Quebec’s National Improvisation League, as well as his coscriptwriter’s profession, the hideout is a warehouse full of theater props and echoes the film’s emphasis on the provisionality in performance and repetition of all social identities. After an unsuccessful adaptation of Anne Hébert’s novel Les Fous de Bassan/In the Shadow of the Wind (1986), Simoneau made a science fiction film, Dans le ventre du dragon (“In the Belly of the Dragon,” 1989). This film about experiments on humans by a pharmaceutical company combines elements of Montreal working-class culture with postmodern pastiche and camp, the sets of the laboratory and factory dingily reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). The rest of Simoneau’s career took him out of Quebec, first to English Canada and then to Hollywood (he settled in Los Angeles). His cinematic outings included Per-
fectly Normal (1990), made in Toronto and starring Robbie Coltrane. His first Hollywood feature, Mother’s Boys (1993), was a thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Free Money (1998), starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen, was a Canadian production shot in Quebec. Ignition (2001) marked a return to science fiction in a CanadianAmerican coproduction starring Bill Pullman. Most of Simoneau’s Hollywood output from the mid-1990s was for television and includes directing Diane Keaton in Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight (1994), F. Murray Abraham in the western series Dead Man’s Walk (1997), and Alec Baldwin in the miniseries Nuremberg (1999). Simoneau was also ideally placed to direct the quintessential transatlantic miniseries coproduction Napoleon (2002), starring Christian Clavier as the emperor. Although Simoneau might be taken as an example of at worst a sellout to Hollywood or at best an illustration of the impossibility of remaining in an exiguous Quebec film industry, it might also be said that he exemplifies the ease that much of Quebec’s popular culture feels in relation to the mass culture of the United States. Simoneau is comfortable with genre cinema and television, always doing a professional job and taking opportunities to impose originality where he can. Bill Marshall
See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Comic Strips; Film Noir; Hébert, Anne; Quebec; Television. References Garrity, Henry. “Subversive Discourse in Yves Simoneau’s Pouvoir intime.” Québec Studies 9 (1989–1990): 29–37. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
SLAVERY
SLAVERY The Atlantic slave trade did not begin in the New World, but had its roots in the mid-fifteenth-century Portuguesecontrolled plantations on the island of Madeira. For half a century before 1492, sugar plantations and the mechanisms required to bring slaves from sub-Saharan Africa were established on Madeira. The post-Columbian Atlantic slave trade was based on this earlier model, although it operated on a far larger scale. The Atlantic slave trade was not therefore a hastily conceived model. It developed slowly at first, gained considerable momentum in the late fifteenth century, and by the mid-sixteenth century had evolved into the system that would last, in the French colonies at least, until its final abolition in 1848. Seven European nations—Spain, Portugal, England/Britain, France, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden—were involved in the colonization of the New World between 1492 and the end of the eighteenth century. Each colonial power sought to acquire and settle lands that were inhabited by heterogeneous, well-established indigenous peoples. The development of a system of chattel slavery became fundamental to the economic success of the colonial project and to the creation of the Atlantic world as an integrated economic system. The demand for slaves grew dramatically in the post-Columbian era as a result of the labor shortage in the colonies: once the indigenous peoples either had been slaughtered or had succumbed to imported European diseases, the colonial powers turned to Africa as a provider of a seemingly inexhaustible source of manpower. The Atlantic slave trade, which had begun as a Portuguese monopoly, became, by the seventeenth century, one of the most impor-
1075
tant areas of commerce for the European powers, and consequently there was much conflict over its control. The French slave trade monopoly was initially assigned to the French West Indian Company in 1664 and then transferred to the Senegal Company in 1673. The veneer of humanitarianism that had characterized Spanish slavery in the sixteenth century—the idea that the importation of African slaves would help preserve the Amerindian population—disappeared to be replaced by hard economic considerations: without the “black ivory” of the slaves, there could be no sugar plantations. The French Atlantic ports of Bordeaux (the sugar port) and Nantes (the slave trading port) grew rich as their dynamic merchant communities developed the Antilles trade and dominated European markets in the reexport of colonial goods. The eighteenth century in particular saw a period of rapid economic expansion that has been described as a “golden age” in French commerce. The importance of the slave trade to France in the eighteenth century is demonstrated by the fact that in 1776 Caribbean trade represented more than one-third of total French commerce. At this time, the Atlantic slave trade provided French colonies with 20,000 slaves annually and employed 1,000 ships. Out of the total population of 514,849 in the French islands in 1776, 437,738 were slaves. The inhumane conditions of the Middle Passage have been well chronicled. Three out of ten slaves died during their transportation from Africa to the New World. Slave traders regarded these deaths as unfortunate losses only to their balance sheets. Moreover, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), one planter estimated that one in three imported
1076
SLAVERY
African slaves died during the first three years. In economic terms, therefore, the slave trade involved an exceptional level of depreciation; slavers and planters bemoaned the costs involved in the slave trade, in essence agreeing with Adam Smith and Arthur Young, who condemned slavery as the most expensive, wasteful “business” in the world. Life on a plantation imposed a brutal restructuring of the social relations of work for the newly arrived slave. The master’s domination of the slave was supported by an elaborate system of political and legal controls (for example, the Code Noir of 1685). Work for the slave was no longer connected to ritual, community, and tradition, but was detached from all other social and human activities. Slaves did not work to provide for themselves but to supply an unseen, distant market. Work on the plantation was largely coordinated through a system of gangs, or ateliers, through which slaves were assigned work from childhood to old age. Smaller numbers of slaves were employed in more autonomous, specialized work at the estate mill or refinery; indeed, masters usually found it cheaper to train slaves as carpenters, coopers, masons, wheelwrights, and smiths than to hire labor from Europe. A further subgroup was formed by the house slaves, the cleaners, cooks, and personal servants who generally experienced better conditions than did the field slaves. Through their closer contacts with the masters, house slaves tended to have greater opportunities to buy their freedom. Slave societies were therefore not homogeneous but were built around a complex set of labor, age, and gender divisions. The economic dynamics of the triangular trade—the shipping of goods from
Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas, and sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, and cocoa back to Europe—were such that, just as the colonial planters prospered, so the metropolitan mercantilists reaped the benefits of slave labor. Marxist historians such as the Trinidadians Eric Williams and C. L. R. James have underlined the importance of slavery in the first period of Atlantic capitalist development. They argue that the contradictions and instabilities of capitalism were at their starkest in Caribbean plantation societies, that colonial mercantilism used slavery as a means of extracting surplus value from workers, and that profits from the lucrative sugar and slave trades allowed France and Britain to achieve their self-sufficient economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The slave trade was the foundation for much metropolitan commercial and industrial activity: it led to advances in navigation, to new work in shipbuilding, and to the development of great new ports; it fed new industries processing the colonial raw materials; and it created large profits that were subsequently reinvested into metropolitan industries, further enhancing the metropole’s self-sufficiency. Ironically, according to Williams, this ability to produce internally Europe’s own surpluses led to a decrease in the importance of the Caribbean plantation system. Adverse market conditions, notably the increased European reliance on sugar beets, in turn led to a crisis in colonial economies that ultimately paved the way for the abolition of slavery. However, critics of Williams’s Marxist interpretation, such as Seymour Drescher, have argued that colonial powers acted altruistically in abolishing slavery because the colonial sugar economies were still growing at the time of
SLAVERY
emancipation and that decline came only after abolition. C. L. R. James further argues that the Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery created the conditions for the French Revolution: the new fortunes created in Bordeaux and Nantes gave rise to political ambitions and conflicts that would ultimately lead to metropolitan revolt. It was, he says, the “maritime bourgeoisie” that took the lead in the agitation that instigated the revolution. The French Revolution, in turn, sent ripples around the colonies, most dramatically in Saint-Domingue, which during the 1780s had almost doubled production and had become France’s most profitable colony. It was precisely this economic growth that was to lead to the collapse of the colony. To maintain growth, more than 40,000 slaves a year were being taken to Saint-Domingue; by 1789, more than two-thirds of the colony’s slaves were of African birth, and these were generally more resentful and rebellious than islandborn “Creole” slaves. The eighteenth century had already seen unsuccessful slave revolts, but the particular conditions of the 1780s created a tinderbox situation. As the slave population became ever more rebellious, the grands blancs planters themselves exploited the instability in the metropole to press their claims for more autonomy from Paris. At the same time, the class of petits blancs sought to access political power, and the affranchis (freed, mainly mulatto slaves) pushed for the full application of the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the colony, that is, for equality with whites. In 1791, a slave revolt broke out, and as it progressed, the French, under pressure internally from the slaves and externally from the British and Spanish, abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue in August
1077
1793. Napoléon, however, rejected calls for an autonomous Saint-Domingue, reintroduced slavery, and landed a considerable contingent at Cap Français in 1802. Two years later, Jean-Jacques Dessalines finally declared independence for Haiti, the first black republic in the New World. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, too, acts of slave rebellion intensified during and after the French and Haitian Revolutions. Although no major rebellion occurred in Martinique, in Guadeloupe in 1802 the French army fought a six-monthlong conflict with slaves fighting against Napoléon’s attempts to reestablish slavery in the colony. Slaves were knowledgeable about political events in France, and were sensitive to the repercussions for the increasingly divided colonial planter class. Slave resistance took on many forms on these islands, for example, the circulation of revolutionary tracts, plotting, arson, strikes, and poisoning. When the British annexed the two islands in February 1793, Martinique was quickly subdued, but in Guadeloupe black slaves, anxious to resist British plans to reintroduce slavery, fought alongside French troops finally to expel the invaders in December 1794. Slave identity and sense of belonging were not therefore constructed in a simple, dualistic, “black and white” way: colonial societies had complex color- and class-related inner hierarchies that—certainly in independent Haiti—have proved obstacles to a subsequent sense of political common cause. This confused and entangled set of allegiances is personified in the figures of Magloire Pélage and Louis Delgrès, two Martinican former slaves who rose through the ranks of the French colonial army, but who took opposing sides in the struggle to reimpose slavery. Delgrès absconded toward
1078
SLAVERY
Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe to lead the resistance against Bonaparte’s pro-slavery forces, but, in contrast, Pélage cooperated with the French. Pélage’s cooperation was decisive in giving the colonial army their advantage over Delgrès’s rebels. Despite the fierce resistance of the antislavery forces, Bonaparte’s forces finally prevailed, and slavery and the slave trade were reintroduced into French law on May 20, 1802. Slave resistance was not simply a male affair; some women fought alongside the men or were involved in the poisoning of white planters and soldiers, though most played crucial but subsidiary roles in support for the revolt. Women (and children) acted as messengers; as transporters of ammunition, food, and supplies, they cared for the wounded and kept up spirits by leading revolutionary chants such as “vivre libre ou mourir.” Nor were women spared the retributions that followed Delgrès’s defeat: men and women were subjected to quick trials, deportations, and executions. Most notably, the legendary female rebel slave, Solitude, who fought while pregnant, had her execution canceled until she gave birth; and Marthe-Rose, Delgrès’s SaintLucian mistress, was hanged publicly for inciting slave soldiers to murder white prisoners and for her role in encouraging Delgrès to resist. The defeat of Delgrès did not mean the end of slave resistance; some of his men escaped to the hills and formed maroon communities; and on the plantations, insurgency was a constant possibility. Inspired by the example of Haiti, slaves rose up in Carbet, Martinique, in 1822, and in 1823 a plot by free coloreds to massacre whites was foiled. In February 1831, in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, slaves rebelled
and torched eight plantations, only to be quelled by the numerically superior militia. The inspiration for this revolt came again from events in France: slaves adapted the patriotic tune “La Parisienne,” composed in Paris for the July Revolution, as an anticolonial rallying call. Again therefore, just as in Saint-Domingue, slaves were keenly aware of events in the metropole and were able to exploit political instability in France to further their antislavery insurgency. Slave resistance continued until France’s second and final abolition of slavery on April 27, 1848 (another time of metropolitan political change). But emancipation was not immediately proclaimed in the French Antillean colonies. Anxious that emancipation be implemented, 20,000 slaves gathered in the streets of Saint-Pierre on May 22, setting fires and threatening a mass revolt. These acts led the following day to the declaration by Rostolan, the provisional governor of Martinique, of the abolition of slavery, which was made official on June 4, 1848. On Guadeloupe, too, the governor quickly ratified slave emancipation. The key metropolitan figure in passing the abolition bill was Victor Schoelcher, a Frenchman who had encountered slavery on trips to Cuba, Haiti, and Martinique. Schoelcher was the best-informed and best-known European abolitionist, the possible exception being Thomas Clarkson in England. As undersecretary of state for the navy and the colonies, he pressed for and won the immediate abolition of slavery and maintained that all newly liberated slaves should have citizenship conferred. Unlike some of the British abolitionists, Schoelcher was in no way influenced by metropolitan economic interests (for example, the sugar beet producers). His sincerity had won him many
SODEXHO
allies among the newly liberated Antillean blacks, and his attachment to the islands was consolidated when he was elected deputy for Guadeloupe in 1851. Later, he became Martinique’s senator for life, and continued to fight against color prejudice until his death on December 26, 1893. The social effects of slavery did not end in 1848. Postemancipation life did not bring noticeable immediate material improvement for those still compelled to work on the plantations. On another level, the effects of the brutal loss of identity, culture, and language that are inherent to slavery have endured. Indeed, it could be argued that the classic triangular shape of Atlantic imperial trade is not only a model of commercial relations but also a means of figuring the cultural dynamics of the colonial and postcolonial eras between France and its Atlantic colonies. The metropole has long controlled and profited from these exchanges: just as Antillean products have been produced for metropolitan tastes, pleasure, and profit, so Antillean culture has been “consumed” by a French public still hungry for the exotic. Cultural movements such as négritude, Antillanité, and créolité have emerged essentially as attempts to challenge the enduring influence of the metropole on Antillean culture and to heal the deep scars left by slavery. Martin Munro See also: Antislavery Movements; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Bordeaux; Coffee; Cotton; Compagnie du Sénégal; Créolité; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; French Revolution; Guadeloupe; Haiti; Martinique; Nantes; Schoelcher, Victor; Sugar. References James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Vintage Books, 1963.
1079
Shepherd, Verene, and Hilary McD. Beckles, eds. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000; Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2000; Oxford: James Curre, 2000. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
SODEXHO Sodexho, founded in Marseilles in 1966 by Pierre Bellon, has grown in thirty years to become a leader in food and management services, a massive issuer of service vouchers and cards, and a leader in river and harbor cruises. It employs more than 300,000 people in seventy-four countries and has a turnover greater than 12 billion euros. Its customers include companies, government agencies, public and private schools, universities, health care establishments, and retirement homes. The business also includes prestige dining and the management of conference halls and cultural centers. In North America, it employs more than 120,000 people and operates 10,000 sites. In 1998, its operations merged with Marriott Management Services to form Sodexho Marriott Services, which has become Sodexho. The company is focused on environmental and other ethical issues. In 1999, it formed the Sodexho Research Institute on the Quality of Daily Life for analyzing the present and future needs and behavior of consumers around the world. Through its partnerships with international organizations such as the UN, UNESCO, and the WHO, the institute collects vast quantities of data and publishes approximately two research papers a year. Mark Vernon
1080
SOLANAS, FERNANDO
References Fewell, Arnold. The Sodexho School Meals and Lifestyle Survey 2002. Sodexho (USA): 2002. Official website: http//www.sodexho.com (cited April 21, 2004).
SOLANAS, FERNANDO (1936–) Fernando “Pino” Solanas is one of the most important directors in the history of Latin American filmmaking. His political poetic brand of filmmaking and many areas of expertise have earned him auteur status. He has won a series of awards for his films, many of which have been particularly successful at the Cannes and Havana Film festivals. Solanas came to prominence in 1966 when he cofounded the Grupo Cine Liberación, a group for whom filmmaking was tied to social and political revolution. Their most famous film was the revolutionary La Hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), directed by Solanas and Octavio Getino. This was a four-hour film divided into three parts that presented radical Peronism as a liberating movement and explored ways to achieve the revolutionary transformation of Argentine society. In the mid-1970s, Solanas was forced to leave Argentina following death threats made by right-wing death squads, and he settled in Paris. While in France, he completed Los Hijos de Fierro/The Sons of Fierro (1978), an examination of the Peronist movement through an interpretation of José Hernández’s famous gaucho poem, “Martín Fierro.” In France he also made Tangos el exilio de Gardel/Tangos: The Exile of Gardel (1985), most of the money coming from French production companies.
This is a film that uses the song and dance format of the tango to explore the experiences of the exiled community of Argentines in France. Sur/South (1987), made on Solanas’s return to Argentina, following the collapse of the dictatorship, was another French/Argentine coproduction, an experimental film that uses the tale of a man’s journey home after his release from prison to propose an independent, free, and just future for postdictatorship Argentina. In 1992, El Viaje/The Voyage was released, an epic film of a young man’s search for his father that takes him across several Latin American countries. This is an ambitious film that seeks to present political, social, and economic realities in Latin America and calls for the resistance of its oppressed peoples. This was followed by La Nube/The Cloud (1998); this more modest project is a tale of a group of actors fighting to save their theater, which is to be replaced by a shopping mall: the struggle of artists to secure the role of culture in a consumerist age. In 2004 Solanas released Memoria del Saqueo/Social Genocide, a documentary that uses archival footage to explore the roots of the Argentine economic crisis of 2001 and exposes the corruption, greed, and mismanagement of the political classes. Solanas is as well known for his views on filmmaking, particularly the influential theories that he developed in the late 1960s with Getino. In an important article, they advocate Third Cinema, a revolutionary cinema of liberation that exists in opposition to the political and studio system and stands in contrast to the commercial demands of first (Hollywood) and second (auteur) cinema. Although, according to his own categorization, Solanas’s later feature films can be seen as examples of second cinema, as he works within an estab-
SOUPAULT, PHILIPPE
lished system of production and exhibition, he has continued to develop ideas about the importance of creating a Latin American form of filmmaking that should rely on the creation of poetic images and radical political content in opposition to Hollywood. Deborah Shaw See also: Argentina; Cinema, 1945 to the Present. References King, John. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. London/New York: Verso, 2000. Newman, Kathleen. “National Cinema after Globalization: Fernando Solanas’s Sur and the Exiled Nation.” In Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas. Ed. J. King, A López, and M. Alvarado. London: BFI Publishing, 1993: 242–257. Shaw, Deborah. Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Ten Key Films. London/New York: Continuum, 2003.
SOUPAULT, PHILIPPE (1897–1990) French writer, critic, journalist, and radio producer, born in Chaville in 1897. A member of the Parisian dada movement after World War I, Soupault’s collaboration with André Breton on the experimental prose poem, Les Champs magnétiques/The Magnetic Fields (1919), yielded the founding text of the surrealist movement. Soupault’s subsequent writings from the 1920s reveal a fascination with speed and restless wandering; his later career as a journalist, radio producer, and UNESCO researcher led him to travel extensively throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In 1917, the recently demobilized Soupault met future surrealists Breton and
1081
Louis Aragon through the older poet Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom he had corresponded during the war. The three young poets soon became inseparable, joining the dada movement and founding the antiliterary journal Littérature in 1919. That same year, Soupault collaborated with Breton on the experimental work of “automatic writing,” Les Champs magnétiques, which drew inspiration from psychoanalysis as well as from Les Chants de Maldoror (1870), a then little-known text by the symbolist poet Lautréamont. In the early 1920s, Soupault played a central role in founding surrealism, especially in spurring its attention to the “modern spirit” of everyday life in postwar Paris. His early fiction and poetry explore the phenomena of disruption, chance, and mystery at work in the modern city. At the same time, much of Soupault’s writing during this period abandons Paris in favor of the imagined geography of foreign places: from travel itself (La Rose des vents/Compass Rose, 1920), to Greenland (Westwego, 1922) and Australia (A la dérive, 1923). After 1924, Soupault grew increasingly distant from the surrealists while continuing to write prolifically, supporting himself as a journalist and publishing poetry, fiction, and criticism; his 1924 novel Les Frères Durandeau was short-listed for the Prix Goncourt. In 1926, he was excluded from the surrealist movement, partly for his reluctance to join the Communist Party, but also for his unrepentant literary vocation. Soupault nevertheless continued to write what he considered to be surrealist works, most notably Le Nègre/The Negro (1927) and Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928), translated by William Carlos Williams in 1929 as Last Nights of Paris.
1082
SPACE TECHNOLOGY
As a journalist and editor, Soupault established close ties with U.S. and AngloIrish modernists, from Williams and Matthew Josephson to Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. In 1929, he traveled to the United States, visiting New York and teaching at Washington State University, where he published a study of the U.S. influence in France. He visited the USSR in 1931 and later served as a correspondent in Germany, reporting on the rise of Nazism throughout the early 1930s. In 1938, he began working for the radio, relocating to Tunisia at the request of Léon Blum to organize Radio-Tunis. In 1942, he was arrested by the Vichy government and incarcerated for six months. Soon after his release, he directed the underground Radio-Alger and helped reestablish ties between the French press agency (AFP) and the Americas. After the war, he published a memoir of this period, Les Temps des assassins/The Age of Assassins (1945), and continued to travel extensively, first as a reporter and, later, as a representative of UNESCO. From 1951 until his retirement in 1977, Soupault worked in radio while continuing to write and publish poetry. The three volumes of his autobiography, Mémoires de l’oubli/Memoirs of Oblivion, appeared between 1981 and 1997. Jonathan P. Eburne See also: Breton, André; Josephson, Matthew; Surrealism; Williams, William Carlos; World War I; World War II. References Boucharenc, Myriam. L’Echec et son double: Philippe Soupault romancier. Paris: H. Champion, 1997. Morlino, Bernard. Philippe Soupault: Qui êtesvous? Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987. Soupault, Philippe. Mémoires de l’oubli. Paris: Lachenal and Ritter, 1981, 1986, 1997.
SPACE TECHNOLOGY Although the “space race” of the 1960s is often considered to have concerned only the superpowers and their ambitions to achieve prestigious accomplishments such as orbiting satellites and human flight, and, ultimately, manned landings on the moon, the acquisition of a basic capacity in space technology was for many countries during the 1950s and 1960s part of their struggle to limit their perceived “technology gap” with the United States. Because of Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States, the British space program could take a more relaxed attitude toward the development of space technology than those of other European countries, both because industrial and technological links with the United States were closer and because politically American launch facilities could be made available for British use. France, on the other hand, whose military-diplomatic stance in the international system was defined by Charles de Gaulle during the 1960s as one of “national independence,” and whose development of nuclear technology during the 1950s and 1960s had enabled the creation of a stand-alone nuclear deterrent force, was not naturally entitled to any American assistance. France’s drive to develop space technology was closely linked to the creation of the force de frappe—since ballistic missiles are necessary as delivery systems—as well as to the need for French technology and industry to remain competitive with those of the United States. As in the field of aviation and aerospace, France’s drive to possess space technology capable of rivaling U.S. expertise and the strategic/military, industrial, commercial, and other advantages that such technology confers is informed by a com-
SPORT
plex nexus of motives (from military to commercial) and involves a complicated mix of public and private sector actors. Additionally, the costs of space technology have necessitated collaborative and cooperative programs where national interests coexist within multilateral projects. For France, the development of space technology has been intimately linked, since the 1960s, with collaborative European projects organized by the European Space Agency (ESA). However, because France has always been the prime mover within the ESA, “European” space policy has often been considered merely French space policy in disguise, driven by French concerns over France’s own military independence and technological vitality (and, as an afterthought, those of Europe). During the 1940s and 1950s, French space activities worked principally on developing launcher technologies from the German rocket engines of World War II, culminating in a series of launchers that allowed France to place a satellite—the perhaps predictably named Astérix—into orbit in November 1965. France’s ambition was to be the world’s third space power after the United States and the USSR, and the success of her launcher and satellite programs confirmed this ambition and provided the vectors for the ballistic-missile element of the French nuclear deterrent. The French national space agency—the Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES)—was set up in 1961 to lead the civil space sector, although because civil and military applications in space technology are so closely linked in nature and in their industrial production, the lines between CNES and military procurement agencies are sometimes blurred. As the costs of programs escalated in the 1960s, CNES became involved in
1083
fledgling European space activities in the form of the ELDO (rockets) and ESRO (space science) organizations, but the failure of the European Europa launcher program led to the creation of the ESA in 1975. Under the guidance of the ESA (and CNES), the “European” launcher Ariane became operational in 1979, providing Europe with a facility competing with those of the United States in technical, industrial, commercial, and strategic matters. Commercialized by the “European” company Arianespace, launched from the ESA launch base in Kourou (French Guiana) and dominated by CNES, the Ariane rocket accounts for 50 percent of all satellite launches worldwide and has thus successfully challenged the U.S. dominance of commercial space launches. Ariane is a symbol of European technological independence as well as a case study in French-Atlantic military, industrial, and commercial rivalries. Hugh Dauncey See also: Aviation; Gaulle, General Charles André Marie Joseph de; Guiana; Nuclear Technology. Reference Cohendet, Patrick, and André Lebeau. Choix stratégiques et grands programmes civils. Paris: CPE/Economica, 1987.
SPORT Modern sport came relatively late to France, with little significant activity before the nation’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which served to convince politicians and educators alike of the need for increased physical fitness on the part of the (male) youth of the nation. However, the importation of athletic sports on the British model in the later 1870s and 1880s
1084
SPORT
saw a rapid expansion of clubs devoted to rugby, association football (soccer), rowing, and track and field events. French sports administrators also took a leading role in the organization of the first international sporting competitions, the revival of the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin being the outstanding example. However, it was soccer that was to provide the most regular focus for sporting contacts between France and the Americas, with Latin American countries consistently to the fore. Soccer’s world body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), was formed in Paris in 1904, with France the leading force among its seven founding members. When this organization launched its quadrennial World Cup competition in 1930, the major contribution made by Jules Rimet, the French president of FIFA, was commemorated with the solid gold trophy bearing his name. Most of the leading European nations ignored this first World Cup, hosted by Uruguay, which made France’s participation all the more significant—as was the participation of the United States, which did better than France by reaching the semifinals. France hosted the third edition of the event in 1938, when a pattern began of valiant but generally unsuccessful French attempts to compete with the emergent Latin American giants of world soccer, particularly Brazil. The Brazilians would go on to win the World Cup five times (in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002), retaining the Jules Rimet trophy outright in 1970 after their third victory. France lost to the eventual winners in the semifinals in Stockholm in 1958, but famously beat Brazil in the quarterfinal (on penalties, following a 1–1 draw) in 1986, only to be
knocked out in the next round. However, French soccer’s finest hour came on July 12, 1998, when France beat Brazil (3–0) in the World Cup final in the purpose-built Stade de France in Paris. As far as France’s sporting contacts with North America are concerned, the geographical separation of France and the United States has inevitably meant that the scope for sporting contacts between the two countries has been limited. This tendency has been aggravated by the cultural specificity, and thus the unsuitability for export, of much sporting activity in both locations (such as boules and baseball). However, various significant events and iconic individuals may be noted in the sporting context. The Olympic Games, boxing, tennis, and the annual Tour de France cycle race are the most obvious spheres in which sport has contributed to the development of relations between the two countries. Yet the French and the Americans undoubtedly do things very differently in the sporting sphere: both as a practice and a spectacle, sport has tended to divide the two nations rather than bring them together. Thus, it cannot be denied that the outstanding French sporting achievement of recent years, namely, victory as the host nation in the 1998 soccer World Cup, has had only a limited resonance on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the competition for the United States was almost certainly the U.S. team’s pool match in Lyon against Iran (which the Americans lost 2–1). The modern Olympic Games, have, since their French-inspired inauguration in 1896, been the primary event bringing together French and American athletes, albeit as part of a much bigger whole. Although
SPORT
the United States did not participate officially in Coubertin’s first Olympiad, a small group of American competitors organized their own passage to Greece, where they competed with remarkable success. Ivy League students James Connolly and Robert Garrett were to the fore as the dozen or so Americans went on to win eleven gold medals, the most by any country, thereby establishing a pattern that would become ever more familiar at subsequent Games. American athletes would thus be noteworthy in the 1900 Olympics, the first of two Games to be held in Paris, and also the first to see female participants admitted, even though only a tiny number and in strictly selected events. Although the French organization of the Games left much to be desired, they were an important stage in the event’s development, both in the number and the quality of participants. Such was the U.S. dominance of track and field events that competitors from the United States won seventeen of the twenty-three gold medals in contention, with Alvin Kraenzlein and John Tewksbury dominating the sprint events. The conspicuous failures of management that characterized the Games were also influential in the determination of the United States to improve significantly on French efforts at the Games hosted in Saint Louis in 1904. The Inter-Allied Games of 1919 were the first major sporting encounter after World War I. These military games were organized on the Olympic model and confirmed the status of the United States as the preeminent sporting power, the majority of track and field events being won by American soldiers. The event was hosted by General John Pershing and was centered on
1085
the new stadium, built by a combination of French civilian and U.S. military labor, in the Bois de Vincennes in the Paris suburbs. Particularly successful in this venue was Charles Paddock, who dominated the sprints and who would go on to win two gold medals at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp. These Inter-Allied Games also featured a triangular rugby competition between France, the United States, and Romania. The final was played at the new Pershing Stadium on June 29, 1919, the day after the signature of the Versailles peace treaty. However, there was little sign of either reconciliation or accord on the field of play, as the French won what was a horribly violent final against the Americans (8–3). The game was observed—and roundly condemned—by, among others, Allan Henri Muhr, an American who had established himself as an important figure in French rugby, even playing for France in that country’s first ever international match, against New Zealand, in 1906. By the time the Olympics returned to Paris in 1924, the quadrennial event had become firmly established and had taken on many of its characteristic trappings and ceremonials. Notable American successes at these Games included another gold and silver for Charles Paddock. They also included particularly DeHart Hubbard’s victory in the long jump, the first individual gold medal for a black athlete. Also remarkable in the Olympic pool was Johnny Weissmuller, later Hollywood’s “Tarzan,” who in one day won two gold medals in swimming and a bronze medal in water polo. Gertrude Ederle, a swimmer from the United States, similarly won a relay gold and two individual bronze medals in Paris. She would cause a sensation two years later
1086
SPORT
by becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel, and in the fastest time then recorded (fourteen hours, thirty-nine minutes, a performance that was to stand as the women’s record for thirty-five years). However, the most noteworthy American success at the 1924 Paris Games was arguably that of the rugby team, made up of college footballers brought together only for the event. As in 1919, the championship consisted of a triangular competition with the host nation and Romania, in what was effectively a rerun of the InterAllied Games. Having beaten the United States in 1919, and again in 1920 (14–5), it was widely anticipated that the French would have little difficulty winning the rugby gold medal in Paris in 1924. Following easy victories for both sides over the Romanians, the home side met the Americans in the final, held this time at the Colombes stadium, in front of a highly partisan crowd of 20,000 spectators. Once again, the match was an ill-tempered and violent affair. The decisive final score, 17–3 to the United States, prompted booing from the angry crowd, which even threatened to turn on the victorious Americans. For the International Olympic Committee, the experience of the 1924 Paris Games was such that the IOC decided to drop rugby as an official sport, with the result that the United states may legitimately be regarded as still being the reigning Olympic champions. Among later Olympic meetings of the two nations, the most significant in direct influences was the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which was to have a lasting impact on France’s approach to the recruitment and coaching of its representatives in international sporting competitions. The conspicuous success of black American athletes at
this event, intended as a showpiece for the white supremacism of the Nazi state, famously outraged Adolf Hitler. Less well known is the fact that the outstanding performances of such athletes as John Woodruff, Ralph Metcalfe, and, most impressively, Jesse Owens also encouraged French sports administrators to look to France’s African colonies as a breeding ground for athletic talent from the later 1930s until the end of the French empire in the early 1960s. Sport in France has historically been characterized by waves of imports from the country’s European neighbors, and particularly Germany and Britain. However, U.S. sporting imports have also been significant, including especially basketball, which arrived with U.S. troops during World War I and now ranks as France’s fifth most practiced sport. Particular interest in the game is shown by French youth of ethnic minority origin, for whom American sporting models also have a significant impact on fashions in clothing. One indicator of this imported game’s current strength was the performance of the French men’s basketball team at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, where it was only narrowly defeated (85–75) in the final of the competition by the U.S. “Dream Team” of majorleague professionals. Further evidence of transatlantic exchanges in this particular sporting sphere is provided by player migration, most obviously that of Tariq Abdul-Wahad, who in 1997 became the first French player in the NBA when he signed with the Sacramento Kings. This followed college appearances with the University of Michigan and San Jose State, and would in turn lead to professional contracts with the Orlando Magic, Denver Nuggets, and Dallas, the player’s current team. With
SPORT
family origins in the French South American overseas department of Guiana, AbdulWahad was originally christened Olivier Saint-Jean, but changed his name when he converted to Islam, also in 1997. Since then, the French media has regularly presented the star as a role model for young Muslim males. However, the sporting import that has had the most remarkable impact on Franco-American relations is undoubtedly boxing. Boxing on the American model first came to French audiences around 1908–1909, when boxers from the United States were brought to France. Their exhibition bouts prompted a rapid expansion of public interest in the sport on both sides of the 1914–1918 hostilities. This craze reached its height in 1921 with the enormous press coverage of Georges Carpentier’s challenge for Jack Dempsey’s heavyweight championship of the world. From a mining town in the north of France, Carpentier was France’s first world boxing champion, although in the light heavyweight rather than the heavyweight division. His fight with Dempsey in Jersey City on June 2, 1921, drew an unprecedented crowd of 112,000 and was followed at a distance by millions more on both sides of the Atlantic. Presented by the French press as a symbol of traditional cultural values in the face of the arrogant modernity of the United States, Carpentier was soundly beaten by his heavier and stronger opponent—a result that, when relayed back to France, and as witnessed by the young Simone de Beauvoir, caused men and women to burst into tears in the streets. In contrast to Carpentier’s valiant but predictable failure, one sporting sphere in which France may be said to have estab-
1087
lished a tradition of sporting excellence in the eyes of Americans is tennis, both in French competitions and French competitors. The annual Open championship at the Roland Garros tennis center, in the Auteuil suburb of Paris, retains its prestigious status as one of the professional game’s “Grand Slam” events (with the American Open, the Australian Open, and the British Wimbledon championship). France’s reputation as a tennis-playing nation was initially established by its first international sports star, Suzanne Lenglen. Although she never won the American (or the Australian) championship, Lenglen’s series of victories at both Roland Garros and Wimbledon underpinned her sporting celebrity. However, it was her depiction by newspapers and magazines as a “rebel,” both in her style of play and, especially, in her preference for comparatively revealing tennis outfits, that ensured her wider notoriety in the United States, just as it had already done in France and Britain. If Lenglen represented a peculiarly French, and inherently controversial, variety of femininity for U.S. audiences, the team that won the Davis Cup for the first time at Philadelphia in 1927 was the epitome of masculine sporting elegance in the French style. Moreover, the combination that had defeated the American holders in their own backyard, bringing to an end seven straight years of success in a homegrown competition that dated back to 1900, would go on to retain the trophy for the next five seasons. France’s “Four Musketeers”—Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet, and René Lacoste—would thereby leave an indelible mark on the competition and establish what was a French “Golden Age” in the sport. The Roland Garros center itself was the most
1088
SPORT
tangible result of their success, having been established to provide a venue capable of staging the 1928 edition of the Davis Cup. The glory days of the later 1920s and early 1930s would be followed by the trauma of war and occupation. In 1940, Jean Borotra, the “Bounding Basque,” would actually become the collaborationist Vichy regime’s first minister for sport. As for the Davis Cup, a French national side would not win it again until 1991, but France has since triumphed twice more in 1996 and 2001, thus underlining the durable appeal of this American competition for French players and spectators alike. More recently, French sporting imports from the United States have included the so-called “Californian” sports of windsurfing, snowboarding, and hang gliding, together with other strongly individualistic and consciously “liberating” outdoor activities and “informal” uses of new sporting spaces, such as street basketball, street hockey, in-line skating, and skateboarding. However, it is the successful integration of star performers from the United States into France’s most prestigious and socially significant sporting event, the annual Tour de France cycle race, which is of great interest in France. The first American to ride in the Tour was Jonathan Boyer in 1981. Just five years later, in 1986, Greg LeMond became the first American to win the event, going on to record further victories in 1989 and 1990. LeMond’s success encouraged U.S. sponsorship of cycling teams, with backers including 7-Eleven, Motorola, and, most recently and most successfully, the United States Postal Service. In 2003, the event’s centenary year, Lance Armstrong, the USPS team’s star rider, became only the second competitor to win five consecutive
Tours, also bringing to five the elite group of five-time winners (with Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain). That Armstrong should have overcome testicular cancer to do so not only magnifies the scale of his achievement but also ensures that he will forever be a part of the Tour’s légende, just as will his young compatriot Tyler Hamilton, who finished fourth in the 2003 Tour despite breaking his collarbone during the opening stage. Armstrong won again in 2004. The presence of such intensely competitive American cyclists has undoubtedly reinvigorated the Tour after the drug scandals of the later 1990s and thus contributed significantly to its worldwide appeal as a thoroughly modern and media-friendly sporting product. Philip Dine See also: Basques; Beauvoir, Simone de; Guiana; Saint Louis; World War I; World War II. References Armstrong, Lance. It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2000. Deville-Danthu, Bernadette. Le Sport en noir et blanc: du sport colonial au sport africain dans les anciens territoires français d’Afrique occidentale, 1920–1965. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Escot, Richard, and Jacques Rivière. Un Siècle de rugby. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997. Fulton, Bob. “Our First Olympics.” American Heritage (July/August 1996): 52–60. Hargreaves, Jennifer. Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports. London: Routledge, 1994. Rauch, André. “Courage against Cupidity: Carpentier and Dempsey—Symbols of Cultural Confrontation.” In European Heroes. Ed. Richard Holt, J. A. Mangan, and Pierre Lanfranchi. London: Frank Cass, 1996: 156–168. Yonnet, Paul. Jeux, modes et masses: la société française et le moderne (1945–1985). Paris: Gallimard, 1985.
STANTON,THEODORE WELD
STANTON,THEODORE WELD (1851–1925) Journalist, Associated Press correspondent, author, translator, publicist, editor, and literary agent based in Paris from 1881 to about 1920. Stanton distinguished himself in many areas of his profession by actively promoting discussion of world peace and civil liberty issues such as the enfranchisement of women and freedom of the press. His activities as a journalist and literary agent put him in the vanguard of a new category of cultural transmitters that emerged along with improved international communication technologies in the nineteenth century. He contributed more than 400 articles to many prestigious periodicals in the United States and France, such as the Daily Inter Ocean, The Nation, the New York Times, and the Mercure de France. His articles sought to explain French culture, politics, and literature to U.S. readers and vice versa. Stanton’s particular gift was for the astute reminiscences and often amusing anecdotes he included in his writing; they made his descriptions of the many celebrities, royals, and great statesmen and authors of his acquaintance come alive for his readers in an era before film and television. As the European agent for the monthly North American Review, and for three New York book publishers (Harper and Bros., Henry Holt and Co., and D. Appleton and Co.), he represented French writers as diverse as Emile Zola (journalist and naturalist author) and Camille Flammarion (popular science writer). Stanton not only brought French authors and U.S. publishers together and handled the contracts, he arranged for the translations and organized the sending of proofs.
1089
Theodore Stanton was born on February 10, 1851, in Seneca Falls, New York, where three years earlier his mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), had founded the women’s suffrage movement of the United States by organizing the first Women’s Rights Convention. His father, Henry Brewster Stanton (1805– 1887), was a career journalist, an abolitionist, an internationalist, and a New York senator. Theodore Stanton studied at the College of the City of New York and at the Sorbonne, then received a graduate AM degree from Cornell University in 1877. He married Marie Margueritte de Berry in Paris in 1881. His books include The Woman Question in Europe (1884) and his translation of François J. Le Goff ’s biography of the French statesman, The Life of Louis Adolphe Thiers (1897). In 1909, he edited A Manual of American Literature 1609–1906, a work intended for a European audience. Stanton was the publicist at the first meeting of the International Olympic Committee, founded in 1894 in Paris. He worked for the American Field Service at Neuilly during World War I. His mother did not live to see the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that gave women the vote in 1920, but soon afterward, Theodore Stanton and his sister, Harriot Stanton Blatch, edited and published a volume of their mother’s personal papers. Theodore Stanton died on March 1, 1925, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he was involved in the creation of the library at the New Jersey College for Women. Shelley Beal See also: Feminisms; World War I; Zola, Emile.
1090
STATUE
OF
LIBERTY, THE
References Wagstaff, Theodore S., and Fernanda Perrone. “Guide to the Collection of Theodore Stanton (1851–1925).” Mabel Smith Douglass Library, Rutgers University. Zola, Emile. Correspondance. Ed. B. H. Bakker and Colette Becker. Montreal: Montreal University Press.
OF LIBERTY, THE Standing on Bedloe Island in New York City’s harbor, Liberty Enlightening the World was a French gift to the people of the United States. Its purpose was to celebrate French-American friendship, the centennial of U.S. independence, and France’s key role in the republic’s birth. The idea of giving a monument honoring Liberty to the American people was conceived by the ardent Republican and Liberal political thinker Edouard de Laboulaye, who, like Tocqueville, admired the U.S. model of government. But it was the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi who, already committed to colossal sculpture, proposed a 151-foot-high female personification of Liberty. Not only was Bartholdi the sculptor capable of imagining such a technologically challenging production, he was also the ambitious promoter who could realize his audacious idea. Bartholdi’s persistence and relentless energy kept the project afloat between its initial conception in the 1860s and its final unveiling on Bedloe Island in 1886. Yet the Statue of Liberty can hardly be described as the creation of one man; from beginning to end, it was realized by committees and large workforces. Not only did hundreds of men labor on its behalf, thousands of French and U.S. citizens paid for it.
STATUE
According to Bartholdi, Laboulaye first conceived of a statue to commemorate Liberty at a party that Bartholdi attended in 1865. But Bartholdi did not begin working on the statue until 1871. Instead, during the late 1860s, he was preoccupied with another project of international ambition: designing a colossal statue of an Egyptian fellah woman to serve as a lighthouse at the Suez Canal. Grandiosely titled Egypt Bringing Light to Asia, the statue was doubtlessly inspired by his own youthful voyage to Egypt in 1855–1856, the imminent opening of the Suez Canal, and the presence of the Egyptian leader Ismaïl Pasha at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867. Bartholdi returned to Egypt in 1869, just months before the inauguration of the canal, to sell his plan to Ismaïl Pasha, who ultimately turned it down. Despite Bartholdi’s later public protests to the contrary, the statue was an adaptation of the Egyptian lighthouse he had intended for the Suez Canal. With few modifications, the drawings and clay maquettes of the Egyptian lighthouse metamorphosed into the figure of Liberty. Liberty Enlightening the World was erected in the outskirts of Paris between 1880 and 1884. The sculptor had originally entrusted the architect Eugène Viollet-leDuc to make his colossus stand; the architect had planned to fill the statue with sandfilled metal coffers. But Viollet-le-Duc’s death led Bartholdi to seek out the young engineer Gustave Eiffel, who replaced the solid sand-filled interior with a far more modern and relatively inexpensive simple iron armature upon which thin sheets of copper could hang; Eiffel’s design permitted the statue’s surface to expand and contract with changes in temperature and to with-
STATUE
stand the force of the wind. At the Gaget and Gauthier foundry in Paris, artisans built the sculpture’s exterior through a series of magnifications of solid plaster models designed by Bartholdi. Each magnification entailed the traditional, laborious gridding of measurements, or points, which mapped the complex, swelling, irregular shape. Only 2.5 millimeters thick, the copper sheets weighed more than 160,000 pounds. After Eiffel had constructed the internal iron armature at the foundry in Paris, the sheets were then appended from the bottom up. Between 1880 and 1884, the statue rose outside Paris and became a tourist attraction. In 1885, it was dismantled, placed in labeled cases, and transported to New York City. The challenges of financing the colossal monument surpassed those of its making. A fund-raising campaign launched by the Franco-American Union, an assembly of prominent progressive statesmen, lasted from 1875 to 1880. Initially, their primary instrument was the burgeoning press, which they enlisted to rally the patriotic support of readers. Despite a rhetorical emphasis on the entire French people’s capacity to offer a Republican centime, contributors were generally men of wealth and power. Other fund-raising events, including a lavish banquet at the Louvre, produced disappointing results. The FrancoAmerican Union eventually turned to the sale of reproductions, including photographs and souvenirs. It also charged entrance fees to a diorama of the statue’s future view of New York City; to the statue’s head, which could be entered at the Universal Exposition of 1878; to the Gaget and Gauthier foundry; and, finally, to the erected statue itself. Still short of the re-
OF
LIBERTY, THE
1091
quired funds, the union also initiated a lottery in 1879. Fund-raising for the pedestal in the United States also proved more difficult than anticipated. Despite ongoing publicity campaigns, press coverage, and souvenir sales, progress was halting, and the French repeatedly became exasperated with the inactivity of the American committee, which all but stopped efforts between 1877 and 1882. Bartholdi himself traveled repeatedly to the United States to seek support for the plan (1871, 1876–1877, 1885, 1886, and again in 1893). The sculptor also accompanied the monumental arm and torch to Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876; the arm was then moved to New York City to further publicize and promote the project. Despite these efforts and the loyalty of some powerful supporters in the United States, the American committee had not been able to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars required to build the pedestal and reassemble the statue itself. Fortunately, just a year before the statue’s inauguration in 1885, Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the World, managed to recast the effort as a working-class crusade: the people would succeed where the rich had failed. Within months, the World had collected more than $100,000. Over four years, the American committee had raised $300,000 (including Pulitzer’s donations), to which the U.S. government added $65,000. On October 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty was officially inaugurated in a spectacular ceremony that included a parade in Manhattan, a flotilla of 300 ships and boats in the harbor, an unveiling, a dedication, and fireworks. President Grover Cleveland called Bartholdi the “greatest man in America today.” Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had
1092
STEAMBOATS
replaced Laboulaye as the president of the Franco-American Union upon the latter’s death (1883), also gave a speech. Despite the evident failure of his effort to build a sea-level Panama Canal, and despite the U.S. government’s explicit opposition to French control of that canal, Lesseps nonetheless linked the Statue of Liberty and the Panama Canal in his speech. Such a connection was justified. Both monuments were intended to be symbols of progress, global alliances, technological innovation, entrepreneurial success, and the mobilizing power of the press, which inspired people to give their centimes and pennies. Bartholdi and Lesseps were similar men, but their paternalistic gestures to the United States were soon to be eclipsed. When the United States succeeded in completing the Panama Canal after the French had failed, Americans quickly forgot that their Statue of Liberty had been a French invention and gift. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby See also: Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste; Panama Canal; Republicanism; Sculpture; Tocqueville, Alexis de. References Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste. The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. 1885. Reprint, New York: N.Y. Bound, 1984. Dillon, Wilston S., and Nel G. Kotler, eds. The Statue of Liberty Revisited. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “Geometry/Labor = Volume/Mass?” October 106 (fall 2003): 3–34. ———. “Out of the Earth, Egypt’s Statue of Liberty?” Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture. Ed. Mary Roberts and Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones. New York: Blackwell, forthcoming. New York Public Library. Liberty: The FrenchAmerican Statue in Art and History. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Trachtenberg, Marvin. The Statue of Liberty. New York: Penguin, 1986.
STEAMBOATS Concurrently developed by French and U.S. inventors during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, steampowered riverboats helped spread settlement and the industrial revolution to the heartland of the United States during the ensuing hundred years. Although Thomas Newcomen developed the first steam engine in England in 1712, it was not until late in the century that serious attempts were made to use steam power in boats. In 1774, Le Comte Joseph d’Auxiron and Le Chevalier Charles Monnin de Eollenai attempted to power a vessel with a Newcomen steam engine, but the boat sank just before its first trial on the Seine. D’Auxiron died shortly afterward, and the experiment was abandoned. In 1783, Marquis Claude de Jouffroy d’Abbans designed the first operational steamboat, and this one sailed successfully for fifteen minutes against the current on the Saône. In 1816, Jouffroy obtained a patent for and later built the Charles-Philippe, which he operated on the Seine. In the United States, John Fitch first operated his steamboat Experiment in 1788, and in 1790 he began commercial operations on the Delaware River. Although popular, Fitch’s business was unprofitable and ceased operations after a short time. Another American, John Fulton, as an art student in Paris became interested in building submarines and later—in partnership with the U.S. ambassador to France, Robert Livingston—in building steamboats. The most famous early steamboat, Fulton’s Clermont, was also the first to achieve a measure of commercial success, sailing the Hudson River beginning in 1807. This success led the Fulton-Livingston partnership to apply for and receive monopolies on operations
STEIN, GERTRUDE
on the Hudson River throughout New York State and elsewhere. The voyage of Nicholas J. Roosevelt’s New Orleans from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1811 ultimately led to the opening of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to steamboats. Vessels operated by the engineer and inventor John Stevens navigated the coastal waters. Henry Miller Shreve challenged the Fulton-Livingston monopoly and also successfully navigated the Mississippi and Ohio. Shreve’s vessel Enterprise carried supplies for General Andrew Jackson’s army before the Battle of New Orleans. Paddlewheels—of either the sternwheel or the side-wheel variety—were the means of propulsion for most river steamers. The steamboat’s ability to carry people and large cargoes efficiently over great distances was crucial to the rapid settlement and industrialization of the American interior. Although steamboats are most widely associated with the Mississippi River, they were essential transportation on other rivers as well as on lakes and bays throughout the Americas and Europe. Paddle-wheel steamboats on rivers such as the Fraser and Sacramento helped fuel the California gold rush in 1858. The riverboat culture of the later nineteenth century was immortalized in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Famous riverboats from this era included the Robert E. Lee, which defeated the Natchez in a famous race between New Orleans and Saint Louis in July 1870. By the close of the nineteenth century, the growing domination of the railroad industry and the development of the internal combustion engine would lead to the decline of steamboats as a principal means of inland transportation. Mark F. Hall
1093
See also: Mississippi River; New Orleans; Ohio; Saint Louis; Twain, Mark. References Deeson, A. F. L. An Illustrated History of Steamships. Buckinghamshire, UK: Spurbooks, 1976. Flexner, James Thomas. Steamboats Come True: American Inventors in Action. New York: Viking Press, 1944; Fordham University Press, 1992. Ward, Ralph T. Steamboats: A History of the Early Adventure. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1973.
STEIN, GERTRUDE (1874–1946) Novelist, poet, dramatist, and literary critic. Gertrude Stein is best known for her radical experimentation with literary language and form as well as her influence on the artistic and intellectual culture of the Parisian Left Bank. Born in Pennsylvania to German Jewish parents, Stein spent her early childhood in Vienna and Paris before her family settled in California. As a student at Radcliffe College, she studied psychology under the philosopher William James and continued her psychological research as a medical student at John Hopkins University. In 1903, Stein joined her brother Leo in Paris and remained in France for most of her life. The Steins’ home at 27, rue de Fleurus, in Montparnasse, became an important artistic and literary salon, housing paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Braque and, after World War I, hosting “the lost generation” of expatriate writers from the United States—including Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Stein found an intellectual companion in Picasso, one of the
1094
STEIN, GERTRUDE
early visitors to rue de Fleurus, and his theories of cubist art informed Stein’s own experimental literary strategies. Three Lives (1909), Stein’s first published work, offers three impressionistic narrative portraits of working-class women, the second of which, “Melanctha,” has prompted critical debate about the racial politics of her writing. The Making of Americans (1925), written during her early years in Paris, notable for its minimal punctuation and evocation of a “continuous present,” anticipates the techniques of verbal portraiture deployed in Tender Buttons (1914). Characterized by disorientating arrangements of phrases and objects—Stein’s famous attempt to “avoid nouns”—this volume of poetry is a significant modernist accomplishment. In 1907, Stein met Alice B. Toklas, who became her lifelong companion, “wife,” and secretary. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), with Toklas as its ostensible narrator, is both a fictionalized self-portrait and a chronicle of Parisian artistic and literary culture. Although the most successful of Stein’s works, its anecdotal style provoked disgruntled responses from some of its “characters,” in particular Hemingway. A riposte appeared as Testimony against Gertrude Stein (1935), which included contributions from Matisse, Braque, and Tristan Tzara. Nevertheless, The Autobiography established Stein’s reputation in the United States, and the following year saw the staging of Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and her U.S. lecture tour. Paris provided a distance and freedom for Stein to explore the questions of sexual and national identity that are central preoccupations of her writing. Q.E.D., fin-
Gertrude Stein, prominent writer and arbiter of Parisian literary and artistic circles, shown aboard the SS Champlain as she sailed for her home in Paris after a six-month lecture tour in the United States, 1935. (Bettmann/Corbis)
ished during her first year in Paris and published posthumously as Things as They Are (1950), is a semiautobiographical account of an unhappy lesbian affair and provides a contrast to the experimental articulation of a lesbian erotic aesthetic in “Lifting Belly,” written between 1915 and 1917 and published in 1953. The Geographical History of America (1936) reflects on notions of identity, landscape, and writing; Paris France (1940) is a meditation on her adopted “hometown.” The sustained influence of Stein’s radical experimentation on methods of literary analysis is testimony to her position as one of the most exciting innovators of the twentieth century. Rebecca Munford
STEVENS,WALLACE See also: Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Gay Movement; Hemingway, Ernest; Literary Relations; Painting; Toklas, Alice B. References Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Dubnick, Randa. The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Dydo, Ulla. Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Will, Barbara. Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius.” Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
STEVENS,WALLACE (1879–1955) Born in Reading (Pennsylvania), the poet Wallace Stevens was a francophile who never had occasion to visit France. Yet his relations with France and the French fueled his poetic, artistic, and intellectual interests, especially his reading of French poetry and philosophy, his acquaintance with postimpressionist art, and his support for individual French intellectuals during World War II. He read in French and enriched his own writing with French words and expressions. Not only did the sounds and cadences of French bring Stevens pleasure, but the language and culture satisfied cosmopolitan penchant beyond a mere taste for the exotic. Like many artists and intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, Stevens considered Paris the artistic and intellectual capital of the world. Stevens read widely in “modern” and contemporary French poets, who were much “in the air” at the time. He also had direct contact with
1095
the French artistic avant-garde through his friend Walter Arensberg, the man who introduced postimpressionist art to the United States in the 1913 Armory Show. At Arensberg’s New York “salon,” Stevens saw paintings by Paul Cézanne and the cubists and conversed, often in French, with the predominantly French artists present there. Stevens’s early Harmonium (1923) not only breaks with traditional poetry but also shares the avant-garde taste for exuberant experimentation and occasionally refers to modern painting and painters. In the 1930s and 1940s, Stevens continued his habit of reading not only literature but also works on art and aesthetics (including Charles Mauron and Henri Focillon in translation, 1935 and 1942), and he expanded his modest collection of art. The Paris bookseller Anatole Vidal became Stevens’s vital link to the French world. The correspondence would run from the mid-1930s until the war and then be taken up by Vidal’s daughter, Paule, until 1954, Stevens writing in English, the Vidals in French. Stevens relied on the Vidals to obtain subscriptions to French literary journals (among them Mesures and La Nouvelle Revue française), bibliophile editions, and works of contemporary artists such as Bombois, Oudot, Céria, and TalCoat. Stevens favored figurative works and even represented a portrait of Vidal himself in a poem dating from 1938. During the war years, Stevens helped his expatriate friend, Henry Church, look for ways of bringing the intellectuals Jean Wahl and Jean Paulhan to the United States. Wahl invited Stevens to give a paper in 1943 at the Entretiens de Pontigny, organized in exile at Mount Holyoke College. With the war, the France that Stevens
1096
SUDBURY
loved but had never seen was about to disappear, although after the war he would continue to correspond with Church’s widow and buy books from Paule Vidal. Stevens was little known in France during his lifetime. Small literary journals published French translations of a few individual poems during Stevens’s career, but it was not until the late 1980s that translators began to tackle larger segments of his difficult and sometimes obscure poetry and prose. Books on Stevens’s work by French academic critics are rare. Stevens died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1955. Beverly Maeder See also: Literary Relations; World War II. References Bloom, Harold, ed. Wallace Stevens (Bloom’s Major Poets). Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Filreis, Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. MacLeod, Glen. Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993. Rehder, Robert. The Poetry of Wallace Stevens. London/New York: Macmillan/Saint Martin’s Press, 1988.
SUDBURY City in Ontario, Canada. Once best known for its blasted landscape of environmental devastation, the Sudbury region is home to the third-largest francophone community in Canada outside Quebec. Today a regional service center of 155,000, it was trackless wilderness until the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s uncovered some of the world’s largest deposits of copper
and nickel. Mining and smelting operations were quickly established. A group of Jesuits managed to arrive in advance of the railroad and established a mission in 1883. Francophones were attracted from Quebec and the Ottawa valley by the promise of work in the forestry sector, where they traditionally dominated. Many, however, ended up farming. Today, about 30 percent of Sudbury’s population considers French its mother tongue, roughly equal to the percentage of native English speakers. The rest of the population is composed of immigrant groups, notably Finns, Italians, and Ukrainians. The Québécois were not welcome. The International Nickel Company (Inco), the region’s largest employer, refused to hire francophones. The area was particularly targeted by the infamous provincial Regulation 17 of 1912, which forbade the use of French in Ontario’s schools for more than fifteen years. The result was the mobilization of the French-speaking community and the forging of a new, Franco-Ontarian identity. The Collège du Sacré-Coeur was founded in 1913 and was for decades the only postsecondary institution in northern Ontario. Although lacking clout with the government, the church was able to bring pressure on Inco to abandon its hiring policy. This permitted the community to give up farming, already under threat from the sulfur dioxide emissions from the open-pit smelting process. By the 1960s, the Sudbury landscape had changed considerably. Decades of pollution had scoured 84,000 hectares clean of vegetation, leaving nothing but blackened rock. The scenery inspired NASA to use it to test its lunar rover. Restructuring, com-
SUEZ COMPANY
petition, and a drop in prices brought a decline in the importance of mining. Relations between the English-speaking majority and the French-speaking minority entered four decades of slow amelioration. The Jesuit college, now known as the University of Sudbury, joined two Protestant colleges to form Laurentian University, one of two bilingual degree-granting institutions in the province. The university offers courses in Franco-Ontarian folklore and ethnography. It is also home to the Centre franco-ontarien de folklore, which contains an important collection of monographs and histories of French-Ontario parishes and thousands of audio recordings of tales, legends, and songs. Cambrian College, an applied arts and technology college established in the 1960s, declared itself officially bilingual in 1975, for the first time offering francophone students the chance to study a range of semiprofessional fields in their own language. In the 1990s, with a considerable injection of money from the federal government, the provincial government established Collège Boréal, a French-speaking institution. Sudbury itself is now green, thanks to one of the world’s largest land reclamation schemes, which was honored at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Kevin Crombie See also: Jesuits; Language; Ontario; Ottawa; Quebec; Space Technology. References Churchill, Stacy. Official Languages in Canada: Changing the Language Landscape. Ottawa: Department of Canadian Heritage, 1996. The Francophone Community in Ontario. Toronto: The Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2002.
1097
SUEZ COMPANY (COMPAGNIE DE SUEZ/SUEZ LYONNAISE DES EAUX-DUMEZ) Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez was formed after a merger in 1997 between Compagnie de Suez, the company that built the Suez Canal and the utilities and construction giant, Lyonnaise des EauxDumez. It is now a world-leading water treatment and services group, vying Vivendi, alongside other utilities. In 1999, the company added two North American subsidiaries to its books, Nalco Chemical and United Water Resources. Its romantic origins reach back to the engineering feat of 1858–1869, the building of the Suez Canal. The original Suez company grew rich as a result. Which explains why, in 1956, when President Nasser of Egypt forced the British out, a coalition including the French tried to retake the canal, an action that ended in failure. After that debacle, the company was forced to reinvent itself: it turned to finance and formed its first bank in 1959. In 1966, the Banque de Suez et de l’Union des Mines (BSUM) was formed; it then purchased Lyonnaise des Eaux, though the companies maintained separate identities for the next thirty years. The 1980s saw troublesome acquisitions, and in 1990 the name was changed to Compagnie de Suez, when it began a divestment of its financial business. By 1997, the merger with Lyonnaise des Eaux was complete, with the Dumez side of the business added as a result of another merger. Mark Vernon
1098
SUGAR
References Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez. France: PF Publishing, 1991. La Lyonnaise des Eaux a cent ans. France: Compagnie de Suez, 1979.
SUGAR The dominant commodity of FrenchAmerican relations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Control of sugar production was an important motivator for U.S. and French imperial policies. Until the mid-nineteenth century, both countries relied on slave labor for cultivation of cane as part of a triangular trade among Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas’ eastern coasts and Caribbean islands. With the rise of the beet sugar industry, however, trade between the Americas and France slowly diminished. Columbus brought the first cane plants to the Americas in 1493, but Spanish settlers first introduced cane for commercial purposes on the American mainland in Florida in 1600; French settlers did likewise on the islands of Haiti in 1625; Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint Kitts in 1635; and Louisiana in 1751. From the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, producers in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico supplied most of the world’s sugar. The main productive unit of cane sugar in the Americas through the midnineteenth century was the slave plantation, the annual rate of return being estimated at from 5 to 10 percent. The Civil War, which ended slavery in the United States, destroyed 90 percent of the U.S. sugar industry, heavily centered in Louisiana, but slowly rebuilt through sharecrop-
ping arrangements with tenant farmers (many former slaves); recruitment of laborers from Japan, China, and the Caribbean; transition from distributed mills to central factory systems; and the transition of sugar facilities from individual to corporate ownership. French abolition of colonial slavery declared by the revolutionary Second Republic in 1848 had a less dramatic effect on French sugar production in Martinique and Guadeloupe; Caribbean planters and French investors undertook postabolition measures similar to those of U.S. producers. Sometimes sugar allied French and American sugar interests; at other times it set the two countries at odds. Among its attempts to control and raise revenue from its North American colonies, Britain in 1764 passed a Sugar Act. The Sugar Act prohibited the colonists from trading various goods, including sugar, with nonBritish territories. Acknowledging the illegal French-American trade, the act specifically banned colonial ships from visiting or trading with the French possession Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. On the other hand, Haiti, occupied by France as a sugar colony, proved enormously significant in the question of competing American and French imperialism. Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called in its colonial period, was the richest of all Caribbean colonies during the eighteenth century. However, inspired by the French Revolution, the vast slave majority on the island rose against the planters in 1791. Army troops ordered by Napoléon to the island failed to impose order, and in 1804 leaders of the former slaves proclaimed independence from France and established the Republic of Haiti. By the mid-1820s, the Haitian sugar industry had ceased to exist.
SUGAR
1099
View of sugar mill in operation, Haiti, 1724. (Library of Congress)
The Jefferson administration of the United States, fearing a French foothold too close to its borders, sent arms and supplies to the slave rebels to assist in their defeat of the French. Jefferson exploited French preoccupation with war with Britain, as well as the Haitian Revolution, to negotiate with Napoléon for the purchase of Louisiana. Needing money, France sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803, heavily reducing French influence in the Americas. France recognized the Haitian republic in 1838 upon Haiti’s commencement of payments to compensate for the losses of sugar planters driven out; the United States, influenced by the prejudices of its planter class in the South, would not recognize the Haitian republic until 1862.
In an interesting but less significant incident, France threatened the sovereignty of Hawaii in the 1840s, drawn by Hawaii’s large-scale cane plantings commenced in 1825. French threats prodded the king, Kamehameha III, secretly to cede his islands to the United States. Secretary of State Daniel Webster ensured Hawaii’s independence while instructing his minister in Hawaii to return the deed of cession to avoid antagonizing France. Spurred initially by Louisiana production, sugar became a U.S. domestic product, and the United States became a major cane as well as beet sugar producer, consumer, and, to a lesser extent, exporter by the 1870s. Sixteen U.S. states would become cane or beet sugar producers. Although the sugar trade between the United
1100
SUPERVIELLE, JULES
States and France gradually diminished, technology exchange between the two countries continued. For example, refugees from Haiti and French-educated scientists settled in Louisiana and influenced local sugar planters, and French technical journals influenced developments in the post– Civil War era. When, during the Napoleonic wars, the British navy blockaded Europe and Napoléon retaliated by cutting off European maritime trade, French agriculturalists commenced sugar production from domestic sugar beets. During the nineteenth century, France shifted its national investment from Caribbean cane sugar to domestic beet sugar, and this product met the demands of French consumers. In the early twenty-first century, France annually exported nine times as much sugar as it imported. This development virtually eliminated the sugar trade between France and the Americas. Timothy M. Roberts See also: American Civil War; Antislavery Movements; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Florida; French Revolution; Guadeloupe; Haiti; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Martinique; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. References Galloway, J. H. The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Heitmann, John. The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830–1910. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Hunt, Alfred. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. Stein, Robert. The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
SUPERVIELLE, JULES (1884–1960) As a poet, dramatist, fabulist, essayist, and novelist, Jules Supervielle made an original contribution to twentieth-century French literature, particularly through his poetry, which is colored by his frequent voyages across the Atlantic Ocean between France and his native Uruguay. Indeed, these maritime journeys are chronicled in his works that communicate affectionately and meditatively images of seascapes and landscapes, rolling waves, and vast and treeless South American plains. Supervielle’s peripatetic life began in Montevideo in 1884, where he was born into a banking family. Several months later in France, the infant lost both parents to cholera and was subsequently raised by family members. This loss was to affect his sensibility throughout his lifetime, and it inspired works that evoke themes of longing, death, underprivileged individuals, and travel. Fluent in French, Spanish, English, and Portuguese, Supervielle was educated in France, where he discovered nineteenthcentury French poets such as Leconte de Lisle, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. In 1906, after completing his French military service—which left him with a serious cardiac condition—he received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from the Sorbonne. In 1907 in Uruguay, Supervielle married Pilar Saavedra, for whom his love inspired a poetry collection titled Comme des Voiliers/Like Sailboats, published in 1910. In 1919, he published Poèmes: Voyage en soi, Paysages, les poèmes de l’humour triste, Le Goyavier authentique/Poems: Travels within Oneself, Landscapes, Poems of Sad Humor, The Authentic Guava Tree; the work, dedicated to his mother, creates compelling images of land and sea, trees, plains, and
SURREALISM
mountains seen through the eyes of the poet-traveler. Later in life, Supervielle continued travel between France and Uruguay; he became involved in the Paris literary world, establishing friendships with such prominent poets as Paul Valéry and Henri Michaux. At the outbreak of World War II, Supervielle was once again in Uruguay, and this “exile” during the German occupation was supremely difficult for him. His love of France and his failing health would ultimately produce a collection of poetry simply titled Poèmes (1945) that is emblematic of his poetics: imagery built from allusions to time and space, light and dark, air and water. In 1946, Supervielle, with his wife and youngest daughter, sailed back to Paris, where he would be appointed by Uruguay to the post of honorary cultural attaché. This sea traveler and writer died in Paris in 1960, five years after being named unanimously by the Académie Française recipient of its Grand Prix de la Littérature. Kenneth W. Meadwell See also: Language; Michaux, Henri; Vigny, Alfred de; World War II. References Blair, Dorothy. Jules Supervielle: A Modern Fabulist. Oxford: Blackwell, 1960. Meadwell, Kenneth W. “Jules Supervielle.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 258, Modern French Poets. Ed. Jean-François Leroux. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2002: 374–381. Paseyro, Ricardo. Jules Supervielle: le forçat volontaire. Monaco: Editoos du rocher, 2002.
SURREALISM French avant-garde movement that grew out of the revolt against bourgeois values in the wake of World War I.
1101
Surrealism exerted one of the most enduring influences on twentieth-century art and literature, well beyond its conventional historical limits (1924–1945). Shortly preceded by the manifestations of the dada group in Zurich, and inspired by its anarchistic spirit, surrealism adopted a more positive conception of art, based on the exploration of language and the Freudian theory of the unconscious. The arrival of dada leader, Tristan Tzara, in Paris in 1919 acted as a catalyst to the seething insurgent mood that reigned amidst young intellectuals. Littérature (1919– 1924), the magazine coedited by three future surrealist writers, Breton, Aragon, and Soupault, became a springboard for dada artists such as Duchamp, Picabia, Ernst, Arp, and Man Ray. Despite the apparently happy alliance between the two groups, the rift that occurred between Breton and Tzara in 1922, over the organization of the Congrès de Paris, revealed deep-seated ideological tensions that eventually led to the official launch of surrealism in 1924, the year when Breton published his First Surrealist Manifesto and the inaugural issue of La Révolution surréaliste, the magazine of the movement. Some of the representative dada artists (such as Duchamp, Ernst, and Man Ray) went on to become prominent members of the surrealist movement. U.S.-born Man Ray, in particular, whose work was closely associated with dada events in the United States and France during the 1920s (such as the publication of the New York Dada magazine in 1921, in collaboration with Duchamp), later illustrated two of Breton’s programmatic writings (Nadja, 1928, and L’Amour fou, 1937) and directed the highly acclaimed surrealist film, L’Etoile de mer (1928). A similar process of reappropriation marked
1102
SURREALISM
Surrealism was at its high point in the mid-1920s, attracting artists from both sides of the Atlantic. This is a surrealist composition by the photographer Man Ray. (Library of Congress)
the relationship that surrealism entertained with cubist artists, most notably, with Picasso (as can be seen in Breton’s essay, Surrealism and Painting of 1928). While carefully trying to ensure that the early experimentation with hypnotic sleep, automatic writing, and language games was taking surrealism away from the radical negativism of dada manifestations, Breton maintained a more inclusive and altogether more tolerant attitude toward nonaffiliated explorations in visual arts. Given the language barrier and the scant supply of surrealist works in English translation during the 1930s, it is not surprising that the impact of French visual artists in the United States by far predated the reception of poetic and ideological
writings that defined the position of the Parisian group at the time. Man Ray was among the artists who contributed (along with Dalí, Ernst, Miró, Masson, and Picasso) to the first ever surrealist exhibition in the United States, titled Newer Super Realism, which took place at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1931 and also included works by Joseph Cornell and Charles Howard. In New York, Julien Levy’s gallery, on Madison Avenue, presented the same exhibition in 1932; Joseph Cornell, who was once more invited to participate, provided the catalog cover design. In 1936, a more significant exhibition, titled Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, opened at the Museum of Modern Art and brought together works by a wide spectrum of avant-garde artists, both from Europe and the United States. In Paris, an exhibition of American artists (Bidermann, Ferren, Gallatin, Morris, and Shaw) was organized at the Pierre gallery, the same year as the Exhibition of Surrealist Objects (1936), which took place at the Charles Ratton gallery. Chilean-born Roberto Matta, who met the surrealist group in 1937 and contributed to the International Surrealist Exhibition (1938) at the Beaux-Arts gallery in Paris, settled in New York in 1940 and introduced U.S. artists (such as Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Gorky, and Baziotes) to automatism and surrealist ideology. However, it is fair to say that the majority of U.S. artists during the prewar era were formed under the influence of cubism (which arrived earlier to the United States, on the occasion of the 1913 Armory Show) and only became interested in surrealist art during the 1940s, when Miró’s and Masson’s biomorphism gradu-
SURREALISM
ally superseded the prevalent penchant for abstraction. If Arshile Gorky (1905–1948) and Alexander Calder (1898–1976) might be a case in point, one must not underestimate the sweeping reputation that Dalí’s paintings and installations enjoyed in the United States, from 1936 onward, despite the artist’s expulsion from the surrealist movement, on political grounds, in 1934. Dalí participated in the Hartford exhibition in 1931, then had his first personal exhibition at Julien Levy’s gallery in 1933. The English edition of his work, Conquest of the Irrational, came out at the Julien Levy editions in 1936, only a year after its first publication in Paris. All his paintings in the Julian Levy exhibition were sold that year, and Dali gave a talk at MOMA on “Surrealism, Painting, Paranoiac Imagination,” as well as contributed to the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism. Apart from David Gascoyne’s Short Survey of Surrealism (1935) and his translation of Breton’s What Is Surrealism? (1936), most of the major writings of the movement remained virtually unknown to the anglophone world until well into the 1950s and 1960s. English translations of poets such as Desnos, Péret, and Eluard appeared only in 1970. During World War II, a significant number of French surrealists arrived in the United States (among them Ernst, Duchamp, Breton, Tanguy, and Masson) and started interacting with U.S. artists (including Morris Hirshfield, Robert Motherwell, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, and Arshile Gorky). In 1942, Breton founded the magazine VVV, the editorship of which he entrusted to the U.S. sculptor David Hare. Ernst and Duchamp were drafted on to the advisory
1103
board. Breton’s Prolegomena to the Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not came out in a bilingual version in the first issue of VVV, which opened its pages to surrealist exiles, as well as to U.S. artists and writers (William Carlos Williams, Motherwell, and Calder). Jointly organized by Breton and Duchamp in New York, the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism (1942) included works by Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, Morris Hirshfield, Robert Motherwell, alongside those of mainstream French surrealists. For years, Breton worked as a radio broadcaster with the French service of Voice of America while continuing to write and make occasional public appearances (as in the series of talks he gave at Yale University, in 1942, on the Situation of Surrealism between the Two Wars). In 1943, Breton’s book, Arcane 17, was published in the United States by the Brentano Press. A collection of his poems, in English translation, titled Young Cherry Trees Protected by Hares, came out in 1946, with a cover drawing by Duchamp and illustrations by Arshile Gorky. A revised version of Breton’s text, Surrealism and Painting, was also published at the Brentano Press in 1945 (and included an appreciation of Gorky’s work). Breton returned to France in 1946 and organized with Duchamp a major international surrealist exhibition at the Maeght gallery in Paris (that once again brought together the French and U.S. artists of the time). In 1966, the year Breton died, the first U.S. surrealist group was founded by the poets Penelope and Franklin Rosemont. The group, which had Breton’s support, played a major part in organizing the World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago in 1976. During the second half of the century,
1104
SWAIM, BOB
surrealism continued to have considerable influence on successive waves of avantgarde artists, from Jackson Pollock to pop art and Andy Warhol, and from the Parisian situationist group to the more recent adepts of the fluxus movement. Ramona Fotiade See also: Avant-Gardes; Breton, André; Duchamp, Marcel; Ernst, Max; Masson, André; Painting; Sculpture; Williams, William Carlos; World War I; World War II. References Janis, Sidney. Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944. Polizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Sakolsky, Ron, ed. Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Autonomedia Press, 2002.
SWAIM, BOB (1943–) Film and television director born in California. Swaim came to France to study anthropology with Claude Lévi-Strauss, but later worked as cameraman and director of photography and directed many advertisements. His first feature, La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1977), is the reconstruction of this quarter’s underworld in the 1950s, featuring a popular detective character, Nestor Burma, based on a novel by the French writer Léo Malet. The real success, however, came with La Balance (1982), in which gangsters and policemen are depicted as using similar violent methods. The realism induced by a solid script and rounded characters gives the film a tense and violent atmos-
phere that is characterized by unusually cool objectivity rather than sensationalism. The basic moral corruption and manipulation are depicted as part of a dirty job someone has to do; but in doing so, Swaim uses an anthropologist’s nonjudgmental approach. Escort Girl (1986) with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine was a more ambitious project. Set in Notting Hill Gate or in palaces close to Kensington, it depicts London as a crossroads for international terrorism and as the battlefield of rival factions. This portrait of an intellectual woman looking for extra money and thrills by becoming a hostess for important people was not, however, a success. Masquerade (1988) marked Swaim’s return to the United States. Mixing his usual talent for thrillers with a dose of sentimentality, he portrayed a certain wealthy American youth totally devoted to money. Revenge, treachery, and love were good ingredients for an archetypal Hollywood thriller, but the proliferation of masquerade left spectators bewildered. The following two productions were contrasting. Moving away from the dark side of his preceding thrillers, Swaim was trying at the same time to go as far as he could from the coarse realism that characterized his work and to get to an intimate subject close to his own experience. The first was L’Atlantide (1993), where the choice of a science fiction genre proved hazardous. Shot in Cinecittà in Rome, the project was probably too ambitious, and Swaim was disappointed with the film, which had a cold reception from critics as well as from the public. The transposition of Pierre Benoit’s novel had always been a challenge for cine-
SWAIM, BOB
matographers who had tried with varying success to put it on the screen over the years. The Climb/Le Défi (1998) portrayed an unusual friendship between a young kid and a grouchy old man dying from lung cancer. Here Swaim wanted to go back to events of his childhood and to
1105
praise the courage of those who are different and try to be themselves. He now works as a television producer. Roger Bourdeau See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Crime Fiction; Lévi-Strauss, Claude.
T TADOUSSAC Quebec village of 870 inhabitants (2001 census). Tadoussac is considered to be the cradle of New France because it celebrated its 400th anniversary in the year 2000. It is located at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence and Saguenay rivers. The Montagnais name for the village comes from the mounds that surround it. Although Jacques Cartier officially visited the site in 1535, other white people had previously landed there. The Basques were already frequent visitors, hunting for whales, fishing, and trading in furs with the local Amerindian populations. In 1599, Pierre Chauvin, who had been given the territory by the king of France, established a trading post there. This constituted the real foundation of Tadoussac and made it the first place in North America where white people built dwellings. In 1603, Champlain went there to represent the governor of Dieppe, to whom Chauvin had handed over his privileges. In 1608, Champlain returned to Tadoussac to await preparation of the boats that would later take him to Quebec, the city he founded. No transatlantic vessel arrived without stopping in Tadoussac, making it a true Canadian transatlantic port.
Tadoussac became an important point of passage for missionaries, among other groups. In 1615, Père Dolbeau built a small wooden chapel there; in 1643, this was replaced by a stone church, the first of its kind in Canada, to which Louis XVI gave a bronze bell. Sadly, part of this site burned down in 1747 and a wooden chapel was built in its place; this remains the only eighteenth-century wooden church still in existence in Canada; it now houses important historical artifacts, Louis XVI’s bell among them. Tadoussac’s beaches were already known and popular in 1800; Governor Dufferin built a sumptuous villa there. As a result, the upper middle classes of the day wanted to follow suit. In the 1860s, a company of rich city dwellers built the first Grand Hôtel there, which, with its red roof, made a name for itself as a highly sought-after holiday location. Today, Tadoussac remains a popular North American tourist location; several hundred thousand visitors every year enjoy its whaling excursions, the beauty of the landscapes, the richness of its cultural heritage, and the warm welcome offered by inhabitants of the region. Sonia Lebel
1107
1108
TALLEYRAND-PÉRIGORD, CHARLES MAURICE
DE
See also: Basques; Cartier, Jacques; Catholic Church; Champlain, Samuel de; Fishing; Fur Trade; Montagnais; New France; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Whaling. Reference Santerre, Louis-Ange. De Tadoussac à Sept-Iles. Montreal: Leméac, 1971.
TALLEYRAND-PÉRIGORD, CHARLES MAURICE DE (1754–1838) French politician. Talleyrand earned his name as “diable boîteux” (limping devil) during his long career in clergy and politics spanning several regimes. He once went to the United States as refugee and later asked for large bribes to foster French-U.S. relations. Talleyrand started his career in the clergy during the ancien régime, rising to the post of bishop of Autun in 1789. Only a few months later, Talleyrand played an essential role in the revolutionary decision to abolish church ownership of land and to confiscate it for the French state. In 1792, he went to London as ambassador, but soon fell out with his Parisian masters. By then exiled and proscribed, he left Britain for the United States early in 1794. Talleyrand developed financial activities in the form of speculations, whereby he used his former political contacts. His only close associate in the U.S. political establishment of the time was Alexander Hamilton. During his stay, Talleyrand traveled extensively to the borders of what was then the United States. Talleyrand was “pardoned” in 1795 and returned to France in June 1796. When he became foreign minister in 1797 (a post he held several times with intervals until 1815), he did nothing to promote FrenchU.S. relations. These relations were in cri-
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, French foreign minister during the postrevolutionary and Napoleonic periods. (Library of Congress)
sis because the United States was caught between the two belligerents France and Britain, which both tried to force their will on the new republic, still weak militarily. The behavior of the foreign minister insulted U.S. diplomats in Paris: if they wanted to speak to Talleyrand, they were expected to bribe his associates for that privilege. He also demanded actions by the U.S. diplomats that would have compromised U.S. neutrality, his behavior amounting to the blackmail of the U.S. delegation. The scandal broke, and French diplomacy then had to repair the situation. After a short interval out of office, Talleyrand joined the new government of Napoléon Bonaparte in November 1799. During the Consulat (period of the Napoleonic government before the establishment of the
TALON, JEAN
empire in 1804), French-U.S. relations had to be reestablished after the difficulties of the revolutionary period, which had on occasion threatened the real danger of an allout war between the two countries. Napoléon Bonaparte decided to sell French Louisiana (much greater than the U.S. state of Louisiana today) to the United States because with France’s permanent conflict with the British it could not be defended. Although Talleyrand as foreign minister was involved in the negotiations, Napoléon influenced the events himself. During the rest of his tenure as foreign minister, Talleyrand had mainly to focus on European affairs, later taking part in the congress of Vienna and then becoming the French ambassador to Britain. Oliver Hemmerle See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; French Revolution; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase. References Cooper, Duff. Talleyrand. London: Cape, 1932. Morlot, Georges Albert, and Jeanne Happert. Talleyrand, une mystification historique. Paris: Veyrier, 1991.
TALON, JEAN (1625–1694) Jean Talon was the first intendant of New France, serving from 1665 to 1668 and again, after a brief return to France, from 1669 to 1672. Talon’s role as intendant was to control the colony’s internal administration, especially settlement, finance, and justice. Talon was born at Châlons-sur-Marne in 1625 to Philippe Talon and Anne Beuvy. From the time he was twenty-eight years old, Talon consistently occupied a place in French governmental affairs. His first post
1109
was that of war commissioner in Flanders and intendant of the army of Turenne. He became commissioner of Quesnoy in 1654, and then the intendant of Hainaut in 1655, a position that he occupied for ten years until he received the position of intendant of “justice, police, and finances for Canada, Acadia, Newfoundland, and other areas of northern France” on March 23, 1665. Talon was sent to New France along with Lieutenant General Tracy to bring to justice Governor De Mesy (dead upon their arrival) for his abuse of power. Along with Tracy, Talon also worked closely with Governor Courcelles and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the controller of finances in France under Louis XIV. Talon’s chief duties included presiding over the governing council of New France in the absence of Tracy and Courcelles, listening to various complaints of the colony’s citizens, administrating criminal justice, passing judgment in civil matters, and using royal funds for the general defense of the colony. Talon’s chief goal as intendant was to attend to the interests of France and to increase her prestige on the world scene, especially by creating a French empire in North America. To do this, Talon felt that New France’s products needed to be exploited; to this end, he created a trade system between France, Canada, and the Antilles. When the Saint Lawrence was frozen in winter, exports went to Acadia, and the two regions were linked by a series of stockrooms that could be found along the river. Talon also conducted the first census of New France in 1666. At that time, 3,215 people were living in the colony. To assure its prosperity, Talon thought that more people should settle there. To encourage this, Talon gave wedding presents
1110
TANGUY, YVES
to young couples and prizes to large families. He also sought to tame the vagabond nature of the Coureurs de bois by forbidding established persons to return to France. Talon decided that the colony’s upper class needed to be enlarged and, to this end, advised Colbert to be wary of the West Indies Company’s monopoly on the fur trade; without free trade, the important members of the colony’s society, unable to make money in Canada, would return to France. Because of Talon’s influence, the population of New France more than doubled during his intendantship. Talon was also successful in occupying the two banks of the Saint Lawrence River, establishing an economic equilibrium in the colony, and in giving the colony the image of an empire because of the territorial expansion he promoted, namely, the explorations of Louis Joliet in the area of Mississippi. Jean Talon’s years after his intendantship in New France were passed as the first valet of the king’s wardrobe under Louis XIV, a post he was appointed to in 1674, then in 1675 he was named secretary of Louis XIV’s cabinet. He was granted the titles of Baron of Islets (1674) and Count of Orsainville (1675). Talon died at Versailles on November 21, 1694, and is buried in the Church of Notre-Dame-enVaux in Châlons-sur-Marne. Stephanie Longo See also: Acadia; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Coureurs de bois; Fur Trade; Joliet, Louis; New France; Newfoundland; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River. References Bibaud, Maximilien. Dictionnaire historique des hommes illustrés du Canada et de l’Amérique. Montreal: Presses Cérat, 1857. D’Allaire, Micheline. Talon. Ottawa: Editions Fides, 1970. Rumilly, Robert. Artisans du miracle canadien. Montreal: Editions Albert Lévesque, 1936.
TANGUY, YVES (1900–1955) French painter, sculptor, and draftsman, born 1900 in Paris, naturalized American (1948), who immigrated on the eve of World War II to the United States, where he remained until his death. His fantastic landscapes exemplify one aspect of surrealist painting. Tanguy never pursued traditional art education, but instead was self-taught. His legendary leap from a Paris bus to view a Giorgio de Chirico painting began his alliance with surrealist practice. More than half of Tanguy’s working life was spent in the United States, where his work influenced the postwar U.S. avant-garde. Tanguy lived in Paris until 1918, when he joined the merchant marine and for two years sailed to Africa and South America. He became interested in painting in 1923, when he spied de Chirico’s The Child’s Brain (1914, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), a work valued by the surrealists, in Paul Guillaume’s gallery window. La Révolution surréaliste, the early surrealist journal, exposed Tanguy to surrealist practice and impressed him with what he called the “spirit of its contents.” He met André Breton in 1925 and joined the group soon thereafter. Some of Tanguy’s best-known paintings come from this early period— disquieting, dreamlike landscapes that reflect the surrealist interest in the unconscious (Mama, Papa Is Wounded! 1927, Museum of Modern Art, New York). The artist exhibited regularly with surrealist painters and sculptors, took part in surrealist games, such as Exquisite Corpse, and collaborated with poets such as Paul Eluard and Benjamin Péret on illustrated books. In the first issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (a more politically oriented surrealist periodical, published between
TANNER, HENRY OSSAWA
1930 and 1933), Tanguy and others signed a declaration of solidarity with Bretonian surrealism and supported Breton’s recent excommunication of dissidents in his second surrealist manifesto. Tanguy arrived in the United States in November 1939 with the American painter Kay Sage, who later became his wife. The couple settled first in Greenwich Village, then on a Connecticut farm, not far from the sculptor Alexander Calder. Tanguy enjoyed professional success in the United States as one of the most renowned European émigré artists. By the mid-1930s, his work was already familiar in the United States through individual and group exhibitions; after 1942, the Pierre Matisse Gallery began regularly showing his work to New York audiences. During the war, Tanguy also participated in collective surrealist exhibitions (including First Papers of Surrealism, 1942) and European exile shows. He received significant critical attention in May 1942, when the wartime surrealist-oriented journal View devoted an entire issue to his work, along with that of Pavel Tchelitchev. At war’s end, Tanguy settled permanently in Connecticut, visiting Europe on several occasions. He exhibited, painted, and sculpted actively in the late 1940s and 1950s, when his fascination with Paleolithic wall paintings manifested itself in his work. Tanguy died in 1955 in Woodbury, Connecticut. Ellen Adams See also: Breton, André; Painting; Péret, Benjamin; Surrealism; World War II. References Sawin, Martica. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Sweeney, James Johnson, ed. “Eleven Europeans in America.” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 13, no. 4–5 (1946): 2–40.
1111
Von Maur, Karin. Yves Tanguy and Surrealism. Osfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2001.
TANNER, HENRY OSSAWA (1859–1937) Henry Ossawa Tanner is well known for paintings of religious subjects and their special use of light and color. His most famous work, The Banjo Lesson (1893, o.c.; Hampton University Museum of Art), depicts an elderly African American showing a young boy how to strum the instrument. Tanner’s dignified depiction of realistic characters won him much praise, and he became the first African American artist to gain wide international recognition. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, the eldest child of Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835–1923), a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Sarah Elizabeth Miller Tanner (1840–1914), who was a freed slave. Henry Ossawa was named in honor of the abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859), whose nickname, “old Brown of Asawatomie,” derived from the Kansas town where he started his crusade against slavery. Tanner grew up in Philadelphia and moved to Atlanta in 1889, where he opened a gallery of photography before teaching drawing briefly at Clark University. After visiting London in 1891, Tanner abandoned his plans to travel to Rome and remained in Paris. He studied at the Académie Julian, where he was influenced by the “orientalism” of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. Tanner’s biblical paintings were also informed by his travels to Palestine (1897 and 1898), Algiers (1908), Egypt (1910), Tangiers, and other Moroccan cities (1912).
1112
TAVERNIER, BERTRAND
Except for brief stays in the United States, after 1894 Tanner lived mostly in France. He was active in the American Art Association of Paris, and by 1904 he purchased a summer house at Trépied, near Etaples in Normandy. During World War I, he served in the American Red Cross in France (1917–1919), which adopted Tanner’s idea of allowing the vacant land around hospitals and military bases to be used by convalescent patients to raise vegetables. Tanner won numerous awards in France and the United States, beginning with an honorable mention at the 1896 French Salon for Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1895, o.c., location unknown). Later, the painting was awarded silver medals at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition (1901) and at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis (1904). The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896, o.c., Musée d’Orsay, Paris) won a third-class medal at the 1907 French Salon and was purchased by the state for the Luxembourg Museum. The secondclass medal won by The Disciples at Emmaus (1906 Salon, o.c., Musée d’Orsay, Paris) gave Tanner the hors concours designation, which allowed him to exhibit at future salons without submitting to the jury. In 1908, Tanner attended a dinner given by the French president at the Elysée Palace. The same year, Wise and Foolish Virgins (ca. 1906–1907, o.c., location unknown) was given a place in the Salon d’honneur. He was elected associate member of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1909 and was made a full academician in 1927. In 1923, Tanner was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor by the French government. Throughout his career he was visited by young U.S. artists, including Hale Woodruff and Palmer Hay-
den, who had come to study in Paris. Henry Ossawa Tanner died in Paris on May 25, 1937, and was buried at Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine. Leslie Stewart Curtis See also: Painting; Slavery; World War I. References Bruce, Marcus. Henry Ossawa Tanner: A Spiritual Biography. New York: Crossroad, 2002. Mathews, Marcia M. Henry Ossawa Tanner, American Artist. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Mosby, Dewey F., Darrel Sewell, and Rae Alexander-Minter. Henry Ossawa Tanner. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1991. Shaw, Thomas M. “The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner.” What Manner of Men? A Reconsideration Across the Synapses of Art History of Three Paintings and Their Images of Men of African Descent. Lanham, MD/New York/Oxford: University Press of America, 1997.
TAVERNIER, BERTRAND (1941–) As well as a major French contemporary filmmaker, Bertrand Tavernier is a respected specialist and enthusiastic ambassador of U.S. cinema in France. Often associated with the French quality tradition, he has directed more than twenty-five films to date, both fiction and documentaries. Tavernier first became involved in cinema in the late 1950s when he founded a ciné club, the Nickel-Odéon. He worked as a critic for several French cinema journals in the 1960s and as a press agent for various new wave directors, including JeanLuc Godard, Agnès Varda, and Claude Chabrol, which gave him an insight into the crafts of film production. He was also involved promoting the films of his favorite Hollywood directors that were re-
TEL QUEL
leased in France, including those of Joseph Losey, Elia Kazan, John Ford, Fritz Lang, and Raoul Walsh. Tavernier directed his first feature films in the 1970s, L’Horloger de Saint Paul/The Clockmaker (1973), Que la fête commence/ Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975), and Le Juge et l’Assassin/The Judge and the Assassin (1976) and worked with established screenwriters of the 1950s, including Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, and the actor Philippe Noiret. He is considered a prolific director, and his major films, including Death Watch (1979), Coup de Torchon/ Clean Slate (1981, adapted from Jim Thompson’s novel Pop. 1280 (1980), Un Dimanche à la campagne/A Sunday in the Country (1984), L’Appât/The Bait (1995), and Capitaine Conan (1996), explore different genres, periods, and styles, earning him the qualifier of “eclectic” in a French cinema context where authorship remains associated with thematic and stylistic continuity. Normally deeply rooted in France, Tavernier’s films have recurrent themes— the representation of history, justice, social concerns, and death—and they are informed by his personal political commitment. Some of his films bear the direct influence of the United States, however, not only as a result of his collaborative work with Anglo-American directors and actors (such as Harvey Keitel), but also because of their subject matter: his documentary Mississippi Blues (1983), codirected by Robert Parrish, and Round Midnight (1986), set in Paris but retracing the last days of an American jazz musician, are examples. An erudite cinephile, Tavernier has written extensively about the U.S. cinema in 50 Ans de cinéma américain (1991), a historical encyclopedia of more than a
1113
thousand pages, including entries on directors and screenwriters, and Amis américains (1993), a series of interviews with directors and screenwriters from the United States with whom he often developed a personal friendship. Tavernier is a public figure in France, always prepared to commit himself to worthy causes. One of his many paradoxes is his campaign for the defense of French cinema in the context of the “cultural exception” debate, which does not stop him from remaining a fervent admirer of U.S. cinema. A humanist and committed citizen, he has often played an active role in the debates and controversies of his time on questions as diverse as crime, immigration, housing, and the education system; he has used film as a means of artistic expression for his militant action, as films like L.627 (1992), Ça Commence aujourd’hui/It All Starts Today (1999), and Les Double Peine de Lyon (2001) illustrate. Isabelle Vanderschelden See also: Chabrol, Claude; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Godard, Jean-Luc; Jazz; Losey, Joseph. References Hay, Stephen. The Filmmaker of Lyons. London/New York: Tauris, 1999. Higgins, Lynne. “Screening America.” French Cultural Studies 14, no. 42 (October 2003): 310–322. Raspiengeas, Jean-Claude. Bertrand Tavernier. Paris: Flammarion, 2001.
TEL QUEL This avant-garde Parisian periodical (1960–1982) was the key tribune of first structuralist and then poststructuralist theory. Among the writers and thinkers associated with it are Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gérard Genette,
1114
TEL QUEL
Jean-Joseph Goux, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers. The Tel Quel collective had many enthusiasms: Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, Chairman Mao, radical textuality, Jacques Lacan, and briefly, “America.” In 1977, Tel Quel published a special triple issue on the United States, celebrating in particular the experimental artistic scene of New York. In the editorial debate that opens the issue, Kristeva claims that Americans excel in “nonverbal” forms, contentiously putting this down to the continent’s presymbolic state; that is to say, she praises U.S. art for being primitive, unconsciously motivated. Accordingly, the issue concentrates on North American dance (Merce Cunningham, Viola Farber, Meredith Monk), cinema (Michael Snow), painting (Robert Motherwell), and theater (Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson). The special issue also expresses tentative approval of U.S. modes of political and social organization. One editor, Marcelin Pleynet, makes some fairly standard comments about plurality and freedom of movement, and Kristeva describes the United States as a “polytopia” highly resistant to totalitarianism, although she admits the potential for violence inherent in the “nonverbal” continent. The special issue is particularly remarkable in light of the highly polemical stance Tel Quel had taken against all aspects of U.S. politics and culture during the Vietnam War. In the period 1966–1973, the journal was uncompromising and vociferous in its denunciation of U.S. “imperialism,” and for much of that time it promoted Maoism as the utopian solution to the West’s problems. To embrace the United States almost immediately afterward could be considered an
extraordinary turnaround had not Tel Quel already shown an interest in the U.S. avant-garde before the Vietnam War. Although the journal was foremost concerned about promoting the “limit-texts” of European modernism, in the early 1960s it also turned its gaze westward. Two members of the editorial collective, Pleynet and Denis Roche, were responsible for bringing U.S. painting and poetry to French attention. Pleynet wrote about Paris exhibitions by Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline, and the journal published previously untranslated parts of Pound’s Cantos, Pound’s essay on “The Art of Poetry,” poetry by John Ashbery and Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson’s manifesto on “Projective Verse.” Pleynet considered the abstract expressionists the logical inheritors of the surrealists, who had fled to New York in the wake of World War II. Many thinkers attached to Tel Quel eventually secured academic positions in North America, although members of the editorial collective were not as successful as peripheral figures such as Derrida and Foucault. From 1973, Julia Kristeva shared a chair at Columbia University with Umberto Eco, and Tzvetan Todorov and others did lecture tours or teaching stints in the United States (Pleynet, Sollers) and Quebec (Jean Ricardou, Jean Thibaudeau). Peter Buse See also: Avant-Gardes; Barthes, Roland; Bataille, Georges; Dance; Derrida, Jacques; Foucault, Michel; Lacan, Jacques; Painting; Pound, Ezra Loomis; Surrealism; Theory; Vietnam War; World War II. References ffrench, Patrick, and Roland-François Lack, eds. The Tel Quel Reader. London: Routledge, 1998. Forest, Philippe. Histoire de Tel Quel 1960–1982. Paris: Seuil, 1995.
TELEVISION Kristeva, Julia. “D’Ithaca à New York.” Polylogue. Paris: Seuil, 1977: 495–515. Kristeva, Julia, Marcelin Pleynet, and Philippe Sollers. “Why the United States?” Trans. Seán Hand. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986: 272–291. First published as “Pourquoi les ÉtatsUnis?” Tel Quel 71, no. 3: 3–19.
TELEVISION France came relatively late to television. Unlike cinema, “le septième art,” which is a sector of cultural, artistic, and industrial/commercial activity about which France is proud to be proud, and the “neuvième art” of comic strips (bande dessinée) about which France is coyly pleased, television has always produced concern about its medium and its message. French television has been the site of often interrelated debates engaging with French-American and French-Atlantic issues in various ways and at various levels. Before the advent of satellite television, for example, French domestic television was a theater of popular cultural representations of the United States and the arena for the importing of U.S. programs and program formats, but did not—in any quantitatively significant sense—reach out to francophone and other viewers outside the hexagon. As “national” television, French programs were vehicles for generally conventionally received ideas about the United States and purveyed the U.S. television industry’s own depictions of lifestyles in the United States. Unlike radio, which through Radio France Internationale (RFI) traditionally reached out to the wider world, television was a system of representations and practices that displayed in microcosm the anxieties of the French cultural and political elites about French
1115
identity and popular media and about French creativity and cultural values. The perennial French preoccupation with cultural quality has—perhaps more than in any other sector—been a central feature of France’s thinking about television. The advent of TV5, beaming French and non-French francophone satellite television across the world, marked as much the beginning of the rest of the world’s looking at France through the window so created as France’s tardy recognition that although—in the words of Pompidou— “television was the voice of France,” there was not much point to such a voice when global TV is dominated by CNN and the BBC. Even on the level of technology, French television has been part of France’s technological ambitions to stand free of U.S. hegemony. The conflicting PAL and SECAM systems of the 1960s and today were the result of Gaullist “technological Colbertism,” just as French efforts to encourage the development of European High Definition Television (HDTV) in the late 1980s and 1990s were informed by French desires to protect French and European culture and industry. The concept that links the many threads of French thinking on television—and of the relation of French television to U.S. television—is that of quality, or rather the “quality” of television programs deemed appropriate for a nation of such culturally high standards as France and the “quality” of programs appropriate to defend French political and cultural exceptionalism against commercial and cultural globalization. One recurrent leitmotif of debate on French television has been the place within its scheduling of programs from the United States, programming genres, and techniques. At its simplest, this has involved
1116
TELEVISION
French chagrin at the domestic industry’s inability to produce programs that French audiences want to watch and frustration that importing tired (or not-so-tired) U.S. hits is more profitable than trying to encourage costly homegrown talent. At a slightly more complicated level, the French television industry (and the cultural elite that comments on its every development) has occasionally indulged in concern (and sometimes moral panic) at the nature of programming genres and techniques that have been transposed directly from the United States to France. More complicated, perhaps, is the issue of techniques of televisual political communication, copied from U.S. politics, but much questioned by some politicians and media experts. The frequency with which French TV channels screen U.S. serials—“les séries américaines”—has remained high over the decades; even as the structure of the sector has changed from a state monopoly of three channels to today’s variety of public and private, schedules still feature large numbers of popular programs imported from the United States. Recourse to Columbo, ER (Urgences), and other much weaker serials demonstrates the inability of the “national” TV production industry to produce adequate French material at an appropriate cost and has also contributed to an intrusive Americanization of people’s leisure: young French people learn English from pop songs and learn about the United States from Magnum PI and NYPD Blue. The (low) quality of much of the U.S. material shown on French TV has traditionally strengthened the prejudices toward television as a medium of France’s cultural elites: when television was taking off in France during the 1950s and 1960s, it
struggled against the hostility with which the governing classes regarded “mass” media. In France, in particular, the prime importance attached to classically defined (primarily literary) “high culture” has meant that television was long derided as mass common-denominator popular culture, unsurprisingly attached to lowquality U.S. material (even if the state monopoly also tried to maintain standards by showing Racinian dramas and other high culture). If there is thus frequent concern about the presence of U.S. programs in the schedules and about their cultural content and level, there is also periodic debate about the ways in which French TV imports programming genres and techniques from the United States and uses them in the production of French programs. The prime example of this is the genre of “reality programming” (RP), which raised a furor of discussion during the 1990s as French-produced “télé-réalité” programs (mainly from the private TF1 channel, but also from the state France 2) such as Témoin No. 1 (crime), Mea culpa (social problems), and Perdu de vue (missing persons), used the real-life stories of citizens—who usually figured in the programs themselves—in often sensationalist treatments of delicate subjects. The critique of French RP melded concerns over the cultural quality of the “reality shows” as “infotainment” with debate over the appropriateness of U.S. styles of managing the interface between public and private spheres within the context of French “Republican” society. A related issue has been that of television “political marketing,” where French politics and TV have since the 1960s—but at the cost of much questioning of standards and values—managed the gradual assimila-
TELEVISION
tion of some techniques of U.S. political communication. “Modern” political communication is generally accepted to have been introduced to France by Jean Lecanuet’s 1965 presidential campaign, which borrowed U.S. techniques of TV presentation and the marketing of political candidates; and during the 1970s and 1980s, parties, image advisers, and media experts discussed bitterly whether French Republican democracy should accept the feared abasement of levels of political debate that would result from U.S.-inspired sound-bite politics and political advertising. Such discussion centered around the assumed high quality of traditional French political communication (deemed to be concerned with “content” rather than presentation) and the presumed low quality of U.S. political marketing (obsessed with presentation at the expense of content). These issues were reiterations of classic French interpretations of clashes between “fond” and “forme” and French cultural/ political quality versus U.S. mass culture/ demagogy. Beyond the issue of political communication, but linked to it, French television since the 1960s in particular has often been marked by a frequently problematic relationship with politics and the state, which again, directly and indirectly, engages with questions of “quality” and “national identity.” The ways in which the Gaullist state dominated and exploited television during the 1960s are well documented: as policy maker, regulator, monopolistic owner, deviser of industrial policy, and financial controller, the Gaullist regime used television as a tool to help legitimize itself and the new Fifth Republic. Governments had always used television in its early years, so
1117
this continued the trend, but as viewers became progressively more numerous during the 1960s, and as Gaullist ideology on France’s independence and exceptionalism espoused TV as an instrument of propaganda, the linkage between France and its television became ever closer. It was this— more so than the infamous overuse made by de Gaulle and his governments of direct access to television for political broadcasts—that was expressed in 1969 by Pompidou when he stated that national radio and television were the official voice of France. That television and radio were national and “official” until the liberalization of broadcasting in the early 1980s (the private sector Canal Plus was created in 1984 and TF1 was privatized in 1987) reflects another aspect of the quality debate: as national official television undertaking a brief of “service public,” the state channels purveyed not only information but also culture. This was high culture disseminated to a mass audience within the context of Malraux’s policy of cultural “democratization,” and although the genres of fiction and light entertainment expanded considerably from the 1960s onward, the “service public” ethos (rather like the Reithian values of the BBC) combined with Gaullist ideology and the preeminence of high culture meant that U.S. influences could be seen only as unwelcome. The creation of the Franco-German cultural channel Arte in 1992 and its subsequent success bears witness to the continuing strength of this cultural imperative, as does the government support for the educational channel La Cinquième, which shares Arte’s transmission. Television has thus been a key tool in the difficult defense of high culture and of
1118
TERTRE, JEAN-BAPTISTE
DU
French culture threatened by Americanization. Popular culture has also been formed and molded by television, but yet another facet of the multiple role played by “le petit écran” has been the depiction and discussion of France’s political and sociocultural national identity. Television has accompanied and served to celebrate, commemorate, and discuss key moments of the French national experience: particularly since the 1970s, events such as the funeral Mass for de Gaulle in Notre-Dame, films such as Le Chagrin et la pitié (revealing the facts of collaboration), Socialist President Mitterrand’s symbolic visit to the Panthéon in 1981, the celebration of the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, and even the coverage of the 1998 soccer World Cup celebrations have provided a televisual construction and dissemination of national identity. As satellite broadcasting and web radio/television increasingly make the concept of “national television” somewhat of a nonsense, countries such as France, which have traditionally been much concerned with the exceptionalism of their culture but have also perhaps been less active in disseminating it internationally via the mass media than the United States or Britain, may find it useful to reconsider their approach. Hugh Dauncey See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Comic Strips; Crime Fiction; French Revolution; Gaulle, General Charles de; Mitterrand, François; Pompidou, Georges; Republicanism; Sport. References Kuhn, Raymond. The Media in France. London/New York: Routledge, 1995. Lochard, Guy, and Henri Boyer. Notre Ecran quotidien: Une radiographie du télévisuel. Paris: Dunod, 1995.
TERTRE, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1610–1687)
DU
Father Jean-Baptiste du Tertre is best known for his extensive account of early French colonization in the Antilles, the Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (“General History of the West Indies Inhabited by the French”), published in four volumes from 1667 to 1671. Born in Calais in 1610, du Tertre served in the Dutch navy and the French army before entering the Dominican order in 1635. Du Tertre arrived in Guadeloupe in 1640 and spent the next sixteen years in a missionary capacity throughout the Antilles. Although du Tertre had little evangelical success among the Carib populations, his ecclesiastical post brought him into sustained contact with French settlers and indigenous culture. He drew from these experiences to produce the Histoire, a wonderfully rich picture of Caribbean life during the period of early conquest and settlement. The opening pages of the Histoire announce that the work’s fundamental goal is to help future royal governors effectively manage Caribbean society. Throughout his narrative, du Tertre reminds his readers that the success of the early French colonies was by no means a historical inevitability because of chronic disorder, violence, and disease. The first chapter, for example, illustrates how the fate of the first French colony on Saint Christopher—now Saint Kitts—hung on a series of fierce conflicts and shifting alliances between French, English, Spanish, and Carib. This delicate balance of power between competing groups was perpetually at risk because of famine, disease, and subsequent population decline. Du Tertre believed that it was possible to minimize the adversity of the colonizing
TEXAS
process by promoting amicable relations with other European powers, and especially with indigenous populations. One of du Tertre’s most original contributions in the Histoire is his portrayal of the Carib’s daily life. Although his discourse on the indigenous was obviously limited by his ideas, often unstated, about his colonial and evangelical mission, du Tertre at times shows a surprising degree of impartiality. He was one of the first authors to describe in painstaking detail a wide range of Caribbean social practices and religious beliefs such as birth rites, education, gift exchange, conceptions of a divinity, and old age. At certain moments in the Histoire, du Tertre praises the indigenous for their virtuous simplicity and gentle manners. He also does not hesitate to condemn some French colonial policy—such as the confiscation of indigenous food supplies in Martinique during the 1630s—for having sparked long and costly struggles. Yet, as recent scholars convincingly demonstrate, it would be inaccurate simply to view du Tertre as an uncritical advocate of native life. He also considered the Carib as susceptible to drink, lazy, uncouth, and excessively cruel toward slaves. The Histoire has enjoyed an enduring legacy since its publication. It has served as the basis for more balanced and nuanced histories of indigenous society and culture, and has also inspired fiction writers interested in themes of exoticism. When evaluated with caution, du Tertre’s easily accessible chronicle today continues to be useful to intellectual historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists. Kenneth Loiselle See also: Guadeloupe; Martinique; Slavery.
1119
References Boucher, Philip P. “The Caribbean and the Caribs in the Thought of SeventeenthCentury Colonial Propagandists: The Missionaries.” Proceedings of the Fourth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, April 6–8, 1978. Ed. Alf Andrew Heggoy and James J. Cooke. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979, 17–32. ———. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. New York: Methuen, 1986.
TEXAS Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, under orders from his king, Louis XIV of France, sailed from Rouen to establish a French presence at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Whether by design or mistake, La Salle instead sailed farther west in the Gulf of Mexico, eventually into Matagorda Bay where, in the Crown’s name, the explorer established his colony at a nearby site on Garcitas Creek in 1685, the first of several short-lived French establishments in what would become the state of Texas. Some historians believe La Salle’s settlement, known simply as “the post on the Baye St-Louis,” was deliberately placed west of the Mississippi to give him better access to Mexico and the silver mines. La Salle was assassinated in modern East Texas by some of his own men while on an overland expedition in search of the Mississippi River. In 1714, Louis Juchereau de SaintDenis was commissioned to explore the region west of the Louisiana colony. He traveled into present-day Texas, where he reaffirmed for France La Salle’s claim to the
1120
TEXAS
region. The intent of Saint-Denis, as he is known historically, was to establish trade with Spaniards in modern Mexico. SaintDenis became so powerful that Spaniards feared him personally, in part because Indians across the vast region were loyal to him personally. In 1742, when he petitioned for a release of his duties as commandant of the French post at Natchitoches, Louisiana, and to move with his wife and children to Spanish territory, Saint-Denis was “encouraged” to remain in Louisiana. Promises for early advancement of his sons were inducement enough; Saint-Denis died in Natchitoches two years later in 1744. Athanase de Mezières, who had married Saint-Denis’s daughter, himself assumed the mantle of command at the Natchitoches post. In 1763, when French Louisiana became Spanish Louisiana, Mezières was appointed governor of the Spanish province of Texas. He died in San Antonio before assuming command and is buried there in the Cathedral of San Fernando. Other Frenchmen made unsuccessful attempts to locate La Salle’s post on the Baye St-Louis via a Gulf route, among them, Jean Berenger and Jean Baptiste Bénard La Harpe. Neither was successful. Berenger bypassed the bay, sailed farther west, and entered Copono Bay, which he mapped, originally thinking it was La Salle’s. In 1720, Berenger sailed again, under La Harpe’s command; they undershot the mark and entered Galveston Bay. At neither locale was a French presence established. Finally, nearly a century later, in April 1817, another Frenchman tried, and successfully so, to establish a settlement in the region. The pirate Jean Laffite set up a republic on Galveston Island in 1817; three
years later, in 1820, Laffite abandoned the site. At the republic’s peak, more than 1,000 people resided there. In 1818, General Charles Lallemand, with some Napoleonic exiles, attempted to establish themselves near the Trinity River across Galveston Bay from Laffite’s operation. It is believed the colony was established as a revolutionary colony from which an invasion of Mexico would be launched. (French interest in Spanish silver mines was of continuous interest from the time of La Salle through the mid-nineteenth century.) Eventually Champ d’Asile, as Lallemand’s colony was known, succumbed to flooding and food shortages. Less than twenty years later, after Texans defeated General Santa Anna’s Spanish forces at the Battle of San Jacinto near present-day Houston, the Republic of Texas was created. In the Texas State Archives at Austin is a letter from France’s king, Louis-Philippe, recognizing the new republic. A commercial treaty was made between Texas and the Republic of France in 1840, and soon thereafter the French Legation was established in Austin. Directing some of the most successful colonization efforts was Henri Castro, who established Castroville, west of modern San Antonio. Less successful were the efforts of Victor Prosper Considérant in the midnineteenth century, who established La Réunion, a Socialist, or free-thinking, colony on the upper Trinity River near the site of modern Dallas. For a variety of reasons, the colony failed. The soil was less than desirable for even the most experienced farmers, which Réunion’s colonists were not; however, the process of attempting to gain experience produced an individualism, sometimes matching the ruggedness of the region’s environment. That
THEATER
individualism was contrary to the Socialistic intent of the founder. The colony was also underfinanced. Patricia R. Lemée See also: La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de, Sieur; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Louisiana; Louis-Philippe, King of France; Mexico; Mississippi River; SaintDenis, Louis Juchereau de. References Beecher, Jonathan. “Building Utopia in the Promised Land: Icarians and Fourierists in Texas.” The French in Texas: History, Migration, Culture. Ed. François Lagarde. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Bishop, Curtis. “Castro’s Colony.” The New Handbook of Texas. Ed. Ron Tyler. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1996. Lemée, Patricia R. “Tios and Tantes: Familial and Political Relationships of Natchitoches.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 101, no. 3 (1998): 341–358. ———. “Ambivalent Successes and Successful Failures: Saint Denis, Aguayo, and Juan Rodriguez.” The French in Texas: History, Migration, Culture. Ed. François Lagarde. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
THEATER Theater and the sociopolitical role of language in the Americas are closely connected. The first live performances in French Lower Canada go back to 1606, when Marc Lescarbot wrote Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France to celebrate the arrival of French colonial government at Port Royal. The play was a theater subgenre known as réception with added “local” elements in the interpretation. There are records describing this play as being staged in native war canoes with Frenchmen dressed as natives offering fish and game to the leaders of the colony. The language was colored with sounds depicting native speech. All the surviving texts of
1121
the performances are réception, written to celebrate specific occasions for colonial power and not used for their merits as artistic or dramatic works. Demographic structure and the opposition of the church prevented the development of national or local plays and theater well until the twentieth century. Leading up to the twentieth century, theater activities remained uneven, ranging from garrison soldiers performing for their entertainment (even adapting Shakespeare and Molière) to companies such as Les Jeunes Messieurs Canadiens and Allan’s Company, who performed with modest success and had national and international touring companies. It could be said that before World War I there were three different kinds of theater in French Canada: religious/pedagogic, political, and “social,” that is, drama intended for entertainment. Although many other factors contributed to this unevenness, the blame lies at the door of the Catholic Church, which ruled cultural and social life and interfered with public presentations. The Catholic Church opposed and censored theater practices from the beginning, blaming the theater for moral dissolution and debauchery, for example, the famous 1693–1694 Affaire Tartuffe, when the church banned Molière’s play. The Jesuits encouraged the art of communication and presented French neoclassical plays in schools. After the British conquest, French Canadians lost their political, cultural, and social momentum; they turned inward to idolize their rural past and protect their culture, language, and religion. Although immigration from France had virtually ceased, large families meant that the number of French-speaking inhabitants continued to increase. The purpose of theater to
1122
THEATER
French Canadian literature, or littérature québécoise, was to record their common history, protect their culture, and express their distinctiveness. However, live theater could also serve as a communal place that reinforced identity and served as a cultural protection against recolonialization. In 1765, Pierre Chartier founded the first francophone company in Quebec, its members coming from the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, and Switzerland. Although little is known about the company, it performed works from the Comédie-Italienne for the purpose of averting Governor James Murray’s prohibition, which banned plays and players from France. The more permanent theater company, Les Jeunes Messieurs Canadiens, founded in Montreal by Joseph Quesnel, was active from 1780 to 1817. The function of the company was to protect French culture and social life. It performed many of Molière’s plays, and in the 1789–1790 season it presented the first Canadian opera, Colas et Colinette, ou Le Bailli dupé, which was written by Quesnel. For the anniversary of the National Assembly in 1792, the company moved to Quebec City and presented a series of Molière’s works. His plays and language had an important role in the formation of Quebec drama. In 1804, the company built its first permanent building, the Patagonian Theater. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Quebec, as in other provinces, the theater was kept alive by touring companies (Sarah Bernhardt and Edmund Kean stopped in Montreal) and by amateur theater productions across French Canada. However, the Catholic clergy of Quebec opposed local and touring companies, attacking plays and actors and prohibiting parishioners from attend-
ing performances, even refusing absolution to anyone who went. In the United States, French cultural and religious presence remained strongest in Louisiana. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the older French communities in New Orleans had a tendency to “re-create” pre-revolutionary French aristocratic society and stay away from the rowdier newcomers who settled the American section of the city. Their part of New Orleans became known as the French Quarter. During this period, there were no permanent theater companies; however, drawing room presentations were staged by amateur groups in family houses. In the twentieth century, the influence of New Orleans French culture on mainstream theater was seen in the work of Tennessee Williams, who lived there while writing A Streetcar Named Desire. He drew inspiration from the city’s cultural milieu and the conflict between immigrant and aristocratic traditions as background for his characters and story. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the independent theater concept on the development of local and artistic theater outside the commercial milieu in the United States. Artistic principles and changes developed by independent theater were used in opposition to the generally poor quality of Broadway productions and in time had an artistic influence on them. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was the French independent theater movement that spread throughout Europe and subsequently to the United States. Independent theater started in 1887, when André Antoine established the Théâtre Libre in Paris after a successful presentation of works by new playwrights. The main shift occurred when productions
THEATER
were organized as private events. In this way, Antoine allowed the presentation of plays outside the mainstream production realm defined by the censors’ license or money. He established an alternative production model centered on community or membership, as well as a forum for new playwrights to work. As a model, Théâtre Libre had an impact on the formation of “people’s theater.” This concept came out of Maurice Pottecher’s work. He established the Théâtre du Peuple in the village of Bussange in France in 1895. Pottecher had previously worked as actor and dramatist with Théâtre Libre. He wrote plays and staged them in his village, involving the whole community and putting on a new production each summer. The plays generally dealt with local identities through common stories and legends. Soon, other communities started to follow this example, spreading the concept throughout France. In 1905, similar community-focused theater productions were staged in England as well as in the United States. The concept of “people’s theater” had a strong presence in the United States in the form of a pageant movement usually celebrating community history and dramatizing local stories. From the 1910s, “the people’s theater” started to gain momentum; by 1915, sixty-three productions of the pageant plays were being performed in twenty-three states. This movement prepared the foundation for independent theater in the United States. From 1912 to 1917, up to fifty “little theaters” appeared throughout the United States where community-based groups offered their subscribers a season of plays. In 1916, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré was inaugurated by a group of amateur theater
1123
lovers. Still surviving, Le Petit Théâtre is the longest-running community theater in the United States. The building the thespians moved to, which they still use, was a corner building constructed in 1794 by Jean Baptiste Orso. Another important factor influencing the development of independent theater was the number of Americans who reported new theater developments in France and Europe, among them Hiram Moderwell, Clyton Hamilton, Oliver Syler, and Sheldon Cheney. Cheney founded the Theater Arts Magazine in the tradition of French arts journals for the debate of current topics. Moreover, touring companies coming to the United States in search of audiences during World War I practically demonstrated what was happening in the new theater movement. The influence of Jacques Copeau and his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier (founded in 1913 in Paris) on theater in the United States was significant. Before World War I broke out, he produced fifteen plays in one season. Theater production had to stop during the war, and Copeau spent two seasons from 1917 to 1919 in New York as a guest of the New York Stage Society. During this period, the philanthropist Otto Khan from the New York Stage Society sponsored several European tours. Copeau provided examples of a new theater for young artists ready to embark on an exploration of theater. Central to Copeau’s preoccupation in Théâtre du Vieux Colombier was the belief that the actor is the only important element in the production and that modern theater needed to discover new dramatists who could maintain the literary standard. He attached a school to his theater in which actors could pursue training programs in various traditions and styles. These
1124
THEATER
elements of Copeau’s practice were the main features of art theater in the United States, focusing on actors, new staging (or at least staging that opposed the prevailing photographic reality of Broadway productions), and developing new dramatists. It was not until after the end of World War II that independent French Canadian, or Quebec, theater, as an indigenous professional institution, started to develop. Quebec theater had its inception with Gratien Gélinas’s play Tit-Coq, directed by Gélinas, premiered on May 22, 1948, at the Monument National in Montreal. The play, performed in English, became a hit and toured English Canada as well as the United States. The first professional arts theater company, Théâtre du Rideau Vert, was founded in 1949 in Montreal by Mercedes Palomino and Yvette Brind’Amour. Although it mainly focused on the traditional theater of European classics, it was this company that premiered Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-soeurs in 1968 and placed itself at the forefront of new Québécois theater. The 1950s saw new theater companies that prepared the formation of the distinctive Quebec theater culture and started with Tremblay’s production. In 1951, the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde was set up in Montreal by Georges Groulx, Jean Gascon, Jean-Louis Roux, and Guy Hoffman as a repertory theater focusing on classics, particularly Molière, and later including Quebec repertory (Tremblay) and new works. In 1953, Le Théâtre-Club, which staged children’s plays, was founded; and in 1957, Gélinas started the ComédieCanadienne, which influenced the formation of alternative companies. In the 1950s, radio and television arts had significant influence on the advance of professional theater in Quebec. Theater and mass
media became a space for the expression of tensions in the construction and preservation of national identity. In the 1960s, the confluence of several social and political events such as the Quiet Revolution; the development of an educational system in pre-university schools (CEGEP), which made acting and theater studies more accessible; the formation of the center for auteurs dramatiques; and the opening of Tremblay’s Belles-soeurs marked a turning point in Quebec’s theater. Drama has always been an important element in redefining the cultural national identity in Quebec. Québécois new theater began to reflect political consciousness, equating cultural with national identity and political liberation. Quebec’s culture became a cocktail, a mixture of French colonial foundations, aggressive Americanism, and the influx of new immigrants constituting a substantial political and cultural force. The new theater of exploration in Quebec was not French, English Canadian, or American, but was a mix of various influences, each striving to find its own theatrical vocabulary. The generation of authors after 1968 was well aware of the colonial legacy present in Quebec and Canadian theater. At the end of the 1960s, 90 percent of translations were imported from France. Québécois theater found its own identity through its stage language, thus creating an identity independent of French playwrights. For the first time, Quebec subject matters and familiar settings were presented, and the popular dialect, joual (Montreal’s working-class French), was used. Between 1958 and 1980, there were thousands of collective creations working under the umbrella organization L’Association Québécoise du Jeune Théâtre.
THEATER
Breaking away from the traditional way of making theater was a political act. Developing in opposition to mainstream theater, “Jeune Théâtre” worked from a collective creation and popularized a robust, direct, and physical style of acting that contrasted with the intellectual and more refined mainstream style. Umbrella theater organizations started promoting creativity and giving new artists a forum for expression, among them the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental and the Ligue nationale d’improvisation. Theater began to spread with the formation of the Théâtre Populaire du Quebec, and summer theaters used barns all over the province to perform their programs. Québécois theater was supported by the independent political movement Parti Québécois. The “nouvelle dramaturgie québécoise” (new Québécois dramaturgy), as it has been called, pointedly rejected foreign influences, especially French. Until the mid-1980s, theater served as a tool for the political debate on national identity. Placing primary importance on the verbal presentation of words and not on the written text, language in theater became reflective of the conditions in Quebec and was having an ideological function as a medium for national identity. In the 1980s, plays and performances responded to the specific concerns of different social segments rather than to nationalist separatist fervor. The form of expression and communication became the primary concern of artistic exploration; it moved from verbal to visual communication and reflected the internationalism and multiculturalism of Quebec society. Montreal’s Carbone 14 were the leading proponents of performances based on theatrical imagery. In their approach, the language of
1125
the stage became more important than spoken language as a means of communication. Later, toward the end of the 1980s, the orientation shifted from a collective method of work to a collaborative approach to production. The reason for the change was to transfer creative responsibility from the actor/writer to the director and designer. Collaborative instead of collective methodology described the new work. In contemporary Quebec theater, it is a common practice to use the collaborative approach of playwright, director, and designer, radically rewriting written text through mise-en-scène. The reception of Quebec theater in France as a world theater rather than subservient works from an ex-colony was formed mainly through the plays of Michel Tremblay, whose Les Belles-soeurs and Hosanna were particularly successful in Paris. Companies such as Cirque du Soleil and Lalala Human Steps brought about further internationalization of Quebec theater. Robert Lepage, one of the most important Québécois authors and directors, creates international theater by touring world capitals and festivals. Here theatrical language and mise-en-scène, and not the text, are the key elements in the communication process. Contemporary Quebec theater has created its own space for cultural independence, with theater no longer using the French language as a social and political metaphor for survival but for communication with the world. Aleksandar Dundjerovic See also: Catholic Church; Language; Lepage, Robert; Louisiana; Molière; Montreal; New France; New Orleans; Quebec; Quebec City; Quiet Revolution; Tremblay, Michel; Williams, Tennessee; World War I; World War II.
1126
THEORY
References Brockett, Oscar G. Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theater and Drama since 1870. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973. Donohoe, Joseph I. Jr., and Jonathan M. Weiss, eds. Essays on Modern Quebec Theater. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995. Rubin, Don, and Carlo Solorzano, eds. World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theater. Vol. 2, The Americas. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. Thibaudat, Jean- Pierre. Théâtre français contemporain. Paris: Ministère des affaires étrangères ADPF, 2000.
THEORY French theory is a mainly American invention. If the French were pressed to assign a corporate name to the disparate collection of works of philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, and literary criticism that make up what the American academy calls “theory,” it might be “thought” (pensée). For better or for worse, and in spite of the many differences between them, the thought and writings of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-François Lyotard, and others have been reborn across the Atlantic, and in the English-speaking world generally, as “theory.” When it made its official American debut at the Johns Hopkins University symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” in Baltimore in October 1966, French theory was known simply as “structuralism.” When the proceedings of that symposium, where Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, and Tzvetan Todorov were among the
speakers, were published in 1970, the editors referred to “structuralist thought.” By the mid-1970s, however, “theory” had taken over as the umbrella term to describe most of the radical thought that emerged in France from the 1960s onward, and more important, “poststructuralism” had displaced structuralism as the key French influence on intellectual life in the United States. “Poststructuralism,” according to Jacques Derrida, is also a “purely American notion.” Even thus misnamed, French theory often found more fertile ground in the United States than it did in France, although it found no little resistance as well. Poststructuralism can be described as a philosophy or politics of “difference,” which explains some of its success in the heterogeneous United States. At the same time, it must be said that the dominant currents of American intellectual life— pragmatism and empiricism—are decidedly incompatible with recent French thinking. In spite of their differences, the diverse thinkers who make up French theory share concerns in three main areas: language, subjectivity, and truth. (1) Language. All French theory starts from Saussure’s insight that language is an arbitrary system and that signs do not simply refer to reality but rather help to constitute it. Barthes takes up Saussure’s proposal for a more general “semiology” and treats all of culture as a sign system, analyzing the codes, the system of differences, that make up its meanings. Foucault, in a rejection of positivism, examines how knowledge is generated textually in what he calls “discourses.” Derrida tests the limits of Saussure’s model and argues that meaning in language never rests, is always undecidable; and Kristeva proposes a prelinguistic “semiotic” realm, which is in
THEORY
constant tension with the “symbolic,” or language. In each case, language never simply communicates, nor is it ever transparent, but rather a site of contestation and multiplicity: nothing could be further than the utopian models put forward in the American tradition, such as Noam Chomsky’s idea of “linguistic competence.” (2) Subjectivity. French theory decenters the subject, that is, it carries out a polemic against the unified cogito of Cartesianism. Lacan reinvigorates the Freudian unconscious to argue that the subject is always shot through with desire and therefore constitutively split, never whole. Kristeva modifies Lacan to talk of a terminally incomplete “subject in process.” Althusser claims that we are all subjects of ideology, “interpellated” particularly by the liberal illusion of “freedom”; and Foucault describes a world in which individuals inhabit networks of discipline and power. Clearly, none of these perspectives squares well with American notions of individualism and freedom within the market, never mind “life . . . and the pursuit of happiness.” (3) Truth. As the inheritors of Nietzsche, French theorists are highly suspicious of truth. Foucault’s oeuvre is in effect a history of truth in which he details how knowledge (or regimes of truth) has been generated about madness, illness, sexuality, all in an attempt to exert power over subjects. The suspicion of science continues in The Postmodern Condition where Lyotard argues that truth claims on a grand scale can no longer be made in a postmodern era marked by incredulity toward “grand narratives.” Finally, in the writings of Baudrillard, truth is purely chimerical or apparitional because we live in a hyperreal environment where “simulation,” and not the real, is the order of the day. This gen-
1127
eral suspicion of the truth and the real clashes drastically with American pragmatism and a commonsensical reliance on “what works,” although Baudrillard at least has struck a chord with the most mediatized culture on Earth. Because of the inherent incompatibility of French thought and American intellectual traditions, and even though these French thinkers are primarily philosophers or psychoanalysts, they were not first read and appreciated by those Americans who shared their disciplines. Philosophy departments in the United States were dominated by analytical philosophy and had no time for what was perceived to be mainly rhetorical trickery emerging from the French camp. American psychoanalysis, meanwhile, had taken a limited understanding of Freud to produce a version of ego psychology that concentrated on the “cure” and on adjusting patients to society. Lacan’s return to Freud, which promises no healing of damaged egos and insists on the persistence of desire and lack, made hardly a dent on the American psychoanalytical establishment. It was left instead to departments of literature in universities to read and disseminate French theory, even though only a small part of this theory was devoted exclusively to literature. In the first instance, this meant that departments of French and comparative literature carried out the task of introducing and translating the work of Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan, although English literature departments, which were larger and more numerous, began to teach French theory. The Canadian province of Quebec is an interesting exception to this pattern. The shared language meant that thought from France could be more quickly assimilated in Quebec:
1128
THEORY
Lyotard even wrote The Postmodern Condition at the behest of the provincial government. Along with Johns Hopkins, one of the key institutions for the promotion of French theory in the United States was Yale. Yale French Studies published a special double issue on structuralism in 1966 edited by Jacques Ehrmann, but the university was specifically instrumental in raising the profile of Jacques Derrida and his method of reading, deconstruction. Derrida was a visiting professor at Yale through the 1970s and 1980s, and his colleagues at Yale, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman (and later their students Barbara Johnson and Gayatri Spivak), produced an American brand of deconstruction that fit relatively well into American traditions of literary criticism. Their close and often highly playful rereadings of Romantic poetry seemed close in strategy to the new criticism championed in Yale in the 1950s. Derrida’s claim in Of Grammatology that “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (there is no outside of the text) bore a resemblance to the new critical insistence on close attention to the text itself with no reference to “extrinsic” features, and Derrida’s ability to spot aporias and moments of undecidability in texts did not appear to be far removed from the new critical prizing of ambiguity. Such superficial similarities cannot conceal the fact that Derrida was in general not scrutinizing literary texts (although his American followers were), but the Western philosophical tradition, and that he rejected the textual unity and coherence that the new critics so cherished in the isolated poetic object. Nevertheless, the rapid success of Derrida and deconstruction within some quarters of American intellectual
life, and the slower reception of other thinkers, such as Althusser, Lacan, and Deleuze, must be attributed to deconstruction’s finding the path of least resistance. Derrida himself lamented the institutionalization of deconstruction within the American academy, its incorporation into the syllabus, and its appropriation as just another methodology when it is in many ways anti-institutional. In sheer influence, Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva are probably the two thinkers after Derrida who have had the greatest impact in North America. Foucault was often seen as an antidote to Derrida because his work included a historical dimension that Derrida’s apparently lacked. His analysis of power found many imitators who sought out discursive regimes and epistemic shifts, although once again it was literary critics before traditional historians who took up Foucauldian methods. The “New Historicism” of the 1980s, associated with Stephen Greenblatt, has often been linked with Foucault, and indeed during the last few years of his life, before he died in 1984, Foucault spent time as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where Greenblatt also taught. The Berkeley-based journal Representations, with its interest in issues of history, language, culture, and power, reflects the continuing American legacy of Foucault. Meanwhile, Kristeva, who does not call herself a feminist, was labeled, along with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, as one of the “French Feminists,” whose interest in psychoanalysis and language produced a new hybrid when combined with pragmatic and liberal American feminism. Kristeva has held a post at Columbia University in New York since 1973 and has ex-
THEORY
erted much influence within literary studies in general, although a certain skepticism toward her feminism remains, particularly with relation to her anti-Cartesianism. A similar ambivalence toward French theory prevails in African American studies, where figures such as Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker Jr. have attempted to put poststructuralism to work, most notably in “Race,” in Writing and Difference, a special issue of Critical Inquiry edited by Gates in 1985. The influx of French theory stimulated the founding of many new journals and the transformation of others. Journals were often the first point of contact, not the least in their provision of translations, because the translation of entire books such as Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967, published in English in 1976) and Writing and Difference (1967, in English in 1978) was a slow process. A quick survey of the changing interests of the most important journals of this period provides an accurate measure of the tempo of reception of various French ideas. In addition to its issue on structuralism, Yale French Studies published important numbers on French Freud (1972), Graphesis (1975), Literature and Psychoanalysis (1977), Feminist Readings (1981), and On Bataille (1990). New Literary History, based at the University of Virginia, was an important clearinghouse for structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory throughout the 1970s, publishing essays by Derrida, Cixous, de Man, Hartman, Todorov, Gerard Genette, and Hayden White. Other important journals of the 1970s included boundary 2, Diacritics, Glyph, Semiotext(e), and Sub-Stance. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the feminist periodical Signs, the title of which reflects the linguistic turn, published trans-
1129
lations of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva before any of their books had appeared in English. Although Lacanian psychoanalysis had less success in literary circles, it energized the burgeoning field of film studies and film theory, which was represented by such journals as Camera Obscura, Jump Cut, and Wide Angle. During the 1980s, the radical art journal October became the main vehicle of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the United States. Although “French theory” is now fully incorporated into the syllabi of North American universities, this does not mean that it was wholly accepted within those universities, and outside the universities the reception has ranged from bafflement to hostility. More traditional literary journals, such as the New York Review of Books and the Partisan Review, as well as wide circulation magazines such as Time and Newsweek, have been unable to suppress their outrage and dismay at the excesses and impenetrability of Derrida and company; indeed, they usually collapse the questions French theory poses into wider pedagogical and political issues about the canon and so-called political correctness. That Baudrillard’s theories of simulation enjoyed a vogue in the rarefied New York art world in the 1980s could only have confirmed suspicions about the elitism of French thought. In the eyes of many, contemporary theory was finally discredited as only so much smoke and mirrors by the “Sokal hoax” of 1996 when the physicist Alan Sokal submitted to the journal Social Text an essay that seemed to bring together French theory and science. Social Text accepted and published the essay, only to have Sokal expose it as a nonsensical pastiche of slogans from Lacan, Kristeva, and others.
1130
THÉRIAULT, YVES
In France, philosophers such as Derrida and cultural critics such as Barthes regularly published in the public sphere, and they are taken seriously by parts of the mass circulation press, therefore the vitriol of the press in the United States is disconcerting. It may be for this reason that French theorists have much less to say about the United States than American intellectuals have to say about them. Lacan had one or two scathing things to say about Coca-Cola and American ego psychology, the latter of which he considered the main enemy in his struggle for the soul of psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari take the United States as paradigmatic of the “society without the father” in AntiOedipus, and Deleuze continues this praise elsewhere with his encomium on the “superiority of Anglo-American literature.” Derrida generally maintained a polite silence about his host country, except to express affection for it and to thank it for its hospitality to his person and his writings. In 1976, he did deconstruct the Declaration of Independence (which for him is an act of affirmation), and he has somewhat cryptically announced that “America is deconstruction.” Jean-François Lyotard held posts at the University of California, Irvine, and Emory University and wrote Le Mur du Pacifique (1975), which celebrates American space and movement in a lyrical fashion. But of all the French theorists, it is Jean Baudrillard and Kristeva who have reflected most on the North American continent. Baudrillard does so in the ironic and provocative America, which describes the United States as a “utopia achieved”; he remarks on the culture of simulation that prevails there, a theme he developed earlier in Simulations, where he argued that Disneyland exists to disguise the fact that all
the United States is a form of simulated theme-park world. Kristeva praises the energy and inchoateness of the United States, which she calls a “polytopia,” but at the same time labels it a “nonverbal” and implicitly violent society. Peter Buse See also: Barthes, Roland; Bataille, Georges; Baudrillard, Jean; Coca-Cola Company; Deleuze, Gilles; Derrida, Jacques; Disneyland Paris; Feminisms; Foucault, Michel; Guattari, Félix; Hocquenghem, Guy; Lacan, Jacques; Language; LéviStrauss, Claude; Lyotard, Jean-François; Tel Quel. References Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. 1982. Reprint, London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1983. Donato, Eugenio, and Richard Macksey, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Havercamp, Anselm, ed. Deconstruction Is/in America. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Lotringer, Sylvère, and Sande Cohen, eds. French Theory in America. London/New York: Routledge, 2001. Mathy, Jean-Pierre. Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993. Mehlman, Jeffrey. Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan 1940–1944. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
THÉRIAULT, YVES (1915–1983) One of the most important and prolific writers in Quebec literary history who set himself apart from his contemporaries by embracing both the European tradition and American ethos that characterize Quebec’s culture.
THURBER, JAMES
When he died in 1983, he had published forty or so novels, hundreds of short stories, a few plays, children’s books, newspaper columns, and various short essays and articles. Having left school at an early age, Thériault was a self-made writer who saw writing as a trade and produced “popular” as well as “real” literature. He became the first Quebec author to make a living exclusively from writing. Although he perfected his style and knowledge of grammar by reading French authors such as François Mauriac, Thériault was linked to William Faulkner and other U.S. writers as a result of his grasp of storytelling techniques. Born in 1915, Thériault started his literary career in the late 1930s by writing plays and narratives for radio. This largely unknown but nonetheless important body of work has been neglected because of the restricted access to the material and the sheer number of plays and tales written. To this day, more than 1,300 texts for radio have been retraced, and most have been published as short story collections. This first step as a scriptwriter led Thériault to a successful career as a novelist that lasted for forty years. He published his first book, Contes pour un homme seul (“Tales for a Man Alone”), in 1944. This collection of short stories influenced the way Thériault’s work was perceived by critics, and most reviews, biographies, and studies have presented Thériault as a conteur, a storyteller. Although his first novel, La Fille laide (“The Ugly Girl”), was published in 1950, public and critical recognition came in 1958 with the publication of his most successful book, Agaguk. But it was with Aaron (1954) and Ashini (1960) that he achieved critical success. Thériault’s narratives focus on a quest for individuality and the struggle between
1131
humankind and the forces of nature. Landscape occupies a central role in the novels: stories are set in wild, open spaces and harsh mountainous countries that are not specifically identifiable, yet are recognizably North American. Having no formal education, Thériault taught himself French grammar through reading and writing. He developed a personal style that was either characterized as poetically archaic or criticized as oversimplistic and grammatically inaccurate. Marginalized from his contemporaries, Thériault was never part of an ideological movement or literary group. Categorization was made impossible because of the diversity of his works and the idiosyncrasy of his views on writing, his mistrust of intellectualism, his taste for material success, and his claim to belong to popular culture. Nowadays, Thériault is widely recognized as one of Quebec’s greatest storytellers. Céline Gagnon See also: Quebec. References Hesse, Martha G. Yves Thériault: Master Storyteller. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Perron, Paul. Semiotics and the Modern Quebec Novel: A Greimassian Analysis of Thériault’s Agaguk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
THURBER, JAMES (1894–1961) U.S. humorist noted for short stories, essays, plays, and cartoons that examined the absurdities, frustrations, and humbling experiences of modern existence and the tensions, if not outright hostility, between men and women. Though many books of Thurber’s writings and drawings would appear, he
1132
TIMBER
was especially well known for the work that appeared for decades in the New Yorker magazine. A vulnerable man who at one time or another was plagued by anxiety, depression, heavy drinking, impotence, and (in his last years) blindness, Thurber’s profound understanding of the intimate association that can exist between comedy and tragedy gave his work a sophisticated dimension more common in French humor than in its U.S. counterpart. Thurber had appreciative audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and was himself particularly attracted to France, first visiting there as a young man shortly before the end of World War I. Raised in Columbus, Ohio, Thurber was both repulsed and powerfully attracted by Paris when the U.S. Army stationed him there in 1918. Thurber was still a virgin at nearly twenty-five, a state highly symbolic of Thurber’s American innocence at the time; he lost that virginity in Paris with a dancer from the Folies Bergères. Not surprisingly, one of Thurber’s favorite novelists was Henry James, another U.S. writer who was fascinated by the appeal and danger the Old World might represent to an American. Not experiencing much success as a writer back home in Ohio after he left the army, Thurber returned to France in 1925 to work for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune; while editing the paper’s Riviera edition, he discovered the appeal of the south of France. It was on Thurber’s return to live in the United States after this French stay that he began his association with the New Yorker. By the time he went back to France yet again in 1937, he had become a writer of international renown and socialized while there with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, and Janet Flanner.
In hiring Thurber in 1927, the New Yorker editor brought together an extraordinary array of writing talent. Thurber would work with E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley. Of Thurber’s abundant work, most famous would be his 1939 short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a psychologically astute description of a timid man’s fantasies of power and his mental escapes from the smothering influence of a wife who seeks to control his every move. Like some of Thurber’s other work, and much of his own life, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is simultaneously horrible and hilarious. John Ibson See also: Flanner, Janet; Hemingway, Ernest; James, Henry; Ohio; World War I. References Bernstein, Burton. Thurber: A Biography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Kinney, Harrison. James Thurber: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Thurber, James. The Thurber Carnival. New York/London: Harper, 1945.
TIMBER Timber was a minor item of export from the United States to France from the eighteenth century. As a natural resource managed by French reforestation practice, it was later studied by North American lumber and conservation interests. North American timber’s main value to Europe before the twentieth century was its use in shipbuilding. The depletion and poor quality of Western European forests during the eighteenth century as sources of masts, and that of oak forests in Britain and France in particular, forced
TIMBER
the world’s two principal maritime powers to import naval timber and to search far afield for naval masts. Both imported from neighboring states and the Baltic market, but sought masts overseas because masting trees in Europe were often too brittle for use. France, moreover, frequently suffered from British patrols that could intercept Baltic lines of mast supply in time of war. Until the late eighteenth century, Britain enjoyed an advantage over France in its access to the forests of its New England colonies, which produced excellent masts of extraordinary size, superior even to masts supplied by the forests of Canada. The American Revolution opened the door to French-American relations concerning timber because the colonies rejected the British monopoly on American masts; by 1776, the two sides were negotiating secret sales of surplus French arms from the French and Indian War to the Americans in exchange for tobacco, cotton, whale oil, and lumber. At the same time, Britain’s resulting lack of reliable timber disadvantaged its war effort; the most famous consequence was the navy’s failure to relieve Cornwallis at Yorktown, which owed partly to the fleet’s poor condition after storm gales had played on inferior masts, planking, and pitch. In 1785, Louis XVI sent André Michaux and his son, François André Michaux, to the United States to discover which trees could be shipped back to France to grow profitably in its forestdepleted areas. Their findings yielded no commercial benefit, although their 1810 publication North American Sylva remained for decades the most comprehensive account of the seeds, plants, and trees east of the Mississippi.
1133
Although some illicit trade occurred between New England and the French West Indies, France could not quickly exploit its new timber opportunities, even after the French-American treaty of amity and commerce in 1778. British patrolling interfered with would-be French transatlantic trade. After the war, desiring only oak timber for naval usage, French officials underestimated the pine, spruce, and fir forests of New England. Nor did they develop contacts with potential live oak suppliers in South Carolina and Georgia, preferring instead to maintain procurement of timber from the Baltics and Russia. These factors, coupled with the British blockade of Europe during the Napoleonic wars, generally limited timber shipments from the United States to France until well into the nineteenth century. The Napoleonic wars, meanwhile, caused Britain to rethink its reliance on Baltic timber. Like all of continental Europe, Denmark and the straits were at the mercy of Napoléon’s army, and many of the rest of the timber ports within the Baltic were threatened by Napoléon’s continental system. The British government imposed a severe tariff (275 percent in 1807) on Baltic timber imports, the effect of which was to make Canadian timber more costeffective despite its transatlantic transportation costs. Canadian timber exports, especially from Quebec and Ontario, first to Britain and soon the rest of Europe and the United States, increased steadily in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, Canada became the world’s secondlargest exporter of lumber, behind Europe, due in large part to the harvesting of timber in British Columbia, which displaced the eastern provinces as the leading exporting province.
1134
TOBACCO
The Americans and French did not thoroughly investigate the extent of forests in the United States until the latter part of the nineteenth century. The comment by Count Constantin François de Volney in his 1804 publication View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America that the United States was an “almost universal forest” suggested the vague sense of abundance, shared on both sides of the Atlantic, of American forests. This sense also underlay the practice of exhaustive harvesting and resultant deforestation practiced by the U.S. lumber industry until the twentieth century. Trade, technology exchange, and shared conservation practice slowly increased between the two countries. The openings of the Hudson-Champlain Canal in 1822 and the Erie Canal in 1825 allowed for logs, sawn lumber, and timber to be rafted from the Great Lakes to Albany for loading on ships bound for New York and overseas, allowing regular lumber exports to France. Meanwhile, a French inventor developed the band saw in the early years of the nineteenth century. It was on display in Baltimore in 1819, but did not become popular until after its exhibition at the Philadelphia Centennial Convention in 1876. Gifford Pinchot, famous for working with President Theodore Roosevelt to bring millions of acres into the National Forest system, and the first director of the U.S. Forest Service, first developed his interests at the Ecole Nationale Forestière in Nancy in 1890, as the profession of forestry did not even exist in the United States at the time. In 1906, C. W. Goodyear founded the Great Southern Lumber Company in Bogalusa, Louisiana. Initially profitable, the company began to founder as a result of overlogging and forest devastation. Good-
year visited the sandy Landes district near Bordeaux and saw the area planted with pines to stabilize the dunes. He returned to Louisiana convinced of the practicability of large-scale reforestation. Timothy M. Roberts See also: American Revolution; French and Indian War; Louisiana; Mississippi River; Roosevelt, Theodore D.; Tobacco; Whaling. References Bamford, Paul W. Forests and French Sea Power 1660–1789. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956. Davis, Richard C., ed. Encyclopedia of American Forest and Conservation History. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1983. Hutchins, John G. B. American Maritime Industries and Public Policy, 1789–1914: An Economic History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941. Miller, Char. Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism. Washington, DC: Shearwater, 2004. Perrault, E. G. Wood and Water: The Story of Seaboard Lumber and Shipping. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Williams, Michael. Americans & Their Forests: A Historical Geography. 1989. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
TOBACCO The material history of tobacco and the history of its representations are both significant vectors in the relations across the French Atlantic; however, the relation between the two histories is not a simple one. There was no knowledge of the cultivation of tobacco outside the Americas before the end of the fifteenth century. It is difficult to give a reliable account of preColumbian Amerindian tobacco use because such an account must in large part be reconstructed from European historical, ar-
TOBACCO
chaeological, and ethnographic sources. However, it appears that tobacco use was part of a range of medicinal and hallucinogenic cultural practices that have always been part of Amerindian life. These practices were spread everywhere across the Americas (even groups with no other agriculture grew some tobacco), with special concentration in the Mexican and Colombian areas. Shamans regulated the cultural and medical use of narcotics: tobacco was the most widely and intensely used of the narcotic plants (perhaps because the effects of nicotine were faster, less dangerous, and more easily regulated than many other narcotic plants). Ceremonially, tobacco was deified in Aztec and Mayan cultures; it was offered— by the southwestern Chippewa, for example—in the form of smoke to soothe spirits, it was used in practices of divination, and it was linked with agricultural and human fertility in eastern Texas and across South America. Eastern North American societies developed the calumet ritual in which the sharing of the pipe made political and social obligations binding. Amerindians consumed tobacco by smoking (most commonly in the form of cigars, although pipes were also common, particularly in the north), chewing, drinking, and in the form of snuff; it was also administered rectally. For Goodman, tobacco use is so widespread and so deeply embedded in Amerindian cosmologies that it stands synecdochically for “culture itself.” If tobacco culture was restricted to the Americas until the end of the fifteenth century, by around 1630 it was clearly also a European product with nearly total global reach (by this date, European practices and apparatuses were sold to Amerindian peo-
1135
ples). It is possible to claim that it was the first “exotic” global commodity, spreading as crop and as product and practice more widely and more quickly than sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate. The French were slower than Britain, Holland, and most other European nations to embrace tobacco, but by 1764, when the French tobacco monopoly was established to control the cultivation, manufacture, and sale of tobacco in France, 80 percent of French demand could be satisfied by domestic production, the remainder being supplied in large part from the French colonies, particularly Saint-Domingue, and from Brazil. However, this structure was short-lived: by 1708, the British colonies in Virginia supplied more than half of the French need, and domestic and colonial production continued to fall off thereafter. Thus, the French tobacco relation to the Americas became largely mediated by Britain (initially mostly through London, then Glasgow). The growth of the British Chesapeake tobacco settlements, initially run as tobacco farms with British indentured labor, and then, after the 1680s, increasingly as tobacco plantations based on slavery, signaled the beginning of a modern structuring of the Atlantic. Although its global spread was regulated by the European colonial powers, there remained traces of Amerindian visions of tobacco within Europeanized tobacco culture. The modes of consumption follow Amerindian patterns: cigars, pipes, snuff, chewing, and by enema and the rectal clyster (which was admittedly less popular and enduring than the other modes, but it is seen, oddly eroticized, in eighteenthcentury paintings by Fragonard, for example). André Thevet described the medicinal effects of American smoking in the 1550s.
1136
TOBACCO
Vendors of Tobacco by Jean Baptiste Debret, nineteenth century. By 1764, 80 percent of French demand for tobacco could be satisfied by domestic production, with the remainder supplied in large part by the French colonies, particularly Saint-Domingue, and from Brazil. (Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis)
In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French tabagies—smoking taverns—were likened by contemporaries to Amerindian smoking ceremonies. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antitobacco discourses, seeing tobacco as pagan, also reacted to its non-European origins, channeling a critique of the transformation of national culture through its imbrications in the New World and a newly global economy. Religious objections, which worried that the sacrament could be expelled by sneezing or spitting, gradually gave way; in 1779, the pope established his own tobacco factory.
Early European accounts of the effects of tobacco depended on the system of humors. Tobacco was understood to expel phlegm and to warm and dry the body. The imperatives to be derived from this differed according to viewpoint, but there was no generalized prohibition against the use of tobacco either by women or young people. Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to the court in Lisbon from 1559, for whom nicotine was retrospectively named, promoted tobacco as a herbal panacea and as suitable for life at court. He sent seeds to Catherine de Medici, who began French cultivation. The prestige of the French
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS
court was significant in the legitimization of tobacco use, particularly in the form of snuff, across Europe. When a physiology of the humors gave way to germ theories of disease, discourses on the positive and negative effects of tobacco shifted. In the second half of the nineteenth century, antitobacco societies, in which Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were active in the United States and Louis Pasteur and Gustave Le Bon in France, concentrated on the dangers of the cigarette and stressed the relations between smoking and decadence, inefficiency, intemperance, and degeneration. In France, this vision of pathology was associated incoherently both with aristocratic remnants and with democratizing tendencies. In North America, the bad effects of smoking were coded as European: sometimes Spanish, sometimes French. When Lucy Gaston ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1923 on an anticigarette platform, her (admittedly limited) appeal mixed its crusade against tobacco with a promise of withdrawal from Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism. The story of tobacco since the end of the nineteenth century is dominated by the rise of the cigarette. James Duke, by 1890 president of the American Tobacco Company, responsible for 90 percent of U.S. cigarette production and dominant over most other tobacco production, controlled the rights of the Bonsack cigarette machine, which standardized the cigarette and hugely increased production capacity. The pattern of tobacco globalization shifted in this moment to a production-led process, demanding the aggressive advertising-led penetration of new markets. The cultural distinctions—in class and nation—between modes of tobacco consumption were
DE
1137
gradually overcome until the multinational corporations that developed from the American Tobacco Company dominated global markets (although national companies, such as SEITA in France, compete in many domestic markets). There have been attempts to align representations of cigarettes with this mode of U.S.-led globalization. Phillip Morris’s support of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1986 and its sponsoring the publication of the Bill of Rights is perhaps the most striking example. But at the same time, as Richard Klein has suggested in his reading of literary and filmic accounts of smoking, the cigarette has retained something of its iconic Frenchness. Geoff Gilbert See also: Brazil; Nicot, Jean; Santo Domingo; Slavery; Wilson, Woodrow. References Goodman, Jordan. Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence. London: Routledge, 1993. Klein, Richard. Cigarettes Are Sublime. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint. New York: Knopf, 1947. Price, Jacob M. France and the Chesapeake. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. Rival, Ned. Tabac, miroir du temps. Paris: Perrin, 1981.
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS (1805–1859)
DE
Born in 1805 at Verneuil near Paris, the historian Alexis de Tocqueville grew up in the Ile-de-France, Angers, Dijon, and Metz. His father, the Comte Hervé Bonaventure de Tocqueville, was a mayor
1138
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS
DE
Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America. (Library of Congress)
and prefect on the move. Tocqueville, the son, chose the law as his profession. In 1827, he accepted employment as a mediating judge (juge auditeur) in Versailles, becoming substitute judge (juge suppléant) after 1830. It was there, by the palace of the “Sun King,” that he met his commoner wife from England, Mary Mottley. They married in 1835, but no children were born of the union. With Gustave de Beaumont, also a lawyer, Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 on a government assignment to study its prisons. Their findings and conclusions appeared in 1833: The U.S. Penitentiary System and Its Application in France. Here they admire the severity and effectiveness of the “separate” or “solitary” system of punishment and reform, especially as employed in Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary (now a National Historic Landmark), where the prisoner, always in isolation, was
taught to think of labor as a gift or release from the boredom of idleness. But once across the Atlantic Ocean, curious and in awe of Enlightenment men, Tocqueville took it upon himself to examine most everything, not merely the routines of convicts. His travels—undertaken on foot, horseback, stagecoach, and riverboat, one of which sank—took him north to the cities of Montreal and Quebec, and then south, through more than a dozen states; he visited New York City, Green Bay, New Orleans, and much in between. Democracy in America, which predicted a war over slavery, is a record of these journeys; it consists of two volumes, published in 1835 and 1840, respectively. In them, one finds Tocqueville’s own observations, as well as his conversations with farmers (free and enslaved), artisans, hunters, traders, manufacturers, teachers, judges, ministers, and Indians. He even met President Andrew Jackson and the last living signatory of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll. Democracy in America argues that in the United States, because of a unique, complementary passion for independence and association, a model form of equality was developing, compatible with liberty— a “Mayflower Compact” that, Tocqueville hoped and forecast, would spread also to Europe, finally ending there the persistence of royal and aristocratic laws and customs. (According to the book, one reason for the success of democracy in the United States was that monarchy and aristocracy had never flourished there.) Tocqueville especially appreciated the way in which Americans, in his view a pragmatic, resourceful, and assiduously competitive people, put the rights of states and municipalities before those of their federal, centralized government; this assured fair and representa-
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS
tive governance. What Tocqueville did not like about Americans was their tendency, born of convenience, to bow to the whims of general or common opinion. He thought the middle- and lower-class majority lacked education and experience. This and other judgments, such as Tocqueville’s contempt for materialism and the endorsement of religion, betrayed his own status as a descendant of nobles, his lineage dating from the Battle of Hastings. The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), which concerns France in the “new” era of 1789–1794, has likewise made Tocqueville’s reputation. The text submits that the revolution failed, promising more than it could deliver—and that in failing the event was, despite its bloodiness, not as cataclysmic or transformative as has been claimed since by those taken with the symbolism of the guillotine or the extremism of the period’s language. Despite his emphasis on continuity, Tocqueville admits that the revolution did cause change: legal, political, and social centralization, for example, not to mention the marginalization of the church. But he contends that these processes had been initiated by Louis XIV and his successors. Hence, Tocqueville’s thesis on despotism (not feudalism, which he believed moribund): terrible before the establishment of a republic, it then grew increasingly worse under the direction of the Girondins and Jacobins. He insists that, like the kings before them, what these parties needed but resisted was the leadership and advice of a benevolent yet prudent aristocracy, one able to see virtue in compromise and a system of checks and balances. Tocqueville held many important public offices, using them as he did his writings, that is, to advocate liberalism. In 1839, electors in Valognes (Manche) made
DE
1139
him their representative in the Chamber of Deputies. In this post, as well as promoting the devolution of government, Tocqueville lobbied for the improvement of his nation’s military and administrative relationship with Algeria, which he thought overly harsh and bureaucratic. Tocqueville even encouraged the emancipation of slaves in the colonies. But he was no Toussaint L’Ouverture. His ambition was to make imperialism pay off, abroad and at home: baffled and frightened subjects did not make for either productive workers or eager consumers. There is a touch of Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism (1835) in this argument. A treatise on the age of industry, it maintains that poverty is relative rather than absolute—that the poor have also enjoyed progress. Tocqueville points out that their standard of living was rising; yet he recognizes that by comparison with the rich, whose numbers had risen, they could well be feeling poorer because they were unable to distinguish between need and want. Following the revolution of 1848, which Tocqueville initially opposed because of its radicalism and bloodletting, he became a member of the Second Republic’s Constituent Assembly. In 1849, he was voted into the Legislative Assembly and appointed its vice president. That year, he further accepted the post of foreign minister to President Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (III). With the coup d’état of 1851 and the establishment of the Second Empire, Tocqueville decided to retire from politics, refusing to swear allegiance to autocracy; for his opposition he suffered a night behind bars. Tocqueville died of tuberculosis in 1859. He lies buried in the Normandy village that carries his name. Johan Åhr
1140
TOKLAS, ALICE B.
See also: Catholic Church; French Revolution; Montreal; Quebec City; Slavery; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François. References Jardin, André. Tocqueville: A Biography. Trans. Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Manent, Pierre. Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. Trans. John Waggoner. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996. Pierson, George Wilson. Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938.
TOKLAS, ALICE B. (1877–1967) Alice Babette Toklas was born to middleclass parents in San Francisco, California, on April 30, 1877. Raised to become the respectable wife of a man from the same German-Polish-Jewish background, she longed to know the life of American expatriates in Europe as depicted in Henry James’s novels and stories. She did live one such life in the company of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), whose legend is closely intertwined with Toklas’s single-minded devotion to it. During her forty-two years of almost uninterrupted residence in Paris, Stein enjoyed an undiminished following of younger, often talented artists, to whom she acted as a sort of queen. But biographers have long argued that in their shared household, Toklas was responsible for making some of the most important decisions —from when and where Stein would try to publish some of her enormous output to deciding whom they would lovingly accept into their inner circle (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder) and whom they would reject (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams). Indeed, her indefatigable efforts at proofreading texts for small presses, turn-
ing inauspicious manuscripts into cash and administering their often depleted bank accounts, have been the substance of much speculation. Toklas’s only extant literary work is her memoir What Is Remembered (1963), written in collaboration with Holt’s editor Robert Lescher (whose name does not appear on the book cover) and generally considered a hollow and opportunistic sequel to Stein’s own Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). In 1906, Toklas met the expatriates Michael and Sarah Stein—Gertrude Stein’s elder brother and sister-in-law—who were living in Paris, but had returned to Oakland to assess the damage caused by the earthquake of April 18 to the apartment buildings they owned there. She traveled with them to Paris in 1907, immediately meeting Gertrude. Toklas and Stein exchanged the equivalent of marriage vows in the ancient town of Fiesole in 1908 during their habitual summer sojourn in Italy. Pledging loyalty and responsibility toward one another, from that moment on they considered themselves husband (Stein) and wife (Toklas), but wisely refrained from making their alliance public. The outbreak of World War I caught the two women in England. On learning that the Germans had been stopped at the Marne, they returned to Paris, only to leave again for Majorca in 1915 after the first German zeppelin flew over the French capital. Upon their return to Paris in the summer of 1916, Toklas became a “delegate” for the French government, commissioned to raise funds for the ambulance corps and the U.S. soldiers fighting in Europe. She also became the godmother to a host of young GIs. In 1933, the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas brought Stein
TOURISM
instant fame, but her companion remained somehow in obscurity. Readers and reviewers often doubted the real existence of Toklas, who in the book appears as a fictional first-person narrator and a counterbalance to other opinions that Stein voices as a character. Having lived through the Vichy regime, Stein died of intestinal cancer in July 1946. Toklas went on living for another twenty-one years, still possessed of an absorbing devotion to Gertrude, whose legend and myth she fostered with unflagging enthusiasm even at the expense of compromising some biographical facts. Her emotional pain was eased by her conversion to Catholicism on December 9, 1957, which gave her the promise of an afterlife in heaven with Stein. She died in Paris on March 7, 1967, and was buried beside Stein in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in a Catholic service. José María Rodríguez García See also: Fitzgerald, F. Scott; James, Henry; Literary Relations; Pound, Ezra Loomis; Stein, Gertrude; Williams, William Carlos; World War I; World War II. References Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. New York: Praeger, 1974. Simon, Linda. The Biography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Sohuami, Diana. Gertrude and Alice. London: Pandora, 1991.
TOURISM The word was imported into the French language from the English, where it referred to the seventeenth-century English young gentlemen for whom the “Grand Tour” to the Continent had become a necessary part of their education. The French
1141
term touriste appeared in Louis Simond’s Voyage d’un Français en Angleterre/Journey of a Frenchman in England in 1816, and use of the term was popularized by Stendhal, whose 1838 Mémoires d’un touriste focused on his travels to Italy. Between 1800 and 1815, the number of foreign visitors to France fluctuated between 10,000 and 12,000, increasing after the Napoleonic wars to 30,000 in 1830 and 50,000 in 1848. In 2002, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) ranked France—which saw some 76.5 million international visitors that year—as the world’s leading recipient of tourists. Among the early Americans visiting France in the late eighteenth century were Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and Gouverneur Morris. Tourism, however, existed before the introduction of the word in France, where thousands made the pilgrimage through the south on their way to Santiago de Compostela in the Middle Ages. Charles Estienne’s guidebook, Le Guide des chemins de France/The Guide to the Roads of France, said to be the first in France, was published in 1552. English Grand Tourists on their way to the sites of antiquity passed through France and, because of bad roads, lack of security, and malaria in southern Europe, many of them got no farther. Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Arthur Young were among the English who wrote of their travels to France in the eighteenth century, and English tourists in France were lampooned in sketches by William Hogarth, among others, in the penny press. Eighteenth-century tourism in France was facilitated by the development of a post-road network, as well as larger and more comfortable carriages equipped with springs. The French Revolution brought
1142
TOURISM
visitors interested in seeing the dawn of an anticipated glorious new age. Some, such as Thomas Paine, wrote revolutionary tracts; others, such as William Wordsworth, became disillusioned; and yet others, such as Anacharsis Cloots, were guillotined in France. The Louvre was opened as a museum for the public during the French Revolution, and, at almost the same time, a reverse French tourist “invasion” of Brighton, England, was also satirized in the British penny press. With the end of the Napoleonic wars, English gentlemen began retiring to Pau in southern France and Malta. The U.S. defeat of the Barbary pirates in 1801 and the French occupation of Algiers in 1830 helped open the Mediterranean to tourism, and French travelers such as Alexis de Tocqueville visited and described the United States, the Marquis Astolphe de Custine likewise Russia, and Flora Tristan, Peru. During the Second Empire, the reconstruction of Paris, engineered by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, and the development of street lighting facilitated night tourism, turning the French capital from the city of “light” to the city of “neon.” France reached its modern pinnacle of tourist iconicity in the fin de siècle period, when the extension of railway networks and the advent of luxury steamships increased the volume of international tourism. At the time, however, France had few competitors for tourists from England and the United States. The French empire was also made accessible by steamship and rail. Rail lines, extended from Paris to Nice in 1864, helped fuel the subsequent development of the Côte d’Azur. The network of great train stations in Paris was completed with the construction of the Gare de
Lyon between 1895 and 1902, timed to coincide with the Universal Exhibition of 1900, itself a tourist attraction. Train service facilitated recreational bicycling, which surged in popularity during the last decade of the nineteenth century and offered enhanced mobility for women, who embraced it in large numbers. The Touring Club de France was established in 1890 to promote cycling, and later expanded its activities to all forms of tourism. The first Tour de France bicycle race was run in 1903. Railway development was accompanied in France by an increase in communal roads from 331,000 kilometers in 1871 to 539,000 in 1911, and in 1900 the first Michelin guidebook was published. By the end of the nineteenth century, railways, and then automobiles, made spas, seashores, and mountains increasingly accessible. Deauville acquired its social “season.” The Eiffel Tower, built for the centennial celebration of the 1789 revolution, became an enduring tourist symbol. The twentieth century began with Henry Adams’s Mont Saint-Michel et Chartres, first published in 1904, which became an iconic American view of medieval France. Domestic and foreign tourism were promoted by the state, which in 1910 established an Office National du Tourisme to encourage tourism under the Minister of Public Works. Following World War I, the state intensified its promotional role with legislation in 1919 to help organize spas, health resorts, and tourist centers. Ten years later, a high commissioner and undersecretary for tourist traffic was named and a ministerial commission established to help regulate the tourist trade. Gastronomic tourism was boosted by the Michelin tire company, which began rating restaurants in 1926 and unveiled its three-
TOURISM
1143
Tourist boats on the River Seine, Paris Exposition, 1889. Pavilion of Portugal at left and Food Products building at right with Eiffel Tower in background. (Library of Congress)
star rating system five years later. The writings of Curnonsky (Maurice-Edmond Sailland) helped popularize regional French cuisine in restaurants beyond Paris, made accessible by the automobile. Automobiles also contributed to an interwar fashion for suntans by enabling more people to visit beaches. Favorable post–World War I currency exchange rates brought Americans, who followed Ernest Hemingway and his Moveable Feast, to France. Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, a young writer from the United States, drove through France in the 1930s and acquainted American readers with the newly “discovered” French regional
cuisine. European colonialism opened much of Africa and Asia to Western tourism during the interwar years, the great age of luxury steamships, even if more Europeans “toured” these areas by way of the pavilions created for the 1931 French Colonial Exhibition than actually traveled to these faraway lands. In 1935, the state established a Commissariat au Tourisme, and the following year the Popular Front government introduced two-week congés payés (paid holidays), stimulating the developing youth hostel (auberges de jeunesse) movement, which emphasized touring in and becoming acquainted with the various regions of
1144
TOURISM
France. Social tourism programs grew, such as the more than 5,000 colonies de vacances, which provided summer vacations to upward of 100,000 urban children, but these declined after World War II when greater affluence and a changed ethos led more of the French toward individual and family, as opposed to group, vacations. The privations of World War II and German occupation did not destroy tourism, as Vichy, a spa town, became the provisional capital, and hoteliers continued to ply their trade as best they could. Thousands of German soldiers and civilian officials were given tours of occupied France by a special unit of the Wehrmacht, established for that purpose. With the liberation, France welcomed Allied troops, encouraging them in magazines, such as For You, to tour in France. Arthur Frommer, the American author of Europe on $5 a Day, recalled that he had first become excited about touring Europe during military service there. A postwar reprise in tourism began with the introduction of the inexpensive Renault 4CV and Citroën 2CV automobiles in 1947 and the arrival of the first airborne package tour in Corsica in 1949. Early postwar French vacationers at a beach resort were famously depicted in the 1948 Jacques Tati film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot/Mr. Hulot’s Vacation. The 1951 film An American in Paris (Minnelli), with music by George Gershwin and scenes of Paris taxis, the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, Notre Dame, the Folies Bergère, and 1890s Montmartre cancans, the dance in which women lift their skirts, laid out the popular itinerary for the growing numbers of Americans visiting Paris. Club Méditerranée (Club Med), created in 1950 as a nonprofit organization to make seaside vacations available to the less affluent, had
evolved to a profit-making commercial model by the 1960s. The postwar recovery of the mid1950s, together with the political stability engendered by the cold war and the economic growth of the Common Market, contributed to French tourist development. Within France, there was a shift during the 1950s as vacationers increasingly switched from trains to cars. During the 1960s, jumbo jets increased the numbers and broadened the access for transatlantic tourism. The relative decline in the cost of air travel, especially after the 1978 airline deregulation in the United States, also facilitated tourism. In 1970, France ranked third, behind Italy and Canada, in the number of tourist visits measured by the WTO. The French Revolution Bicentennial celebrations helped move France into first place, where it remained after 1988. In tourist income, however, France was in third place, behind the United States and Italy. From 1979 through 1989, the average stay in France was reduced from 9.4 to 7.3 days, a cause of concern to the French tourism industry. The election of François Mitterrand as president and a Socialist government in 1981 led to an extension of the congés payés from four to five weeks and, in 1982, the establishment of the National Agency for Vacation Checks (Agence nationale pour les chèques-vacances, or ANCV) under the Ministry of Tourism to help make vacations affordable for those of modest means. Assistance in the form of vacation checks (chèques-vacances) enabled more than 5 million people in France to take vacations away from home between 1982 and the ANCV’s twentieth anniversary in March 2002. With the help of the chèquesvacances program, the percentage of French
TOURISM
people staying home during their vacations declined from one-half to one-third between 1982 and 2002. Most French tourists, however, stayed within France, in contrast to vacationers from Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the Benelux countries, who traveled abroad in greater numbers in the early 1990s. French theme parks gained popularity, with several competing sites opening in the late 1980s. In 1987, Futuroscope, featuring high-tech video media, including 3-D film and virtual reality rides, was opened 5 miles north of Poitiers and attracted some 225,000 visitors. Futuroscope added bigscreen films and Cinerama (wraparound film) and by 1994 had attracted 2 million visitors. In 1989, Parc Astérix opened in a forest, 22 miles (37 kilometers) north of Paris. Based on a popular cartoon figure, Astérix represented ancient Gallic resistance to Julius Caesar and the conquering Romans with an implicit resistance to American popular culture as well. Parc Astérix featured French history and attracted 1.35 million visitors, of whom 85 percent were French, during its first year. EuroDisney, opened in April 1992, lagged in popularity because of insufficient parking space for buses and related infrastructural problems and because it had been patterned after the U.S. model and, as such, had been the subject of considerable controversy. Adjustments were made, and by the turn of the millennium, EuroDisney had become the most popular tourist attraction in Europe, bringing 12.5 million visitors annually, more than twice the number for the Eiffel Tower. EuroDisney visitors were 40 percent French, 57 percent other European, the remainder being from the rest of the world. Walt Disney Studio Park opened in Paris on March 16, 2002, with the goal of extending
1145
the total visitor count to both Disney parks to 17 million per year. A new competitor appeared in February 2002 when Vulcania, the project of former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, opened in Saint-Ours-les-Roches, near Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne. Conceived in 1992 by Giscard, then president of Auvergne’s Conseil Régional, Vulcania, an underground volcanic park, attracted more than 500,000 visitors during the tourist season of 2002. The theme parks sought to attract young families on school vacations and a growing population of younger retirees, created by legislation enabling people to retire at sixty and by the growing life span in France. By 2000, the life span in France for men was 75.2 years and for women 82.7. Retirees often took up permanent residence in areas they had discovered in previous visits. A survey of 248 retiree households on the Côte d’Azur showed that 20 percent of them had brought a child to live with them there. Sometimes, threegeneration families, including children, parents, and grandparents, went on tour. Club Med in the 1970s had become famous for its hedonistic bouffer, bronzer, et baiser (eat, tan, and make love) motto but, because of AIDS in the 1980s and an older tourism market, abandoned its hedonistic image in favor of “cultural” tourism. Another sign of changing patterns in tourism was the demise in 1983 of the Touring Club de France, anachronistic in an era of private tourist agencies and theme parks. The advent of the thirty-five-hour week in 1998 led many workers to shift their free hours from the end of the workday to the end of the workweek, so that the three-day weekend became more common. With this in mind, the new theme parks were designed to encourage longer stays. In
1146
TOURNEUR, JACQUES
all, the growth in tourism transformed earlier economic sectors such that the Canal du Midi now generated more income from tourism than from the shipment of industrial goods. Southern France drew more than half its income from the holiday trade. France in the past two centuries has seen revolutions in productivity and leisure of immense proportions, and these have impacted the growth of tourism both domestic and foreign. Tourism, once the prerogative of the few, has been expanded to larger segments of the population. Although tourism helped preserve ecological parks, gastronomy, and cultural history, some have complained of the depredations of tourist “hordes.” France, however, saw its top rank threatened by new competition a century after the Eiffel Tower. The same railway and steamship networks that helped highlight France on the cultural map, later supplemented by automobile and airline networks, undermined the French by making more cultural competitors increasingly accessible in the twentieth century. WTO tourist figures were undoubtedly inflated because they included arrivals in both directions, going to and from northern Europe to Spain, so that tourists were often counted twice or more. France owed its continued number-one tourism status to its location at the crossroads of Europe and the large amount of travel facilitated by the European Union. Bertram M. Gordon See also: Adams, John; AIDS; Aviation; Automobiles; Citroën; Cuisine; Dance; Disneyland Paris; Exposition Coloniale; French Revolution; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Hemingway, Ernest; Jefferson, Thomas; Michelin; Mitterrand, François; Paine, Thomas; Sport; Steamboats; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Tristan, Flora; World War I; World War II.
References Cazes, Georges. Le Tourisme en France. Paris: PUF, 1984. Dumazedier, Joffre. Toward a Society of Leisure. With a foreword by D. Riesman. Trans. S. E. McClure. New York: Free Press, 1967. Gordon, Bertram M. “Going Abroad to Taste: North Americans, France and the Continental Tour from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present.” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History. Selected papers of the annual meeting (1998): 156–170. Harp, Stephen L. Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Levenstein, Harvey. Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Rauch, André. Vacances en France de 1830 à nos jours. Paris: Hachette, 1996.
TOURNEUR, JACQUES (1904–1977) French-born international film and television director who became a cult reference of the horror genre. Born in Paris, Jacques Tourneur discovered the film world of the United States at a very early age when he followed his father, director Maurice Tourneur, to Fort Lee, near New York, in 1914. Jacques Tourneur spent his teenage years in the United States and became a U.S. citizen in 1919. He went to Hollywood soon after, working on small jobs at MGM. Keen to learn his trade, Tourneur decided he could get the best training by joining his father in France. He left for France in 1928 and directed his first film in 1931, working in partnership with his father, mainly on Les Filles de la concierge (1934). Jacques Tourneur returned to Hollywood and MGM in 1935 to work on shorts, graduating to fea-
TOURNEUR, MAURICE
tures only in 1939, mainly B-movies. The producer Val Lewton at RKO provided the right conditions for Tourneur to reveal himself as a director, with a particular sensitivity and talent for fantasy and horror (Cat People, 1942; I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, both 1943; Night of the Demon, 1957; The Comedy of Terrors, 1964, a parody of the genre). Cat People is internationally revered as Tourneur’s masterpiece, a perfect example of his skill at creating an atmosphere of fear through subtlety and suggestion. Simone Simon, a compatriot, starred as Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian émigrée haunted by a curse that turns her into a black panther when she harbors sexual desires. Simon, with her feline looks and particular mix of innocence and powerful sexuality, excelled in the role and became a cult star. The cult of Cat People is such that it overshadows Tourneur’s other films and his success and skills in other genres. Tourneur indeed also directed one of Hollywood’s greatest film noirs, Out of the Past in 1947, starring Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer, as well as Berlin Express (1948) in the same category. Tourneur also directed successful westerns (Way of a Gaucho, 1952; Canyon Passage, 1946; Bonanza, 1959; Wichita, 1955; Stranger on a Horseback, 1955), comedies, romantic dramas (Ann of the Indies, 1951, starring Louis Jourdan), costume dramas (The Flame and the Arrow, 1950, with Burt Lancaster), and most other genres. Highly efficient, versatile, and able to adapt to most production conditions and to turn a bad script into a good film, Tourneur inspired respect and admiration in his peers. After crossing over to television (The Twilight Zone, 1959), Tourneur retired to France in 1965. Catherine Hellegouarc’h
1147
See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Florey, Robert; Jourdan, Louis; Simon, Simone; Tourneur, Maurice; Westerns. References Fujiwara, Chris. Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall. Baltimore/London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998. Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg. The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak. New York: New American Library, 1972.
TOURNEUR, MAURICE (MAURICE THOMAS) (1876–1961) French film director born in Paris. This highly prolific film director, almost forgotten for decades and overshadowed by the cult fame of his son Jacques Tourneur (1904–1977), was one of the most skilled and imaginative filmmakers of the silent era in France and the United States. Sent to the United States by the French film company Eclair in 1914, Maurice Tourneur became one of the leading pioneers of U.S. silent cinema along with influential names such as D. W. Griffith, Thomas Ince, and Cecil B. DeMille. In 1918, the film magazine Photoplay indeed listed Maurice Tourneur in fourth position in their list of the greatest U.S. directors of the period. Tourneur’s French and American silent films have, however, for the most part disappeared and are thus largely unknown. Originally a decorator and book illustrator, he later applied his artistic skills and techniques to his filmmaking, bringing him a strong reputation for the pictorial quality and invention of his films. In his days as an artist, Tourneur was an assistant to both Auguste Rodin and Puvis de Chavannes, contributing to the latter’s design of the great staircase of the Public Library in Boston. Tourneur’s decorating also led
1148
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, FRANÇOIS
him to create set designs for the stage, introducing him to theater circles. Tourneur became an actor in 1900, working for Réjane, André Antoine, and Abel Tarride. Like many of his contemporaries, Tourneur not only graduated to directing plays but also started directing films, first for ACAD and then for Eclair in 1912. French studios such as Méliès, Pathé, Eclair, and Gaumont were opening in Fort Lee and New York from 1904, trying to prevent the pirating of French silents by U.S. studios. Tourneur was sent to Fort Lee to defend Eclair’s interests in 1914, joining Emile Chautard, and became part of the first French film colony in the United States, along with Alice GuyBlaché, Herbert Blaché, Félix Mesguisch, Albert Capellani, Georges Archaimbaud, Emile Cohl, Henri Diamant-Berger, Léonce Perret, Louis J. Gasnier, Lucien Andriot, Ben Carré, and Sarah Bernhardt, among the most famous. Tourneur excelled at creating dark, exotic atmospheres onscreen, almost gothic and expressionist before the days of German expressionism (Trilby 1915; The Blue Bird, Woman, 1918; Treasure Island, 1920; The Last of the Mohicans, 1921; The Isle of Lost Ships, 1923). Despite his success and the relative artistic freedom of those days, he fell out with producer Irving Thalberg and returned to France in 1926. Having left France at the beginning of the war and taken U.S. citizenship in 1921, Tourneur was no longer welcome in France; to escape criticism, he worked in Germany for a while, where he directed Marlene Dietrich, then unknown. However, the films he eventually managed to make in France in the 1930s and 1940s, with some of the greatest actors of the period, are the most celebrated today (Les Gaietés de l’Escadron/Fun in Barracks,
1932; Les Deux Orphelines/The Two Orphans, 1933; Justin de Marseille, 1935; Avec le Sourire/With a Smile, Koenigsmark/ Crimson Dynasty, 1936; Katia, 1938; Volpone, 1941; Cécile est morte/Cecile Is Dead, 1944). Catherine Hellegouarc’h See also: Cinema, 1895–1945; Gasnier, Louis J.; Guy-Blaché, Alice; Rodin, Auguste; Tourneur, Jacques; World War I. References Mitry, Jean. Maurice Tourneur, Anthologie du Cinéma, Tome IV. Paris: L’Avant-Scène, 1968. Waldman, Harry. Maurice Tourneur: The Life and Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, FRANÇOIS (1742–1803) Haitian revolutionary leader. Born into slavery on the Bréda plantation in Haut-du-Cap, on the French colony of Saint-Domingue on May 20, 1742, Toussaint was to become the leader of the slave revolt and bring the island to the brink of independence. A descendant of an African prince, his godfather, Pierre Baptiste, taught him to read and write. It was during the period of stalemate that followed the slave leader Boukman’s execution in 1791 that Toussaint came to the fore. Where Boukman had led by fierce inspiration, Toussaint was altogether more politically minded and reflective, bringing discipline and military awareness to the revolt. In effect, Toussaint transformed Boukman’s maroons into an efficient army of liberation, skilled in guerrilla tactics. Toussaint also realized that the fundamental goal of the insurrection was the overthrow of the colonial system. He was well aware of the ongoing repercussions of the French
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, FRANÇOIS
Revolution and used this knowledge skillfully as he bargained and gave concessions, playing on the rivalries of the colonial powers. Toussaint aligned his troops with the Spanish, who were seeking to regain control in their former colony, until 1794; he then transferred his support to the republican French, who had abolished slavery in August 1793, and thereby regained tenuous control of Saint-Domingue. Toussaint then went to war against the British, whose promise to reimpose slavery had won them the support of the white planters and who sought to exploit France’s revolutionary turmoil. Toussaint finally succeeded in driving the British out of Saint-Domingue in 1798, at great cost to the colonial army. The abolition of slavery had highlighted racial and class divisions among the liberated slaves. The predominantly mulatto anciens libres became entangled in a power struggle with the nouveaux libres, the outcome of which was the war of the South between Toussaint and the forces of André Rigaud, the mulatto leader. Toussaint emerged victorious, and in the 1801 Constitution was declared governor-general of an autonomous Saint-Domingue. Toussaint’s foreign policy was more conciliatory than Dessalines’s later, more radical position, and trade agreements were reached with Britain and the United States. Internally, Toussaint sought to revive the plantation system, establish legal liberty for all slaves, and at the same time offer new terms to the white owners in return for their recognition of his authority. France, however, was unwilling to concede SaintDomingue, which had been the most profitable of all its colonies, and Napoléon landed 5,000 men at Cap Français with the intention of exploiting the ongoing con-
1149
Toussaint L’Ouverture meets with the invading generals in Haiti to make peace after his guerrilla troops defeated whites in battle. (Library of Congress)
flict between blacks and mulattoes as a means to regain control and ultimately reintroduce slavery. With the support of the mulatto generals Rigaud and Pétion, and strengthened by the recent arrival of reinforcements from the metropole, the French persuaded Toussaint that cooperation was his only option. Duped by the French, and betrayed by his own generals, Toussaint was captured and taken to France, where he soon perished in the fort of Joux in the Jura. The foundations laid by Toussaint were too strong, however; new mulatto and black generals—Dessalines, Pétion, and Christophe—united the anticolonial factions and moved toward the final proclamation of independence on January 1, 1804. Haiti, the first modern black republic, had been born.
1150
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, FRANÇOIS
Haitian historical representations of Toussaint have been split along clearly defined racial lines: mulatto historians have disputed the primary importance of Toussaint and argued that the mulatto leader Rigaud was the real force behind the revolution. Their argument is that Toussaint was tyrannical, an unwitting tool for the whites, and that he preferred conciliation with France to sharing power with mulattoes in an independent state. Moreover, they argue, Toussaint worked in league with the colonialists to reintroduce slavery through his reworking of the plantation system. On the other hand, the memory of Toussaint was used by noiriste thinkers and writers in the 1920s and 1930s, notably François Duvalier, to create a historical myth of Haitian elite blacks as righteous defenders of the masses and of national independence working counter to duplicitous mulatto leaders who, according to this noiriste revision of history, were concerned only with betraying the people and looking after their own self-interest. Duvalier was the self-proclaimed living incarnation of “the five founders of the nation,” Dessalines, Pétion, Christophe, Estimé, and, of course, Toussaint. The truth lies somewhere between these two versions: Toussaint was realistic about the need for foreign trade and foreign technical assistance for the island’s survival, and although he would have continued to live under the French flag, he could have done so only if he was in effective control of the colony. It is undeniable, however, that Toussaint’s war was as much with the mulattoes as with France, and neither he nor Rigaud valued the cause of national independence above the narrower internal interests of class and color. These unresolved disputes have fundamentally weakened postinde-
pendence Haiti’s ability to build any kind of modern, functioning society. In the broader Caribbean context, Toussaint has become a less ambiguous symbol of anticolonialism and black resistance. Major literary figures such as Walcott, Glissant, Harris, and Césaire have asserted the importance and relevance of Toussaint in the ongoing development of Caribbean cultural identity. For Césaire, Toussaint is the center of Haitian history, and indeed of Caribbean history. Outside the Caribbean, too, Toussaint has been celebrated as a heroic, exemplary figure: Wordsworth, Lamartine, and Hugo all wrote tributes to Toussaint and to the Haitian Revolution in general. The posthumous influence of Toussaint was also felt in the United States, where white abolitionists and blacks saw him in similar terms to the romantics. Proslavery factions, however, fearful of a similar slave revolution in the United States, denounced Haiti and Toussaint in traditional racist terms as examples of black barbarity. Historians of the American independence era have recently argued that Toussaint effectively thwarted Napoléon’s plans to use French-controlled Louisiana as a base from which to invade the United States. Napoléon required Toussaint’s 40,000 men to carry out his plan, but Toussaint refused and thus saved the United States from a catastrophic war with France. Napoléon’s defeat in Saint-Domingue ended Napoléon’s ambitions to create a New World empire, and in 1803 he sold Louisiana to the United States, which allowed Jefferson to consolidate the new democracy. In these ways, the memory of Toussaint, a complex, sometimes contradictory figure, caught in the maelstrom of his time, has become a potent symbol of
TRAVEL WRITING
freedom, a very real catalyst for the radical changes and movements of the past 200 years, such as the abolition of slavery, the Harlem Renaissance, négritude, black civil rights, and Caribbean decolonization. Martin Munro See also: Bonaparte, Napoléon; Boukman, Daniel; Césaire, Aimé; Christophe, Henri; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; French Revolution; Glissant, Edouard; Louisiana; Slavery. References Arthur, Charles, and J. Michael Dash, eds. Libete: A Haiti Anthology. London: Latin American Bureau (Research and Action), 1999. Césaire, Aimé. Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981. Dash, J. Michael. Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Geggus, David P., ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Geggus, David P., and David B. Gaspar, eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins. 1938. Reprint, London: Allison and Busby, 1994. Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
TRAVEL WRITING Travel is a practice and metaphor central to understandings of the formation of the French Atlantic. The space is crisscrossed by innumerable transatlantic journeys, as well as by a series of more permanent axes whose consolidation these journeys permitted. Ideas, texts, music, and other forms
1151
of cultural production have traveled and been circulated in these complex processes of exchange, but such circulation has invariably depended on the complementary physical movement of individuals, many of whom have produced—and continue to produce—accounts of their journeys. Travel writing associated with the French Atlantic constitutes a vast body of texts, even if the generic label is understood to refer strictly to the travelogue of an actual journey. Into a wider understanding of the category as travel literature would fall an even more diverse range of journey-related texts describing transatlantic itineraries, ranging from the philosophical essay to the novel, from Michel de Montaigne’s “Des cannibales”/“On Cannibals” (Essais I, XXXI) to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit/Journey to the End of Night (1934). Some of the earliest travelers to the Americas were French: Jean de Léry, for example, produced his account of a journey to South America, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, in 1578, but most of the first French accounts of journeys to the Americas were to the North, including Jacques Cartier’s Bref récit/Brief Narration (1545), a narrative describing his second journey in 1535 up the Saint Lawrence River; Samuel de Champlain’s accounts of his various expeditions in Canada; and Robert La Salle’s Mississippi journals. Eighteenth-century French travel accounts continued to recount exploration of South America (e.g., Charles-Marie de la Condamine and Pierre Bouger in Ecuador), but North America persisted as the dominant zone: Louis Lahontan provides a protoethnographic account of his decade as an army officer in Quebec in Nouveaux voyages du baron de la Hontan dans l’Amérique
1152
TRAVEL WRITING
septentrionale/New Voyages to North America (1703). La Pérouse spent long periods in North America as a member of the French navy and an explorer committed to the protection of French interests after the Treaty of Paris (1763); his posthumously published Voyage autour du monde/Voyage Round the World (1797) records the section of his circumnavigation involving exploration of the northwest coast of North America. In the late eighteenth century, North America attracted romantic travelers such as Chateaubriand, whose five months traveling up the Hudson and across the wilderness of New York State to Niagara inspired a series of subsequent texts, including Atala (1801) and his autobiographical Mémoires d’outre-tombe/ Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb (1849– 1850). Tocqueville traveled to North America 1831–1832, and his political tourism led to the publication of De La Démocratie en Amérique (1835–1840); the desire to study North American democratic institutions during the American Civil War also motivated Louis-ProsperErnest Duvergier de Hauranne’s transatlantic travel, described in his Huit Mois en Amérique (1866). As the century progressed, however, a more observational and impressionistic travel writing emerged, some of which, such as Paul Bourget’s Outre-mer, notes sur l’Amérique (1895), was not well received by certain readers in the United States. North America continued to be a dominant theme in twentiethcentury French travel writing, with travelers such as Victor Segalen benefiting from the rapid improvement in travel networks to cross the continent. Journey accounts were subject to increasing formal experimentation, as can be seen in Blaise Cen-
drars’s “Les Pâques à New York” (“Easter in New York,” 1912). Some early twentiethcentury accounts, such as Paul Adam’s Vues d’Amérique ou la nouvelle Jouvence (“Views of America or New Youth,” 1906) or Paul Morand’s Rien que la terre/Earth Girdled (1926), offer a eulogy of New World modernity, an attitude tempered by Georges Duhamel’s more critical Scènes de la vie future/America: The Menace (1930). Sartre and Beauvoir produced narratives of their journeys in North America during and after World War II, and the continent continued to fascinate later twentieth-century travelers. In Mobile (1960), Michel Butor describes a contemporary space crisscrossed with freeways and saturated with the images of advertising, and the rapidly changing society of the final decades of the century forms the basis for the accounts of Edgar Morin (Journal de Californie, 1970), Jean-François Revel (Ni Marx ni Jésus, 1970), and Jean Baudrillard (Amérique, 1986). Alongside such journeys through hyperreality, the mythical American West continues to fascinate French travelers, as Michel Le Bris’s La Porte d’Or (“The Golden Gate,” 1986) makes clear. Although among twentieth-century French travelers there remains an emphasis on North American journeys, we have notable accounts of travel to South America and the Caribbean. One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century French travel literature is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (1955), an account of an ethnographic fieldwork in 1930s Brazil. Also of interest are the Belgian traveler Henri Michaux’s antitravel narrative Ecuador (1929), texts by surrealists such as André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the Second World War, as well as cer-
TRAVEL WRITING
tain texts by authors linked to the contemporary Pour une littérature voyageuse movement (e.g., Jean-Luc Coatalem, Mission au Paraguay, 1996). Although for historical reasons the corpus of French travel accounts of the Americas eclipses accounts of journeys the other way, France remains an area central to North American travel literature. Thomas Jefferson, American commissioner to the royal court in France from 1784, described his French stay in his extensive correspondence, but it was really in the nineteenth century, with North Americans instrumental in the development of mass tourism, that many major authors traveled to France. James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton all produce accounts of their transatlantic travels, from which emerges a sense of the exoticism of the Old World. By the early twentieth century, numerous guides were produced for North American visitors to France, and after World War I, there was an influx of North Americans to Paris. These visitors included prominent black authors (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen) seeking a mythical color-blind France and contributing to a “Harlem Renaissance overseas” during these années folles. African American travelers such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin continued to produce personal travel accounts in the period immediately following World War II; and in the second half of the twentieth century, France continued to play a diverse role, ranging from the site of Jack Kerouac’s search for Breton origins in Satori in Paris (1966) to a foil for Bill Bryson’s observational humor in Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991).
1153
Travel writing represents a rich and complex corpus of material in consideration of Franco-American relations, reflecting historical shifts and permitting an understanding of changing attitudes and identities. It is important, nevertheless, that such a corpus should not be restricted to France–United States, East-West trajectories. There is a considerable body of texts relating to the transatlantic journeys of francophone Caribbean writers (e.g., Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 1939, and Edouard Glissant, Soleil de la conscience, 1956). Moreover, MichelTété Kpomassie’s L’Africain du Groenland/An African in Greenland (1981), describing a journey from Togo to Greenland in which France plays a minor role, adds another dimension to the elaboration, through travel, of a network of francophone Atlantic relations. Charles Forsdick See also: Adam, Paul; Baldwin, James; Baudrillard, Jean; Beauvoir, Simone de; Brazil; Breton, André; Butor, Michel; Cartier, Jacques; Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Cendrars, Blaise; Césaire, Aimé; Champlain, Samuel de; Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de, Vicomte; Duhamel, Georges; Duvergier de Hauranne, Ernest; Glissant, Edouard; James, Henry; Jefferson, Thomas; La Condamine, Charles-Marie de; La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de; La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur; Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de; Le Bris, Michel; LéviStrauss, Claude; Martinique; McKay, Claude; Michaux, Henri; Montaigne, Michel de; Morin, Edgar; Niagara Falls; Quebec; Revel, Jean-François; Saint Lawrence River; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Segalen, Victor; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Treaty of Paris; Twain, Mark; Wharton, Edith; World War II; Wright, Richard.
1154
TREATY
OF
PARIS
References Goulemot, Jean M., Paul Lidsky, and Didier Masseau, eds. Le Voyage en France: Anthologie des voyageurs français et étrangers en France, aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris: Laffont, 1997. Jullien, Dominique. Récits du Nouveau Monde: Les voyageurs français en Amérique de Chateaubriand à nos jours. Paris: Nathan, 1992. Lee, Jennifer. Paris in Mind. New York: Vintage, 2003. Levenstein, Harvey. Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Speake, Jennifer, ed. Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia. 3 vols. New York, London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003. Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
OF PARIS (1763) The Treaty of Paris (February 10, 1763) between France and Great Britain ended the French and Indian War (1754–1763). This treaty was preceded by the Treaty of Fontainebleau (November 3, 1762) between France and Spain. Along with Canada, France ceded to Great Britain Île Royale (since then Cape Breton Island), Île Saint-Jean (later Prince Edward Island), Louisiana east of the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes basin, Saint-Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago. France also gave up Senegal in Africa and its possessions in India. Furthermore, France ceded New Orleans (Nouvelle-Orléans) and the rest of Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain. For its part, Great Britain returned the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, SainteLucie, and Marie-Galante in the West Indies, besides Saint-Pierre et Miquelon in
TREATY
the North Atlantic, and Goré (later Chad) in Africa, to France. France kept its fishing rights in Newfoundland and in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Havana was returned to Spain, whereas the latter ceded Florida to Great Britain and recognized the British rights over Honduras. Great Britain had conquered the dominion of the seas and had turned the North Atlantic into its own Mediterranean Sea. France, however, had not been completely excluded from it. The concurrent combination of military errors on the battlefield, administrative disorder, and indifference toward Canada had resulted in France’s abandonment of all its French subjects on North American soil. These had been subject to British rule as of the Conquest of Montreal (September 8, 1760) and were eagerly awaiting to be returned to France when the final treaty was signed. That did not happen, but they were given limited religious freedom (“as far as the laws of Great Britain permit,” art. 4), the right to their properties, and the possibility of emigrating within eighteen months. In Great Britain as well as in France, the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Paris provoked a wide debate on whether to exclude the French from North America. The final decision to make Canada a British colony was motivated especially by the international political context. Yet according to the opposition leader, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, known as “the Elder” (1708–1778), this was not enough. He accused the prime minister, John Stuart, Earl of Bute (1713–1792), of not wanting to give France the coup de grâce. According to Pitt, France did not weaken in Europe and had succeeded in protecting its economic interests in the North Atlantic
TREATY
fisheries and in the large West Indian plantations, even though it gave up all its continental colonies. Luca Codignola See also: Fishing; French and Indian War; Guadeloupe; Louisiana; Martinique; Mississippi River; Montreal; Saint Lawrence River; Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. References Lawson, Philip Graeme. The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Marshall, Peter James. “British North America, 1760–1815.” The Eighteenth Century. Ed. Peter James Marshall and Alaine M. Low. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998: 372–393. Rashed, Zenab Esmat. The Peace of Paris 1763. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1951. Ward, J. R. “The British West Indies in the Age of Abolition, 1748–1815.” The Eighteenth Century. Ed. Peter James Marshall and Alaine M. Low. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998: 415–439.
OF UTRECHT (1713) A series of treaties concluded at Utrecht in 1713–1714 ended the War of the Spanish Succession, known in North America as Queen Anne’s War. The treaty between Britain and France, signed on April 11, 1713, marked an important stage in the growth of Britain’s North American empire. Given the importance that France placed on its cod fishery in the northwest Atlantic, its most difficult concession was probably the recognition (in Article 13) of British sovereignty over the island of Newfoundland. This included an undertaking to give up the fort and colony established in 1662 at Plaisance (Placentia). However,
TREATY
OF
UTRECHT
1155
the treaty allowed the French to maintain a seasonal migratory fishery on the Newfoundland coast between Cape Bonavista and Pointe Riche—the location of which, as well as the precise nature of the French right to fish, was later to be the cause of disagreement. The fishery was also safeguarded by the agreement that France would retain Cape Breton Island (Île Royale) and Île Saint-Jean, while ceding mainland “Nova Scotia or Acadia,” as well as Sable Island. This region had been in British hands since 1710, but the French sought to minimize the cession by arguing that Acadia proper was the peninsula only. The final treaty stated that the region had been ceded according to its “ancient boundaries,” a vague phrase that was to lead to interminable disputes. Nonetheless, France had retained a North American base for its fishery, from which the sea route to the Saint Lawrence River could also be protected. Saint Christopher’s (Saint Kitts) in the West Indies was also ceded to Britain. Since the 1660s, Britain and France had disputed the ownership of Hudson Bay. The treaty settled the matter by providing that France would “restore” to Britain the bay and Hudson Strait, along with the hinterland. Boundaries were discussed, but again were not defined. The negotiators agreed instead that all the North American boundaries in dispute would be referred to a joint commission. New France was now hedged in from the north and east. In addition, Article 15 recognized British sovereignty over the Iroquois and appeared to allow British access to the interior fur trade. New Englanders had gone a long way to achieving their goal of taking over Acadia, and British fur and
1156
TREMBLAY, LISE
fish merchants had gained secure and extensive territories. Nevertheless, France was able to develop a thriving if vulnerable colony at Île Royale, focused on the citadel at Louisbourg, and managed until the French and Indian War to confine the area of effective British control to peninsular Nova Scotia. The joint boundary commission met, but settled nothing. In many respects, so far as North America was concerned, Utrecht marked little more than a pause in the Anglo-French contest that ended fifty years later. James K. Hiller See also: Acadia; Fishing; French and Indian War; Fur Trade; Louisbourg; New France; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Saint Lawrence River. References Miquelon, Dale. New France: “A Supplement to Europe.” Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987. Savelle, Max. “The Forty-Ninth Degree of North Latitude as an International Boundary, 1719: The Origin of an Idea.” Canadian Historical Review 38, no. 3 (1957): 183–201.
TREMBLAY, LISE (1957–) Québécois writer, born in Chicoutimi, Quebec, in 1957, and first published in the early 1990s. Lise Tremblay’s novel La Danse juive was winner of the 1999 Governor General’s Literary Award. In 2003, the author won the Grand Prix du livre de la Ville de Montréal for her collection of short stories, La Héronnière. Gail Scott’s translation of La Danse juive is called Mile End (2002), the Montreal neighborhood where the story takes place. Her first novel, L’Hiver de pluie (“The Winter of Rain,” 1990), is an atmospheric work that already bears the stamp of
Tremblay’s style and recurrent themes: the father’s contempt, the relationship with the mother, obesity, a life of wandering, an inner sense of exile, solitude, a feeling of helplessness, shame, even the denial of life. In this novel, set in Quebec City, the narrator wanders through the city, bent on escaping from herself and disappearing altogether. The title of the second novel, La Pêche blanche (“White Fishing,” 1994), refers to winter and to ice fishing in the Saguenay. Two brothers still bear the wounds of their northern childhood, a time of imposed silence and crippling conformity. Robert stays in the Saguenay, but the more adventurous Simon chooses to live in San Diego and travel along the West Coast of the United States. This introspective novel shifts back and forth across the North American continent, echoing both brothers’ similar struggle for inner peace and, for Simon, the need always to be on the move, almost like a wanderer. La Danse juive expresses a deep, repressed rage. The obese female narrator roams about the streets of Montreal to observe and be observed, because for her parents, she no longer exists. Here, the family is put on trial: the father’s vulgar ways, his fear, the mother’s frayed existence because she can’t think for herself, the brother’s rigid conformity. The more the female narrator puts on weight, the more violent her anger. She uses her obesity to punish those who have made her the mediocre monster she is. She breaks off with Mel, her lover, says hurtful things to her mother, and ends up killing her father by giving him the silent treatment. The five short stories in La Héronnière are set in a remote village, near a nesting site for herons. City dwellers seeking peace
TREMBLAY, MICHEL
and quiet come here to hunt and fish; others settle here. What lies behind the peaceful facade of this village? Abandoned dreams, compulsive alcoholism, senseless cruelty, lost illusions. The only rule is lying and keeping up appearances. Here, the writer homes in on mankind’s excruciating solitude. The spoken word is the keystone of Tremblay’s work. Words bring comfort, inflict wounds, even death. Yet, Tremblay uses mainly indirect speech that remarkably renders the gap between the self and one’s life, a life that’s elusive, forever beyond reach. Tremblay’s words express human vulnerability and delve into the soul. Her restrained and frugal style is what makes her work so powerful; from behind the veil of indirect speech, repressed feelings rise to the surface in a mighty, seething tide. Lucie Lequin See also: Montreal; Quebec City. Reference Joubert, Lucie. “Le monde de Lise Tremblay: Montréal, île maudite, refuge ou no woman’s land?” University of Toronto Quarterly 70, no. 3 (summer 2001): 717–726.
TREMBLAY, MICHEL (1942–) The works of Michel Tremblay, prolific Montreal playwright and novelist, center mainly on the francophone working class of the Plateau Mont-Royal, notably the rue Fabre, Tremblay’s childhood home. Born in 1942, Tremblay grew up during la grande noirceur, in the time warp of a postwar Quebec firmly under the thumb of the reactionary Duplessis government and its ally, the Catholic Church; but as an adult in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, he
1157
participated in the decisive modernization of Quebec and, like many of his contemporaries, further supported the independentist movement. Tremblay’s most famous play, Les Belles-Soeurs/The Guid Sisters (1968), is underpinned by the rebellious spirit of the times. Mixing “kitchen-sink” realism with absurdist farce and tragic soliloquy, it tells the story of a “big win” that turns sour, portraying the frustration of fifteen female protagonists confined to the domestic restrictiveness of a Montreal kitchen. But it was the linguistic register of the play that sparked massive controversy as Tremblay brought joual, the working-class variety of Montreal French, to unprecedented prominence on the public stage. Hailed by some as a celebration of the vitality of Québécois identity, castigated by others as a disgraceful exhibition of a degraded dialect, joual ensured a bombshell succès de scandale for the play. The finale where the erstwhile winner, Germaine Lauzon, weeps over her lost dreams to the accompaniment of the Canadian national anthem carried forward the implications of the joual debate, further encouraging the members of the Québécois audience to reflect on their own status as “losers” within the Canadian federation. Between 1968 and 1978, Tremblay produced ten more plays. Some continued to focus on the dysfunctionalities of the iconic Québécois family. Others, set on “the Main,” the rue Saint Laurent, that traditionally divided the francophone East End and the anglophone West End of Montreal, portrayed a marginalized population of artists and performers, transvestites, homosexuals, petty criminals, prostitutes, and pimps. Escapees from the stifling constraints of family and religion,
1158
TREMBLAY, RÉMI
they represent rejection and social exclusion, but also the pervasive sense of humiliated alienation experienced throughout Quebec society. After ten years of theater, Tremblay’s work took a new direction with Les Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal, a cycle of six novels following the fortunes of a family loosely modeled on Tremblay’s own. Again generic innovation was an important feature. La Grosse Femme d’à côté est enceinte/The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant (1978), for example, follows events that happen in the family and among their neighbors during a twenty-four-hour period. Meanwhile, the main characters of the Chroniques (la grosse femme)—her husband Gabriel and her child Jean-Luc (Tremblay’s alter ego); her mother-in law Victoire and the latter’s brother Josaphat; her brother-in-law Edouard; Albertine, her sister-in-law; and Albertine’s two children, Therese and Marcel—will become the protagonists of several further plays and novels. Formal experimentation remains a key feature: Albertine, en cinq temps/Albertine in Five Times (1984), for instance, traces a life history through five different characters, each representing a stage in Albertine’s life. Nearly forty years after Les BellesSoeurs, Tremblay continues to write. His corpus, including some thirty plays and a dozen novels, constitutes a veritable comédie humaine, the constantly recurring characters crisscrossing the different genres of theater and narrative in the parallel Quebec universe of Tremblay’s richly inventive imagination. Rachel Killick See also: Catholic Church; Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet; Language; Montreal; Quebec; Quiet Revolution; Theater.
References David, Gilbert, and Pierre Lavoie, eds. Le Monde de Michel Tremblay. Montreal/Carnières, Belgium: Cahiers de Jeu/Lansman, 1993. Tremblay, Michel. Les Belles-Sæurs. Ed. Rachel Killick. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000.
TREMBLAY, RÉMI (1847–1926) One of the most important journalists both of Quebec and of francophone eastern United States in the nineteenth century. Rémi Tremblay was born in 1847 in Saint-Barnabé (Quebec). At the age of twelve, he moved with his parents to New England in their search for work, and for four years followed them to various cities and factories in New Hampshire, attending school whenever possible. Back in Quebec at the beginning of the American Civil War, Rémi was unable to shake from his mind the images he had seen in the United States of soldiers in shiny uniforms parading in the streets, acclaimed by all and admired by the most beautiful women in town. In 1864, at age sixteen, he walked fifty miles to Rouses Point, the closest U.S. border town, lied about his age, and enrolled for five years in the U.S. Army. He soon became a member of the 14th Regular Infantry Regiment and took part in all the major battles of 1864: Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna. Taken prisoner by Southern forces, he spent six months at the infamous Libby prison in Richmond (Virginia), from which he was freed at the end of the war. Unwilling to continue his military service, he deserted and went back to Quebec for a
TRENET, CHARLES
few years before moving back to Woonsocket (New Hampshire) in 1867, where, among other things, he slowly started a career in journalism. After a vivid literary altercation with a Catholic priest about coming to the aid of France, which was then besieged by the Prussians at the height of the Franco-Prussian War, Tremblay had to move to the Eastern Townships (southeast of Montreal), where he pursued his journalistic career with increased ardor and also became a translator. In 1884, after more than a decade in Quebec, he wrote his only novel, an autobiography relating his experience during the American Civil War (Un Revenant: Episode de la guerre de Sécession/One Came Back: A Franco-American Civil War Novel). The following year, Tremblay was offered the job of editor in chief of the francophone newspaper L’Indépendant in Fall River (Massachussetts). Thus began a long, though sometimes intermittent association between Tremblay and the inhabitants of francophone New England. In 1885, he also founded La Ligue des patriotes, an association that lasted well into the twentieth century. A true (Canadian) patriot, Tremblay was vocal in his defense of francophone and Catholic institutions, among which was the right to a francophone Catholic priest. He also fought diligently to maintain the integrity and quality of francophone schools. It was during a heated debate between rival newspapers about francophone schools that he was attacked by a Franco-Protestant named Narcisse Cyr, who denounced him to the U.S. authorities as a deserter from the U.S. Army. Fortunately for him, the authorities were no longer interested in Civil War deserters and no action was taken. Apart from his novel, Tremblay wrote dozens of songs and
1159
published two plays (L’Intransigeant and A Trompeur, trompeur et demi) and five collections of poems: Chansonnier politique du Canard (1879), Caprices poétiques et chansons satiriques (1883), Coups d’aile et coups de bec (1888), Boutades et rêveries (published in Fall River in 1893), and Vers l’Idéal (1912). He is one of the pioneers of Franco-American literature and an important figure in the Franco-American community during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Jean Levasseur See also: American Civil War; Catholic Church; Montreal; Quebec. References Levasseur, Jean. “Rémi Tremblay: Portrait d’un Franco-américain patriote.” Québec Studies 33 (spring 2002): 73–82. Tremblay, Rémi. Un Revenant. Ed. Jean Levasseur. Sainte-Foy: Les Editions de la huit, 2003.
TRENET, CHARLES (1913–2001) French author-composer, singer, actor. Charles Trenet remains the all-time most influential songwriter in the francophone world. Everyone, from Charles Aznavour to Robert Charlebois, from Jacques Brel to Georges Brassens, owes him a debt. From 1937, Trenet invented a synthesis of American jazz rhythm with French words, but his songs were not mere jazz but rather authentic French songs that he qualified as “swing,” made of poetic lyrics with a jazz rhythm and orchestra: “J’ai ta main,” “Il pleut dans ma chambre,” “Verlaine” (in a crooner style). He wrote words and composed music for most of his songs, creating countless classics: “Que reste-t-il de nos amours?” “Boum,” “Le
1160
TRINIDAD
Soleil et la lune.” Oddly, the melody of his 1968 song “Quartier latin” is in fact copied from an early jazz standard sung by Al Johnson, “Little Girl” (composed by Hyde and Henry). Trenet also published novels. As an actor, he starred in French films from 1938 to 1943: La Route enchantée (Caron, 1938), Je chante (Stengel, 1938), Romance de Paris (Boyer, 1941), Frédérica (Boyer, 1942), Adieu Léonard (Pierre Prévert, 1943). During the 1950s, his song “Y a d’la joie” was used in Canada for a radio commercial for Coca-Cola. From the late 1940s, Charles Trenet went many times to Canada, especially to Quebec City. In 1950, he composed three famous songs that referred to Canada. Trenet names many cities in “Voyage au Canada,” a humorous song about traveling by various means. In “Dans les rues de Québec,” a descriptive song about the streets of Quebec City “that makes him think of Paris,” Trenet humorously imitates the female folksinger Madame La Bolduc. An unusual song titled “Les Pharmacies” (1951) is almost an anthropologist’s observation of the huge drugstores characteristic of North America. Later in the 1960s, Trenet wrote “Les Chiens-loups,” a lessknown song that he often included in his repertoire onstage, in which he says he would like to emigrate to Canada if someday he left his beloved France. In 1953, Charles Trenet became officially a permanent resident of Canada, although he never lived outside his beloved France for more than a few months. He actually composed his classic song “L’Ame des poètes” in Quebec City, where he spent time between 1948 and 1954. It was a producer from Montreal, Gilbert Rozon, who convinced Trenet after
his retirement in 1975 to do a comeback show at the Théâtre Saint Denis in July 1983 for the Juste pour Rire (Just for Laughs) comic festival. Trenet did the same show in the summer of 1984 in Quebec City for the celebration of the 350th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s first trip to Canada. On September 10, 1988, Trenet did a special concert at the Colisée de Québec, with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec and guest director François Dompierre. Later in the 1990s, Trenet toured France and Quebec. A Musée Trenet was inaugurated by Trenet himself in Narbonne, in the house where he was born. Yves Laberge See also: Aznavour, Charles; Brel, Jacques; Cartier, Jacques; Charlebois, Robert; Cinema, 1895–1945; Coca-Cola Company; Jazz; Music (Pop); Quebec; Quebec City. References Balen, Noël. Charles Trenet. Monte Carlo: Editions du Rocher, 1992. Cannavo, Richard. Monsieur Trenet. Paris: Editions Plon, 2001.
TRINIDAD In the 1780s, almost 300 years after its “discovery” by Columbus, the island of Trinidad was an isolated and undeveloped outpost of the Spanish empire. The modern history of the island effectively began in 1783, when the Spanish authorities issued a decree that opened up Trinidad to large-scale settlement by Catholic planters and their slaves from the French Caribbean islands. The first wave of French planters (white and free colored) came from Martinique, Saint Lucia, Dominica, and Grenada, and were lured by the opportunities to acquire new lands in Trinidad. Further
TRISTAN, FLORA
waves followed quickly as the dual repercussions of the French and Haitian Revolutions forced many planters to seek refuge in Trinidad. These influxes immediately infused the island with the morals, customs, and language of the “French Creoles,” a term that designated the racially exclusive elite group of aristocratically descended immigrants born in the islands. Although the nucleus of this group consisted of these “old families,” other well-connected, island-born “white” Catholics of English, Irish, Spanish, Corsican, and German descent were accepted into the French-Creole group. Whereas many of the French free coloreds and their slaves supported the Republican cause, the French-Creole families were staunchly royalist and hostile to all revolutionary movements. Given its exclusive nature, the elite intermarried compulsively, and evidence of “Negro blood” led to expulsion. The French Creoles considered themselves model slave masters, though their supposed paternalism was largely relative to the more rigid British system. Sugar and later cocoa plantations were the foundations of French-Creole wealth, though they also dominated the surveying and law professions, which facilitated their acquisition and exploitation of new lands. After the British took control of Trinidad in 1797, and the subsequent formation of an English-Creole group, the culture of the French Creoles gradually declined. By the end of the nineteenth century, differences between the two elite Creole groups had largely disappeared, and French families now tended to send their children to Catholic schools in England. Linguistically, too, English came to dominate and became the language of commerce, religion, and education, supplanting the Creole that the
1161
French and their slaves had taken to Trinidad. The earliest calypsos were sung in Creole, and it was only with the move to English-language and European instruments that calypso gained popularity with the elite. Trinidad Carnival was originally an elegant French-Creole social event that, after emancipation in 1838, was gradually popularized and Africanized to the extent that, by the end of the century, white Creoles could not play without the real threat of violence. The French Creoles had a profound influence on the shaping of modern Trinidad, its society, culture, and folklore. Their steady decline ran parallel to the fall of European imperialism and the movement toward independence and democracy in the previously colonized world. Martin Munro See also: Catholic Church; French Revolution; Grenada; Haiti; Language; Martinique; Republicanism; Saint Lucia; Slavery; Sugar. References Brereton, Bridget. Race Relations in Trinidad and Tobago 1870–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ———. A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962. Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1981.
TRISTAN, FLORA (1803–1844) French writer and political activist. Born on April 7, 1803, Flora Tristan was of mixed descent, her father being a Spanish Peruvian, her mother an émigré in temporary exile from the French Revolution. They met and married in Spain and settled in Paris without regulating their papers with the three relevant authorities of Spain, Peru, and France. When Tristan’s father
1162
TRISTAN, FLORA
died suddenly in 1807, the property was confiscated, and Flora Tristan was raised with only dim memories of her father and aristocratic wealth. By the age of seventeen, she was married to her first employer, André Chazal, a lithograph artist, but by 1825 she was separated from him and had left her three young children in care to take employment as a ladies’ companion. She lived at various temporary addresses in her attempts to flee from her husband’s persecution, especially after she began earning from her writing. In desperation, Flora Tristan journeyed to South America, leaving from Bordeaux on April 7, 1833, and stayed for several months in Peru with her father’s family in a vain attempt to gain access to her inheritance. She left Lima again in July 1834, returning to Paris by January 1835. She left no record of her return voyage via North America and England, but Flora Tristan’s writing career began and flourished with travel and politics. It was while preparing her first major work on her Peruvian voyage that Tristan wrote and published her first extensive work in 1835, Nécessité de faire bon accueil aux femmes étrangères (“The Need to Give a Warm Welcome to Foreign Women”). Although she chose to remove traces of her menial positions in the years between 1825 and 1833, upon her return from her trip to Peru she henceforth flaunted her continuing travel experiences in Europe and the Americas, writing from a more socially elevated position as a woman of letters or as a female traveler: these works included Pérégrinations d’une paria; a novel, Méphis; her London journal, Promenades dans Londres; and her diary, Tour de France. Her very first publication was a petition to parliament, the only legitimate political act permitted to women in France, for the restoration of
divorce. That had been introduced by the revolutionary government and outlawed by the Restoration Monarchy of 1814 (subsequently reintroduced by the Third Republic in 1884). She wrote a second petition for the abolition of the death penalty, thus attempting to intervene and spare her husband from this fate—he had attempted to kill her in a public shooting in September 1838, from which she recovered. He served a seventeen-year prison sentence with hard labor. Tristan’s final publication, Union ouvrière, before her untimely death in Bordeaux in November 1844 at the age of forty-one, was a project to create a workers’ union. She had been touring French towns promoting her Socialist ideas when she was taken ill. Tristan’s widowed daughter Aline, who had married the republican Clovis Gauguin, by whom she had a son, Paul, and a daughter, Marie, retained the Tristan Peruvian connection when she traveled to Peru and stayed with her great-uncle, the same man who had welcomed Flora Tristan some twenty years previously. It was only in the late twentieth century that Tristan’s Peruvian ancestry was celebrated by Peru. The Maison du Pérou in Bordeaux also commemorated the bicentenary of her birth with contributions from the contemporary Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and French feminist scholars. Across France and Latin America, she is celebrated in alternative politics, and youth and women’s movements bear her name. Máire F. Cross See also: Feminisms; Gauguin, Paul; Painting; Travel Writing. References Cross, Máire Fedelma. The Letter in Flora Tristan’s Politics. London/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Grogan, Susan. Flora Tristan: Life Stories. London/New York: Routledge, 1998.
TROPIQUES
TROPIQUES Intellectual Caribbean journal. In contrast to previous Paris-based “black” francophone journals such as Revue du Monde Noir, Légitime Défense, and L’Etudiant Noir, Tropiques (1941–1945) was founded in Martinique by Aimé Césaire, his wife, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Georges Gratiant, and Aristide Maugée. Despite the precarious conditions of its existence—the shadow of Vichy censorship and a severe shortage of material resources—the articles, reviews, and poems of Tropiques remain powerful documents of the many-faceted interests of the group. The journal, notably, shows a strong surrealist influence, which was compounded by André Breton’s chance discovery of the first issue in a store window as he wandered the streets of Fort-de-France and by his subsequent meeting with Césaire and the rest of the group. Tropiques also reveals the group’s interest in Africanity, which was largely mediated through the now discredited work of the German ethnologist, Leo Frobenius. The view proposed by Frobenius of African culture as an innate life force waiting to be rediscovered is often combined in Tropiques with a Freudianinfluenced conviction that this force has survived the traumas of the Middle Passage and centuries of slavery and colonialism and now resides in the collective unconscious. The explicit aim of the Tropiques group was to unlock this collective Africanized “black” unconscious, and, at the same time, to revalorize the Antilles through articles on its flora, fauna, and folklore. Tropiques also shows a marked attachment to the French literary avant-garde: articles in praise of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont are helpful in understanding the influences on Césaire’s poetry. Indeed,
1163
the varied concerns and interests expressed in the articles in Tropiques make it an essential point of reference for readers of Césaire’s dense and challenging work. Interestingly, however, Césaire’s is not the dominating presence in Tropiques: his contributions consist of pieces of poetry, short articles, and only one major essay on poetics (“Poésie et connaissance”). The central preoccupations of the group are chiefly explored in articles written by either Suzanne Césaire or René Ménil, recognition of whom has been eclipsed by the more or less exclusive critical focus on Aimé Césaire. Tropiques is a testament to the energy and commitment of the group as a whole, to the exchange of ideas and influences between the metropole and the Antilles, and to the early attempts of the group to ground Caribbean writing and literally to clear the land for the subsequent generations of writers who are not only, as Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant proclaim, “à jamais fils d’Aimé Césaire,” but also the intellectual offspring of the entire Tropiques project. Martin Munro See also: Avant-Gardes; Bernabé, Jean; Breton, André; Césaire, Aimé; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël; Lautréamont, Comte de; Literary Relations; Martinique; Ménil, René; Surrealism. References Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1981. Davis, Gregson. Aimé Césaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Munro, Martin. Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre. Leeds, UK: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2000. Tropiques, Collection Complete, 1941–1945. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978.
1164
TRUDEAU, PIERRE ELLIOTT
TRUDEAU, PIERRE ELLIOTT (1919–2000) Pierre Elliott Trudeau was born into a wealthy Catholic family on October 18, 1919, in Montreal, to a Québécois father and a mother of Scottish origin. He attended the institutions of the Montreal bourgeoisie: the Académie Querbes and the Jesuit Jean-de-Brébeuf college. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Montreal in 1940 but, with conscription and the advent of war, was forced to join the ranks of the Corps-école of Canadian officers. In 1943, he returned to university and graduated. “A citizen of the world,” in his own words, he then attempted to see as much of the world as possible: in 1944, he enrolled at Harvard; in 1946, he attended the Institut d’études politiques in Paris; and he enrolled at the London School of Economics the following year. It was during these European years that he became involved in great ideological debates, most notably through his relationship with the authors of the review Esprit in Paris. Between 1947 and 1949, he visited the Middle East, Palestine, Eastern Europe, and Asia and continued his religious and philosophical quest through contact with the worlds he discovered. This led him, after a brief period in Ottawa at the Queen’s Privy Council, to become involved with the idealist and progressive Catholic review Cité libre, where he developed a philosophy that was both social-democratic and liberal. When he traveled to Communist China and to Cuba, where he met Fidel Castro, he attracted the venom of North American anti-Communists and conservative Catholics. Nevertheless, the political situation in Quebec changed with the death of Pre-
mier Duplessis. Trudeau taught federalism and constitutionalism at the University of Montreal from 1961 onward, and he participated with fervor in the social debates that enlivened Quebec during the Quiet Revolution. Trudeau expressed a personal approach toward Canada, denouncing the ethnic and nationalist defensiveness of French Canadians. He then joined the Canadian Liberal Party and was elected to the House of Commons in 1965. His political career then rocketed: he became justice minister in 1967, then prime minister of Canada the following year, remaining in the post for fifteen years. From the beginning of his political career, his public persona first intrigued, then fascinated, and a veritable “Trudeaumania” then took hold of part of Canada, but another part of the population was annoyed by his intellectual arrogance and by a lifestyle that was sometimes judged to be scandalous. As prime minister, Pierre Trudeau inaugurated his policy of “counterbalance” to reduce Canadian dependence on the United States, notably by developing Canada’s ties with Asia, by recognizing Communist China, by establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and through a much more critical international policy that distanced itself from the diplomacy of the powerful neighbor. In Canada, despite the presence of sovereignists in power in Quebec from 1976 onward and the organization of a first referendum on Quebec sovereignty in 1980, Trudeau managed to guarantee national unity by making Canada a bilingual and multicultural country and by repatriating—although without Quebec’s agreement—the Canadian constitution from London to Ottawa in 1982, but not without having first in-
TRUFFAUT, FRANÇOIS
cluded the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms. Following his withdrawal from political life in 1984 and until his death on September 28, 2000, Trudeau continued to participate in political debate and to combat the “waste” that an asymmetrical development of federalism in Quebec’s favor would have represented. Despite his great popularity, Trudeau remained a controversial figure, particularly in Quebec, where the sovereignists did not forgive him for the virulence of his opposition to them. Christophe Traisnel See also: Catholic Church; Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet; Montreal; Quebec.
1165
References McCall, Christin, and Stephen Clarkson. Trudeau: l’homme, l’utopie, l’histoire. Montreal: Boréal, 1990. McRoberts, Kenneth. Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. Against the Current: Selected Writings. McClelland and Stewart, 1996.
TRUFFAUT, FRANÇOIS (1932–1984) The filmmaker who more than any other represents “French cinema” in Englishspeaking countries, whose career and life were cut brutally short by a brain tumor.
François Truffaut in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (Columbia/The Kobal Collection)
1166
TRUFFAUT, FRANÇOIS
Rescued from delinquency—a response to a most dysfunctional childhood—by André Bazin, Truffaut began as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma, where he became so vituperative a critic of the cinéma de qualité tradition on French cinema that he was briefly banned from the Cannes Film Festival. Like the other new wave directors, he favored the low-budget improvisation and location shooting associated with the Hollywood B-movie. Thanks to his wife’s money, he was able to make Les Quatre Cents Coups/The Four Hundred Blows (1959), the first appearance of JeanPierre Léaud as Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel. This touching and humorous evocation of adolescence, owing more to the Italian neorealists than to anything in French cinema hitherto, has remained one of the best-loved and most widely seen of French films. Léaud/Doinel was to reappear in a series of films, including Baisers volés of 1970, that take him through to a fulfilled vocation as a writer. Jules et Jim (1962), a love triangle sustained by a remarkable performance from Jeanne Moreau, rivals Les Quatre Cents Coups as Truffaut’s best-known film. The brio with which, like Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Pianist of 1960, it oscillates between tragic and comic, and the virtuoso deployment of cinematic technique, have perhaps tended to obscure the morbid streak that runs through Truffaut’s work— apparent already in Jules’s unfulfilled wish to scatter Catherine’s ashes to the winds, most marked in La Chambre verte/The Green Room (1978), based on a Henry James novella, in which Truffaut himself plays a journalist whose specialty is obituaries. Literary influences on this autodi-
dact’s work include, as well as James and his sacrosanct reference point Balzac, the American pulp novel, such as the work of David Goodis from which Tirez sur le pianiste is adapted. French society and history play a sometimes understated but significant part in his work, exemplified by the Franco-German brotherhood-cumrivalry in Jules et Jim, the treatment of the occupation in 1980’s Le Dernier Métro/The Last Metro, and the dedication of Baisers volés/Stolen Kisses to Henri Langlois as an index of Truffaut’s support of the May 1968 movement. The American influence on Le Nuit américaine/Day for Night (1973) is less than might be expected, for the title refers to a type of cinematic lighting, but La Sirène du Mississippi (1969), starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo, is as its title suggests set largely in the Deep South, and Truffaut’s most widely seen screen appearance, despite his supposed inability to speak English, was almost certainly in a Hollywood blockbuster. For another great cinematic poet of childhood, Steven Spielberg, in 1977, he played the scientist who establishes contact with the extraterrestrials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Keith Reader See also: Bazin, André; Cahiers du cinéma; Cinema 1945 to the Present; Deneuve, Catherine; James, Henry. References Baecque, Antoine de, and Serge Toubiana. François Truffaut. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Bonnafons, Elisabeth. François Truffaut. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1981. Holmes, Diana, and Robert Ingram. François Truffaut. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1998. Insdorf, Annette. François Truffaut. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
TWAIN, MARK
TWAIN, MARK (1835–1910) Mark Twain was the nom de plume, virtually the nom de guerre of Samuel Langhorne Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, a writer deservedly famous in American letters for many reasons, among them least significantly his long feud with France. In some circles, Clemens’s literary persona is perhaps as much remembered for his French-baiting as for his Americanism, as if his dislikes and likes were two sides of the same coin. Like Ernest Hemingway, Clemens spent twelve years abroad. But Hemingway spent roughly half his time in Paris. Clemens made five visits to France: from the first short sojourn, chronicled in Innocents Abroad (1867), to an extended stay in the winter of 1894–1895, totaling perhaps ten months at most, principally in Paris. Over that period and after, his evolving relations with France, its language, its people, and its capital may be read as a touchstone to his personal development; certainly they reflected shifting emotions and highlighted a growing ambivalence in a man who refused to idealize even the Holy Land. It is pat to maintain that either Clemens or Twain graduated from a cheery francophilia in the 1860s to a virulent francophobia in the 1870s, well before the pessimistic works of the 1890s. Clemens was not so unsubtle. The implied or forthright criticism dates already from the not-soinnocent days of Innocents Abroad, just as there are bright moments during the darker years. The Dreyfus case became the subject of a lifelong fury when the captain was first condemned in December 1894, during Clemens’s fifth and last residency in France. In that same year, Paul Bourget published his unflattering impressions of
1167
the United States and of Americans in Outre-Mer. Twain replied with even more virulent criticism of France and the French, but spoke approvingly of the Zola of “J’accuse” and, in so doing, reconsidered his previous criticism of the same author’s fiction. From this point, though, one might suspect that “never the twain shall meet.” Yet the convergence of the twain is documented in his enduring affection for Joan of Arc, a forty-year affair that came to a head in his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896). If Clemens had criticized a French immorality that attracted him, the child-woman Joan represented the virtue and virginity he had lost at his daughter Suzy’s death, also in 1896.
In some circles Clemens’s literary persona—Mark Twain—is perhaps as much remembered for his French-baiting as for his Americanism, as if his dislikes and likes were two sides of the same coin. (Library of Congress)
1168
TWAIN, MARK
Twain’s reception in France began with the early incomprehension of MarieThérèse Blanc in 1872. He responded by back-translating his “Jumping Frog” from French into incomprehensible or comic English. French criticism long reflected the same strong emotions that Twain showed toward France, in reverse sequence. If Twain’s sentiments toward the French are traditionally said to voice admiration, then anger, and finally contempt, a century later French reactions seem to have moved from contempt and anger toward admiration. The cliché of his feud with France aside, Twain, like
Clemens, did distinguish between the solid virtues of the French from Joan of Arc to Emile Zola and their unflattering features, namely anti-Americanism, antiSemitism, and Gallic pride generally. Roy Rosenstein See also: Bourget, Paul; Dreyfus Case; Hemingway, Ernest; Joan of Arc; Zola, Emile. References Keating, L. Clark. “Mark Twain and Paul Bourget.” French Review 30 (April 1957): 342–349. Wilson, Mark K. “Mark Twain’s Feud with France.” PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1971.
U URSULINES Originally founded in 1535 by Saint Angela Merici (c. 1470–1540) in Brescia, Italy, for the instruction, education, and protection of young girls, the Company of Saint Ursula was transformed into a religious order in 1612 and came to New France in 1639. Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation of Tours, accompanied by the lay benefactor and rich widow originally from Normandy, Madame de la Peltrie, opened the first Ursuline monastery and school for girls in North America in the city of Quebec. In general, the Ursulines enjoyed a greater degree of success in the education of native, i.e., Amerindian, girl students than did the Jesuits in the education of native boys. The Ursulines sought to evangelize their students, but also learned from them the arts of porcupine-quill embroidery and beading. Relics of artistic production from the Ursuline convent attest to original creations bearing the traces of cultural transfers between the French and natives. In addition, the founder of the convent, Marie of the Incarnation (1566–1618), mastered several native languages and composed dictionaries in Algonquin and Iroquois. She also demonstrated significant artistic tal-
ents as an architect, painter, and sculptor. Her letters and writings, which constitute an excellent source for French Canadian history, reveal that she fully understood the necessity of trade, commerce, and good relations with the natives in relation to the survival of the colony. She expressed a deep appreciation for certain aspects of native ideology, in particular the importance of dreams and visions in native cultures. In 1697, a second Ursuline monastery was founded in Trois-Rivières, and in 1727, on request of Governor Bienville, the Ursuline order established a school in New Orleans. The New Orleans school and orphanage became the first educational institution for women in the United States. Among the institution’s first students were native girls, as well as the children of African slaves. Maureen Waters
1169
See also: Catholic Church; Jesuits; New Orleans; Quebec; Slavery. References Eccles, W. J. France in America. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1990. Oury, Guy Marie. Les Ursulines de Quebec, 1639–1953. Sillery, QC: Editions du Septentrion, 1999. Turgeon, Christine. Le Fil de l’art: Les broderies des Ursulines de Quebec. Quebec: Musée du Quebec, 2002.
1170
UTOPIAS
UTOPIAS Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), his ideal but supremely ironic imaginary island society, contains in its title the seeds of an ambiguity or tension that has beset all subsequent explorations of the theme. With a teasing etymological ambivalence, the “no-place” (outopia) of More’s invention confronts the “good place” (eutopia), reflecting the dichotomy between the literary utopia, in which the needs and desires of humanity are manipulated at the whim of the author and the practical experiment, grounded in reality, in which the construction of the perfectly ordered society is the goal. In France, as in the Americas, the history of utopian thought reflects both strands: aspiration and reform, imagination and pragmatism. It also reflects the interplay of time and place; modernity looks to the future for a better world rather than to a mythical golden age in the past. Fertile ground for exploration of the idea of a good, or perfectible, society could be found in eighteenth-century France, where the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the power of human reason underpinned an optimism about human progress that lasted until the early decades of the twentieth century. It also offered an intellectual model well suited to the transition to the New World, with the apparently limitless possibilities offered by virgin territory and fledgling social and political institutions. The millions of migrants leaving the shores of Europe—with 600,000 from France alone passing through Ellis Island—to start a new life in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are further testimony to the allure of utopian possibilities.
In France, the publication of the Encyclopédie raisonnée des arts et des métiers (1751–1772), under the editorship of Diderot and d’Alembert and inspired in part by the publication in England of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia in 1728, demonstrated a belief in the ability of humans to master their environment: the human condition, therefore, could be perfected. Diderot’s confident claim that “le but . . . est de rassembler les connaissances . . . afin que . . . nos neveux deviennent plus instruits, deviennent en même temps plus vertueux et plus heureux” [Our aim is to gather all knowledge together so that our descendants, being better instructed, may become at the same time happier and more virtuous] set the tone for reforming projects and literary utopias in the years that followed. Morelly’s Code de la Nature (1755), with its vision of a world in which labor is attractive, property abolished, and education compulsory and free, prefigures Socialist and Communistic ideas. JeanJacques Rousseau, in major works that deal with the relationship of individual and society, betrays a reforming spirit that, if not exactly utopian, upholds the natural goodness of the individual in the face of a corrupting society. His Emile and Du Contrat social (both 1762) lay the foundations for the modern disciplines of educational and political philosophy, respectively. In L’An 2440/The Year 2440 (1770), the novelist Sébastien Mercier solved the difficulty of locating utopia in the real world by setting his ideal society in a temporal rather than spatial dimension. Nicolas Rétif de la Bretonne, in the shadow of Rousseau, sought to isolate in his reforming projects and novels, notably Le Paysan perverti/The Peasant Boy Led Astray (1776), what he saw
UTOPIAS
as the victims of a corrupt urban world in imaginary utopian rural communities, every want catered for, every vice eradicated. Something of the same spirit of order can be seen in the architecture of the period: the utopian projects of Etienne Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux emphasized simple and natural forms to project the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment, as is evident in Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans (1775– 1779) and in his unexecuted plans for the utopian garden city of Chaux. There is a transatlantic echo of this Enlightenment rationalism in Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for the new and neatly ordered city of Washington. The influence of Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Rousseau spread far beyond the boundaries of France. In England, the radicalism of Thomas Paine and William Godwin was most evident in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–1792) upheld the ideals of the revolution, and Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), founded on a belief in justice and mutual assistance, served as an inspiration for the English romantic poets. Godwin’s work places the search for utopia in a rural setting, offering the vision of an agrarian arcadia in which reciprocity of effort guarantees a just society. It was Thomas Jefferson, however, who set the seal on a specifically American utopian vision with his Notes on Virginia (1785). Here Jefferson sketches an American pastoral that rejects the return to an Arcadian golden age in favor of a forward-looking creation of a better world through the efforts of the cultivator, the bringer of order to an existing wilderness.
1171
The projects of the Frenchman Charles Fourier, outlined in his Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire/New Industrial and Social World (1829), reflecting the taxonomic instincts of the utopian planner, proposed the establishment of “phalanstères” (“phalanges”) composed of 1,620 people (subdivided into sixteen “tribes” and thirty-two “choirs”) in a cooperative agricultural community responsible for the welfare of its individual members. Fourier’s ideas were influential in the United States, underpinning the short-lived settlement at Brook Farm in Massachusetts (1841– 1846), as were those of Etienne Cabet, whose Voyage en Icarie/Voyage to Icaria (1840) described a visit to a bountiful utopian island community inhabited by a virtuous, happy, and democratically represented people. Cabet’s attempt to give physical form to his fictional utopia had only limited success; communities were established briefly in Illinois, Missouri, and California following an abortive attempt to settle at Red River, Texas, in 1847, but dissension had caused the breakdown of the experiment by the mid-1850s. Ideal worlds were easier to imagine than to realize: the prime example of American utopianism can perhaps best be seen in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), which, ironically, relates one man’s vision of the good life in communion with nature but lacks a sense of involvement with the community. The idealism, but also the impracticality of the utopian, communitarian dream, is encapsulated in the title of Edward Bellamy’s hugely popular Socialist novel, Looking Backward (1888). Bellamy’s attempt to project, in the guise of a romance, the advances of industrial society perhaps reflects the
1172
UTOPIAS
influence in the United States of French philosophers such as Auguste Comte; its own transatlantic influence can be seen, in turn, in the admiration expressed by the French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, as confidence in the progress and perfectibility of the human condition began to falter in the face of mechanized warfare and ideological dogma, utopia gave way to all-too-believable dystopian fantasies. The confrontation of individual will and communal interests, once so easily resolved in the ideal world of the literary utopia, created a gulf that practical experience was unable to bridge. Peter Wagstaff See also: French Revolution; Illinois Country; Jefferson, Thomas; L’Enfant, PierreCharles; Missouri; Paine, Thomas.
References Beecher, Jonathan. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1992. Hartig, Irmgard, and Albert Soboul. “Notes pour une histoire de l’utopie en France au XVIIIe siècle.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 224 (1976): 161–179. Jacques, Annie, and Jean-Pierre Mouilleseaux. Les Architectes de la liberté. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford/New York: Blackwell, 1987. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. London: Philip Allan, 1990. Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. Trousson, Raymond. Voyages aux pays de nulle part: histoire de la pensée utopique. Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1999.
V VADIM, ROGER (1928–2000) French film director, producer, and actor, born in Paris. Roger Vadim and his young wife, Brigitte Bardot, took French cinemas and spectators by storm in 1956 with the provocative Et Dieu créa la femme. . . . Although both stars had begun their careers earlier in the decade, the intensely sensual film proved to be a launchpad for both, introducing Bardot as a European sex kitten to rival Marilyn Monroe, and Vadim as the Svengali-like husband who filmed his wife with what was perceived as an astonishing lack of inhibition. The film preceded the explosion of the French New Wave by some years, but its low-budget qualities, together with its interest in youth and sexuality, signaled it as a film wholly of its time and one that clearly anticipated the energy that was already brewing in French filmmaking circles. The Bardot-Vadim marriage was shortlived, Bardot leaving Vadim for her costar Jean-Louis Trintignant, but Vadim’s romantic association with a string of international screen beauties was only just beginning. In 1958, he married the actress Annette Stroyberg, and in 1963 he fathered a child with Catherine Deneuve. In
1965, he married Jane Fonda, daughter of the actor Henry Fonda and sister of Easy Rider star Peter Fonda (Hopper, 1969). He directed Jane Fonda in La Ronde (1964) and again in the comic science fiction Barbarella in 1968. Both films were controversial; Fonda performed nude scenes in the first (the first U.S. actress to do so on the big screen) and portrayed scantily clad intergalactic nymphomanic in the second. After another brief marriage in the 1970s, Vadim married the French actress MarieChristine Barrault, the niece of theater legends Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud. This marriage lasted until his death, in Paris, from cancer in 2000. In 1988, Vadim remade his debut film in English (And God Created Woman . . .) starring the actress Rebecca de Mornay; the film’s plot was loosely based on that of the original film, displacing the action from Saint Tropez to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In spite of the erotic content—or perhaps because of it—the film found itself compared unfavorably with the original and was a commercial and critical flop in both France and the United States. This was to be Vadim’s last attempt at feature filmmaking; he returned to France, where he made films for television until his death. His legacy
1173
1174
VALLIÈRES, PIERRE
continues, however, with three of his four children choosing to make careers in cinema: Christian Vadim (his son with Deneuve) is an established actor in France; Nathalie Vadim (his daughter with Stroyberg) has worked as a director in both film and television in the United States; and Vanessa Vadim (his daughter with Fonda) recently directed a documentary, again in the United States. Sue Harris See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Deneuve, Catherine; Fonda, Jane; Remakes. References Marie, Michel. The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Trans. Richard Neupert. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
VALLIÈRES, PIERRE (1938–1998) Québécois political activist and writer, born in Montreal, to a working-class family. Vallières was educated at the Collège de Chambly and he studied philosophy at the Collège Franciscain de Québec. During the 1960s, he was a leading Marxist figure in Quebec; together with other artists, such as the poet Gaston Miron and the playwright Michel Tremblay, he encouraged pride in being a nationalist and a Québécois. From 1963 to 1965, he worked as a journalist for the international section of La Presse and headed the review Révolution Québécoise. Vallières is best known for his essay Nègres blancs d’Amérique: autobi-
ographie précoce d’un “terroriste” québécois (1968; White Niggers of America, 1971). In 1966, Vallières was imprisoned for five years for subversive activism (the bombing of a factory) and was released in 1970. Vallières wrote White Niggers of America while in prison. The book, written as a mix of autobiography and political activism, reflects the author’s anger toward the political and social injustice of the colonial position of French Canada and toward Quebec’s domination by the anglophone minority at the time. Vallières’s life story encapsulates the frustration felt by many young people in Quebec. White Niggers of America politicized Quebec by comparing Quebec’s existence to that of other colonized nations. Subsequently, it became Quebec’s separatist movement’s call for action, promoting the idea that revolution is the only means of social and political change. The subjective story depicts a young man who leaves Quebec because he feels betrayed by the state and sees no future except to accept economic poverty, but he realizes that to find his place and voice he must return to Quebec and invoke a revolution. Vallières’s ideology found its home in the formation of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) in 1963. The FLQ was determined to overthrow through revolution the government founded on “mediaeval Catholicism and capitalist oppression.” The FLQ was against colonial institutions (the military), colonial language and information media, big business, and factories that discriminated against francophone workers. Failed revolutionary activists of the October Crisis in 1970 (when Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s Labor minister, was murdered) discredited
VAN PEEBLES, MELVIN
the movement and thus started the decline of the FLQ and the idea of violent struggle as a means to achieve political change. From 1970 onward, Vallières became disillusioned with his separatist ideas, dedicating himself to write about Quebec’s nationalism and the question of political freedom. Vallières engaged with the October events in his 1977 book L’Exécution de Pierre Laporte: Les dessous de l’Opération/The Assassination of Pierre Laporte. Unlike the subjective recollection in White Niggers of America, in L’Exécution he observes events from a critical distance of time and his personal disengagement with the revolutionary movement. In time he grew disenchanted with the cause, dedicating himself to help international causes for freedom fighting where oppression was immanent. He resumed his career as a journalist and wrote political texts for the most important Quebec journals. Other important works include: L’Urgence de choisir (1971)/Choose (1972); Un Québec impossible (1977)/The Impossible Quebec (1980); Les Scorpions associés (1978); La Démocratie ingouvernable (1979); Changer de Société (1982); Les Héritiers de Papineau (1986); and Le Devoir de résistance (1994). Aleksandar Dundjerovic See also: Catholic Church; Miron, Gaston; Quebec; Tremblay, Michel. References Coppens, Patrick, and Yvon Allard. “En hommage: Pierre Vallières, 1938–1998,” http://www.sdm.qc.ca/txtdoc/tbhvalli .html (cited April 25, 2004). Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Vallières, Pierre. Nègres blancs d’Amérique: Autobiographie précoce d’un “terroriste” québécois. Paris: F. Maspéro, 1969.
1175
VAN PEEBLES, MELVIN (1932–) Influential African American artist and author working in theater, film, and music, born on August 21, 1932, in Chicago, Illinois. While working in San Francisco in the 1950s as a cable car driver, he wrote his first book on the subject of cable cars and self-financed several short films, including Three Pick Up Men for Herrick (1957) and Sunlight (1957). In 1959, Peebles subsequently moved to the Netherlands, where he attended the University of Amsterdam, added the “Van” to his name, and joined the Dutch National Theater. After having seen several short films by Peebles, the founder of the influential Cinémathèque Française, Henri Langlois, invited him to Paris, where he received a grant to produce a feature film, La Permission, based on his novel of the same name. Produced in 1967 and known internationally as The Story of the Three Day Pass, it lays out many of the concerns of Peebles’s later work in that it focuses on the themes of racial difference and prejudice. It is the story of a young African American soldier whose social transgression is to fall in love with a white Parisian girl. La Permission, heavily indebted to the French New Wave, emphasized unconventional editing and realist gestures in contradistinction to those of popular cinema. The success of La Permission was noted by executives at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, and Peebles was hired by the studio to direct a farcical “race problem” film, Watermelon Man (1970), in which a white racist wakes up one morning to find that he has turned black. Now that he had the financial leverage to produce independent
1176
VARÈSE, EDGAR
films, Peebles directed Sweet Sweetback’s Baadass Song (1971), some financial assistance for the film coming from Bill Cosby. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadass Song has overshadowed Peebles career through its success as the de facto invention of the blaxploitation film genre. It also created notoriety as a militant work calling for a black revolution, the film being dedicated to “All the Brothers and Sisters who have had enough of the Man.” It also outlines the stock characters and situations that would become the generic tropes of the blaxploitation films popular throughout the 1970s, such as the tough streetwise hero, the structural use of popular black music, and the underworld as a milieu. Despite its influence on black popular cinema, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadass Song’s independent sentiments align it closer with the American art cinema of the period in that it is highly unconventional in its presentation and is concerned with ideological crisis, recalling Peebles’s earlier engagement with French art cinema. Peebles’s next film did not appear until 1989, a body-swap comedy, Identity Crisis, which was a dilution of his previous concerns with racial identity. Peebles worked in theater and brought to the stage a Broadway musical, Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, that was praised by critics but was ultimately a commercial disaster. Peebles was the first African American man to hold a seat on the U.S. stock exchange, where he now devotes his energy while also supporting the film career of his son Mario. A retrospective at the Museum of Metropolitan Art in 1990 confirmed his place as a significant figure in the production of black film culture. Gary Needham See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present.
References Chaffin-Quiray, Garrett. “‘You Bled My Mother, You Bled My Father, but You Won’t Bleed Me’—The Underground Trio of Melvin Van Peebles.” Underground USA: Filmmaking beyond the Hollywood Canon. Ed. Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider. London: Wallflower Press, 2002: 96–108. Peavy, Charles D. “An Afro-American in Paris: The Films of Melvin Van Peebles.” Cineaste 3, no. 1 (summer 1969).
VARÈSE, EDGAR (1883–1965) French composer. Varèse never received the recognition his work merited—he is a precursor to “musique concrète” and extolled electronic instruments long before they were widely used. His music contains much that had been considered nonmusical (at least in the Western tradition): sirens, whistles, birdcalls, massed percussion, everyday sounds. He was even a precursor in sensing that the time when Paris was the center of the avant-garde was over, and he left for New York during World War I (arriving late 1915) and thereafter alternating periods of several years there with shorter but still substantial periods in Europe. His reason for the move was that, although Paris was the most international gathering ground for art, its audiences, in his view, were unreceptive to the avant-garde, particularly in music. Varèse also brought the new European music to New York through the International Composers’ Guild. Varèse sought to bring composition back to sound and to widen what music could be or do, and in this he, like Satie, inspired John Cage, but also more recent phenomena such as noise music or sound art. New music, argued Varèse, should be
VARÈSSE, EDGAR
1177
Edgar Varèse listening to electronic music. (Bettmann/Corbis)
about blocks of sound, masses sonores, and dissonance (although he also believed we could leave the binary of dissonance/consonance behind) rather than harmony. Electronic instruments would save us from the limits of tonality and liberate composers from the restrictions of traditional notation. Varèse’s music sought to rethink music as a time-based medium: instead of an orderly progression through themes and patterns, it would be about sound’s arriving, as is now commonly heard in the compositional avant-garde. He does not seek to undo composition but to alter what it is about. In so doing, he is a truly experimental composer, attempting to scientifi-
cally expand music and our hearing of sound. This is despite his distancing of his own work from that of the futurists or dada. Landmarks in his repertoire are Amériques (1918–1921) with its combination of huge brass, woodwind, and percussion sections, along with whistles; Ionisation (1929–1931), which uses percussion, including untuned percussion, as the music material; and, in anticipating future developments, his contribution to Le Corbusier’s Philips pavilion (Brussels, 1958), the Poème électronique (1957–1958), which is a musique concrète composition: made up of sounds spliced together and played
1178
VATTEMARE, NICOLAS-MARIE ALEXANDRE
through an immense array of speakers. He is also a significant figure in the history of electronic music, using ondes martenots, and initially commissioning theremins for his Ecuatorial (1932–1934). His visit to Darmstadt (home of “new” German electronic music) in 1950 is also seen as crucial, serving in turn as belated recognition of Varèse himself as well as inspiring the “next generation.” Paul Hegarty See also: Avant-Gardes; Le Corbusier; Music (Classical); World War I. References Bredel, Marc. Edgar Varèse. Paris: Mazarine, 1984. Varèse, Edgar. Ecrits. Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987.
VATTEMARE, NICOLAS-MARIE ALEXANDRE (1796–1864) Celebrated during the 1820s and 1830s for his extraordinary talent as a ventriloquist and mime artist, Alexandre Vattemare is remembered today by only a handful of specialists interested in the history of library and museum collections. His pioneering idea of establishing an agency of international cultural exchange was, however, realized a hundred years after his death in 1864 by UNESCO, which published the Manuel des échanges internationaux de publications in 1956. Born in 1796 of minor Norman nobility, Vattemare discovered at a young age that he could make his voice speak as though it were issuing from a distance or up close, as an old man or a young girl, a knock on the door or a barking dog. After being dismissed from medical studies for
making cadavers speak during surgical lessons at the Hôpital Saint Louis, he was placed in charge of a group of 400 Prussian prisoners stricken with typhus. When Napoléon fell in 1814, Vattemare accompanied his charges back to Berlin, where he found himself stranded during the 100 days, without resources. Turning himself into a one-man show, he wrote plays featuring virtuoso feats of ventriloquism, often impersonating as many as ten different characters in one night. For the next twenty years, he traveled throughout the capitals of Europe as “M. Alexandre: comédien et gentilhomme.” He was invited to the courts of London, Potsdam, Weimar, and Saint Petersburg; Goethe, Pushkin, Walter Scott, Queen Victoria, and Nicholas I of Russia were among his most enthusiastic admirers. During these years of itinerant acting, Vattemare explored the libraries, museums, and curiosity shops of the cities he visited in search of local color to include in his performances. He discovered that some towns possessed doubles of items that were missing elsewhere and initiated a system of cultural exchange that was adopted by several European countries. After failing to convince the French government to pass a law allocating funds for a permanent agency of exchange, he traveled in 1839– 1841 and 1847–1850 to the United States and Canada, where his project was generously adopted by the governments of most of the former colonies. He was instrumental in founding the Smithsonian Institution and the Boston Public Library and, by the end of his life, had sent more than 12,000 documents representing the civic, scientific, and artistic achievements of the new republic to Paris for the creation of an American library in the Hôtel de Ville. In
VEBER, FRANCIS
the 1860s, the French government withdrew from the lip service they had paid for a permanent agency, and, with the onset of the Civil War, funds dried up in the United States. A large part of Vattemare’s vast collection was destroyed in the fire of the Hôtel de Ville in 1871. Today, the Bibliothèque Administrative de la Ville de Paris possesses 245 titles with Vattemare’s stamp, a valuable resource for historians of urban development, and his dream of free, accessible public libraries has been realized on both sides of the Atlantic. Suzanne Nash See also: American Civil War; Bonaparte, Napoléon. References Revai, Elizabeth. Alexandre Vattemare: trait d’union entre deux mondes: le Québec et les Etats-Unis à l’aube de leurs relations culturelles avec la France au XIXe siècle. Montreal: Editions Bellarmin, 1975. Tilliette, Pierre-Alain. “Alexandre Vattemare et la bibliothèque américaine de la ville de Paris.” Catalogue du fonds des Etats-Unis d’Amérique. Vol. 2. Paris: Direction des affaires culturelles de la Mairie de Paris, 2002 (Les Collections de la Bibliothèque Administrative de la Ville de Paris, 7): 10–55.
VEBER, FRANCIS (1937–) Francis Veber has written and directed some of the most successful French comedies of the last thirty years. He is also one of the few French filmmakers to live mostly in Hollywood and to have found, mainly with remakes of his own films, a niche within mainstream U.S. cinema. Veber began writing plays and successful screenplays in the late 1960s, for example, L’Enlèvement (“The Kidnapping,” 1968), Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure
1179
noire/The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (Robert, 1972), and L’Emmerdeur/A Pain in the A** (Molinaro, 1973). In 1976, he wrote and directed his first film, Le Jouet/The Toy, starring comedy star Pierre Richard. In twenty-five films and four plays, many of which became box-office hits, Veber has successfully paired French comedy actors, such as Gérard Depardieu/Pierre Richard, Jacques Villeret/Thierry Lhermitte, and recently Depardieu/Jean Reno, in classic hits including La Chèvre/The Goat (1981), Les Compères/ComDads (1983), Le Dîner de cons/The Dinner Game (1998), and Le Placard/The Closet (2000). Veber has shown special talent for bringing together the different elements that create the conditions for “high concept” comedies, namely, an original plot, comic characters, and a good combination of actors. His stories are mainly derived from the close observation of people and the minutiae of their lives, from which he extracts universal comedic situations. He specializes in character comedy and has created over the years three recurrent archetypes who form the basis of his plots: François Perrin, the absentminded character whose innocent actions invariably result in chaos; François Pignon, the naïve victim who is always exploited; and Bernard Campana, who represents physical masculinity and whose life is disrupted by his meeting either Perrin or Pignon. Veber’s films are perceived as very French, and his name may not be familiar to U.S. audiences. However, he has cooperated in many Hollywood remakes of his films by adapting his own screenplays to the U.S. film market. Notable examples include The Birdcage (Nichols, 1996) with Robin Williams and Gene Hackman; the
1180
VENEZUELA
remake of La Cage aux folles (Molinaro, 1978), a successful play that he had adapted; Buddy, Buddy (Wilder, 1981), a remake of L’Emmerdeur, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau; and Father’s Day (Reitman, 1997), a remake of Les Compères, starring Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. He has also contributed to other Hollywood adaptations, such as My Father, the Hero (Miner, 1994). Veber’s films are influenced by the tradition of screwball comedies made in the United States, such as the films of Frank Capra and Leo McCarey. They have a universal appeal, and they illustrate Hollywood’s recurrent interest in French film concepts, as well as a recent shortage of high-quality popular screenplays. Veber is a prolific writer and a successful commercial filmmaker. He may be ignored by the film critics, but certainly not by the public; indeed, Le Dîner de cons had more than 9 million spectators in France, and Le Placard more than 5 million. These recent films have mostly been produced in France, but uncharacteristically for comedies, they have had an international distribution. More remakes are currently being considered, confirming Veber’s international status. Isabelle Vanderschelden See also: Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Depardieu, Gérard; Remakes; Reno, Jean. References Blackwelder, Rob. “Hollywood Loves Francis Veber,” http://www.splicedonline.com /features/veber.html (cited February 2, 2004). Meyer, Andrea. “Interview: The Cruel Comedy of Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game,” http://www.indiewire.com /people/int_Verber_Francis_990709.html (cited November 21, 2003).
Salé, Christian. Les Scénaristes au travail: entretiens avec Jean Aurenche, Gérard Brach, Jean-Claude Carrière, Nina Companeez, Jean-Loup Dabadie, Jean Gruault, Jorge Semprun, Francis Veber. Paris: FOMA—5 Continents, Hatier, 1981.
VENEZUELA Although it is not part of the community of francophone countries, nor indeed those considered as “francophile,” Venezuela has, since it gained independence, maintained a relationship with France through the influence of various figures. Initially, this relationship was indirect. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when France dominated Spain, Napoléon sent his brother José to replace Ferdinand VII, heir to the Spanish throne. The elite in Caracas took advantage of the situation, on the one hand, to reject the authority of “Pepe Botella,” José Bonaparte’s nickname, and to defend the Spanish throne, but, on the other hand, they also tried to get around the Iberian representative, Vicente Emparan, and to form an autonomous junta. These events took place on April 19, 1810, the beginning of the independence process for the colonies of the United States, and the date is still celebrated in Venezuela as a national holiday. Some years earlier, Venezuela had been one of the main places of study for an important scientific expedition, led by the German Alexander von Humboldt and the Frenchman Hervé Bompland who, as soon as they returned to Paris, encountered Simón Bolívar, then working on his ideas for independence. Nevertheless, the period during which French influence was felt most strongly in
VENEZUELA
1181
Map of Venezuela. Since Venezuela has gained independence, it has maintained a relationship with France. (MAPS.com/Corbis)
Venezuela was, without doubt, the end of the nineteenth century, when the francophile caudillo Antonio Guzmán Blanco (1829–1899) governed the country. The son of an ex-president of the young republic, Guzmán Blanco began as ambassador to Europe and loan negotiator and then became president of Venezuela in 1870. He governed until 1887, during three separate periods. He was a pacifier and organizer of his country, and his government was marked by the construction of a series of monuments that aimed to develop urban culture. Caracas thus became a kind of miniature Paris. Guzmán Blanco ordered the construction of the university and the
capitol, which is today the seat of the National Assembly as well as a national pantheon. Even though he imposed the separation of church and state, Guzmán Blanco also ordered the construction of a basilica and a church, identical to Sainte Chapelle. He also had various statues erected. He retired in France in 1887, where his daughter, Carlota, had married Charles, the Duke of Morny. Guzmán Blanco died in Paris in 1899. The French influence in Venezuela is not just historical. The French language, since the nineteenth century but also during the twentieth century, has left many traces on the Spanish language as it is spoken in
1182
LA VÉRENDRYE FAMILY
Venezuela. One of the most amusing examples is the word “coroto,” which today refers, in a familiar and vague manner, to a utensil. The explanation is that when President Guzmán Blanco moved to his vacation residence, he brought, among other things, his collection of paintings, which included several works by Gustave Corot. The word is a local variation of Guzmán Blanco’s “corots.” There is also a word in French that stems from the Venezuelan vocabulary of the period: “rastaquouère,” which comes from “arrastra cuero,” and refers to an upstart. Caracas has not retained much of its colonial architectural heritage. In this capital city, apart from Guzmán Blanco’s monuments, it was the modern period from the 1940s to the 1960s that saw an upsurge in construction. The most important architect is Carlos Villanueva (1900–1975). The son of a Venezuelan diplomat, the Londonborn Villanueva studied in France. After completing his studies at lycée and then at art school, he moved to Venezuela, where he was responsible for the construction of the Fine Art Museum of Caracas and the Central University, as well as the El Silencio quarter, considered to be jewels of modern architecture. Today, economic and industrial exchanges between Venezuela and France are still important, notably in the fields of transport (the Caracas subway is French) and oil. Pablo Aiquel See also: Architecture; Bolívar, Simón; Language. References Hernández, Tulio, ed. Historia de Venezuela en imágenes. Caracas: Fundación Polar, 2000. Rosenblat, Angel. Estudios sobre el habla de Venezuela: Buenas y malas palabras. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1987.
LA VÉRENDRYE FAMILY In their quest to discover the “Western Sea,” Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de la Vérendrye, his four sons, and his nephew were the first westerners to reach the territories of the current-day Canadian province of Manitoba and what are now the U.S. states of North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Building a series of posts northwest of Lake Superior, they considerably extended France’s commercial empire in North America. In 1712, after fighting in North America and France during the Spanish War of Succession, Canadian-born Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de la Vérendrye (1685–1749) returned to the colony. Until 1727, he led the life of an unremarkable seigneur, occasionally engaging in smallscale fur trading. It was then that he formed a commercial partnership with his brother, Jacques-René, first becoming his second in command, then commander in chief of the Poste du Nord, which embraced the area north of Lake Superior. La Vérendrye soon became interested in the “Mer de l’Ouest.” The search for this “Western Sea”—an imaginary gulf opening into the Pacific at roughly the same latitude as the Saint Lawrence River—was as old as the French presence in North America. Relying on the reports of native informants, la Vérendrye came to believe that this sea was to be found in the region of Lake Winnipeg, which had until then remained unexplored by Europeans. Yet the discovery of this shortcut to the Orient was not the only reason to investigate this region. Such exploration, la Vérendrye believed, would lead to the construction of a chain of trading posts that would reestablish the supremacy of the French fur trade in the Northwest, effectively negating the
VERMONT
effects of the surrender of Hudson Bay to Great Britain in 1713. The colonial administrators and French court offered their moral support to la Vérendrye’s project, but were reluctant to subsidize it. Hence, la Vérendrye had to rely on several important Montreal fur traders to finance his enterprise. In June 1731, la Vérendrye left Montreal, accompanied by three of his sons, Jean-Baptiste (1713–1736), Pierre (1714– 1755), and François (1715–1794), his nephew La Jemerais (1708–1736), and some fifty men. Joined by the fourth son, Louis-Joseph (1717–1761), a few years later, they spent the following decade exploring the region that lay between Lake Superior and the Saskatchewan River, and built a series of forts and trading posts along the way. To the south, their explorations along the Missouri led them as far as current-day Wyoming and Nebraska. Though the Western Sea remained elusive, their explorations greatly added to the geographical knowledge of the time, opening the way for further French, and later British and American, explorers and traders. Shortly before the death of la Vérendrye in 1749, Louis XV recognized his exploits by awarding him the esteemed cross of Saint Louis. Although the expeditions of the la Vérendryes had truly been a family venture, the father had been the driving force: though la Vérendrye’s surviving sons continued trading in the western posts for some time after their father’s death, they did not undertake further significant explorations. Jean-François Lozier See also: Fur Trade; Manitoba; Saint Lawrence River; Saskatchewan.
1183
References Combet, Denis, ed. La Vérendrye, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye, 1685–1749/In Search of the Western Sea: Selected Journals of La Vérendrye. Winnipeg: Great Plains, 2001. Crouse, Nellis M. La Vérendrye: Fur Trader and Explorer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956. Kavanagh, Martin. La Vérendrye, His Life and Times: A Biography and a Social Study of a Folklore Figure, Soldier, Fur Trader, Explorer. Brandon, Manitoba: M. Kavanagh, 1967. Smith, G. Hubert. The Explorations of the La Vérendryes in the Northern Plains, 1738–1743. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.
VERMONT The northern New England state of Vermont is linked to the French-Atlantic world by a long history of French Canadian immigration. Located immediately adjacent to Quebec, Vermont’s rural and urban landscapes became popular destinations and important sites of cultural negotiation for tens of thousands of French Canadians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before 1870, 40 percent of New England’s French Canadian immigrants lived in Vermont. As pressure for land and work in Quebec intensified during the early nineteenth century, so, too, did immigration to Vermont towns, such as Saint Albans and Burlington, where French Canadians found work primarily in lumber and textile mills. By the 1870s, however, French Canadian immigration to Vermont declined as immigrants bypassed the mostly rural state in favor of southern New England’s larger urban areas and more numerous mills. Indeed, by 1900, Vermont accounted for only 10 percent of
1184
VERNE, JULES
New England’s French Canadian population. Increasingly, those French Canadians who did come to Vermont settled in rural areas, working seasonally or renting and purchasing farms of their own. Between the 1870s and 1890s, thousands of AngloVermonters had left the state in search of opportunity elsewhere in the United States. Their departure, combined with Vermont’s shift from wool to dairy production, opened up new opportunities for French Canadian immigrants, many of whom purchased abandoned farms and took up dairy farming. Although a steady decline in Vermont’s dairy industry since the 1950s has forced many farmers out of business, many thousands of French Canadian descendants still live in Vermont today. Although these descendants are widely accepted as part of contemporary Vermont society, this was not always so. Well into the twentieth century, Vermont’s French Canadians struggled to maintain their cultural identity and to carve a secure place for themselves amid an Anglo majority that was often prejudiced, if not openly hostile. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, many Anglo-Vermonters embraced “nativist” U.S. politics and the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party with which nativism was associated. Building on this foundation, anti–French Canadian sentiments persisted for decades in Vermont, even as Anglos turned to immigrants to work in their shops or to purchase their farms. Many of Vermont’s rural residents, intellectuals, and politicians berated French Canadians as intemperate, lazy, and criminally inclined. In addition, many sentimental tourists and urban Americans idealized rural Vermont as a national stronghold for “traditional” Anglo-American
culture; when they championed the “typical Vermonter” or “Green Mountain Boy,” it was not the state’s French Canadian residents that they had in mind. Consequently, many nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Anglo-Americans excluded French Canadians conceptually from the category “Vermonter” and downplayed their contributions to the state’s larger cultural mosaic. Blake Harrison See also: Catholic Church; Quebec; Timber. References Blow, David J. “The Establishment and Erosion of French-Canadian Culture in Winooski, Vermont, 1867–1900.” Vermont History 43, no. 1 (winter 1975): 59–74. Brault, Gerald J. The French Canadian Heritage in New England. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England; Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1986. Vicero, Ralph D. “French-Canadian Settlement in Vermont Prior to the Civil War.” Professional Geographer 23, no. 4 (October 1971): 290–294.
VERNE, JULES (1828–1905) French writer, born in Nantes. Jules Verne began his series of Voyages extraordinaires dans les mondes connus et inconnus (“Extraordinary Voyages to Known and Unknown Worlds”) in 1862 and continued until his death in Amiens in 1905; some posthumous volumes were reworked by his son Michel. The voyages took their young readers to the extent of the imagination but nonetheless remained very much of their time: the British are seen as rapacious colonizers, and the Americans are admired, sometimes mistrusted, for their liberty and enterprise. Verne is still revered and much read, and the Centre International Jules Verne in the northern French town of Amiens, where he settled, carries
VERNE, JULES
on Verne’s educational mission. Rejecting his father’s provincial law office for the Parisian theater, Verne finally found success with the publisher Hetzel. Cinq Semaines en ballon/Five Weeks in a Balloon appeared in book form in 1863, and their association continued in Hetzel’s Magasin d’Education et de Récréation, which began publication the following year. Education and entertainment are very much Verne’s ambitions in his work. The escapism of voyages in balloons or submarines or fabulous flying machines is grounded in factual geographical, historical, or scientific detail, and part of the fascination that Verne still holds for modern readers is the incantatory power of the lists, which fill page after page: the poet Apollinaire famously said of him: “What a style! Nothing but nouns.” Though Verne is admired as a forerunner of science fiction, his magnificent machines are generally only extrapolations of what existed in his day. The steamer Great Eastern, on which he traveled to New York in 1867, becomes Une Ville flottante/Floating City (1871), then is enlarged to L’Île à hélice/Floating Island (1895). A 20-foot submarine called the Nautilus had been built at the beginning of the century, and Verne himself witnessed submarine trials in the bay of the Somme. Verne glibly assumes electricity as a motive force for submarines and the seventy-six propellers of the Albatros, Robur’s flying platform (Robur le conquérant/Clipper of the Clouds, 1886). Robur returns as a menace in Maître du monde/Master of the World (1904), and the enigmatic Nemo, first seen as the implacable enemy of British colonialism and a champion of the oppressed in Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers/20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870), reappears as Prince Dakkar in L’Île mystérieuse/The Mys-
1185
Captain Nemo observes octopus. “Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvelous!” Illustration from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers), 1870. (Bettmann/Corbis)
terious Island (1874). In this novel, we see almost all the Vernian themes: a small group of Yankees, captive in besieged Richmond, escape in a storm-tossed balloon to an island. With meager resources, but ingenuity and scientific knowledge (together with providential help from Nemo, in hiding on his stranded submarine), they render “Lincoln Island” habitable, only for Nemo-Dakkar to blow it up. Solitary heroes can be dangerous, especially when their ambition harnesses science, as is shown by the exploits of the Baltimore Gun-Club (De La Terre à la lune/From the Earth to the Moon, 1865; Sens dessus
1186
VERRAZZANO, GIOVANNI
DA
dessous/Topsy-Turvy, 1889). In the first of these, the Frenchman Michel Ardan embodies the enthusiasm Verne sought to impart; in the second, another Frenchman, Alcide Pierdeux, embodies science coupled with skepticism: both are the voice of Verne. Stephen F. Noreiko See also: Ballooning; Steamboat. References Costello, Peter. Jules Verne, Inventor of Science Fiction. New York: Scribner, 1978. Vierne, Simone. Jules Verne: Mythe et modernité. Paris: PUF, 1989.
VERRAZZANO, GIOVANNI (CA. 1485 TO DEATH UNKNOWN)
DA
First person commissioned by François I to sail to the New World for France. Verrazzano explored a vast area of the east coast of North America but was unable to follow up his initial explorations because of circumstances in France. Verrazzano was born ca. 1485 near Florence to an influential family and moved to France, settling in Dieppe, in 1506 to pursue a maritime career. He was chosen to lead an expedition to the New World, the voyage having one primary motive: to explore the coastline of America above Florida in search of a passage to the Pacific Ocean. This voyage was backed by the local Italian merchants and commissioned by François I. Verrazzano set sail from Dieppe with four ships toward the end of 1523, but circumstances meant that three of the ships had to return to France, and Verrazzano sailed for the New World in one vessel, La Dauphine. He landed in the New World in March 1524 and explored a vast area of the eastern coastline, from 34
to 50 degrees latitude, visiting such places as modern-day Virginia and Maryland, New York, New England, and Maine. By the time the crew had reached Newfoundland, supplies were running short, and Verrazzano returned to France. Upon his return, he wrote a letter to the king describing what he had seen in the new lands. Although the original is no longer extant, this letter was recorded, most notably by Ramusio, and subsequently translated by Hakluyt to form part of his Principle Navigations. Verrazzano was keen to return to the new lands to follow up his findings, but the time was not auspicious for France to send a further voyage. Details of Verrazzano’s life after this are unclear, and there has been much speculation about his fate. Some believe he went into service for Henry VIII of England; others that he was hanged for piracy; yet other records show him living in Rome in 1537. The most widely accepted view seems to be that he was captured and eaten by cannibals on a subsequent voyage to America. Perhaps Verrazzano is best remembered for what he did not find. He passed the great bays of Chesapeake and Delaware without notice, and although he did explore New York Bay to an extent, thus beating Hudson by some eighty-five years, he failed to realize its potential. The most famous legacy Verrazzano left, however, was his mistaken belief that he had seen the Pacific Ocean from his position in North Carolina, a belief immortalized as the “Sea of Verrazzano” on maps of the period. However, no passage to the supposed ocean was discovered, and in reality, the mistaken “ocean” most likely refers to Pamlico Sound. Jo Edwards
VIAN, BORIS See also: Florida; François I, King of France; Maine; Newfoundland. References Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages A.D. 500–1600. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Parkman, Francis. France and England in North America. Vol. 1, Pioneers of France in the New World. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965. Sauer, Carl Otwin. Sixteenth Century North America: The Land and the People as Seen by the Europeans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
VIAN, BORIS (1920–1959) French writer and musician, born in 1920, in Ville d’Avray. Boris Vian became one of the legendary figures of the postwar cultural revival in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s. His lifelong interest in jazz music and the literature of the United States shaped his free-spirited attitude during the occupation and can be said to account for the unique blend of French-bred absurdist wordplay and American pulp fiction that characterized some of his most controversial writings. Inspired by the success of the recently created Série noire, Vian published his first book, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes/I Spit On Your Graves (1946), under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan—a tribute to the American pianist, Joe Sullivan, and a reference to the French jazz musician, Paul Vernon, who played in Claude Abadie’s band alongside Vian in the 1940s. The book dealt with mixed-race relationships and described the lynching of a character and the hanging of the main protagonist in retribution for the murder of two girls. The publication stirred fiery debates in France and became the object of a legal action that
1187
lasted from 1947 until 1950. Although Vian initially adopted the mask of a translator and went to great lengths to provide a credible biography for his “alter-negro,” Vernon Sullivan, he eventually admitted authorship of the book, of which the “original” edition in American English came out in 1948. The double-identity game continued with several other thrillers (Les Morts ont tous la même peau (“The Dead All Have the Same Skin,” 1947), Et on tuera tous les affreux (“And All the Dreadful Ones Will Die,” 1948), Elles se rendent pas compte (“They Don’t Realize,” 1950), just as Vian’s second strand of prose writing, his burlesque and allegorical evocation of jazz-loving youth under the occupation (“les zazous”), was gaining the status of a cult book with the publication of Vercoquin et le plancton (1946). Similar in style, yet testifying to a more lyrical vision, L’Ecume des jours/Froth on the Daydream (1947) has remained Vian’s most enduring best-seller, a superbly crafted linguistic and metaphorical exploration of adolescent dreams in which the extravagant verbal puns and sometimes macabre reflections on the passing of time recall the universe of Alfred Jarry and Lewis Carroll. The author of two volumes of poems, Barnum’s Digest (1948) and Cantilènes en gelée (1949); plays, L’Equarrissage pour tous/The Knacker’s ABC (1950), Le Goûter des généraux/The Generals’ Tea Party (1951); and hundreds of songs, articles, and a dozen translations of U.S. writers, Boris Vian encapsulated the aspirations and youthful enthusiasm of a whole generation of artists and intellectuals who, between 1946 and 1950, transformed the cafés and clubs of Saint Germain-desPrés into the center of an unprecedented media and cultural phenomenon at the crossroads between the pre-war surrealist
1188
VIATTE, AUGUSTE
avant-garde and the new existentialist movement. His last novel, L’Arrache-coeur/ Heartsnatcher, came out in 1953. Vian died at the age of thirty-nine, of heart failure, while watching the first screening of the film adaptation of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. The tireless jazz musician and constant companion of Sartre and de Beauvoir in the heyday of Saint Germain-des-Prés, who dated the manuscript of L’Ecume des jours “Memphis, 8 March 1946/Davenport, 10 March 1946,” yet never made the journey to the United States or Great Britain, was one of the most charismatic ambassadors of U.S. culture in postwar Paris. Ramona Fotiade See also: Beauvoir, Simone de; Crime Fiction; Jazz; Literary Relations; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Surrealism; World War II. References Jones, Christopher M. Boris Vian Transatlantic: Sources, Myths and Dreams. Peter Lang, 1999. Pestureau, Gilbert. Boris Vian, les amerlauds et les godons. Paris: UGE, 1978.
VIATTE, AUGUSTE (1901–1993) Swiss-French academic and critic. Viatte was born into a Catholic bourgeois family in Porrentruy in the Swiss Jura. At a young age, he graduated first from the University of Fribourg (1921) and then the University of Paris, where he defended two dissertations, one of which was a thèse d’état on romanticism, Les Sources occultes du romantisme (1927), rewarded by the Académie Française. He started his long university career at Hunter College in New York (1925– 1933), ending it at Paris XIII in the 1970s
following his tenure at Université Laval in Quebec (1933–1949), then at the Polytechnic School of Zurich (1952–1967). If his first published works are mainly on French romanticism, his publications in his mature period deal mostly with French North America and la francophonie, the fait français, an expression that translates more accurately the meaning of Viatte’s intellectual quest, linked in part to a historical and personal demand. This passion to defend and promote the French “spiritual heritage” led Viatte to complete his great work, Histoire littéraire de l’Amérique française (1954). This unprecedented set of comparative dense and well-documented analyses of the main axes of development of the first literatures in French outside Europe, namely, in North America and the Caribbean, made Viatte the pioneer of francophone studies. This book of almost 600 pages emerged from an initiative of the Canadian Council of the Humanities. It was the fruit of years of research and numerous journeys to the French Antilles, Haiti, Louisiana, and New England, supported in part by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and was copublished in Paris and in Quebec, showing the measure of Viatte’s exceptional relations on both sides of the Atlantic. Those links grew stronger through the years, beyond the publication of important works such as Les Etats-Unis (1962), and the special issue of Etudes françaises on “Chateaubriand et ses précurseurs français d’Amérique” (1968), led to the creation, among others, of the France-Haiti Association, the FranceCanada Association, and its attendant literary award. Viatte’s growing interest in the French presence in the United States pushed him
VIELÉ-GRIFFIN, FRANCIS
to some extent to read and interpret the world through this Franco-American phenomenon. To be convinced, one only has to look at the important place given to French America in his La Francophonie (1969), or his Histoire comparée des littératures francophones (1980), and above all to read his “Esquisse d’une géographie des lettres” (1966), in which he advances a theory on the production and evolution of literature based on the Franco-American cases of Louisiana, Haiti, and Canada. This pioneering work, both theoretical and critical, “on the borders of history, geography and literature,” today is ignored, especially in Anglo-American circles, despite the fashion for francophone studies and so-called postcolonial studies. Viatte’s in-depth work is probably inaccessible to those used to the francophone literatures of a few popular writers and books published in Paris, and Michel Beniamino is correct in stating that Viatte was the only one to write a “literary history of francophonie,” but “one must note that such historical enterprise has never been followed, which shows us the present state of francophone studies and highlights the importance of Viatte’s critical work.” Jean Jonassaint See also: Chateaubriand, François-August René de, Vicomte; Francophonie, La; Haiti; Louisiana; Quebec. Reference Beniamino, Michel. “Auguste Viatte: de la littérature coloniale à la naissance de la francophonie littéraire.” Regards croisés entre le Jura, la Suisse romande et le Québec. Regards croisés entre le Jura, la Suisse romande et le Québec. Ed. Claude Hauser and Yvan Lamonde. Sainte Foy, QC: Presses de l’Université Laval; Porrentruy, Switzerland: Office du patrimoine et de la culture de la République et Canton du Jura, 2002.
1189
VIELÉ-GRIFFIN, FRANCIS (EGBERT LUDOVICUS VIELÉ) (1864–1937) U.S.-born French poet, major figure in the symbolist movement and enthusiastic translator of Walt Whitman. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, to a French general originally from Lyon and an American mother with French ancestors, he arrived in Paris in 1872 unable to speak French. Never to return to the United States, he adopted the French language and identity for the rest of his life and work. Although ignored by Pound and Eliot, he was much admired by his French contemporaries for his enthusiastic lyricism. His popularity was such that it was suggested he replace Mallarmé in 1899 as figurehead of the French poetic school. This prestige was short-lived, however, lasting little beyond symbolism’s heyday of the 1890s, and today he is little known and almost unread. Vielé was extremely interested in the English language, translating among others Whitman, Swinburne, and Hart Crane. In 1888, hoping to carry out Jules Laforgue’s aborted plan to translate Leaves of Grass, Vielé sent Whitman his Les Cygnes (“The Swans,” 1887), whereupon a delighted Whitman sent Vielé his consent and a copy of the David McKay edition. Although the project was never completed, Vielé published translations of “Faces,” “To a Locomotive in Winter,” and “The World below the Brine” in the Revue de Paris of November 1888, with translations of “There Was a Child Went Forth,” “To a Foil’d European Revolutionnaire,” “Song of the BroadAxe,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” appearing later in other reviews. In 1926, he became president of the French Comité de Whitman.
1190
VIETNAM WAR
Although Vielé denied any poetic debt to Whitman, the latter’s sensual embrace of life, along with the influence of Swinburne, Emerson, and Carlyle, can be discerned in Vielé’s own poetry, in which his exuberant love of nature, inspired by the natural landscapes of the Touraine region, also recalls English romantics such as Wordsworth and Keats. Following the gentle, sentimental Cueille d’avril (1886), his first poems in vers libre appear in Joies (“Joys”, 1889), with its bittersweet nostalgia for an idyllic time past when an intimate contact with nature was celebrated in fluid rhythms and refrains reminiscent of folk song. His most popular works were Les Cygnes (revised 1892) and La Chevauchée d’Yeldis (1893), in which the tone of optimism, idealism, and faith in human progress rarely falters. Save for moments of doubt in La Partenza (1899), Vielé’s insatiable passion for life in all its forms triumphs over metaphysical anguish; indeed, he was much admired by his contemporaries for moving symbolism away from its often pessimistic tone toward a joyful communion with the universe and for championing the vers libre cause. Following a volume of unsuccessful dramatic poems in 1898, however, he published infrequently, abandoning writing almost entirely after 1914. David Evans See also: Laforgue, Jules; Literary Relations; Pound, Ezra Loomis. References Cours, Jean de. Francis Vielé-Griffin, Son æuvre, sa poésie, son art. Paris: Champion, 1930. Erkkila, Betsy. Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth. New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press, 1980: 77–87. Michaud, Guy. Message poétique du symbolisme. Paris: Nizet, 1947: 538–542.
VIETNAM WAR The longest war in the history of the United States, occurring in the aftermath of—and in many ways linked to—French colonization of the area. U.S. involvement eventually aroused unusually widespread opposition, in the United States and around the world. Though the U.S. Congress never formally declared war, and though U.S. military and intelligence officers were in Vietnam at least as early as the 1950s, the war may reasonably be said to have begun in 1965, when the first U.S. ground troops were sent into combat. And although there was never a formal surrender or even an official admission of U.S. defeat, the war may be said to have come wholly to an end when the few remaining Americans hurriedly left Saigon in 1975. Americans fought in support of the Republic of Vietnam (or South Vietnam), one of the two political entities created after the French left their former colony following a devastating 1954 military defeat. Some, especially makers of U.S. foreign policy at the time, characterized the war as a critically important contest with Communism as represented by the opponents in the war, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (or North Vietnam) and the Viet Cong, insurgents in the South. Others, however, saw the conflict as essentially a Vietnamese civil war, the final stage of Vietnam’s rejection of colonialism, a dispute between two factions that had originated in the era of French occupation. Like all colonial powers, the French favored certain groups over others in their colony, giving some Vietnamese a vested interest in perpetuating colonial status while other Vietnamese supported home rule. The Catholicism of the French became an important dividing line in Viet-
VIETNAM WAR
nam: it was no coincidence that in the twentieth century larger Vietnamese landholders were usually Catholics, and poorer peasants, if religious at all, tended to retain the religion of their ancestors. After the Japanese were removed from their own brief control of Vietnam during World War II, Ho Chi Minh and his Communist forces intensified the armed struggle for independence against the French. Ho was unmoved when Vietnam was declared an associated state within the French Union in an agreement between French President Vincent Auriol and Bao Dai, the French-educated former emperor of Vietnam. The United States refused to aid the French with either atomic weapons or U.S. troops, and the forces of independence defeated the French decisively in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Negotiations in Geneva that year included the several parties with an active interest in Vietnam: the United States, France, China, the Soviet Union, and factions from within Vietnam itself. The Geneva Accords brought an end to combat and established what was supposed to be a temporary division of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel until national elections could be held. Perhaps because it was clear that Ho Chi Minh and his supporters would win, the United States opposed such elections, and eventually two separate Vietnamese governments were established: one in the North led by Ho, and one in the South under Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic educated in the United States. President John F. Kennedy sent thousands of U.S. military “advisers” to train and otherwise assist the forces of South Vietnam in the effort to crush an insurgency sympathetic to and supported by North Vietnam. The role of the United
1191
A French advance patrol finds and questions a Communist suspect. The French Foreign Legion played a major combat role in the war against the Viet Minh. (National Archives)
States in Vietnam was increased dramatically by President Lyndon Johnson, who sent the first ground troops in 1965. The United States eventually had a military force in Vietnam of half a million. Ground combat stayed in the South, but the North, especially Hanoi, was heavily bombed. U.S. losses were heavy, despite the dramatic technological advantage held by the United States and its South Vietnamese allies. Interestingly, France was not a supporter of U.S. conduct of the war, and President Charles de Gaulle was urging U.S. withdrawal as early as 1966. Six directors, among them Claude Lelouch and Jean-Luc Godard, together made the 1967 French documentary, Loin du Vietnam/Far from Vietnam, a bitter indictment of the role the United Syates played in the war. Their own government’s past colonial adventures in
1192
VIGNEAULT, GILLES
Vietnam as well as Algeria helped animate the French Left’s participation in the disorders that shook France in 1968, a year of particular turmoil throughout much of Europe and the United States. France had its own National Vietnam Committee, some of whose members were arrested during fierce protests. Opposition to American participation in the war grew within the United States, eventually becoming a factor in President Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection in 1968. Thousands of young men crossed the border into Canada and took up residence there to escape being drafted to fight the increasingly unpopular war. A new president, Richard Nixon, pursued a policy of gradual U.S. withdrawal, called “Vietnamization,” even though Nixon also ordered highly controversial incursions into neighboring Cambodia and particularly fierce bombing attacks on North Vietnam. After three years of intermittent negotiations in Paris between Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and later secretary of state, and Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam, a cease-fire was declared in 1973. South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu resisted the end of U.S. involvement. Thieu’s feeling of vulnerability was warranted: the forces of North Vietnam thoroughly triumphed when they took Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City in 1975. Symbolically enough, former President Thieu fled to Paris, but his former prime minister, Nguyen Cao Ky, went to the United States. Vietnamese emigration to the United States, France, and other Western countries increased tremendously in subsequent years with the departure of hundreds of thousands of people at odds with the new Communist regime. John Ibson
See also: Catholic Church; Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Gaulle, General Charles de; Godard, Jean-Luc; World War II. References Baritz, Loren. Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam, and Made Us Fight the Way We Did. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking Press, 1983. Lâm, Truong Buu. Patterns of Vietnamese Response to Foreign Intervention, 1858–1900. New Haven, CT: Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1967. Osborne, Milton. From Conviction to Anxiety: The French Self-Image in Vietnam. Bedford Park, South Australia: School of Social Sciences, Flinders University of South Australia, 1976. Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
VIGNEAULT, GILLES (1928–) Quebec singer-songwriter, poet, actor, and publisher. One of Quebec’s most celebrated living singer-songwriters, Vigneault is renowned for his affectionate, but not uncritical, depiction of the ways of “simple” Quebec folk, his melodramatic performances, and his overt commitment to Quebec’s national independence campaign. Gilles Vigneault was born in 1928 in Natashquan (Quebec) into a middle-class francophone family. He studied literature at university and had some of his poetry published in students’ journals. He moved between jobs throughout the 1950s, including teaching, acting, and stage direct-
VIGNY, ALFRED
ing. Then, in the late 1950s, he created and presented several series for Quebec television that focused on regional folktales and picturesque local characters. Vigneault also set up his own publishing company, Editions de l’Arc, which still publishes his own poetry and the work of other writers who share his aesthetic and political preoccupations. After his song “Jos Monferrand” (1958) was banned from radio broadcast for its use of strong language, Vigneault decided to perform his music onstage. In the 1960s, usually accompanied by a pianist, he toured the province’s boîtes à chansons, spearheading the movement toward provocative and politically committed lyrics in Quebec songwriting. Onstage, Vigneault’s emphatic arm gestures and overall melodramatic presence soon earned him a reputation as a powerful performer. Various Quebec and French artists also interpreted his songs, acknowledging his skillful songwriting. The songs he wrote in collaboration with the composer Claude Léveillée, such as “Danse à Saint-Dilon” (1962), a fast and repetitive jig with a violin, explored the musical heritage of the first French immigrants. Elsewhere, his use of a symphony orchestra sought to reflect the vastness of Quebec and to portray the grand sweep of love and despair. Vigneault’s lyrics juxtaposed his erudite poetry skills with Quebec colloquialisms, often describing colorful and strong-willed characters (“La Manikoutai,” 1967). However, he also targeted the narrow-mindedness and puritanism of Quebec’s rural society, as in the story of the doomed love of an Indian for a white woman (“Jack Monoloy,” 1962). After 1966, Vigneault toured in Paris and Europe, journeys that increased inter-
DE
1193
national awareness of the campaign for recognition of a Quebec national identity. The separatist terrorist attacks of 1970 influenced his decision to become involved in peaceful campaigning for the province’s independence. He sang at autonomist meetings and composed a satirical song targeting the then prime minister, Robert Bourassa (“Ti-cul Lachance,” 1971). Alongside Leclerc and Robert Charlebois, Vigneault participated in the Superfrancofête festival of 1974, which supported the choice to make French the official language of Quebec. In 1980, he gave his support to the “yes” vote for the referendum on independence; he also continued to tour between Paris and Montreal, winning a string of awards for his oeuvre. At the 1990 Montreal Francofolies festival, various artists of the new generation paid Vigneault a special tribute to mark the first thirty years of his artistic career. Barbara Lebrun See also: Beau Dommage; Charlebois, Robert; Dufresne, Diane; Francofolies, Les; Language; Leclerc, Félix; Music (Pop); Quebec. Reference Sermonte, Jean-Paul. Gilles Vigneault, le poète qui danse. Paris: Le Rocher, 1991.
VIGNY, ALFRED (1797–1863)
DE
French romantic poet and dramatist. “Like a ship that abandons an entire family on a desert island, France has cast away into Canada an unhappy population speaking the same language I write and referred to for some time as the Canadian nation,” notes the French romantic, Alfred de Vigny, in a polemical essay, “Les Français du Canada,” written between 1839 and
1194
VIGNY, ALFRED
DE
1840. The essay brings to light the insular thinking of the author’s compatriots and suggests a complacent attitude on their part toward any culture extending beyond the frontiers of France, the nation-state, their “Céleste Empire.” It is based primarily on two conversations: the first, in London (February 16, 1839), between Vigny and Lord Durham (John George Lambton, 1792–1840), governor-general of Canada (1838); the second, in Paris (1839), between Vigny and Louis-Joseph Papineau (1786–1871), president of the Assembly of Lower Canada (1815–1837), who fled to the United States following the 1837–1838 rebellion, thence to Paris (1839–1845). As a historical document on Canada, it outlines important past events, including the Battle of Quebec (September 13, 1759); the Treaty of Paris (February 1763); and the 1837 and 1839 rebellions of Upper and Lower Canada, the latter unfolding when Vigny was in London and privy to Lord Durham’s report on the 1837 rebellion, presented to the Colonial Office on January 31, 1839. As a social document, “Les Français au Canada” treats with equal and candid measure several sociopolitical themes: the power and domination of the English lords through hereditary privilege and their attempts to subjugate a New World French nation all but forgotten by its motherland, the brave but futile struggle of French Canadians to maintain their customs and laws in the face of English oppression, and the controversial approach to territorial acquisition. The postscript lists various questions put to Papineau by Vigny, in 1839, on France’s culpability regarding the fate of French Canadians, Papineau’s political stance, and general questions of cultural interest on Canada.
Although Vigny’s “Canada” essay was not published during his lifetime, his North American poem, “La Sauvage,” one of the eleven philosophical poems of the collection, Les Destinées (“Destinies,” 1864), appeared first in the Revue des Deux-Mondes (1843). The poem draws its inspiration from, among others, Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique/ Democracy in America (1834), Michel Chevalier’s Lettres sur l’Amérique du Nord/Society, Manners and Politics in the United States (1836), Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis, tableau de moeurs américains/Marie, or Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America (1835), and Chateaubriand’s Atala and Les Natchez/The Natchez: An Indian Tale (1801 and 1826, respectively). In “La Sauvage,” the poet considers the benefits of civilization and the drawbacks of barbarism. Distancing himself from the Rousseauesque “Noble Savage” concept, he argues against the law of the jungle (barbarism), which he equates with social disorder, a disregard for property rights, and the servitude of women, emerging instead on the side of the settler (civilization) whose values—a respect for the family unit, women, work, culture, and heredity —represent reform and advancement. Historical and geographical discrepancies aside, “La Sauvage” and its literary sources bear witness to a continuing awareness by some of France’s nineteenth-century writers of colonization and its impact on the fate of North America’s indigenous peoples. In 1989, the Commission du Toponymie du Québec paid tribute to Vigny’s literary contributions on North America by naming a lake at the northern end of the Saint Lawrence, on the Réserve faunique
VILLECHAIZE, HERVÉ
de Sept-Îles-Port-Cartier, 650 kilometers north of the city of Quebec, the Lac Alfred de Vigny. Janette McLeman-Carnie See also: Noble Savage; Quebec; Quebec, Battle of; Saint Lawrence River; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Treaty of Paris. References Jeune, Simone. “Vigny au Far-West: La Sauvage.” French American Review, no. 3–5 (1978–1980): 1–16. Saulnier, V. L. Alfred de Vigny: Les Destinées. Geneva: Droz, 1967.
VILLECHAIZE, HERVÉ (1943–1993) Diminutive actor primarily remembered for his role as Christopher Lee’s sidekick in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (Hamilton, 1974) and as Ricardo Montalban’s assistant in the TV series Fantasy Island (1978–1983). These two roles, the sinister Nick Nack in the Man with the Golden Gun and the childlike, eternally smiling Tattoo in Fantasy Island, fully encompass the limited range of characters that were available to Villechaize, which may have alternated between the comical or the villainous but which always remained stereotyped as grotesque dwarves. The fact that Villechaize never lost his heavy French accent only added to his oddball persona; indeed, his voice had become so recognizable by the 1980s that the Whoopi Goldberg comedy The Telephone (1988) included a voice-only cameo by Villechaize. Born in Paris into a family of Filipino ancestry, Villechaize stopped growing at an early age, a condition accompanied by various health problems that dogged him for the rest of his life. He studied art in Paris
1195
and pursued a career as a painter and photographer, initially in France, and from the mid-1960s in the United States, before turning to acting. His first, uncredited, film appearance was in Conrad Rooks’s Franco-American underground film Chappaqua (1967), which featured countercultural icons William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg next to the French stage legend Jean-Louis Barrault. Over the next few years, Villechaize appeared in various U.S. films, often in independent productions such as Robert Downey Sr.’s Greaser’s Palace (1972) and Oliver Stone’s feature film debut Seizure (1974) or in weird exploitation fare such as Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (Speeth, 1973). Fantasy Island briefly established Villechaize as a muchloved TV celebrity, but he was fired from the series when he demanded the same salary as his costar, Montalban. In the 1980s, Villechaize capitalized on his established image by appearing in cameo parts, as in Airplane II: The Sequel (Finkleman, 1982), and even occasionally in leading roles, as in the offbeat science fiction fantasy Forbidden Zone (Elfman, 1980). Following years of worsening medical problems and bouts of alcoholism and depression, Villechaize committed suicide in Hollywood in 1993. Tim Bergfelder See also: Burroughs, William S.; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Television. References Chapman, James. License to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. London: I. B. Tauris, 1999. Clute, John, and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Seldin, Scott. Yes, Boss: Fantasy Island’s Tattoo. Croton-on-Hudson, NY: Blythe and Pennington, 1982.
1196
VIVENDI UNIVERSAL
VIVENDI UNIVERSAL A leading entertainment conglomerate. Vivendi’s boss Jean-Marie Messier was brought down in the crash that followed his outlay of $42 billion on Universal’s film and music businesses in 2000, and it is now a company routinely heaped with scorn. It began grandly in 1852, with Napoléon III’s patronage and shareholders including James de Rothschild. Competition ate into privilege, if more slowly than stock market crashes, and for a long time the company, as Générale des Eaux Group, shared its French water business with equanimity. Diversification of significance first came in the 1960s with a thermal imaging program, and under the presidency of Guy Dejouany from 1976, it was by 1991 one of the most successful stocks on the Paris exchange. Alongside other achievements, Générale des Eaux was the third-largest bottled water supplier in the United States, and it also supplied cable TV to Montreal. The 1990s saw massive expansion way beyond the utilities market. In 1996, JeanMarie Messier took control, restructuring the company around its environmental and communications interests, selling $25 billion of holdings in the attempt to contain the conglomerate and arguing that ownership of content and distribution was essential in modern media markets. The company was renamed Vivendi in 1998, a neologism that suggests life. Vivendi’s purchase of Seagram Company in 2000 bought it a 22 percent share in the world music market. The formation of Vivendi Universal Publishing made it number three in that marketplace, and Groupe Cegetel, now Groupe SFR-Cegetel, turned the company into the leading private telecommunications company in France.
However, following the 2000 crash, that expansion is now in reverse. The appointment of Jean-René Fourtou as chairman and CEO in 2002 turned it on its head, and the company is currently engaged in a radical program of divesting nonstrategic assets. Mark Vernon See also: Mineral Water. References Johnson, Jo. The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal. London: Penguin, 2003. “Veni, Vidi, Vivendi.” Economist (December 22, 2001).
VODUN Practiced principally in Haiti, Vodun is a syncretistic religion born in the Americas, a blend of the West African beliefs brought to the Caribbean by slaves and the Catholicism imposed on these slaves by French colonists. Its venerated panoply of divine spirits are known as lwa. Long considered by the postrevolutionary Haitian middle and upper classes as a savage and shameful peasant religion, Vodun was given a substantial boost of respectability by the publication in Haiti in 1928 of Jean PriceMars’s classic ethnographic study, Ainsi parla l’oncle/So Spoke the Uncle; shortly afterward, Vodun was seized as a demagogic tool by the dictator François Duvalier, who made it Haiti’s official religion, a status it maintains today. The history of Vodun is inextricably linked to Haitian politics. Whether through Duvalier’s twentieth-century hijacking of its folk popularity to further his own ends
VOISINE, ROCH
or in the eighteenth-century rebel Mackandal’s yoking of the slaves’ Vodun faith to their eventually successful self-emancipation (an event described by Alejo Carpentier in his novel The Kingdom of This World), Vodun has constantly interacted with real historical processes of social, sexual, and racial domination. In the different Vodun phenomena of spirit possession (the temporary and joyous invasion of a human subject by a “divine horseman,” that is, a lwa) and zombification (the enslavement of an individual by a malevolent sorcerer who has stolen part of his soul), Vodun belief mimics and deconstructs the dynamic of mastery and subjugation through which its emergence in the Americas came into being. Vodun is characterized by hybrid and multiple subject positions: in many ways it is the ultimate “postmodern” religion. Developing in eighteenth-century SaintDomingue (colonial Haiti) in tandem with the Caribbean slave society itself, Vodun combined both official and folk religious French discourses—for example, the cult of saints, the European obsession with witchcraft and possession—with African figures and rituals, the resultant mixture being an “Atlantic” product irreducible either to Europe, Africa, or the Americas. Many of the lwa themselves are hybrid characters: Ogou the spirit of war is conflated with Saint James, Danbala the serpentine river-god with Saint Patrick, and Ezili the virgin goddess of love with the Madonna. The spirits of Vodun are fundamentally unstable, constantly shifting between their African, French, and American forms to provocative effect. Some representations of Ezili, for example, present her as pale, French speaking, and decorous, but
1197
she exists elsewhere as black (or blood red), Creole speaking, and lustful or sexually debased. Oscillating thus between stereotypes of privilege and despair, Ezili reflects the sheer extremity of the conditions under which Vodun developed and demolishes the totalitarian values of purity that plantation society attempted to impose on its black, white, and “mulatto” subjects. Similarly, the Vodun conception of the human soul—split into three parts, the ti bon anj, the gwo bon anj, and the ko kadav— complicates any notion of a unified or fully coherent subjectivity, insisting instead on fluidity and fragmentation. Andrew Asibong See also: Carpentier, Alejo; Catholic Church; Haiti; Santo Domingo; Slavery. References Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970. Hurbon, Laennec. Voodoo: Truth and Fantasy. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
VOISINE, ROCH (1963–) Canadian singer-songwriter born Roch Joseph Armand Voisine on March 26, 1963, in Saint-Basile, New Brunswick. Voisine’s first success came on July 1, 1986, during a show staged for Canada Day in Montreal. The following fall, he was asked to present Top Jeunesse, a variety program for teenagers on the channel Télévision Quatre-Saisons. Following a knee injury, he had to give up his career as an ice hockey player, but he did take on a fictional role as Dany Ross, a hockey player
1198
VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET
in the important Quebec TV series Lance et Compte/He Shoots, He Scores, broadcast by Société Radio Canada. Well known to the Quebec public, his first album Hélène in 1989 was an instant success there. The single was a huge hit in France, Belgium, and Switzerland, and an English-language version was also successful in Norway, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He received many awards from the ADISQ (Association québécoise de l’industrie du disque, du spectacle et de la vidéo) and won the prize for best francophone album of 1989 at the Victoires de la Musique ceremony in France. In 1990, he was the first French Canadian to fill the Zénith concert hall in Paris for four nights; he also toured France for the first time, and he released the box-set Double, on which half the songs were in English. Acadian by birth, Voisine speaks English and French with equal ease, which allowed his then manager, Paul Vincent, to hope for an equally impressive breakthrough in anglophone Canada and the United States. The singer undertook his second European tour in 1991, kicking off at the Stade de Bercy in Paris, with the climax an open-air concert on the Champ de Mars, in Paris, broadcast live to 14 million TV viewers by the French channel TF1. This tour resulted in the live album Europe Tour. In January 1992, Roch Voisine became the youngest artist to be decorated by the French government: he was made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1993, he worked with David Foster for his first album entirely in English, I’ll Always Be There, released in both Canada and Europe. Alternating between albums in French and English, he released Coup de tête in 1994, after which he moved to Los Angeles to work on Kissing Rain, which was re-
DE
leased in 1996 and with which he hoped to become successful in the United States. On May 4, 1997, Voisine’s manager, Paul Vincent, died, marking a turning point in the singer-songwriter’s career. The same year, he was honored by the Canadian government, who made him Officer of the Order of Canada. His fans then had to wait two years before the release of Chaque Feu in 1999. For Christmas 2000, the singer tried something new and prepared two Christmas albums, one in English, the other in French. He was made Canadian representative for UNICEF. Following the release of his eponymous album in 2001 and a Canadian and European tour, he traveled, in 2002, between Montreal, London, Paris, Vancouver, and Los Angeles, where he worked with several internationally renowned teams on the album Higher, which also made it to the top of the Canadian charts. On December 17, 2003, Je te serai fidèle, released in France, found itself at the top of the charts in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. Sonia Lebel See also: Acadia; Language; Music (Pop). References Kallmann, Helmut, and Gilles Potvin, eds. Encyclopédie de la musique au Canada. Vol. 3. Montreal: Fides, 1993: 3503. Sperandio, Eric Pier. Roch Voisine: la nouvelle idole romantique. Montreal: Editions Frémontel/Publications Golden Globe, 1990.
VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET DE (1674–1778) French writer, born and died in Paris. As an essayist, historian, dramatist, and conteur, Voltaire showed a sustained in-
VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET
terest in the New World. Though fascinated by travel, he generally used discussions of the Americas to spread his liberal philosophy. Thus, the Quakers were celebrated for their tolerance in the Lettres philosophiques (1732); these pacifists in Pennsylvania were responsible for the only golden age in the annals of man (letter 4). This eulogistic tone persisted in the Essai sur les moeurs (“Essay on Manners,” 1756—hereafter Essai—chapter CLIII), in the Traité sur la tolerance/Treatise on Tolerance (1763), and in the Questions sur l’encyclopédie (1771–1772), where this form of “primitive religion” is equated with deism (articles “Eglise” and “Quakers”). To the very end, in Histoire de l’établissement du Christianisme (“History of the Establishment of Christianity,” 1776), Voltaire predicted that the Quakers would teach the world true morality. The historian was a keen student of Franco-British conflicts in North America “over a few acres of snow” (Candide, chapter 23) and a “wretched country” that cost France far more than it was worth (Essai, chapter CLI). In the Précis du siècle de Louis XV/The Age of Louis XV (1769), the sieges of Louisbourg are described, and cod fishing is said to be the only saving grace of Cap Breton, providing employment for 10,000 men and revenues of 10,000 livres (chapter 28). France’s ambitions in Acadia sparked off a disastrous general war in Europe (1756–1763). In L’Ingénu (1767), the protagonist, an intelligent Huron and a bon sauvage, voices strong criticism of Louis XIV’s autocratic rule in the 1680s. Although less interested in Louisiana, Voltaire argued in his writings that France should have invested more resources in this region. Twelve nomadic families in 1708
DE
1199
French Enlightenment-era author and philosopher Voltaire. (Library of Congress)
were soon integrated into larger colonies created by John Law in 1717–1718, where Voltaire predicted France would one day relocate her surplus population (Essai, chapter CLI). Columbus’s discovery of the New World is hailed as the greatest event in world history (chapter CXLV), and European avarice motivated Portuguese expeditions that led to the accidental discovery of Brazil (chapter CL). The conquistadors’ barbarity in Mexico (Essai II, 347) and in Peru (chapter CXLVII) deeply offended the philosophe. Although he praised the Jesuits’ civilizing influence in Paraguay, Voltaire deplored their political ambitions, a criticism reiterated in Candide (chapter 14). In the same conte, slavery is condemned as inhumanity in the encounter with the slave at Surinam, near French Guiana (chapter 19), and Eldorado is part
1200
VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET
of the onslaught against Leibniz’s optimism (chapter 18). Set in Lima during the Spanish conquest, Alzire ou les Américains (1735), a tragedy advocating religious tolerance, has inspired operas notably by Nicolini (1797) and Verdi (1845). Candide, of course, inspired Leonard Bernstein’s operetta. Voltaire read widely and wrote frequently on the Americas. Despite the historian’s genuine interest in the relativity of customs, the propagandist had a static view
DE
of human nature, using the New World as a platform for his philosophical ideas. Serge Rivière See also: Acadia; Catholic Church; Fishing; Hurons; Jesuits; Louisbourg; Louisiana; Mexico; Music (Classical); Noble Savage; Slavery. References Béguin, Michelle, and Goldzink, eds. Candide. Paris: Larousse, 2002. Naves, Raymond, ed. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques. Paris: Garnier, 1988. Pomeau, René, ed. Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques. Paris: Garnier, 1957.
W WARNER-VIEYRA, MYRIAM (1939–) A Caribbean-born author, long based in Senegal, Myriam Warner-Vieyra has forged a career as a writer, and her work deals primarily with the experience of women in the French Caribbean and West Africa. Born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in 1939, she made her way to Africa via France (a route also followed by major Caribbean figures such as Frantz Fanon). After completing her secondary schooling in France, she moved to Dakar, in Senegal, where she qualified as a librarian. She married the Senegalese film producer and director Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (now deceased), and they had three children together. In her published fiction—three works to date—Warner-Vieyra has crisscrossed the Atlantic. Her first novel, Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit/As the Sorcerer Said (1980), is set in the Caribbean and focuses on the troubled existence of a young woman born to a black father and a Métisse mother who is remote and distant in relations with her “racially different” daughter. The novel thus explores the complexity of racial hierarchies in the Caribbean and examines the attraction of
Paris as the site of cultural and social prestige for many islanders. In her second novel, Juletane (1982), Warner-Vieyra uses the diary form to tell the story of her eponymous heroine, a young Caribbean woman. Juletane marries a Senegalese man in Paris; they travel back to Senegal, only to have their romantic idyll broken by her Muslim husband’s revelation that he is already married. Juletane cannot cope with this polygamous relationship, and the situation deteriorates beyond repair when the husband takes a third wife. The diary thus becomes an exploration of the cultural chasm that separates black Antilleans and Africans (and also of the divide between Juletane and her co-wives, who are forced to vie for their husband’s affections). Juletane, an orphan with no roots in either the Antilles or in France, finds herself isolated and lost in an African culture that she cannot understand or accept. This exploration of the relationship between the French Caribbean and Africa is carried further through the character of Hélène, a Caribbean social worker who has discovered Juletane’s diary some years later. A far more assertive woman, Hélène offers hope of a more confident female Caribbean identity in the future.
1201
1202
WASHINGTON, GEORGE
Warner-Vieyra’s most recent work, Femmes échouées (“Fallen Women,” 1988), is a collection of nine short stories that explores the different forms of oppression suffered by women in different communities on either side of the Atlantic. This book cemented her position as a key figure linking Caribbean and African women’s fiction, and her work is often included in discussions of both traditions. However, her literary silence throughout the 1990s means that her reputation has begun to dwindle slightly. She still lives in Dakar, where she works as a librarian at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop. David Murphy See also: Fanon, Frantz; Guadeloupe; Métis. References Dia, Alioune Touré. “Myriam WarnerVieyra.” Amina 96 (1980): 34–36. Lionnet, Françoise. “Inscriptions of Exile: The Body’s Knowledge and the Myth of Authenticity in Myriam Warner-Vieyra and Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie.” Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995: 87–100.
WASHINGTON, GEORGE (1732–1799) He was, said Charles-Maurice de TalleyrandPérigord upon the death of George Washington, “one of the noblest beings ever to honor the human race.” The course of Washington’s life—from humble beginnings on the fringes of the British Empire to world historical figure admired throughout Enlightened Europe—testifies as much to the events that transformed the North American colonies in the late eighteenth century as to the particularities of Washington’s life.
George Washington was born February 22, 1732, into a Virginia family of the second rank. When his father died in 1743, the majority of the estate was divided between George’s two elder brothers, closing off to him the easiest path to gentry status in colonial Virginia: inheritance. Lacking the formal education enjoyed by other children of Virginia’s planter class, young George began cultivating the patronage of local elites. In short order, he was appointed a county surveyor in Virginia, an important (and potentially lucrative) post in the rapidly expanding colonies. The position familiarized Washington with the western backcountry and instilled in him a more continental vision than that of most planters of the South—or merchants of the North for that matter. Washington’s prospects brightened when his older brother died in 1752, and he inherited Mount Vernon, a mediumsized estate on the Potomac River. Too ambitious to settle down, however, Washington joined the colonial militia. His first battle was unusually significant: while leading an attack on a small party of half-asleep French emissaries in the backwoods of the Ohio valley early one morning in 1754, Washington set off a chain of events that led to the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the expulsion of the French from North America. Washington’s published account of the battle—if it can be called such—gave him some modest celebrity in Virginia, though it earned him greater renown in France, where he became known as the treacherous assassin of Ensign Coulon de Jumonville. Washington hoped his experience on the frontier would lead to a commission as an officer in the regular British army. It was an ambition the young anglophile provin-
WASHINGTON, GEORGE
cial never realized. Instead, Washington was named a colonel in Virginia’s forces. He led the defense of the colony’s frontier for nearly five years. His frustration at never having achieved a more prestigious rank was aggravated by the often condescending treatment he, like other provincial Americans, received from imperial authorities. Washington retired from the military in 1758—the first in a series of retirements from public life that give his life a narrative unity—and soon after he married Martha Dandridge Custis, the most eligible widow in Virginia, thus gaining control of her former husband’s vast estate. Running his plantations with the exacting standards of a general, Washington grew into one of the wealthiest men in Virginia, managing a labor force of hundreds of slaves. As conflict within the British Empire intensified during the 1770s, Washington threw himself behind the Patriot cause. Serving as a delegate to the Continental Congress, Washington was named commander in chief of the armed forces when fighting broke out in Massachusetts in 1775. Washington’s personal bravery helped motivate troops and the public alike, and perhaps more important, he quickly grasped the essential strategy in what is now called asymmetrical warfare: aiming not for decisive victory, yet avoiding defeat. Washington’s success largely lay in his ability to hold his army together long enough to persuade the French to enter the war, and ultimately to exhaust the British politically and financially. During the war, Washington became a national figure before a nation even existed, his birthday replacing the king’s as a holiday, his fame disseminated in poetry,
1203
This print shows George Washington standing outside a tent and holding the Declaration of Independence and the treaty of alliance with France. At his feet lie torn copies of documents relating to reconciliation efforts by Great Britain. (Library of Congress)
prose, and prints. Thanks in large part to the influx of idealistic young aristocrats— liberals in the French army whose admiration and loyalty he quickly gained—Washington’s fame spread to France and eventually all of Enlightened Europe, where he embodied the American cause as a curious mixture of republican saint and virtuous Roman citizen. Victorious at Yorktown in 1781 thanks to the French navy, Washington waited until the peace treaty was signed in Paris in 1783 to resign his commission and retire from public life. It was this last act, above all, that elevated Washington to such exalted status in popular mythology: a modern-day Cincinnatus, giving up power to return to his plow.
1204
WASHINGTON, GEORGE
Washington, of course, did not actually return to a plow; he had slaves for that. The war—and, in particular, the service of blacks in the army—began a slow and tortuous evolution in Washington’s views toward slavery. Although in his private correspondence Washington repeatedly criticized slavery, he consistently refused to act publicly or even to speak out against the institution, even as his holdings grew to make him one of the largest slave owners of the Chesapeake region. It was only after his death that Washington’s published will revealed his posthumous emancipation of his slaves: an act that made Washington the only Founding Father who freed his slaves. Washington gave up retirement in 1787 to preside over the convention designing a new federal Constitution. Gambling his reputation on the endeavor, Washington helped gain ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Although he did not actively participate in the debates that framed the document, the strong powers granted to the executive in the new government may have proved acceptable to Americans—so suspicious of centralized power— only because they knew Washington would become their first president. Elected in 1788, Washington began what he hoped would be a brief term as president of the United States, successfully establishing a new administrative structure and, ever attentive to the importance of symbolism, a republican pageantry suitable to the new nation. Washington’s personal prestige helped preserve some nominal political comity until his second term (1792–1796), when divergent opinions about the French Revolution cracked open the fissures within the political system, making any semblance of political consen-
sus impossible. Abandoning the nation’s commitment to France in its Treaty of Amity and Commerce, Washington allied himself with those opposing U.S. intervention in European wars. Stung by the fierce public criticism unleased by his controversial positions, Washington left office in 1796 and, upon his departure, published a summation of his political views. His “Farewell Address” called for unity among citizens, warning against political and geographical factions, and urging against entanglements in foreign wars, helping to shape U.S. foreign policy well into the twentieth century. The Farewell Address highlighted the unAtlantic strains of Washington’s thought and policy—indeed, of U.S. political culture more broadly—articulating a vision of the United States as separate from, rather than part of, the Atlantic world. Washington’s plea to remain “detached & distant” from Europe—“to pursue a different course”— would echo through the centuries, marking an enduring divide with those who held that the United States was and should be tied to the larger Atlantic sphere and its politics. Although Washington’s life ended with the eighteenth century, he continued to live on as a powerful national, and even international, symbol. Diverse groups in the United States immediately set about refashioning his image to advance often conflicting political and social objectives. Meanwhile, Washington inspired others in the Atlantic world, including Simón Bolívar and José Martí, in their quests for national liberation. Perhaps most explosively of all, U.S. slaves struggling for freedom occasionally made connections between Washington and Toussaint L’Ouverture,
WESTERNS
famed leader of the Haitian Revolution. Just as it has since his death, Washington’s legacy will no doubt continue to reverberate throughout the Atlantic world. François Furstenberg See also: Bolívar, Simón; French Revolution; Haiti; Ohio; Slavery; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François; Treaty of Paris. References Freeman, Douglas Southall. George Washington, A Biography. 7 vols. New York: Scribner, 1949–1957. Grizzard, Frank E. George Washington: A Biographical Companion. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Higginbotham, Don, ed. George Washington Reconsidered. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Schwartz, Barry. George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
WESTERNS More than any other film genre in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, the western acted as a symbolic vehicle of the dominant ideology that proposed the United States as exemplar of freedom, democracy, and opportunity and the American West as the arena in which the fortuitous destiny of the American people was achieved. The classic Hollywood western endorsed an Anglo-American vision that tended to suppress alternative cultural histories. The American West was in a sense a creation of the Louisiana Purchase. Tocqueville also helped establish the dominant view of the United States and its westward physical expansion as the positive formation of a wholly new social order, and of the American people as especially gifted
1205
in “turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes and subduing nature” (Democracy in America, 1835). This mythology of the United States and of the American West, in particular, achieved popularity in France even before the invention of motion pictures: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show first visited Paris as part of the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and was received with great enthusiasm by the French public just three years after France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty testified to the close relationship between the two republics. The visit had a decisive influence on the career of one of the major stars of early French cinema, the actor Joe Hamman (1883–1974), who had a lifelong fascination with the American West and went to live there at the age of seventeen: he trained as a cowboy, met William Fredric Cody (Buffalo Bill) at his home in North Platte, Nebraska, and secured work in Cody’s Wild West Show. Returning to France after several years, Hamman became known for his roles in silent westerns such as La Conscience de cheval rouge/The Red Man’s Honor (Roudès, 1912) and The Subterranean City (1913), which were an important genre in the French cinema from 1910 to 1914 and which he discusses in his memoirs Du Far West à Montmartre (1962). Le Railway de la mort (Durand, 1910), in which he starred as the cowboy hero Arizona Bill, typified the genre with its death-defying action sequences on board a speeding train as two men engage in a desperate race to stake a claim to a discovery of gold. These French westerns, each about ten or fifteen minutes long, many of them produced by the largest French film studio, Gaumont, were distributed and exhibited successfully in France as
1206
WESTERNS
well as in the United States, where they contributed to France’s role as the world’s largest exporter of films before World War I. They were filmed not in New Mexico or Texas but on the outskirts of Paris and in Provence and the Camargue, where the famous local horsemen known as the gardians were enlisted to play the roles of Indians. The success of these films demonstrated the transatlantic appeal of the mythology and spectacle of the American West, but the French western was eclipsed by its U.S. counterpart as Hollywood cinema emerged and made the genre its own after World War I. Jean Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935) symbolically redeployed the cowboy hero in its recounting of the struggle for control of a publishing house between a corrupt capitalist boss and a workers’ cooperative led by Lange (René Lefèvre), a writer of pulp westerns. In the film’s analysis of class in Popular Front France, the protagonist of Lange’s stories, Arizona Jim, appears as an icon of the oppressed working man and his resistance to the rise of fascism in the lead up to World War II. In the aftermath of the Allied liberation and as France went through an intense period of modernization and urbanization in which U.S. political, economic, and cultural influence increased markedly, the Hollywood western became a focal point for debate on the cinema and on the relationship between French and American culture as a whole. For critics such as André Bazin and Eric Rohmer in Cahiers du cinéma, the western elicited a response that was at the same time admiring of the United States and U.S. cinema and yet implicitly critical of its standard mythology and iconography. Although they admired the pre-war westerns of William S. Hart
and John Ford, they found their moral clarity and straightforward heroism to be naïve and out of date, and they applauded the psychological complexity and moral confusion that increasingly complicated the western genre in the 1950s. In his article “Rediscovering America” (December 1955), Rohmer admired the flawed and conflicted characters of Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) and Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952). Bazin, in his article “The Beauty of a Western” (January 1956), argued that intelligent westerns, such as Anthony Mann’s The Far Country (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955), sought to examine themes of authority, violence, civilization, and morality, which were especially germane after World War II. Mann’s approach interested Bazin for its stylistically sophisticated foregrounding of landscape—for example, through the then new technology of Cinemascope—which tended to highlight the tension between the epic scale of the visual image of the American West and the troubled characters around whom Mann’s films revolved. French appreciation of the western in the 1950s therefore coincided with the high point of the genre but also anticipated its decline. Baroque reworkings of the western, such as Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), became central to the new canon of films in which were prized the ability of certain U.S. film directors—such as Mann and Ray—to produce critically intelligent work within the mass culture confines of the Hollywood system. Their work was also celebrated in the programming of films at the Cinématheque Française, run by the legendary Henri Langlois, which did much to promote the reputation and popularity of the western in France. In the 1960s, however, a new gen-
WESTERNS
eration of politically sensitive French youth increasingly questioned the role of U.S. culture in France, and the popularity of the western declined as it did in the United States, where its heroic mythology was seen to be discredited by the Vietnam War. The films of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and others in the nouvelle vague took U.S. popular culture as a subject for critique. In turn, their stylistic innovation— for example, their use of the jump cut in editing, or of dynamic, mobile cinematography—influenced Hollywood westerns, such as Samuel Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), and Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), as well as road movies such as Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), which reengineered many elements of the western for the dystopian and critical atmosphere of the day. Meanwhile, the French western did manage to make sporadic reappearances, but with nothing like the coherence or success of the era of Joe Hamman: the popular star Fernandel appeared in a comic western Dynamite Jack (Bastia, 1961), a French version of the Italian spaghetti western was made in Une Corde, un Colt (Hossein, 1969), and Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot starred as outlaw sisters in the western spoof Les Pétroleuses (Christian-Jaque, 1971). None of these was of lasting importance in the history of the genre. Since the 1970s, both in the United States and in France, the western and Franco-American encounters in the genre have become marginal and often fraught with difficulty. When Michael Cimino cast the French actress Isabelle Huppert as the leading lady Ella Watson in his ill-fated Heaven’s Gate (1980), preferring her to Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton, the fact
1207
that Huppert was unknown to the U.S. cinemagoing public was one of the many reasons cited for the film’s disastrous boxoffice performance and critical reception. Wim Wenders’s road movie Paris, Texas (1984), on the other hand, was a French/German/British/U.S. coproduction. The film implicates France in the American West in its thematic exploration of the relationship between Europe and the United States, giving the film its title. The central character is Anne (Aurore Clément), a French housewife at home and yet out of place in Southern California. More recently, Manuel Poirier’s Western (1997), which won the Prix de Jury at Cannes, further attenuated the western genre in its road movie about a Catalonian and a Russian who travel together across northern France in a narrative of (self-) discovery that loosely recalled the original genesis of the western as a representation of migration, adventure, and national identity. In 2004, the entirely French blockbuster western Blueberry (Kounen) attempted to translate to the cinema the long-standing success in France of the bande dessinée series of that name, begun in 1963, and to replicate the recent success of French reworkings of U.S. genre cinema such as Luc Besson’s science fiction The Fifth Element (1995). Visuals and scenarios from the western have also played an important role in hip-hop culture emerging from the French banlieues. Mark Shiel See also: Bardot, Brigitte; Besson, Luc; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Cahiers du cinéma; Cinema, 1895–1945; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Comic Strips; Godard, Jean-Luc; Louisiana Purchase; Mississippi River; Renoir, Jean; Texas; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Truffaut, François; World War I; World War II.
1208
WHALING
References Abel, Richard. The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914. Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1998. Hillier, Jim, ed. Cahiers du cinéma: The 1950s, Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. London/New York: Routledge, 1996. Lev, Peter. The Euro-American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Ray, Robert B. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
WHALING As early as the twelfth century, fishermen from the Basque regions of Bayonne and Biarritz were whale hunting in the Bay of Biscay. By the end of the sixteenth century, the European whaling trade had migrated northward, and Basque whalers, alongside cod fishermen from all over Europe, were setting sail for the waters of Newfoundland. Various explanations have been posited for the expansion of Basque whaling into Icelandic and North American waters. Depletion of whale stocks off the coast of Spain caused by overfishing or changes in tidal flow, which redistributed cetacean food sources into more northern areas, is one possibility. Another is that the Basques sought to extend the whaling season from a winter to a yearlong activity by following whales to their northern winter habitats. Either way, by the sixteenth century, the coastal waters of Europe did not contain enough whales to meet the demands of what was by then a flourishing European market for whale oil and other derivatives. Before kerosene became the household fuel of predilection in the late nineteenth century, oil derived from whales was Europe’s primary source of lighting fuel. Other byproducts were used to grease machinery or
used as additives in paints, varnishes, and cosmetics. Whalebone was also greatly sought after by the fashion industry for use in the manufacture of corsets. From the dozen or so coastal stations that they established along the coast of Labrador in Canada, the Basques hunted the Atlantic northern right whale. Otherwise known as the “baleine des Basques” or the “baleine franche noire,” the right whale was the favored quarry of the Basques because its passive nature and the buoyancy of its carcass meant that it was the easiest species of whale to hunt and to catch. From observation towers erected at the whaling stations, the horizon was scanned for whale activity. When whales were spotted, a flotilla of small boats was launched in pursuit. In the early years of whaling, techniques for the capture of whales were rudimentary and of limited success. The “drogue” method was the most primitive approach. Harpoons attached to a heavy wooden barrel were thrown at the whale, which would be allowed to run until it finally tired, died, and floated to the surface. Often, however, the dying whale would dive and swim out of range of its pursuers. On successful expeditions, dead whales would be towed back to shore, where the whale blubber was melted down into oil on specially constructed stone furnaces and then transported back to France. The Basques dominated fishing in Newfoundland until the arrival of the Dutch and the British in the seventeenth century. Basque mariners were employed by British and Dutch companies to hunt and process on their behalf. However, once the new incumbents had been trained in whaling techniques, they took over the whaling stations, dislodging the Basques from the coast. Forced out to sea, the
WHALING
Basques developed onboard whale processing methods and a more effective, though more perilous, form of “drogue” fishing called “fast fishing.” In “fast fishing,” the whaling boat itself was used as a counterweight to the whale. The Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Versailles (1783) severely curtailed the access of Basque whalers to Newfoundland fishing grounds, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Basque involvement in the North Atlantic whaling industry had become practically nonexistent. In any event, by the late 1700s, stocks of the right whale off the Newfoundland coast had been so diminished by overfishing that whaling companies were extending their operations to the Greenland ice floes of the North and to the waters of the South Atlantic. The discovery of the sperm whale, an offshore species highly prized for its high-quality odorless oil, became the whalers’ principal quarry. The onboard techniques perfected by the Basques meant that the sperm whale could be pursued, killed, and processed offshore. By the nineteenth century, commercial whaling in Newfoundland was almost uniquely shore based and controlled by British, Norwegian, and Newfoundland companies. Fierce competition for meager returns meant that French commercial whaling had opted to concentrate its activities in the Pacific Ocean. Ships set sail from Nantes and Le Havre to hunt in New Caledonia. Even here, success was modest; in 1868, France’s last whaling ship, The Winslow, returned to Le Havre for the last time. The coastal whaling industry in Newfoundland suffered a rapid decline in the years before World War I. Diminishing stocks and competition from new steampowered whaling boats meant that coastal
1209
whaling became uncompetitive. In 1904, fourteen companies operated out of Newfoundland. By the eve of World War I, they had all ceased to trade. The wide-scale adoption of factory fishing practices by the 1920s caused whaling companies to return to North Atlantic waters in force. Steam-powered boats, sophisticated onboard processing facilities, and better navigational equipment brought about an enormous boost in catches. However, it was inevitable that the average annual catch rate of 50,000 whales recorded by the end of the 1930s could not be sustained. Once again, stocks began to rapidly diminish. The International Whaling Commission, established in 1946 to coordinate a system of international regulation, was initially ineffective. Catch quotas set by the commission were too generous, and several countries refused to participate. In 1982, with many species of whale on the verge of extinction, the IWC finally achieved a worldwide moratorium on whaling, which came into force in 1985. Although Norway and Japan have defied the ban, the moratorium has been generally adhered to by other nations, effectively bringing to an end whaling as an industry in Atlantic waters. Wendy Michallat
See also: Basques; Fishing; Le Havre; Nantes; Newfoundland; Treaty of Utrecht; World War I. References Cazeils, Nelson. Dix Siècles de pêche à la baleine. Rennes: Ouest-France/Edilarge, 2003. Kurlansky, Mark. The Basque History of the World. New York: Walker, 1999. Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1921. Outhwaite, Leonard. The Atlantic: A History of an Ocean. New York: Coward McCann, 1957.
1210
WHARTON, EDITH
WHARTON, EDITH (1862–1936) One of the most important female writers in the United States. Edith Wharton is best known for her two major novels, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), but she wrote fourteen other novels and three novellas, as well as numerous volumes of short stories, two volumes of poetry, travel writings, memoirs, and art criticism. Most of her novels deal with social manners and cultural conflict in the tradition of Henry James, to whom she is sometimes unfavorably compared. However, Wharton’s narrative style differed from that of her friend James in possessing a clarity and sharpness of wit that derived in part from her interest in French literature. Despite their differences, James and Wharton’s sustained contact with European culture helped both writers direct their satirical attention to the social myths and class system found on the east coast of the United States. Wharton was keen to explore the ways in which individuals are shaped, but often also victimized, by economics and environment. However, this naturalist focus did not detract from her profound interest in style, which developed when she lived in Paris—periodically from 1907 and permanently from 1910. In her late essay “Visibility in Fiction” (1929), for example, she argued that style is the key for unifying form and content: style lends a story the “enduring semblance of vitality,” and it is necessary for the creation of visible characters. She admitted that “the gift of giving visibility to the characters of fiction is the rarest in the novelist’s endowment,” warning that visibility is often overstated in the novels of Charles Dickens and Honoré de
Balzac because they regularly associate their characters with physical or mental oddities. In contrast, she aspired to the art of Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert in blending realistic physical descriptions with emotional and mental complexity. In this vein, many of Wharton’s novels present engaging but troubled characters faced with emotionally limiting or debilitating circumstances. In her best-known novel, The Age of Innocence, Wharton’s satire is directed at the false values and social restrictions displayed by the leisure class and at the unwelcome emergence of the nouveau riche in the late nineteenth century. While living in France in the 1910s, Wharton directly experienced the brutality of war and the consequences of modern technology in her contribution to war relief for the Allies (for which she was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1916). The Great War represented a devastating shock to the sheltered and idealized past of her U.S. childhood, and she turned it into the subject matter of The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923). For Wharton, war symbolized the crumbling of traditional culture and a fall from innocence into the chaos of modernity. This conflict between innocence and experience is transposed in The Age of Innocence, in which May Welland is the innocent and childlike product of old New York society, and Ellen Olenska is perceived by the parochial old New Yorkers as the embodiment of a decadent and fallen Europe. The male protagonist, Newland Archer, is the progeny of old New York caught uncomfortably between May and Ellen as symbols of his sense of obligation and unfulfilled passion, respectively. However, Archer’s inability to chal-
WHISTLER, JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL
1211
false promises that imagination can engender. Her other novels develop these core themes, but also develop her fictional range, as in historical studies of European culture in The Valley of Decision (1902) and the challenge to Americans’ views of Europe in Madame de Treymes (1907). Martin Halliwell
Early twentieth-century author Edith Wharton. While living in France in the 1910s, Wharton directly experienced the brutality of war and the consequences of modern technology in her contribution to war relief for the Allies. (National Archives)
lenge his class values leads to his final realization in Paris that he has missed out on the possibilities of life. By dramatizing the tensions between the three characters, the novel questions the currency of innocence and explores the ambivalent relationship the United States has with Europe in the early twentieth century. Wharton found Paris much more liberating than New York as a place for literary and sexual fulfillment. She even began her novella Ethan Frome (1911) in French as a homage to Flaubert, but then shifted to English to tell the story of the eponymous character’s imprisonment in a loveless marriage in the bleak New England village of Starkfield. Like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Trois contes (1877), Wharton’s novella can be considered antiromantic in exposing the delusions and
See also: James, Henry; Literary Relations; Madame Bovary; World War I. References Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Bell, Millicent, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
WHISTLER, JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL (1834–1903) U.S. painter profoundly influenced by the artistic traditions of France. During his long periods of residence there he became an important catalyst in cultural exchanges between artists and writers. After three years at West Point, Whistler left the United States to study art at Gleyre’s studio in Paris, where he arrived at the age of twenty-one. Over the next few years, he established a wide circle of friends, which included Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Henri FantinLatour, Alphonse Legros, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and James Tissot. Although Whistler moved to London in 1859, he continued to pay visits to Paris during the 1860s. His Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862,
1212
WHISTLER, JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL
Lithograph of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé by James Abbott Whistler, 1892. (GLAHA 49536, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) impressed the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire in 1863 when it was exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in Paris, along with Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. As a key member of the artistic avant-garde at this period, Whistler posed with Baudelaire, Legros, Manet, and Felix Bracquemond for Fantin-Latour’s Hommage à Delacroix (1864, Musée d’Orsay). Whistler’s career in Britain was not without problems, and after being bankrupted by his lawsuit against Ruskin, he began exhibiting in the Paris salon again from 1882. He became friendly with several French writers, notably Robert de Montesquiou, Théodore Duret, and Octave Mirbeau, all of whom were accomplished art critics who ensured that he maintained a high profile in the French
press. With the poet Stéphane Mallarmé (Whistler’s closest friend), Duret and Montesquiou orchestrated the purchase of his most famous canvas, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1867, Musée d’Orsay), by the French government in 1891. Shortly afterward, Whistler was made Officier de la Légion d’honneur for his contribution to the fine arts in France. Whistler moved back to Paris in 1892 until the premature death of his wife in 1896. He immortalized his French friends in Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black: Portrait of Théodore Duret (1882–1884, Metropolitan Museum, New York); Harmony in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1891–1894, Frick Collection, New York); and in the delicate drypoint and lithographs of Mallarmé (1892, Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow), who made Whistler’s aesthetic credo accessible to French readers when he translated his Ten O’Clock Lecture in 1888. Whistler’s career ended on a note of heartening critical acclaim for his exhibits in the Paris World Fair in 1900: Léonce Bénédite, the curator of the Luxembourg Museum, noting the influence he had exerted and absorbed, said that this highly original painter of international standing had become part of the great French tradition in painting. Joy Newton See also: Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre; Degas, Edgar; Exposition universelle; Painting. References Barbier, Carl, ed. Correspondance MallarméWhistler. Paris: Nizet, 1964. McLaren Young, Andrew, Margaret MacDonald, Robin Spencer, and Hamish Miles. The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1980.
WHITE, EDMUND Newton, Joy, ed. La Chauve-souris et le papillon: Correspondance MontesquiouWhistler. Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990. Stratis, Harriet K., and Martha Tedeschi, eds. The Lithographs of James McNeill Whistler. Vol. 1. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago in association with the Arie and Ida Crown Memorial, 1998.
WHITE, EDMUND (1940–) The writer Edmund White, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, lived in Paris for more than ten years, from 1983 until about 1997, after receiving a one-year Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to write anywhere in the world. He chose Paris, and when the fellowship expired, White stayed on in his chosen city, living by his writing. Although he has repatriated to the United States and teaches creative writing at Princeton University, he remains, particularly through his writing, strongly affiliated with the French capital. White is an important American gay writer. Although his designation as gay has been less important to his non-American readers, reaching a more mainstream audience in Europe, he has been part of a literary movement in the United States that has consolidated a gay community and identity by addressing and assuming, and thereby conjuring, a gay readership. He is a familiar personality in the pages of the U.S. gay press. White has said that to qualify as a person of letters, one has to be accomplished in at least three kinds of writing. In the breadth of the kind and quantity of his own publications, he has certainly shown
1213
himself to meet his definition. White is an essayist, novelist, and biographer—and more. And even within the fiction genre, he has written many different kinds: the autobiographical novel for which he is most known—particularly the trilogy comprised of A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997)—but also his nineteenth-century historical novel, Fanny: A Fiction (2003). His earlier, more ethereal and mannered fiction includes Forgetting Elena (1973), Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), and Caracole (1985). The Married Man (2000) is his posttrilogy novel, but it carries the same earmarks of captivating autobiographical prose. He has published many short stories, collected in The Darker Proof (1988) and Skinned Alive (1995). He is also a playwright—some of his dramas have been produced in London and New York—but he is less known for this genre. He is the biographer of two French writers, Jean Genet (1993) and Marcel Proust (1999); many of his essays spanning the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s have been collected in the volume The Burning Library (1994); and he is the editor of the collections The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (1992) and Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (2001). He has also written some books that are harder to classify: he is the author, with Charles Silverstein, of The Joy of Gay Sex (1977); of the book States of Desire (1980), an account based on his travels, interviews, and sexual encounters with gay men across the United States; and he wrote the vignettes for a book of written and drawn sketches in collaboration with his dying lover, Hubert Sorin, Sketches
1214
WILLIAMS,TENNESSEE
from Memory: People and Places from the Heart of Our Paris (1994). He is also the author of the peripatetic account of his beloved city, The Flâneur (2001). White is an officer of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and in 2000 he was awarded the prize of the Festival of Deauville for the entire body of his work. Monica Pearl See also: AIDS; Gay Movement; Genet, Jean. References Barber, Stephen. Edmund White: The Burning World. London: Picador, 1999. Edmund White’s own website: http://www .edmundwhite.com (cited April 19, 2004).
WILLIAMS,TENNESSEE (1911–1983) The Southern dramatist Tennessee Williams was one of the three most important practitioners of twentieth-century theater in the United States. Williams’s typical dramatic mode was the tragicomedy, and he spent much of his career searching for a suitable label for his fusion of psychological character study and interest in the pressures that place and history exact, often unknowingly, on individuals. The majority of his plays written between The Glass Menagerie (1944) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) were characterized by poetic realism, but he continued to develop his dramatic language through the 1960s and 1970s, also writing numerous short stories, a novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1950), and publishing two volumes of poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). Williams’s most famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), focuses on the
conflict between the neurotic and aging Southern belle Blanche DuBois and the raw Polish immigrant Stanley Kowalski, set within the French Quarter of New Orleans. Williams had fallen in love with New Orleans in 1938, during which time he lived and worked in the French Quarter. Williams made exemplary use of setting in Streetcar, drawing off New Orleans as a Southern city, but one that is also atypical of the South with its mixture of cultures, languages, and immigrant groups. Originally titled “The Poker Night” and set in Chicago, Williams draws deeply from the Franco-American culture of New Orleans to lend sensuality to the clash between old and new South that Blanche and Stanley represent, respectively. Williams could not speak much French (he was still learning in 1977), but his interest in New Orleans is reflected in his short stories “One Arm,” “Desire and the Black Masseur,” “The Angel in the Alcove” (all collected in One Arm, 1948), and the until recently unpublished “The Night Was Full of Hours” (2002). A more general engagement with French culture filters into the symbolic mode of representation that characterizes his mixed dramatic style and overlaps with his interest in Spanish and Mexican cultures. He also wrote one-act plays based on New Orleans, including The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (1942), Auto-Da-Fé (1945), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), and The Mutilated (1967), as well as his late memory play Vieux Carré (1977), the title of which indicates the importance of bohemian New Orleans in his work. Williams’s work has been enthusiastically received in France. One of Williams’s most important French relationships was
WILLIAMS,WILLIAM CARLOS
with Jean Cocteau, whom he had met in 1948 in Paris and again in 1952 in Barcelona. Cocteau praised Williams’s poetic and psychological interests, but was critical of the puritan and parochial streak that ran through his Southern drama. Cocteau adapted a radically sexualized version of Streetcar at Théâtre Edouard VII in 1949 (which Williams did not like), and both artists were drawn to the Orpheus myth: Cocteau in Orphée (1926) and Le Testament d’Orphée (1960) and Williams in Orpheus Descending (1957). The influence of Cocteau on Williams can also be seen in one of his late plays, Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), which develops themes from Cocteau’s poem “Clair-Obscur.” Following the success of a 1977 production of Williams’s play In a Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Something Cloudy, Something Clear was produced in 1982 for the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre in New York City: an off-off-Broadway repertory that had opened in 1971 and was dedicated to preserving Cocteau’s “poetry of the theater.” Martin Halliwell See also: Chicago; Cocteau, Jean; Language; Literary Relations; New Orleans; Theater. References Falk, Signi L. Tennessee Williams. New York: Twayne, 1978. Holditch, Kenneth, and Richard F. Leavitt. Tennessee Williams and the South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Kontaxopoulos, Jean. “Orpheus Introspecting: Tennessee Williams and Jean Cocteau.” Tennessee Williams Annual Review 4 (2001): 1–27. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.
1215
WILLIAMS,WILLIAM CARLOS (1883–1963) U.S. poet. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883, to a British father and a Puerto Rican mother. The poet idealized his mother, the formidable Raquel Hélène (Elena) Hoheb Williams, to almost pathological extremes. Elena was herself of mixed French and Jewish-Dutch parentage and remained an outsider throughout her married life in suburban New Jersey because of her difficulties with the English language and her nostalgia for Puerto Rico and Paris. In the 1870s, she had studied in Paris under Carolus-Duran, the fashionable portrait painter who also instructed John Singer Sargent. In Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of My Mother (completed c. 1945; published in 1959), Williams was to romanticize the Caribbean culture of métissage as well as the southern European world of Latinity, whose survival he saw compromised by the rise of fascist ideologies in Spain, Italy, and Germany. In January 1898, Elena traveled to Europe with her two children, placing them at a private school outside Geneva and taking them to Paris in the winter of 1899. The poet returned to France twice. In 1909–1910, he did postgraduate work in pediatrics at the University of Leipzig, using the intervals of academic life to travel in Europe, including Paris and London. In London, he met Ezra Pound, whom he had befriended as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. On his return from Germany, Williams went on to practice family medicine in Rutherford from 1910 to the mid-1950s, allowing himself only one “sabbatical” (as he called his six-month
1216
WILSON, LAMBERT
European sojourn with his wife, Flossie) in Paris in 1924. There, he completed several of the pieces that would eventually form his collection of historical prose, In the American Grain (1925), notably “Père Sebastian Rasles,” which uses the French and Spanish early colonization of North America to dislodge an anglocentric interpretation of American history. In this piece, Williams represents himself in conversation with the noted French polymath Valéry Larbaud (the translator of Walt Whitman into French) in the latter’s studio, where they assess the Spanish and English colonial legacies and discuss the French Jesuit missionaries’ syncretic approach to the material and spiritual life of the Abenaki Indians of western Maine. In addition to his autobiographical writings, Williams’s most important work dealing in part with France is his first novel, A Voyage to Pagany (1928), which is best described as a fictionalization of his sabbatical in Paris. The protagonist, a New Jersey physician named Dev Evans, comes to Europe without his wife, a situation that allows for his involvement with several American expatriate women. One of Williams’s chief contributions to U.S. literature is the adoption of techniques of writing typical of the European (particularly French) avant-garde, which he puts through the filter of his nativist poetics by using settings and subject matters that correspond to what he called the “local conditions” of his project. Williams’s only booklength translation was Philippe Soupault’s surrealist novel Last Nights of Paris/Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928, trans. 1929), the apocalyptic overtones of which also resonate in his long antipastoral epic Paterson (1946–1958). His own early discovery of the literary mode that James Clif-
ford, in his book The Predicament of Culture (1988), would call the French tradition of “ethnographic surrealism” (represented by Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiris, among others) becomes apparent in the above-mentioned “Père Sebastian Rasles” and his poem “To Elsie” (included in Spring and All). Today Williams is considered (along with Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens) one of the truly towering figures in twentieth-century English-language poetry. He died in his Rutherford home on March 4, 1963. José María Rodríguez García See also: Anti-Americanism; Avant-Gardes; Bataille, Georges; Caillois, Roger; Duchamp, Marcel; Jesuits; Leiris, Michel; Literary Relations; Maine; Paz, Octavio; Pound, Ezra Loomis; Stein, Gertrude; Stevens, Wallace; Surrealism. References Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese, eds. Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGrawHill, 1981. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Rodríguez García, José María. “The Culture of Conversation and the Voice of the Indian in William Carlos Williams’s ‘Père Sebastian Rasles.’ ” Neophilologus 86 (2002): 477–492. Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. New York: Twayne, 1968.
WILSON, LAMBERT (1958–) French actor, theater director, and singer, born in Neuilly, near Paris. Wilson studied at the Drama Center in London and graduated in 1977. In the same year, he was given his first (minor) onscreen role in Julia (Zinnemann, 1977). Since then, he has starred in films and TV movies, acted in and directed numerous
WILSON,WOODROW
theater productions, founded a production company (Démons Productions, in 1996), and released albums covering various musical genres. His varied career has seen him switching between roles and projects in English and French, and he is becoming more popular in the United States thanks to his role as the Merovingian in two of the three Matrix films (Wachowski Brothers, 2003). While at drama school, Wilson also trained as a classical singer and, in 1989, released an album of songs from U.S. musicals (Musicals), including such classics as “Maria” from West Side Story, “A Fine Romance” from Swing Time, and Cole Porter’s “You Do Something to Me.” In 1996, he released another album, Démons et merveilles, this time in French, on which he covered classic songs from French cinema, from “Le Tourbillon” from Jules et Jim to “Où est-il donc?” from Pepe le Moko. It is, however, for his acting roles that Wilson is perhaps best known. From a series of small roles in the late 1970s and early 1980s (From Hell to Victory [Lenzi, 1979], Chanel Solitaire [Kaczender, 1981], La Boum 2 [Pinoteau, 1982], he began to work with some of the world’s leading directors: Claude Chabrol (Le Sang des autres/Blood Relatives, 1984, alongside Jodie Foster), Peter Greenaway (The Belly of an Architect, 1987), James Ivory (Jefferson in Paris, 1995, in which he played the Comte de Lafayette), and Raúl Ruiz (Combat d’un amour en songe, 2000), to name but four. In 2003, he starred in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as the Merovingian, an evil computer program that traffics information. Although Wilson speaks excellent English, he was asked to play the role with an emphasized French
1217
accent. His character explains that he sampled every other language before choosing French because he feels it is the best language for swearing; he then gives a colorful demonstration of what he means. Wilson’s bilingualism was picked up on, but in reverse, in his role in Pas sur la bouche (Resnais, 2003), where he was asked to emphasize not his French accent but his English accent when playing Eric Thomson. In 2004, Wilson appears as Georges Hedare, husband to Sharon Stone’s character, in French director Pitof ’s version of Catwoman, with Halle Berry in the title role. Wilson has spoken, in interviews, of the position of European actors, and more specifically French actors, in contemporary Hollywood, commenting jokingly on the apparent trend that sees Europeans, and French actors in particular, being given roles as “baddies.” Wilson continues both to appear in French-made productions and to pursue a Hollywood career. Cristina Johnston See also: Chabrol, Claude; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Jazz; Music (Classical); Porter, Cole; Resnais, Alain; Ruiz, Raúl. Reference Villiers, Mara, and Gilles Gressard. Stars d’aujourd’hui. 2 vols. Paris: Ramsay, 1985–1986.
WILSON,WOODROW (1856–1924) Scholar, educator, governor of New Jersey, and twenty-eighth president of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War I and onto the global stage as the premier power of the twentieth century. When he sailed the Atlantic in December 1918, bound for the
1218
WILSON,WOODROW
Paris Peace Conference and committed to a League of Nations, he enjoyed, in the opinion of supporters and critics alike, a degree of prestige and influence unprecedented in the history of world affairs. Born in Staunton, Virginia, on December 28, 1856, and raised in a devoutly Presbyterian family, Wilson graduated from the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton University), received his PhD from Johns Hopkins, and taught history and government at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton, where he became university president in 1902. A rising star in the Democratic Party, noted for progressive views on tariff, banking, and labor reform, he won the governorship of New Jersey in 1910, and in the presidential election two years later defeated Republican William Howard Taft and “Bull Moose” candidate Theodore Roosevelt. As promised, the new president supported antitrust legislation and the creation of a Federal Reserve Board, but his “New Freedom” did not cross the color line; convinced that separate-but-equal segregation provided the best path to social peace for all American citizens, Wilson placed limits on his celebrated advocacy of “selfdetermination.” At first, the administration’s foreign policy focused largely on unrest in the Caribbean, revolution in Mexico, and, after August 1914, on keeping the United States out of Europe’s war. Wilson won reelection in 1916, but by the following spring submarine attacks in the Atlantic and the interception of a German telegram soliciting Mexican and Japanese support against the United States wrenched the country from isolation to engagement. Calling for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917, and winning it from Congress four
days later, Wilson pursued a new missionto “make the world safe for democracy”— and in January 1918 announced the Fourteen Points that would serve as his blueprint for global peace. Confronted by the might of the United States, reeling from revolution at home, and ready to accept the Fourteen Points as a basis for negotiation in the fall of 1918, Germany signed the Armistice on November 11. Greeted in France by crowds shouting “Vive le Wilson!” and met with equal enthusiasm in London and Rome, the first U.S. president ever to travel abroad while in office pressed his case for a League of Nations. At the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson, absolute in his certainty that the league provided the only mechanism for lasting peace, confronted the war’s seasoned leaders. France’s Georges Clemenceau, irritated by what he defined as Wilson’s messianic idealism, aimed to protect France by punishing Germany, and Britain’s David Lloyd George, who shared much of that spirit of revenge, focused on the preservation of the British Empire. Like veteran horse traders in gilded halls, they acquiesced to Wilson’s League of Nations in exchange for a treaty, signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919, that imposed crushing reparations on Germany, confirmed the triumph of nationalism, and violated the U.S. president’s dream of international concord. If the Paris victory seemed pyrrhic, Wilson could still save the league for the world at home. His political opponents, however, isolationists and others led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican, rejected the league’s Article X, on collective security, and moved for ratification with “reservations.” But compromise, for
WINE
Wilson, had always been anathema. A cross-country tour to marshal popular support failed in the fall of 1919, and shortly after his return to Washington, the president suffered a stroke (most likely the third in his lifetime) that left him partially paralyzed. Still refusing to negotiate with “reservationists,” he contributed to the final and ironic defeat of his most fervent wish: he instructed congressional supporters to vote against ratification of the Versailles Treaty on March 19, 1920. Revered as the visionary architect of a new world order based on international cooperation, condemned as a self-righteous zealot armed with promises that could never be delivered, Woodrow Wilson, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize of 1919, died in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 1924. What remained of his league, beyond the shores of the United States, died during the following decade. Michael Burns See also: Mexico; World War I. References Heckscher, August. Woodrow Wilson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Link, Arthur S., ed. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. 69 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–1994.
WINE In colloquial languague, wine could be defined as the naturally fermented juice of fresh grapes, but the International Office of Vine and Wine (OIV) defines it technically as a product obtained exclusively by, partial or complete, alcoholic fermentation
1219
of squeezed-out fresh raisins, or must. Yet wine is also inseparable from vines and their cultivation, and, in this respect, it refers to a much broader human and cultural process. Reputed for its nutritional and medical values, it has also become a potent spiritual product. If the worldwide history of wine has been well documented, it has also been studied with specific national contexts in mind. The history of wine remains above all a series of national histories. Yet, it is only with the recent work of the British geographer, Tim Unwin, that a history of exchanges, migrations, transnational movements, and the circulation of ideas has provided a more balanced picture. For example, few French scholars have examined the U.S. contribution to the phylloxera crisis, which, despite its having been imported from the United States, was also solved by U.S. scientists who pioneered the process of grafting French vines on to the rootstocks of the American species. Another striking example of this failure to appreciate the extent of the intellectual and commercial exchanges between France and the United States concerns the wave of European migrants, many of them of French origin, who went to the United States to create vineyards or came back determined to use their experience to improve the quality of their own wines in France. These migrations have left their mark on the landscape with the Chablis or Burgundy in California, whose borrowed names have since become a source of legislative friction between France and the United States. However, the phenomenon of the wandering winemaker has nowadays become commonplace; the current generation travels all over the world, from one
1220
WINE
vintage to the next, and the French have not escaped this fashion. In the context of the ideological and discursive war provoked by globalization and the crisis in consumption affecting traditional European wine-producing countries, an Atlantic approach to French studies could be a fruitful way of underlining the numerous connections between France and the United States in relation to wine. This would include the global and shared history of wine in Europe and the United States, making wine as a worldwide practice and process benefiting from a comparative perspective, and, finally, the ideological and mythical war between terroir and vins de marque. Since classical times, the cultivation of the vine, and especially the production of fine wines, has been one of the hallmarks of civilized society. Born in the Orient, the vine quickly spread, becoming a major cultural element of the Mediterranean area. Associated with the dawn of humanity, wine rapidly became a source of power and rivalries, inequalities, and social hierarchies and structured the daily organization of these societies. The religious dimension of wine, because of its intoxicating nature, quickly made it a central component of political and social life. Its economic value and its power in trade facilitated its rapid expansion and colonization. The Greeks, founders of the Mediterranean viticulture, were followed by the Romans, who expanded it further and made its cultivation one of their main occupations throughout their empire. Wherever the church went, wine production followed, be it in the twelfth century, when the monks established the most famous French vineyards, or in the sixteenth century, when monks and Je-
suits of European origin arrived in the United States on the heels of Christopher Columbus in 1492 as colonization, evangelization, and implantation of wine went together. Later, the Huguenot refugees from religious persecution in France emigrated as well, building their cabins in Florida and making wine. In 1764, some of them obtained the right to cultivate a vast domain in South Carolina, where they planted vines and named their town Bordeaux. French Protestants also established the cultivation of vines in several parts of the Americas and in South Africa, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Jesuits later funded, in 1823, the seminar of Saint Stanislas in Florissant (Saint Louis, Missouri) and have produced wine for more than a century. In the New World, Christianity and the Catholic Church, which needed wine for their rituals, had a major impact on the extension of wine production. Spanish, Italian, and French settlers contributed substantially to the implantation of vineyards in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Peru. Today, vineyards cover approximately 8 million hectares and are spread across the five continents: the civilization of wine extends geographically and historically from Attica to the Pacific. It could be argued that a common civilization of wine has progressively emerged and that it has had a great influence not only on geography, history, science, and technology, but also on religion, arts, and traditions. Growing vines and making wine have today become worldwide practices, and the vast literature published in many languages confirms that a comparative perspective has benefited everybody. Sciences, and especially ampelography (the scientific study
WINE
of vines), enology (the science of making wine), and viticulture, have developed in parallel—but later for France, with the needs of the profession and the state’s concerns. It is undeniable that viticulture and oenology have played a major role in creating better-quality wines in the context of a worldwide professional community of winegrowers, technicians, wine experts, and merchants. Progress in viticulture and winemaking have been stimulated by diseases and natural circumstances. European viticulture suffered in 1850 from attacks of oidium, or powdery mildew, a disease that came from the United States; but it was the phylloxera vastratix, known as “Trojan bug,” that devastated part of the French vineyards, first in Provence in 1861, then in Bordeaux in 1867. It was only in 1901 that French vineyards in Champagne were reconstituted and U.S. rootstocks were used to support the grafting of French vinifera. It was not an easy task to convince the French of the need to adopt this solution; indeed, a long and ideological struggle opposed for many decades the “hybridizers,” who sought new healthy plant stock from hybrid vines, against the “Americanists,” or “grafters,” who advocated grafting healthy plant stock from American vines onto French vines. The work of Thomas Volney Munson (1843–1913), a plant scientist in Denison, had a major impact on the progress achieved in fighting the murderous plant louse. Several experimentations had previously been conducted in the United States under his guidance, where the disease was already known and studied. French and U.S. scholars exchanged visits and engaged in extensive correspondence, and Pierre Viala (1859–1936), an expert on fungi
1221
and later professor of viticulture, was selected by the French government to go to the United States. On several occasions, he met with Munson, his mentor, who at the time had built up an extensive collection of grapevines identified by the soil they preferred and their degree of resistance to phylloxera and other diseases. In recognition of Munson’s contribution to the phylloxera crisis, he was awarded, in 1889, the Chevalier du Mérite Agricole and the Légion d’honneur for his assistance. In the history of wine production, individual contributions have always played a major role in bringing about social and technical changes, improving quality and implementing new commercial ideas. Several examples could be given of the role of French migrants such as Jean-Louis Vignes (1779–1862) from Bordeaux or the Burgundian Paul Masson (1859–1940), both of whom imported new grapes into the United States and contributed to the emergence of high-quality wines. Jean-Louis Vignes, for example, was born in Cadillac (near Bordeaux) and arrived in California in 1831, where he managed to buy 100 acres of vines in Los Angeles. By 1851, he was producing 1,000 barrels of wine a year, and he was joined in his project of expansion by his French family. The success of his enterprise was later consolidated by the opening of a cellar of Californian wines in New York in 1861. Another similar illustration of this spirit of enterprise was provided by the Burgundian, Joseph Masson, who started producing champagne in California in 1865 and made a success of it. There are countless other examples of this European contribution to the wine odyssey. Among the famous figures cited by historians and wine experts, the name of
1222
WINE
Winemaker André Tchelistcheff was responsible for developing the Carneros area as one of the best wineproducing areas of California. (Ted Streshinsky/Corbis)
André Tchelistcheff (1901–1994) comes regularly to the fore. Born in Moscow in 1901, raised in Czechoslovakia, he fought for the White Army before emigrating to France, where he became acquainted with Professor Paul Marchais (Institut National Agronomique de Paris), who trained him as an enologist. He was then hired in Burgundy by Georges de Latour (1847–1940), the founder of the Beaulieu Vineyard in California, and played a major role in improving the quality of the fine grapes such as cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir, and chardonnay and in writing many of California’s house rules, which are still in place. Wine production is now entering a new period of rapid change, and this is likely to pose a serious challenge to European vineyards because they will no longer enjoy the prerogatives and preeminence they have
possessed for centuries. It is true that the data of worldwide production still confirms the predominant position of France, Italy, and Spain, which together account for nearly half of the total production compared to, respectively, the United States and Argentina, with 8.4 percent and 5.6 percent. But this European hegemony is increasingly being challenged as the New World expands its production (the United States increasing its production from 16,000.000 hectoliters in 1990 to 23,800.000 in 2001); in France, production decreased from 65,530.000 hectoliters to 58,243.000 during the same period. European vineyards are now subject to major restrictions, partly imposed by the European Union. If Europe is characterized by some archaic and fragmented professional structures, the United States has long been
WINE
characterized by a very organized chain of production in the wine sector. Historically, there have always been examples of the acquisitions of French vineyards by foreigners at times of crisis. In 1935, for example, a rich U.S. financier, Clarence Dillon, acquired Haut-Brion, the prestigious Château de Pontac, located in the Graves. But the opposite is also true. More recently, the Burgundian wine merchant, JeanClaude Boisset, bought a vineyard in the Napa Valley. A major concentration of capital has taken place in the United States since the 1970s, and the economic landscape is today more or less dominated by a handful of U.S. and Australian companies. The spread of wine could be explained by favorable financing, the allure of the industry for wealthy professionals, and the pioneering spirit of growers, conditions that were also behind some of the historical changes in European vineyards. Since the recent acquisition of one of the Australian wine leaders (BRL Hardy) by the U.S. company Brands (second position in wine production in the United States), the company has now become the new worldwide leader— with a turnover of 3 billion euros expected for 2003—followed by the Californian Gallo (1.7 billion euros). There are also several examples of successful European companies, among them Pernod-Ricard, which owns Orlando, Wyndham, and Jacob’s Creek, but the French wine market is still dominated by small companies and private landowners. Historically, the war of wines is not a new topic, as is illustrated by the two notorious wine-tasting competitions comparing French wines to U.S. wines in 1889 and in 1976. In 1889, during the Exhibition of
1223
Paris, Californian wines were officially recognized with two golden medals given to Cresta Blanca (Charles A. Wetmore). Another competition was run in 1976, when Steven Spurrier, an English wine merchant, organized a wine tasting between French and U.S. wines. Again, in both groups, red and white, a Californian wine emerged triumphant. The bataille des vins remains defined by the opposition between Europe and the New World, terroirs to marques. In this alleged battle, Robert Parker (1947), U.S. wine expert and writer, has played a crucial role in imposing his views on French consumers with his guide, which has become almost as popular in France as elsewhere. His influence has been crucial in imposing Anglo-Saxon tastes on French producers by popularizing the use of new oak barrels. He has also launched the career of several French producers by praising their wines in his “bible.” One of the major contributions in English to the concept of terroir has been written by James Wilson, U.S. geologist, who has turned his attention to the question of how the diverse soils of France produce such fascinating differences in the taste and quality of wine. In his contribution, Wilson defines terroir as the allinclusive ecology of the vineyard that takes in the composition of the bedrock, the timing of the frost, the amount and intensity of rainfall, and the technique and soul of the vigneron, wine as a finely crafted product, each vintage representing the unique physical attributes of the vineyard, the culture of the local community, and the personality of the vigneron. The current debate opposing the concept of terroir to the “geographical indications” (GIs) in the context of the GATT
1224
WISCONSIN
and the World Trade Organization will be crucial for the future of the AOC (appellation d’origine contrôlée) as the European Union is calling for a global registry that would protect place-names covered by GIs as unique for the purposes of labeling agrofood products, a request that is vehemently opposed by the United States. Problems will arise for U.S. producers who took preexisting European names for their products if the European Union is successful in its attempt to gain recognition. The battle remains, after all, a question of economics and consumer choice. Marion Demossier
See also: Argentina; Bordeaux; Brazil; Catholic Church; Chile; Cuisine; GATT; Huguenots; Jesuits; Mexico; Missouri; Saint Louis. References Adams, Leon. The Wines of America. New York: McGraw Hill, 1973. Bazin, Jean-François. Le Vin de Californie: Faut-il avoir peur du vin américain? Paris: Denoël, 1983. Johnson, Hugh. Story of Wine. London: Mitchell Beazley, 1999. Larousse. Wines and Vineyards of France. New York: Arcade, 1990. Peters, Gary L. American Winescapes: The Cultural Landscapes of America’s Wine Country. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Pitte, Jean-Robert. “Vin.” Images économiques du monde. Ed. André Gamblin. SEDES, 47ème année (2002): 348. Robinson, Jancis. The Oxford Companion to Wine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Sutcliffe, Serena. Great Vineyards and Winemakers. New York: Rutledge Press, 1981. Wilson, James. Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate and Culture in the Making of French Wines. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Unwin, Tim. Wine and the Vine. London: Routledge, 1996.
WISCONSIN Now on the northern border of the United States with Canada, Wisconsin was the site of several forts in southwestern New France, from 1634 to the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, after earlier explorations of the region west of the Great Lakes. French Canadian colonists, the first explorers of Wisconsin, made their secondary and mainly transient migration for different reasons. Missionaries sought salvation for themselves and as many as 10,000 Native Americans in the region. Traders with a more secular mission sought a river route even farther west. However, French Canadian traders left a lasting legacy because they assimilated better than later settlers into native customs and clans, creating a new métis culture. Descendants of combined French and native heritage had an enduring impact, evident in many place-names. A river bears the surname of Etienne Brûlé, who explored Lake Superior, Wisconsin’s northern border, from 1621 to 1623. A federal forest is named for the first fur trader to make fruitful alliances with natives, Jean Nicolet, who crossed Wisconsin’s eastern border of Lake Michigan in 1634 to a site near the future Fort La Baye, now Green Bay. Traders traveled the western Wisconsin border of the Mississippi River to the site of another future fort, near Prairie du Chien. Others went inland by 1660, wintering with natives at a lake still called Lac Court Oreilles. Even the native clan name of Dekorah on signs across the region traces to the trader Sabrevoir Descaris, who wed Ho-Chunk woman chief Hopokoekaw, or the Glory of the Morning of Wisconsin. He deserted her, but descendants led the Ho-Chunk near Fond du Lac for decades.
WORLD WAR I
An ill-fated Jesuit named Father René Menard arrived in the 1660s, followed by Father Claude Allouez, who built a birchbark chapel on Lake Superior at La Pointe, ancient spiritual site of native nations on the largest of the Apostle Islands, Madeline, a misspelling of the baptismal name of a local chief ’s daughter upon marriage to the trader Michel Cadotte. Allouez now is a town near Green Bay and De Père, where the père established a second mission. His first site passed to Father Jacques Marquette, for whom a major Milwaukee university is named. He and the trader Louis Joliet followed native guides to the long-rumored river route across Wisconsin in 1674, at last linking New France by waterway from the Saint Lawrence to the Mississippi. Almost a century passed before the French and Indian War brought the first permanent settler, Lieutenant Charles Langlade. He stayed to become “the father of Wisconsin” in state histories, marrying a métis and fathering a family that further intermarried for generations with other métis, such as descendants of pioneering voyageur Pierre Grignon, to the point that many became an almost indiscernible, impossibly complicated mixture of cultures. French forts became British, fur trading declined, and posts became towns and cities well before Wisconsin won statehood in 1848. But famed métis families, and even dynasties, endured in farming, fisheries, forestry, and mining in the north. Few descendants now work in those industries, but a significant number still reside there. Wisconsin remains a center in the United States of persons of French ancestry—although they now comprise less than 3 percent of the state population, including 30 percent in urban southeastern Wiscon-
1225
sin and 20 percent in metropolitan Milwaukee. Another almost 1 percent of the population is of native ancestry, however, among them métis who also are part of Wisconsin’s French heritage. Genevieve McBride See also: Brûlé, Etienne; Catholic Church; French and Indian War; Jesuits; Joliet, Louis; Marquette, Jacques; Métis; Mississippi River; New France; Saint Lawrence River. References Kellogg, Louise Phelps. The French Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest. New York: Cooper Square, 1968. Smith, Alice E. The History of Wisconsin. Vol. 1, From Exploration to Statehood. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1973. Wisconsin Cartographers Guild. Wisconsin’s Past and Present: A Historical Atlas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Zaniewski, Kasimierz J., and Carol J. Rosen. The Atlas of Ethnic Diversity in Wisconsin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
WORLD WAR I Upon the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the United States a neutral nation. Yet, while the Wilson administration pursued its policy of strict neutrality, large segments of U.S. society soon felt a strong sympathy for the Allied cause in general and the plight of France in particular. This sympathy was generated in large part when France was invaded and the war was being fought on its home soil. The suffering of the French civilian population generated a tremendous outpouring of charitable contributions from Americans to help the people of France. Numerous relief
1226
WORLD WAR I
organizations sprang up in the United States to solicit and distribute these funds. Americans also began actively to volunteer their services for France. Many did so by serving as volunteer ambulance drivers with the French army. Although attached directly to the French forces, these ambulance drivers were able to avoid the delicate issue of participation by citizens of a neutral nation in the war by limiting themselves to a noncombatant role. Many of these ambulance drivers came from the upper classes, and indeed prominent Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale sponsored their own volunteer ambulance companies to serve in France. Although the volunteer ambulance drivers attracted the attention and bolstered sympathy for France from a neutral United States, it was the Americans who volunteered to fight for France in the Great War who fired the imagination and excitement of the people back home. Shortly after French entry into the Great War in August 1914, a group of about two dozen young Americans in Paris at the time volunteered for the French army, parading through the streets of Paris with the U.S. flag to the recruiting station for the French Foreign Legion. During the years of U.S. neutrality, hundreds more followed in their footsteps, including the poet-legionnaire Alan Seeger, who was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre on July 4, 1916, and whose book of poetry became a best-seller in the United States later that same year. Yet another group of U.S. volunteers fighting for France stole the headlines away from the Legionnaires. This was the famous group of fighter pilots known as the Escadrille Lafayette, which first went into action at Verdun in 1916. The young men
serving in this squadron were a colorful group and displayed an eccentric and adventurous spirit. They wore their own selfdesigned “uniforms,” had the head of an American Indian war chief painted on the sides of their aircraft, and were accompanied around their aerodrome by their lion cub mascots “Whiskey” and “Soda.” Beneath the colorful show they put on they were also deadly fighter pilots, soon to win recognition as one of the elite squadrons of the French army’s Service Aéronautique. Inspired by the example of the Escadrille Lafayette, an organization was created called the Lafayette Flying Corps, which trained hundreds of U.S. volunteer pilots for service with numerous squadrons of the Service Aéronautique. After the United States entered the war, some of these pilots transferred to the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), but a surprisingly large number remained serving with the French throughout the duration of the conflict. U.S. entry into World War I was a major turning point in the history of the United States and marked its emergence as a world military power. The United States was officially an “associated power” of the Allies because President Woodrow Wilson worked hard to maintain a political aloofness from the European combatants. Yet, at the time of the entry of the United States into the conflict, the U.S. Army numbered only 135,000 officers and men, less than one-tenth the size of the smallest of the major European combatants, and the United States possessed virtually no heavy artillery, tanks, or combat aircraft. As a consequence of these deficiencies, the United States needed a tremendous amount of support and advice in establishing a significant military force in Europe.
WORLD WAR I
France and Great Britain sent military missions to the United States shortly after that country entered the war in the hopes of securing the lion’s share of the potentially vast U.S. military resources for their nations. Marshal Joseph Joffre headed the French Mission and offered to provide weapons and instruction in modern warfare to the nascent AEF that would be sent to fight in Europe. Joffre succeeded in convincing the Wilson administration, and the American people, to entrust the AEF to the care and training of the French army rather than the British. Joffre’s visit resulted in an agreement between the French and U.S. governments that laid the foundation for Franco-American military relations in the Great War and established France as the principal military partner of the United States in the conflict. The entry of the United States into the Great War came at an opportune time for France; in that spring of 1917, the war had entered into its most perilous stage. France was suffering through massive labor strikes and food shortages as defeatist politicians argued for surrender, and mutiny erupted in the French army. Yet the arrival of the first U.S. contingent, led by General John J. Pershing, gave France a tremendous morale boost during its most dire period of crisis of the war. The arrival of the first Americans, and the promise that hundreds of thousands more were on their way, greatly encouraged the French people and the French army to continue the struggle. France played the dominant role in arming and training the AEF in World War I. U.S. soldiers went into battle equipped with French artillery, French automatic rifles, French machine guns, French tanks, and French aircraft. In addition, French instructors trained in whole or part the vast
1227
majority of U.S. soldiers who served in combat during World War I. The United States reciprocated French military aid by providing raw materials and financial assistance to a French nation desperately in need of both commodities at the time of the U.S. entrance into the war. The Franco-American military relationship was not always a smooth one, and indeed one of the severest challenges occurred during the winter of 1917–1918. The French, impatient about the length of time it was taking to assemble a complete army from the United States, argued that U.S. soldiers should be amalgamated into the French army by battalions. The relationship was greatly strained during this time, yet it survived because both nations realized they needed one another if they were to prevail. The AEF entered into serious combat for the first time in 1918, and did so in the French sectors of the Western Front under French leadership. U.S. divisions served under French corps, French army, and French army group command. Virtually every “U.S.” engagement of World War I was in fact a Franco-American military operation. The battles waged by the FrancoAmerican forces in the summer of 1918, and in particular their magnificent counteroffensive at the Second Battle of the Marne, proved the combat efficiency of the combined Franco-American forces. The Franco-American victory at the Marne marked a major turning point in the course of the Great War and demonstrated the significance of the Franco-American military contribution to the Allied war effort in 1918. Although the French exercised command over U.S. divisions, during the course of the war, the French also provided
1228
WORLD WAR II
the Americans with ever greater authority as they supported the development and deployment of an autonomous U.S. force responsible for its own sector of the Western Front. When the U.S. 1st Army was formally organized in the late summer of 1918, it was a Franco-American force, containing French divisions, French artillery batteries, French armored units, and French aircraft. In addition, all its operations were supported by, and waged in conjunction with, French armies fighting in support of its operations at every step. During the Great War the people of the United States viewed France as a fellow democracy in a world still dominated by monarchies, and they held a deep respect for the historical and contemporary achievements of the French army and its leaders. Americans also cherished the remembrance of how French assistance during the American Revolution had been a decisive factor in the winning of independence for the United States. The French people in turn saw the United States as not only a fellow democracy but also as their deliverers at a time when their nation seemed to be on the verge of collapse. U.S. soldiers respected the experience and professionalism of their French trainers, and the French admired the enthusiasm and fighting abilities of the Americans. The commander of the AEF, General John J. Pershing, became good friends with his French counterpart, General Philippe Pétain, and their personal relationship did much to help promote a harmonious rapport between the two armies. The friendship between the people and armies of the two republics was based on a mutual respect and mutual appreciation for the abilities and accomplishments of the other.
After the war was over, political differences arose between the U.S. and French governments over a host of issues related to the treatment of a now defeated Germany and the U.S. commitment to occupation of the Rhineland and the long-term security of France. The relationship forged between the nation’s armies on the battlefield began to fall apart over these political differences, and the American people soon evinced an overwhelming desire to end their involvement in European affairs. Although the friendship of the United States with France during the First World War ended on a sour note in the new political environment of the 1920s, it should not be forgotten that during the war itself the two nations were extremely close, and there was an especially strong bond between the armies of the two nations that had been forged on the battlefields of the Western Front. Robert B. Bruce See also: Wilson, Woodrow; World War II. References Bruce, Robert B. A Fraternity of Arms: America & France in the Great War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. Kaspi, André. Le Temps des Américains. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1976.
WORLD WAR II As a name for the 1939–1945 conflict, “World War II” assumes that the war of 1914–1918 was really the first world war. However, there were earlier global conflicts, such as the 1756–1763 French and Indian War, which France fought in Europe, Asia, and North America. Sometimes seen as a second “German” war, the 1939–1945 conflict has been depicted as
WORLD WAR II
the continuation of a German quest for world power begun in 1914. What is commonly called the Second World War began officially with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. After a rapid victory over Poland, which they divided with the Soviet Union, the Germans in the spring of 1940 took Denmark and Norway, then attacked in the West, conquering the Low Countries and France. Britain then stood alone against a Continent dominated by the Germans and their ally Italy. Unable to mount an invasion of Britain, the Germans launched air raids in the summer of 1940, but the British held out while battling the Italians in North Africa. In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and in December the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. By 1945, the combined force of the Allies (Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States) prevailed, but not before the war had been carried to almost all parts of the world, millions of civilians had been killed, notably in the Holocaust, and atomic weapons had been used against Japan. The Allied victory was followed by the cold war, in which Europe and much of the rest of the world was divided into two blocs, dominated by the United States and Soviet Russia. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the cold war, whereas Germany and Italy, once defeated, were reborn to become major players, with France, in a reorganized European Union, and Japan developed one of the largest economies in the world. In keeping with the theme of this encyclopedia, however, this article focuses on the French Atlantic, which played a critical role in the evolution of World War II because Hitler missed several critical opportunities there in the summer of 1940.
1229
For France, the wartime period began meaningfully with the 1938 Munich agreement, which transferred the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany and reestablished the German supremacy in central Europe, which had been interrupted by the defeat of 1918. Once again, Germany became a threat to France. On August 23, 1939, Germany signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, freeing the German eastern flank for an attack on Poland, which came a week later (September 1). The German conquest of Poland was followed by relative inaction on the Western Front as the French sat behind their defensive fortifications on the Maginot Line and the Germans waited for an opportune moment to attack. Known in France as the drôle de guerre (phony war), the inaction in the west ended with a German offensive on May 10, 1940. Within six weeks, the Germans had overrun the Low Countries and much of northern France by skirting the Maginot Line and using coordinated air and tank attacks to pierce the French lines. The Germans took 1.5 million French soldiers prisoner. Marshal Philippe Pétain, France’s World War I Battle of Verdun hero (1916), formed a government and asked for an armistice, which was signed on June 22, 1940, at Hitler’s order in the same railway car at Rethondes, in northern France, that had been the scene of the signing of the November 1918 armistice. Two days later, a Franco-Italian armistice was also signed. France was divided into a German occupied zone in the North and West and an unoccupied or “free” zone of about twofifths of France in the South. The French were allowed to maintain control of their fleet, still undefeated and second in strength only to the British in Europe, and
1230
WORLD WAR II
of the empire, provided these were not used against the Axis (Germany, Italy, and Japan). Alsace and Lorraine, lost by Germany to France in 1918, were reannexed in 1940 by Germany. The Italians were given an occupation zone in the Southeast. In November 1942, the Allies landed in French North Africa and the Germans responded by occupying the “free zone”; at the same time, the French scuttled their navy to avoid losing control of it. The Italian occupation zone in the Southeast was extended. With Paris in the occupied zone in June 1940, the French government moved to Vichy, and the Third Republic government voted full power to Pétain to create a new state; this came to be known as the Etat Français (French State) or, simply, “Vichy.” The Vichy government proclaimed a “National Revolution” to create a more authoritarian France, more suited to a Europe dominated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, though as much inspired by the Spain of General Francisco Franco and domestic right-wing political thought as by the Axis powers. France was to be purged of what the new leaders saw as the republic’s amoral materialism and political undesirables, namely Communists, Freemasons, and Jews. In October, Vichy enacted the first of several anti-Jewish laws; these led ultimately to French collaboration in the Holocaust. General Charles de Gaulle refused to accept the 1940 defeat, and while in London exile he created Free France, an umbrella organization for resistance against the Axis throughout France and the empire. On June 28, the British recognized him as head of Free France, and in September the Free French attempted, unsuc-
cessfully, to capture Dakar, in West Africa, from the Vichy authorities. On September 26, Japanese forces entered Indochina, a colony that neither of the French factions was able to protect. By November, the French enclaves in India, Tahiti, and all of French Equatorial Africa had joined Free France. A combined British and Free French force ousted the Vichy authorities from Lebanon and Syria in July 1941. In December, a surprise raid by the Free French took control from the Vichy authorities of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, off the coast of Canada. With the November 1942 Allied landings, the North African territories also went over to the Free French, renamed “Fighting France” the previous July. Late 1942 through early 1943 marked a turning point in the war as the British stopped a German advance at El Alamein in Egypt, the Americans thwarted a Japanese raid and destroyed much of the Imperial air force at Midway, and the Soviets stopped the Germans at Stalingrad. In July 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily, leading to an invasion on the Italian peninsula and the overthrow of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. The Italian occupation zone in southeastern France was taken over by the Germans in August, and Corsica, occupied by the Italians in November 1942, was liberated in October 1943. On June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy constituted the largest amphibious operation yet seen in the history of warfare and was followed by the liberation of Paris on August 25 and the expulsion of the Germans from almost all France by the beginning of September. Charles de Gaulle took over as the head of a provisional government in Paris and brought France actively into the final
WORLD WAR II
campaign against Axis forces in Europe, which ended with the German surrender on May 8, 1945. Despite U.S. ambivalence, the French were given back all their colonies and later a role in the postwar occupation and reconstruction of Germany. Within weeks of Japan’s surrender (August 15), Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent, setting the stage for a colonial war that ended only with the defeat of France in 1954. De Gaulle, disillusioned with the reemergence of the Third Republic’s politics as usual, resigned in January 1946. The German rout of the French in 1940 proved to be a costly victory, in large part because of the shortsightedness of Hitler and his entourage. Despite—or perhaps because of—the speed of their victory, and in their rush to conclude an armistice and humiliate the French at Rethondes, the Germans had not fully considered the various options presented by their success. Hitler’s policy had been simply to neutralize France and force Britain out of the war, freeing him for an attack against Soviet Russia. The German leaders seem to have contemplated a repeat of their 1914 strategy, which was to knock the French out of the war, then move against Russia. With the German victory in 1940, however, Admiral Erich Raeder argued for a Mediterranean strategy of going through Spain into Gibraltar and North Africa, cutting Britain off from most of its empire. Had the Germans moved immediately, General Franco of Spain might have had to reach an accord with them. There is evidence to show that Franco was ready to enter the war on Germany’s side in June, but Hitler did not pursue this option. With Spain on the Axis side, the Germans could have used the
1231
Spanish islands in the Atlantic against Britain. By stopping their offensive when it was in high gear and accepting an armistice with the French, the Germans missed a chance to settle things decisively in the West. Had the French continued to fight from North Africa, which General de Gaulle favored in 1940, rather than so quickly requesting an armistice, the Germans might have been forced to adopt a more concerted and ultimately successful Mediterranean plan. Conversely, the shortsighted spite of the German leaders, so eager to avenge what they considered the humiliation of 1918, prevented them from making a generous peace with the French, which might have left France a contented continental partner cut off from Britain. Either a more generous arrangement with the French or a more thoroughgoing takeover, on the Polish model, might have cut the British Empire and freed the Germans for their planned offensive in the East. By permitting the existence of a semiautonomous and truncated France in 1940, the Germans cast away the potentialities of their own victory by failing to make it permanent. German mistakes in 1940 do not mean that Pétain and his Vichy supporters foresaw eventual Axis defeat and were acting from a shrewd vision to spare France for the present so that it could later victoriously resume hostilities, the “shield-sword” argument (Pétain the shield, de Gaulle the sword) made by Pétain at his 1945 trial and subsequent Vichy apologists. Available evidence indicates that Pétain and his supporters fully anticipated a German victory in 1940. The armistice conditions were harsh, but Vichy retained some autonomy
1232
WORLD WAR II
as it controlled the unoccupied zone, the fleet, and the overseas empire. France was given neither a real peace nor eliminated as a factor in international affairs. Because of their agreement with France, which also meant supporting Pétain’s government, the Germans were unable to make an agreement with Spain that would have enabled them to take Gibraltar and close the western Mediterranean to the British, in large measure because Hitler was unwilling to give French territory in Africa to Spain. Nor was Hitler willing to make the concessions that might have induced the French into joining the Axis. In the summer of 1940, the French foreign minister, Paul Baudouin, warned the Spanish about German expansionist plans in North Africa, and later that year Pétain warned Franco about Hitler’s designs on Gibraltar. Unwilling to cede French territory in Africa to Spain, Hitler, paradoxically, proved willing to allow Japan to march into French Indochina. This encouraged the Japanese to turn their expansion plans south rather than north, and they attacked the United States instead of the Soviet Union. Had Japan invaded Soviet Russia in 1941, drawing Soviet troops away from the defense of Moscow and Leningrad, the war could have ended differently. Had French military forces, including those held in German captivity, been sent to Indochina following Germany’s victory in 1940, the Japanese might have been pushed into a northern strategy against Russia, leading to a different result for World War II. Precluded from Indochina, the Japanese could not have adopted a southern strategy, which might have kept them from attacking the United States. In the sequence of German errors, the French role turns out to be more pivotal
than they realized. Rethondes lured the Japanese into attacking the wrong place and prevented the Spanish from coming to Germany’s aid—this was the real significance of Vichy. It is unlikely that the magnitude of the German errors at Rethondes and its consequences were understood by Pétain and the other Vichy leaders, who must be evaluated on the basis of their intentions and what they did, given the circumstances of their time. With the loss of the unoccupied zone, the fleet, and the overseas empire in November 1942, Vichy was deprived of the leverage it had. The Allied conquest of the French empire in North Africa brought home to many in metropolitan France the realization that Germany might indeed lose the war. It highlighted the failure of the Germans to develop an effective Mediterranean strategy while fighting in Soviet Russia and provided a base on French territory for General de Gaulle’s Free France, which was able to move to Algiers from London. By early 1944, the Vichy government had become virtually a fascist state with its paramilitary organizations waging open warfare in collaboration with the Germans against the increasingly wellorganized resistance. Vichy forces fought the resistance and hunted Jews, Communists, and Freemasons in a Franco-French civil war, while resistance activists assassinated those accused of collaboration with Vichy and the Germans. The liberation of France in the summer of 1944 brought a purge of Vichyites, the severity of which is still debated in France more than half a century after the events. Despite the unquestioned harshness of the 1940 armistice terms and the heavy exactions from occupied France for the German war effort, there has been no full accounting of the real cost of Germany’s
WORLD WAR II
1233
Crowds of French patriots line the Champs Elysées to view Allied tanks and half-tracks passing through the Arc du Triomphe after Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944. (Library of Congress)
occupation of France in terms of resources diverted and missed opportunities. After World War II, France lost great power status in a cold war dominated by the United States and Russia. The French also lost most of their empire, culminating with the independence of Algeria in 1962. However, the birthrate rose, women received the vote, France linked up with the emerging Common Market (now European Union) in the late 1950s, and the country enjoyed unprecedented prosperity built during what is now called les trente glorieuses (the thirty glorious) years of economic expansion, from the liberation through the oil crisis of 1973–1974. Bertram M. Gordon
See also: Foreign Policy, 1945–Present; Gaulle, General Charles de; SaintPierre et Miquelon; World War I. References Blumenthal, Henry. Illusion and Reality in Franco-American Diplomacy, 1914–1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. Hurstfield, Julian G. America and the French Nation 1939–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Nettelbeck, Colin W. Forever French: Exile in the United States 1939–1945. New York: Berg, 1991. Rossi, Mario. Roosevelt and the French. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993. Young, Robert. France and the Origins of the Second World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
1234
WRIGHT, RICHARD
WRIGHT, RICHARD (1908–1960) American writer. The birth of Richard Nathaniel Wright in Rucker’s Plantation, Mississippi, was noted only in the family Bible kept by his Seventh Day Adventist mother, a stern schoolteacher. The event was not officially recorded by the authorities any more than by his illiterate sharecropper father. From this unheralded beginning as the grandson of four former slaves, after two of whom he was named, Wright became the first bestselling African American writer and the first of his race to end the segregation within the Library of America. In his fiction and many other publications, the mature Wright added new meanings to his adolescent request as recalled in his memoir Black Boy: “Will you please let this nigger boy have some books.” Self-taught Richard Wright was perhaps the first black to claim his birthright to borrow from the U.S. literary pantheon; he certainly became the first to return and take his own place later in that same library. Wright’s long journey led him to crisscross the Black Belt, fleeing domestic violence across backwater Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas to Chicago and finally to New York. But his home country was no more the promised land than had been his hometown. France, with its enlightened liberalism toward blacks, beginning with Alexandre Dumas, had attracted him long before 1940. In the 1930s, he had discovered Marcel Proust, admired André Malraux, followed André Gide, and studied Louis Aragon. But his finances and then the war precluded a visit. After the immediate success of Black Boy (1945) brought economic security, he corre-
Portrait of Richard Wright, 1939. After his definitive emigration to France in June 1947, Wright was reductively labeled a black existentialist. (Library of Congress)
sponded with Gertrude Stein, met Sartre the following year in New York, and arrived in Paris in May at the invitation of the French government. In touring the city on the way to his hotel, he was overwhelmed by its gentle beauty. He was feted by not just the government but his publishers (Gaston Gallimard, Albin Michel) and the literati (Sylvia Beach, André Gide, Albert Camus, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and others). After his definitive emigration to France in June 1947, he was reductively labeled a black existentialist. Concurrently, his inspiration and productivity in fiction, not to mention his visibility and reputation in the United States, began a steep decline.
WRIGHT, RICHARD
From this period dates also the film version of Native Son (1951) by the Jewish French director Pierre Chenal, who had survived the war by fleeing to Argentina. When politics blocked filming in Europe, the movie was shot on location in Chicago and then in Buenos Aires. Starring Wright himself as Bigger, Sangre Negra was an immediate hit in Argentina. In the United States, where the film was massively edited and sometimes prohibited, it failed, largely because of amateurish acting and excessive cutting. Although well received at the Venice Film Festival and successful across Italy and elsewhere in Europe, it never was
1235
released in France. Wright died suddenly of a heart attack on November 28, 1960. Roy Rosenstein See also: Argentina; Beach, Sylvia; Camus, Albert; Césaire, Aimé; Chicago; Cinema, 1945 to the Present; Dumas, Alexandre; Literary Relations; Malraux, André; Mississippi; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Stein, Gertrude. References Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Morrow, 1973. ———. “Richard Wright: An Intellectual in Exile.” From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991: 175–194.
Y YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE (MARGUERITE ANTOINETTE JEANNE MARIE GHISLAINE CLEENEWERCK DE CRAYENCOUR) (1903–1987) Poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, and translator, born in Brussels on June 8, 1903. Yourcenar’s Belgian mother died of puerperal fever and peritonitis shortly after the birth. Marguerite traveled extensively with her French father and was educated by him with the help of private tutors. This privileged education not only strengthened the father-daughter bond but also exposed the young Marguerite to a wide variety of literary and cultural influences; this laid the foundations of the eclecticism that is reflected throughout her work. Her father supported her work on her first novel, Alexis ou le traité du vain combat (1929), in which the eponymous narrator discusses his sexuality in an extended letter to his young wife. Marguerite’s father died in 1929, shortly before Alexis was published to critical acclaim. Alone for the first time, but now an established author, Yourcenar continued to combine travel and writing. Her visits to Italy gave rise to Denier du rêve/A Coin in Nine Hands, a work set in fascist Italy that she published as a novel in
1934 and later adapted for the theater; a stay in Greece in 1935 in the company of the poet Embiricos inspired her to start work on Feux/Fires (1936). Fame led to new connections; in 1937, Yourcenar met Virginia Woolf in London to discuss the former’s translation of The Waves into French. Soon after the outbreak of World War II, Yourcenar accepted an invitation to visit her friend Grace Frick in the United States; Grace subsequently translated several of her works into English and became her lifelong partner. Yourcenar adopted U.S. citizenship in 1947. After 1950, Yourcenar and Frick moved to Mount Desert Island (Maine) to a house they named “Petite Plaisance.” This later period saw the publication of two major novels in which the author’s erudition is impressively reflected. In 1951, Mémoires d’Hadrien/ Memoirs of Hadrian appeared after a gestation of more than twenty-five years. This work, which many consider to be the author’s finest, marked a return to the epistolary genre that she had used so effectively in her first novel. Yourcenar’s Hadrian addresses his memoirs to his successor Marcus Aurelius, explaining his many insights into statecraft and human nature, and celebrates his love for a Greek youth. In the 1950s, Yourcenar also started work on
1237
1238
YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE
L’Œuvre au noir/The Abyss (1968) in which she vividly imagines the life of a Renaissance doctor. She was elected to the Royal Belgian Academy in 1969. In 1978, Yourcenar met a young man, Jerry Wilson, who was to play an important role in her life, especially as Grace died from cancer in 1979. After Grace’s death, Yourcenar began to travel extensively once again and was generally accompanied by Jerry, who was to remain close to her until he died of AIDS in 1986. In 1981, Yourcenar became the first woman to be elected to the French Academy, and in 1986 she was awarded the French Legion of Honor. Toward the end of her life, the author decided to write her autobiography; the third and final volume
was not yet complete when she died in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on December 17, 1987. Her papers were donated to Harvard University to be made available to the public at the Houghton Library. Ana Medeiros See also: AIDS; Feminisms; Literary Relations; World War II. References Sarde, Michèle. Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar. Paris: Laffont, 1995. Savigneau, Josyanne. Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life. Trans. Joan E. Howard. Chicago: UCP, 1993. Yourcenar, Marguerite. With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980.
Z ZOBEL, JOSEPH (1915–) Martinican author. Born into a family of modest means in Rivière-Salée in the south of Martinique in 1915, Joseph Zobel is one of the most enduring figures of French Caribbean culture. A contemporary of Aimé Césaire, Zobel’s work has never received the same acclaim as Césaire’s, which is due in large part to the less revolutionary, more quietly insistent tone of Zobel’s writing. Nevertheless, when Zobel’s first novel, Diab’la (which Césaire encouraged him to write), was published in 1942, it was quickly banned by the Vichy regime, which considered its story of a peasant who seeks liberation through working the land to contain an implicit critique of the political, economic, and social system put in place by the French colonial administration. Zobel left Martinique in 1946 for France, where he stayed at Fontainebleau, teaching at the Lycée François Ier, while at the same time following courses in literature, theater, and ethnology. Zobel’s second novel, La Rue Cases-Nègres/Black Shack Alley (1950), is certainly his most popular and well-known work. Through its presentation of the situation of poor rural Martinicans living and working on a plantation in the early part of the
twentieth century, the novel constitutes a persuasive critique of a system that had changed little since the abolition of slavery. Moreover, in the protagonist José Hassam’s experiences of education, and his movement from the plantation across small towns and to the capital Fort-de-France, the novel constructs an intricate model of the social, racial, and economic tensions of colonial Martinique. La Rue Cases-Nègres has attracted an even wider audience through the success of Euzhan Palcy’s 1983 film of the book. In 1957, Zobel relocated to Senegal, where he worked on various teaching development posts. Some of his experiences in Senegal are related in his 1982 collection of short stories, Et si la mer n’était pas bleue (“And If the Sea Weren’t Blue”). His retirement took him not to Martinique but to the south of France, where he has continued to write prose and also developed various other skills such as sculpture, drawing, and Japanese floral art. Perhaps most notably, he has also published collections of poetry, Poèmes de moi-même (“Poems of Myself,”1984) and Poèmes d’amour et de silence (“Poems of Love and Silence,”1994), which bring together poetry, extracts from his diaries, and some of his drawings. A documentary film on Zobel’s life, Joseph
1239
1240
ZOLA, EMILE
Zobel: D’amour et de silence, was made in 1998 by Kamel Kezadri and Olivier Codol. If Zobel’s literary vision has remained firmly focused on the rural Martinique of childhood, he has nonetheless been a reliable and perceptive chronicler of this bittersweet time and has lived and apparently resolved the tensions that have traditionally pulled Antillean sense of belonging between the triangular points of the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. Martin Munro See also: Antislavery Movements; Césaire, Aimé; Martinique; Palcy, Euzhan; Slavery; World War II. References César, Sylvie. La Rue Cases-Nègres: du roman au film. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994. Kande, Sylvie. “Renunciation and Victory in Black Shack Alley.” Research in African Literatures 25, no. 2 (1994): 33–50. Ormerod, Beverley. Chap. 3 in An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel. London: Heinemann, 1985. French author Emile Zola. Created between 1880 and 1902. (Library of Congress)
ZOLA, EMILE (1840–1902) French author, born in Paris in 1840. Emile Zola had visited London and spent a year’s exile from French justice in the Home Counties, but never physically arrived in the United States. His books, however, emphatically did: in the twenty-two years following 1878 and the first English translation of one of his novels (Hélène: A Love Episode, by Mary Neal Sherwood), thirty-one publishers brought out 180 American editions of his novels and short stories, reprints excluded, although heavy, “deodorizing” excisions were invariably practiced; such strong meat as L’Assommoir (translated by Sherwood under a “Sandian” male pseudonym in 1879) was a particular
casualty. Nor were they distinguished by a high degree of accuracy if the example in Germinal of “a quart of beer” for “un quart de beurre” is anything to go by. Albert J. Salvan provides a useful periodization of Zola’s literary reception in the United States. From 1880 to 1886, there was much violent criticism of the crudity and “immorality” of the subject matter of literary naturalism, with even a writer and acquaintance such as Henry James far less likely to take up the aesthetic cudgels on his behalf than, say, the Irishman George Moore. From 1886 to his death, with well
ZOLA, EMILE
over half his oeuvre having now appeared, readers and critics were more willing to be subjugated by the pulsing vitality of Zola’s forceful and coherent world vision, one unmatched by any U.S. novelist of the time. His somewhat muddled and ham-fisted appropriation of science did him no harm at all in the eyes of a like-minded readership. After his death in 1902, an iconic reputation enhanced by the passionate polemic of J’Accuse . . . ! was assured, although the vogue for his work that had been nourished by a regular output, swiftly translated, began to die down. Naturalism lived on in the United States in the homegrown products of Crane, Norris, and Dreiser. Zola’s documentary-based realism has received a ringing endorsement from Tom Wolfe, in his preface to The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Having found Thackeray’s Vanity Fair too sophisticated to be the model for his multistranded big-city novel, he enthuses over how Honoré de Balzac and Zola treated Paris, and Charles Dickens, London. Zola’s willingness to get his hands dirty in the service of his art results in the characterization (not too strong a word) of the pit pony Bataille in Germinal, which Wolfe holds up as one of the supreme moments in French literature, and then calls for a brigade of Zolas to take U.S. literature out of its current pale state.
1241
As cinematic property, Zola’s novels were assimilated into the American canon in the shape of adaptations such as Dorothy Arzner’s 1934 Lady of the Boulevards (Nana) and Human Desire (1954) the interesting, though flawed, film noir remake of Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine by Fritz Lang starring Glenn Ford. More significant, perhaps, is the biopic treatment accorded in the thirties to Zola’s championing of Alfred Dreyfus in J’Accuse . . . !, the open letter to the president of the Republic, Félix Faure, which caused a sensation when published in L’Aurore of January 13, 1898. The Life of Emile Zola (1937), directed by William Dieterle, is in no sense diachronic, but it is largely a dramatization of this crucial period; starring Paul Muni, it was the recipient of three Oscars, including that of best picture. Geoff Woollen See also: Dreyfus Case; James, Henry; Renoir, Jean. References King, Graham. Garden of Zola: Emile Zola and His Novels for English Readers. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1978. Salvan, Albert J. Zola aux Etats-Unis. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1943. Wolfe, Tom. “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” Preface to The Bonfire of the Vanities. London: Picador, 1990: vii–xxx.
INDEX Note: bold page numbers indicate main encyclopedia entries; italic page numbers indicate pictures. A Bout de souffle, 267–278, 523, 1061–1062 A Nous LaLliberté, 261–262, 271 “A Santiago,” 851 A Travers Les Vents, 259 Abbaye de Créteil, 394, 402, 520 Abbittibbi, 367 Abbott, Berenice, 95, 96, 422, 930–931 Abdul-Wahad, Tariq, 1086–1087 Abenakis and French and Indian War, 598 and Maine, 754, 1216 Abolition. See Antislavery movements Absalom, Absalom!, 869 Abstract art, 519, 520, 781 Académie des Lettres du Québec, 137 Académie française, 684 and Green, 531 Académie Royale de Danse, 343 Académie Royale de Musique, 343 Acadia, xxxi, 49–55, 50 and Champlain, 239 and cotton, 305 deportation of French from, xxxiii, 860
and exile (grand dérangement), 51, 208 map, 52 See also Cajuns; Maillet, Antonine; Mons, Pierre Dugua de; Nova Scotia Acadian Renaissance, 53 Acadie, 689 L’Acadie, 925 Accentus, 847 The Accursed Share, 128 Acolapissas, 172 Act of Union (Canada, 1840), 961 Action Française, 148, 315, 612, 771 Actuel, 309 ACT-UP, 59 Ad Vielle Que Pourra, 848 Adam, Paul, 55–56, 1152 Adams, Ansel, 95, 96, 930 Adams, Bryan, 503 Adams, Henry Brooks, 56–57, 1142 Adams, John, 38, 56, 57–58, 58 on constitutions, 989 and Jefferson, 58 and Quasi War/XYZ Affair, 459, 485–486 Adams, John Quincy, 56, 58 Adams-Onís Treaty, 817 Adderley, Julian “Cannonball,” 351 A. D. G., 321 Adieu Babylone, 642 Adiós Nonino, 932 Adjani, Isabelle, 149
1243
Aerospace. See Space technology Aérospatiale, 106, 107 L’Affaire Toulaév, 1064 Africa, and Exposition Coloniale, 425–426 L’Africain du Groenland, 1153 African Americans postwar era, 840 soldiers in France, 42 See also Jazz; Slavery African trilogy, 297 L’Afrique fantôme, 710 Agaguk, 1131 The Age of Innocence, 1210 The Age of Reason, 485, 905 Agee, James, 422 Agence nationale de valorisation de la recherche, 13 Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation, 14–15 AIDS, 7, 59–61, 512. See also Gay movement Ainsi Parla L’Oncle, 23, 1196 Air France, 108, 294 Airbus, 106, 107–108, 291 Aladdin’s Lamp, 275 Alain (Emile Chartier), 530 Alancar, José de, 527 Alberta, 61–62 map, 62 Alberta, University of, 62 Alcântra Machado, António de, 188 Alex, Joe, 113 Alexander, William, 50, 887
1244
INDEX
Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 24, 62–63, 364, 366 and Breton, 555 on Dessalines, 370 and Lam, 676 Alexis ou le traité du vain combat, 1237 Algeria, 325 and Fanon, 430, 431 and oil, 413 and U.S. policy, 465 Algerian War of Independence, xxxvi, 429, 510, 881, 1065 Algonquins, 240, 753 and Champlain, 672, 673 and French and Indian War, 598 and Marquette, 773 and Quebec, 960 Algren, Nelson, 138, 139 Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (U.S.), 38, 58 Alien Resurrection, 623 Allah Superstar, 879–880 Allar, André-Joseph, 29 Allégret, Marc, 631 and Maria Chapdelaine, 768, 769–770 Allégret, Yves, 440–441 Allen, Woody, 63–64 Allende, Salvador, 34, 254, 255 and Neruda, 860 Alline, Henry, 73 Allouez, Claude, 810, 1225 Allward, Walter Seymour, 1058 Almond, Paul, 199 Alphaville, 298 Altazor o el viaje en paracaídas, 583 Althusser, Louis, 205 Altman, Robert, 577 Alvin, 955, 956 Amade, Louis, 140 Amaral, Tarsila do, 32–33, 34, 907 and Cendrars, 232, 907 L’Amazone, 187 Amélie, 623–624 America, 131, 133 America the Menace. See Scènes de la vie future
Un Américain peu tranquille, 662 The American, 610–611 The American Cancer, 76 American Civil War, xxxiv, 39, 40, 64–69 and balloons, 115–117 and DuPont, 401 and France, 152–153, 460–461 and Hugo, 815–816 and R. Tremblay, 1158–1159 American Emergency Rescue Committee, 192 American Fur Company, 635 An American in Paris, 216–217, 642, 644, 645, 846, 1144 American Relief Committee, 489 American Revolution, xxxiii, 7, 38, 39, 69–73 and emigration from U.S. into Canada, 860–861 and La Pérouse, 655 and Lorimier, 733 and Rochambeau, 1003–1004 See also Deane, Silas; Franklin, Benjamin; Jefferson, Thomas; Jones, John Paul; Lafayette, Marquis de; Washington, George American Tobacco Company, 1137 American War of Independence. See American Revolution Amerika, 1066–1067 Amerindians. See Native Americans “Amérique,” 580 L’Amérique au jour le jour, 138–139 L’Amérique insolite, 980 L’Amérique saigne, 419 Amériques, 1176 Amherst, Jeffrey, 481–482, 717, 737 Amila, John (Jean), 319, 320 El Amor en los tiempos del cólera, 502
El Amor no es amado, 150 Amour, colère, folie, 249 L’Amour en relief, 573 L’An 2440, 1170 Anabase, 1035–1036 Anarcho-syndicalism, 193 Anchors Aweigh, 644 And God Created Woman . . . (English version), 1173. See also Et Dieu créa la femme . . . (French version) Andrade, Antonio Caso, 802 Andrade, Oswald de, 34, 188, 232 André, Edouard, 82 The Angel of Darkness, 1021 Angeli, René, 503 Anger, Kenneth, 105 Annapolis Royal, 888–889 Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 74 Anne, Duchess, 853 Anne of the Thousand Days, 199 Anne Trister, 943, 944 Année dernière à Marienbad, 992 Annie Hall, 63, 64 Another Country, 114 Anouilh, Jean, 394 Antheil, Georges, 846 Anthony, Richard, 44, 140 Anthony, Susan B., 436 Anthropology. See Leiris, Michel; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; Rivet, Paul Anti-Americanism, 43–46, 74–77 and automobiles, 102–103 and McDonald’s, 788 Revel on, 993–994 See also Bernanos, Georges; Segalen, Victor Antibiotics, 388 The Antiphon, 120 Anti-Semitism contemporary, 882 and Panama Affair, 914 and Vichy regime, 490 See also Dreyfus case Antislavery movements, 19, 77–79
INDEX and Benezet, 145 and Bigelow, 152 and Franklin, 475 See also Schoelcher, Victor; Slavery Anti-Slavery Society, 79 Antoine, André, 1122–1123 Antoine, Nicolas, 1059 Antônio José, 527 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 191, 583, 1081 Apostrophes, 814 Aquin, Hubert, 80–81 Aquinas, Thomas, 771 Arafat, Yasser, 516 Aragon, Louis, 102, 105, 633 and Breton, 191, 917 and Josephson, 630 and Neruda, 859–860 and Soupault, 1081 Ararat, 109 Arawak, 1042 and name Haiti, 368 Arcadie, 541 Arcand, Denys, 81–82, 880, 962 and Bluteau, 157 Archambault, Louis, 1058 Archimede, 955 L’Architecture aux Etats Unis, 85 Architecture, 33, 82–86 Buenos Aires, 89–90 See also Le Corbusier Arcos, Santiago, 254 Arden, Elizabeth, 303 Argentina, 86–90 and Basques, 126, 127 Caillois in, 206–207 and French artists, 30 map, 87 See also Tango Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 556, 919 The AristoCats, 577 Aristotle, 618 Arkansas River, xxxii, 654 Arkin, Alan, 600 Armstrong, Lance, 1088 Armstrong, Louis, 886, 981 Aron, Raymond-ClaudeFerdinand, 90–91 Arp, Hans, 104 Arrabal, Fernando, 626
Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1212 Art brut, 389 L’Art de la cuisine française au XIXème siècle, 327 Art deco, 91–92 Art et Catholicisme, 315 Art nouveau, 92–94, 93 L’Art sacré, 315 Art Student League, 178 Artaud, Antonin, 94–95, 802, 953 Arte television, 1117 Arts and crafts movement, 92–93 Arzner, Dorothy, 1241 Asselineau, Charles, 130 Assiniboia, 799 Assiniboine River, 763 Association CanadienneFrançaise de l’Alberta, 62 L’Association Québécoise du Jeune Théâtre, 1124–1125 Astaire, Fred, 109 Astérix, 284, 287, 288 Astérix satellite, 1083 At the Opera, 225 all Atala, 247–248, 875, 884, 1152 Atget, Eugène, 95–96, 422, 930–931 photo by, 96 Atlantic Charter, 273 Atlanticism, 96–97 and French Revolution, 482 and Lautréamont, 694–695 L’Atlantide, 1104–1104 Atoms of Silence, 979 Attikamègues, 960 Au Revoir les enfants, 758 Au verso du silence, 922 Aubert, François, 908 Aubry, René, 214 Auclert, Hubertine, 435 Audran, Stéphane, 235–236 Audubon, John James, 5, 98–99, 98 Augusta, Nísia Floresta Brasileira, 187–188
1245
Aulnay, Charles de Menou, sieur d’, 887 Aumont, Jean-Pierre, 263 as French Lover, 631 Auric, Georges, 275, 844 Auriol, Vincent, 400, 1191 Une Aurore boréale, 455 Aury, Louis-Michel, 99–100 Auschwitz, 449 Auster, Paul, 100–101 Autobiografías, 895 “Autobiographie Américaine,” 669 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1094, 1140–1141 Autocritique, 842 Automobiles, 101–104 G. Duhamel on, 395 and Loewy, 730 Autoroute de l’Ouest, 85 Auxiron, Joseph d’, 1092 L’Avalée des avalés, 391 Avant-gardes, 104–106 “Avec,” 108 Avedon, Richard, 123 Aviation, 106–108. See also Airbus; Boeing; Bombardier; Chanute, Octave; Concorde; Mirage; Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de The Awakening, 258, 749 Ayraud, Pierre Robert. See Boileau-Narcejac Aznavour, Charles, 11, 14, 108–109, 850 and Leyrac, 720 Aztecs, 128, 1135 Azul, 348 Babas, 309–310 Baca-Flor, Carlos, 30 Bacardi rum, 326 “Bad John,” 691 Badalamenti, Angelo, 623 Badin, Father, 646 Baillargé, François, 909 Bailyn, Bernard, 988–989 Baines, François Brunet de, 30 Baise-moi, 945 Baker, Josephine, 32, 42, 111–114, 112, 345, 954
1246
INDEX
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 5 Le Bal des Folles, 299–300 “Balade du suicidé,” 633 La Balance, 1104 Balanchine, George, 345 Baldwin, James, 114–115, 1153 and gay sexuality, 114, 512 Ball, Hugo, 104 Balladur, Edouard, 256, 821 Ballet, 342, 343–345 Ballet Suédois, 345 Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit, 616 Ballets Russes, 275, 342, 344–345, 344 344 influence on Kelly, 642, 645 Ballooning, 115–117, 116 Balzac, Honoré de, 610, 725 Bambattaa, Afrika, 570 Bande dessinée. See Comic strips Banjo: A Story without a Plot, 790–791 The Banjo Lesson, 1111 Bank of Montreal, 307 Banque de Montréal, 838 Banque générale, 289 Banque royale, 289 Banville, Théodore de, 130 Baptista de Segura, Juan, 621 Baptiste, Pierre, 1148 Le Bar des Palmistes, 409–410 Barachois, 848 El-Baradei, Mohamed, 605 Barbara (Monique Serf ), 938 Un Barbare en Asie, 804 Barbarella, 287, 456 The Barbarian Invasions. See Les Invasions barbares Barbeau, Marcel, 169 Bardot, Brigitte, 118–119, 118 and blue jeans, 361–362 and Gainsbourg, 499 and Reichenbach, 980 and Vadim, 118, 119, 1173 Barlow, Joel, 580 Barnes, Djuna, 119–120, 121
Barney, Nat(h)alie Clifford, 120, 121–122, 512 Baroncelli, Jacques de, 271 Barras, Paul, 164 Barrault, Christine, 1173 La Barre du jour, 195 Barré, Raoul, 909 Barre, Raymond, 716 Barreda, Gabino, 801–802 Barrès, Maurice, 23, 55 Barreto, Don Marino, 32 Barrin de La Galissonière, Roland-Michel, Marquis, 122–123, 477, 478 Barry, Fred, 374 Barthes, Roland, 123–124, 931, 1127, 1130 on Erté, 417 influence of Borges, 171 Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste, 124–125, 125, 314, 1060, 1090 Barton, Raymond, 250 Basketball, 1086 Basques, 125–127 and Saint Lawrence River, 1024 and Tadoussac, 1107 and whaling, 1208–1209 Basse-Terre, 661 Bastiat, Frédéric, 722 Bastide, Paul Arbousse, 187 Bastide, Roger, 34, 187 Bataille, Georges, 128, 710, 782, 953 and Caillois, 206 and jazz, 612 Bataille, Sylvia, 396 Baton Rouge, xxxii, 128–130 Battle of, 129 Battle of Algiers, 881 Battle of Antietam, 66 Battle of First Bull Run, 65 Battle of New Orleans, 866–867 and Shreve’s steamboat, 1093 Battle of Santomé, 1044 Battle of the Fishes, 782 Battle of the Plains of Abraham, 481, 673–674, 834–835, 866, 968
Battle of Waterloo, xxxiv Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 75, 130–131, 406 influence of Poe, 131, 725–726, 940 influence on Eliot, 727 on Madame Bovary, 750 Baudouin, Paul, 1232 Baudrillard, Jean, 131–133, 179, 334, 1129, 1130, 1152 on EuroDisney influence of Borges, 171 on 9/11, 882 Bauhaus, 85 Baur, Harry, 405 Bazin, André, 133–134, 205, 1206 Beach, Sylvia, 134–135 Beatles, 44 Beau Dommage, 135–136, 706 Le Beau Serge, 235 Beauchamp, Pierre, 343 Beauchemin, Yves, 136–137 Beauharnais, Alexandre de, 164 Beaujeu, Daniel de, 479 Beaujolais, Comte de, 745 Beaumarchais, Pierre Caron de, 353, 700 Beaumont, Gustave de, 1138 Beauregard, Pierre Gustave Toutant, 67 La Beauté du métis, 3, 4 The Beautiful Room Is Empty, 1213 Beauvoir, Simone de, 137–140, 138, 436, 437, 1152 and Chauvet, 249 and Sartre, 137–139, 1047, 1048–1049 Beaux-Arts style, 84, 86 Be-bop, 612–613 Bécassine, 285 Bécaud, Gilbert (François Silly), 140–141, 850 Bechet, Sidney, 111 Beckett, Samuel, 135, 1082 Bedaux, Charles Eugène, 102, 141–142 Bedaux, Fern Lombard, 141 Bedaux system, 141
INDEX Beethoven, Ludwig von, 343 “Begin the Beguine,” 143 Bégon, Michel, 1005 Begonias, 1005 Beguine, 32, 142–143 Beigbeder, Frédéric, 878, 879 Beineix, Jean-Jacques, 143–144, 149 Being and Nothingness. See L’Etre et le néant Béjart, Maurice, 345 Béké class, 17, 779 Belbenoit, René, 374 Béliveau, René-Charles, 909 Bellamy, Edward, 1171 Belle, 1005 Belle de jour, 360, 433 Belle époque and Adam, 55 and art nouveau, 92 and Brazil, 187 and Gigi, 284 La Belle Rochellaise, 411 Les Belles-Soeurs, 1124, 1125, 1157 Bello, Andrés, 254–255 Bellocq, E. J., 871 Bellon, Pierre, 1079 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 523–524, 524 Bemberg, Maria Luisa, 442 Bénard, Henry-Jean-Emile, 29 Benezet, Anthony, 144–145 Benigni, Roberto, 600 Bening, Annette, 346 Benjamin, Judah, 66 Benjamin, Walter, 95 Benjamin-Constant, JeanJoseph, 1111 Benoît, Jean, 145–146, 915 Beothuks, 960 Béranger, Anne, 214 Bérégovoy, Pierre, 821 Berenger, Jean, 1120 Beresford, Bruce, 157 Bergasse, Nicolas, 317 Berger, Michel, 938 Berger, Yves, 880 Bergier, Jean, 237 Bergman, Ingrid, 183, 625 Bergson, Henri, 802 Berlin Olympics (1936), 1086
Berlioz, Hector, 847 Bernabé, Jean, 147, 295, 316, 317 Bernanos, Georges, 76, 147–148, 188 Bernstein, Leonard, 843 Berri, Claude, 143, 267 Bertrand, Pierre, 135 Bessette, Arsène, 699 Besson, Luc, 143, 144, 149–150, 268, 625, 677 and Reno, 984 Betty Blue, 144, 381, 382 Bianciotti, Hector, 150–151 Biard, François-Auguste, 30, 31, 906–907 Biard, Pierre, 621 Biassou, Georges, 368 “La Bicyclette,” 832 Bienville, Jean-Baptiste, sieur de, 151–152, 151, 739 and establishment of New Orleans, 152, 866 and Mississippi River, 818 and Mobile, 822 Bigelow, John, 152–153, 153 Bilbao, Francisco, 254 “Bilbao Song,” 633 Bilingualism Manitoba, 765–766 Ottawa, 901 Quebec, 178 See also Francophonie, La Bill 22 (Quebec), 178 Bill 101 (Quebec), 682 Bill of Rights (U.S.), 483 Biloxi, 455, 738, 739 Binoche, Juliette, 153–154 The Birdcage, 1179–1180 The Birds of America, 99 Birkin, Jane, 499 Bishop, Maurice, 534 Bissot de Vincennes, JeanBaptiste. See Vincennes, Jean-Baptiste Bissot, sieur de Bizet, Georges, 214–216, 847 Bizot, Jean-François, 309 Black Atlantic, 4, 7 The Black Atlantic, 4 Black Boy, 1234 Black Code. See Code Noir
1247
“Black Mozart.” See SaintGeorges, Joseph Boulogne, chevalier de Black Panthers, 515, 516 Black Robe, 157 Black Skin, White Masks, 429–430, 664 Blackfoot, 763 Black-Label, 342 The Blacks, 515–516 Blair, Tony, 97, 605–606 Blais, Marie-Claire, 14, 155–156 Blanc, Louis, 1052 Blanc, Mel, 921 Blanchard, Henri-LéonPharamond, 908 Blau, Eric, 188–189, 1066 Blix, Hans, 605 Blondel, François, 1004–1005 Blondin, Charles (JeanFrançois Gravelet), 875 Blue in the Face, 101 Blue Nude, 784 Blue Riband Trophy, 106 Blueberry, 1207 Blum, Léon, 42, 43, 156, 1082 Blum-Byrnes Agreement, 156, 263–264, 267 Bluteau, Lothaire, 156–157 Bao Dai, 1191 BOAC, 294 Boas, Franz, 952 Bob le flambeur, 791 Bodet, Jaime Torres, 803 Boeing, 106, 107, 108, 294 Le Boeuf sur le toit, 845 Bogart, Humphrey, 523, 527, 573 La Boheme, 575 Boileau, Pierre Louis. See Boileau-Narcejac Boileau-Narcejac, 157–158 Bois Brûlé. See Métis Boisset, Jean-Claude, 1223 Bolduc, Louis, 818 Bolero, 143 Bolívar, Simón, 158–160, 991, 1180 and Aury, 99, 100 influence of Washington, 1204 and Miranda, 813
1248
INDEX
Bombardier, 160–161 Bombardier, Denise, 161–162 Bombardier, J.-Armand, 160 Bompland, Aimé, 159 Bompland, Hervé, 1180 Bon Dieu rit, 1031–1032 Le Bon Samaritain, 189 Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson, 162–163 Bonaparte, Jérôme, 67, 162, 163–164 Bonaparte, Jérôme Napoléon (son of Jérôme and Elizabeth), 162 Bonaparte, Joseph, 460, 1180 Bonaparte, Josephine Tascher de la Pageier de Beauharnais, 164–165 children of, 164 Houdon bust of, 580 Bonaparte, Louis Napoléon, 164 Bonaparte, Mathilde, 163 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 165–166, 165 and balloons, 115 Bolívar on, 159 and brother Jérôme, 162–163 and bureaucratization, 721–722 children of, 164–165 as consul, xxxiii and Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, 162–163 as emperor, xxxiv and end of Quasi War, 460 former supporters in Brazil, 27 Houdon bust of, 580 and Josephine, 164–165 and Lafayette, 668 and Leclerc, 704, 743–744 and Lesueur, 713 and Liancourt, 657 and Louisiana, 129 and Louisiana Purchase, 165–166, 460, 741, 743, 1099
and Miranda, 813 and restoration of slavery in Caribbean, xxxiii, 18, 78, 536, 542–543 and Saint-Domingue, 743 and Talleyrand, 1108–1109 and U.S., 39 See also Napoléon III Bonaparte, Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul (nephew of Emperor Napoléon), 163 Bonaparte, Pauline, 704 Bonfa, Luis, 32 Bonheur d’occasion, 307–308, 766, 1015 Bonhomme Richard, 628, 629 Bonjour Tristesse, 1061 Bonnat, L., 909 A Book, 120 The Book of Repulsive Women, 120 Boom generation writers (Latin America). See García Márquez, Gabriel Boone, Daniel, 733 Bordaz, Robert, 12 Bordeaux, 28, 166–169 Bordes, Gilbert, 409 Borduas, Paul-Emile, 169–170, 910 Borges, Jorge Luis, 34, 88–89, 170–171, 171, 937 and Caillois, 206–207 Les Borgès, 760 Bororo tribe, 718 Borotra, Jean, 1088 Bortaluzzi, Paolo, 214 Boscawen, Edward, 737 Bossa nova, 32 Bossu, Jean-Bernard, 172 La Bottine Souriante, 848 Bouchard, Lucien, 173 Bouchard, Michel Marc, 174–175 Bouchardon, Edmé, 95 Boucher, Denise, 634 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 175–176, 175, 187, 834, 968 and Vaudreuil, 673
Bougainvillea, 175 Boukman, Daniel (Daniel Blérald), xxxiii, 78, 176–177, 1148 Boukman Ekspereyans, 849 Boulanger, Georges, 55 Boulez, Pierre, 846, 847 Boulle, Pierre, 177–178 La Boum, 768 Bouquet, Henry, 481 Bourassa, Henri, 229 Bourassa, Robert, 178–179 Bourdelle, Antoine, 30, 1059 Bourdieu, Pierre, 179–180 Bourgeois, Louise, 180–181, 1060 Bourgeoys, Marguerite, 762, 837 Bourget, Paul, 181–182, 1152, 1167 Bourguiba, Habib, 473 Bouton, Charles Marie, 339 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 474 Bouvard, Joseph, 82 Bouygues, 86 Bovaryisme, 749 Bové, José, 788 Boxing, 1087 Boyer, Charles, 182–183 and Dalio, 340–341 as French Lover, 631 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 183–184, 554, 1044 A Boy’s Own Story, 1213 Braddock, Edward, 478–479, 897 Bradstreet, John, 480 Brands (company), 1223 Braque, Georges, 95, 315 Braudel, Fernand, 187 Brault, Michel, 161–162, 184–185, 199, 636 Braveheart, 768 Bravo, Manuel Alvárez, 803 Brazil, 185–188 and art deco, 92 and French artists, 526, 906–907 and French expatriates, 27 “French invasions,” 185 and French settlers, 27–29
INDEX map, 186 and Portuguese court, 29, 906 and positivism, 34 and soccer, 1084 Break dancing. See Hip-hop music and culture Breath, Eyes, Memory, 347 Breathless. See A Bout de souffle Brébeuf, Jean de, 587, 675 Brecht, Bertolt, 633 Bref récit, 1151 Breillat, Catherine, 945 Brel, Jacques, 188–189, 1066, 1073 Bresdin, Rodolphe, 189–190 etching by, 190 Bresson, Robert, 134 Breton, André, 23, 24, 34, 105, 190–192, 191, 1101–1103 and Aragon, 191, 917 and Benoît, 146 and Caillois, 206 and Césaire, 234 and Ernst, 415 and Fini, 442 and Haiti, 555 and Lam, 908 and Lebel, 703 and Masson, 781–782 and Mexico, 802–803 and Paz, 917 and Soupault, 1081 and Tanguy, 1110 and World War II, 192, 490 Bretton Woods Agreement, 776, 792 Briand, Aristide, 41, 462 Briand-Kellogg treaty, 41–42, 462 Bricolage, 406 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 391 Bridge over the River Kwai, 177 Bright, Susie, 946 Brillat Savarin, JeanAnthelme, 327 Brind’Amour, Yvette, 1124
Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 79, 145, 317, 483 Britain and Acadians, 888–889. See also Cajuns and New France, 865–866 Romantic movement, 884–885 space program, 1082 See also New Brunswick British Airways, 294 British North America Act, 961 Brittany, 192–194, 853. See also Saint-Malo Bronx River Parkway, 85 Brooks, Romaine, 121 Brossard, Nicole, 194–195 Brouard, Carl, 555 Brown, John, 1111 Brûlé, Etienne, 195–196, 805, 1224 as truchement and coureur de bois, 311 Brussels Treaty (1948), 856 Bryant, William Cullen, 152 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo, 196–197 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), 560 Brynner, Yul, 276 Les Bûcherons de la Manouane, 678 Buenos Aires, 89–90 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 1205 Bug-Jargal, 21, 580–581 Bugnard, Louis, 313 Bugnet, Georges, 62, 197–198 Bujold, Geneviève, 198–199 Bullitt, Thomas, 646 Bulnes, Manuel, 254 Buñuel, Luis, 105, 262 Bureau Export de la Musique Française, 852 Burgoyne, John, 71 Burk, John Daly, 624 Burke, Edmund, 905 Burnier, Michel-Antoine, 309 Burroughs, William S., 199–201, 200
1249
and Genet, 516 and Kerouac, 647 Burton, Gary, 529 Bush, George W., and administration, 37, 46, 882–883 and Iraq War, 97, 466 Bussières, Arthur de, 858 Butler, Edith, 54 Butor, Michel, 201–202, 875, 1152 Byrnes, James Francis, 43, 156 Cabet, Etienne, 203–204, 1171 Cable, George Washington, 869 Cabrel, Francis, 368 Caddo, 654 Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, xxxii, 152, 204–205, 371, 371, 806 Cadotte, Michel, 1225 Caduveo tribe, 718 Le Café, ou l’Ecossaise, 278 Café de Procope, 276 Cage, John, 105, 846, 1176 La Cage aux folles, 1179–1180 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 234–235, 1153 Cahiers du cinéma, 134, 205–206 and Chabrol, 235 and Godard, 523 on J-P Melville, 792 and Marker, 772 on Rouch, 1012 and Truffaut, 1166 on westerns, 1206 Cahokia, 594 Caillois, Roger, 88–89, 188, 206–208, 728–729 Cain, James M., 210 Cain, Joe, 822 Cajuns, 49, 208–209, 740–741 distinguished from Louisiana creoles, 330 and music, 848 Calder, Alexander, 1059, 1060, 1103, 1111
1250
INDEX
California Gold Rush, 39 Callaghan, Morley, 563 Calypso, 1161 Cambio de Piel, 491 Les Camelots du roi, 315 Camera Lucida, 123 Campos, Augusto de, 332 Camus, Albert, 209–211, 211 and Melville, 726 Camus, Marcel, 32 Canada and art deco, 92 and Catholic Church, 227 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 62 confederation, xxxiv and cotton, 305–307 derivation of word, 220, 1037 and France, 9–16 and French artists, 908, 909 and French language, 682–683 judiciary support for gay marriage, 513 postwar relations with France, 466–467 and Rochelais seagoers, 658–659 and sculpture, 1057–1058 See also Acadia; Manitoba; New Brunswick; New France; Newfoundland; Nova Scotia; Ontario; Ottawa; Quebec; Saint Lawrence River; Saskatchewan Canada Dry, 273 Canada français, 699 Canadian Council of the Humanities, 1188 Canadian Pacific Railway, 899, 1096 “La Canadienne suspendant au palmier le tombeau de son nouveau-né,” 580 Canal Plus, 86, 944, 1117 Can-Can, 577 Candide, 79
Canetti, Jacques, 705 Canto de amor a Stalingrad, 859 Canto General de Chile, 859 The Cantos, 951–952 Cape Breton Island, xxxiii, 734–735, 1155. See also Île Royale; Louisbourg Cape Cod, xxxii Cape Girardeau, 733 Capellani, Albert and Paul, 262 Capitalism, and slave trade, 1076–1077 Capra, Frank, 264 La Capricieuse, 10 Capucine (Germaine Lefebvre), 211–212 Carax, Léos, 143, 149 and Binoche, 154 Carbet, xxxi Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 34 Carême, Marie-Antonin, 327 Caribbean and Bordeaux, 166–168 and contract workers from India, xxxiv and de Gaulle, 24, 25 folk music, 848–849 and France, xxxiii, 17–26, 28 Francophone, 17 and French artists, 907 and French language, 683 and French Revolution, 486 in Hollywood films, 573–575 introduction of slavery, xxxii Nantes and trade with, 853–854 stratified society, 17–18 and Vichy regime, 23–24 See also Beguine; Guadeloupe; Martinique; Slavery; Sugar Caribbean Development Bank, 26 Caribs, xxxi and Grenada, 533
and Saint Lucia, 1028 CARICOM, 26 Carle, Gilles, 212–213, 693 and Maria Chapdelaine, 768, 770 Carlson, Carolyn, 213–214 Carmen, 214–216, 215 and habanera, 343 performance by Norman, 885 See also Jeanmaire, Zizi (Renée); Mérimée, Prosper Carmen Jones, 216 Carné, Marcel, 134, 263, 271 and Legrand, 709 and Morgan, 840 Caro, Marc, 623 Carolinas, xxxi Caron, Leslie, 216–217, 252, 284, 631–632, 643 as ballerina, 345 Carothers, Wallace, 402 Carpentier, Alejo, 217–218, 238, 1049, 1197 Carpentier, Georges, 1087 Carradine, Keith, 759 Carrefour, 85, 219 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste, 854 Carrington, Leonora, 442 Carroll, Charles, 474–475, 1138 Carroll, John, 162, 228 Carte Vermeil, 158 Carter, Jimmy, 45 Cartier, Georges Etienne, 306, 961 Cartier, Jacques, xxxi, 9, 219–222, 221, 227, 860, 865 450th anniversary celebration, 268 and François I, 473 and fur trade, 492 and Hochelaga, 837 as inspiration for Perrault, 925 and Micmacs, 754 and Roberval, 1001 and Rochelais fishermen, 658 and Saint Lawrence River, 1024
INDEX and Saint-Malo, 1036–1037 and Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, 1039 and site of Quebec City, 969 and Tadoussac, 1107 voyages to Canada, 863–864, 1151 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 222–224, 223, 422, 930–931 Casablanca, 264, 573, 576, 841, 920 Casque d’or, 1070 Cassatt, Mary, 224–225 and Degas, 355–356 painting by, 225 Cassady, Neal, 647 Castro, Fidel, 34 and Africa, 325 and Beauvoir, 139 and Debray, 354 Lam and administration of, 676 Castro, Henri, 1120 Castro, Roland, 309 Cat People, 1071, 1072, 1147 Catastrophism, 56 Catayée, Justin, 544 Catelin, Prosper, 30, 1059 Cather, Willa, 225–227, 226 Catherine de Saint Vincent, 126 Catherine, Princess of Württemberg, 162, 163 Catholic Church, 10, 227–230 in Canada, 899 and comic strips, 286–287 and spread of wine production, 1220 Catholic League, 853 Catlin, George, 39 La Cause du peuple, 696 Cayenne, xxxii Cedrón, Tata, 89 CEGEP, 13 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 102, 230–231, 1151 Céloron de Blainville, PierreJoseph, 231–232
Cendrars, Blaise (FrédéricLouis Sauser), 34, 188, 232–233, 1152 Centenario, 88 Centenary College, 683 Center for French and Francophone Studies, 295 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 43–44 Centre d’Art (Haiti), 571–572, 1058 Centre de recherche industrielle (Quebec), 13 Centre National de La Bande Dessinée et de l’Image, 284 Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 979 Centre national d’études spatiales, xxxvi, 1083 Cercle et Carré group, 907 Cercle Molière, 766 Cerrone, 851 Certeau, Michel de, 4, 233–234 Césaire, Aimé, 23, 24, 234–235, 366, 1153 and Boukman, 176 and créolité advocates, 316 on Damas, 341 and departmentalization, 537–538, 543, 780 on Firmin, 443–444 on Gratiant, 530 influence of McKay, 790 influence on Pépin, 921–922 and La Revue du monde noir, 994–995 and Lam, 676 and R. Ménil, 793–794 on Toussaint, 1150 and Tropiques, 1163 and Zobel, 1239 See also Négritude movement Césaire, Suzanne, 793–794, 1163 Cézanne, Paul, 394 CGE, 292 Chabrol, Claude, 205, 235–236, 441, 749
1251
Chagall, Marc, 315 Le Chagrin et la pitié, 1118 Chair piment, 933 Challe, Robert, 236–237 Chambers, Paul, 351 Chambertrand, Gilbert de, 22 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 25, 237–238, 295, 296, 316 Texaco, 317, 781 The Champagne Safari, 142 Champfleury, Jules, 189 Champlain, Samuel de, xxxii, 9, 238–241, 239, 860 and Brûlé, 195–196, 311 exploration of Great Lakes area, 805 as founder of New France, 864 and fur trade, 492, 864 and Hochelaga, 837 and Iroquois, 864 and Lake Champlain, 672–673, 672 and Maine Indians, 754 and Montagnais, 830 and Montreal, 424, 961 and Niagara Falls, 874–875 and Quebec City, 969 and Saint Lawrence River, 1024–1025 and Tadoussac, 1107 Les Champs magnétiques, 1081 Chandler, Asa G., 273 Chandler, Raymond, 319, 527 Chanel, Coco, 432, 433 Chanel company, 302, 303, 434 Chaney, Lon, 584 Chanson yéyé. See Yéyé music Chantiers américains, 786 Les Chants de Maldoror, 694, 1081 Chanute, Octave, 241–243, 242 Chapleau, Adolphe, 10 Chaplin, Charlie, 261–262, 575, 844, 845 on Bedaux, 142 and Cocteau, 275
1252
INDEX
Charade, 576–577 Chardère, Bernard, 947 Charlebois, Robert, 14, 243–244, 706, 851, 938 Charles, Jacques, 1112 Charles, Jean-Claude, 897 Charles, Ray, 44, 109 Charles II, King of England, 276–277, 493 Charles VIII, King of France, 853 Charles IX, King of France, 453, 454, 701 Charles X, King of France, xxxiv, 314, 745 Charles Town, Carolina, xxxii Charlevoix, Pierre-FrançoisXavier de, 244–245, 244 Charlie Hebdo, 287 Charlier, Jean-Michel, 287 Charnay, Claude-JosephDésiré, 245–246 Charrier, Jacques, 119 Charrière, Henri, 246, 374, 544–545 Charter of the Atlantic, 464 Chartier, Jean-Pierre, 440 Chartier, Pierre, 1122 Chase, Samuel, 474–475 Chastanet, Jean-Louis, 76 Chaste, Aymar de, 239 Chateaubriand, FrançoisAuguste René de, Vicomte, 39, 247–248, 247, 724–725, 1152 and Niagara Falls, 875 and term Noble Savage, 884 Chauvet, Marie, 248–250 Chauvin, Pierre, 1107 Chavannes, Puvis de, 1147 Cheap Imitation, 846 Checker, Chubby, 850 Chemetov, Paul, 33 Chenal, Pierre, 1234–1235 Cheney, Sheldon, 1123 Cherbourg, 250–251 Chéreau, Patrice, 945 Chéri-Bibi, 544–545 Cherokees, 598
Chevalier, Maurice, 251–252, 284, 575, 576, 577, 920 as French Lover, 631 influence of American big-band sound, 850 and Legrand, 709 Chèvenement, Jean-Pierre, 354, 379 Chevrolet, Louis Joseph, 101 Chiang Kai-shek, 465 Chicago, 252–253 Chickasaw, 152, 739–740 Chien-Caillou, 189 Chile, 253–255 and French artists, 30 map, 254 Chiniquy, Charles, 956 Chirac, Jacques, xxxvi, 15–16, 255–257, 256 and AIDS blood test patents, 59 and G. W. Bush, 37 and L. Bouchard, 173 and Iraq War, 97, 257, 466, 602, 605–606 and Lévesque, 716 and Madonna concert, 750–751 and Mitterrand, 750, 820–821 and Quebec, 178–179 Choctaws, 739–740 and sassafras, 329, 330 Chopin, Frédéric, 1042 Chopin, Kate (Katherine O’Flaherty), 257–259, 749, 869 Choquette, Robert, 259–260 Chouteau, Auguste, 818, 1027 Chrétien, Jean, 15 Christ the Redeemer statue (Rio de Janeiro), 92 Christie, Agatha, 318 Christie, William, 847 Christophe, Henri, 183, 260–261, 553–554, 1149 and Dessalines, 369, 370 Christopher, Warren, 490 Chronicles of the Indies, 1023 Chronique d’un été, 184, 1013
Chrysler, 928–929 Church, Henry, 1095 Churchill, Winston, 464, 1009, 1010 Cicatrices, 1023 Cicero, 618 Cien Años de soledad, 502 CII, 292 Cimino, Michael, 1207 Ciné-club movement, 205 Cinema American female stars and French culture, 1061–1062 Canadian Cooperation Project, 578 and Citroën 2CV, 102–103 direct, 184. See also Rouch, Jean Duhamel on, 395 French exile community in Hollywood (1940s), 340–341, 405, 1011 and Hollywood blacklist, 350–351 impact of Guy-Blaché, 547 mise-en-scène, 133, 144 as “septième art,” 1115 Third Cinema, 1080–1081 tradition de qualité, 205 See also Blum-Byrnes Agreement; Cahiers du cinéma; Film noir; Hollywood’s French Caribbean; Hollywood’s Paris; Hollywood’s Quebec; National Film Board of Canada; New Wave (film movement); Positif; Remakes; Westerns Cinema, 1895–1945, 41, 42, 261–265 Cinema, 1945 to the present, 265–268 Cinéma du look, 143, 144, 149–150 Cinéma vérité, 1012, 1013 Cinq Semaines en ballon, 117, 1185
INDEX La Cinquième television, 1117 Cirque du Soleil, 268–269, 269, 1125 Citadelle Laferrière, 260 La Cité des enfants perdus, 623 Cité des sciences, 381 Cité libre, 678 Le Citoyen franco-américain, 956 Citroën, André, 102, 270 Citroën (Automobiles Citroën), 270 and Michelin, 805 2CV, 102–103, 270, 1144 See also Peugeot—PSA Peugeot Citroën SA City Beautiful movement, 84 Civil unions, 513 Cixous, Hélène, 194, 439 on Lispector, 723–724 and Maximin, 787 Clair, René (René-Lucien Chomette), 262–263, 271 Clarac, Charles de, 187 Clarins, 303 Clark, George Rogers, 515, 646, 733 Clark, William, 733, 818, 819, 1027 Clarke, Kenny, 928 Clarkson, Thomas, 78, 145, 183, 260, 1078 Claudel, Paul-Louis-CharlesMarie, 31, 151, 188, 272–273, 272 Clavière, Etienne, 317 Cleaver, Eldridge, 429 Clemenceau, Georges, 37, 40, 461, 1218 Clement VIII, Pope, 220 Clement XIV, Pope, 622 Clément, René, 143 Clerc, Laurent, 1068–1069 Clerville, Nicolas de, 1004–1005 Cleveland, Grover, 1091 Les Clients du Central Hôtel, 319–320 Clinton, Bill, 45, 46, 132 and Balkan intervention, 97
and gays in the military, 513 Clinton, Henry, 71, 1004 Cloots, Anacharsis, 1142 Close, Glenn, 346 Cloutier, Suzanne, 517 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 263, 383, 440 CNES. See Centre national d’études spatiales Cobb, Jimmy, 351 Cobra, 1045 Coca-Cola Company, 273–274, 809–810 advertisement, 274 Coca-Colonization, 332 Cocciante, Richard, 502, 585 Coco, 350 Coco Lafleur, candidat, 690 Cocoanuts, 451 Cocteau, Jean, 263, 274–276, 275, 383 and Genet, 515 and jazz, 612 and Satie, 844, 846 and T. Williams, 1214–1215 Cod fishing, 444–447, 446 Code de la Nature, 1170 Code Noir, xxxii, 536, 552, 740, 778, 1076 CODOFIL. See Council for the Development of French in Louisiana Cody, William, 1205 Coeur de maman, 375 Coeurs Vaillants, 286 Coffee, 28, 276–278 Cohen, Gustave David, 279–280 Cohen, Leonard, 625, 634 Colas et Colinette, 843 Colbert, Claudette (Lily Claudette Chauchion), 182, 280–281, 281, 575–576 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, xxxii, 237, 282, 700, 810 and commercial success of New France, 865 and fur trade, 493 and La Rochelle, 657, 659 and Rochefort, 1004
1253
and Talon, 1109–1110 Colbert de Terron, Jean, 1004–1005 Colbertisme, 282, 721 technological, 291 Cold War, 465 and Marshall Plan, 775–776, 777 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette), 282–284, 283 Coligny, Gaspard de, 28, 186, 452–453, 582 Colin, Paul, 112 Collard, Nathalie, 946 Collège de Sociologie, 206 Collège du Sacré-Coeur, 1096, 1097 Collège Saint-Joseph, 52 Le Collier de ptyx, 639–640 Colombia, 159 Colonialism assimilation and association, 425–427 and Parkman’s works, 916–917 The Color of My Love, 376 Colson, Guillaume, 907 Coltrane, John, 351 Columbus, Bartholomew, 1043 Columbus, Christopher, xxxi and Grenada, 532 and Guadeloupe, 535–536 and Hispaniola, 551, 1042–1043 and Saint Lucia, 1028 and sugar, 1098 and Trinidad, 1160 Columbus, Diego, 1043 La Comédie de la mort, 189 Comédiens et amateurs, 692 Comic strips, 284–289 and Jodorowsky, 625, 626 as “neuvième art,” 1115 Comité de défense du cinéma, 156 Comité français de libération nationale (CFLN), 279, 463 “Comme d’habitude,” 852, 1073
1254
INDEX
Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, 668–669 Common Market. See European Economic Community Common Sense, 483, 903 Communauté des Habitants, 492 Communist Party, 42, 43, 45 and Breton, 191–192 and Césaire, 794 and Coca-Cola, 274 and comic strips, 286–287 and Fuentes, 491 and Huidobro, 583 and Jean, 615 and R. Ménil, 794 and Neruda, 859 and Péret, 923, 924 and Roumain, 555 and Sábato, 1021 and Sartre, 1048 and Serge, 1064 and Wright, 568–569 Compagnie des CentAssociés, 492, 864, 998 Compagnie des Iles d’Amérique, 1028 Compagnie des Indes, 289, 291, 654, 739. See also Compagnie d’Occident Compagnie des Indes orientales, 323 La Compagnie des Machines Bull (CMB), 292 Compagnie d’Occident, xxxii, 289–290, 594–595 Compagnie du Canada, 998 Compagnie du Mississippi. See Compagnie d’Occident Compagnie du Nord, 593 Compagnie du Sénégal, 290–291 Compagnie Nouvelle de Canal de Panama, xxxv Compagnies de Guinée, de l’Assiente et de SaintDomingue, 323
Company of Canada, 240 The Company of Men, 504 Company of the Hundred Associates, 241 Company of the Indies. See Compagnie des Indes Company of the West, 739 Compère Général Soleil, 63 Les Complaintes, 670 Computer technology, 291–292. See also Cyberculture The Computerization of Society, 292, 333 Comte, Auguste, 34, 255, 801–802 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 318 Concorde, 106, 107–108, 291, 292–294, 293 Condé, Maryse, 294–295, 539 La Condition postmoderne, 748 Condorcet, Marie-JeanAntoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de, 618, 620 Confederation of Catholic Trade Unions, 307 Confederation of Democratic Trade Unions, 308 Confederation of National Trade Unions, 308 Confiant, Raphaël, 295–296, 316, 317 Congés payés, 1143, 1144–1145 Congrès International d’Etudes du Canal Interocéanique, 912–913 Connolly, Horace Lorenzo, 421 Conservative Party (Quebec), 399 Considérant, Victor Prosper, 1120 Constant, Benjamin, 722 Constant, Paule, 296–297 Constantine, Eddie, 298–299 Contemporary Arts Society, 169 Contón, Edgardo, 89
Contrat Social, 987, 991, 1170 La Contre-nature de Chrysippe Tanguay, écologiste, 174 Contreras, Jesús, 1059 Cooper, James Fenimore, 725 Copeau, Jacques, 374, 632, 827, 1123–1124 Copi (Raoul Damonte), 299–300 Copland, Aaron, 843 Coppola, Francis Ford, 44–45 Corcoran, William, 83 Cordier, Henri-Louis, 30 Cordon bleu, 327 Corea, Chick, 352 Corrective Body, 996 Corlaer, Arent van, 593 Cormier, Ernest, 92 Cornell, Joseph, 1102 Cornwallis, Charles, 72, 666, 1004 El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 502 Corot, Gustave, 1182 Corsairs, 1036–1037 Cortázar, Julio, 88, 89, 300–301, 301 Cosmetics, 301–304, 302. See also L’Oréal Cosmographie universelle, 27 Costa, Lúcio, 188, 698 Costa-Gavras (Constantinos Gavras), 304–305 Côte d’Azur, 575 Côté, T. G. A., 956 Cotillion, 342, 343 Cotton, 305–308. See also Denim Cotton Comes to Harlem, 569 Coucou Bazaar, 389–390 Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, 209, 742–743 The Count of Monte Cristo, 398 Counterculture, 308–310, 309 Courbet, Jean, 130
INDEX Coureurs de bois, 6, 310–312, 594, 740, 806 and Talon, 1110 Cournand, André Frédéric, 312–313 Le Courrier des Etats-Unis, 314–315 Cousineau, François, 393 Cousteau, Jacques-Yves, 758 Coutan, Jules, 30 Couturier, Marie-Alain, O. P., 315–316 Cover Girl, 644 Cramoisy, M., 998 Crane, Hart, 422 Crawford, Joan, 578 Creationism, 583 Crédit Lyonnais, 747 Credo des sang-mêlé ou Je veux chanter la France, 531 Creek tribe, 739 Crees, 763 and Hydro-Quebec, 589–590 and michif, 798 and Quebec, 960 Saskatchewan, 1050 Creole language, 684, 687 and Bernabé, 147 and créolité, 296 in Haiti, 692 in Louisiana, 209 and Poullet, 949–950 Creoles, 17, 22 Canada, 244 Condé on, 294–295 defined, 871 Louisiana, 330, 741–742, 871 Créolité, 147, 316–317 and Condé, 295 and Martinique, 781 and Pineau, 933 similarity of Poullet’s work to, 950 See also Bernabé, Jean; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël Cresson, Edith, 821 Crèvecoeur, MichelGuillaume-Jean de, 317–318, 724–725 Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1206
Crime fiction, 318–323 adapted for the screen, 527 and Poe, 940 and Vian, 1187–1188 See also Film noir Cronenberg, David, 199 Crosby, Bing, 109 Crozat, Antoine, xxxii, 152, 323–324, 822 Crozat Company, 739 Croze, Marie-Josée, 82 Cruel Intentions, 346 Crumb, Robert, 288 CSF, 292 Cuba Academy of Fine Arts, 29, 907 and Africa, 325 Cuban Revolution, 34, 324–326 and Depestre, 364 Cubism and Duchamp, 390 and Dufy, 393 and Gleizes, 519–520 La Cueca, 760 Cuisine, 28, 326–331. See also McDonald’s; Wine cummings, e.e., 331–332, 332 Cunard line, 314 Cunha, Euclides da, 187 Cunningham, Merce, 846 Curtiz, Michael, 264 Custine, Astolphe de, 1142 Custine, Delphine de, 813 Cyana, 955, 956 Cyberculture, 45, 332–336. See also Computer technology Cycling, 1088 Cyrano de Bergerac, 336–337 Dablon, Claude, 805 Dadaism, 104–105 and Breton, 191 and Duchamp, 390–391 and Ernst, 415 and Josephson, 630 and Soupault, 1081 See also Surrealism Daeninckx, Didier, 321
1255
Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé, 339–340, 340, 929 and Niépce, 877–878 Daguerreotypes, 929–930 Daimler-Benz, 929 DaimlerChrysler Rail Systems, 160 Dakota tribe, 397 Dalí, Salvador, 105, 1103 Dalio, Marcel (Israel Moshe Blauschild), 340–341 Dallas, Alexander J., 162 Damas, Léon-Gontran, 341–342, 544, 545 Dance, 42, 342–345. See also Delsarte, François Dangerous Liaisons, 345–346 Daniel, Arnaut, 332 Daniel Johnson Dam, 589 “Dans les rues de Québec,” 1160 “Dans ma Camaro,” 938 “Danse à Saint-Dilon,” 1193 La Danse juive, 1156 Danse sauvage, 112–113 Danticat, Edwidge, 346–348 La danza inmóvil, 1056 Dard, Frédéric, 318 Darío, Rubén, 88, 348–349, 728 Dark Passage, 527 Darlan, Admiral, 462–463 Darrieux, Danielle, 182, 349–350 Dartaguette, Bernard Diron, 129 Dartaguiette, Jean-Baptiste Martin, 151–152 Darty, Paulette, 844 Darwin, Charles, 56 Dasani water, 809–810 Dassault, 106, 107 Dassin, Jules, 264, 350–351 and film noir, 440–441 Daumas, Louis-Joseph, 30, 1059 Daven, André, 112 David, Jacques-Louis, 29 David, Jean-Louis, 906 Davis, Angela, 516 Davis, Bette, 183 Davis, Jefferson, 64–66
1256
INDEX
Davis, Miles, 275–276, 351–352, 352 and Greco, 275–276, 352 and Legrand, 709 and Sartre, 352, 613 Davis Cup, 1087–1088 Davy, Jean-François, 944 Day, Dorothy, 771 Dayan, Josée, 346 D-Day, xxxv, 250–251, 250 DDT, xxxvi De Kooning, Willem, 954 De L’Egalité des races humaines, 22, 443 De Mille, Agnes, 616 De Mornay, Rebecca, 1173 De Tracy, Antoine-LouisClaude, comte Destutt, 865 Deaf people. See Sign language Deane, Silas, 352–354, 353, 904 Debray, Régis, 324, 354–355 Debré, Robert, 313 Debret, Jean-Baptiste, 30, 31, 187, 526, 906 Vendors of Tobacco, 1136 Debussy, Claude, 844 “The Decisive Moment,” 223 Declaration of Independence, xxxiii, 483, 986 and Adams, 57, 475 and Franklin, 475 and Jefferson, 475 Declaration of Sentiments, 436 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 18, 435, 482, 487, 991 and Jefferson, 620 and Lafayette, 667, 989 and Saint-Domingue, 1077 Declaration of the Rights of Woman, 435 Le Déclin, 81 Decoin, Henri, 349 Deconstruction, 365–366 Decroux, Etienne, 625 Deerskin trade, 477, 896. See also Fur trade
La Défense, 85 Defert, Daniel, 59 Le Défi américain, 333, 1065–1066 Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar, 258, 355–356 A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 356 Degotti, Ignace Eugène Marie, 339 Dejouany, Guy, 1196 Delacroix, Eugène, 130 Delacroix, René, 265 Delanoë, Bertrand, 513 Delanoë, Pierre, 140 Delaumosne, Abbé, 359 Delaunay, Charles, 612, 613 Delaware, and DuPont family, 401, 402 Delaware tribe, 478, 732, 896 Deleuze, Gilles, 7–8, 356–358, 540, 1130 and Lebel, 704 Delgrès, Louis, 21, 536, 1077–1078 Delicatessen, 623 Delsarte, François, 358–359 DeMille, Cecil B., 625 Deming, Barbara, 155 Democracy in America, 725, 1138–1139, 1152 Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, 350, 359, 360–361, 642, 645, 709 Dempsey, Jack, 1087 Demy, Jacques, 350, 359–360, 642 Deneuve, Catherine, 346, 359, 360–361, 1173 and Saint Laurent, 433 Denim, 361–363 advertising label, 362 Denis, Ferdinand, 30, 187 Denonville, Governor, 489 Depardieu, Gérard, 337, 363–364 Départements d’outre-mer. See Guadeloupe, Guiana, Martinique Depestre, René, 24, 62–63, 364–365 and Breton, 555 on Dessalines, 370 and Lam, 676 Deren, Maya, 105
Le Dernier des Justes, 1053–1055 Dernières Fiançailles, 708 Les Derniers Humains, 367 Derrida, Jacques, 46, 365–366, 438, 1128–1130 influence of Borges, 171 Des Moines, 602 Des Rosiers, Joël, 366–367 Descartes, René, 336 Description of Louisiana, 565–566 Desjardins, Richard, 367–368 Desnos, Robert, 917 Despentes, Virginie, 945 DesRochers, Alfred, 259 Desrosiers, Marie-Michèle, 135 Desrosiers, Réal, 135 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, xxxiii, 183, 368–371, 553, 1149 and Christophe, 260 and Leclerc, 704, 705 Dessalines ou la passion de l’indépendance, 937 Destouches, LouisFerdinand. See Céline, Louis-Ferdinand Detective stories. See Crime fiction Detroit, 371–372 British exit, 806–807 and Céloron de Blainville, 231–232 Fort Detroit and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 942–943 founding of, xxxii, 204, 371, 371 See also Michigan Les Deux Printemps, 615 Le Deuxiéme Sexe, 137, 139, 436 Devil’s Island, xxxv, 372–374 detention house, 373 The Dew Breaker, 347 Dewaere, Patrick, 363 Dewey, Loring D., 183 Deyglun, Henry, 374–375 DHJ, 308 Di Cavalcanti, Emiliano, 33, 907
INDEX Diab’la, 1239 Le Diable au corps, 775 Diaghilev, Sergey Pavlovich, 275, 342, 343 The Dial, 665, 951 Dialectique de l’américanisation, 691 Dialogues, 357 Dialogues de Monsieur le Baron de Lahontan et d’un sauvage, 884 Diamon, Neil, 140 Diáz, Porfirio, 802 Dictionnaire amoureux de l’Amérique, 879, 880 Diderot, Denis, 579, 722, 1170 and term Noble Savage, 884 Dieskau, General, 673, 834 Dieterle, Wilhelm, 440, 584–585 Dietrich, Marlene, 182, 275 Dillon, Clarence, 1223 Dion, Céline, 375–377, 376, 503, 962 Dior, Christian, 432 The Diorama, 339 Le Discours antillais, 522 Discours sur l’inégalité, 884, 952 Discourse on Inequality. See Discours sur l’inégalité The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, xxxi Disdéri, Adolphe-Eugène, 930 Disney Company. See Walt Disney Company Disneyland Baudrillard on, 132 and offshoots, 378 Disneyland Paris, xxxvi, 7, 86, 377–381, 1145 Baudrillard on, 334 site before construction, 378 Diva, 143–144 “La Diva de l’Empire,” 844 DJ Kool Herc, 570 Djian, Philippe, 381–382 DJ’ing. See Hip-hop music and culture Dmytryk, Edward, 350
Doelling, Marie-Louise, 692 Doisneau, Robert, 322 Domenech e Montaner, Luis, 93 Dominica, xxxii, xxxiv Dominican Republic, 554, 1043, 1044. See also Santo Domingo Dominion Textile, 307, 308 Domino thesis, 777 Don Giovanni, 551 Don Segundo Sombra, 88 Donald Duck, 785 Donen, Stanley, 642, 644 Donnacona, 220–222 Dorion, Thomas, 956 Dorléac, Françoise, 359, 360 Dormale, Bernard, 119 Dorziat, Gabrielle (Gabrielle Sigrist), 382–383 Dos Passos, John, 383–385, 384 and Cendrars, 233 and Cummings, 331 Doubrovsky, Serge, 385–386 Doucet, Clément, 845 Doucet, Jacques, 431 Doucet, Julie, 288 Doudous, 22 Douglas, Thomas. See Selkirk, Lord (Thomas Douglas) Douglass, Frederick, 443 Down There, 527 Drapeau, Jean, 12–13, 839 Dreier, Katharine, 391 Dreyfus, Alfred, 374, 387 Dreyfus case, 386–388 Drôle de Drame, 632 Drucour, Augustin de Boschenry de, 737 Drumont, Edouard, 75–76 Bernanos on, 148 A Dry White Season, 910–911 Du Cubisme, 519, 520 Du Pont, François Gravé, 830 Du Rausset, Nombre, 1043 Du Sable, Jean-Baptiste Point, 253 Dubos, René Jules, 388–389 Dubuffet, Jean, 389–390 Dubuque, Julien, 602
1257
Duchamp, Marcel, 89, 104, 390–391, 390, 630, 1101 on Calder sculpture, 1060 and Lebel, 703 and Parent, 915 and Ray, 262, 391, 976 and VVV, 415 Ducharme, Réjean, 391–392 Duchesneau, 489 Duclerc, Jean-François, 187 Dufresne, Diane, 392–393, 471 and Plamondon, 938 Dufy, Raoul, 393–394 Duguay, Rodolphe, 909 Duguay-Trouin, René, 187, 653 Duhamel, Georges, 76, 273, 394–395, 402, 1152 Duhamel, Marcel, 318–319, 396–397 Duke, James, 1137 Dullin, Charles, 827 Duluth, 397–398 Dumas, Alexandre, 398–399, 399, 725 Dumas, Alexandre (the elder), 398, 843 Dumas, Georges, 187 Dumas, Roland, 414 Dumez, 747 Dumézil, Georges, 206 Dumont, AugustinAlexandre, 30 Dumont, Gabriel, 799 Dunant, William Crapo, 101 Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet, 229, 399–400, 561, 972, 1157 DuPont, Alfred I., 401 DuPont, Eleuthère Irenée, 400 DuPont, Henry, 401, 402 DuPont, Henry A. (son of Henry), 401 DuPont, Pierre Samuel (1739–1817), 400–401, 401 DuPont, Pierre Samuel (1870–1954), 401
1258
INDEX
DuPont, Samuel, 401 DuPont family, 400–402 Dupont de Nemours, 618, 620 Duquesne, Albert, 374 Duquesne, Ange de Menneville, Marquis de, 478 Durand, Jean, 261 Durham, Lord, 10 Durham Report, 10 Durkheim, Emile, 179 Durtain, Luc (André Nepveu), 402–403 Dutch and Africa, 290 and coffee, 277 Duval, Jean, 241 Duval, Jeanne, 130 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc,” xxxvi, 25, 556, 919 Chauvet on, 249 and death of Alexis, 63 and memory of Toussaint, 1150 and Péan, 918 reporters opposing, 668 and vodun, 1196–1197 Duvalier, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” 556, 919 Duvergier de Hauranne, Ernest, 403–404 Duvergier de Hauranne, Prosper, 403 Duvivier, Julien, 263, 271, 404–405, 920 and Dalio, 340, 341 and Maria Chapdelaine, 768, 769 Dworkin, Andrea, 945 Dylan, Bob, 44, 405–407, 406, 850–851 and Lanois, 689 Dynamite Jack, 1207 East India Company, 700. See also Compagnie des Indes orientales Eastman, Max, 789–790 Les Eaux de la mémoire, 418 Eboué, Félix, 537, 994 Echenoz, Jean, 318 Ecole d’Arcueil, 845 Ecole de Brive, L’, 409–411
Ecole des Beaux-Arts Montreal, 146 Paris, 84 Ecole littéraire de Montréal, 858 Ecole nationale d’administration, 13 Ecole nationale d’administration publique, 13 Ecorché, 579 Ecrire en pays dominé, 25 L’écriture au féminin, 194–195 Ecrivains des Amériques, 641–642 Ecuador, 804, 1152 and Bolívar, 159 Ederle, Gertrude, 1085–1086 Edict of Nantes (and revocation of ), 582, 657 Edison, Thomas, 261, 930, 1137 Les Editions L’Hexagone, 814 Les Editions Tintamarre, 683 Education européenne, 503–504 The Education of Henry Adams, 56, 57 Edwards, Blake 600 EEC. See European Economic Community Egoyan, Atom, 109 Eiffel, Alexandre-Gustave, xxxv, 912, 913–914, 1060, 1090–1091 Eiffel Tower, 270, 914, 1142, 1143 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 412–413, 412 and de Gaulle, 412, 463 and “domino theory,” 465 Eisenstein, Sergei, 133 El Dorado, xxxi El Mina, Ghana, xxxi Electronic music, 1176–1178 Elf-Aquitaine (TotalFinaElf ), 413–414
Eliot, T. S., 135 French influences, 727 influence of Laforgue, 668, 669 on Mississippi River, 817–818 and Pound, 951 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 995 Ellington, Duke, 927, 982 Eloge de la créolité, 316 Eluard, Paul, 105, 415, 1110 Elvis, ballade sudiste, 409 Elvis Gratton, 414–415 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 725, 727 Emmanuelle, 944 Emparan, Vicente, 1180 L’Emploi du temps, 201 Encyclopédie raisonnée des arts et des métiers, 1170 L’Enfirouapé, 137 The English Patient, 154 Enlightenment and Chile, 254–255 and Jefferson, 618 The Enormous Room, 331 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1171 Enriquillo, Chief, 1043 Entre la mer et l’eau douce, 185, 199 D’Entre les morts, 157 Equant, 469, 470 Equiano, Olaudah, 79 and Benezet, 145 Equilbey, Laurence, 847 Eribon, Didier, 60–61 Erie Canal, 371–372 Erie tribe, 896 Ernst, Max, 415–416 415–416 Battle of the fish, 416 Erté (Romain De Tirtoff ), 417 ESA. See European Space Agency Escadrille Lafayette, 1226 Escomel, Gloria, 418 Esnambuc, Pierre Belain d’, xxxii L’Esprit des lois, 989 Essai sur les moeurs, 1199 Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, 443
INDEX Estates General. See Etats Généraux Esterhazy, Ferdinand Walsin-, 386 Estienne, Charles, 1141 Estimé, Dumarsais, 556, 1150 Et Dieu créa la femme . . . (French version), 118, 719, 1173. See also And God Created Woman . . . (English version) Etats Généraux, 630, 656 Les Etats-Unis d’Amérique, 152 Les Etats-Unis d’aujour-d’hui, 1067–1068 Ethnography. See Leiris, Michel Ethnology. See Rivet, Paul Etienne, Franck, 418–420 Etienne, Gérard, 420 Etincelles, 364 Étoffe du pays, 305 L’Etre et le néant, 1047 Etrog, Sorel, 1058 Euro Disneyland (EuroDisney). See Disneyland Paris European Coal and Steel Community, 857 European Defense Community, 792 European Economic Community, 510 and Giscard d’Estaing, 519 European Organization of Economic Cooperation, 776, 777 European Recovery Plan. See Marshall Plan European Space Agency, 1083 European Space Center. See Kourou space center Eva Peron, 299 Evangeline, 421–422, 868 Evangeline, 49, 208, 421 Evans, Bill, 352 Evans, Walker, 95, 96, 422–423, 423, 930–931 Everett, Rupert, 346
Evian water, 809 Exception culturelle, 156, 266–268, 506 and Lang, 680–681 and rock and roll, 850 Exhibitions, 944 L’Exil selon Julia, 933–934 Existentialism. See Beauvoir, Simone de; Camus, Albert; Sartre, JeanPaul Expo 67, 423–425 Exposition Coloniale (1931), 425–427, 426 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels (1925), 91 Exposition Universelle (1900), 427–428 L’Express, 1065 Exquemelin, Alexander Olivier, 935 Fabius, Laurent, 820 Fabre, Hector, 10, 971 La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo, 720 Facets to the Sun, 181 Facundo, 87–88 Fahrenheit 9/11, 880 Falardeau, Pierre, 414 Falguière, Jean-Alexandre, 1060 Falls, Robert, 828 Fanon, Frantz, 23, 25, 429–431, 430 and Beauvoir and Sartre, 139 influence of Lacan, 664 influence on Miron, 814 and Sartre, 1048 Fantastica, 213 Fantasy Island, 1195 The Farewell Symphony, 1213 A Farewell to Arms, 563 Farm Securities Administration (U.S.), 422 Fashion, 46, 431–434 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 298 Faulkner, William, 43, 321–322, 331, 726, 1131 influence of Flaubert, 749
1259
on New Orleans, 868, 869 and To Have and Have Not, 573 Fauré, Gabriel, 1047 Fauteux, Roger, 169 Fauvism and Duchamp, 390 and Dufy, 393 Fédération Internationale de Football Association, 1084 Federation of Textile Workers of Canada, 307 Fédon, Julien, 533 La Fée aux choux, 547 Les Feluettes, 174 The Feminine Mystique, 436–437 Feminisms, 7, 434–439 and Beauvoir, 139–140 and pornograpy, 944–946 See also L’écriture au féminin; Sand, George (Aurore Dupin) La Femme assise, 299 La Femme de l’hôtel, 943 Femmes échouées, 1202 Féret, Jacques, 1033–1034 Fernandel, 1207 Ferrat, Jean, 851 Ferré, Léo, 633 Ferrer, José, 337 Ferry, Jules, xxxv Fête de la Musique, 680 Fête foraine de Baie-SaintPaul, 268 Feuillade, Louis, 404 Feyder, Jacques, 262, 271 and Rosay, 1011–1012 Fictions, 88, 170 FIFA. See Fédération Internationale de Football Association Fifth Republic, xxxvi and de Gaulle, 510 and Giscard d’Estaing, 517 and Mendès, 793 and television, 1117 Le Figaro, 314 Filé, 329 Filipacchi, Daniel, 945 Filles du Roy, 439–440, 865 and Mance, 761–762
1260
INDEX
Film. See Cinema Film noir, 396, 440–441 adapted from film noir, 527–528 See also Crime fiction Fini, Leonor, 441–443, 442 Firmin, Anténor, 22, 443–444 Firth, Colin, 346 Fisher, Mary Frances Kennedy, 1143 Fishes of North America, 714 Fishing, 444–447, 446, 1155. See also La Rochelle; Newfoundland; SaintPierre et Miquelon; Whaling Fitch, John, 1092 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 134, 383–384, 447–448, 447, 1140 and Hemingway, 448, 563 Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, 447–448 Flaget, Father, 646 “Flamingo,” 927–928 Flanagan, Ralph, 846 Flanner, Janet, 448–449 Flaubert, Gustave, 610, 749 Les Fleurs du mal, 131 Les Fleurs sauvages, 708 Floch-Prigent, Loïk Le, 414 Florence, Hercules (Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence), 187, 450 Florey, Robert, 450–452 Florida, xxxi, 452–455 map, 453 as name for eastern coastline of North America, 452 See also Ribaut, Jean Florida group (aka Martín Fierro group), 88 FLQ. See Front de Libération du Québec Fluxus movement, 105 Folch-Ribas, Jacques, 455–456 Folz, Jean-Martin, 929 Fonda, Jane, 456–457, 457 and Vadim, 456, 1173 Fontaine, Joan, 631
Football. See Soccer Forbes, John, 481, 897 Forbidden Journey, 441 Force Ouvrière, 43–44 Ford, Gerald, 45 Ford, Henry, 457–458, 1137 Ford, Henry II, 458 Ford, Tom, 434 Ford, William Clay Jr., 458 Ford Motor Company, 101–102, 457–458 Fordism. See Ford, Henry; Ford Motor Company Foreign policy, 1776–1945, 37, 458–463 Foreign policy, 1945–present, 37, 464–468 The Foreign Student, 662 Forest, Jean-Claude, 287 Forestier, Jean-Claude Nicolas, 82 La Forét, 197, 198 Forget Paris, 577 Forman, Milos, 346 Forsmann, W., 313 Fort Caroline, 701 Fort Crevecoeur, xxxii Fort Detroit. See Detroit Fort Duquesne, 478, 479–480 Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 151–151 Fort Necessity, xxxiii Fort Pontchartrain du De Troit. See Detroit Fort St. Jean-Baptiste, 1032, 1033 Fort St. Louis, xxxii Fort-de-France, Martinique, xxxv La Forteresse, 441 Fortune, 422–423 Foucault, Michel, 59, 179, 309, 468–469, 946, 1128 influence of Borges, 171 on sexual orientation, 511 Foulquier, Jean-Louis, 470–471, 471 Fountain, 391, 976 Fouquet, Nicolas, 282 The Four Hundred Blows. See Les Quatre Cents Coups
Fourastié, Jean, 823 Fourier, Charles, 1171 Fourth Republic, xxxvi, 510, 778 Fourtou, Jean-René, 1196 Fox tribe, 478 Framatome, 892 “Les Français du Canada,” 1193–1194 France abolition of slavery, 79, 536–537, 543 and Africa, 325, 425–426 and American Civil War, 152–153 and American Revolution, 483, 904, 1203. See also Lafayette, MarieJoseph-Paul-YvesRoch-Gilbert du Motier Marquis de and Argentina, 86–90 assimilationist colonial policy, 19–22 and Basques, 126–127 and Canada, 9–16 Canadian artists in, 909–910 and Caribbean, 17–26, 28 and Chile, 253–255 Civil Solidarity Pact, 513 colonial departmentalization, 21, 538–539, 780 and Cuba, 324–326 cultural exception. See Exception culturelle and Franklin, 475, 475, 483–484 French traders and Native Americans of Chicago area, 253 governmental concessions to Walt Disney Company, 380 and Guadeloupe, 22, 24 and Guiana, 17–18, 24 and Haiti, 17, 20–21 Hocquenghem on, 3–4 and immigration to North America, 5 independent theater, 1122–1124
INDEX and Indochina, 413, 425–426 influence on Mexican indepenence, 800–801 and Iraq War, 602–607 and Israel, 882 and Jefferson, 618–619 and Latin America, 27–35, 467–468 Latin American artists in, 32–33 and Maine, 753–754 and Martinique, 22, 24 as mère patrie to black colonial citizens, 779–780 movement in favor of empire, xxxv and Muslim countries, 881–882 and native peoples of North America, 6 opposition to Iraq War, xxxvi, 37, 46 postwar relations with Canada, 466–467 postwar relations with U.S., 465–468 and Quebec, 10–16 and Quebec sovereignty, 15 relations with former colonies, 467 and rubber trade, 1016–1019 separation of church and state, xxxv space program, xxxvi, 1082–1083 and tango, 31, 89 and Third World, 324 and Treaty of Paris (1783), 73 and U.S., 37–46, 606–607 U.S. artists in, 908–909 and Vietnam, 1190–1191 and World War II, xxxv, 1228–1233 See also Brittany, Republicanism France and England in North America, 916–917 France Antarctique, 27–28 France Equinoxiale, 28
France libre, 315 France Telecom, 333, 334, 469–470 France 2 television, 1116 France-Amérique, 314, 683 France-Québec, 13 France-Roy, 1001–1002 Franco, Francisco, 126, 1230, 1231 Bernanos on, 148 Francofolies, Les, 368, 470–472, 471, 851 François, Auguste, 30 François, Claude, 851, 852 François, Pierre, 935 François I, King of France, 49, 220, 452, 472–473, 473 and Cartier, 1036–1037 and Roberval, 1001 and Verrazano, 472–473, 1186 Francophonie, La, 14–15, 26, 473–474, 681–682 and Bouchard, 173 and Danticat, 346–347 and Des Rosiers, 367 and Ontario, 898–900 and Ottawa, 901 and Saskatchewan (Fransaskois), 1050 See also Bilingualism; Francofolies, Les Franco-Prussian War, xxxiv–xxxv, 1083 Frank, Nino, 440 Frank, Robert, 931 Franklin, Benjamin, 459, 474–475, 475, 579, 854 on ballooning, 115 Bigelow as editor of writings of, 153 and Lafayette, 666 on Louisbourg, 735 and Paine, 903–904 Fransaskois, 1050, 1051 Frantic, 577 Fraser Committee (Canada), 945 Frears, Stephen, 346 Fréchette, Louis, 476–477 Fred Waring Orchestra, 774 Free France, 1230, 1232
1261
French and Indian War, xxxii, xxxiii, 10, 477–483, 479, 597, 598 costs of, 69, 70 and Detroit, 371 and La Pérouse, 655 origins of, 896 and Treaty of Paris (1763), 1154 and Washington, 478, 896–897, 1202 See also Indian Wars; Seven Years’ War French Antilles, xxxi French Canadians and Madonna, 750 in Manitoba, 763 in New England, 306, 1183–1184 See also Quebec French Committee of National Liberation (FCNL). See Comité français de libération nationale (CFLN) French culture as diasporic, 4–8 and Disneyland Paris, 378–381 and Dylan, 406–407 and Lang, 680 Morin on feminization of, 842 See also Exception culturelle French fries, 328 French Kiss, 577 French language and créolité, 296 hybridization, 684–688 Louisiana, 209, 742–743 and Montigny, 836 Quebec, 8, 14, 836 See also Creole language; Language; Michif French Poets and Novelists, 610 French Research Foundation, 183 French Resistance, xxxv and Josephine Baker, 113 See also Gaulle, Charles André Marie Joseph de; Vichy regime; World War II
1262
INDEX
French Revolution, xxxiii, 7, 38–39, 482–488 and Bordeaux, 166, 167–168 and Brazil, 187 and colonies, 18–19 compared with Mexican Revolution, 802 and Haiti, 553 influence on Argentina, 87 Jefferson’s reaction to, 620 and Lafayette, 667 and Louis-Philippe, 745 and Miranda, 812 and Nantes, 854 and Napoléon, 165 and Paine, 904–905, 1171 and people of color, 486–487 proclamation of new constitution, 484 and Rochambeau, 1004 and Saint-Georges, 843 and slavery, 487, 778–779, 1077 200th anniversary celebrations, 885, 1118 and U.S., 459 See also July Revolution (1830) French Shore (Treaty Shore), 737–738, 873 French West Indies. See Caribbean Frères volcans, 937 Fresneau, François, 1016, 1017–1018 Freud, Sigmund, 663 Frick, Grace, 1237 Friedan, Betty, 436–437 Frommer, Arthur, 1144 Front de Libération du Québec, 80, 1174–1175 Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire, 572–573 Front national, 4, 882 Front populaire, 1000, 1143–1144
Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de, 488–489, 594, 773 and King William’s War, 597 Fry, Varian, 489–490 Fuentes, Carlos, 490–491 on Cortázar, 300 as Mexican ambassador to France, 491 Fulton, John, 1092–1093 Fulton, Robert, 580 Funny Face, 576 Fur trade, 9, 492–495, 493 and Céloron de Blainville, 231 and Champlain, 239–240 and Frontenac, 489 importance to New France, 864 Indiana, 598 and Montagnais, 830 and Ontario, 899 and Talon, 1110 Saskatchewan, 1050 See also American Fur Company; Compagnie d’Occident; Coureurs de bois; Deerskin trade; Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des; Juneau, Laurent Solomon; La Vérendrye family; Radisson, PierreEsprit; Voyageurs Fusée-Aublet, Jean-Baptiste, 1016, 1018 Futuroscope, 381, 1145 G8 (Group of 8), 466–467 Gabin, Jean, 43, 263, 920 and Duvivier, 404–405 Gabon, 14 Gaboury, Serge, 288 Gabriel, Peter, 517 Gage, Thomas, 71 Gagnon, André, 938 Gagnon, Clarence Alphonse, 497–498 Gainsbourg, Serge (Lucien Ginsburg), 498–499, 980 Gaire, Jean, 1051
Gairy, Eric, 533–534 Gallant, Mavis, 499–500 Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins, 1068–1069 Gallé, Emile, 417 Gallimard, Gaston, 396 Gallimard publishing house, 391, 396 Gallo, Robert, 59, 60 Gallo wines, 1223 Gambetta, Leon, xxxv Les Gammes, 797 Gance, Abel, 639 Gangotena, Alfredo, 803–804 Garbo, Greta, 182, 275 García, Joaquín Torres, 33, 907 García Márquez, Gabriel, 501–502, 501 García y Moreno, Joaquín, 1043–1044 Gardel, Carlos, 31 Garneau, Hector de SaintDenys, 561 Garnier, 732 Garou (Pierre Garand), 502–503, 585 Garoute, Jean-Claude (Tiga), 761 Garrett, Edmund C., 557 Gary, Romain (Roman Kacew), 141, 503–504 Gasnier, Louis J, 504–505 Gaspe Bay, xxxi Gassendi, Pierre, 336 Gaston, Lucy, 1137 Gates, Horatio, 71–72 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 505–507 and cultural exception, 266–267 Gaudi i Cornet, Antonio, 93 Gauguin, (Eugène Henry) Paul, 30, 507–509, 508, 953 and Hassan, 557–558 Gaulle, Charles André Marie Joseph de, xxxv, xxxvi, 44, 509–511, 509 and Aron, 90 Boukman on, 176 and Caribbean, 24, 25
INDEX and Cuba, 325 Debray on, 354–355 and Eisenhower, 412, 463 and France-Amérique, 314 and French Canadians, xxxvi, 9, 10–13, 510 and Johnson, 37 and Kennedy, 855 and Lévesque, 716 and NATO, 855–857 as non-Atlanticist, 97 and nuclear technology, 510, 891, 892 and Pompidou, 940–941 postwar economic policy, 777–778 resignation of, xxxvi and F. D. Roosevelt, 37, 42–43, 463, 1009, 1010, 1010 suspicion of U.S., 466 and television, 1117, 1118 as Tintin, 284 and two Canadas, 12 on Vietnam War, 1191 and “Vive le Québec libre,” xxxvi, 9, 12, 425 and World War II, 10–11, 1009–1010, 1230–1232 Gaullism, 255–256, 518 and anti-Americanism, 76–77 Gaultier, Jean-Paul, 304, 434, 623 Gaumont company, 547 Gautier, Théophile, 130, 566, 728 Gauvreau, Pierre, 169 Gay, John, 659 Gay movement, 511–514 and Guérin, 541 and Hocquenghem, 572 and White, 1213 See also AIDS Gélinas, Gratien, 1124 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. See GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade)
General Motors, 204 Générale des Eaux, 1196 Generation of 1837 (aka Unitarians), 87 Genêt. See Flanner, Janet Genêt, Edmond-Charles, 38, 514–515 Genet, Jean, 515–516, 516 and Fonda, 456 influence on Rouch, 1012 Genina, Augusto, 336–337 Geographical Society of Paris, xxxv George III, King of Great Britain, 861, 965 German Expressionists, 133 Germinal, 267, 1240, 1241 Gershwin, George, 846 Getino, Octavio, 1080 Ghesquière, Nicolas, 434 Giard, Basil, 602 Gide, André, 134 as gay movement ancestor, 512 and Malaquais, 756 Gift of God, 829 Gigi, 217, 252, 284, 576, 631–632 Gil, Gilberto, xxxi Gillespie, Dizzy, 351, 612 Gilroy, Paul, 4, 6 Ginastera, Alberto, 932 Ginsberg, Allen, 200 and Genet, 516 influence of Michaux, 804 and Kerouac, 647 Giovanni’s Room, 114 Girard, François, 516–517 Giraud, Henri, 463, 1010 Giraudoux, Jean, 263, 632–633 Girodias, Maurice, 200 Girondins and Bordeaux, 168 and Genêt, 514 and Miranda, 812 Giroud, Françoise, 1065 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, xxxvi, 15, 517–519 and Aron, 90 and Chirac, 255–256 and liberalism, 722–723
1263
and NATO, 857 Plan vert, 543 and Servan-Schreiber, 1066 and Vulcania, 381 Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, 575 Givenchy, Hubert de, 211 Gladwin, Henry, 943 Glass, Philip, 846–847 The Glass Key, 321 Glatigny, Carolus. See Montigny, Louvigny de Gleizes, Albert, 519–521 Glissant, Edouard, 8, 25, 176, 521–523, 781, 1153 Globalization, 45 GlobeCast, 469 Go Tell It on the Mountain, 114 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 22, 30, 443 Godard, Jean-Luc, 205, 267–268, 441, 523–524, 524 and Binoche, 153–154 and Constantine, 298 and Fonda, 456 and Seberg, 1061–1062 Godbout, Adélard, 589 Godbout, Jacques, 179, 525–527 Godefroy, Maximilien, 83 Godin, Gérald, 634 Godwin, William, 1171 Goldman, Jean-Jacques, 376 Goldwater, Robert, 180 Gonçalves de Magalhães, Domingos José, 526–527 Gonneville, Paulmier de, 27 Good Renown, 829 Goodis, David, 527–528 Goodyear, C. W., 1134 Gordon, Charles, 307 Goree, Senegal, xxxi Gorky, Arshile, 1103 Goscinny, René, 287, 747 Gouges, Olympe de, 435 Gouin, Paul, 399–400 Gould, Glenn, 517 Goupil, Didier, 878, 879
1264
INDEX
Gourgues, Dominique de, 454 Gourmont, Rémy de, 121, 727 Gouverneurs de la rosée, 555, 1014 Graffigny, Françoise de, 714–715 Graffiti art. See Hip-hop music and culture Graham, Sheila, 448 Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue), 144, 149 Grand Central Terminal (New York), 85 Le Grand Jeu, 1011 Grand Tableau anti-fasciste collectif, 703 Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons, 587 Grandbois, Alain, 528–529 La Grande Allure, 925 La Grande Dérive des esprits, 933 Grande noirceur, 400 La Grande Peur des bienpensants, 148 Grand-Louis l’Innocent, 699 Grandmaster Flash, 570 Grands Soirs et petits matins, 650 Granz, Norman, 832 Grappelli, Stéphane, 529–530, 612, 613, 614 and Petrucciani, 927–928 and Reinhardt, 529, 981 Grasse, Admiral de, 459, 1004 Gratiant, Georges, 1163 Gratiant, Gilbert, 530–531 Graves, Michael, 86 Gravier, Charles, Comte de Vergennes, 73, 459 Great Depression, 42 The Great Gatsby, 448 Great Lakes, 372 and des Groseilliers, 534–535 and Saint Lawrence River, 1024, 1026 Gréber, Jacques, 84, 85 Greco, Juliette, 275–276, 352 Green, Julien Hartridge, 531–532, 532 Green Card, 363
Greenberg, Clement, 389 Greene, Nathanael, 72, 904 Grégoire, Batiste-Henri, 79, 486 Grégoire, Gilles, 715–716 Grégoire, Henri, 279 Greif, Jean-Jacques, 879 Grenada, xxxiii, 17, 532–534, 533 map, 534 Grey, Edward, 96 Greysolon, Daniel, Sieur du Lhut, 397, 810 Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, 677 Griaule, Marcel, 710 Griffith, D. W., 577 Grignon, Pierre, 1225 Les Griots, 757 Gris, Juan, 583 Gropius, Walter, 85 Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des, 493, 534–535, 810, 975. See also Radisson, Pierre-Esprit Grossman, D. Jon, 331–332 Groulx, Gilles, 184 Ground Work, 101 Group of Six, 275, 844–845 Groupe d’etude et de recherche en espace créolophone et francophone (GEREC-F), 147 Groupe Révolution Socialiste (Martinique), 937 Groupe SFR-Cegetel, 1196 Groussac, Paul, 88 Grupo Cine Liberación, 1080 Guadeloupe, xxxi, xxxii, 17–18, 535–539 abolition of slavery, xxxiv, 1078–1079 and beguine, 142–143 and Bordeaux, 167 and Exposition Coloniale, 426–427 and France, 22, 24, 28 as French department, 537–538 and Labat, 661
map, 537 and Martinique, 538–539 as region of France, xxxvi and Saint Martin, 1029 slave revolt, xxxiii, 1077 See also Creole language Guattari, Félix, 7–8, 357, 540–541 and Lebel, 704 Guava, 29 Guérand, Jean, 28 “Guerilleros,” 851 Guérin, Daniel, 541–542 “Guerre du jazz,” 612–613 La Guerre est finie, 199 Guevara, Che, 34, 325 and Beauvoir, 139 and Debray, 354 Guggenheim, Peggy, 105, 415 Guglielmi, Louis, 105 Guiana, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 542–545 and Chinese, xxxiv and DDT, xxxvi as department, 542 and Exposition Coloniale, 426–427 and France, 17–18, 24 freedom for slaves in, xxxiv, 543 and French rocket site, xxxvi and Haitian immigrants, xxxvi Kourou space center, xxxvi, 543–544 map, 543 occupation by British and Portuguese, xxxiv as prison colony, xxxiii, xxxv, 19, 543 restored to French control, xxxiv and rubber, 1018 slavery, 542 See also Devil’s Island Guibert, Hervé, 59–60 Guillaume, 30 Guillaumet, Henri, 107 Guillem, Sylvie, 345 Guillemin, Roger, 545–546 Guilloux, Louis, 194 Guimard, Hector-Germain, 93
INDEX Güiraldes, Ricardo, 88 Guizot, François, 722 Gulf of Mexico, xxxii Gulf War (1991) Baudrillard on, 132 and Mitterrand, 821 Gumbo, 329–330 Gunpowder. See DuPont family Guthrie, Woody, 405–406, 407 Guy, Michel, 944 Guy-Blaché, Alice, 546–547 Guzmán Blanco, Antonio, 1181–1182 Gysin, Brion, 200 Habanera (dance), 342, 343 Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, 364–365 Hagège, Claude, 549–550 Hahn, Emmanuel, 1057–1058 Hahn, Reynaldo, 550–551 Haiti, 98, 551–557, 552 and coffee, 278 defeat of British, 1149 and France, 17, 20–21, 228 in Hollywood films, 573–574 and immigration to French Guiana and Quebec, xxxvi independence, xxxiii–xxxiv, 553, 1044, 1099, 1149 and Leclerc’s expeditionary corps, 704–705, 743–744 map, 555 occupation by U.S., xxxv and Peck, 919–920 proposed concession of Môle Saint Nicolas to U.S., 443 Rural Code of (1826), 184 Saint Soleil group and Malraux’s visit, 761 and sculpture, 1058 slave rebellion, xxxiii, 1077 source of name, 553 and Surrealism, 23–24 and universalism, 22
and World War II, 24 See also Alexis, Jacques Stephen; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; Duvalier, François “Papa Doc”; Saint-Domingue; Santo Domingo; Toussaint L’Ouverture, François Haliburton, T. C., 421 Halifax, Nova Scotia, 890 Hall, Radclyffe, 121 Halliday, Johnny, 44, 850, 1066 Halston, 433 Hamilton, Alexander, 485, 515, 1108 Hamilton, Tyler, 1088 Hamman, Joe, 1205 Hammett, Dashiell, 319, 321–322, 527 Hancock, Herbie, 352 Hanna Barbera, 731 Hannah and Her Sisters, 63, 64 Hannibal, 808–809 The Happy Time, 578 Hardouin-Mansart, Jules, 302 Hardwicke, Cedric, 584 Hare, David, 415 Harlem Renaissance, 234, 341, 954. See also McKay, Claude Harmsworth, John, 809 Hartman, Geoffrey, 365–366 Hassam, Frederick Childe, 557–558, 557 557–558, ital 557 Hastrel de Révedoy, Adolphe d’, 30 Hauranne, Louis-ProsperErnest Duvergier de, 1152 Haussmann, Baron, 84 Haussmann, Georges Eugène, 1142 Havana Club rum, 326 Havell, Robert Jr., 99 Havemeyer, Louisine, 356 Hawaii, 1099 Hawks, Howard, 440, 573 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 558–559, 559, 726
1265
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 560–561 Hearn, Lafcadio, 21 Heaven’s Gate, 1207 Hébert, Anne, 14, 440, 526, 561–562, 562 and Jacob, 609 Hébert, Louis, 561 Hébert, Maurice, 561 Hébert, Paul Octave, 741 Hefner, Hugh, 945 Hegel, G. W. F., 128 Heirtzler, James, 954–955 Héléna, André, 319–320 Hélène, 1198 Helms-Burton bill, 326 Hemingway, Ernest, 134–135, 383–384, 562–563, 563, 1143 and coffee, 278 debated influence on roman noir, 321–322 and Fitzgerald, 448, 563 and Pound, 563 and Stein, 563 and To Have and Have Not, 573 Hémon, Louis, 6, 564, 768, 835–836 Hendricks, Barbara, 885 Hendrix, Jimi, 851 Hennepin, Father Louis, xxxii, 564–566, 565, 811 and Duluth (Greysolon), 397, 810 and Niagara Falls, 875 Henri II, King of France, 186, 301 Henri IV, King of France, 829 Henry and June, 577 Henry I, King of Haiti. See Christophe, Henri Henry IV, King of France, 853 Hepburn, Audrey, 284, 576–577, 1049 Hepburn, Katharine, 182 L’Herbier, Marcel, 182 Heredia, José Maria de, 566–567, 728 Heredia, Pedro de, 567 Hergé, 286, 288 Hermione, 1005
1266
INDEX
Hernández, José, 88 H’Eros-Chimères, 419–420 Héroux, Denis, 189, 567–568 Hetu, Jacques, 137 “L’Heure exquise,” 550 Highlander, 677 Himes, Chester, 568–570, 569 Hinton, Michel, 135 Hip-hop music and culture, 570–571, 851 Hippolyte, Hector, 571–572 Hiroshima mon amour, 992 Hispaniola, xxxii, 551. See also Saint-Domingue; Santo Domingo L’Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 883 Histoire de sexualité, 468–469 Histoire des deux Indes, 421, 978–979 Histoire des Girondins, 254 Histoire d’O, 945 L’Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, 883, 1151 Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, 1034 Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, 1118–1119 Histoire littéraire de l’Amérique française, 1188 An Historical and Statistical Account of NovaScotia, 421 Hitchcock, Alfred, 205, 264, 578, 631 Hitler, Adolf, 42, 1229, 1231–1232 G. Duhamel on, 395 See also World War II Hiver à Majorque, 1042 L’Hiver dans les Laurentides, 498 H’mong, 544 Ho Chi Minh, 1191, 1231 Hoche, Lazare, 164 Hochelaga and Hochelagans, xxxi, 221–222, 240, 837 Hocquenghem, Guy, 3–4, 7, 8, 309, 572–573
The Hole in the Wall, 451 Hollywood’s French Caribbean, 573–575 Hollywood’s Paris, 575–577 Hollywood’s Quebec, 577–579 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 930 Homassel-Hecquet, MarieCatherine, 1034 Hommage à la femme noire, 1054, 1055 L’Homme de la Mancha, 188 L’Homme et le sacré, 206, 207–208 Un Homme et une femme, 32 L’Homme rapaillé, 8, 814 Hommes et problèmes du jazz, 612–613 Hondo, Med, 176 Honegger, Arthur, 846 Hooker, Johnny Lee, 44 Hoover, Herbert, 462, 1010 Hôpital Beaujon, 85 Hopscotch, 89 La Hora de los hornos, 1080 L’Horloger de Saint Paul, 1113 Hot Club de France, 529, 612, 981 Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 761 Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1033 Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 579–580, 1060 The House of Mirth, 1210 House Un-American Activities Committee, 350 How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, 785 Howard, Charles, 1102 Howe, William, 71 Hubbard, DeHart, 1085 Hudson River, xxxi Hudson’s Bay Company, 493, 534, 535, 764 and Scottish-native métis community, 798 merger with North West Company, 763–764 See also Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des; Radisson, Pierre-Esprit Huelsenbeck, Richard, 104
Huet, Pierre, 135 Hueues, Victor, xxxiii Hugo, Victor-Marie, 21, 87, 102, 502, 544–545, 580–581, 581 on Cooper, 725 and Schoelcher, 1052 See also Hunchback of Notre-Dame/NotreDame de Paris; Misérables, Les Huguenots, xxxi, xxxii, 582 in Kentucky, 646 and La Rochelle, 657 Massachusetts group on Dreyfus case, 386–387 and Richelieu, 997, 998 and Spanish destruction of French colony in Florida, 452–455 and wine, 1220 See also DuPont family; Revere, Paul Huidobro, Borja, 33 Huidobro, Vicente, 255, 583–584 Huis Clos, 1047–1048 Huit mois en Amérique, Lettres et notes de voyage, 1864–1865, 404, 1152 Hull, William, 807 Human Desire, 1241 Humboldt, Alexander von, 159, 1180 Hunchback of NotreDame/Notre-Dame de Paris, 584–585, 585 Hundred Years’ War and Brittany, 192 and Le Havre, 700 Huppert, Isabelle, 236, 749, 1207 Huron Relations, 587 Hurons, xxxi, 586–588, 830 and Brûlé, 196, 311 and Champlain, 239–241, 673 and des Groseilliers, 534 and fur trade, 492 and Jesuits, 621, 622 and Lalemant, 675 and Marquette, 773 in Michigan, 806 and Quebec, 960
INDEX Le Hussard sur le toit, 154 Hussein, Saddam, 602–603, 605–606 Husserl, Edmund, 90 Huston, John, 1049 Huston, Nancy, 588–589 Hydro-Quebec, xxxvi, 589–591, 972 Hypermarchés. See Carrefour L’Hypothèse du tableau volé, 1019 I Confess, 578 I Was Born in Love with You, 885 Iberville, Pierre le Moyne d’, 151, 455, 593–594, 738 and Mississippi River, 818 and Mobile, 822 Ibis Rouge, 147, 683 IBM, 292 Icarians, 203–204 Idyllic Song, 846 If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 568–569 “If We Must Die,” 790 Ile d’Orléans, 481 L’Ile mystérieuse, 117 Ile Notre-Dame (Montreal), 423 Île Royale, 734–736, 888, 889. See also Cape Breton Island, Louisbourg Île Saint-Jean, 735, 737, 888, 889, 1155 Ile Sainte-Hélène, 423 Iles du Salut, xxxiii Illinois Country, 594–597, 738, 739 map, 595 Illinois River, xxxii, 660 Images, 678 Imagism/Imagisme, 560 “Immortal Gatito: The Gabrielle Russier Case,” 499–500 Impressionism and Dufy, 393 and Hassam, 557 In the American Grain, 1216 L’Incarnation, Marie Guyart de, 675, 726, 1169
Indian Wars, 597–598. See also French and Indian War; King George’s War; King William’s War; Queen Anne’s War Indiana, 598–599 map, 599 Indiana, 1041–1042 Indians. See Native Americans Indochina, 425–426 Indochina War (1950s), 413, 510, 1191, 1191. See also Vietnam War Industrial design. See Loewy, Raymond Ingres, Jean-Dominique, 908 Innocents Abroad, 1167 Innu. See Montagnais Inspector Clouseau, 600 Institut d’Ethnologie, 952 Institut français d’Amérique latine, 803 Institut National Agronomique, 388 Instituts universitaires techniques, 13 Inter-Allied Games, 1085 International Colonial Exposition. See Exposition Coloniale (1931) International Monetary Fund, 505 International Nickel Company (Inco), 1096 International Style, 698–699 International Whaling Commission, 1209 Internet, 332–336 Interview with the Vampire, 869 Inuit, 960 Les Invasions barbares, 82, 880, 962 L’Invention du Quotidien, 233–234 The Invesitgation, 1023 L’Invitée, 138 Iowa, 601–602 map, 601 Ioways, 601 Ipeca, 28
1267
Iraq War, xxxvi, 37, 46, 602–607, 882 Baudrillard on, 132 and Chirac, 257, 466 coalition and opposition, 97 French antiwar rally, 604 Irigaray, Luce, 194, 439 Irma la Douce, 577 Iroquois, 6, 830 absorption of other tribes, 587 in Canada, 220–221 defeat by Champlain and Algonquins, 672 and derivation of word Canada, 1037 and France-Roy, 1001–1002 and French and Indian War, 598 and Hurons, 864 and Jesuits, 622 and Lafayette, 667 and Miami tribe, 253 and Montreal, 837 and negotiations over Ohio River valley land rights, 478 and Quebec, 960 and Quebec City, 969 uprising, 489 wars with New France, 864 and westward movement of other tribes, 598 Irving, Washington, 727 Is Paris Burning?, 577 Ismaïl Pasha, 1090 L’Isolé Soleil, 787 Israel, 882 It Happened One Night, 280, 281 IXE-13, 525, 693 Izquierdo, Maria, 94 Izzo, Jean-Claude, 321 Jaca, Jose de, 78 J’Accuse . . .!, 1241 Jacks, Terry, 189 Jackson, Andrew, 37, 460, 866–867, 1138 Jackson, George, 516 Jackson, Michael, 132 Jacob, Suzanne, 609–610
1268
INDEX
Jacobinism, 19, 38, 168 Jacobs, Marc, 434 Jacques, Christophe, 27 Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, 188–189, 1066 “J’ai ta main,” 1159 Jakobson, Roman, 719 James, Henry, 610–611, 611, 726, 727, 1047, 1132 on Flaubert, 749 on Hawthorne, 558 and Zola, 1240 James I, King of England, 887 Jarvis, Richard, 441 Jasset, Victorin, 261 Jaurès, Jean, 1171 Les Javanais, 756 Jay, John, 459 Jay Treaty (1790), 485–486 and Métis, 798 “Le Jazz et la Java,” 886 Jazz, 31, 43, 611–614, 849 and New Orleans, 614, 871 and Nougaro, 886–887 and Vian, 1187–1188 Le Jazz Hot (book), 612 Jazz hot magazine, 696 “Je t’aime moi non plus,” 499 Jean, Marcel, 396 Jean, Raymond, 615–616 Jean-Louis, Me, 994 Jeanmaire, Zizi (Renée)345, 616–617 Jeanne d’Arc, 149 Jefferson, Thomas, 38, 617–620, 617, 1153 and Adams, 58 on coffee, 278 drawing by Saint-Mémin, 1038 and DuPonts, 400–401 and French architecture, 83 and french fries, 328 and French Revolution, 483, 484–485, 515 and Houdon, 579, 580 and Lafayette, 618, 620, 666 and L’Enfant, 712
and Louisiana Purchase, 166, 460, 620, 819, 1099 and Napoléon, 165–166 Notes on Virginia, 1171 Jesuit Relations, 675, 998 Jesuits, 620–623, 864 and colonial government, 227 and Hurons, 492, 534, 587, 898 and Illinois Country, 594, 596 and Maine, 753 and native peoples of North America, 6 and Ontario, 898 and Sudbury, 1096 and wine, 1220 See also Certeau, Michel de; Lalemant, Jérôme; Laval, François de Montmorency; Marquette, Jacques Jesuits College (Quebec City), 227 Jesus, 618 Jésus de Montréal, 81, 156–157 La Jetée, 772 Jeune droite, 76 Jeune École, xxxv Les Jeunes Messieurs Canadiens, 1122 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 623–624 J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, 1187, 1188 Joan of Arc, 624–625, 624 Clemens on, 1167 João VI, King of Brazil, 526 João, King D. I, 29 Jobim, Antonio Carlos, 32 Jobin, Louis, 1057 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 625–627 Joffre, Joseph, 1227 Johnson, Alvin, 279 Johnson, Lyndon B., 37 and Vietnam War, 44, 1191–1192 Johnson, William, 477 La Joie de vivre, 721 Le Joli Mai, 772 Joliet (Jolliet), Louis, xxxii, 252, 594, 601, 622, 627–628, 627
Lake Michigan/ Mississippi River voyage, 806 and Minnesota, 810 and Mississippi River, 818 as musician, 843 and Wisconsin, 1225 See also Marquette, Jacques Joly, Eva, 414 Jones, Chuck, 920 Jones, John Paul, 579, 628–629 Bonhomme Richard, 628, 629 “Jos Monferrand,” 1193 Josephson, Matthew, 630–631, 630, 1082 Jouffroy d’Abbans, ClaudeFrançois-Dorothée, marquis de, 1092 Jouhandeau, Marcel, 151 Le Jour de mon retour sur terre, 878, 879 Jourdan, Louis (Louis Gendre), 577, 631–632, 920 Journal de Californie, 842–843, 1152 Journal de mon voyage en Amérique, 745 Journal des Jésuites, 675 Journal of a Voyage to North America, 244–245 Jouve, Pierre-Jean, 402 Jouvet, Louis, 632–633, 827 Joyce, James, 134, 895, 1082 Juárez, Benito, 67, 460, 801 Jugendstil movement, 93 Jujol, Josef Maria, 93 Juletane, 1201 Julien, Pauline, 633–634 Juliette Pomerleau, 137 July Monarchy. See LouisPhilippe, King of France July Revolution (1830), xxxiv, 398, 745 and Lafayette, 668 Jumonville, Coulon de, 1202 Juneau, Josette Vieau, 634 Juneau, Laurent Solomon, 634–636 634–636
INDEX Jung, Carl, 676 The Jungle, 676 Juppé, Alain, 256 Jurassic Park, 267 Jutra, Claude, 636–637 Kahane, Anne, 1058 Kahlo, Frida, 803 Kalb, Johann de, 353, 353 Kamehameha III, King of Hawaii, 1099 Kamouraska, 561, 636 Kaoma, 32 Kaplan, Nelly, 639–640 Karan, Donna, 434 Käsebier, Gertrude, 930 Kaskaskias, 594 Kassav’, 640–641, 849 Kattan, Naïm, 641–642 Katy-Did, 242 Kaufman, Philip, 154, 577 Kaufman and Broad, 85 Kellogg, Frank, 41, 462 Kellogg-Briand Pact. See Briand-Kellogg treaty Kelly, Gene (Eugene Curran Kelly), 216–217, 642–645, 643 Kelvin, Lord, 56 Kennedy, Edward, 648 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 761 Kennedy, John F., 44, 761 and de Gaulle (re NATO), 855, 857 Gary on, 504 and Vietnam, 1191 Kentucky, 645–647 Kerouac, Jack (Jean Louis Kerouac), 5, 409, 647–648, 1153 and Genet, 516 Kerry, John, 648–649 Kerry, Teresa Heinz, 648 Keynes, John Maynard, and economic theory, 792, 838–389 Khan, Otto, 1123 Kieslowski, Krzysztof, 154 Kind of Blue, 351–352 King, Clarence, 56 King, Grace, 868 King George’s War, xxxii, 597, 598. See also Indian Wars; War of Austrian Succession
King William’s War, xxxii, 597. See also Indian Wars; War of the League of Augsburg The Kingdom of this World, 1197 Kingston, 1025–1026 Kirke, David, 621 Kirke brothers, 969 Kirstein, Lincoln, 422 Kiss Me Kate, 947 Kissinger, Henry, 1192 Kitson, Henry Hudson, 665 Klein, Calvin, 433 Klein, William, 184, 649–650, 931 Kokis, Sergio, 6, 650–651 Kominform, 777 Korean War, 465 Kouchner, Bernard, 309 Kourou space center, xxxvi, 543–544 Kpomassie, Michel-Tété, 1153 Kristeva, Julia, 4, 194, 439, 1128–1130 Kroc, Ray, 788 Kundera, Milan, 25 Kurys, Diane, 154 Ky, Nguyen Cao, 1192 La Boulaye, Duret de, 237 La Condamine, CharlesMarie de, 187, 653, 1016–1017 La Dauversière, Jérôme Le Royer de, 755, 837 La Fare, Marquis de, 834 La Framboise, Alexis Joseph, 634–635 La Framboise, Marguerite Magdelaine Marcotte, 634–635 La Galissoniére. See Barrin de La Galissoniére, Roland-Michel, Marquis La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de, Sieur, 654–655, 1120 654–655 La Luzerne, Anne-César de La Luzerne de Beuzeville, chevalier de, 767
1269
La Peltrie, Madeleine de, 762 La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de, 655–656, 1152 La RochefoucauldLiancourt, FrançoisAlexandre-Frédéric de, Duc, 656–657 La Rochelle, 657–659 Hotel de Ville, 658 La Rochelle Francofolies, 470–471, 472 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de, Sieur, xxxii, 594, 660–661 and Belle, 1005 death of, xxxii, 738 Lake Michigan/ Mississippi River voyage, 806 and Louisiana, 128–129, 489, 660–661, 738 and Mississippi River and valley, 599, 601, 660–661, 817 and Texas, 1119 La Vérendrye, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de, 763, 1050, 1182 La Vérendrye family, 1182–1183 Labat, Jean-Baptiste, 661–662 El laberinto de la soledad, 917 Laboulaye, Edouard de, 124, 1090, 1091–1092 Les Labours, 497 Labro, Philippe, 662–663 The Labyrinth of Solitude, 729 Lac aux dames, 1071 Lacan, Jacques, 205, 438, 663–664, 1130 Lachaise, Gaston, 664–665 Lachine Canal, 837 Lachine massacre, 489 Laclède, Pierre, 818, 1027 Lacombe, Albert, 61 Lacroix, Adon, 976 Ladies Almanac, 120 Laemmle, Carl, 584, 585
1270
INDEX
Lafayette, Anastasie Adrienne de Noailles, Marquise de, 666, 667 Lafayette, George Washington, 668 Lafayette, Marie-JosephPaul-Yves-RochGilbert du Motier Marquis de, 38, 145, 353, 353, 666–668, 667 Bartholdi statue of, 124–125 Baton Rouge visit, 129 and Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 667, 989 and Hermione, 1005 and Jefferson, 618, 620, 666 return visits to U.S., 129, 646, 666–667, 668 Lafayette Flying Corps, 1226 Laferrière, Dany, 668–669 Laffite, Jean, 1120 Lafitte brothers, 99, 100 Laforgue, Jules, 669–670 Lagarrigue, Jorge and Luis, 255 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de, 670–671, 864, 1151 and term Noble Savage, 884 Lainé, François Bloch, 13 Lake Champlain, 671–674, 672 Lake Michigan, xxxii Lalala Human Steps, 1125 Lalemant, Gabriel, 587, 675 Lalemant, Jérôme, 587, 674–675 Laliberté, Guy, 268 Lalique, René, 417, 665 Lallemand, Charles, 1120 Lalonde, Brice, 648 Lalurie, Madame, 869 Lam, Wilfredo (or Wifredo), 24, 676, 907–908 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 21, 254 Lambada, 32 Lambert, Christophe, 149, 677
Lamothe, Arthur, 677–679 Lance et Compte, 1198 Lancôme, 732 Lanctôt, Micheline, 679–680 Landowski, Paul, 92 Landry, Bernard, 173 Lang, Fritz, 182, 263, 264, 1241 and film noir, 440, 441 Lang, Jack, 266, 680–681 as minister of culture and communication, 380 Lang, Luc, 878–879, 880 Langlade, Charles, 1225 Langlois, Henri, 1206 Language, 10, 681–689, 1126–1127 and Hagège, 549–550 Quebec, 8, 14 See also Creole language; Francophonie, La; French language; Michif; Sign language Lanois, Daniel, 689–690 Laporte, Pierre, 1174–1175 Lara, Catherine, 938 Lara, Christian, 690–691 Lara, Oruno, 22 Laramie Station, 732–733 Larbaud, Valéry, 802, 1216 Laroche, Maximilien, 691–692 Lassalle, Eugène, 692–693 The Last Time I Saw Paris, 576 Last Year at Marienbad. See Année dernière à Marienbad Lastarria, José Victorino, 254 Latin America and France, 27–35, 467–468 and French artists, 29–30, 907–908 and French Revolution, 487–488 and French travelers, 30–31 influence of music on French musicians, 851 Miranda and independence movements, 812, 813
postwar independence movements, 465 republicanism, 987, 991 and sculpture, 1058–1060 Latinité, 55–56 Latour, Georges de, 1222 Latraverse, Guy, 470 Lattre de Tassigny, General Jean de, 463 Laudonnière, René Goulaine de, 452–454, 700 and Le Moyne, 701, 702 Laughton, Charles, 584, 585 Laura Laur, 609 Laure, Carole, 213, 693–694, 770 Lauren, Ralph, 433 Laurens, Jean-Paul, 497 Laurier, Wilfrid, xxxv, 10, 765 Laurin, Camille, 682 Laussac, Collette, 409 Laussat, Pierre-Clément de, 743 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse), 694–695, 1081 Lautrec, 109 Laval, Charles, 508 Laval, François de Montmorency, 227, 489, 675, 695–696 Laval, Pierre, 462–463 Lavasseur, Eugène, 272 Lavilliers, Bernard, 851 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 400 Law, John, 152, 289, 291, 739, 822 Lawrence, Charles, 51 Laxalt family, 127 Le Bris, Michel, 696–697, 1152 Le Caron, Joseph, 587 Le Clerc, François (Pie de Palo), 934–935 Le Clézio, Jean Marie Gustave, 697–698 Le Corbusier, 33, 82, 85, 315, 698–699 and Cendrars, 188 Le Duc Tho, 1192 Le Franc, Marie, 699–700 Le Gendre d’Armeny, MarieMarguerite, 323
INDEX Le Havre, 700–701 Le Jeune, Paul, 621 Le Moyne, Pierre, 129 Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques, 701–703 engraving of watercolor by, 702 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 257, 513, 882 “Le Poulpe” series, 321–322 Le Ray de Chaumont, Jacques-Donatien, 475 League of Nations, 41, 462, 1218–1219 U.S. refusal to join (1919), 464 Leahy, Admiral, 462–463 Léardée, Ernest, 143 Learjet Corporation, 160 Léaud, Pierre, 1166 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 703–704 Leblanc, Jean, 78 LeBon, Gustave, 1137 Lebreton, Joachim, 30 Lecanuet, Jean, 518 Leclerc, Charles-VictorEmmanuel, General, 704–705 Leclerc, Edouard, 219 Leclerc, Félix, 14, 136, 705–706, 851 Leclerc, Joseph-Nicolas, 907 Leclercq, Chrétien, 706–707 Leconte, Patrice, 154 Ledoux, Claude Nicolas, 1171 Leduc, Ozias, 169, 910 Lee, John Silver. See BoileauNarcejac Lee, Robert E., 66 Lefebvre, Jean Pierre, 707–708 Leforestier, Maxime, 851 Left Bank, 121 Legault, Père, 279 La Légende de Jimmy, 938 La Légende du peuple, 476 Léger, Fernand, 112, 315, 390, 907, 908 Léger, Robert, 135 Légion d’honneur and Baker, 113 and Baldwin, 115 and Bedaux, 142
and Bernstein, 843 and Bombardier, 162 and Bouchard, 173 and Boulle, 178 and Bourassa, 179 and Carlson, 214 and Charnay, 245 and Cocteau, 276 and Guillemin, 546 and Munson, 1221 and Norman, 885 and Reeves, 980 and Sábato, 1022 and Tanner, 1112 Légitime Défense, 23, 530–531, 789, 793, 794 Legrand, Michel, 708–709 and Demy, 359 Legrand, Pierre, 935 Leibowitch, Jacques, 59 Leiris, Michel, 206, 612, 710–711 Lejeal, Léon, 1063 Leland, Henry Martin, 204 Lelouch, Claude, 32, 880 Lemaître, Augustine, 877 LeMond, Greg, 1088 L’Enfant, Pierre-Charles, 83, 84, 711–712, 711 Lenglen, Suzanne, 1087 Léon, 984 Lepage, Robert, 275–276, 517, 712–713, 1125 and Bluteau, 157 LePichon, Xavier, 954–955 Leroux, Gaston, 544–545 Léry, Jean de, 28, 186, 883, 1151 Lesage, Jean, 11–12, 13, 400, 716 and Hydro-Quebec, 589, 590 and modernization, 825 and Quiet Revolution, 962, 972–973 Lescarbot, Marc, 883–884, 1121 Lescher, Robert, 1140 L’Escolle, Michel de, 82 Lescot, Elie, 63, 555, 676 Lesseps, Charles de, xxxv, 914 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, xxxv, 911–914, 1091–1092
1271
Lessert, Marquis de, 809 Lesueur, Charles Alexandre, 713–714 “Let It Be Me,” 140 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 422 Let’s Make Love, 833 Letter from an Unknown Woman, 631 “Letter from Paris,” 448, 449 Letters from an American Farmer, 317–318 The Letters from St. Thomas, 22 La Lettre aérienne, 195 Lettre aux Américains, 275 Lettre ouverte aux Français qui se croient le nombril du monde, 161 Lettres d’une Péruvienne, 714–715 LeVau, Louis, 302 Léveillé, Claude, 720, 1193 Leven, Gustave, 809 Lévesque, René, xxxvi, 15, 178, 715–717, 716, 962 and Hydro-Quebec, 589, 590 and Quiet Revolution, 972–973 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 34, 187, 362, 718–719, 1152 and Swaim, 1104 Tristes Tropiques, 718, 952 Lévis, François Gaston de, Duc, 717–718, 967–968 Levison, Salmon, 462 Levitt, 85 Levy, Julien, 930, 1103 Levy, Raoul J., 719–720 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 1000 Lewis, Meriwether, 733, 818, 819, 1027 Leyrac, Monique (Monique Tremblay), 720–721, 938 L’Herbier, Marcel, 404 Lhote, André, 907, 908 Les Liaisons dangereuse. See Dangerous Liaisons
1272
INDEX
Liancourt, Duc de. See La RochefoucauldLiancourt, FrançoisAlexandre-Frédéric de, Duc Liautaud, Georges, 1058 Liberalism, 721–723 The Liberator, 789–790 Libérett, 299 Libertad bajo palabra, 917 La Liberté, 418 Liberté, 455 Liberty Enlightening the World. See Statue of Liberty La Librairie du Courrier des Etats-Unis, 314 Library collections. See Vattemare, NicolasMarie Alexandre Lieberman, Rolf, 214 Lieutenant en Algérie, 1065 Lifar, Serge, 345, 616 Life Is Good and Good for You in New York, 649 The Life of Emile Zola, 387 Life on the Mississippi, 1093 Lincoln, Abraham, 40 and Bigelow, 152 and Civil War, 64–65 daguerreotype of, 930 Lindbergh, Charles, 270 Linder, Max, 261, 505 Lipschitz, Jacques, 315, 583, 1058, 1061 Liquois, Auguste, 286 Lisle, Leconte de, 566, 728 Lispector, Clarice, 723–724 Literary relations, 14, 21, 33–34, 42, 724–730 Le Bris and, 696–697 Littérature, 191, 1101 La littérature migrante, 1002 Little Girl in an Armchair, 225 Little Nemo, 285 Litvak, Anatole, 182, 382 Livingston, Robert R., 743, 744, 1092–1093 Livingston, William, 162 Le Livre brisé, 385 Llanos, Alberto Valenzuela, 30
Llosa, Mario Vargas, 749–750 Lloyd George, David, 1218 Lobato, Monteiro, 188 Locke, Alain, 994 Locke, John, 618 Lockwood, Didier, 614 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 1218 Loewy, Raymond, 730–731 Loge des Neuf Soeurs, 579 Loin du Vietnam, 1191 Lolonais, François, 935 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 49, 208, 421, 727 Longueil, Charles Le Moyne de, 593 Looking Backward, 1171 Loopy de Loop, 731 Lopez, Jennifer, 303 Lorca, Federico García, 859 L’Oréal, 732 Lorimier, Louis, 732–733 Losey, Joseph, 733–734 Lost Generation, 383–384, 563, 727–728, 930. See also Stein, Gertrude Loti, Pierre, 193, 1005 Louis IX, King of France (Saint), 1027 Louis XII, King of France, 853 Louis XIII, King of France, xxxii, 488, 848 and Richelieu, 997 and siege of La Rochelle, 657 Louis XIV, King of France, 9, 17, 828 and Académie Royale de Danse, 343 and Code Noir, 536, 552, 778 and commercial success of New France, 865 and corsairs, 1037 on cuisine, 328 and Filles du Roy, 439 founding of Rochefort, 1004 and fur trade, 493 and Hennepin, 565
Louisiana named in honor of, 738 Revocation of Edict of Nantes, 582 and Versailles, 302 Louis XV, King of France, xxxiii, 10 and Lévis, 717, 718 St. Louis named for, 1027 Louis XVI, King of France, xxxiii and potatoes, 328 recognition of U.S., 459 and Rochambeau, 1003 and School for Children of the Nation, 656 and Society of the Cincinnati, 666 and timber, 1133 Louis XVIII, King of France, 657 Louisbourg, xxxiii, 51, 734–738 and French and Indian War, 480 Louisiana, 738–743 Cadillac as governor, 204 ceded to Britain and Spain, xxxiii and coureurs de bois, 311 cuisine, 329–330 and d’Iberville, 594, 738 founding of, xxxii and French language, 209, 682–683, 685 map, 742 returned to French control, xxxiii reversion to royal colony status, xxxiii and Spanish, 129, 330 statehood, xxxiv and sugar, 1098, 1099 theater, 1122 See also Bienville, JeanBaptiste, sieur de; Bossu, Jean-Bernard; Cajuns; Crozat, Antoine Louisiana, 410 Louisiana Purchase, xxxiii, 18, 37, 460, 620, 741, 743–745, 819 and American West, 1205
INDEX and Napoléon, 165–166, 460, 741, 743, 1099 negotiations, 744 and role of Toussaint, 1150 sugar and Haitian Revolution as factors in, 1099 Louisiana State University, 130 Louis-Napoléon, xxxiv Louis-Philippe, King of France, xxxiv, 203, 314, 722, 745–746, 745 and Biard, 906–907 Louiss, Eddy, 927 Louvre, Palais du, 83, 1142 Love in the Afternoon, 576 Love in the Time of Cholera. See El Amor en los tiempos del cólera “Love on the Rocks,” 140 The Loves of Carmen, 216 Lower Canada, xxxiv, 898–899, 961. See also Quebec Loy, Mina, 120 Loyalists, 72, 966 Loyola, Ignatius, 620 Lubitsch, Ernst, 575, 576 Lucky Luke, 287, 288, 746–747, 746 Lugones, Leopoldo, 88 Lui, 945 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 343 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 261, 930 Lumumba, 919 Le Luxe, 784 Lyautey, Maréchal Hubert, 425 Lyell, Charles, 56 Lyman, John, 169 Lyonnaise des Eaux (Lyonnaise des EauxDumez), 747–748, 1097. See also Suez Company (Compagnie de Suez/Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez) Lyotard, Jean-François, 748, 1130
M Klein, 734 Ma, Yo-Yo, 517, 529 Mabille, Pierre, 24 MacDonald, Dwight and Nancy, 1064 MacDonald, Jeanette, 252, 578 MacDonald, John A., 961 Mackandal, 1196–1197 Mackaye, Steel, 358 MacKinnon, Catharine, 945 Maclure, William, 714 MacMillan, Harold, 857 MacMonnies, Frederick William, 1060 Macon, Nathaniel, 166 MacOrlan, Pierre, 95 Mad magazine, 287 Madame Bovary, 749–750 Madame Roza, 141 Madame X, 1046, 1046 Madeira, 1075 Madelin, Alain, 722–723 Madero, Francisco, 802 Madison, James, 162 Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone), 5, 132, 750–751 The Madwoman of Chaillot, 633 Magical realism. See García Márquez, Gabriel Magnier, Pierre, 336 Magnum agency, 931 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, xxxv Maigret, 318, 751–752 Mailer, Norman, 756, 807 Maillet, Antonine, 54, 752–753 Maine, 753–755 border dispute with New Brunswick, 862 map, 754 Maison Carrée, 619 La Maison du coteau, 956 Maison du Québec, xxxvi, 11–12 Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de, 755, 762, 837, 843 Le Maître du jeu, 650 Les Maîtres fous, 1012 Makandal, François, 552 Makovski, Claude, 639
1273
Malaquais, Jean (Vladimir Malacki), 755–757, 1064 Malaria. See Panama Canal “Malaussène saga,” 322 Maldonado, Pedro Vicente de, 653 Maldoror, Sarah, 757–758 Maléfices, 158 Malet, Léo, 319, 320 Malfatti, Anita, 33, 907 Maliseet tribe, 621 Malkovich, John, 346 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 726, 728 Whistler’s lithograph of, 1212 Malle, Louis, 758–759, 759 Mallet, Marilú, 759–760 Malraux, André, 11–12, 25, 760–761, 895 as minister of cultural affairs, 380, 761 A Man Called Ironside, 578 The Man with the Golden Gun, 1195 Man, Paul de, 123, 365–366 Management consulting, 141 Mance, Jeanne, 755, 761–762, 961 Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 321 Les Mandarins, 138, 139 Manet, Edouard (artist), 30, 31, 131 influence on Sargent, 1046 visit to Brazil, 187 Manet, Eduardo (writer), 729 Mangin, Jean-Charles, 83 Mangones, Albert, 1058 Mangourit, Michel-AngeBernard de, 514 Manhattan, 63, 64 Manicouagan-Outardes complex, 589, 590 Manifeste des 343, 437 Manitoba, xxxv, 763–767. See also Red River Rebellion Manitoba Schools Act, 765 Mann, Anthony, 1206
1274
INDEX
Mann, Heinrich, 490 Mann, Thomas, 491, 625–626 Manon Lescaut, 869–871 Manship, Paul, 665 Mansour, Joyce, 146 La Mante religieuse, 206, 207 A Manual of American Literature 1609–1906, 1089 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 123 Marais, Jean, 276 Marais, Stéphane, 303 Maran, René, 545 The Marble Faun, 558, 559 Marbois, François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, 743, 767 Marceau, Marcel, 625 Marceau, Sophie (Sophie Maupu), 768 Marchais, Paul, 1222 Marchand, Jean, 972–973 Mardi 11 septembre, 879 Mardi Gras, 822 Marey, Etienne Jules, 930 Maria Chapdelaine, 6, 263, 564, 693, 768–771 and Montigny, 835–836 Marie-Jeanne, Alfred, 25–26 Marin, Maguy, 345 Maritain, Jacques, 279, 771–772 Marker, Chris (Christian François BoucheVilleneuve), 772–773 Marlatt, Daphne, 195 Marley, Bob, 849 Maroons, 18, 1078 rebellions, 78, 552 Marqueste, Laurent-Honoré, 29 Marquette, Jacques, xxxii, 594, 601, 622, 627, 773–774, 1225 and Michigan, 805–806 and Mississippi River, 818 See also Joliet (Jolliet), Louis Marriott Management Services, 1079 Marrons. See Maroons Marshall Plan, xxxvi, 7, 43, 464, 775–778, 856–857
and Atlanticism, 97 and modernization, 823 Marshall, Bill (G. William Marshall), 774–775 and Morgan, 841 Marshall, George, 775–777 Marshall, Michael, 774, 775 Marshall, Tonie, 775 Martha’s Vineyard, 1069 Marthe-Rose, 1078 Martí, José, 348, 349, 728, 936 influence of Washington, 1204 Martin, Paul, 513 Martin, Steve, 337, 600 Martín Fierro, 88 Martinique, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 17–18, 778–781, 780 and beguine, 142–143 and Bordeaux, 167 and coffee, 278 and Exposition Coloniale, 426–427 and France, 22, 24, 28 as French department, xxxvi, 521, 780 Gauguin in, 30, 508 and Guadeloupe, 538–539 map, 779 as region of France, xxxvi and slavery, xxxiv, 1077–1079 See also Bonaparte, Josephine Tascher de la Pageier de Beauharnais; Creole language Marxism and anti-Americanism, 76–77 France, 466 Latin America, 465 and May 1968, 308–310 Masculin-Feminin, 915 Mason, James, 66 Maspero, François, 324 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 753 Massacres, 782 Massiac Club, 486 Masson, André, 781–782 Masson, Joseph, 1221
Masson, Paul, 1221 Le Mât de cocagne, 364 Matagorda Bay, xxxii Mathieu, Mireille, 782–783 Mathilde, Princess, 550 Matisse, Henri, 783–785, 784, 953 and Couturier, 315–316 influence on Dufy, 394 Matisse, Pierre, 389, 784 Mato Grosso, 718 Le Matou, 137 Matrix cosmetics, 732 Matrix films, 1217 Matta, Roberto, 1102 Mattelart, Armand, 785 785 Maubilian tribe, 822 Maudslay, Alfred, 245 Maugée, Aristide, 1163 Maumee River, 598, 599 Maupassant, Guy de, 405, 610 Mauriac, François, 139, 726, 1131 Maurois, André (Emile Herzog), 134, 786 Maurras, Charles, 23, 76, 315 Mauss, Marcel, 206, 1000 Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, xxxiv, 29, 40, 460–461 and Charnay, 245 execution of, 801, 801 Maximin, Daniel, 787–788 Maxixe, 342, 343 May 1968, 233, 308–310 and de Gaulle, 511 and Fuentes, 491 Genet on, 516 and Grands Soirs et petits matins, 650 and Hocquenghem, 572 and Lebel, 703 and Sartre, 1048 and Tout va bien, 456 and Vietnam War, 1191–1192 Mayans, 128, 1135 Mayden, Cecil, 441 Mayerling, 349, 382–383 Mayol, Félix, 31 Mazarin, Cardinal, 282 Mazureau, Etienne, 867 McAlmon, Robert, 134
INDEX McCalls magazine, 120 McCarthy, Eugene, 350 McCloud, Scott, 288 McDonald’s, 788 McIlhenny, Thomas, 330 McKay, Claude, 788–791, 789 McLaren, Norman, 636 McLaughlan, Donald Shaw, 497 McLaughlin, John, 352 McMillan Plan, 84 Mecca Cola, 274 Médecine science, 13 Medici, Catherine de, 186, 301–302, 876, 876, 1136 and Florida, 452, 454 Mediology, 354–355 Meese Commission (U.S.), 945 Meier, Richard, 86 Meigs, Mary, 155 Méliès, Georges, 387 Mellon-Beranger agreement, 462 Melville, Herman, 210, 726 Melville, Jean-Pierre (JeanPierre Grunbach), 441, 791–792 Memeskia, 599 Memmi, Albert, 814 Mémoire battante, 678 Memoire sur les Moeurs, Coustumes et Relligion des Sauvages de l’Amerique septentrionale, 927 Mémoires d’Hadrien, 1237–1238 Men of Progress, 1053–1054 Menard, René, 1225 Mendès France, Pierre, 792–793, 793 Menéndez de Avilés, Pedro, 454 Menier, Henri, 960 Ménil, Dominique and Jean de, and Ménil Museum, 315 Ménil, René, 793–794, 1163 Mentelle, Augustus and Victorie, 646 Menuhin, Yehudi, 529 Menwat, 849
Mercié, Marius-JeanAntonin, 1060 Mercier, Henri, 66 Mercier, Honoré, 10, 306 Mercier, Sébastien, 1170 Mercouri, Melina, 351 Mercure de France, 978 Mère patrie, 20, 23 Merengue, 849 Mère-Solitude, 897 Merici, Angela, 1169 Mérimée, Prosper, 794–796 Merino, Ignacio, 30 Mermoz, Jean, 107 Merrill, Stuart Fitz Randolph, 796–797 Mes Loisirs, 476 La Messagère, 910 Messiaen, Olivier, 31–32 Messier, Jean-Marie, 1196 La Métamorphose des dieux, 761 Métellus, Jean, 897 Métis, 797–800, 962 Alberta, 61–62 and coureurs de bois, 311 Canada, xxxv, 6 Caribbean, 19 defined, 492, 797 and fur trade, 492, 494 Manitoba, 763–764, 766 Minnesota, 811 and music, 848 Saskatchewan, 1050 Wisconsin, 1224–1225 See also Red River colony; Riel, Louis Métissage, 312, 798, 800 and W. C. Williams, 1215 Métraux, Alfred, 24, 710 Metropolitan Museum, 259 Meurtres pour mémoire, 321 Mexican Revolution (1910–1919), 802 Mexico, xxxiv, 29, 800–803 and Artaud, 94–95 and Basques, 127 Bigelow and French occupation of, 153 Charnay and archaeology of, 245–246 French control of, 67 and H. Rousseau, 30 Serge’s exile in, 1064
1275
See also Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico; and under Napoléon III Mezières, Athanase de, 1120 Miamis, 231–232, 478 in Indiana, 598, 599 and site of Chicago, 252–253 Michaux, François André, 1133 Michaux, Henri, 697, 803–804, 1101, 1133, 1152 Michelet, Claude, 409, 410 Michelet, Jules, 624 Michelin (Compagnie Générale des Etablissements Michelin), 270, 804–805, 1018 Clermont-Ferrand factory, 1017 1017 Michelin Guide Rouge, 804–805 Michif, 798 Michigan, 805–807. See also Detroit Michigan, University of, 372 Mickey Mouse, 285, 287 Micmacs, 50–51, 220 and Cartier, 492 and Jesuits, 621 and Leclercq, 706, 707 and Lescarbot, 883–884 and Maine, 754 and New Brunswick, 860 and Nova Scotia, 888, 889 and Quebec, 960 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 85 Milhaud, Darius, 31, 188, 275, 345, 844–845, 846 and jazz, 612 and primitivism, 953 Mill, J. S., 722 Miller, Arthur, 1049 Miller, Henry Valentine, 42, 727–728, 807–808 and Cendrars, 233 Miller, Patsy Ann, 584 Millett, Kate, 807 Milwaukee, 634
1276
INDEX
Minc, Alain, 333 Mineral water, 808–810 Minghella, Anthony, 154 Mingo tribe, 231–232, 478, 896 Mining. See Sudbury Minitel, 332–334, 470 Minnelli, Liza, 109 Minnelli, Vincente, 642, 749–750 Minnesota, 810–812. See also Duluth Minute Maid Company, 273 Miquelon. See Saint-Pierre et Miquelon Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 483–484 Mirage, 107 Miranda, Francisco de, 812–813, 991 Miron, Gaston, 8, 813–814 Misérables, Les, 544–545, 814–816 movie still, 815 Misraki, Paul, 32 Missing, 304–305 Mississippi, 816–817 Mississippi Blues, 1113 Mississippi River, xxxii, 817–818 and Joliet, 627–628, 806 and La Salle, 599, 601, 660–661 and steamboats, 1093 See also Compagnie d’Occident Missouri, 819 Missouri River, 817, 818 Mitterrand, François, xxxvi, 15, 45, 97, 819–821 and campaigns against Giscard d’Estaing, 517–518 and Chirac, 750, 820–821 and de Gaulle’s policies, 511 and Debray, 354 and exception culturelle, 681 and Gaullist policy, 256 and Grand Louvre, 86 and grands travaux, 379 and Lévesque, 716
and NATO, 857 and Quebec, 178 visit to Panthéon, 1118 Mobile, 152, 455, 738, 739, 822 French fort, xxxii Mobile, 201, 1152 Mobile River, 151 Modern Times, 142 Modernism and Amaral, 907 and avant-garde, 106 and H. D., 560 Madame Bovary as modernist novel, 749 relation between Brazilian and French, 188 Modernismo, 88, 728 and Darío, 348 Modernista, 93 Modernization, 823–827 The Moderns, 577 Modiano, Patrick, 318 La Modification, 201 Moebius, 288 Mohawks, 240, 598 “Moi, mes souliers,” 706 Moirans, Epiphane de, 78 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 827–828, 828, 1121–1122 La Môme vert-de-gris, 298 Mon Cheval pour un royaume, 948 Mon Oncle Antoine, 636 Monangambee, 757 Monbeig, Pierre, 34 Moncton, Université de, 53, 862 Monderie, Robert, 368 Monet, Claude, 130, 1046 Monique Leyrac chante Vigneault et Léveillée, 720 Monk, Thelonius, 612 Monnerville, Gaston, 176, 543 Monnier, Adrienne, 134, 135, 191 Monnin de Eollenai, Charles, 1092 Monroe, James and Lafayette, 668 and Louisiana Purchase, 460, 743, 744
and release of Lafayette’s wife, 667 and release of Paine, 905 Monroe, Marilyn, 833, 1070–1071 Monroe Doctrine, xxxiv, 22, 460 Mons, Pierre Dugua de, 49–50, 239–240, 582, 658, 829 and Champlain, 969 Mont de piété, 191 Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, 56, 57, 1142 Montagnais, 239, 830–831 and Champlain, 673 and Quebec, 960 Montagnards, 812 Montagnier, Luc, 59, 60 Montaigne, Michel de, 727, 831–832, 883, 1151 Montand, Yves, 199, 456, 832–833 and Costa-Gavras, 304 and Signoret, 832–833, 1070–1071 Montaner, Rita, 32 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Grozon, Marquis de, 175, 480, 481, 834–835, 835 death of, 481–482, 673–674, 834–835, 968 and Lévis, 717 and war with Britain, 967 Mont-Cinère, 531 Montesquieu, 714–715, 722 on republics, 988, 989 Montgolfier brothers, 115 Montgomery, Richard, 970 Montigny, Louvigny de, 835–836 Montmagny, Charles Huault de, 837 Montpensier, Duc de, 745 Montreal, xxxiii, 836–839, 838 as film location, 578–579 founding of, xxxii, 492, 755, 961 Francofolies, 470–472 Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 761
INDEX Huron village at site of, xxxi and Maisonneuve, 755, 837 and Saint Lawrence River, 1024, 1025 technological industries, 839 and World War II refugees, 500 See also Expo 67 Montreal Cotton, 307 Montreal Peace Treaty (1701), 837 Monvoisin, Raymond Quinsac de, 30 Moore, Brian, 157 Moore, George, 1240 Moore, Michael, 880 Moore, Roger, 600 Moraes, Vinicius de, 32 Morand, Paul, 85, 840, 1152 More, Thomas, 1170 Moreau, Jeanne, 346, 352 Morellet, André, 618 Morgan, James, 497 Morgan, Michèle (Simone Roussel), 840–841 and Marshall, 774–775 Morgan Bank, 40 Morgan, Michèle, 263 Morin, Edgar, 841–843, 1152 Morise, Max, 396 Morris (Maurice De Bevere), 746–747, 746 Morris, Gouverneur, 580, 667 Morris, William, 92–93 Morse, Samuel F. B., 339–340, 929 Mort à Crédit, 230 La Mort d’un Bûcheron, 213 Morton, Jelly Roll, 614 Moslems. See Muslims Motherwell, Robert, 105, 123 Mouchach, 316 Moulin Rouge!, 577 Mounier, Emmanuel, 11, 76 Mount Pelée, xxxv, 142–143, 530 Mousseau, Jean-Paul, 169 Mouvement de liberation des femmes (MLF), 437 Mouvement Républicain et Populaire, 43
Movies. See Cinema Ms. Magazine, 437–438 La Mulâtresse solitude, 1054 Muller, Martine Marie, 409, 411 Mullett, Alfred B., 83–84 Mulroney, Brian, 173 Un Mundo para Julius, 197 Munson, Thomas Volney, 1221 Murders in the Rue Morgue, 451 Murray, James, 968, 1122 Murray, Natalia Danesi, 449 Musée Carnavalet, 95 Musée de L’Homme, 952 Musée de Trocadéro, 953 Musel, Hélène, 298 Museum collections. See Vattemare, NicolasMarie Alexandre Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 1000 Museum of Modern Art, 389 Music (classical), 843–847. See also Electronic music; Opera Music (folk), 847–850 Music (pop), 11, 44, 850–852. See also Hip-hop music and culture; Jazz; Reggae; Rock and roll; Yéyé music; World music; Zouk Music in the Shape of a Square, 846–847 Musique concrète, 1176, 1177–1178 Muslims, 7, 619, 881–882 Mussolini, Benito, 42, 951, 1230 Muybridge, Eadwaerd, 930 My Antonia, 225 “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” 1072 My Dinner with André, 758 “My Way,” 852, 1073 Myth. See Caillois, Roger Nadar, Félix, 130 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement
1277
Nagle, Isabel Dutaud, 665 Naked Lunch, 199–200 Nalco Chemical, 1097 The Name of the Rose, 74 Nantes, 853–855 Napoléon III and American Civil War, 66–67, 152–153 establishment of Guiana as penal colony, 543 and Générale des Eaux, 1196 and Maximilian, 245 and Mexico, xxxiv, 10, 29, 40, 67–68, 460–461, 801 and state unification, 722 withdrawal of voting rights for ex-slaves, 779 Napoleonic wars, xxxiii, xxxiv Narcejac, Thomas. See Boileau-Narcejac Nardal, Paulette and Jane, 994 Nariño, Antonio, 487 Nars, François, 303 Naskapis, 960 Nasoni tribe, 654 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 1097 Nasser, Jacques, 458 Nasty, Dee, 570 “Natashquan,” 140 Les Natchez, 247 Natchez tribe, 152, 739–740. See also Chateaubriand, François-Auguste René de, Vicomte Natchitoches, 1032–1033, 1120 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (U.S.), 730 National Film Board of Canada, 81, 184, 212 and Godbout, 525, 526 and Héroux, 567 and Jutra, 636 and Lefebvre, 707 National Front. See Front national National Liberal Party (Canada), 399
1278
INDEX
Native Americans and Bresdin, 189 of Chicago area, 252–253 French enthusiasm for, 39 and French religious conversion efforts, 864 and fur trade, 311–312 and Hydro-Quebec, 589–590 in Indiana, 598–599 and Jesuit conversion practices, 621–622 and Lorimier, 732–733 and Louisiana, 738–739, 741 and Maine, 753–754 in Michigan, 806 in Mississippi, 817 in Missouri, 819 of Ohio region, 478, 481, 482 and tobacco, 1134–1135 and Ursulines, 1169 See also Fur trade; Hurons; Métis Native peoples (of North America), 6 Native Son, 1234–1235 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 44, 855–857, 856 and Atlanticism, 97 creation of, xxxvi, 855 Eisenhower as commander of, 412 La Nausée, 613, 1047, 1048 Navarro, Pascale, 946 Navigation Acts, 971 Nazi sympathizers, 286 Né à Québec, 528 “Ne me quitte pas,” 189 Nécessité de faire bon accueil aux femmes étrangères, 1162 Needles and Opium, 275–276 Neg Mawon/Marron Inconnu, 1058 Le Nègre et l’amiral, 296 Les Nègres, 515 Nègres blancs d’Amérique, 1174 Les Négriers, 176 Négritude movement, 23, 24–25, 316 and Depestre, 364, 365
Haiti, 555 and Martinique, 781 McKay on myth of la France non-raciste, 790–791 Ménil on, 794 prefigured by La Revue du monde noir, 994 See also Césaire, Aimé; Créolité; Damas, LéonGontran; McKay, Claude; Senghor, Léopold Sédar Négrophilie, 953–954 Nelligan, Emile, 858–859 “Néo-polar,” 320–321 Neoprene, 402 Neruda, Pablo (Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Bosoalto), 255, 859–860 and Caillois, 206–207 Nestlé Group, 809 Neutral Island, Maine, xxxi Neuvième Art. See Comic strips Never On Sunday, 351 New Brunswick, 52–54, 860–863 map, 861 New Deal, 42 New France, 863–866 end of, 837, 863 and Filles du Roy, 439–440 Leclercq’s histories of, 706–707 and music, 843 Parkman on, 916–917 and sculpture, 1057 Tadoussac as cradle of, 1107 See also Acadia; Canada; Louisiana; Quebec New Harmony, Indiana, 714 New Light, 73 New Orleans, 866–872 as birthplace of jazz, 614, 871 Bossu on, 172 and cotton, 306 and Degas, 355, 356 establishment by Bienville, 152, 866 map, 868
Ursuline Convent, 83, 870–871 and T. Williams, 1214 New Rochelle, New York, 657 New Voyages to North America, 671 New Wave (film movement), 45, 267–268 and Allen, 63 and Chabrol, 235 and film noir, 441 influence of Kelly, 642, 645 and Legrand, 709 Malle’s relation to, 758 and Marker, 772 Melville as father of, 791 and Tavernier, 1112 New York, 840 The New York Trilogy, 101 The New Yorker, 448–449, 1131–1132 Newcomen, Thomas, 1092 Newfoundland, 872–874 establishment as Canadian province, 874 and fishing, 444–447, 1155 whaling, 1208–1209 NFB. See National Film Board of Canada Ngo Dinh Diem, 1191 Niagara Falls, xxxii, 874–875, 875 Nicolas, Pierre, 287 Nicolet, Jean, 1224 Nicot, Jean, 876–877, 876, 1136 Niemeyer, Oscar, 33, 188, 698 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 339, 877–878 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 128 “Night and Day,” 946 Nightwood, 120 Nikita, 149 Nikolais, Alwin, 213 9/11, 46, 465 Baudrillard on, 132–133 cultural perspectives, 878–880 political perspectives, 880–883
INDEX 9/11, 880 Nine Eleven, 879 Ninotchka, 576 Nipsya, 197–198 Nixon, Richard, 45, 97, 509, 516 and Kerry, 648 and Vietnam War, 1192 Nkrumah, Kwame, 444 Nobel Prize to Cournand, 312, 313 to Guillemin, 545 Noble Savage, 831, 883–885. See also Primitivism Noël, Alexandre-Jean, 29, 1058-1059 Noirisme, 556 Noirs et blancs en couleurs, 74 Nora, Simon, 333 Nord perdu/Losing North, 588–589 Nord-Sud, 583 Norman, Jessye, 885–886 Normandy, in Hollywood films, 575 Norris, Frank, 727 North Africa, and Jefferson, 619 North American Association of Basque Organizations, 127 North American Free Trade Agreement, 467 North American Sylva, 1133 North Atlantic Treaty Organization. See NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) North West Company, 494, 763–764 Northwest Passage, 220, 222 Northwest Rebellion, 764, 799, 998–999, 1050 Northwest Territories Act of 1875, 62 Les Notables du village, 476 Notes of a Native Son, 114 Notes on the State of Virginia, 483 Notes on Virginia, 1171 Notre-Dame Congregation (Montreal), 762
Notre-Dame de Paris, 502, 938–939 Nougaro, Claude, 886–887 Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire, 1171 Nouveau roman movement, 201 Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental, 1008, 1125 Nouveau village, 85 Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique, 662 Nouveaux voyages du baron de la Hontan dans l’Amérique septentrionale, 1151–1152 La Nouvelle Barre du jour, 418 Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésie, 707 Nouvelle vague. See New Wave (film movement) Nouvelles de Mexique, 803 Nova Scotia, xxxi, xxxiii, 50–52, 887–891, 1155 and American Revolution, 72–73 and fishing, 446 and formation of New Brunswick, 860, 887 See also Acadia Noverre, Jean-Georges, 343 N.T.M., 571 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 892 Nuclear technology, 291–292, 891–893, 1082 and de Gaulle, 510, 891, 892 See also Reeves, Hubert Nude Descending a Staircase, 104, 390 La Nuit de Calama, 410 La Nuit du carrefour, 441 Nuit et brouillard, 992 Núñez de Cáceres, José, 1044 Nuremberg Trials, 449 Nureyev, Rudolf, 345 Nylon, 402
1279
Nyman, Michael, 846 O Gringo, 851 O Pioneers!, 225 Oblate Order, 901 L’Obsession anti-américaine, 993–994 Ocampo, Victoria, 88, 206, 728, 895–896 Oceanography. See Project FAMOUS October group, 396 Odawas, 806 Of Grammatology, 1128, 1129 Office franco-québécois pour la jeunesse, 13 O’Hara, Charles, 1004 O’Hara, Maureen, 584, 585 Ohio, 896–897 Ohio Indians, 896, 897 Ohio River and valley, 598 and Céloron de Blainville, 231–232 and French and Indian War, 477 and La Salle, 660 and steamboats, 1093 Oil and gas industry. See Elf-Aquitaine (TotalFinaElf ) Ojibwas, 253, 397, 478, 763, 806, 1050 O.K., Joe, 194 Okra, 329 The Old Man and the Sea, 563 Olier, Jean-Jacques, 755, 837 Ollivier, Emile, 897–898 Olympics, 1084–1087 L’Ombre et la proie, 158 Les Ombres errantes, 879 On a mangé la dune, 753 “On Cannibals,” 831, 883, 1151 “On Carriages,” 831–832 On est au coton, 308 On purge Bébé, 985 On the Road, 647 Ondine, 632–633 120 Days of Sodom, 146 One Hundred Years of Solitude. See Cien Años de soledad
1280
INDEX
One of Ours, 226 The One Who Is Legion, or A. D.’s After-Life, 121 Oneidas, 489 Onondagas, 489 Ontario, 898–900 11 septembre, 2001, 879 11 septembre, mon amour, 878–879 11’9”01—September 11, 880 Opera, 847. See also Norman, Jessye; Paris Opera Opera Mundi, 285 Ophüls, Max, 263, 631 Orange (France Telecom brand), 469, 470 Orangina, 274 Orchestre Antillais du Bal Blomet, 143 Order of Jacques Cartier, 962 Les Ordres, 185 Orfeu Negro, 32 Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (Algeria), 510 L’Organisation Internationale de La Francophonie, 474 Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, 26 Les Origines de l’homme américain, 1000 Orleans, Philip, Duc d’, 866 Orléans, Philippe (Egalité), duc d’, 745 Orozco, José Clemente, 33, 908 Orphans of the Storm, 575 “Orphée noir,” 23 Orphelien, 143 “Orphic trilogy,” 275 Orphist paintings, 519, 520 Osorio, Governor, 1043 L’Osstidcho, 243 Ott, Carlos, 33 Ottawa, 900–901 Ottawas, 253, 478, 773. See also Pontiac Où est passée la noce?, 136 Où va le peuple américain?, 541 Ouachitas, 172 Ouidah, Benin, xxxi OuLiPo, 922 Outcault, R. F., 285
Outre-mer (Notes sur l’Amérique), 181, 1152, 1167 Overstreet, Richard, 442 Owen, Robert, 203, 714 Owens, Jesse, 1086 Ozarks, 5 Ozep, Fedor, 265, 441 Pabst, G. W., 263 Paddock, Charles, 1085 Padilla affair, 325 Pagnol, Marcel, 265 Paine, Thomas, 483, 485, 667, 903–905, 904, 1142, 1171 Painting, 906–910 Pal Joey, 643 Palcy, Euzhan, 910–911 Pallière, Jean-Léon, 30 Palmer, Elihu, 485 Palomino, Mercedes, 1124 Pan Am, 294 Panama Affair, xxxv, 914 Panama Canal, 22, 911–914, 912, 1092 911–914, ital 912 and Bigelow, 153 and French exploration of isthmus, xxxv French interest sold to U.S., xxxv French workers (1884), xxxv and U.S. occupation of Haiti, 554–555 Le Panama; ou les Aventures de mes sept oncles, 232 Panassié, Hugues, 612–613 Papaya, 29 Papillon, 246, 247, 374, 544–545 Papon, Maurice, 321 “Les Pâques à New York,” 232, 1152 Par les deux bouts de la lorgnette, chroniques du passé réfléchi, 530 Parade, 844, 846 Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 359, 709 Parc Astérix, 381, 1145 Parent, Madeleine, 307–308 Parent, Mimi, 146, 914–915
Paris in Hollywood films, 575–577 See also Disneyland Paris Paris, Texas, 1207 Paris Blues, 577 Paris Bourse, 469 Paris Commune, xxxv, 190 Paris Exposition (1889), 1143 Paris Notebooks, 499 Paris Opera, 214 Paris Opéra-Ballet, 345, 642 Paris Treaty of 1815, 79 Paris When it Sizzles, 577 Parizeau, Jacques, 15, 173 Parker, Charlie, 351, 612, 613 Parker, Robert, 1223 Parkman, Francis, 916–917, 916 Parmentier, AntoineAugustin, 328 Parnassianism, 88, 566, 728 Parquet, Jacques Dyel, Sieur du, 1028 Parra, Angel, 255 Pars vite et reviens tard, 322 Parti Acadien, 54 Parti Québécois, xxxvi, 15, 178, 962 and Lévesque, 715–716 Parti Socialiste, 15, 820 Particularism, 22–23 Pas de Dieux, 642, 644 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 633 Los Pasos perdidos, 217–218 Le Passager du transatlantique, 924 Passamaquoddies, 754 La Passion selon Galatée, 610 Pasteur, Louis, 1137 Pasteur Institute, 59 Pastry War, 746 Pathé (film studio), 504–505 Patriots’ Rebellion, xxxiv Patterson, Pat, 182 Paulhan, Jean, 1095 Le Pavillon des miroirs, 6, 650 Paysage de l’aveugle, 897 Le Paysan perverti, 1170–1171 Paz, Octavio, 729, 803, 917–918, 937 Péan, Stanley, 918–919
INDEX Peanuts, 287, 288 Pearson, Lester, 12 La Pêche blanche, 1156 Peck, Raoul, 919–920 Pèdre, 78 Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, 906 Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 907 Péguy, Charles, 272 Pei, I. M., 86 Pélage, Magloire, 1077–1078 Pélagie-la-charrette, 54, 752, 753 Pellan, Alfred, 146, 915 Pelletier, Gérard, 972–973 Pelloutier, Fernand, 193 Pemberton, John Styth, 273 Pennac, Daniel, 318, 322 Penobscots, 754 Pépé le Moko, 404–405 Pepe Le Pew, 920–921 Pépin, Ernest, 921–922 Pepperrell, William, 737 Peppers, 330 Pepsi Cola, 274 Peptides, 545, 546 Péralte, Charlemagne, 554 Perec, Georges, 922–923 Peres, Manuel, 847 Péret, Benjamin, 923–924, 1110 The Perils of Pauline, 505 La Permission. See The Story of the Three Day Pass Pernod Ricard, 274, 326, 1223 Péron, François, 713 Perrault, Pierre, 184, 925–926 Perret, Léonce, 262 Perrier, Louis, 809 Perrier water, 299, 808–809 Perrot, Jean-Marie 489 Perrot, Nicolas, 926–927 Pershing, John J., 41, 461, 1085, 1227, 1228 Perto do Coração Selvagem, 723 Peru, 30 Pétain, Philippe, xxxv, 10, 462, 490, 509, 1229 as head of Vichy regime, 1230, 1231–1232
Mitterrand’s admiration for, 820 and World War I, 1228 Peters, Dewitt, 571, 1058 Pétion, Alexandre Sabès, 183, 260, 554, 1149 and Dessalines, 369, 370 Petipa, Marius, 344 Petit, Roland, 345 Le Petit Monde de Don Camillo, 405 Le Petit Prince, 1034 Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré, 1123 Les Pétroleuses, 1207 Petrucciani, Michel, 614, 927–928 Peugeot, Pierre, 929 Peugeot, Thierry, 929 Peugeot—PSA Peugeot Citroën SA, 270, 928–929, 928. See also Citroën (Automobiles Citroën) Pew, Pepé le, 288 Peyot, Emile-Edmond, 30 Peyramaure, Michel, 409, 410 Peyrefitte, Alain, 12 Phélypeaux, Jérôme, comte de Pontchartrain, 152 Philip II, King of Spain, 452, 454 Philippe, Gérard, 346 Philippot, Michel, 31–32 Phillip Morris, 1137 Philosophy, 1127 Phipps (Phips), William, 489, 597, 888 Photography, 929–932. See also Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé; Florence, Hercules (Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence) Phylloxera vastratix, 1221 La Physiologie du goût, 327 Piaf, Edith, 32, 850 and Constantine, 298 and Mathieu, 783 and Montand, 832 Piankashaws, 598, 599 Piazzolla, Astor Pantaleón, 31, 932–933 Picabia, Francis, 104
1281
Picasso, Pablo, 490 and l’art nègre, 953 and Cocteau, 275, 276 and Huidobro, 583 and Lam, 676, 907–908 and Stein, 1093–1094 and Surrealism, 1101–1102 Pichon, Louis A., 162 Le Piège de Méduse, 846 Pierce, Franklin, 1044 Pierné, Gabriel, 845 Pierrot, Jean Louis, 1044 Pierrot le fou, 524 Pigments, 341–342 Pills, Jacques, 140 Pilote, 287 Pinchon, Emile-Joseph, 285 Pinchot, Gifford, 1134 Pineau, Gisèle, 933–934 The Pink Panther (and sequels), 211, 600 Pinochet, Augusto, 34 Pinzon, Vicente Yañez, 542 Piracy and privateers, 934–936 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, 574 Pitt, William, 78, 480, 737, 967, 1154–1155 Pius VII, Pope, 162 Pivert, Marceau, 1064 Pivot, Bernard, 814 Placoly, Vincent, 936–937 Plains of Abraham. See Battle of the Plains of Abraham Plainsong/Cantique des plaines, 588 Plaisance, 445, 872. See also Newfoundland Plaisir d’amour, 639, 640 Plamondon, Luc, 393, 502, 585, 851, 938–939, 962 Plan Calcul, 291–292 Plan vert, 543 Planet of the Apes, 177 Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes, 1054, 1055 Playboy, 945 Pleynet, Marcelin, 123, 1114
1282
INDEX
Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, 1055 Plumier, Charles, 1005 Pluriculturalism, 759 Pocock, J. G. A., 988–989 Poe, Edgar Allan, 939–940, 939 and Baudelaire, 131, 725–726, 940 and daguerreotypes, 930 French enthusiasm for, 725–726 influence on Claudel, 272 influence on Darío, 348, 349 works related to balloons, 117 Poème électronique, 1177–1178 Poèmes: Voyage en soi, Paysages, les poèmes de l’humour triste, Le Goyavier authentique, 1100–1101 Poems and Poèmes: Autres Alliances, 121 La Poésie antillaise, 294–295 “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas,” 498 Pointe-aux-coques, 54, 752, 753 Poiret, Jean, 236 Poiret, Paul, 417, 431 Poirier, Manuel, 1207 Poitevin, Jean-Marie, 265 Poïvet, Raymond, 286 Polanski, Roman, 577 Polignac, Camille Armand Jules Marie, Prince of, 67 Polka, 143 Pollock, Jackson, 105, 954 Le Polygraphe, 712–713 Pompidou, Georges, xxxvi, 14, 940–941 and Chirac, 255 and Cuba, 325 death of, 517–518 television, 1115, 1117 Pomus, Doc, 1066 Pons Plan, 102 Pontalba, Baroness, 868–869 Pontiac, 941–943 death of, 942, 943
Pontiac’s Rebellion, 482, 596, 598, 806, 941–943 Ponty, Jean-Luc, 529 Pool, Léa, 943–944 Popular Front. See Front populaire Pornography, 944–946 Port Royal, North Carolina, xxxi Port-Royal, Nova Scotia, 888 Portal, Michel, 614 Porter, Cole, 143, 946–947 Portrait of My Lover, 1030 Portugal, 29, 906 Positif, 947–948 Positivism, 34, 255 Postimpressionism, 557 Postmodernism and Baudrillard, 131 and Burroughs, 200 and Dylan, 406 and Madonna, 751 See also Lyotard, JeanFrançois Poststructuralism, 365–366, 1049, 1126, 1128. See also Tel Quel Potatoes, 327–328 Potawatomis, 253, 478, 598, 601, 806 Pottecher, Maurice, 1123 Pougy, Liane de, 121 Poujade, Pierre, and movement, 219, 793, 826 Poulenc, Francis, 275, 844, 847 Poulin, Jacques, 948–949 Poulin, Julien, 414 Poullet, Hector, 316, 949–950 Pound, Ezra Loomis, 121, 134, 950–952, 951, 1140 French influences, 727 and H. D., 560 and Hemingway, 563 and Laforgue, 669 “Poupée de cire, poupée de son,” 498 Pour la suite du monde, 184 Pournin, Marie, 762
Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, 354 Pouvoir intime, 1074 Pouy, Jean-Bernard, 321 Powell, Baden, 32 Powell, Colin, 605 The Practice of Everyday Life, 4, 233–234 Pradier, Charles, 906 Prairie du Chien, 601–602 Preludes, 844 Premier établissement de la foy dans la NouvelleFrance, 706 Le Premier Jardin, 440 Preminger, Otto, 441, 625, 1061 Présence africaine, 234 Presle, Micheline, 775 Presley, Elvis, 44, 850 Prêt-à-porter, 432 Prêt-à-Porter, 577 Pretty Baby, 758 Préval, René, 919–920 Prévert, Jacques, 263, 396, 841 Prévert, Pierre, 396 Prévost d’Exiles, AntoineFrançois, Abbé, 724–725, 869 Prévost, Pierre, 339 Price, Bruce, 84 Price-Mars, Jean, 23, 24, 444, 555, 994, 1196 Prideaux, John, 481 Primitivism, 952–954 modernist, 112–113 See also Noble Savage Prince Edward Island, 52–53, 54 Principle Navigations, 1186 Prisme d’yeux, 146 Pritzker Prize, 86 Privateers and Genêt, 514 See also Aury, LouisMichel Le Prix, 137 Le Procès-verbal, 697 Prochain Episode, 80 Progress in Flying Machines, 242 Project FAMOUS, 954–956 Les Promesses du ciel et de la terre, 410
INDEX Prose Poems, 131 Proust, Marcel, 151 and Bryce Echenique, 197 and Burroughs, 200 as gay movement ancestor, 512 Provencher, Bishop, 765 Provincetown Players, 119 Provost, Joseph, 956–957 Psychoanalysis, 663–664, 1127 “Le P’tit Bonheur,” 705–706 Pulitzer, Joseph, 124–125, 1091 The Purple Rose of Cairo, 64 Pyrenees, 125 Le Quai des brumes, 841 “Quand j’aime une fois j’aime pour toujours,” 368 Quartier des Gratte-ciel, 85 Quasi War, 459–460, 485–486 Les Quatre Cents Coups, 633, 1166 Quatre Continents, 403 Le Quatrième Siècle, 522 Quebec, 959–963 and civil unions, 513 and cotton, 305–307 cuisine, 329 cultural identity (18th century), 6–7 and de Gaulle, xxxvi, 9, 10–12, 510 and étoffe du pays, 305–306 and Filles du Roy, 439–440 folk music, 848 founding of, 195 and France, 10–16 and Franco-Canadian relations, 9 and Franklin, 474–475 and French language, 8, 14, 836 and Haitian immigrants, xxxvi in Hollywood films, 577–579 modernization, 824–826 and Patriots’ Rebellion, xxxiv
pop music, 851 sovereignty issue, xxxvi, 15, 1193 theater, 1121–1122, 1124–1125 and U.S., 377 See also Aquin, Hubert; Canada; Expo 67; New France; Quiet Revolution; St. Lawrence River Quebec, 578 Quebec Act, xxxiii, 70, 71, 228, 964–966, 965 Quebec, Battle of, 966–969 Quebec City, xxxiii, 969–972, 970 British conquest of (via Saint Lawrence River), 1025, 1025 and Champlain, 238–239, 1024–1025 founding of, xxxii, 227, 238–239, 961 Huron village at site of, xxxi as substitute film location, 578 Québec Soft, 525 Québec-France, 13 La Québécoite, 1002–1003 Queen Anne’s War, xxxii, 597–598, 1155. See also Indian Wars; War of the Spanish Succession Queen Mary I, 251 Queen Mary II, 251 Quesnel, Joseph, 1122 Quest for Fire, 74 Queylus, Gabriel de, 695 Quiet Revolution, xxxvi, 81, 229–230, 400, 962, 972–973 evoked in TV show, 578 and Catholic Church, 229–230 and Hydro-Quebec, 589, 972 and M. Tremblay, 1157 and “maîtres chez nous,” 590 and Trudeau, 972–973, 1164 See also Blais, Marie-Claire
1283
Quignard, Pascal, 879 Quilapayún, 255 Le Quimboiseur l’avait dit, 1201 Quinquina, 28 Quinquina, 653 Quintet for Piano and Strings, 550–551 Quintette du Hot Club de France, 529, 612, 613 La Quinzaine littéraire, 150 Races et racisme, 1000 Radisson, Pierre-Esprit, 493, 534, 535, 810, 975–976. See also Groseilliers, Médard Chouart des Raeder, Erich, 1231 Raffarin, Jean-Pierrre, 513 Raimond, Julien, 486 Raisin-Dadre, Denis, 847 Raleigh, Walter, xxxi, 701–702 Rambaud, Patrick, 309 Ramée, Joseph-Jacques, 83 Ramezay, Claude-Roch de, 968 Rap. See Hip-hop music and culture Rappeneau, Jean-Paul, 337 Les Raquetteurs, 184 Los raros, 349 Rassemblement pour la République, 256 Rassemblement pour l’Indépendance Nationale, 80 Ratio Studiorum, 621 Rauschenberg, Robert, 1030 Ravardière, Daniel de la Touche, Sieur de la, 186 Ravel, Maurice, 844, 845, 847 The Raven, 940 Ray, Man (Emmanuel Radnitsky), 95, 105, 930, 976–977, 977, 1101–1102 and Duchamp, 262, 391 as filmmaker, 262 and Josephson, 630 Ray, Nicholas, 1206
1284
INDEX
Raynal, Guillaume-ThomasFrançois, 145, 421, 978–979, 978 Rayuela, 300 Razilly, Isaac, 50, 887 Razilly brothers, 186 Reagan, Caroline Dudley, 111 Reagan, Ronald, and administration, 45, 97, 466 and AIDS blood test patents, 59 and Cuba, 325 Reality programming, 1116 Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir, 923 Reclus, Elisée, 30 Reclus, Onésime, 473 Recollect Order, 587, 864. See also Hennepin, Father Louis Red River, 763 Red River colony, 763–764, 798, 799 Red River Rebellion, 764, 998 The Red Violin, 517 Redon, Odilon, 190 Redouté, Pierre-Joseph, 164 Reefer Madness, 505 Le Réel et le théâtral, 642 Reeves, Hubert, 979–980 Reflections on America, 771 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 905 Refus global, 169–170 Reggae, 849 La Règle du jeu, 340 Rehr, Henrik, 879 Reich, Steve, 846 Reichenbach, François, 980–981 La Reine de Pommes, 569 Reinhardt, Django, 612, 613, 614, 981–982 and Grappelli, 529, 981 El Reino de este mundo, 217–218 Reinoso, Pablo, 33, 1060 Relations des Jésuites. See Jesuit Relations Remakes, 982–984 Renaudin, Désirée, 164 Renault, 928, 929, 1144
Reno, Jean, 984–985 Renoir, Jean, 43, 133–134, 264, 271, 985–986, 1241 and film noir, 441 and October group, 396 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 985 Republicanism, 18–19, 38, 40, 986–991. See also Bolívar, Simón Residues and Metaphors, 996–997 Resnais, Alain, 105, 772, 992–993 and Bujold, 199 Rétif de La Bretonne, Nicolas, 1170 Retour de Guyane, 342 La Réunion, 1120–1121 “Rêve d’artiste,” 858 Revel, Jean-François, 993–994, 1152 Un Revenant, 1159 Revere, Paul, 5 Révolution dans la révolution?, 354 La Révolution française, 885 Revolution of 1848, 746 La Révolution surréaliste, 191, 415, 1101, 1110 Revue des deux mondes, 404 Revue des sciences de l’eau, 13 Revue du monde noir, La, 994–995 La Revue indigène, 555 La Revue moderne, 259 Revue nègre, 111, 954 Reyes, Alfonso, 728, 802 Ribault, Jean, xxxi, 452–454, 700, 995–996 Ribeyrolles, Charles, 30 Rice, Anne, 860 Richard, D. R. Jr., 313 Richard, Gabriel, 372 Richard, Nelly, 996–997 Richards, D. W., 313 Richardson, Henry Hobson, 84 Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de, 997–998, 997 and Acadia, 50 and Compagnie des CentAssociés, 492, 864
and Compagnie du Cap Vert et du Sénégal, 290 and expansion of colonization, 241 and La Rochelle, 657 and Le Havre, 700 Rideau Canal, 901, 1026 Riel, Louis, xxxv, 764, 799, 962, 998–999. See also Métis; Northwest Rebellion; Red River Rebellion Riel Rebellion of 1885. See Northwest Rebellion Rififi, 351 Rigaud, André, 1149, 1150 Rights of Man, 485, 903, 905, 1171 Rimbaud, Arthur, 406, 407, 858 as gay movement ancestor, 512 Rimet, Jules, 1084 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 27, 29 Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 169 Rivard, Michel, 135 Rivera, Diego, 33, 908 Rivet, Paul, 803, 1000–1001 Rivette, Jacques, 205 Rivière, Jacques, 94 Robard, Maud, 761 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 105 Roberts, Howard, 1060 Roberval, Jean-François de la Roque, Seigneur de, 658, 1001–1002 Robespierre, Maximilien, 38, 168, 485 Robin, Régine, 1002–1003 Rochambeau, JeanBaptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de, 72, 1003–1004, 1003 Rochambeau, Vicomte de (son of comte), 1004 Roche, Denis, 1114 Roche, Kevin, 86 Roche, Pierre, 108 Rochefort, 1004–1005. See also Les Demoiselles de Rochefort
INDEX Rock and roll, 140. See also Yéyé music Rockefeller Institute, 388 Roda-Gil, Etienne, 1066 Rodin, Auguste, 30, 1005–1007, 1057–1058, 1059 and M. Tourneur, 1147 The Thinker, 1006, 1006 Rodriguez, Narciso, 434 Roger-Ducasse, Jean, 845 Rogers, Ginger, 775 Rohmer, Eric, 205, 1206 Rojas, Ricardo, 88 Rokafull, Maria de, 654 Romains, Jules, 1007–1008 Le Roman d’une orphéline, 375 “La Romance du vin,” 858 Romans noir, 319–321 Romier, Lucien, 76 Ronfard, Jean-Pierre, 1008–1009 Ronin, 984–985 Room at the Top, 1070 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 489 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 462, 1009–1011, 1010 anticipation of World War II, 464 and de Gaulle, 37, 42–43, 463, 509–510 and Haiti, 554 influence of Keynes, 792 and relations with France, 412 Roosevelt, Nicholas J., 1093 Roosevelt, Theodore, 40, 461, 1134 The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, 976 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 87–88 Rosay, Françoise (Françoise Bandy de Nadèche), 1011–1012 Rose Marie, 578 Ross, Harold, 449 Ross, Kristin, 826 Rossellini, Roberto, 133–134 Rostand, Edmond, 336 Rothschild, James de, 1196 Rouch, Jean, 184, 1012–1014, 636
Roudanez, Louis Charles, 741–742 Rouen Commercial Company, xxxii Rouge, mère et fils, 609 Rougemont, Denis de, 76 Roumain, Jacques, 24, 364, 366, 555, 994, 1014–1015 Roumer, Emile, 555 Rousseau, Henri, 30, 722 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1170 on republics, 987, 989 and term Noble Savage, 884–885, 952 Rousseau, Joseph-Tomas, 909 La Route est belle, 451 Les Routes du Sud, 734 Roux (in cooking), 329–330 Roux, Jean-Louis, 828 Rowley, Kent, 308 Roxanne, 337 Roy, Gabrielle, 307–308, 766, 1015–1016 Royal Proclamation of 1763, 71, 964, 965 Royalle, Candide, 946 Rozenbaum, Willy, 59 Rubber, 653, 1016–1019 Michelin factory, 1017 La Ruche. See Alexis, Jacques Stephen; Depestre, René Rudolph, Alan, 199, 577 La Rue Cases-Nègres, 910, 1239 Rugby, 1085, 1086 Ruiz, Raúl, 255, 1019–1020 RUN DMC, 570 Rupert, Prince of England, and Rupert’s Land, 493 Ryder, 120 Sá, Mem de, 28 Sábato, Ernesto, 1021–1022, 1049 Sable Island, 1155 Sabrina, 576 Sachs, Gunter, 119 Sacrifices, 782 Sade, Marquis de, 146
1285
Saer, Juan Jose, 1022–1023 Sagard, Gabriel, 587 Sage, Kay, 1111 Saguenay Fjord, 1024 Saint Jean Baptiste Society. See Societé Saint JeanBaptiste Saint Joan, 1061 Saint John, New Brunswick, 861 Saint Laurent, Yves, 432–433 Saint Lawrence River, xxxi, 9, 1023–1027 and Cartier, 220, 227 and Expo 67, 423 and fur trade, 494 See also Montreal, Quebec City Saint Louis, 1027 World’s Fair (1904), 84 Saint Lucia, xxxii, xxxiv, 1028–1029 map, 1028 Saint Martin, 1029–1030 Saint Phalle, Niki de (Catherine MarieAgnès de Saint Phalle), 1030–1031 Saint Pierre, Martinique, xxxv, 780 Saint-Amand, Edris, 1031–1032 Saint-Denis, Louis Juchereau de, 1032–1033, 1119–1120 Saint-Denys Garneau, Hector de, 561 Saint-Domingue, xxxii, 17–18, 28, 551–552 abolition and restoration of slavery, xxxiii, 553, 1077, 1148 and Bordeaux, 167, 168–169 and conditions of slavery, 1075–1076 and French Revolution, 486–487 sugar and slavery, 1077, 1098 See also Dominican Republic; Haiti; Hispaniola; Santo Domingo
1286
INDEX
Sainte-Hélène, Marie-André Regnard Duplessis de, 1033–1034 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 107, 1034–1035 Saint-Geneviève, 595–596 Saint-Georges, Joseph Boulogne, chevalier de, 843 Saint-Gobain, 292 Saint-Hilaire, Auguste César Prouvençal de, 30, 187 Saint-Ignace, JeanneFrançoise Juchereau, 1033 Saint-John Perse (Alexis Léger), 43, 1035–1036 Saint-Lusson, Daumont, 810, 926 Saint-Malo, 1036–1037 Saint-Mémin, Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de, 1038–1039 drawing of Jefferson, 1038 Saint-Ogan, Alain, 285 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 187 Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, xxxiii, 10, 445–446, 1039–1041 Saint-Vallier, Jean-Baptiste de La Croix de Chevriéres de, 696, 827 Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, 155 Les Saisons de Vendée, 410–411 Sajous, Léo, 994 Le Salaire de la peur, 832 Les Salauds ont la vie dure, 319–320 Saligny, Dubois de, 67 Salk Institute, 545, 546 Salsa, 32 Salvador, Henri, 32 Salves et salives, 922 Samba, 32 Sambizanga, 757 Sampers, H. P., 314
Sand, George (Aurore Dupin), 1041–1042, 1041 Sandeau, Jules, 1041 Sangre Negra, 1234–1235 Sans la miséricorde du Christ, 150 Santana, Pedro, 1044 Santo Domingo, 17, 28, 1042–1045. See also Dominican Republic; Haiti; Hispaniola; Saint-Domingue Sarduy, Severo, 123, 1045–1046 Sargent, John Singer, 1046–1047, 1046 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 87–88 Saroyan, William, 643 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 23, 1047–1050, 1048, 1152 on American writers, 726 and anti-Americanism, 76 and Aron, 90–91 and Beauvoir, 137–139, 1047, 1048–1049 and Davis, 352, 613 influence of Dos Passos, 384 and jazz, 613–614 and R. Wright, 1234 Saskatchewan, 1050–1051. See also Northwest Rebellion Sassafras, 329 Satie, Erik, 105, 275, 844, 845–847, 1176 Satori in Paris, 647, 1153 Sauguet, Henri, 845 Sauks, 253, 478 Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, xxxii Sauriol, Brigitte, 157 Sauser, Frédéric-Louis. See Cendrars, Blaise (Frédéric-Louis Sauser) “La Sauvage,” 1194 Sauvageau, Florian, 525 Sauvolle, François Marie, sieur de, 151
Say, Thomas, 714 The Scarlet Letter, 558–559 Scènes de la vie future, 394, 395, 1152 Schally, Andrew, 546 Schiaparelli, Elsa, 432, 442 Schneider industrial group, 892 Schoelcher, Victor, 19, 20, 24, 79, 1051–1052, 1078–1079 Schoelcher University, 147 Schoen, Eugene, 91 Schuessele, Christian, 1052–1053 Schwarz-Bart, André, 1053–1054, 1054–1055 Schwarz-Bart, Simone, 539, 1053, 1054, 1054–1055 Schweppes Beverages, 273, 274 Scorsese, Martin, 44–45 Scorza, Manuel, 1056–1057 Scott, Thomas, 999 Sculpture, 1057–1061 Seagram Company, 1196 Seale, Bobby, 516 “Seasons in the Sun,” 189 Seberg, Jean, 523, 1061–1062 and Gary, 503, 504 as Joan of Arc, 625 Second Empire, xxxiv architecture, 83, 84 Second Republic, xxxiv, 40, 990 voting rights for ex-slaves, 779 The Second Sex. See Le Deuxiéme Sexe “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” 1132 Seeger, Alan, 1226 Segalen, Victor, 875, 1062–1063, 1152 Seigneurial system, 1023 Séjour, Victor, 867 Séjourné, Laurette, 1064 Selkirk, Lord (Thomas Douglas), 763, 799 Sellers, Peter, 600
INDEX Selye, Hans, 546 Selznick, David O., 631, 643–644 Séminaire des Missions étrangères, 594 Semple, Robert, 799 Senegal. See Compagnie du Sénégal Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 23, 176, 341, 473 on McKay, 788–789 September 11, 2001. See 9/11 “September Morn,” 140 Serge, Victor (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich), 490, 1064–1065 Sergent, René, 82 Série Noire, 318–319 and Duhamel, 396–397, 569 and Himes, 569 influence on Vian, 1187 Serres, Oliver de, 327 Servan-Schreiber, JeanJacques, 333, 1065–1066 Sésé-Séko, Mobutu, 919 Seul, 502, 503 Seul ou avec d’autres, 567 Seuphor, Michel, 33, 907 Seven Years’ War, xxxii, 477 and Washington, 1202 See also French and Indian War Seward, William H., 65 Shahn, Ben, 422 Shakespeare and Company, 134–135 Sharon, Ariel, 882 Shawnees, 231–232, 478, 598, 732, 896 Sherman, William T., 130 Sherwood, Mary Neal, 1240 Shields, Brooke, 758, 759 Shirley, William, 598, 737, 889 Shoot the Piano Player. See Tirez sur le pianiste Short Brothers, 160 Shorter, Wayne, 352 Shorts Missile Systems, 160 Shreve, Henry Miller, 1093
Shuman, Mort, 188–189, 1066–1067 “Si mes vers avaient des ailes,” 550 Sica, Vittorio de, 1049 Siegfried, André, 1067–1068 Sierra, Justo, 801–802 Sign language, 1068–1070 Signoret, Simone (Simone Kaminker), 1070–1071, 1072 and Montand, 832–833, 1070–1071 Sigogne, Jean-Mandé, 891 Le Silence ou le parfait bonheur, 455 Les Silences du colonel Bramble, 786 Silly, François. See Bécaud, Gilbert (François Silly) Silva, Julio, 33, 1060 Simard, Alain, 470 Simenon, Georges, 318, 751–752 Simon, Simone, 1071–1072, 1071 Simone, Nina (Eunice Waymon), 1072–1073, 1073 Simoneau, Yves, 1073–1074 Simulation, 131–132 Sinatra, Frank, 140, 852 Sinclair, Patrick, 806 Singin’ in the Rain, 644 Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, 27 Sint Maarten, 1029 Siodmak, Robert, 263, 440 Sioux, 601, 773 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 33, 908 6,810,000 Litres d’eau par seconde, 202, 875 Skytrain, 108 Slave trade abolition in France, xxxiv and Bordeaux, 167 development of, 1075 and economic effect on Europe, 1076–1077 transatlantic, abolition of, xxxiii
1287
Slavery, xxxi, 1075–1079 1075–1079 abolition in French colonies, xxxiv, 536–537, 1078 abolition in SaintDomingue, xxxiii, 553 Caribbean, xxxii, 848–849 and French Revolution, 487, 778–779 Guadeloupe, 536 Guiana, 542 Haiti, 551–553, 1075–1076 Illinois Country, 595–596 Louisiana, xxxii, 739–740 Martinique, 778–779 Saint Lucia, 1028 Saint Martin, 1029 Santo Domingo, 1043 slave rebellions, 77–78. See also Haiti and sugar, 17, 1029, 1043, 1075, 1076–1077, 1098 and Washington, 1203, 1204 See also Antislavery movements, Code Noir Slidell, John, 66 Slimane, Hedi, 434 Smarth, Rosny, 919–920 Smith, Adam, 722, 1076 Smith, Stuff, 530 Smoke, 101 Snow Ann, 77 Snowmobiles, 160 Snuff, 945 So Human an Animal, 389 Soccer, 1084 Socialism, and Guérin, 541 Socialist Party, 43, 680 La Société Civile Internationale du Canal Interocéanique du Darien, xxxv Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour las conversion des sauvages de la Nouvelle-France, 837
1288
INDEX
Société des Amis des Noirs, 79, 486 Société Gallo-Américaine, 317 Société générale cinématographique, 678 Société Générale des Eaux Minérales de Vittel, 809 Société nationale de l’industrie aéronautique et spatiale, 107 Societé Saint Jean-Baptiste, 228–229, 962 Society for African Colonization, 183 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 78, 79 Society of Equality (Chile), 254 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Society of the Cincinnati, 483–484, 666, 711 Socrate, 846 Sodexho, 1079–1080 Sofrecom, 470 Sokal, Alan (Sokal hoax), 1129 Solal, Martial, 529, 614 Solanas, Fernando, 1080–1081 Solar, Xul, 89 Solibo magnifique, 237 Soliman Aga, 277 Solitude (rebel slave), 1078 Sollers, Philippe, 1045 Some Historical Account of Guinea, 145 Sommet de la francophonie, 173 Sonatine, 679 A Song for Quebec, 634 Sontag, Susan, 123 Sore, Jacques, 934–935 Soto, Hernando de, 817 Soulouque, Faustine, 1044 Soumy, Jean-Guy, 409, 411 Soupault, Philippe, 1081–1082, 191 Southern University, 130 Soviet Union, 464–465 Space technology, 1082–1083
Montreal aerospace industry, 839 See also Bombardier; Kourou space center; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (U.S.); Nuclear technology Spain and Spanish destruction of French colony in Florida, 452–455 and Louisiana, 129, 330, 866–867 relations with France under François I, 472–473 Spanish Civil War, 126 Spanish-American War and DuPont, 401 and France, 461 Sparks, Jared, 153 Spiegelman, Art, 288 Spielberg, Steven, 45 The Spirit of St. Louis, 576 Spirou, 286 Sport, 1083–1088 Sprinkle, Annie, 946 Spurrier, Steven, 1223 Square dance, 342, 343 St. Gaudens, Augustus, 1060 St. Hilaire, Archange, 143 Stadacona, xxxi, 220–222, 240, 969 Stade de France, 379 Stalin, Josef, 43, 464, 465 Stamp Act of 1765, 71 Standard Oil, 130 Standing Woman (Elevation), 665 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 436 Stanton, Theodore Weld, 1089–1090 Starmania, 851, 938, 962 Statue of Liberty, The, xxxv, 37, 40, 125, 1090–1092 and Bartholdi, 124–125, 1060, 1090 coverage by Courrier des Etats-Unis, 314 U.S.-French exchange of statues of liberty, 990 Steamboats, 1092–1093
Stebbins, Genevieve, 358 Steichen, Edward, 930 Stein, Gertrude, 134, 1093–1095, 1094, 1140–1141 and Hemingway, 563 and R. Wright, 1234 Steinbeck, John, 43 Steinberg, Saul, 123 Stellio, Alexandre (Fructueux), 32, 143 Stern, Robert, 86 Steuben, Friedrich Von, 353 Stevens, John, 1093 Stevens, Wallace, 1095–1096 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 696, 1047 Stewart, Terry, 319 Stieglitz, Alfred, 930, 976 Stone, Lucy, 436 Stonewall Rebellion, 512 The Story of the Three Day Pass, 1175 Strait of Belle Isle, xxxi Strand, Paul, 223–224 Strauss, Levi, 361 Stravinsky, Igor, 953 A Streetcar Named Desire, 1214–1215 Stroyberg, Annette, 1173 Structuralism, 365, 1049, 1126, 1128, 1129. See also Tel Quel Stuart, John, 1154 Stukeley, Thomas, 995 Subjectivity, 1127 Subway, 677 Sucre amer, 690–691 Sudbury, 1096–1097 Sudbury, University of, 1097 Sue, Eugène, 725 Suez Canal, 911, 1090, 1097 Suez Company (Compagnie de Suez/Suez Lyonnaise des EauxDumez), 1097–1098. See also Lyonnaise des Eaux (Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez) Sugar, 28, 1029, 1043, 1098–1100 decline of industry, 538 mill, 1099
INDEX and slavery, 17, 1029, 1043, 1075, 1076–1077, 1098 Sugar Act of 1764, 1098 Sugar Hill Gang, 570 Suite marine, 259 Sullivan, Louis H., 85, 93 Sullivan, Vernon. See Vian, Boris The Sun Also Rises, 563 Supercomputers, 291 Superfrancofêtes, 706, 1193 Supervielle, Jules, 803, 1100–1101 Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 884 Sur, 88, 895 Surrealism, 23, 34, 105, 1101–1104 and Bourgeois, 180 and Breton, 191–192, 630 and Cartier-Bresson, 222–223 and Duhamel, 396 and Ernst, 415 and Fini, 442 and Haiti, 23–24 influence of Poe, 940 and Josephson, 630, 631 and Kaplan, 639–640 and Lam, 676 and Latin American writers, 728 and Masson, 781 and Ménil, 793–794 and Mimi Parent, 914–915 and Paz, 917 and Péret, 923–924 and Soupault, 1081 and Tanguy, 1110 See also Bataille, Georges; Benoît, Jean Surrealist Manifesto, 191 Surrender on Demand, 490 Surveiller et punir, 468 “Suzanne,” 634 Suzor-Côté, Marc-Aurèle De Foy, 909–910 Swaim, Bob, 1104–1105 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadass Song, 1175–1176 Sylvestre, Anne, 634 Symbolism, 88 and Claudel, 272
and Hassam, 557 influence of Poe, 940 reception in U.S., 726–727 and Vielé-Griffin, 1189–1190 La Symphonie pastorale, 774–775 Synthetic Waltzes, 846 Tabasco, 330 Tadoussac, 830, 1107–1108 Taffanel de La Jonquière, Jacques-Pierre de, 122 Taglioni, Marie, 343–344 Tailleferre, Germaine, 845 Taino, 551 Taínos, 1042 Take the Money and Run, 64 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de, 38, 743, 744, 1108–1109, 1108 on Washington, 1202 Talon, Jean, 865, 926, 961, 1109–1110 Tamango, 795–796 Tamaroas. See Cahokia Les Tambours sauvages, 410 Tango, 31, 89, 342, 343 and Piazzolla, 932–933 Tanguay series, 174 Tanguy, Yves, 396, 1110–1111 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 1111–1112 Tarahumaras, 802 Tardieu, André, 273 Tarot Garden, 1031 Tartuffe, 827, 1121 Taumay, Auguste-Marie, 1059 Tavernier, Bertrand, 1112–1113 Tawakonis, 654 Taylor, Zachary, 129 Tchelistcheff, André, 1221–1222, 1222 Tchelitchev, Pavel, 1111 Téchiné, André, 154 Teflon, 402 Tel Quel, 94, 1113–1115 and Barthes, 123 and Lautréamont, 694 and Sarduy, 1045
1289
Télé-Québec, 136 Television, 14, 1115–1118 Télévision Quatre-Saisons, 1197 Tellier, Paul, 160 Temblor de cielo, 583 Téméraire, 286 Les Temps modernes, 139 Tennis, 1087–1088 Terres brûlantes, 411 Terrier, Jean, 934–935 Terroir, 327, 1220, 1223–1224 Terron, Colbert du. See Colbert de Terron, Jean Terry, Clark, 928 Tertre, Jean-Baptiste du, 1118–1119 Tessera, 195 Tesson, Louis Honoré, 602 Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse, 441 Testimonios, 895 Texaco, 317, 781 Texas, 1119–1121 TF1 television, 1116, 1117 Thalberg, Irving, 252 Thaly, Daniel, 22 Thatcher, Margaret, 97 Thays, Charles, 82 Theater, 1121–1125 Theater Arts Magazine, 1123 Theater Guild, 119 Theater of cruelty, 94 Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, 1121 Théâtre du Hasard, 375 Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, 174, 1124 Théâtre du Peuple, 1123 Théâtre du Rideau Vert, 1124 Théâtre du Trillium, 174 Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, 827, 1123 Le Théâtre et son double, 94 Théâtre Expérimental de Montréal, 1008 Théâtre Libre, 1122–1123 Théâtre Populaire du Quebec, 1125 Theme parks, 1145. See also Disneyland; Disneyland Paris
1290
INDEX
Theory, 46, 1126–1130 Thériault, Yves, 1130–1131 Thevet, André, 27, 186, 876 Thiers, Adolfe, 87 Thieu, Nguyen Van, 1192 The Thinker, 1006, 1006 Third Republic, xxxiv, 40, 219, 510, 990 and modernization, 823 restoration of voting rights for ex-slaves, 779 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, 517 This Land is Mine, 986, 986 Thoby-Marcelin, Philippe, 555, 571, 572 Thomson, Virgil, 846 Thomson-CSF, 160 Thoreau, Henry David, 726, 1171 A Thousand Plateaus, 7–8, 357, 540 Three Fires. See Ojibwas, Odawas, Potawatomis Three Men and a Baby, 983–984 The Three Musketeers, 7, 398 Three Soldiers, 384 Thresor de la langue françoyse, 876 Thurber, James, 1131–1132 Tiens-toé ben, j’arrive, 393 Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 93 “Tiffany” trilogy, 297 Tilden, Samuel J., 153 Tillinac, Denis, 409 Timber, 1132–1134 The Time of Your Life, 643 Timucua Indians, 701, 702–703, 702 Tinguely, Jean, 1030 Tintin, 284, 286, 288 Tirez sur le pianiste, 108, 527 Tit-Coq, 1124 To Have and Have Not, 573 “To Roosevelt,” 348–349 Tobacco, 28, 1134–1137 Vendors of Tobacco, 1136 See also Nicot, Jean Tobago, xxxii, xxxiv Tocqueville, Alexis de, 10, 722, 725, 1137–1140, 1142, 1152
influence on Duvergier, 403 on Jefferson, 617 on New Orleans, 867 Todorov, Tzvetan, 4 Toklas, Alice B., 1094, 1140–1141 Tolsa, Emmanuel, 29, 1058 Tomatoes, 328 Tontons Macoutes, 556 Top Jeunesse, 1197 Töpffer, Rodolphe, 285 El Topo, 626 Topor, Roland, 626 Torcals, Vic, 143 La Torche, 545 Tortuga, 935 Tosquelles, François, 664 Toubon, Jacques, 267, 334, 682 Toubon Act, 549, 682 Tour de France, 1088, 1142 Touring Club de France, 1142, 1145 Tourism, 45, 1141–1146. See also Disneyland; Disneyland Paris; Travel writing Tournachon, Gaspar Félix, 930 Tourneur, Jacques, 262, 1146–1147 Tourneur, Maurice, 262, 1146, 1147–1148 Toussaint L’Ouverture, François, xxxiii, 7, 19, 78, 553, 743, 1148–1151, 1149 capture of, xxxiii Césaire biography of, 235 and Christophe, 260 and Dessalines, 368–369 as governor of Santo Domingo/SaintDomingue, 1043–1044 and Leclerc, 704–705, 743–744 and Washington, as linked by U.S. slaves, 1204–1205 Toussaint Louverture, 21 Tout peut arriver, 662 Tout-Monde, 523
Trans-American Development Bank, 467 Travel writing, 1151–1154 Traversée de la Mangrove, 295 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 598, 673, 889 Treaty of Aranjuez, 1043 Treaty of Basel, 1043 Treaty of Fontainebleau, 817 Treaty of Mortefontaine, 460 Treaty of Paris (1763), xxxiii, 10, 51, 69, 458–459, 482, 1154–1155 and British acquisition of New France, 866, 964 and cession of French possessions to Spain and Britain, 740 and French possessions on Canadian eastern shore, 737–738, 873 and French transatlantic control, 681 and Grenada, 533 Treaty of Paris (1783), 57, 72–73 and Franklin, 475 Treaty of Ryswick, xxxii, 551, 593 and Santo Domingo, 1043 Treaty of Saint Ildefonse. See Treaty of San Ildefonso Treaty of Saint-Germain-enLaye, 50, 621 Treaty of San Ildefonso, xxxiii, 460, 743, 1154 Treaty of Tordesillas, 472 Treaty of Utrecht, 593, 1155–1156 and Île Royale, 735, 872 and Newfoundland, 872–873 and Nova Scotia, 888 and whaling, 1209 Treaty of Versailles (1763), 837 Treaty of Versailles (1779), 533 Treaty of Versailles (1783), 1209
INDEX Treaty of Versailles (1919), xxxv, 464, 777 Tremblay, Lise, 1156–1157 Tremblay, Michel, 1124, 1157–1158 Tremblay, Rémi, 1158–1159 Trenet, Charles, 11, 14, 850, 1159–1160 Trent affair, 66 Tres Tristes Tigres, 1019 La Trilogie des dragons, 712 “Trilogie Noire,” 319 Trinh, Coralie, 945 Trinidad, 1160–1161 Trinity, 560 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 1173 Tristan, Flora, 435, 508, 1142, 1161–1162 Tristes Tropiques, 718, 952, 1152 Trois couleurs: bleu, 154 Trois Hommes et un couffin, 983–984, 983 Trois-Rivières, 1025 Les Trophées, 566–567 Tropic of Cancer, 807 Tropiques, 23–24, 793–794, 1163 Trotsky, Leon, 191 Trottoirs de Buenos Aires, 89 La Trouée, 555 Troye, Pierre de, 593 Truchements, 311 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, xxxvi, 15, 1164–1165 and Bourassa, 178 and Quiet Revolution, 972–973, 1164 and War Measures Act, 634 Truffaut, François, 45, 108, 205, 441, 1165–1166, 1165 and American pulp fiction, 527–528 and Jutra, 636 Trujillo, Rafael, 1044 Truman, Harry S., 464, 777 Truman Doctrine, 464, 775–776, 777, 778 Truth, 1127 “Tu verras,” 886 Tucker, Sophie, 613–614 The Tunnel, 1021
Tupinambá, 28, 186, 876, 883 Turgeon Commission, 307 Turkey, 276–277 TV5, 14, 35 TVFQ99, 14 Twain, Mark, 624–625, 1093, 1167–1168, 1167 on Bourget, 182 and Dreyfus case, 386 and Verne, 117 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1185, 1185 Two Years in the French West Indies, 21 Twombly, Cy, 123 Tzara, Tristan, 104–105, 191, 1101 Uderzo, Albert, 287 Ultraísmo, 170 Ulysses, 134 Unanimism, 1007–1008 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 154 Underground Railroad, 674 Une Corde, un Colt, 1207 UNESCO, 1178 Ungar, George, 142 Union nationale (Canada), 399–400 Unison, 375–376, 377 United States and art deco, 91 and Basques, 126, 127 Bourget on, 181–182 and Camus, 210–211 and civil union issue, 513 and Claudel, 272–273 and Cold War, 465, 775–776, 777 and Cuba, 324–325 Deleuze and Guattari on, 356–357, 540 and France, 37–46 and French artists, 908–909 and French Revolution, 483–485, 515 and Haiti, 554–555, 556 and influence of Toussaint, 1150 Morin on, 842–843
1291
postwar relations with France, 465–468 Romains on, 1007–1008 and sculpture, 1060 and Segalen, 1062–1063 Siegfried on, 1067–1068 and Soviet Union, 464–465 and sugar, 1098 Tel Quel on, 1114 and World War I, 1218, 1225, 1226 and World War II, 464 See also Florida; Illinois Country; Indiana; Iowa; Louisiana; Louisiana Purchase; Maine; Michigan; Minnesota; Mississippi; Missippi River; Missouri; Republicanism United Water Resources, 1097 Universal Exhibition. See Exposition Universelle (1900) Universalism, 22–23 Upper Canada, xxxiv, 898–899, 961. See also Ontario, Quebec Uptight, 351 Ursulines, 675, 761–762, 1169 and Basques, 126, 127 New Orleans, 83, 870–871 US, 689 U.S. Constitution, 483, 986–987, 1204 The U.S. Penitentiary System and Its Application in France, 1138 U.S. trilogy, 297 U.S.A., 840 Utopia, 1170 Utopias, 1170–1172 Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, 1144 Vadim, Roger, 346, 770, 1173–1174 and Bardot, 118, 119, 1173 and Fonda, 456, 1173
1292
INDEX
Valdenuit, Thomas Bluget de, 1038 Valenti, Jack, 506 Valentino, Paul, 537–538 Valérie, 567–568 Valéry, Paul, 134, 150, 190, 727, 1101 Vallières, Pierre, 1174–1175 Les Valseuses, 363 Van Gogh, Vincent, 508 Van Peebles, Melvin, 1175–1176 Varèse, Edgar, 1176–1178, 1177 Vargas, Fred, 318, 322 Varian’s War, 490 Vasconcelos, José, 802 Vattemare, Nicolas-Marie Alexandre, 1178–1179 Vauban, Sébastien, 192 Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, PierreFrançois de Rigaud, Marquis de, 480, 481–482, 597–598, 739 and Montcalm, 673, 834, 967 and war with Britain, 967–968 Vautrin, Jean, 321 Veber, Francis, 1179–1180 Vega, Garcilaso de La, 715 Venezuela, 813, 1180–1182 and Bolívar, 159 map, 1181 Le Vent de janvier, 1031–1032 Vents, 1036 Ventura, Ray, 32 Vergennes, Comte de. See Gravier, Charles, Comte de Vergennes Verlaine, Paul, 348, 349, 858 as gay movement ancestor, 512 Vermay, Jean-Baptiste, 29, 907 Vermont, 1183–1184 Verne, Jules, 117, 187, 854, 1184–1186 and Niagara Falls, 875 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1185, 1185
Vernet, Carle, 95 Verrazano, Giovanni da, xxxi, 49, 220, 452, 700, 1186–1187 and term “New France,” 863 sponsorship by François I, 472–473, 1186 Versailles, 302 Vertigo, 157 El Viaje, 1080 Viala, Pierre, 1221 Vian, Boris, 613, 1187–1188 Viatte, Auguste, 1188–1189 Vichy regime, xxxv, 10, 1230–1232 anti-Semitic laws, 490 arrest of Soupault, 1082 Caribbean reaction to, 23–24 Couturier on, 315 and de Gaulle, 314, 509 and foreign nationals, 489–490 lingering effect of, 941 and Mitterrand, 820 and Morand, 840 and Panassié, 612 and F. D. Roosevelt, 1010 and southeast Asia, 177 U.S. recognition of, 462 Victoria, Queen of England, 900–901 Vidal, Anatole, 1095 Vidal, Paule, 1095–1096 Vidalin, Maurice, 140 Vie des arts, 455 La Vie en rose, 418 La Vie est déguelasse, 319 Vie et mort du roi boîteux, 1008–1009 La Vie mode d’emploi, 922 Viel, Nicolas, 587 Vielé-Griffin, Francis (Egbert Ludovicus Vielé), 1189–1190 La Vierge et le taureau, 320 Vietnam War, 44, 465, 1190–1192 Baudrillard on, 132 Tel Quel on, 1114 See also Indochina War (1950s)
Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, 1201 Vigneault, Gilles, 471, 706, 720, 851, 1192–1193 Vignes, Jean-Louis, 1221 Vigny, Alfred de, 10, 1193–1195 Vilar, Hervé, 140 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 188 Le Village, 615 Villechaize, Hervé, 1195 Villegagon, Nicolas Durand de, 27, 28, 186, 700 De Villepin, Dominique, 605 Vinaver, Michel, 879 Vincennes, François Marie Bissot, sieur de, 599 Vincennes, Jean-Baptiste Bissot, sieur de, 599 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 435 Viollier, Yves, 409, 410–411 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 1090 Virginia, University of, 83 Visages du monde, 528 Visions of Cody, 647–648 Viva Maria!, 118–119 Vivendi Universal, 1097, 1196 Vivien, Renée, 121 The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, 99 Vodun, 1044, 1196–1197 and Danticat, 347 and Dessalines, 369, 370 and Hippolyte, 571–572 in Hollywood films, 574 and music, 849 and sculpture, 1058 Voisine, Roch, 1197–1198 La Voix de la France, 161 Volkswagen Blues, 948–949 Volney, Constantin François de, 1134 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 9, 79, 722, 1198–1200, 1199 and coffee, 278 Houdon busts of, 579 Île Royale, 735 on Quebec and peace, 966–967
INDEX Voodoo. See Vodun Voyage au bout de la nuit, 230, 1151 Voyage autour du monde, 1152 Voyage dans les Etats-Unis d’Amérique fait en 1795, 1796 et 1797, par La RochefoucauldLiancourt, 656 Voyage en Icarie, 203, 1171 A Voyage to the Moon, 336 Voyageurs, 310, 848. See also Fur trade La Vraie Nature de Bernadette, 679 Vulcania, 381 VVV, 415, 1103 Vytlacil, Vaclav, 180 Wabash River, 598, 599 Wahl, Jean, 1095 Waksman, Selman, 388 Walcott, Derek, 370, 1029 Walden, 1171 Walk on the Wild Side, 212 Walker, Horatio, 497 Walt Disney Company French government concessions to, 380 Mattelart on Donald Duck and cultural imperialism, 785 version of Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 585 Wanadoo, 469, 470 Wanger, Walter, 182 War of 1812, xxxiv, 899, 900–901 War of the Austrian Succession, xxxii, 865–866. See also King George’s War War of the League of Augsburg, xxxii. See also King William’s War War of the Spanish Succession, xxxii, 323, 1155. See also Queen Anne’s War War of Tripoli, 619 Warhol, Andy, 123 Warner Brothers, 920 Warner, Jack, 774
Warner-Vieyra, Myriam, 1201–1202 Washington Irving and His Literary Friends, 1053 Washington, George, 71–72, 1202–1205, 1203 Bartholdi statue of, 124–125 and French and Indian War, 478, 896–897, 1202 and Genêt, 514 Houdon sculptures of, 579–580, 1060 and L’Enfant, 711–712 and Paine, 905 and Rochambeau, 1003–1004 Washington, Martha Dandridge Custis, 1203 Washington, D.C. See L’Enfant, PierreCharles The Waste Land, 951 Weas, 598, 599 Weber, Eugen, 823 Weber, Ferdinand L., 424 Weber, Max, 90 Webster, Daniel, 1099 Webster, Herman A., 497 Weissmuller, Johnny, 1085 Welles, Orson, 134, 517 Wendat (Ouendat). See Hurons Wenders, Wim, 1207 Werfel, Franz and Alma, 490 Wertham, Frederic, 287 Wesley, John, 145 West Florida. See Louisiana West Indies, 176 West Indies Company, 1110 Westchester Parkway, 85 Western, 1207 Westerns, 1205–1208 Westinghouse, 892 Wetmore, Charles A., 1223 Whaling, 1208–1209 Wharton, Edith, 101, 1210–1211, 1211 What Is Cinema?, 134 What Is Remembered, 1140 “What Now, My Love,” 140 What’s New Pussycat, 577 Whily-Tell, A. E., 545
1293
Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 121, 1046–1047, 1211–1213 lithograph of Mallarmé, 1212 White, Edmund, 1213–1214 Whitman, George, 135 Whitman, Walt, 348, 406, 407, 726, 727 as gay movement ancestor, 512 Laforgue as admirer and translator of, 668, 669 Merrill on, 796–797 and Vielé-Griffin, 1189–1190 Whitney, J. D., 56 Wichitas, 654 Wiener, Jean, 845 Wiener Werkstätte, 93 Wilberforce, William, 78, 79, 183, 260 Wilde, Dolly, 121 Wilde, Oscar, 348, 796 Wilder, Billy, 263, 575–577 Wilder, Thornton, 1140 Wilkes, Charles, 66 William III, King of England, 565 Williams, Charles, 846 Williams, Tennessee, 1214–1215 Williams, William Carlos, 1081–1082, 1140, 1215–1216 Willoughby, Lord, 1028 Wilson, Edmund, 155 Wilson, James, 1223 Wilson, Jerry, 1238 Wilson, Lambert, 1216–1217 Wilson, Woodrow, xxxv, 37, 40, 1217–1219 and Atlanticism, 96 “new diplomacy,” 461 and F. D. Roosevelt, 1009 Winckler, Paul, 285–286 Windows on the World, 878, 879, 880 Windsor, Duke and Duchess of, 141 Windward Islands, 532
1294
INDEX
Wine, 1219–1224 Winnebagos, 601 Wisconsin, 1224–1225 Wolfe, James, 481, 737, 834, 968 death of, 479, 481, 673–674, 834, 968 defeat of Montcalm, 866, 968 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 435 A Woman of Paris, 575 The Woman Question in Europe, 1089 A Woman’s Way, 577 Women position in New Orleans culture, 868–869 See also Feminisms Wood, Gordon S., 988–989 Wood, Thelma, 120 Woodruff, Winship, 273–274 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 954–955 Woolf, Virginia, 135, 895, 1237 Wordsworth, William, 1142 Workman, Nanette, 938 World Bank, 505 World Cup, 1084 World music, 31–32, 640 World Tourism Organization, 1141 World Trade Organization, 466–467 and GATT, 505–507 World War I, 7, 39, 1225–1228 arrival of U.S. troops in France, xxxv and Breton, 190–191 and Céline, 230 and Chevalier, 251–252 and Cohen, 279 and Cournand, 313 and Cummings, 331 and de Gaulle, 509 and Dominion Textile, 307 and Dos Passos, 383–384 and Duhamel, 394–395 and DuPont, 401 and Fitzgerald, 447
and French-U.S. relations, 41–42, 461–462 and Hemingway, 562, 563 and Maurois, 786 and Montreal, 838 and F. D. Roosevelt, 1009 and Stein and Toklas, 1140 and Tanner, 1112 and W. Wilson, 1218, 1225, 1226 World War II, xxxv, 1228–1233 and Bernanos, 148 and Boulle, 177 and Boyer, 182–183 and Breton, 192, 490 and Brittany, 193–194 and Caillois, 206–207 and Camus, 209 and Cartier-Bresson, 224 and Céline, 230–231 and Citroën, 270 and Clair, 271 and Coca-Cola, 274 and Cohen, 279–280 and Cournand, 313 and Dalio, 340–341 and Damas, 342 and Dubos, 388 and DuPont, 402 and Flanner, 449 and Ford, 458 and France’s infrastructure, 469–470 and French cinema, 263–265, 271 French exile community in Hollywood during, 340–341, 405, 1011 and French filmgoing, 205 and French-U.S. relations, 42–43, 462–463 and Fry, 489–490 and Grappelli, 529 and Haiti, 24 and J. Renoir, 986
and Jourdan, 631 and Lévesque, 716 liberation of France, 1232, 1233 and Malaquais, 756 and Maurois, 786 and Michelin, 805 and migration of French artists to U.S., 1061 and Milhaud, 845 and Mitterrand, 820 and Montreal, 839 and Peugeot, 928 and Reinhardt, 529, 982 and Revel, 993 and Rivet, 1000 and rubber, 1018–1019 and Saint-Malo, 1037 and Sartre, 1048 and Servan-Schreiber, 1065 and Surrealists, 1103 and Tanguy, 1110 and Vian, 1187 See also Eisenhower, Dwight D.; French Resistance; Gaulle, Charles André Marie Joseph de; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Vichy regime World Wide Web, 332 World’s Fairs Chicago (1893), 84 Expo 67 (Montreal), 423–425 St. Louis (1904), 84 See also Exposition Coloniale (1931); Exposition Universelle (1900) The Wretched of the Earth, 430–431 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 85 Wright, Richard, 331, 1153, 1234–1235, 1234 and Baldwin, 114 and Beauvoir, 139 and Himes, 568–569 Wright, Wilbur and Orville, 241, 242 WTO. See World Trade Organization
INDEX Wu Tang Clan, 571 Wyandots, 478, 586, 588. See also Hurons Wynwood, Elizabeth, 1057–1058 Wyse, Lieutenant, xxxv Xavier, Francis, 621 XXL, 944 XYZ Affair, 459, 485–486 “Yale critics,” 365–366 Y. B., 879 Yellow fever. See Panama Canal
Yellow Kid, 285 Yéyé music, 140, 498, 850–851 Young, Arthur, 656, 1076 Young, Loretta, 182 Yourcenar, Marguerite (Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour), 1237–1238 Z, 304 Zaire, 919
1295
Zea, Leopoldo, 803 Zidi, Claude, 143 Zig et Puce, 285 Zobel, Joseph, 1239–1240 Zola, Emile, 1240–1241, 1240 on Dreyfus case, 386 and James, 610 and Norris, 727 See also The Life of Emile Zola Zombi blues, 919 Zombies, 574 Zouaves, 67 Zouk, 143, 640–641, 849
ABOUT THE EDITOR Bill Marshall holds a chair in Modern French Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and he previously taught at the University of Southampton, England, for sixteen years. Professor Marshall’s publications include Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent (1992), Guy Hocquenghem (1996), and Quebec National Cinema (2001), and he has also edited volumes on Musicals (2000) and on Montreal-Glasgow (2005).
1297