Queer Places:
Cimetière du Père Lachaise
Paris, City of Paris, Île-de-France, France
Françoise d'Eaubonne, born Françoise Marie-Thérèse Piston d'Eaubonne on March12, 1920 in Paris and died in the same city on August3, 2005,
was a French woman of letters, novelist, philosopher, essayist and biographer, libertarian feminist and ecofeminist activist.
Françoise d'Eaubonne, born in 1920, was the third of four children born to Étienne Piston d'Eaubonne and Rosita Martinez Franco. One of his sisters is the writer Jehanne Jean-Charles. His mother, daughter of a Spanish Carlist revolutionary, is one of the first women to pursue scientific studies at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris, where she attended Marie Curie's courses. His parents met at Le Sillon, a progressive Christian movement led by Marc Sangnier. His father, originally from Brittany, came from a family of great travelers, counting among his ancestors an anti-slavery navigator from the West Indies. He was a Christian anarchist, and co-founder of the Revolutionary Fascist Party. Étienne d'Eaubonne was general secretary of an insurance company, while Rosita-Mariquita Martinez y Franco interrupted her scientific career once married. Françoise d'Eaubonne was very early sensitized by her mother to the inequalities experienced by women. Françoise d'Eaubonne's childhood in Toulouse was marked by her father's physical decline due to the effects of gas in the trenches of the First World War. She was sixteen years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out, nineteen years old when she saw the arrival of the Republicans in exile.
Françoise d'Eaubonne continued her studies at the Faculty of Arts and Fine Arts in Toulouse. While entering the resistance against Nazism, she published her first poems in 1942, and Le Cœur de Watteau, her first novel in 1944. From the age of 20 to 25, she suffered the privations of the time and met at the Liberation, in a large Parisian train station, the Jewish survivors returning from the camps. She would later summarize her feelings about this period of her life under the evocative title of Chienne de jeunesse. From 1945 until 1956, Françoise d'Eaubonne was a member of the French Communist Party. Close to Laurent Schwartz, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Lucien Goldmann, she married Jacques Aubenque. This youth, plastered on a hypersensitive personality, led her to take a critical look at the world that would shape the radical andfeminist activist. In this sense, the reading of Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex, in 1949, is decisive. Two years later, she defended the philosopher by publishing Le Complexe de Diane. In 1953, she became a member of the National Council of Writers. A reader at Julliard in the 1950s, at Calmann-Lévyin the early 1960s, and at the end of the 1960s at Flammarion, she raised her children, Indiana and Vincent, with the help of her family.
She actively campaigned against the Algerian war and in September 1960, signed the Manifesto of the 121, also called "Declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian war". Co-founder of theWomen's Liberation Movement (MLF) in the late1960s, signatory of the Manifesto of 343 for the right to abortion, she launched the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action (FHAR) with the writer and journalist Guy Hocquenghem and Anne-Marie Grélois in1971, while she is editorial secretary at the Social Scourge. Within the MLF, she also leads the group "Ecology and feminism" who led her to found the association Écologie-Féminisme in 1978. This literary and militant life intersects with those of Violette Leduc, Nathalie Sarraute, Colette, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, of whom she was a very close friend, of Jean-Paul Sartre. A friend of Michel Foucault, Françoise d'Eaubonne is also committed to prisoners' rights and against the death penalty. On September 6, 1976, she married "the prisoner Pierre Sanna, number 645 513, in Fresnes, sentenced to twenty years in prison for a murder he did not commit" and announced it in the columns of the newspaper Liberation: "In revolt against the class from which I come, I want to turn against it the weapons it gives me and divert the institutions it serves to class and gender oppression. I marry Pierrot [Pierre Sanna] because he never bowed his head, for his hunger strikes that damaged his health without result [...]; for having grasped, being common law, the political dimension of his situation. » The following year, she appeared alongside the actor Guy Bedos and the singer Yvan Dautin, at the rostrum of the Mutualité, to demand the abolition of the death penalty. From 1988, Françoise d'Eaubonne became Secretary General of SOS Sexisme. She worked as a literary critic on Radio Mouvance, Paris Pluriel, Paris FM, Radio-Paris andRadio-Beur (1989).
She died in Paris on August 3, 2005 and was cremated in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. His archives are kept at the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine.
My published books:
