When we talk about Françoise Chandernagor, we always remember that she was the first woman to graduate from the ENA, in 1969. We less know that she was also one of the first three women to sit at the Siècle, in 1983 The dinner of the famous association which brings together the French political, financial and media elites then took place at the Automobile Club, Place de la Concorde. Since its founding in 1944, it has only brought together men. Times had changed and certain members, including Robert Badinter and Marceau Long, felt that it was time to modernize, as Françoise Chandernagor tells us: “I was then on the Council of State, one of which I headed. services, and I had published King’s Alley two years before. More and more people wanted women to be tested in the Siècle, but their opponents replied that they should not take any because they would tell everything to the outside world. It was the idiotic idea that women are unrepentant chatterboxes who can’t keep a secret! I made my debut at the same time as Christine Ockrent and Michèle Cotta. We behaved well: we didn’t spit on our plates, we didn’t repeat anything. When I left Le Siècle a few years later, the position of women had clearly improved…”
Daughter of André Chandernagor (who was a deputy, Minister of European Affairs under Pierre Mauroy and first president of the Court of Auditors), herself programmed to shine in high administration, the promising enarch refused positions as secretary of State and resigned from the Council of State in 1993: “My vocation was writing. I wanted to spend as much time as possible in my house in Creuse, and there was no question of me waiting until retirement. My studies should have kept me away – what studies are carried out in Creuse – but thanks to my books I was able to live there.”
To the palaces of the Republic, Françoise Chandernagor therefore preferred the Crozant peninsula and the peat bogs of the Millevaches plateau. In River Goldan evocation in turn poetic and picturesque of his favorite region, it mixes the intimacy of Proust and the wide open spaces dear to the nature writing Americans (a literary genre that she confesses to having never read). In his eyes, Creuse is more beautiful than Montana. When we ask her what literary affiliation she relates to with this unclassifiable book, she appears hesitant: “I didn’t have many models. I really liked the autobiographical stories of historians like Jeanne and her family by Michel Winock or French composition by Mona Ozouf, but it’s different… In French composition, Mona Ozouf links her childhood to Brittany without really singing about Brittany. For my part, I wanted to evoke the figure of my maternal grandfather, a Creuse mason who was very important to me, but also to talk about the landscapes of this Creuse which I adore.”
The “urban ecologists”, these “little minds”
“He has reached the Creuse!” : in her book, Françoise Chandernagor laughs at this once proverbial expression in showbiz when a record or a film had reached deep France. No offense to the most regionalist Creusois, their department remains synonymous with hyper rurality. Its two largest towns, Guéret and Aubusson, have 13,500 and 3,500 inhabitants respectively. Who comes to settle in the area? Twenty years after the arrival of Julien Coupat and his friends in Tarnac, not far in Corrèze, the area continues to attract various shades of the ultra-left, which Françoise Chandernagor is not fond of: “Zadists recently did something shameful to Gentioux-Pigerolles: they defaced the war memorial and hung a Palestinian flag on it. It’s not appropriate. These people who find it great to be in this authentic country are doing very inauthentic things there. we can’t say otherwise.”
With her legendary outspokenness, she also makes fun of “urban ecologists”, described as “small minds” in River Gold. In front of us, she drives home the point: “I’m not green in the political sense of the term – the greens have gone very wrong. They know nothing about nature, and I hate punitive ecology. To raise awareness among people, it’s better It’s best to avoid giving them lessons.” Although neither Zadist nor green, a certain Emmanuel Macron does not escape the sarcasm of the bouncy vice-president of the Goncourt academy. In 2017, when the GM & S factory closed in La Souterraine, Macron declared that his workers, instead of “making a mess”, would be better off looking for work in Ussel. “It’s much too techno,” laughs Françoise Chandernagor, “there are 140 kilometers between La Souterraine and Ussel!”
Impressionism captured the Creuse better than Macronism. Claude Monet and Armand Guillaumin superbly painted Crozant and Fresselines. Literally, if we can cite Gustave Geffroy, who introduced Monet to the Creuse and chaired the Prix Goncourt from 1912 to 1926, the great figure remains the good lady of Nohant, George Sand, one of whose lovers, Jules Sandeau, was born in Aubusson. Françoise Chandernagor, who visited his house around sixty times, pays tribute to him in River Gold : “I now write under the severe gaze of great authors, keeping George Sand on my right so that his ease of writing stimulates me in the event of a breakdown…” During our interview, she specifies: “Sand wrote 50 pages a day – who says better? Well, maybe she wasn’t correcting herself enough… I really like it? Story of my life, but I am especially imbued with his country novels, which I read first. We remember Little Fadette and of The Devil’s Pondless Master bell ringers, yet very beautiful.” What about Marcel Jouhandeau, originally from Guéret? “I knew his wife, a real pot of paint! Always wearing too much makeup, with extravagant outfits. She had been a dancer under the name Caryathis and, at 80, she had something left of that. Jouhandeau’s parents were butchers in the town center of Guéret. After the publication of Chaminadour, he did not dare to return home. I’m not crazy about his work… He just paints the eternal province. But Guéret does not represent the Creuse, and it is not very beautiful, unlike Aubusson.”
This pretty title, River Goldhad been suggested to him by the former president of the Académie Goncourt François Nourissier, who himself got it from Jean Paulhan, who had advised him to one day call a book The Gold of the Loire. Very attached to transmission, Françoise Chandernagor also likes to honor the memory of her former table companions at Drouant: “I knew Nourissier when he already had his white beard, his Victor Hugo-style face. We were neighbors in Paris. He had such a position of power in the literary world that he was constantly praised by people who groveled at his feet, which distressed him, and today he has fallen into an unfair black hole… Read In the absence of geniusremarkable, and A little bourgeois, A French story, The Master of the house, The Museum of Man, Father’s day, The Guardian of the Ruins…” So many titles that could have fit the story of Françoise Chandernagor: in her mansion dating from 1830, sheltered from the Zadists, she is the guardian of Creuse history.
River Gold, by Françoise Chandernagor. Gallimard, 301 p., €21.
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