It was fifty years ago, Antoinette Fouque created the Editions Des Femmes where essays, novels, poems and defenses of activists around the world will dialogue – notably publishing Hélène Cixous, Chantal Chawaf, the Basque Eva Forest, the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi, the Argentinian Silvina Ocampo, the American Anne Sexton and the Brazilians Clarice Lispector and Conceição Evaristo. It was ten years ago that this unclassifiable intellectual, born in Marseille in 1936, died at the end of an intense life marked by singular positions in the fields of psychoanalysis, politics, philosophy and writing.
So many (good) reasons to evoke in this international women’s rights week this great encyclopedic figure who could inspire many future generations. Reading her biographical sketch, we are reminded that she was a pioneer more than once. PhD on the literary avant-garde, with Roland Barthes, psychoanalyst in the wake of Jacques Lacan, co-founder of the Movement of Women’s Liberation (MLF), in October 1968, she invented “Psychoanalysis and Politics”, a research group for the analysis of the unconscious through politics and politics through psychoanalysis, while she was the first woman in the movement to be elected (on behalf of left-wing radicals) to the European Parliament where she will serve as vice-president of the Commission on Women’s Rights. She was also a member of the Parity Observatory from 2002 to 2010.
After highlighting the uterine libido, she associates procreation and the liberation of women, thereby promoting a new model of heterosexual and equal society, as Christophe Bourseiller, one of her admirers, points out. Finally, in 1980, she created the first collection of audio books to “reconcile the oral and the written”, called “The Library of Voices”, imagined for her mother who could neither read nor write. A rich collection today of more than 180 audio books and the majestic voices of Anouk Aimé, Fanny Ardant, Pierre Arditi, Ariane Ascaride, Marie-Christine Barrault, Dominique Blanc, Carole Bouquet, Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Gréco, Anouk Grinberg, Barbara Hendricks, Isabelle Huppert, Noémie Lvovsky, Daniel Mesguich, Michèle Morgan, Anna Mouglalis, Michel Piccoli, Jean-Louis Trintignant, etc.
To celebrate their founder, Editions des femmes is publishing a brief biography, Antoinette Fouque, a pioneer of women’s liberationsigned Julia Pietri, are organizing a conference on March 9 at the Campus des Cordeliers (Paris), launching the Antoinette Fouque prize and perpetuating its “universal” mission with, among other things, on March 14, the release of the collective work Iranian women. Women, life, freedom 1979/2023 and on April 4, that of You, my mother. Voices of French-speaking writers. The philosopher Blandine Kriegel said of Antoinette Fouque that with “her visionary intelligence” she embodied “the spirit of the women’s movement, the paradigm of all democratic movements which have moved our society forward”. There is no doubt, this spirit is not dead.
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