Françoise d'Eaubonne

Françoise d'Eaubonne (12 March 1920 in Paris - 3 August 2005 in Paris) was a French feminist, who introduced the term ecofeminism (écologie-féminisme, éco-féminisme or écoféminisme) in 1974.

Her father was member of the religious Sillon movement and anarchist sympathiser, her mother a child of a Carlist revolutionary. Her childhood in Toulouse was marked by the physical decay of her father, due to the gas he had been exposed to in the trenches during the war in 1914. When she was at the age of 16, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Three years later she witnessed the arrival of the Republicans in exile. Between the age of 20 and 25 she endured the privations of the time. In a railway station in Paris the Liberation, the end of the war met her in the form of freed Jews returning from the camps. Later she would express her feelings in this period of her life with the meaningful title "Chienne de Jeunesse".

Such a childhood together with a hypersensitive personality made her look at the world critically and formed her into a militant radical and feminist. Former member of the French Communist Party, in 1971 she co-founded the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR), a homosexual revolutionary movement. She coined the term ecofeminism in her book Le féminisme ou la mort in 1974. In her literary and militant life she came across a number of people of influence in the 20th century, like Colette, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and many more.

Following her motto, "Not a day without a line", Françoise d'Eaubonne wrote more than 50 works, from Colonnes de l'âme (poetry, 1942) to L'Évangile de Véronique (essay, 2003). Her historical novel Comme un vol de gerfauts (1947) was translated into English as A Flight of Falcons, and extracts from her essay 'Feminism or Death' appeared in the 1974 anthology New French Feminisms. She also wrote science fiction novels, like L'échiquier du temps and Rêve de feu, Le sous-marin de l'espace.

Bibliography

• Novels:
  • Le cœur de Watteau, 1944
  • Comme un vol de gerfauts, prix des lecteurs 1947
  • Belle Humeur ou la Véridique Histoire de Mandrin,1957
  • J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, 1959 (after the film I Spit on Your Grave)
  • Les Tricheurs, 1959 (after the film Les Tricheurs)
  • Jusqu'à la gauche, 1963
  • Les Bergères de l'Apocalypse, 1978
  • On vous appelait terroristes, 1979
  • Je ne suis pas née pour mourir, 1982
  • Terrorist's blues, 1987
  • Floralies du désert, 1995
• Biographies:
  • La vie passionnée d'Arthur Rimbaud, 1957
  • La vie passionnée de Verlaine, 1959
  • Une femme témoin de son siècle, Germaine de Staël, 1966
  • La couronne de sable, vie d'Isabelle Eberhardt, 1967
  • L'éventail de fer ou la vie de Qiu Jin, 1977
  • Moi, Kristine, reine de Suède, 1979
  • L'impératrice rouge : moi, Jiang King, veuve Mao, 1981
  • L'Amazone Sombre : vie d'Antoinette Lix, 1983
  • Louise Michel la Canaque, 1985
  • Une femme nommée Castor, 1986
  • Les scandaleuses, 1990
  • L'évangile de Véronique, 2000
• Essays:
  • Le complexe de Diane, érotisme ou féminisme, 1951
  • Y a-t-il encore des hommes?, 1964
  • Eros minoritaire, 1970
  • Le féminisme ou la mort, 1974
  • Les femmes avant le patriarcat, 1976
  • Contre violence ou résistance à l'état, 1978
  • Histoire de l'art et lutte des sexes, 1978
  • Écologie, féminisme : révolution ou mutation ?, 1978
  • S comme Sectes, 1982
  • La femme russe, 1988
  • Féminin et philosophie : une allergie historique, 1997
  • La liseuse et la lyre, 1997
  • Le sexocide des sorcières, 1999
• Poems:
  • Columns of the soul, 1942
  • Rutten, 1951
  • Neither place nor meter, 1981