FRANÇOISE D’EAUBONNE was one of the most influential and best-known leaders of the French feminist movement.
She took a leading part in every human rights battle over four decades. She led the feminist movement in France to its rapid success and scored hard hits in all her other battles by the power of her language and the drama of her gestures.
The most spectacular of these she made in the cause of justice reform. She was 56, the mother of two grown-up children, when she placed a notice in the Paris daily paper Libération. It announced her marriage to Prisoner 645513, Pierre Sanna, held in the high-security Fresnes jail and “condemned to 20 years’ custody for a murder he did not commit”.
Among the books by her that shaped the French feminist movement was one entitled Will There Still Be Men? and another entitled Feminism or Death. The answer to the first question was “Maybe, but in a very different role”. And the answer to the second was that “Feminism is immortal”.
D’Eaubonne was born in Toulouse in 1920. Her supreme confidence and her considerable campaigning skills were bred into her. Her father, Count Etienne d’Eaubonne, was an aristocrat and also a Christian anarchist, and saw the two roles as entirely compatible. Françoise began her own fighting life in the final days of resistance to the occupying Germans. She also joined what was then the powerful French Communist Party, led by the charismatic and iron-fisted Maurice Thorez, but she was too independent to stay for long in the party.
In the following decade she joined the struggle for Algerian independence, and signed the explosive manifesto that proclaimed the “right” of French soldiers to mutiny.
In the later l960s she took the lead in forming the feminist movement. That was followed by gay rights in the l970s with the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action. All the time she was earning her living as a writer. She churned out nearly a dozen biographies, including lives of Mme de Staël and the romantic poets Rimbaud and Verlaine.
Her final cause was the environment. She sought to link that with feminism in the Mouvement Écologie-Féminisme. Most Frenchwomen failed to see the connection, but this forced ideological marriage did find adherents in the US, and d’Eaubonne spent part of her final years campaigning from the respectable comfort of US lecture theatres.
Françoise d’Eaubonne, feminist, writer and human rights campaigner, was born on March 12, 1920. She died on August 3, 2005, aged 85.