Banning the Boy. Homosex, Censorship and the Work of Éric Jourdan
Résumé
Quels sont les effets de la censure sur la perception et la construction de l’ “identité gay” ? Une réponse à cette question sera fournie par un examen de l’œuvre d’Éric Jourdan dont les textes ont été frappés de quatre formes de censure : censure par l’État suite à l’intervention de la Commission du Livre ; ingérence des maisons d’édition ; les révisions pratiquées par l’auteur en amont de la publication ; l’autocensure au cours de la rédaction d’un texte. Les effets de ces différentes sortes de censure sont les suivants : d’un côté, l’interdiction de son premier roman, Les Mauvais anges, pendant près de trente ans, conforte Jourdan dans sa liberté de pensée et d’écrivain. D’un autre côté, cette interdiction le cantonne dans la catégorie “écrivain gay”, voire “écrivain érotique gay’” – catégories dont il n’a cure. Il s’ensuit que la censure crée et promeut la catégorie même que la censure – et l’écrivain – refusent : l’identité gay.
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- 1 Epitomising Jourdan’s mixture of directness and elusiveness, this heading can be found on p. 7 of (...)
À un moi inconnu1
Introduction
1The depiction or description of sex and sexuality are a notorious target for censorship, not just under totalitarian regimes but also in modern democracies such as France. The first, and arguably the most heinous, form of censorship is when a state or state institution bans the publication of a given book. The second form occurs when a publisher, on occasion without the permission or even knowledge of the author, excises or alters parts of a text prior to publication. A third form of censorship involves an author actually revising a text in anticipation of state or institutional interference. A fourth, arguably more insidious, form of censorship means that an author refrains from writing certain scenes or using certain words in the course of the writing process. The first three of these, at least, apply to the French writer Éric Jourdan and, in particular, to his first novel, Les mauvais anges (1955, 1984).
- 2 Éric Jourdan was born Jean Roger Éric Gaytérou in Paris on 29 May 1930. He became (Jean-)Éric Gre (...)
2Before turning to Les mauvais anges it may be helpful to give a brief summary of Éric Jourdan’s background and career. A first comment that needs to be made about Jourdan is that very little was, and indeed still is, known about him – his date of birth, his name(s), his likeness and his lifestyle2. Whatever the reasons for this obscurity, it was certainly his choice not to be seen, and not to be in any way a public figure, at a time when authors are increasingly required to be visible, audible and omnipresent in the national, international and social media. A second comment is that he had every opportunity to be in public view. As a published novelist and as the adopted son of the highly prestigious and prolific literary father, Julien Green – the first American to be a member of the Académie française – he could be assumed to be potentially well-connected in literary, publishing, media and social spheres. A third and final point to be made about Jourdan is that he, too, was a prolific writer, having published over twenty novels, several collections of short stories, over a dozen (largely unpublished) plays, poetry, essays and articles. Whether under his most familiar pen-name of Éric Jourdan or under a variety of other pseudonyms, Jourdan was a writer who might have been ultra-discreet but whose very discretion – and whose uninterrupted series of publications – ensured that he was both a well-known and yet an unknown contemporary French writer. His very existence seemed, therefore, to be characterised by a certain form of voluntarily assumed and rigorously maintained (self-)censorship.
Les mauvais anges: Banning/Creating ‘Gay Sexuality’
3The aim of this article will be to look at censorship and potential self-censorship in Jourdan with particular reference to the representation of sex, sexuality and violence in his first published novel, Les mauvais anges. Before moving on to the publication history of Les mauvais anges, it will be useful to sketch out the plot of the novel and the nature of its two main characters: Pierre and Gérard. The novel divides into two clear parts, a narrative written by Pierre followed by that of his school-friend, cousin and lover, Gérard. Combining accounts of their current present with revealing flashbacks, Pierre shows how his intimacy with Gérard developed from early school days and, particularly, from the time when, following the deaths of both their mothers, their two fathers combined households in a large property and garden in or near Paris. With a barely visible female cousin, they also spend holidays together in a similarly large house near Amboise in the Loire valley. Thrown together, and yet also isolated, the two cousins develop an increasingly strong mutual attraction. The relationship is, however, also increasingly characterised by both sadistic and masochistic violence – and not just through the predictable exchange of blood to seal their friendship. For if Gérard’s more public violence shows through his destruction of his father’s greenhouse and of their neighbours’ aviary, Pierre reciprocates by beating the voluptuously helpless Gérard and, almost certainly, by abusing Gérard after the latter is humiliated, tortured and gang-raped by their avenging neighbours’ sons. As with his school-“friends”, and, even, with one of their teachers, Gérard’s beauty seems so irresistible that it has to be punished. The two boys are thus caught up in a cycle of reciprocated, and generalised, violence that seems to epitomise their ultimate inability to respond to and deal with their own peerlessness. They are, therefore, unable to combine agape and Eros and thus fuse passionate and spiritual love. As each other’s “twin”, they seem, not unlike Cathy and Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights, to identify with one another, and yet, tragically if predictably, to be unable to actually become each other.
- 3 Jourdan always denied that he had a literary “career”: he wrote and published according to his ow (...)
- 4 See above note 2.
- 5 See Julian Jackson, Living in Arcadia. Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the L (...)
4As with many censored or banned works, the publication history of Les mauvais anges is complex. Indeed, even before the work attracted the attention of the censors, its publication history is a little mysterious – partly no doubt because its content already invited semi-clandestine dissemination and partly because, at the time of writing, Jourdan was of a similar age to his teenage protagonists and not necessarily thinking of using Les mauvais anges to launch a literary career3. According to Jourdan himself, therefore, the first version of the text was roneo-reproduced for a small group of friends before being made available, in private editions, with or without illustrations by well-known illustrators. The semi-clandestine status of Les mauvais anges continued with two further editions from publishers in Lyon and Paris but, being “hors commerce”, were not subject to legal deposit requirements. Since none of these early editions seems to be currently available – and were not even held by Jourdan himself – the beginnings of Les mauvais anges remain tantalizingly shadowy. About the same time, moreover, Jourdan was, under another pseudonym, Roger Véronaise, publishing a short story, Le troisième but, in the first issue of the new ‘homophile’ magazine, Arcadie4. Since the publication of this story nearly got the magazine banned – and might have caused Jourdan himself to be prosecuted had his identity been known – he had good reason to be cautious with Les mauvais anges5.
- 6 Éric Jourdan, Les mauvais anges, Avant-propos de Robert Margerit, Lettre adressée à l’éditeur de (...)
- 7 This illustration, by Raymond Carrance (known as Czanara), depicts two boys, one in an open shirt (...)
- 8 In small red lettering at the foot of the back cover we read: “Il est recommandé à MM. les Librai (...)
5At the same time, what might be called a third edition of Les mauvais anges was being prepared6. Aware of the risks involved, the publishers, Éditions de la pensée moderne, took four precautions: they excised certain words and passages – notably an extended description of Gérard’s seduction by his ‘friend’ Philippe in the latter’s car; they gave the book a deceptively bland cover7; they advised that bookshops should not sell the work to young people under eighteen years of age8; they accompanied Jourdan’s text with the written endorsements of two well-known writers, Robert Margerit and Max-Pol Fouchet. In his accompanying published letter, Fouchet claims that no book could be further from “vice” and Margerit argues that the description of passion needs to be exceptional and even scandalous in order to warrant its inclusion in literature. The edition was indeed given a restrained, even cute, cover illustration which, more worthy of Montherlant than of Jourdan, might have the effect of defusing or disguising the violent eroticism of some of the novel’s content. For Jourdan, himself, however, the cover illustration does the text a disservice in that it makes his protagonists seem babyish and sentimental rather than vigorous, full-blooded young men.
- 9 See the Compte rendu des travaux de la Commission de Surveillance et de Contrôle des publications (...)
- 10 See Emmanuel Pierrat (ed.), Le livre noir de la censure, Paris, Le Seuil, 2008, p. 160-62. Despit (...)
- 11 Éric Jourdan, Les mauvais anges, Paris, La Différence/Frédéric Birr, 1984. The cover of this edit (...)
6Despite these worthy precautions, Les mauvais anges, like Arcadie, attracted the attention of the censors, in the form of the “Commission du livre” – or to give the organization its full title, the “Commission de surveillance et de contrôle des publications destinées à l’enfance et à l’adolescence”9. Unfortunately for Jourdan, the post-Vichy period in France was a catastrophic period for freedom of expression, with, for example, the passing on 16 July 1949 of a law banning “les publications de toute nature présentant un danger pour la jeunesse en raison de leur caractère licencieux ou pornographique, ou de la place faite au crime ou à la violence”10. Given the youthfulness of Jourdan’s protagonists – and indeed his own youthfulness at the time of writing and publishing – combined with his youngsters’ explicitly homosexual eroticism and their recurrent and increasing violence, Les mauvais anges was an easy, almost inevitable, target for the Commission. Along with such titles as Les flirts du mâle, Les harpes de Lesbos and Les reines du strip-tease, Jourdan’s Les mauvais anges was banned on 19 May 1956. In addition, Jourdan himself narrowly escaped personal prosecution for the publication of his novel – only doing so thanks to support from contacts and allies in high places and an understanding that the lapse would not be repeated. As, by then, he was a conscript in the army and thus under the tutelage of the French government, he had little choice but to accept the ban and toe the line. Since the edict was, furthermore, renewed in 1974, Les mauvais anges was effectively both censored and banned for nearly thirty years. It came out, finally, in 1984 and has been in continuous publication ever since11.
Jourdan after Les mauvais anges: Consolidating/Marginalising ‘Gay Sexuality’
- 12 Éric Jourdan, La détresse et la violence, Paris, Plon, 1956.
- 13 Éric Jourdan, Saccage, Paris, La Musardine, 2005. In a rare public comment on the censorship of h (...)
- 14 Le garçon de joie, Paris, Stock, 1994; Sexuellement incorrect, Paris, L’Atelier contemporain, 199 (...)
7What has happened to Jourdan and to his subsequent publications during and since the banning of Les mauvais anges? Whilst what the French State can do has now been seen, what other effects might this history have had, or still have, on other publishers and indeed on Jourdan himself? A first effect, or at least related phenomenon, is that some publishers themselves took (and still take) on the role of censor and dictate the content of some of Jourdan’s publications. In 1956, for example – the year of the banning of Les mauvais anges – Jourdan published a new novel entitled La détresse et la violence, but was obliged by the publishers to alter the text’s ending – by excising a strong sexual scene between the male protagonist and a group of male police officers and, by way of compensation, by including the sudden, somewhat improbable, suicides of the protagonist’s female lovers12. This scene with the police was only restored in a new version of the text, entitled Saccage, in 200513 Jourdan also had difficulties with a novel entitled Le garçon de joie, which was first published in two seemingly separate parts by two different publishers – Le garçon de joie (1994) and Sexuellement incorrect (1995) – before being combined in a new, complete, Le garçon de joie in 200714. In the case of both La détresse et la violence and Le garçon de joie, violent sexual explicitness seems to have been the main issue. Although, in both cases, Jourdan seems to have finally published his texts as originally written, these struggles with interference, censorship and outright bans have had a considerable, possibly indelible, impact on the publication and reception of his works.
- 15 According to SOS Homophobie’s Rapport sur l’homophobie 2015, incidents of lesbophobia, gayphobia, (...)
- 16 The only male protagonist who self-identifies as gay in Jourdan is Cédric in the short story Troi (...)
- 17 See Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay, Sex Before Sexuality. A Premodern History, Cambridge, Polity (...)
8The first, and perhaps most obvious, effect of the interdiction of Les mauvais anges has been to associate Éric Jourdan with the representation of erotic, violent homosexuality. This has in itself has had a number of further effects. One is to confirm the view that homosexuality is in itself taboo, reprehensible and even criminal. It thus plays into the hands of those who, even today in France, object to the recent introduction of “le mariage pour tous” and to parental and procreative rights for gays15. A second effect is to confirm the bipolarisation of sexualities into heterosexual and homosexual – with the former clearly the norm and the latter the marked, marginal and stigmatised “other”, and to give the impression that Jourdan’s books are firmly within the latter category. In fact this distorts Jourdan’s representation of sex and sexuality since sexual identities are not categorized, labelled or pigeonholed in his works. The terms gay and gayness, for example, barely occur in his fiction and are only exceptionally used to apply to his protagonists16. In Jourdan sex and sexuality are essentially fluid and overarching, with a generalised ‘homo-ness’ being much more important than a particular identity, life-style or allegiance. As a result, for a number of male characters such as Fraîcheur in Saccage and Didier in Le garçon de joie, male-on-male desire and what may be called homo-sex either accompanies or follows what might be called heterosexual relationships. In Le jeune soldat, a trio of lovers-partners – two males and one female – establish a new form of family relationship which encompasses and supersedes the couple, whether of two men or of a man and a woman. However much male characters and homo-sex dominate Jourdan’s world, he remains open to a variety of sexual permutations and partnerships, whether for sex, love or companionship. There is a sense, then, in which Jourdan’s writing is “queer” avant la lettre – but certainly without his claiming or desiring that appellation since even that would constrict his view of desire, sex and sexuality. Indeed, it can even be argued that Jourdan’s version of pansexuality is even more radical and more subtle than queer, in that his characters evince desires and practices that both pre-date and post-date both gender and (homo-)sexuality17. His representations thus undercut even the subversion of these categories in ‘queer’.
- 18 On the censorship of Guyotat, see Catherine Brun, “Des effets paradoxaux de la censure: Pierre Gu (...)
- 19 This silence contrasts interestingly with the even more explicitly repudiated Tony Duvert, to who (...)
9It has to be said, moreover, that Jourdan did not see himself as a “gay writer” and still less as an erotic gay writer, despite the tendency to place his books (for example in FNAC) under erotic fiction and despite the sexual explicitness of some of the covers for his novels, used, in particular, by the publishing house La Musardine. It follows that an unfortunate result of the censorship has been to enable Jourdan’s writings to be circumscribed in their supposed remit and readership and thereby to be undervalued in terms of their stylistic elegance and subversive power. Publishers and bookshops seem, unfortunately, to have taken their cue from the censors and directed Jourdan’s books towards a no doubt profitable but limited niche market. Despite the near-canonisation of other formerly censored writers such as Violette Leduc or Pierre Guyotat18, this unseeing attitude seems to be shared by some fellow-writers and literary reviewers who, given the absence of serious reviews of his work and of obituaries after his death, must assume that Jourdan’s novels are for “others” but not for “themselves”19.
Jourdan between Censorship and Literature
- 20 According to Clarisse Fabre, for example, attempts to stop performances of Marie-Aude Murail’s Oh (...)
10At the same time, the interference and the censorship have also had their positive effects. For those who would like to see gay identities recognised and valued, there are some advantages in censorship: it consolidates the existence and staying power of the so-called minority group and can give it a platform for claiming recognition and equality. More specifically, as regards Jourdan, the censorship has made it difficult for Les mauvais anges to go totally unnoticed or unrecognised, even by those who would prefer it to be ignored. As is well known, there is nothing like a ban to increase publicity and, paradoxically, visibility and thereby sales20. A second effect was to encourage Jourdan to persist in his particular vein of writing and in his original, even unique, contribution to French literature. Self-censorship did not, therefore, seem to have followed from official bans or publishers’ blue pens. On the contrary, such intrusions seemed, at least during most of his career, to strengthen Jourdan’s resolve to be free. It would be a grave mistake to see him as a victim of either the censorship or the notoriety that some of his works have achieved. Indeed, in some ways censorship for him was a spur rather than a deterrent. It was a provocation which he could confront with almost Rabelaisian relish or an example of bureaucratic perversity which he countered with a more intelligent, more focused, more mischievous perversity of his own. For with or without censorship, Jourdan is still as he always was: himself.
- 21 I am very touched to have been given this volume by Jourdan before he died.
- 22 Rochefalmer [Éric Jourdan], Éclairs, Paris, Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1969. I am very grat (...)
- 23 Hand-written comment on the copy of Éclairs for Camille and Jean Dutourd.
- 24 Emily Bueno, review of Nicole Moore (ed.), Censorship and the Limits of the Literary. A Global Vi (...)
11There is, however, another side to this censorship which also needs to be acknowledged. Although Jourdan remained unconstrained and uninhibited for most of his writing career, he also had a tendency to go back over some of his (generally unpublished) writings and eliminate at least some of his more overtly erotic passages – in, for example, an unpublished diary/collection of poetry entitled Le cahier noir, from which nearly all the explicitly homoerotic material has been excised21. Somewhat similarly, Jourdan went through his own copy of his published poems, entitled Éclairs22, and decided that only 35 out of 101 poems should be retained in any subsequent edition. Although the motives here seem to be that he judged some of the material of inferior quality, belonging to “l’époque de [s]on bac”23, they show Jourdan’s potential ruthlessness with regard to his own works. It is, therefore, not impossible that Jourdan’s occasional self-censorship bears the residual impact of the early ban imposed on Les mauvais anges and that, in some ways, literature and censorship may in fact define each other “in an ongoing, agonistic engagement”24. Thus censorship can have two, apparently contradictory, effects on literary production: on the one hand, it can encourage the writer to defy his censors and write more potentially provocative prose; on the other hand, the censorship can be internalised and deflected onto past and future publications. Both these reactions may in their different ways characterise Éric Jourdan.
- 25 Conversation with Jourdan in Paris, 10 December 2013.
12The second of these two impulses may have become more evident in Jourdan’s later years. As time went on, he was perhaps increasingly concerned about his own, posthumous reputation, emphasizing that his writing was not “erotic” but “sensual” – and never narrowly “gay”. He repeatedly insisted, moreover, that he read none of the currently fashionable “gay” writers and never went to “gay” bars or frequented the “gay” scene. He had an immense literary, musical and artistic culture, but never selected or viewed that culture through a “gay” lens. In a recent conversation, moreover, Jourdan claimed that he was “really” Éric Green and that “Éric Jourdan n’existe pas”25. With this remark, he seemed to come close to repudiating all those books published under “his” name, or at least to relegating them to the status of fiction or myth, written perhaps by another of his mysterious and volatile selves. As ever, Jourdan was “insaisissable”, “elsewhere”, or possibly nowhere. No wonder he wrote of himself: “j’avais disparu comme un mirage …”. Both Jourdan and censorship seem to concur in keeping his writings at a distance and in maintaining them under a certain kind of erasure, whilst also emphasizing their indisputable, talismanic power. If his works are myth or mirage, they thus embody an unremittingly vigorous and exciting vision that enriches and empowers French literature.
Notes
1 Epitomising Jourdan’s mixture of directness and elusiveness, this heading can be found on p. 7 of a hand-written, unpublished notebook signed J. Éric Jourdan-Green etc [sic], entitled “(Éléments et) Préfaces diverses”. I would like to thank Éric Jourdan for passing this notebook on to me. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to him for the many exchanges we had between 2006 and his death about his interests, priorities and views on a wide range of subjects, including writing, censorship and sexuality.
2 Éric Jourdan was born Jean Roger Éric Gaytérou in Paris on 29 May 1930. He became (Jean-)Éric Green on adoption by Julien Green. Although most of his known works were published under the nom de plume of Éric Jourdan, Jourdan also published under a variety of other pseudonyms such as Roger Véronaise (Le troisième but, Arcadie, 1, January 1954, 27-34) and, for a volume of poetry, Éclairs (Paris, Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1969), under the name of Rochefalmer. He died in Paris on 7 February 2015. For further details of Jourdan’s publications, see Owen Heathcote, From Bad Boys to New Men? Masculinity, Sexuality and Violence in the Work of Éric Jourdan, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2014, p. 225-28. For an evocative account of Jourdan’s career and personality, see Jean-Paul Garnaud, ‘Postface’, in Éric Jourdan, Lieutenant Darmancour (Paris: La Musardine, 2016) (forthcoming).
3 Jourdan always denied that he had a literary “career”: he wrote and published according to his own impulses and needs. Times of intense creativity could therefore be followed by relatively fallow periods when he was either travelling or engaged in other activities.
4 See above note 2.
5 See Julian Jackson, Living in Arcadia. Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS, London, University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 84-85. Contrary to Jackson’s claim, however, the “Véronaise” story was not, according to Jourdan, accepted in order to encourage Julien Green to contribute to Arcadie.
6 Éric Jourdan, Les mauvais anges, Avant-propos de Robert Margerit, Lettre adressée à l’éditeur de Max-Pol Fouchet, Paris, Éditions de la Pensée moderne, 1955.
7 This illustration, by Raymond Carrance (known as Czanara), depicts two boys, one in an open shirt and the other in a ‘salopette’, in a pose of tender embrace.
8 In small red lettering at the foot of the back cover we read: “Il est recommandé à MM. les Libraires de ne pas vendre cet ouvrage aux jeunes gens de moins de 18 ans”.
9 See the Compte rendu des travaux de la Commission de Surveillance et de Contrôle des publications destinées à l’enfance et à l’adolescence, 1er juin 1958, Melun, Imprimerie administrative, 1958. The banning of Les mauvais anges following an “Arrêté du 19 mai 1956” is noted on page 93. It should be added that cinema, too, was subject to strict controls in the same period, not least for its representation of sex and the body: see Frédéric Hervé, La censure du cinéma en France à la Libération (1944-1950), Paris, Association pour le développement de l’histoire économique (ADHE) 2001, p. 157-70.
10 See Emmanuel Pierrat (ed.), Le livre noir de la censure, Paris, Le Seuil, 2008, p. 160-62. Despite the wide coverage of this volume, no mention is made of Jourdan or of Les mauvais anges. Jourdan is similarly absent from the chapter entitled “Les années 50: le péché ‘contre-nature’ ” in Jacques Girard, Le mouvement homosexuel en France 1945-1980, Paris, Syros, 1981. Surprisingly, then, supposedly anti-censorship writers seem to reinforce the silencing of Jourdan and his work.
11 Éric Jourdan, Les mauvais anges, Paris, La Différence/Frédéric Birr, 1984. The cover of this edition, bearing Giovanni Baglione’s L’amour sacré, l’amour profane, is crossed by the strap-line INTERDIT DEPUIS 1956. A more recent edition, prefaced by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, was published by La Musardine in 2001.
12 Éric Jourdan, La détresse et la violence, Paris, Plon, 1956.
13 Éric Jourdan, Saccage, Paris, La Musardine, 2005. In a rare public comment on the censorship of his books, Jourdan, in a postface to Saccage, notes: “Après cela, [the censorship of Les mauvais anges] j’ai été littéralement condamné à voir mes livres châtrés. Le second fut publié sous le titre Détresse et violence. L’éditeur qui me l’avait demandé rechignait à certains chapitres. Je repris le livre, il me supplia de le lui rendre. Avant je coupai une partie de l’histoire, les passages dits érotiques, comme si l’amour physique pouvait être dissocié des pensées et des autres actes. L’éditeur publia donc un texte qui ne me ressemblait qu’en partie [….]” (p. 180). Jourdan was equally indignant about his redaction from Les chefs d’œuvre de l’érotisme, eds. Jacques Sterberg and Alex Gall, préface de Louis Pauvels, Paris, Éditions Planète, n.d., in which extracts from his work and his biography (and those of William Burroughs) were replaced by black blanks: “J’avais disparu comme un mirage…” (written comment in his own copy of the book).
14 Le garçon de joie, Paris, Stock, 1994; Sexuellement incorrect, Paris, L’Atelier contemporain, 1995; Le garçon de joie, Texte intégral, Paris, La Musardine, 2007.
15 According to SOS Homophobie’s Rapport sur l’homophobie 2015, incidents of lesbophobia, gayphobia, biphobia and transphobia have increased significantly since the adoption of “le mariage pour tous” in 2013: “La parole homophobe demeure décomplexée et les LGBTphobies sont désormais installées dans notre société” (p. 14).
16 The only male protagonist who self-identifies as gay in Jourdan is Cédric in the short story Trois beaux garçons, published in “Portrait d’un jeune seigneur en dieu des moissons” et autres nouvelles, Paris, La Musardine, 2010. As Cédric proclaims: “Voilà, je suis gay” (p. 238). This remark is, however, less a gesture of gay pride than a way of implicating a hapless museum official in the robbery he (Cédric) committed. “Gayness” here is part of a theatrical performance rather than a statement of identity; it is instrumental, not confessional.
17 See Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay, Sex Before Sexuality. A Premodern History, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2011. There is even a sense now that male heterosexual relations could become the new queer: see Jane Ward, Not Gay. Sex Between Straight White Men, New York, New York University Press, 2015.
18 On the censorship of Guyotat, see Catherine Brun, “Des effets paradoxaux de la censure: Pierre Guyotat”, and on Leduc, Catherine Viollet, “De la censure éditoriale à l’autocensure: Violette Leduc”, both in Catherine Viollet and Claire Bustarret (eds), Genèse, censure, autocensure, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2005, p. 201-228 and p. 181-200 respectively.
19 This silence contrasts interestingly with the even more explicitly repudiated Tony Duvert, to whom Gilles Sebhan has devoted two books, Tony Duvert, l’enfant silencieux, Paris, Denoël, 2010 and Retour à Duvert, Paris, Le Dilettante, 2015. However courageous these books, Sebhan notes that he had to self-censor his first (Retour à Duvert, p. 12, 103) and that some of what Duvert wrote before 1982 would no longer be publishable now: “Les rencontres dont il donne le récit, aujourd’hui, lui vaudraient une enquête et si les faits se trouvaient avérés, une condamnation lourde” (p. 130). In their very different ways, then (Jourdan was adamantly opposed to paedophilia), both Jourdan and Duvert only narrowly escaped personal persecution and punishment for their attempts to publish what and as they wished. These experiences would seem to gainsay the current proliferation, in the post-Charlie moment, of publications celebrating France as the country of free expression: “Depuis cinq siècles, de grandes voix, écrivains ou philosophes, de Montaigne à Camus, de Voltaire à Sartre, se sont relayées pour porter et défendre en toutes circonstances une irrépressible idée de liberté” (Vincent Giret, “La Liberté en héritage”, Avant-propos, La liberté d’expression. Les grands textes de Voltaire à Camus, Le Monde, hors-série, mars 2015, p. 3).
20 According to Clarisse Fabre, for example, attempts to stop performances of Marie-Aude Murail’s Oh Boy! at the Théâtre national de Chaillot in 2014 were “une aubaine” for the play: “L’activisme des anti-mariage gay donne aux œuvres jeune public un regain de visibilité” (Le Monde, 14 November 2014, 21). It is possible that the controversy over the poster for Alain Guiraudie’s L’inconnu du lac (2012) was similarly counter-productive.
21 I am very touched to have been given this volume by Jourdan before he died.
22 Rochefalmer [Éric Jourdan], Éclairs, Paris, Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1969. I am very grateful to Tristan de Lafond for drawing this volume to my attention.
23 Hand-written comment on the copy of Éclairs for Camille and Jean Dutourd.
24 Emily Bueno, review of Nicole Moore (ed.), Censorship and the Limits of the Literary. A Global View, London, Bloomsbury, 2015 in The Times Literary Supplement, no. 5873 (October 23, 2015), 26.
25 Conversation with Jourdan in Paris, 10 December 2013.
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Owen Heathcote, « Banning the Boy. Homosex, Censorship and the Work of Éric Jourdan », Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine [En ligne], 12 | 2016, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2016, consulté le 15 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/fixxion/7264 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/fixxion.7264
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