French erotica
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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| - | *[[José Bénazéraf]] | + | '''José Bénazéraf''' is a French [[filmmaker]] and [[Film producer|producer]], born [[January 8]] [[1922]] in [[Casablanca]], [[Morocco]]. |
| - | *[[Virginie Despentes]] | + | |
| - | *[[Alain Payet]] | + | After having finished his studies in political sciences, he started his career by producing ''Les lavandières du Portugal'' in [[1958]], a film of [[Pierre Gaspard-Huit]]. He started to direct erotic feature films in [[1961]] with ''[[L'éternité pour nous]]''. |
| - | *[[Francis Mischkind]] | + | |
| - | *[[Max Pécas]] | + | At the end of the 1970s, he moved his attention to the [[direct-to-video]] market. |
| - | *[[Jean Rollin]] | + | |
| - | *[[Catherine Breillat]] | + | :''[[José Bénazéraf]]'' |
| + | :''[[Alain Payet]]'' | ||
| + | :''[[Francis Mischkind]]'' | ||
| + | :''[[Max Pécas]]'' | ||
| + | :''[[Jean Rollin]]'' | ||
| + | :''[[Catherine Breillat]]'' | ||
| ====Actors==== | ====Actors==== | ||
Revision as of 22:04, 9 April 2009
Anonymous satirical caricature of the Cardinal Armand de Rohan-Soubise (1717-1757); this engraving is a good example of "pornography" as a tool for political subversion during France's ancien régime.
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- world erotica, French popular culture, French striptease, libertine novel, French exploitation, French literature, L'enfer
No nation has enjoyed a greater reputation for producing and tolerating erotica --from the 17th century libertine novels to the "whore dialogues" to the original Pads edition of Joyce's Ulysses-- than France. Philosophe Denis Diderot penned an 18th-century novel featuring talking body parts, while poet Guillaume Apollinaire spiced up one of his short works with fetishism. And then there's Gay Paree, Marquis de Sade and Brigitte Bardot.
15th century
The Cent Nouvelles nouvelles is an anonymous collection of nouvelles supposed to be narrated by various persons at the court of Philippe le Bon, and collected by Antoine de la Sale in the 1456-1457. The work borrowed from Boccaccio's Decameron (1350-1353) and has in fact been subtitled the French Decameron.
The nouvelle as genre is considered the first example of literary prose in French, the first text in this category is generally cited as Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles.
The stories are bawdy, ribald and burlesque, with titles such as The Monk-Doctor, The Armed Cuckold, The Drunkard In Paradise, The Castrated Clerk and the The Husband As Doctor.
16th century
The presumed subject of the painting Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses soeurs by an unknown artist (c.1594), is Gabrielle d'Estrées, mistress of King Henry IV of France. In the painting, Gabrielle sits up nude in a bath, holding (assumedly) Henry's coronation ring, whilst her sister sits nude beside her and pinches her right nipple.
The Heptameron is a collection of 72 short stories written in French by Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549). It has the form of a frame narrative and was inspired by the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was originally intended to contain one hundred stories covering ten days just as the Decameron does but at Marguerite’s death it was only completed as far as the second story of the eighth day. Many of the stories deal with love, lust, infidelity and other matters romantic and sexual.
17th century
Precursors to the libertine writers were Théophile de Viau (1590-1626) and Charles de Saint-Evremond (1610-1703), who were inspired by Epicurus and the publication of Petronius.
Les Vies des Dames galantes
- Les Vies des Dames galantes (1665-1666)
Brantôme's posthumously published mémoirs are biographical sketches of the "gallant" men and women of the European courts. Its best known volume is Les Vies des Dames Galantes which was quoted by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and illustrated by Paul-Emile Bécat.
Académie des dames ou le meursius francais
Académie des dames ou le meursius francais is an early work of erotic fiction written by Nicolas Chorier, first published in Latin in c.1659 as Aloisiae Sigaeae, Toletanae, Satyra sotadica de arcanis amoris et Veneris.
The book is written in the form of a series of dialogues with Tullia, a twenty-six year-old Italian woman, the wife of Callias, who is charged with the sexual initiation of her young cousin, Ottavia, to whom she declares, "You mother asked to reveal to you the most mysterious secrets of bridal bed and to teach you what you must be with your husband, which your husband will also be, touching these small things which so strongly inflame men's passion. This night, so that I can indoctrinate you in all of this liberated language, will sleep together in my bed, which I would like to be able to say will have been the softest of Venus's lace."
L'École des filles
L’Escole des Filles ou la Philosophie des dames (a so-called whore dialogue) is an erotic work of fiction first described by Samuel Pepys in his famous diary. It was first published anonymously in Paris in 1655 by an. The presumed authors are Michel Millot and/or Jean L'Ange [or de Lange].
Originally published in 1655, this French text has also been translated as 'The School for Venus,' and despite its initial title (École des filles), should not be confused with The School for Girls (L'École des biches).
Letters of a Portuguese Nun
- Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669)
The Letters of a Portuguese Nun (Fr. Les Lettres portugaises), first published anonymously by Claude Barbin in Paris in 1669, are a work believed by most scholars to be epistolary fiction (comprising five love letters) written by Gabriel-Joseph de La Vergne, comte de Guilleragues (1628–1685).
The passionate letters were a European publishing sensation (in part because of their presumed authenticity) and set a precedent for sentimentalism and for the literary genres of the sentimental novel and the epistolary novel into the 18th century. A 2006 book written by Myriam Cyr argues that the letters are in fact authentic.
Vénus dans le Cloître
- Vénus dans le Cloître (1683)
The Nun in her Smock or Venus in the Cloister is the English translation of the French novel Vénus dans le Cloître (1683), ascribed to Abbé du Prat.
In 1724, Edmund Curll published the "pornographic" title that argued that it is the church, and not Christ, that forbids sexual exploration. In 1727 he was convicted under the common law offence of disturbing the peace for its publication. It appears to be the first conviction for obscenity in the United Kingdom, and set a legal precedent for other convictions.
The format of the book is an example of a whore dialogue. In a series of five dramatic conversations between two fictional nuns (sister Agnès and sister Angélique) are related. In these conversations, the elder more experienced woman instructs the younger about sex.
18th century
Literature
The libertine novel was an 18th century literary genre of which the roots lay in the European but mainly French libertine tradition. The genre effectively ended with the French Revolution. Themes of libertine novels were anti-clericalism, anti-establishment and eroticism.
Authors include Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (Le Sopha, conte moral, 1742), Denis Diderot (Les Bijoux indiscrets, 1748), Marquis de Sade (L'Histoire de Juliette, 1797-1801) and Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses, 1782).
Other famous titles are Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier des Chartreux (1741) and Thérèse Philosophe (1748).
Precursors to the libertine writers were Théophile de Viau (1590-1626) and Charles de Saint-Evremond (1610-1703), who were inspired by Epicurus and the publication of Petronius.
Enfer is French for hell. L'enfer also refers to the private case of the French national library. It was founded in the 1830s and separated works which were an "outrage aux bonnes mœurs" from the rest of the library collection. The contents of this library were cataloged by Pascal Pia and Guillaume Apollinaire in the 1913 Les livres de l'Enfer, and in 2007 the "Enfer" was opened to the public in an exhibition titled Eros au secret.
Robert Darnton is a cultural historian who has covered this genre extensively.
Histoire de Dom Bougre
Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier des Chartreux is a French libertine novel from 1741 attributed to Gervaise de Latouche. The name Bougre refers to the French term boulgre meaning bugger.
Dom Bougre designated the famous abbé Desfontaines.
The novel was republished in 1778 as Mémoires de Saturnin (Paris, Cazin).
Le Sopha, conte moral
- Le Sopha, conte moral, (1742)
Le Sopha, conte moral is a 1742 libertine novel by Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon.
The story concerns a young courtier whose soul in a previous life was cursed to travel from sofa to sofa as a sofa in search of true love and not to be reincarnated in a human body until a man and a woman sincerely in love with each other had consummated their passion on "his" sofa.
Many of the characters in the novel are satirical portraits of influential and powerful Parisians of Crébillon’s time. For this reason the book was published anonymously and with a false imprint. Nevertheless, Crébillon was discovered to be the author and, as a consequence, he was exiled to a distance of fifty leagues from Paris.
Les Bijoux indiscrets
Les bijoux indiscrets (English title: The Indiscreet Jewels) was Denis Diderot's first novel, published anonymously in 1748. It is an allegory that portrays Louis XV as the sultan Mangogul of the Congo who owns a magic ring that makes women's genitals ("jewels") talk.
A comparable trope that Diderot must have known is found in the ribald fabliau Le Chevalier Qui Fist parler les Cons.
Characters include Zima, Cucufa, Mangogul.
Thérèse Philosophe
- Thérèse philosophe (1748)
Thérèse Philosophe is a 1748 French novel ascribed to Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens.
Thérèse philosophe was devoted to recounting the relationship between highly-publicized trial involving Cathérine Cadière and Jean-Baptiste Girard. This novel was written and published in France, during the Age of Enlightenment. It has been chiefly regarded as a pornographic novel, which accounts for its massive sales in 18th-century France (as pornographic works were the most popular bestsellers of the time, see Darnton). Aside from that however, this novel represents a public conveyance (and arguably perversion) for some ideas of the Philosophes.
Les Liaisons dangereuses
Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) is a famous French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in 1782.
The book fascinates with its dark undertones. It is the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two rivals who use sex as a weapon to humiliate and degrade others, all the while enjoying their cruel games. It also depicts the decadence of the French aristocracy shortly before the French Revolution; thus it is seen as a work that exposes the perversions of the so-called Ancien Régime.
The book is an epistolary novel, composed entirely of letters written by the various characters to each other. In particular, the letters between Valmont and the Marquise drive the plot, with those of other characters serving as illustrations to give the story its depth.
The story has been adapted as a film several times—notably in 1988 as Dangerous Liaisons, directed by Stephen Frears, in 1989 as Valmont, directed by Miloš Forman with screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, and in 1999 as Cruel Intentions, written and directed by Roger Kumble.
The novel is often claimed to be the origin of the saying "Revenge is a dish best served cold". However the expression does not actually occur in the original novel.
Marquis de Sade
- L'Histoire de Juliette (1797-1801)
Juliette is a novel written by the Marquis de Sade and published 1797–1801, accompanying Sade's Nouvelle Justine. Whilst Justine, Juliette's sister, was a virtuous woman who consequently encountered nothing but despair and abuse, Juliette is an amoral nymphomaniac who ends up successful and happy.
The full title of the novel in the original French is Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice, and the English title is "Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded" or "Justine; or Good Conduct Well-Chastised".
Both Justine and Juliette were published anonymously. Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author, and as a result Sade was incarcerated without trial for the last 13 years of his life.
Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome ou l’École du libertinage
The 120 Days of Sodom or the School of Freedoms (Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage) is a book written by the French writer Marquis de Sade in 1784. It relates the story of four wealthy men who enslaved 24 mostly teenaged victims and sexually tortured them while listening to stories told by old prostitutes.
The book was not published until 1905. Due to its extreme sexual and violent nature, the book remained banned in many countries for a long time. The film adaptation by Pasolini underwent a similar fate.
Andréa de Nerciat
André Robert de Nerciat (Dijon, 1739 - Naples, 1800) was a French writer of libertine novels and erotic fiction, best known for his novel Le Diable au corps.
Antoine François Prévost
Antoine François Prévost (April 1, 1697 - December 23, 1763), usually known simply as the Abbé Prévost, was a French author and novelist best known for his forbidden sentimental novel Manon Lescaut.
Restif de la Bretonne
Nicolas-Edme Rétif or Nicolas-Edme Restif (October 23, 1734 – February 2, 1806), called Rétif de la Bretonne, was a French novelist, author of fiction works such as The Anti-Justine (1798) and non-fiction Le Pornographe. He was the son of a farmer, and was born at Sacy (Yonne). The term retifism was named after him. The Anti-Justine : or, the Joys of Eros, first published in French in 1798 as L'Anti-Justine. It is an erotic novel by Restif de la Bretonne. It was a reaction to Sade's Justine, using a very similar style to describe a directly opposite political point of view.The English edition is currently published by Creation Books.
- "The Anti-Justine is a pornographic novelization of Restif de la Bretonne's own life and sexual debauches, which the author tried to defend "morally" by declaring his book to be an "antidote" to the supposed poison of de Sade; yet the book is a monumental odyssey of sexual depravity that often rivals de Sade in its relentless explicitness.
- "First published in 1798, this erotic classic is now published in a brand new translation. This novel was de la Breton's attempt to write something even more obscene than the books of his arch-rival de Sade. It is one of the last classic of erotica currently out-of-print and this new edition will restore it to an avid readership. --Creation Books book description
Visual arts
François Boucher
François Boucher (September 29 1703 – May 30 1770) was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative - often erotic - allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, and intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture. He painted several portraits of his illustrious patroness, Madame de Pompadour and is best-known for his depictions of Marie-Louise O'Murphy.
19th century
Literature
Fiction
Alcide Bonneau's translations
- Alcide Bonneau's translations
Alcide Bonneau (Orléans, 1836, Paris, 1904) was a French intellectual, philologist, literary critic and translator of erotica and curiosa. He is also the author of Padlocks and Girdles of Chastity.
He was lexicographer at the Grand dictionnaire of Pierre Larousse (on Spanish and Italian literature), as well as the Nouveau Larousse illustré.
From 1876 to 1893, he was the principal collaborator of the editor Isidore Liseux (1835-1894), for whom he edited, translated and annotated some fifty works labelled as erotic or simply « curieux » : la On Civility in Children by Erasmus (1877); the Facetiae by Poggio Bracciolini (1878); the Raggionamenti by Aretino (1879-1880); the Dialogues de Luisa Sigea by Nicolas Chorier (1881); the Sonetti lussuriosi by Aretino (1882); the Apophoreta, or De Figuris Veneris, by German scholar Forberg, under the title Manuel d’érotologie classique (1882); La Cazzaria by Antonio Vignali (1882); Poésies complètes by Giorgio Baffo (1884); Raffaella by Piccolomini (1884); the Hecatelegium by Pacifico Massimi (1885); The Mandrake, a comedy by Machiavelli (1887); Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman by Delgado (1887); Hermaphroditus by Beccadelli (1892); etc. All translations were annotated, often running longer that the actual text.
In 1887, he collected a number of these essays and published them as Curiosa: essais critiques de littérature ancienne ignorée ou mal connue, it is said that the later bookselling category curiosa thanks its coinage to this collection.
Charles Carrington
Charles Carrington (November 11, 1867 - October 15, 1921) was a leading British publisher of erotica, including flagellation novels that were illustrated by the illustrator Martin van Maële. Born Paul Harry Ferdinando in Bethnal Green, England, he published in Paris where he also managed a bookshop and for a short period of time moved his activities to Brussels. Carrington also published works of classical literature, including the first English translation of Aristophanes "Comedies," and books by famous authors such as Oscar Wilde and Anatole France, in order to hide his "undercover" erotica publications under a veil of legitimacy. Carrington died at St-Ivry, France.
Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal
Les Fleurs du mal (literal trans. "The Flowers of Evil") is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. The poems represented the near-totality of his poetic output since 1840. First published in 1857, the poems were of influence to the symbolists and modernists. Their subject matter deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. A number of the poems were banned in France following an obscenity trial on August 20, 1857. Ernest Pinard, the magistrate who ruled the case had also been involved in the Madame Bovary trial.
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (August 30, 1811 – October 23, 1872) was a French writer best known today for his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), the novella La Morte amoureuse (1836) and his preface to the 1868 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.
While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as diverse as Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert and Oscar Wilde.
He is said to have coined the phrase art for art's sake, was a member of the Bouzingo, a reference in the decadent movement and a member of the Club des Hashischins.
Octave Mirbeau
Octave Mirbeau (February 16, 1848 in Trévières - February 16, 1917) was a French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde. His best-known works are The Torture Garden and The Diary of a Chambermaid.
The Torture Garden ([fr: Le Jardin des supplices) is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau and was first published in 1899, during the Dreyfus Affair. The novel is ironically dedicated : "To the priests, the soldiers, the judges, to those people who educate, instruct and govern men, I dedicate these pages of Murder and Blood."
Published at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Mirbeau’s novel is a loosely assembled reworking of texts composed at different eras, featuring different styles, and showcasing different characters. Beginning with material stemming from articles on the 'Law of Murder' discussed in the "Frontispice" ("The Manuscript"), the novel continues with a farcical critique of French politics as seen in "En Mission" ("The Mission") and then moves on to an account of a visit to a Cantonese prison by a narrator accompanied by the sadist/hysteric Clara, who delights in witnessing flayings, crucifixions and explaining the beauty of torture to her companion ("Le Jardin des supplices", "The Garden").
There is an allegory about the hypocrisy of European 'civilisation' and about the 'Law of Murder'. There is also a denunciation of bloody French and English colonialism and a ferocious attack on what Mirbeau saw as the corrupt morality of bourgeois capitalist society and the state, which are based on murder.
But Mirbeau’s multiple transgressions of the rules of verisimilitude, his disregard for novelistic convention problematize the issue of the novel’s genre affiliation and leave open the question of the author’s moral message, leaving the readers of today in a state of wonderment, perplexity, and shock.
Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset, (December 11, 1810 – May 2, 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist, best-known for Les Caprices de Marianne, an 1833 play which served as the basis for Jean Renoir's 1939 film, The Rules of the Game; and his series of poems Les Nuits. The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand, which lasted from 1833 to 1835, is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, Confession d'un enfant du siècle, and from her point of view in her Elle et lui.
Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (November 2, 1808 – April 23, 1889), was a French novelist and short story writer. He specialised in a kind of mysterious tale that examines hidden motivation and hinted evil bordering (but never crossing into) the supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James and Proust. His best-known collection is The She-Devils, which includes the cult classic Happiness in Crime and is still in print from Dedalus Books. Most recently his Une vieille maîtresse (An Elderly Mistress, 1851) was adapted to cinema by French director Catherine Breillat: its English title is The Last Mistress.
He is variously lumped in with the Late French Romantics, The Decadents, Symbolists and is included in the Genealogy of the Cruel Tale and The Romantic Agony. He is considered a practitioner of the Fantastique and a dandy.
Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs (December 10, 1870, Ghent - June 6, 1925, Paris) was a Belgian bibliophile, erotomaniac, poet and novelist, noted for his lesbian themed erotica. His best known works are the literary mystification Songs of Bilitis (1894) which was the inspiration for Bilitis (1977), a softcore film by David Hamilton; and Woman and Puppet (1898), adapted for film by Josef von Sternberg as The Devil is a Woman (1935) and as That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) by Luis Buñuel.
Pierre Louÿs is better known nowadays for his friendships rather than his own poetry: he was one of the composer Claude Debussy's closest friends, he travelled with André Gide, he attended Mallarmé's soirees, and campaigned for Oscar Wilde's release from prison.
Georges Pichard adapted several works of Louÿs to graphic novel format, including The She-devils (1926).
The Songs of Bilitis (Les Chansons de Bilitis; Paris, 1894) is a collection of erotic poetry by Pierre Louÿs with strong lesbian themes.
The book's sensual poems are in the manner of Sappho; the introduction claims they were found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus, written by a woman of Ancient Greece called Bilitis, a courtesan and contemporary of Sappho, to whose 'life' Louÿs dedicated a small section of his book. On publication, the volume deceived even the most expert of scholars. However, the poems were actually clever fabulations, authored by Louÿs himself, but are still considered important literature.
In 1977, a French film titled Bilitis was released, directed by David Hamilton. It had little connection with Pierre Louÿs' original, being concerned with a twentieth century girl and her sexual awakening.
Trois Filles de leurs mères (The She-Devils, literally Three girls and their mother) is a French erotic novel by Pierre Louÿs written in 1910 and published clandestinely in 1926. Susan Sontag in her essay the Pornographic Imagination describes it as one of the few works of erotic literature to deserve true literary status. It was adapted for film by José Bénazéraf [1] and as a graphic novel by Georges Pichard. André Pieyre de Mandiargues described it as Pierre Louÿs's masterpiece.
From the publisher Creation Books:
- A mother and her three daughters...sharing their inexhaustible sexual favours between the same young man, each other, and anyone else who enters their web of depravity. From a chance encounter on the stairway with a voluptuous young girl, the narrator is drawn to become the plaything of four rapacious females, experiencing them all in various combinations of increasingly wild debauchery, until they one day vanish as mysteriously as they had appeared.
Kathleen Murphy remarks about the novel that it "remains Pierre Louys's most intense, claustrophobic work; a study of sexual obsession and monomania unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity."
Inspired by the relationship Louÿs had with José María de Heredia and her three daughters (with one of whom (the youngest) he had been married) known for their loose morals, the author presents us with a man « X*** », who is visited by a 36-year-old prostitute, Teresa, and her three daughters, Mauricette, Lili and Charlotte.
Printers of erotica in the late 1800s
Printers of erotica in the late 1800s: Jules Gay, Henry Kistemaeckers, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, Isidore Liseux
Theory
Alfred Binet
Alfred Binet (July 8, 1857 – October 18, 1911), French psychologist and inventor of the first usable IQ test. He also wrote "Du Fétichisme dans l’amour." Du Fétichisme dans l’amour is an essay by Alfred Binet first published in the Revue philosophique of 1887. It was the first text to apply the word fetishism in a sexual context.
Visual arts
Ingres
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (August 29, 1780 - January 14, 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he thought of himself as a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was his portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.
La grande odalisque is a painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painted in 1814 and sent to the Paris Salon of 1819. It was met with hostility by the critics, who ridiculed its radically attenuated modeling as well as Ingres's habitual anatomical distortions of the female nude.
When Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French Académie de peinture painted a highly-colored vision of a turkish bath (illustration, right), he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. If his painting had simply been retitled "In a Paris Brothel," it would have been far less acceptable. Sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient.
The Turkish Bath was finished in a rectangular format in 1859, was revised in 1860 before being turned into a tondo. Ingres signed and dated it in 1862, although he made additional revisions in 1863. (Prat, 2004, p. 90.)
Félicien Rops
Félicien Rops (July 7, 1833 - August 23, 1898) was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint. He is best known for his painting Pornokrates and the frontispiece to Les Épaves by Charles Baudelaire.
Rops was born in Namur in 1833, and was educated at the University of Brussels. Rops's forte was drawing more than painting in oils; he first won fame as a caricaturist. He met Charles Baudelaire towards the end of Baudelaire's life in 1864, and Baudelaire left an impression upon him that lasted until the end of his days. Rops created the frontispiece for Baudelaire's Les Epaves, a selection of poems from Les Fleurs du mal that had been censored in France, and which therefore were published in Belgium.
Rops's association with Baudelaire and with the art he represented won his work the admiration of many other writers, including Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Joséphin Péladan. He was closely associated with the literary movement of Symbolism and Decadence. Like the works of the authors whose poetry he illustrated, his work tends to mingle sex, death, and Satanic images.
Pornokrates, also known as Pornocratie, is a 1879 painting by Félicien Rops.
It depicts a blindfolded woman being led by a pig on a leash. For some the pig with the golden tail represents the image of luxury and lucre steering the woman, whose only excuse is her blindness; for others, it is the image of man, bestial and stupid, kept in check by the woman. This image of the pig, as well as those of the puppet and the pierrot are shared by many of Rops’s contemporaries.
Pornokrates heralds the advent to the art world of the contemporary woman which Rops glorified. She is characterised by her arrogance, her composure and her ruthlessness.
In a letter to his friend Henri Liesse, he described the painting:
- "My Pornocratie is complete. This drawing delights me. I would like to show you this beautiful naked girl, clad only in black shoes and gloves in silk, leather and velvet, her hair styled. Wearing a blindfold she walks on a marble stage, guided by a pig with a "golden tail" across a blue sky. Three loves - ancient loves - vanish in tears (...) I did this in four days in a room of blue satin, in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction". --Letter from Rops to Henri Liesse, 1879.
Edouard Manet
Édouard Manet (January 23 1832 – April 30 1883) was a French painter. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia engendered great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism—today these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.
Olympia is an oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet in the Realism style. Painted in 1863, it stirred an uproar when it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon, because the gaze of the goddess depicted was not that of a Venus, but of a Nana.
Though Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) sparked controversy in 1863, his Olympia stirred an even bigger uproar when it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. Conservatives condemned the work as "immoral" and "vulgar." Journalist Antonin Proust later recalled,
- If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration.
However, the work had proponents as well. Emile Zola quickly proclaimed it Manet's "masterpiece" and added,
- When other artists correct nature by painting Venus they lie. Manet asked himself why he should lie. Why not tell the truth?
The negative criticism included that of Jules Claretie, who in L'Artiste in May 1865 identified Olympia as "a courtesan no doubt" (une courtisane sans doute.) A few days earlier, Le monde illustré used a poem by Zacharie Astruc to brand this "auguste jeune fille," a courtesan.
The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe), originally titled The Bath (Le Bain), is an oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet. Painted between 1862 and 1863 , the juxtaposition of a female nude with fully dressed men sparked controversy when the work was first exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, for in 1863; nudes were acceptable in under the pretext of historical allegories, but to show them in common settings was forbidden. The nude in Manet's painting was no nymph, or mythological being ... she was a modern Parisian woman cast into a contemporary setting with two clothed men. Many found this to be quite vulgar. Praised by contemporaries such as Emile Zola who said in 1867: "Painters, and especially Édouard Manet, who is an analytic painter, do not share the masses' obsession with the subject: to them, the subject is only a pretext to paint, whereas for the masses only the subject exists.", the piece is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris
In 1877, French artist Edouard Manet exhibited "Nana", a life-size portrayal of an prostitute in undergarments, standing before her fully clothed gentleman caller. The model for it was the popular courtesan Henriette Hauser. Manet was so much taken with the description of the "precociously immoral" Nana in Zola's L'Assommoir that he gave the title "Nana" to his portrait of Henriette Hauser. The painting was rejected by the hanging committee for the Paris Salon of 1877.
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting, best-known today paintings The Origin of the World, The Stonebreakers and Burial at Ornans.
L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) is an oil on canvas painted by Gustave Courbet in 1866. Measuring about 46 cm by 55 cm (18.1 by 21.7 inches), it depicts the close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed and spreading her legs.
The framing of the scene, between the thighs and the chest, emphasizes the eroticism of the work. Moreover, an erect nipple and the redness of the labia suggest that the model just had a sexual encounter.
The painting was not publicly exhibited until the mid-1990s.
During the 19th century, the display of the nude body underwent a revolution whose main activists were Courbet and Manet. Courbet rejected academic painting and its smooth, idealised nudes, but he also directly recriminated the hypocritical social conventions of the Second Empire, where eroticism and even pornography were acceptable in mythological or oneiric paintings.
Courbet later insisted he never lied in his paintings, and his realism pushed the limits of what was considered presentable. With L'Origine du monde he has made even more explicit the eroticism of Manet's Olympia. Maxime Du Camp, in a harsh tirade, reported his visit of the work’s purchaser, and his sight of a painting “giving realism’s last word”.
In February 1994 the novel Adorations perpétuelles (Perpetual Adorations) by Jacques Henric, reproduced L’Origine du monde on its cover. Police visited several French bookshops to have them withdraw the book from their windows. A few proprietors, such as the Rome bookshop in Clermont-Ferrand, maintained the book, but others such as Les Sandales d’Empédocle in Besançon complied, and some voluntarily removed it. The author was saddened by these events: “A few years ago, bookshops were counter-powers. When the Ministry of Interior, in 1970, banned Pierre Guyotat’s book, Eden, Eden, Eden, bookshops had been resistance places. Today, they anticipate censorship…”.
Although moral standards and resulting taboos regarding the artistic display of nudity have evolved since Courbet, owing especially to photography and cinema, the painting remained provocative. Its arrival at the Musée d'Orsay caused high excitement. A guard was permanently assigned to the monitoring of this sole work, to observe the reactions of the public.
Achille Devéria
Achille Jacques-Jean-Marie Devéria (February 6, 1800 – December 23, 1857) was a French painter and lithographer. His father was a civil employee of the navy and student of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson and Louis Lafitte (1770–1828).
In 1822, he began exhibiting at the Paris Salon. At some point, he opened an art school together with his brother Eugène, who was also a painter.
By 1830 Devéria had become a successful illustrator and had published a many lithographs in form of notebooks and albums (e.g. his illustrations to Goethe's Faust, 1828) and romantic novels. He also produced many engravings of libertine contents.
His experience in the art of the vignette and maniere noire (dark manner) influenced his numerous lithographs, most of which were issued by his father-in-law, Charles-Etienne Motte (1785–1836). Most of his work consisted of "pseudo-historical, pious, sentimental or erotic scenes." (Wright) Since he rarely depicted tragic or grave themes, he appears less Romantic than many other artists of the time.
Eugène le Poitevin
Eugène le Poitevin(1806 - 1870) was a French artist, author of Les Diableries Erotiques.
Les Diableries Erotiques are a series of lithographs by French artist Eugène le Poitevin, depicting devils and other diabolic creatures engaging in various shenanigans on young girls. Circa 1830s.
Jean-Jacques Lequeu
Jean-Jacques Lequeu (Rouen, September 14 1757 – 28 March 1826) was a French draughtsman and visionary architect.
Born in Rouen, he won a scholarship to go to Paris, but following the French revolution his architectural career never took off.
He spent time preparing the Architecture Civile, a book intended for publication, but which was never published. Most of his drawings can be found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Some of them are sexually explicit (Le Dieu Priape [2] (ca. 1779 - 1795) which shows a rather large male phallus and Trois images du sexe féminin) and are kept in the Enfer of the library. Most of these drawings have been reproduced in Duboy's book but can also be found in Sade / Surreal.
20th century
Literature
Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire (August 26, 1880 – November 9, 1918) was a French poet, writer, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother. Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died at 38 of the Spanish flu during a pandemic.
Les Onze mille verges (The eleven thousand rods) is an erotic novel by Guillaume Apollinaire - written around 1906-1907 (the publication is neither signed nor dated). The novel was banned from its release in 1907 until 1970, various clandestine printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel.
The Eleven Thousand Rods is about a Romanian prince who leaves Bucharest to find the perfect female. The book has elements of sadism, homosexuality, paedophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia and satirical commentary on French government officials, theater administrators, police and journalists.
Les Exploits d'un jeune Don Juan is a French novel by Guillaume Apollinaire first published in 1911. It was adapted as an eponymous film in 1987, and as a graphic novel by Georges Pichard.
The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan), in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt. The book was made into a film by Gianfranco Mingozzi in 1987.
Louis Aragon
- Le Con d'Irène, roman, Louis Aragon, 1928
Louis Aragon (October 3, 1897 – December 24, 1982), French poet and novelist, a long-time political supporter of the communist party and prominent member of the Surrealists.
Irene's Cunt (French: Le Con d’Irène) is an erotic novel by Louis Aragon first published clandestinely in 1928 under the pseudonym of d’Albert de Routisie in order to avoid censorship. Régine Deforges will republish this French novel in 1968 under the bowlderized title Irène ; the book will nevertheless be seized by the authorities for its erotic content.
The original edition featured five eaux fortes illustrations by André Masson and was published on 150 copies.
Georges Bataille
- Le Mort, récit, Georges Bataille, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1967
- Ma mère, récit, Georges Bataille
- Le bleu du ciel, récit, Georges Bataille
- L'abbé C, récit, Georges Bataille
- Histoire de l’œil, récit, Georges Bataille, Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1967
Georges Bataille (September 10, 1897 – July 9, 1962) was a French writer, anthropologist, archivist and philosopher best known for his novella Story of the Eye. Philosophically, he traced the intimate connections between sex and death and is sometimes known as the metaphysician of evil. Though never an official member of Surrealism, Bataille described himself as Surrealism’s ‘enemy from within…’. More than Breton, he influenced 1960s French theorists and mid-1980s American art critics. His macabre interests can be deduced from his reportedly daily gazing at the Death by a Thousand Cuts photographs later published in his Tears of Eros thematic art compendium. Recently his novel My Mother was adapted for film by Christophe Honoré and in 2006 his visionary work was celebrated at the 'Undercover Surrealism' exhibition.
Histoire de l'oeil (Eng:Story of the Eye) is a novella written by Georges Bataille that details the sexual experimentation of two teenage lovers, and their increasing perversion. It is narrated by the young man looking back on his experiences. In its recent Penguin edition (2001), it includes Metaphor of the Eye, a commentary from the late Roland Barthes and notes by Susan Sontag on the significance of Bataille's novella for literary and cultural depictions of human sexuality. Story of the Eye also is one of the key texts in Sontag's nobrow essay The Pornographic Imagination.
Ma mère (English: My Mother) is a novella by Georges Bataille, posthumously and unfinishedly published in 1966. It was loosely adapted for a feature film by Christophe Honoré in 2004. See Ma mère (film). My Mother is a bildungsroman of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother. Its latest English language publication was bundled in My Mother, Madame Edwarda and The Dead Man.
Violette Leduc
Violette Leduc (April 7, 1907 – May 28, 1972) was a French author noted for such novels as Thérèse and Isabelle and La Bâtarde. In 1968 American director Radley Metzger made a film of Leduc's novel Thérèse and Isabelle. The film was a commercial feature about adolescent lesbian love, starring Essy Persson and Anna Gael.
Thérèse et Isabelle is a 1966 novel by Violette Leduc. In 1968 Radley Metzger adapted the novel for film under the German title Therese und Isabelle. The film was a commercial feature about adolescent lesbian love, starring Essy Persson and Anna Gael. In the French countryside an elegant woman pays a nostalgic visit to her adolescent girl’s school, where she passionately remembers her first fiery and forbidden romance...the story of Therese and Isabelle. The tenderness of these two lonely girls' erotic awakenings sensuously blossoms amidst the hothouse atmosphere of their repressive environment. Having both experienced the clumsy and cruel lovemaking attempts of the local Lothario, Therese and Isabelle grow closer and closer to each other - until that fateful moment when they become lovers.
Jean Genet
- Jean Genet
- "In the confessional, semi-autobiographical novels of Jean Genet, such as Our Lady of the Flowers (1944) and The Thief's Journal (1949), the author promulgates the Dostoyevskian immoralist philosophy and inverted value system of hardened criminals, con men, and homosexual drifters, a few of whom appear to be bona fide psychopaths. The most notorious of Genet's nihilists is the sailor Georges Querelle in his novel Querelle de Brest (1947). Querelle is a homosexual serial killer with sadomasochistic tastes who betrays and murders several lovers and acquaintances while on shore leave in the city of Brest." --Sholem Stein
Jean Genet (December 19, 1910 – April 15, 1986), was a French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal; later in life, Genet wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including Querelle de Brest, The Thief's Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks and The Maids.
Our Lady of the Flowers is the debut novel of French writer Jean Genet, published in 1944 in French as Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. The free-flowing, poetic novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld. The characters are drawn after their real-life counterparts, who are mostly homosexuals living on the fringes of society.
The Maids is a 1947 play by the French writer Jean Genet.
Genet based his play on the infamous Papin sisters, Lea and Christine, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933. The story can be read as an absurdist exposition on the intricate power dynamic that exists between unequals. Solange and Claire are two housemaids who construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away.
The focus of their Theatre is the murder of Madame and they take turns portraying either side of the power divide. The deliberate pace and devotion to detail guarantees that they always fail to actualize their fantasies by ceremoniously "killing" Madame at the ritual's denouement.
Histoire d'O
- Histoire d'O, roman, Pauline Réage, 1954
Anne Desclos (September 23, 1907 - April 27, 1998) was a French journalist and novelist who wrote under the pseudonyms Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage. She is best known as the author of Story of O.
Histoire d'O (English title: Story of O) is an erotic novel about female submission and ultimate sexual objectification published anonymously in 1954 by French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage. Desclos did not reveal herself to be the author until shortly before her death, forty years after its initial publication. Desclos said that she had written the novel as a series of love letters to her lover Jean Paulhan who admired the work of the Marquis de Sade.
Published in French, by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, it is the archetypical sadomasochistic story of about a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, who is blindfolded, chained, whipped, branded, pierced, made to wear a mask, and taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse.
O's lover, René, brings her to the chateau of Roissy, where she is trained to serve the men of an elite group. After that, O moves through a series of increasingly harsh masters, from René to Sir Stephen to the Commander. At the climax, O appears as a slave, nude but for an owl-like mask, before a large party of guests.
A critical view of the novel is that it is about the ultimate objectification of a woman. The heroine of the novel has the shortest possible name, consisting solely of the letter O. Although this is in fact a shortening of the name Odile, it could also stand for "object" or "orifice", an O being a symbolic representation of any "hole".
L'Image
- L'Image, Jean de Berg, Paris, Minuit, 1956
Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian) was born in 1930 in Paris is a French writer.
A theatre and cinema actress and photographer, she has published BDSM-related writings under the pseudonyms Jean de Berg and Jeanne de Berg.
L'Image, a sadomasochistic novel published in 1956 by Les Éditions de Minuit, was written under the pseudonym Jean de Berg. Radley Metzger made the novel into a 1975 film, The Image, also known as The Punishment of Anne.
The Image (or in French "L'Image") is a classic 1956 sadomasochistic erotic novel, written by Catherine Robbe-Grillet and published under the pseudonym of Jean de Berg. It was made into a 1975 film, The Image directed by Radley Metzger, also known as The Punishment of Anne.
Catherine Millet
Catherine Millet (born April 1, 1948) is a French art critic, curator, and founder and editor of the magazine Art Press, which focuses on modern art. She is best known as the author of the 2002 memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M..
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by the French art critic Catherine Millet is an erotic novel first published in 2001. It is a semi-autobiographical account of the sexual life of the author. An English translation by Adriana Hunter was published in 2002. Sexual Life was the subject of mild controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. It was reviewed by Edmund White as "the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman". The book details her sexual history, from childhood masturbation to an adult fascination with group sex.
Publishers
Obelisk Press was an English-language press based in Paris, France, founded by Jack Kahane. It published novels that were to risqué to publish in the United States.
Henry Miller's 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, had explicit sexual passages and could not be published in the United States; an edition was printed by the Obelisk Press in Paris and copies were smuggled into the United States.
Obelisk also published Anais Nin, James Joyce, Parker Tyler, Frank Harris and Lawrence Durrell.
Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebadged version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. It published a mix of erotic novels and avant-garde literary works, and is best known for the first print of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
Olympia Press was also the first publisher willing to print the controversial William S. Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch. Other notable works included J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man; the French trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett; A Tale of Satisfied Desire by Georges Bataille and Story of O by Pauline Réage.
Jean-Jacques Pauvert (born April 8, 1926) is a French publisher, famous for publishing the work of de Sade in the late 1940s, sparking off a series of court cases that lasted eight years. He was the first publisher of Story of O in 1954 and the original publisher of Kenneth Anger's 1959 Hollywood Babylon. He published George Bataille's Tears of Eros. Between 1947 and 1970 his publishing house was the subject of about 20 obscenity trials. He was assisted in his defense by the usual suspects of French intellectuals such as André Breton, Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau and Jean Paulhan.
Eric Losfeld (1923? - 1979) was a French publisher who had a reputation for publishing controversial material with his publishing imprints Éditions Arcanes (founded 1952) and Éditions Le Terrain Vague (founded 1955). A rival clandestine French editor was Jean-Jacques Pauvert. The difference between them was -- in the words of Sarane Alexandrian: "Jean-Jacques Pauvert was an editor of surrealism, Losfeld was a surrealist editor."
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin (February 21 1903 - January 14 1977) was a French-born author who became famous for her posthumously published personal journals. Nin is hailed by many critics as one of the finest writers of female erotica. She was one of the first women to explore fully the realm of erotic writing. Before her, erotica written by women was rare, with a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Kate Chopin. Titles include Delta of Venus and Little Birds, which explores male and female sexuality from a female perspective.
Her affair with Henry Miller was the subject of the film Henry & June.
Delta of Venus is a book by Anaïs Nin. It was first published in 1978. In 1995 a film version of the book was directed by Zalman King. There are multiple short stories in this work with certain important characters reappearing throughout. She deals with many different sexual themes, while maintaining the balance of her life's work -- the study and description of woman.
The collection of short stories that makes up this anthology were written during the 1940s for a private client known simply as 'Collector'. This 'Collector' commissioned Nin, along with other now well-known writers (including Henry Miller), to produce erotic fiction for his private consumption. Despite being told to leave poetic language aside and concentrate on graphic, sexually explicit scenarios, Nin was able to give these stories a literary flourish and a layer of images and ideas beyond the pornographic.
The stories range in length from less than a page to one hundred times that, and are tied together not just by their sexual premises, but also by Nin's distinct style and feminine viewpoint.
Film
The depiction of sexuality in mainstream cinema was at one time restricted by law and self-imposed industry standards. Films showing explicit sexual activity were, with very rare exceptions, confined to privately-distributed underground films or "porn loops". Beginning in the 1960s, however, mainstream cinema began pushing boundaries in terms of what is allowed on screen. Although the vast majority of sexual situations depicted in mainstream cinema are simulated, on rare occasions filmmakers have produced motion pictures in which actors were allowed (or instructed) to engage in some level of genuine sexual activity, up to and including sexual intercourse. The difference between these films and pornography is that, while such scenes might be considered pornographic, the main intent of these films is usually not pornographic.
Barbarella
Barbarella, also known as Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy is a 1968 erotic science fiction film, based on the French Barbarella comic book created by Jean-Claude Forest. It has gained a cult following since its re-release in 1977 on home video, and has had considerable influence on pop culture in the decades following its original release.
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle is a 1974 French softcore erotic movie directed by Just Jaeckin, and starring by Sylvia Kristel. The screenplay was written by Jean-Louis Richard, based on novel Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman by Emmanuelle Arsan. The music score is by Pierre Bachelet. It remains one of the most successful French cinema ever produced.
Robert Fripp won an out-of-court settlement over the use of music in the film based on King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic".
At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Alain Siritzky announced that a worldwide search was underway for a new Emmanuelle to star in a new series of films. Only films and episodes produced by ASP ("Alain Siritzky Productions") film company are official and based on Arsan's character.
Le Sexe qui parle
Le Sexe qui parle (The Sex Who Talks) is a French adult film of 1975. It was the first exclusive hardcore feature film produced and released in France to meet international success. The film was exported to the USA with the title Pussy Talk and started a period of French porn chic in America, followed soon by films such as Candy’s Candy (Candice Candy) and Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street (Mes Nuits avec Alice, Pénélope, Arnold, Maude et Richard) in 1976. The film was directed by Claude Mulot (as Frédéric Lansac) who also directed a sequel to Le Sexe qui parle in 1977, which starts with the “infection” passed by Eric to a prostitute.
Talking female genitals is an early theme in French literature as seen in Les bijoux indiscrets by Denis Diderot and the fabliau Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons.
Joëlle (Pénélope Lamour) is a beautiful executive at an advertisement company. Her vagina is infected with a mysterious malice and begins to talk and lead her to indecent sexual acts. It is soon revealed that her problems root from her hardships as an adolescent. In the finale, she has sex with her husband Eric (Jean-Loup Philippe (as Nils Hortzs)) and passes the “infection” to his penis.
Baise-moi
Baise-moi is a novel by French author Virginie Despentes, first published in 1999. A film based on the book, and with the same name, was released the following year. The film, directed by Despentes and actress Coralie Trinh Thi, received intense media coverage because its graphic mix of real rather than simulated sex and violence was on the limit of that allowed by censors in various countries around the world.
Sex Stars System
French film magazine dedicated to erotic cinema and pornographic cinema. Emile Gir was the editor-in-chief and Jean-Pierre Bouyxou was on its editorial board. The magazine lasted for at least 18 monthly issues between 1975-76 (it is not confirmed if issue no. 19 came out as scheduled on November 1976). In December 1976, the magazine's name was changed simply to Stars System and new enumaration began.
Directors
José Bénazéraf is a French filmmaker and producer, born January 8 1922 in Casablanca, Morocco.
After having finished his studies in political sciences, he started his career by producing Les lavandières du Portugal in 1958, a film of Pierre Gaspard-Huit. He started to direct erotic feature films in 1961 with L'éternité pour nous.
At the end of the 1970s, he moved his attention to the direct-to-video market.
Actors
Film production
Eurociné is a Paris-based, family-run film production company. Since 1937, Eurocine has been producing some of the most recognized low budget European flicks, including striptease movies and erotic crime thrillers. It is also a distribution company of b films, and is known for its collaborations with Spanish director Jess Franco. The company was featured in the Eurotika (TV documentary). With greater permissiveness in cinema at the end of the 1960s, Eurocine began to produce erotic movies. But when hardcore films were legalized, the market for erotic films disappeared and Eurocine turned to producing horror and fantasy movies.
Visual arts
Aslan
Aslan (real name is Alain Gourdon, born in Bordeaux (France) on May 23 1930) is a French painter, sculptor and pin-up artist. He is mostly famous in France for his pin ups. He contributed to Lui from the creation of the magazine in 1964 to the early eighties, providing a monthly pin up.
He is the sculptor of the Fifth Republic Marianne as Brigitte Bardot in 1970, followed by the Mireille Mathieu Marianne.
Paul Avril
Édouard-Henri Avril (21 May 1843 in Algiers – 1928 in Le Raincy) was a French painter and commercial artist. Under the pseudonym Paul Avril, he was an illustrator of erotic literature.
Paul-Emile Bécat
Paul-Émile Bécat (1885 – 1960) was a French painter, engraver and draftsman who won the Great prix de Rome in 1920. He is noted for his illustration of erotic literature.
- Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite: mœurs antiques and Songs of Bilitis
- Pietro Aretino, Ragionamenti
- Pierre de Brantôme, Vie des dames galantes
- Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
- Paul Verlaine, Les Amies
- François-Mathieu Pidansat de Mairobert, La secte des anandrynes
Georges Pichard
Georges Pichard (January 17 1920 - June 7 2003) was a French comics artist, known for numerous BD magazine covers, serial publications and adult comics stereotypically featuring well-endowed women and BDSM-imagery. Guido Crepax was an Italian contemporary with similar subject matter, yet a different style.
Toward the end of his life, Pichard adapted classic erotic stories such as Les Exploits d'un jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Apollinaire, The Kama-Sutra by Vatsyayana, Trois filles de leur mère by Pierre Louÿs, La Religieuse by Denis Diderot and Germinal by Émile Zola.
Roland Topor
Roland Topor (Paris, January 7 1938 - Paris, April 16 1997), was a French illustrator, painter, writer and filmmaker, known for the surreal, fantastic and grotesque nature of his work.
Roland Topor is best known for his novel The Tenant ("Le Locataire Chimérique", 1964), which was adapted to film by Roman Polanski in 1976. The later novel Joko's Anniversary (1969), a fable about loss of identity, is a vicious satire on social conformity.
With René Laloux, Topor made "Dead Time" ("Les Temps Morts", 1964), "The Snails" ("Les Escargots", 1965) and their most famous work, the feature length Fantastic Planet ("La Planète Sauvage", 1973). Topor also played Renfield in Werner Herzog's film Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979) and worked on Marquis (1989).
Roland Topor was discovered by Jacques Sternberg and in 1960 he publishes his debut Les Masochistes, a collection of drawings. He exhibits in the university museum Maison des Beaux-Arts, Paris from January 20 to January 30 1961.
He published several books of drawings, including Dessins panique (1965) Quatre roses pour Lucienne (1967) and Toporland (1975). Selections from Quatre roses pour Lucienne were reprinted in the English language collection Stories and Drawings (1967). His carefully detailed, realistic style, with elaborate crosshatching, emphasises the fantastic and macabre subject matter of the images.
In 1962 he created the Panic Movement (mouvement panique), together with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal.
From 1961 to 1965 he contributed to the French satirical Hara Kiri magazine.
He created the drawings for the bizarre introduction of Arrabal's film Viva la muerte (1971).
In 1983, he created with Henri Xhonneux the popular French TV series Téléchat, a parody of news broadcasts featuring a puppet cat and a puppet ostrich.
Clovis Trouille
Camille Clovis Trouille, was born on 24 October 1889, in Amiens, France. He worked as Sunday painter and a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins, and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1905 to 1910. He died on 24 September 1975 in Paris. His themes were anti-clericalism and eroticism.
Tomi Ungerer
Tomi (Jean-Thomas) Ungerer (born November 28, 1931) is a French illustrator best known for his erotic and political illustrations as well as children's books.
Photography
Gilles Berquet, Guy Bourdin, Mirka Lugosi, Pierre Molinier, Eugène Pirou
Gilles Berquet (born 1956) is a French photographer, and one of the driving forces in the European fetish erotica scene. He is also the editor of maniac. Kinky fetish and bondage photography with a film noir feel. Carefully posed with obvious illusions to the subrosa fetish photography of 1920s Paris, the photos maintain a caught in the act modernity.
Guy Bourdin (born December 2 1928 in Paris, died March 29 1991 of cancer in Paris) was one of the best known photographers of fashion and advertising of the second half of the 20th century. His themes included sex, death, violence, glamour and fear. Amongst others, Jean Baptiste Mondino, Nick Knight and David LaChapelle have admitted to be great admirers of his work.
Pierre Molinier (April 13, 1900 - March 3, 1976) was a surrealist painter, photographer and "maker of objects". He was born in Agen (France) and lived his life in Bordeaux (France). He began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.
Eugène Pirou (1841-1909) was an early French filmmaker and photographer who made one of the first pornographic films, Le Coucher de la Marie in which Louise Willy performed a striptease, only a year after the first public screening of motion pictures, though he made his name filming the Tsar's visit to Paris a year later in 1897.
Obscenity censorship in France
The trial of the poet Théophile de Viau in 1623 is a milestone both in the invention of obscenity and in the history of censorship.
Sade - Pauvert - Maurice Girodias - Eric Losfeld - Gustave Flaubert - Charles Baudelaire - Hara Kiri
July 16, 1949: French law targets "publications destinées à la jeunesse," [publications intended for the youth]. Initially, the law applied to magazines and periodicals of a semi-salacious nature, usually well illustrated. In 1954 the law was expanded to include printed books as well.
Bibliography
- List of French erotomaniacs
- J.M. Lo Duca
- Ado Kyrou
- Gilles Néret
- Images Interdites (1989) - Yves Frémion, Bernard Joubert
- History of censorship in France in cinema, newpapers, magazines, posters and books.
- Paris Eros: The Imaginary Museum of Eroticism in Paris (2004) - Hans-Jürgen Döpp
- French Undressing - Naughty Postcards from 1900 to 1920
