Françoise Giroud, a woman to be reckoned with in French media and politics
Journalist and minister Françoise Giroud, who died 21 years ago this week, was a forceful ambassador for women’s rights, intellect and ambition in post-war France. RFI looks back at her life and legacy.
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In May 1974, as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was making his bid to become France's president, he went on the radio to sell himself to French voters. He was at pains to assure them that, despite his somewhat grand manner, he was a man of the people.
A clutch of journalists faced him. One had a question: how much does it cost to take the Paris Metro?
Giscard d’Estaing, then minister of the economy, ventured a figure: 90 centimes. He was off by more than a third; the price of a single ticket was 1 franc 30 at the time.
The question has cropped up repeatedly in political campaigns since then, a litmus test of how "in touch" a candidate really is.
The first journalist to ask it was Françoise Giroud, editor at the time of influential news magazine L’Express, which she had co-founded 21 years earlier.
She had already made clear in her editorials that she was no fan of right-wing Giscard d’Estaing. Yet, when he went on to win the presidency that month and put Jacques Chirac in charge of forming a government, Giroud would accept a role in it: secretary of state for “the feminine condition”, or what we’d now call women’s affairs.
It was the first such position in France’s history. “It was the challenge Giscard was offering that interested me,” she would later say. She claimed she’d accepted it out of curiosity: to see politics and politicians close up, all the better to see through them.
But underneath her wry detachment was a conviction that the conditions of women’s lives mattered – and that, by being stubborn and clear-eyed, she could make a difference to them.
Listen to a conversation about Françoise Giroud on the Spotlight in France podcast:
From film to journalism
Giroud was born Léa France Gourdji, on 21 September 1916, to Jewish immigrants with roots in Turkey and Greece and who moved first to Switzerland and then to France.
Her father, who had founded the Ottoman Empire’s first news agency, died while she was in her mid-teens. She dropped out of her high school in Paris to help support her mother and sister.
She worked first as a typist and eventually as what was then called a “script girl” – a film director’s assistant, responsible for keeping notes on set. From there she moved into assisting directors with the shoot itself, then writing the screenplays.
World War II drove her out of Paris. She spent the occupation bouncing around the centre and south of France, penning occasional screenplays and lyrics for a handful of songs. She passed messages for the Resistance and was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo.
By her own admission, she would never have become a journalist if it weren’t for the war. “I didn’t have any reason to go into journalism, I earned plenty of money in cinema,” she told an interviewer.
“But it was right after the war – everything had been upended, there were no more journalists in Paris because most of them had collaborated to some degree, and so when they were setting up a new publication they asked me to come onboard as editor – which is unbelievable!”
The publication in question was Elle magazine, founded a year earlier by Russian emigree and journalist Hélène Gordon-Lazareff. Giroud would edit it from 1946 to 1953, targeting an audience of women who had played a more active role in society than ever before during WWII and, since its end, were newly eligible to vote.
Commissioning features on news, health, literature and politics as well as fashion, she helped lay the foundations for a magazine that took women seriously – just as seriously she took her responsibility to inform them.
A magazine for a new era
“I think the French were and are the worst informed about themselves of any industrialised nation in the world,” Giroud once declared.
“I don’t ask anyone to share my views. I think all readers, voters, citizens have the right to form their own opinion – but based on reality, not the way they imagine things are.”
In 1953, she took on the mission of investigating that reality. With Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, son of a newspaper owner and with whom she was in a relationship, she co-founded L’Express on the model of American news weeklies like Time magazine.
Unlike other French publications of the time, it didn’t claim to show its readers what Giroud called “the underside of the cards” – inside information, which all too often turned out to be unreliable. “What interests me are the cards themselves,” she said.
As well as conducting in-depth investigations, the new magazine positioned itself against France’s wars in Algeria and Indochina and published some of the foremost thinkers of the era, including Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
It was a young team, remembers Jacques Duquesne, who joined L’Express as a subeditor in the early days.
He and his colleagues felt themselves part of a new generation that hoped to see France rebuild itself for the better after WWII and were frustrated to see it clinging on to a crumbling empire, he told RFI: “That was what L’Express represented: the hopes of young people.”
In charge of the magazine from 1953 to 1974, Giroud urged her cub reporters to be “at once enthusiastic and sceptical”. Truly bad journalists weren’t the ones who lied, she declared. Those were easy to spot. The real failures were journalists who allowed themselves to be duped by the men in power.
France's first 'women's minister'
In July 1974, France’s most powerful men came to Giroud. President Giscard d’Estaing and prime minister Chirac wanted her to be France’s first women’s minister and, after initially declining, she agreed.
She was one of four women in a cabinet of 32 men. It was a record at the time.
Sceptics called it window dressing. Giroud – whose ambitions ranged from surveying barriers to women’s employment to paying subsidies to working mothers and rewriting sexist textbooks – didn’t have her own ministry or budget.
“Any one proposal needs the consultations of two or three other ministers at least,” she told an interviewer three months into the job. “But I think that if one is obstinate, one can succeed.”
Two decades later, as men continued to make up 94 percent of the lower house of parliament, she was less optimistic. “It’s an illusion to think that because they have a ministry, women play a role in public life,” she said. “There have been many changes, positive ones, but they still have a long way to go.”
Giroud was part of one generational shift, however: the legislation of abortion in France, which she argued for on the grounds women should be free to exercise control over their own bodies.
That was considered too radical for the time, so instead health minister Simone Veil made the case for saving lives at risk from unregulated procedures.
The French parliament agreed to legalise abortion in 1975, in an act known as “the Veil law”.
The following year Giroud was made culture minister, a post she held until 1977. It would be her last job in politics: she made a move to run for local office in Paris, but found herself accused of exaggerating her role in the Resistance during WWII.
She dropped out of the election and never ran again.
Grande dame of French media
Giroud returned to the media – a better fit for her dry sense of humour and disregard for pomp.
She wrote several bestselling books, ranging from biographies to memoirs and reflections on journalism, politics, love and France. A charismatic speaker, she was in demand on the lecture circuit and as an authoritative TV commentator.
Giroud continued writing columns and appearing on television right up until her death on 19 January 2003. Aged 86, she fell on the steps of a Paris theatre and passed away the following week, two days after her final byline.
Tributes poured in, praise that Giroud herself might have called well-deserved.
“I despise false modesty,” she once said. “I believe I’m a capable person who’s good at their job. I believe other women could be good at it too – but there’s a certain number of choices in life, and if women aren’t in a position to make those choices, they cannot reach positions of real power.”
True equality, she once quipped, would be reached “the day they give an important job to an incompetent woman”. If so, it wouldn’t be her they hired.
Listen to more on this story on the Spotlight in France podcast, episode 105.
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