Giroud, Françoise (1916—)

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Giroud, Françoise (1916—)

French editor, journalist, and government official. Name variations: Francoise Giroud. Born Françoise Gourdji on September 21, 1916, in Geneva, Switzerland; the youngest of two daughters of Salih Gourdji (a journalist) and Elda (Faraji) Gourdji; attended boarding school in Epinay, France, a suburb of Paris; attended the Lycée Molière and the Collège de Groslay; married to M. Eliacheff (marriage dissolved); children: a son born out of wedlock, Alain-Pierre Denis (1941–1972); a daughter, Caroline.

Françoise Giroud, daughter of Salih Gourdji, a well-to-do expatriated Turkish journalist, and Elda Gourdji , a Frenchwoman, was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1916. She attended boarding school in Epinay, France, and grew up in luxury until her father's death in the early years of the Depression. A bright if reluctant student, Françoise left school at age 15 to learn a marketable trade. After a month of secretarial training, she worked at a bookstore briefly before signing on as a "script girl" for Marcel Pagnol's production of Fanny. Over the next five years, she worked in continuity for dozens of films, including Jean Renoir's masterpiece La grand illusion. It was Renoir who sensed her flair and allowed her to write some dialogue for the film. In her autobiography, I Give You My Word, Giroud discussed her debt to the master director: "What I got from him was the revelation of my possibilities, that anything can happen to you at any time…. He would say to me: 'You have gifts. Start off by ruining them.'" By 1938, Giroud had become the first female assistant director in French cinema history. She had a hand in directing several films and continued to write adaptations and dialogue.

In 1939, when the French film industry cut back on production with the onset of World War II, Giroud lost her job. She worked for several months as a private secretary before joining the mass exodus from Paris in June 1940. She settled in Lyon for a time, where she worked for the Paris-Soir, then the largest newspaper in France, and also contributed feature articles and short stories to 7 Days, a small weekly newspaper. When the movie industry revived, she eagerly went back to work, moving unimpeded between sound stages in both the free and occupied zones of France. In 1943, however, she was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris and imprisoned in Fresnes. She was unaccountably freed several months later, shortly before the Allied invasion in June 1944.

After the war, Giroud continued to write movie scripts, but the initial adventure of filmmaking was gone, and she grew increasingly frustrated and bored. She wrote songs and contributed freelance articles to magazines. In 1946, she joined the staff of Elle, an innovative women's magazine soon known for its daring subject matter. When editor Helene Lazaroff became ill, Giroud took over as editor, staying until 1952, when work on the magazine began to pall for her. "It was because it had become successful," she explained; "we had moved from the artisan stage to the factory level."

After a trip to New York to research a series of articles about women on different economic levels in American society, in 1953, Giroud and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the political editor of Paris-Presse, founded L'Express, a leftist journal of opinion. "Its original mission was to support and nurture a policy of rebuilding France, a policy backed up by solid information," she explained. The magazine, which combined inventive journalistic techniques with political doctrine, attracted some of the best political theorists and writers in France, among them François Mauriac and Albert Camus. In 1956, when Servan-Schreiber, a lieutenant in the military reserves, left to fight in the Algerian War, Giroud took over editorship of the publication. Her ongoing personal relationship with Servan-Schreiber ended completely with his marriage in 1960.

From the time Servan-Schreiber left in 1956 (some believe he was drafted in order to stop his editorials), Giroud became severely depressed, nearly suicidal. "Years went by, during which I was a walking ruin, blacked and burned out like a forest after a fire has swept through it. It took years for me to find another way of living, years before I was able to re-establish a suitable relationship with myself." Psychoanalysis finally brought her back from despair and taught her that her intelligence, on which she had always relied, was powerless against the demons she carried in her soul. "But when you have learned, at your own expense, that intelligence is not what's guiding you, you've really learned a lot…. It's not intelligence that rules the world."

Except for a brief stint as the feature editor of France-Soir in 1960, Giroud remained editor in chief of L'Express until 1974. During her tenure, the magazine metamorphosed into a general news magazine (much like Time) and became one of the most widely read and influential

journals in the country. Giroud not only contributed a weekly editorial, but dozens of longer pieces on a variety of topics from the American space program to the role of women in French society. Especially revealing were her profiles of powerful world leaders such as Charles De-Gaulle, Richard Nixon, and Nikita Khrushchev. Giroud had a particular gift for biography, a seemingly effortless ability to capture the essence of her subject. Marcel Archard, who wrote an introduction to Françoise Giroud vous présent le tout-Paris, a collection of her anecdotal biographies of celebrities like Jean Anouilh, Jean Renoir, Colette , and Edith Piaf , compared her to a painter who skillfully mixes "blood with her paints." During the 1950s, Giroud also published Nouveaux portraits (1954) and La Nouvelle vague: portraits de la jeuness (1958).

In May 1974, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, honoring a campaign pledge, asked Giroud to become his Secretary of State for the Condition of Women. Initially skeptical (she had supported François Mitterand's candidacy), Giroud wrote in her column that Giscard probably expected her to set up office in the Cabinet's kitchen. Upon further consideration, however, she accepted, with the belief that at age 58 she might be able to learn something new. Giroud immediately set out to change the idealized maternal role that French women had been locked into for centuries. Working with a staff of three and virtually no budget, she announced a series of Cabinet-approved edicts to help equalize the status of women in the work force, education, and public life. They included a call for the elimination of "feminine" jobs, the establishment of free day-care centers, and a revision of the Napoleonic Code, which regarded women as chattel. She proposed maternity and paternity leaves and convinced 800 companies to offer all employees flexible working hours so that workers, male and female, could spend time caring for their families. Her most important message, however, to women throughout the world, was the necessity of achieving economic independence. "Without that," she said, "I don't even know what the word freedom means."

In 1979, after serving an appointment as Secretary of Culture, Giroud returned to journalism, becoming the director of the Revue du Temps Libre. In 1993, she co-authored (with philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy) Women and Men: A Philosophical Conversation, which explores the differences between men and women in affairs of the heart.

For a woman so open about her feelings and opinions, Giroud remained remarkably silent about her own personal relationships with men. "Someone once said that you should never tell the story of your life," she wrote in her autobiography, "because it is made up of the lives of others, and you have no right to talk about other people's lives." Just before the German invasion of Paris, Giroud was planning to marry, although in her book the man was not named. Instead, because of the war, they parted, and Giroud, pregnant and unable to obtain an abortion, gave birth to a son in 1941. Always fragile in health, he was killed in a skiing accident in 1972. After the war, Giroud was married for six years to a man described only as a "very seductive Russian." The union produced a daughter, Caroline, and ended around 1952.