Gripari, Pierre (1925–90), French author of modern fairy tales. Gripari observed that since his mother was a witch (a medium, actually), his interest in fairy tales was natural. His first collection of marvellous tales, Contes de la rue Broca (Tales from Broca Street, 1967), was written in collaboration with children, while the Contes de la rue Folie‐Méricourt (Tales from Folie‐Méricourt Street, 1983) were adapted from Russian and Greek folk tales. But it is the parallel world of the Patrouille du conte (Fairy Tale Patrol, 1983) that pushed fairy‐tale discourse to its subversive limits. To liberate classic tales and give them ‘a second wind, a second truth’, Gripari dismantled their dominant socio‐psychological codes and updated them to reflect today's morality and civilizing process. Here, eight children are on a mission to right certain moral and ideological offences in the Kingdom of Folklore. But their politically correct agenda to eradicate sexism, bigotry, and feudalism backfires—with darkly humorous results. Each ‘humanitarian’ change (prohibiting wolves from eating little pigs, abolishing monarchies in the name of democracy) impacts successive tales, and the recodified world becomes yet more barbarous. Moving beyond parody, then, Gripari challenged not only the socialization models that are part of our collective unconscious, but our contemporary political agenda as well.
Bibliography
- Malarte, Claire‐Lise, ‘The French Fairy Tale Conspiracy’,
The Lion and the Unicorn , 12 (1988). - Paucard, Alain, Gripari: mode d'emploi (1985).
- Peyroutet, Jean‐Luc, Pierre Gripari et ses contes pour enfants (1994).
— Mary Louise Ennis
The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
