Blanche et Noir by Louise FAURE-FAVIER (Signed)
FAURE-FAVIER, Louise. Blanche et Noir. Paris: J. Ferenczi et Fils, 1928.
First edition (originally serialized in Le Figaro in 1927). Signed and inscribed by the author ‘a mes chers cousins Madeleine et Frederic Sylvestre, homage affectueux, Louise Faure-Favier’.
Blanche et Noir is the first French novel about a mixed-race relationship between a white woman and a black man. The novel is narrated by Jeanne, who discovers a family secret: her grandmother had eloped to Africa with a Senegalese man after falling in love with him at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. The relationship resulted in a child, Jeanne’s ‘oncle nègre’. At the end of the novel, Jeanne - who like Louise Faure-Favier herself, became one of the few women pilots breaking world records – finally meets her uncle and flies away with him, metaphorically escaping prejudices of race and gender.
Louise Faure-Favier (1870–1961) was a French aviator, journalist (perhaps the first Frenchwoman to do so professionally), poet and novelist. She was a leading figure at the dawn of commercial aviation, setting several speed records, the first of which, in 1919 for Paris to Dakar, and another for a round trip between Paris and Baghdad in 1930. From 1921, she developed and published a series of the first official French aviation guidebooks covering destinations such as London, Tunis and Lausanne, illustrated with aerial photographs she took herself. Faure-Favier was also an influential journalist, who wrote about aviation and air travel, art, culture, and feminism. She was part of the artistic avant-garde or her period, her friends included Guillaume Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin, Erik Satie, Picasso and Cocteau.
227 pp. 8vo, original printed wrappers, slightly soiled. Good.