Languages are like history books and carry within all manner of inheritance from their long past. They challenge norms and borders, they borrow, appropriate, connect the local with other places, and circulate words and cultures. Portuguese and French are no exception to this rule and bear the marks of contact between France and Brazil. The sustained French presence in the Brazilian coasts in the sixteenth century and colonial domination introduced into the French language words still in use today, derived from the Indigenous languages of South America.

Portuguese navigation across all the seas of the globe also enriched the French vocabulary with names of fruits and objects that became commonplace. The integration of numerous French words into Portuguese was likewise an indication of the asymmetry of cultural relations between Brazil and France up to the second half of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, France’s cultural influence reached its peak.

France provided the model for academic institutions such as the School and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Academia Brasileira de Letras, founded in 1897. Frenchmen such as the Garnier brothers pursued the trade of bookselling in Rio de Janeiro, which involved editing and selling books, and played a crucial role in the emergence of the literary field in Brazil.

Connections with France enabled Brazilian artists to engage with major transnational artistic currents, such as Romanticism and Modernism, and to produce original works. Over time, these exchanges took on increasingly diverse and more balanced forms.

Brazilian music reached France after the First World War, following composer Darius Milhaud’s (1894–1974) sojourn in Rio de Janeiro, which inspired him in several works, as well as to Pixinguinha and Donga’s Oito Batutas, who came to Paris in 1921 to perform their maxixes, choros and sambas. Like other parts of the world, France was swept up in the bossa nova wave of the 1960s. Tom Jobim himself acknowledged his fondness for the melodies of Claude Debussy. Henri Salvador, born in French Guiana and guitarist of the orchestra “Ray Ventura et ses collégiens,” which performed at the Cassino da Urca in 1942 and 1943, was also a great admirer of the Brazilian repertoire.

While French architects and urban planners worked extensively in Brazilian cities until the 1930s, Oscar Niemeyer was the designer of several buildings in France, including the headquarters of the French Communist Party, inaugurated in 1980 in Paris, and the “Volcan,” a cultural center in the city of Le Havre, in Normandy.

 

Paris-Match 1962 – Letters to a Black Woman, Françoise Ega

From the 1940s onward, the rise of magazines that placed great emphasis on photojournalism, such as O Cruzeiro in Brazil and Paris-Match in France, helped democratize the circulation of information. It was while reading, in 1962, a Paris-Match report on Carolina Maria de Jesus that Françoise Ega, a domestic worker who had emigrated to Marseille from her native Martinique, discovered her literary vocation. She began writing a diary that took the form of an imagined conversation with Carolina Maria de Jesus, which was to be published posthumously. Françoise Ega is the author of several works and an important figure in the defense of social rights and in the struggle of West Indians, especially women, against exploitation and racial discrimination.

 

Alécio de Andrade (1938–2003)

The photographer lived in Paris from 1964 to 2003. Alongside his professional career and personal projects, he photographed numerous Brazilian intellectuals and artists during their visits to, or exile in, France.