THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT IN FRANCE: THE
FORMATIVE YEARS, 1858-1889

Dissertation for the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
PATRICK KAY BIDELMAN
1975

   

 

 

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THE FOR'IATIVE YEAIB, 1858-1889

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ABSTRACT

THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT IN FRANCE:
THE FUIMATIVE YEARS, 1858-1889

by
Patrick Kay Bidelman

After more than a half century of individual and short-lived
collective protests against the worsening condition of women in France,
an ongoing feminist movement emerged under the Second Empire. Closely
related to a broad spectrum of reformist and revolutionary tendencies,
particularly the political effort to supplant authoritarian with re-
publican rule, the first generation of this movement survived the
defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) and the disrup-
tion of the Paris Commune (1871) to organize an expanded campaign for
women's liberation during the first two decades of the Third Republic.
Once the new republic achieved a modicum of stability, French feminists
held their first women's rights congress in 1878. Eleven years later,
they held a second congress at the time of the centennial celebration
of the 1789 Revolution. The 1889 women's rights congress roughly
coincided with the death or retirement of many of the movement's
founders, and after that date a second generation rapidly assumed
leadership of French feminism. In their ability to effect a transition
frmm one generation to another, the movement's creators obtained their
most notable success: the breaking of the historic pattern that had

reduced earlier feminist protests to sporadic, isolated outbursts.

Patrick Kay Bidelman

In other respects, the movement achieved less. Most of the
hundreds of legal, economic, social, and ideological constraints that
shackled women under the systéme masculiniste remained intact in 1889.
Potentially significant reforms occurred in education and divorce (re-
established in 188h), but these bore a political imprint that left women
with little additional control over their own lives. More critical,
however, was the failure of the movement to develop a solid theoretical
position on the woman question or to devise a strategy around which all
feminists could rally. The chief theoretical stumbling block involved
the ideal of the‘gégg’éducatrice, which assumed that woman possessed
innate domestic talents and called on her to devote herself exclusively
to the roles of wife and mother. At root, the 9&3 e'ducatrice was only
the latest of many "special nature" assumptions about women, but femi-
nists reacted ambivalently to it because, if nothing else, it accorded
some ”superior" qualities to women.

The issue of strategy involved the difficulty of reconciling the
movement's republican sympathies with the fact that most women seemed
indifferent to democracy and in favor of traditional clerical-authori-
tarian government. As a result, the movement split into two camps. One
subscribed to the strategy'of‘lg.breche, which focused on securing
women's civil rights and put off the problem of political rights until
more women underwent democratic indoctrination. The other camp adopted
the strategy of.lfassaut, which stressed the need for rapid enactment
of woman suffrage on the grounds that the vote would permit quick re-
moval of women's civil disabilities and provide women with practical
democratic experiences. Upholders of‘lg_bréche constituted a majority

throughout the movement's first generation, and, under the leadership

Patrick Kay Bidelman
of Maria Deraismes and Leon Richer, they largely excluded the partisans
of.lfassaut, who followed Hubertine Auclert, from the women's rights
congresses of 1878 and 1889.

The formative years of the feminist movement in France thus
present a mixed picture. In the course of a long generation, a small
minority of women and men managed to organize and to perpetuate a
collective struggle against one of the most demeaning of modern abuses,
but the movement failed to lay a firm foundation in either theory or

practice on which subsequent feminists could build.

TIE FDflNIST MDVDENT IN FRANCE:

TIE FOIMATIVE YEARS, 1858-1889

by

Patrick Kay Bidelman

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of History

1975

® Copyright by

PATRICK KAY BIDEIMAN

1975

ACKNOWIEDGMENTS

Many people have contributed in many ways to this study. Most
cannot be mentioned individually, but the author would like to express
gratitude to the ”continuity of inquiry" that sustained this endeavor.
The comunity is not to blame if this work fails to replicate the high
quality of that collective support.

Specifically, the author would like to thank the dozens of per-
sons who rendered assistance at the libraries of Michigan State Univer-
sity and the University of Florida, Brussels' Bibliothaque Royale de
Belgique, and Paris' Bibliothéque Nationals, Archives Nationales, Muse's
Social, Bibliothdque de l'Arsenal, and Bibliotthue de la Ville de Paris.
Matinee Leautey of Paris' Bibliothéque Marguerite Durand deserves a
special thanks in this context.

Teachers and colleagues at both Weston: Michigan University and
Michigan State University provided encouragement for years, particularly
the late Professor Willis F. Dunbar. Their support eventually brought
the author under the guidance of a Doctoral Connittee composed of Pro-
fessors John B. Harrison, Donald N. lmers, and Donald N. Baker. Chairh-
nan Baker is especially not to blame if his extraordinary insight and aid
occasionally failed to reach their mark.

One section of this study depended in large part on two in-
dividuals: Charles Sowerwine, who inofnned the author of the existence

of Hubertine Auclert's "Diary," and Beth Lindquist, who supplied the

ii

author with a copy of that diary. The whole of this study drew on the
language expertise of Professor Richard B. Bizot.

Finally, without the talent and kindness of Corin Bennett and
Kathleen Sullivan, and especially Professors Dale Clifford and Jane
Decker, it is unlikely that this study could have meant so much to the

author, or ever reached completion.

iii

 

 

 

III.

IV.

RI

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

Page
TILLYSIAATIONS ARV-D ABBIUMI‘ITIONS e e e e e e e e e e e e e Vi
DTmDUCTION O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 0 O O 1
Chapter
I. CONDITIONS AND CONSTRAINTS: WOMEN AND
FIDEINISTS UNDER TIE SYSTEIE MASCULINISTE . . . 9
II. CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTRADICTIONS: ROOTS, ROUTES,
AND ALTERNATIVES OF FEMINIST AII’AIUENESS . . . . 57
III. CRISIS AND COOPERATION: MARIA DERAISMES, LEON
RICIIER, TUE STIL’ITEGY OF _L_A_ BIU'SCRE, AND
TRECONGRESSOF1878............. 122
IV. CONITICT: IIURERTINE AUCLERT AND THE
STRATEGYOFyASSAUT............. 182
v. COUNTERATTACK: THE LIGUE FRANCAISE POUR LE
DROIT DES FIDDIES AND THE CONGRESS OF 1889 . . . 272
VI 0 CONCLUSION O O O O O O O O O O O O 0 O O O O O O 322
Appendix
A. PROGRAM OF THE JOURNAL L'AVEN'IR DES FEIMES
OF 1876 O O O I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 0 355
B. PROGRAM OF TUE SOCIETE POUR L'AME'LIORATION
DUSORTDEMMDEOF1887 358

C. LISTE GENERALE DE MEMBERS DE LA SOCIETE POUR
L'Am-ILIORATION DU SORT DE LA FEMME ET LA REVENDICATION
DE SES DROITS EN 1894 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359

D. LISTE ALPHABETIQUE DES MEMBRES DU CONGRES 0F
1878 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 362

E. PROGRAM OF mmERTINE AUCLERP'S LE SOCIETE LE
DROITDESFIDOEIS............... 368

F. ROSTER OF AUCLERT'S FOLLOWERS IN THE LATE
1870's AND 1880.8 O O O O O O 0 0 O O O O O O O 369

iv

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G. PRINCIPLES AND PROGRAM OF RICIER'S LIGUE

FRANCAISE POUR LE DROIT DES WIPES . . . . . . . 372
II. ROSTER OF TIE LIGW FRANCAISE POUR LE DROIT
DES FEMIES FOR 1882-1883 . . . . . . . . . . . . 3711
I. TESTER OF TIE LIGUE FRANCAISE POUR LE DROIT
DES mnm :FOR 1892 O O O O C C C O O O O O O O O 379
J. ROSTER OF TIE 1889 CONGIES FRANCAIS ET
INTERNATIONAL DU DROIT DES FEMIES . . . . . . . . 382
BIBLIOGWIY O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 387

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TRANSLATIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from sources cited
in French are those of the author. Quotations from works by foreign
authors who wrote in English or who had their works translated into
English have been taken from and can be identified by the language of
the title cited in the notes.

After first mention, the names of French feminist groups generally
appear in shortened form, e.g., l'Amélioration for 1a Société pour
l'Amélioration du Sort de la Femme et la Revendication de ses Droits.
Three repositories are regularly cited in the notes by their initials:

AN for Paris' Archives Nationales, END for Paris' Bibliothéque

Marguerite Durand, and EN for Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale.

vi

INTRODUCTION

North of Paris stands a monument that unwittingly represents the
historic subordination of women in France. The Cathedral of Saint Denis
towers above a working class suburb, its twelfth-century Gothic facade
casting an awkward shadow over a neighborhood that no longer toils in
the name of God. Within the Cathedral, whose innovative design signalled
a remarkable advance in uniting height and light, shadows of a different
kind linger. Scattered about the interior are the tombs of French kings
and queens, princes and princesses, who for over a thousand years (be-
ginning in the seventh century) consigned their mortal remains to Saint
Denis. Today the tombs are empty; revolutionaries destroyed their royal
contents during the Reign of Terror. But the sarcophagi remain, mute
witnesses to the violence and limitations of a bygone age and an atti-
tude as old as man himself. Etched into the stone coffin covers of
former kings and princes sit lions, designating courage, power, and domi-
nance. At the feet of queens and princesses lie dogs, symbolic of
loyalty, humility, and obedience. Thus, in desecrating the bones of
tyrants while leaving the sarcophagi largely intact, the New Order joined
hands with the 01d in sanctioning one of humankind's oldest injustices,
the oppression of women by men.

The roots of this oppression burrow deep into time, and there is
no reason to believe that the revolutionaries who violated the tombs of

Saint Denis consciously confined their iconoclasm to mortal remains in

 

2

order to preserve the stony symbols of injustice. Nonetheless, that is
exactly what happened. Theirs was a small act in a larger drama that
over the centuries has improved the lot of all human beings while simul-
taneously increasing sexual discrimination. Their selective desecration
contributed almost imperceptibly to the trend described in 1971 by
Evelyne Sullerot: "As civilization asserts and refines itself, the gap
between the relative status of men and women widens."l At the turn of
the century, a German feminist observed that “the European woman's
rights movement was born in France; it is the child of the Revolution of
1789."2 But if so it took nearly a hundred years for the child to mature
in the land of its birth, and in many respects the struggle of French
feminists involved a direct assault on the work of the Great Revolution.
"The fourteenth of July is not a national celebration," declared a
French suffragist in 1882, "it is the apotheosis of masculinity."3

The realization that men had benefited far more than women from
the Revolution was not new in 1882. Throughout the intervening century,
individuals had protested against the accentuation of woman's subordina-
tion and on at least two occasions, at the time of the Revolution itself
and again during the upheaval of 1848, these protests assumed collective
form. But despite the protests, the status gap continued to widen until
by midpcentury'more men had more rights, while women had relatively

fewer. Since that time, and although the overall gap has tended to per-

sist, the worst of the nineteenth century's legislative abuses have

LEvelyne Sullerot womanI Societf, and Chggge, trans. by
Margaret Scotford Archer (New'York, 1971 , 19.

2Kaethe Schirmacher, The Modern woman's Ri hts Movement, trans.
by Conrad Eckhardt (2nd ed.; New York, 1912), 175.

3Hubertine Auclert, La Cito enne, 2 July - 6 August 1882.

 

 

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iiiiiii

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disappeared. In other words, although French women still face a wide
variety of discriminatory attitudes and practices, many of the legal
barriers to civil and political equality have fallen. HOw this came
about is a comprehensive question involving many factors and many years,
and, as such, it exceeds the scope of this inquiry. The objective of
this study is to examine just one factor in this development, the
establishment of the feminist movement under the Third French Republic.

Feminism can be conceptualized as the struggle in theory and
practice for the right of women to control their own lives. In the
course of this struggle, the feminist movement has fought on two fronts:
against constraints which limited women's options and for conditions
conducive to women's liberation. Feminism entails, in other words, the
effort to obtain both "freedom from" and "freedom to." Only recently
has feminism begun to stress the positive "freedom to" side of the
struggle. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feminism
emphasized the negative. It focused primarily on eliminating the
constraints that prevented women from controlling their own lives.

However, the problem that confronted nineteenth-century French
feminists was not how to define themselves in a broad sense. {All
feminists agreed that they represented the half of humanity that had
from time immemorial struggled against male domination. Instead the
problem concerned (a) how to define themselves in relationship to the
conditions then prevailing in France and (b) how to translate that
definition into reality. On both counts, French feminists found them—
selves divided. Some feminists emphasized simple equality. "The word
Faminism," wrote Hubertine Anclert, "synthesizes the efforts to acquire
for wmmen the rights that men possess"; while to Madame Vincent it

meant simply a "doctrine or theory that puts woman on an equal footing

 

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with.man.” Others envisaged a loftier goal. Feminism."in a word is
'Humanisme integral',' thought Leopold Lacour. Its mission involved
equal rights for women but sought a transcendent ideal. "Feminism, the
effort by an elite of humanity for more harmony and more justice, should
disappear for the well-being of society the day when its efforts will
have succeeded," explained Avril de Saint-Croix: "Feminism, like
masculinism, should then give way to 'integral humanismf."&

Neither definition made much difference during the middle years
of the nineteenth century. Regardless of whether equal rights for women
constituted an end in themselves or stepping stones to a broader social
transformation, no feminist could avoid the glaring contrast between the
privileged status of males and the narrowed sphere accorded to females.
IMen.dominated French society legally, politically, economically, and
ideologically; and so long as their domination endured feminists could
see no hope for improving woman's lot. Thus, despite variances in
definitional emphasis, the general objective of feminists remained the
same: to alter the conditions and to destroy the constraints that
enabled men to hold women in bondage. Theirs was a simple belief, based
on.the premise that sex oppression represented the root cause of social
injustice. Not so simple was the refer-motion of a society that accepted
such injustice as part of the natural order of things.

.A long debate over women preceded the French Revolution and
drew'increasing attention to the issue of sex oppression. From.the
vantage point of feminists, however, the debate's net effect was negative.

As they saw it, the status of women failed to improve in 1789, and, as a

 

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result of the emergency measures of the Terror and Napoleon's influence
on French laws, they found themselves worse off than before. .A half
century later, feminists again organized in opposition to sex oppres-
sion, but the Revolution of 1848 proved no more receptive to their
demands than that of 1789. On each occasion the social disturbances
that permitted women to band together in pursuit of their rights also
gave opponents the chance to reaffirm male supremacy. The Republic of
1848 gave way to the Second Empire, just as the Republic of 1792 suc-
cumbed to the First, and both times organized French feminism died in
the transition.

Nevertheless, the Second Empire represents a watershed for French
feminism. During its authoritarian phase in the 1850's, the regime of
Louis Napoleon crushed the movement, but a feminist revival commenced in
the late 1860's. Louis displayed a personal interest in woman’s plight,
in marked contrast to his great uncle's attitude, and attempted to alle-
viate discrimination, particularly in education. But he could not, or
at least did not, move rapidly enough to satisfy feminist demands. Con-
sequently, the most favorable regime to women's rights in three genera—
tions found itself cast in the role of villain. Feminists refused to
overlook the misogynist implications of the Bonaparte name or to ignore
the protests of exiled sympathizers like Victor Hugo and Jeanne Deroin.
Rather than rally to the Empire, feminists joined forces with the anti-
imperial coalition that hoped to overthrow Louis and reestablish re-
publican rule in France.

Feminists derived four distinct advantages from participating
in the republican coalition under the Second Empire. At a theoretical

level, the vision of a republic appealed to them because it portended

 

 

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a democratic society without privileged classes, based on the will of
all the people and open to peaceful refomm. At a pragmatic level, their
participation in the coalition permitted them to call on the support of
new allies and to employ republican forums to further feminist propaganda.
Psychologically they gained a sorely-needed measure of legitimacy and
respectability. Finally, in aligning themselves with republicanism
under the Empire, feminists found themselves within the camp that would
soon rule France.

The Second Empire collapsed during the disastrous Franco-Prussian
Far, from which the Third Republic emerged on 4 September 1870. But, far
from being the promised land imagined by feminists, the new republic ex-
posed strains in the victorious coalition. So long as "tyranny" had
reigned in the person of the Emperor, the need to present a common front
had obscured differences of opinion. With success, however, the dual
problem of defining and defending the republic came to the fore. Femi-
nists quite naturally expected to participate fully in the new political
order. As a group they had helped to achieve the victory, and as indivi-
duals their faith in republicanism rivaled their belief in feminism.

But as the Third Republic acquired increasing stability, faith in the one
and belief in the other left feminists in a quandary.

In retrospect the broad outlines of the quandary are easy to see.
Feminists fought for the republic because they believed it would inau-
gurate an era of social justice. Once secured, however, the republic
responded with great reluctance to feminist demands. Its two major con-
cessions, expansion of educational opportunities and legalized divorce,
stemed more from a desire to mold young people into good republican

citizens and to strike a blow at Church influence than from a willing-

 

 

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7
ness to alleviate sex discrimination. Yet, compared to alternatives
advanced by monarchists, clericals, and Bonapartists, the republic at
least enacted some reforms and kept alive the hope that women would one
day enjoy the fruits of democracy. If the republic collapsed, feminists
felt, authoritarianism and masculinism would once again combine, ending
all prospect of reform. Hence, the quandary for feminists hinged on
where to draw the line between criticism and defense of the new republic.

At first, in the wake of defeat by the Prussians in 1870, the
disruption of the Paris Commune of 1871, and the possibility of a suc-
cessful monarchist resurgence, the republic's precarious position tilted
feminists in favor of defense. But after the ggig£_m§i crisis of 1877,
which revealed the strength of republican sentiment, the balance began
slowly to shift. Feminists held their first congress the following year
and urged the republic to eliminate discrimination against women in edu-
cation, employment, and civil rights. The young movement split, how-
ever, when the congress refused to discuss woman suffrage on the grounds
that a call for political equality would alienate potential sympathizers
and, if enacted, would jeopardize the republic by delivering countless
female votes into the hands of monarchists and clericals.

As the 1880's unfolded the rift widened and partially immobi-
lized the movement. The minority of feminists, who saw political rights
as the key to woman's emancipation, adopted the strategy of’lfassaut
espoused by Hubertine Auclert through her group, the Société pour le
Suffrage des Femmes (founded in 1876 as the Société'pour les Droits des
Femmes) and her newspaper, La Citoyenne (1881-1891). The majority

favored the strategy of‘12.breche, which accorded priority to acquiring

civil rights for women, and looked to Maria Deraismes and Leon Richer

 

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8

for leadership. Deraismes and Richer had brought about the feminist-
republican coalition under the Second Empire, and together they had co-
sponsored the 1878 Women's Rights Congress. They drifted apart somewhat
during the next decade as Deraismes tried to straddle the suffrage issue,
while Richer combatted it through his Ligue Francaise pour 1e Droit des
Femmes (founded in 1882) and his journal, Le Droit des Femmes (1869-1891).
But cooperation between them never entirely ceased, and in 1889, during
the centennial celebration of the Revolution, Deraismes and Richer co—
hosted the Second French Congress for WOmen's Rights.

The 1889 Congress marked a turning point in the development of
French feminism. Auclert's absence, together with skillful managing by
Deraismes and Richer, guaranteed that the issue of woman suffrage would
not mar the proceedings; and not until 1908 did a French feminist con-
gress officially place the issue on its agenda. However, the victory of
one feminist strategy over another did not mark the significance of the
Congress, for, despite its adherence to the hgéghg line, the 1889 Con-
gress failed to achieve either organizational or programmatic unity.
Instead, its significance lay in the emergence after years of struggle
of an ongoing movement. Feminists would no longer have to start anew as
they had after 1789 and 18h8. For the first time, a second generation
of French feminists could build directly on the consciousness and

dynamic of its immediate predecessor.

 

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CHAPTER I
CONDITIONS AND CONSTRAINTS: WOMEN AND

FDiINISTS UNDER THE SYSTH'IE MASCULINISTE

From the vantage point of feminists, the condition of French
women during the second half of the nineteenth century was bleak. A
complex array of legal, ideological, and socio—economic factors held
women in a state of distinct inferiority. Taken together these fac-
tors constituted the systéme masculiniste. women found themselves
completely excluded from many areas of French life, such as politics,
higher education, and the professions. Where exclusion could not or
did not operate, as in the home and in some branches of industry,
women found themselves in a subordinate position, subject to the con-
trol of men. Individual and class differences affected the way in
which women reacted to their condition. But for feminists the
differences in discrimination meant little. In their eyes, all women
suffered to a greater or lesser extent. "woman is neither free nor
happy in France," exclaimed Olympe Audouard in the course of de-

claring a "war on Men" in 1866.1

The Code
The principal constraint on which the systéme masculiniste

rested was the Code Napoleon. Officially promulgated in 1804, the

 

lOlympe Audouard, Guerre aux hommes (Paris, 1866). 57.

9

 

 

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10

Code locked women into a "paper Bastille" of legal restrictions.2
Legend holds that in a museum somewhere is one of Napoleon's chairs,
marred by rips and gashes. The story goes that the Emperor disfigured
it in a rage when faced with critics who felt the Code treated women
too harshly.3 Whatever the truth of the story, the Code certainly re—
flected Napoleon's low opinion of women. Female greatness, he asserted
in a famous tilt with Madame de Steel, had only one dimension, fecundity.
The idea that "genius has no sex" is absurd, he added; nothing is "more
detestable than the woman who thinks.”h The Code also reflected
Napoleon‘s imperial approach to the organization of society. Every in-
stitution required a leader of unquestioned authority. He had provided
that for France as a whole; new men, as husbands and fathers, would
provide that for the family. woman belongs to man, Napoleon maintained,
as the tree and its fruit belong to the gardener.5

Thus, under the Code the family emerged as a miniature empire.

In return for protection, the wife owed obedience to her husband. She

 

2La Cito enne, 2 July - 6 August 1882.

3Winifred Stephens, women of the French Revolution (New York,
1922), 166.
hFrancis I. Clark, The Position of women in Contemporary
France (London, 1937), iii.

5 Francoise Guelaud-Leridon, Recherche sur la condition
feminine dans la société d'au'ourd'hui (Paris, 1967), 93. "What we
ask of education," Napoleon wrote, "is not that girls should think,
but that they should believe.” Gordon wright, France in Modern
Times (Chicago, 1960), 90.

6For information on the Code and feminist reaction to it, see:
ELM.J. wattel, ed., Code Napoleon (Amsterdam, 23,1888); women's Posi-
tion in the Laws of the Nations, prepared by the International COuncil
of women (Karlsruhe, 1912). 97-126; Leon Richer, Le Code des Femmes
(Paris, 1883); Maria verone, La Femme et la_lgi (Paris, 1920 ;

 

 

 

 

 

_.-——~'-— —_

h.“

could not ha" '
g university Fit-1'
proper“: and wit
mange, nor 1131
and whatever she
he lived she had
tent, rezardless
nniaze, birth,
consent to leave
father’s consent
1 father could i:
the Iot'ner'a pem
“”5 Party in ca.
A wife's 1
t“ Years or more.
“Triage bed, Willi
2,930 (men. .11:

and he could file
\

PM Sat-'71“, La Le.-
(Paris, 189577?
N." ”I." the Cm}
931. cim prom
mon derived {n
or tradition end
com“ 8' ”1d cor

11.10:: for Vomc

11
could not have a separate residence, obtain a hunting license, or attend
a university without his consent. He had total control over community
property, and without his permission she could neither give, sell,
mortgage, nor buy. A wife could not work if her husband forbade it,
and whatever she earned in wages or royalties belonged to him. While
he lived she had no legal authority over her children and was incompe-
tent, regardless of her marital status, to witness certificates of
marriage, birth, and death. Children under twenty-one needed parental
consent to leave home or to marry, but if the parents disagreed the
father's consent alone sufficed. Upon a simple request to the courts,
a father could imprison his children for various lengths of time without
the mother's permission.7 A father could also assign guardianship to a
third party in the event that he predeceased his wife.

A wife's adultery could bring imprisonment of three months to
two years or more; a husband's went unpunished unless he defiled the
marriage bed, which, even then, would cost him only a fine of 100 to
2,000 francs. {All children born in wedlock belonged to the husband,

and he could file a paternity suit if necessary, but no illegitimate

 

Ph. Sagnac, La Legislation civile de la Revolution Frangaise l789-l80k
(Paris, 1898). The Code, referred to above in the singular, included
not only the Civil Code of 180% but four other codes (penal, commer-
cial, civil procedure, and criminal procedure). France's legal tra-
dition derived from Roman law, whereas England subscribed to a common
law tradition and the united States developed a system based on both
common law and constitutional law. The significance of this separate
tradition for women in France stemmed from the Roman emphasis on pri-
vate law. "French law was, accordingly, more apt to intervene in
relations within the family than English law." Ross Evans Paulson,

women's Suffrage and Prohibition: A Com arative Stud of 1 ualit
and Social Control (Glenview, Illinois, 1973), Q3.
7Fathers could imprison offspring for one month if under

sixteen, six months if between sixteen and twentybone. Illegitimate
children had no inheritance rights whatsoever. "Society has no in—

 

 

 

 

child or W“ 3‘
Pm] Code sancti
cm“ in {13:73:
mm; instant F3
theirs. 1n S9303
persons occordin.
voaen.

In depict
questioned autlm
established the l
tnd ministratit
in the course of
read in Man's 1
against her. The
“F, as did the d
W)“. for example
“thorny Confer]
nail 'to seek Lb.

lapses to the 0b]

12
child or unwed mother could file a paternity suit. Article 324 of the
Penal Code sanctioned acquittal for husbands who killed their wives
caught in flagrant'gélit. Foreign women who married Frenchmen ac-
quired instant French citizenship; French women who wed aliens lost
theirs. In general, announced Article 1124 of the Civil Code, unfit
persons according to the law were minors, ex-convicts, and married
women.

In depicting married women as unfit while attributing un-
questioned authority to husbands and men in general, the Code also
established the legal and "spiritual" premises for a series of judicial
and administrative decisions that further narrowed the rights of women
in the course of the nineteenth century. Unless the statutes clearly
read in woman's favor, administrators and judges invariably ruled
against her. The denial of political rights to women came about in this
way, as did the denial of other rights. Married women lost postal pri-
vacy, for example, when the courts ruled that in light of "the domestic
authority conferred upon him by law" a husband could open his spouse's
mail "to seek the proof of an offense against his honor or some grave
lapses to the obligations of marriage of which his wife might be guilty."8
Roman lost the right to hunt in 1883 when a Corsican appeals court up-
held the conviction of a widow, who, in taking up the sport on her
doctor's advice, had violated a decree to the contrary by a local mayor.
The widow in question drew a fine of sixteen francs and had her gun

9

confiscated.

 

terest in having these bastards recognized," Napolébn exclaimed.
Robert B. Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution (New York, 1967), 90-1.

8Sanche de Gramont, The French: Portrait of a People (New
York, 1969). «00.

9La Cito enne, 7 January - h February, 5 March - 1 April 1883.

 

 

Single '0“
the 00399 hm in t‘
sale 'protection.‘
15611, therefore a:
could lake use of
offspring. {hit be
the right to mate
es well under tie
the right to be d

In only 0
a locus of :1th}.
timletion to 315
convenient labels
developed in °PP<

is e lega1 Vitae

Dose of her in“)

F.

1)

Single women, divorcees, and widows fared somewhat better under
the Code, but in turn they had to confront a hostile society without
male "protection." Divorce, available from 1792 to 1816 and again after
188%, therefore amounted to a mixed blessing. women without husbands
could make use of the provisions guaranteeing equal inheritance for
offspring. But beyond this the Code did not go. Women enjoyed neither
the right to vote nor the right to hold office, which most males lacked
as well under the Empire, but men at least had received compensation -
the right to be domestic tyrants.

In only one respect did the Code prove beneficial to women - as
a focus of attack for subsequent French feminists. By giving legal arb
ticulation to misogynist customs, it provided clear-cut objectives and
convenient labels for reformers. Numerous campaigns, for example,
developed in opposition to Article 340, which prohibited paternity suits,
and one feminist group, Jeanne Schmahl's l'Avant Courriére (1893-1907),
spent over a decade in pursuit of just two goals, woman's right to serve
as a legal witness of public and private acts andawife's right to dis-
pose of her income without her hmband's authorization.10 But nearly a
century had elapsed by then, and Schmahl could work through a movement
that had already acquired a generation of experience. The feminists

who built that movement were not so fortunate.

The Church
The Roman Catholic Church constituted a second constraint in
the systems masculiniste. Centuries, as well as opposing views on

matters spiritual and temporal, separated Napoleon from Saint Paul.

 

10France enacted a law permitting paternity suits in 1912.
For an interesting article on l'Avant Courriere and its relationship

 

 

 

m on at least |
and their ideolo
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ideology and in

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1k
Yet on at least one issue the two men transcended the intervening years
and their ideological differences. Both agreed that order required
woman's subordination to man. "The husband is the head of the wife,”
wrote Paul, "even as Christ is the head of the Church."11 In feminist
eyes, the Church represented a powerful influence that, in its structure,
ideology, and institutional role, fostered the subordination of women.

The structure of the Church appalled nineteenth-century
feminists on two counts. As a model for social organization the Church
not only resembled the anti-woman regimes of Napoleon I and his nephew,
but also, in its hierarchical and authoritarian aspects, the Church
represented the antithesis of what feminists considered to be the pre-
requisite for women's liberation: a democratic republic susceptible to
change from below. The second count involved the personnel of the
Church, which reserved its most influential posts to men while denying
to all of its officials what feminists and non-feminists alike con-
sidered to be one of woman's unique capabilities, procreation.

In ideology the Church abetted the systéme masculiniste by
relegating women to a subordinate position within a single institution,
the family. ”women belong to the family, and not to political society,"
wrote Louis de Bonald (1753-1840), a leading spokesman for traditional,
authoritarian Catholicism, "and nature has made them for domestic
cares, and not for public functions." To women fell "almost exclu-

sively” the task of raising children, he explained, which entailed

 

to other feminist groups in France, see Jeanne E. Schmahl, "Progress
of the women's Rights Movement in France," Forum, XXII (September,

1896). 79-92.
11Ephesians 5:23

 

'1
E
E
;
E .:

 

 

that 'all, in thei:
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towards public at:

. . . Look
sex that it ca
it destines to
frat. the most
ligions action.
ceremonies; 1'.
donestic works
principles, an
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Hosea possessed a
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Rising len, b
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Of their nisfo
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Sentiment .

learning the”: Ron.

15
that "all, in their education, ought to be directed towards domestic
utility, as all, in the education of young men, ought to be directed
towards public utility:”

. . . Look at nature, and admire how it distinguished the
sex that it calls to exercise public functions from that which
it destines to the cares of the family: it gives to the one,
from the most tender age, the taste for political and even re-
ligious action, the taste for horses, for arms, for religious
ceremonies; it gives to the other the taste for sedentary and
domestic works, for household cares, for dolls: these are the
princigles, and the best education system should develop
them.1

women possessed a unique nature, the negative aspects of which required
special handling:
The powerful recourse to emulation, so effective in
raising men, because it awakens in them the most generous
passions, ought to be employed with extreme care in the
education of women, among whom it may arouse vanity, gource
of their misfortunes, their faults, their ridicules.l
Intuition predominated in the "weaker sex," Bonald.maintained, and "we
should, in the education of young women, speak to their heart as much
as to their reason . . . because women have received in sentiment
their portion of reason."lh
Sentiment permitted women to know "so many things" without

learning them, Bonald added, but men must nonetheless retain un-

questioned authority within the family:

 

12Le Vicomte Louis de Bonald, Legislation primitive (hth ed.,
Paris, 18h7), Alt-l7. In this work, originally published in 1802,
Bonald referred to women as ”personneslgg sexe.” But during the
Restoration, "the expression'lg sexe, so in vogue thirty years earlier,
disappeared.“ IEvelyne Sullerot, Histoire de la Presse feminine en

France, des origines a l8h8 (Paris, 1963;, 3. Hereafter cited as

Sullerot, Presse.
13Ibid.

1E‘Ibid.

 

 

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16

The paternal power is independent from other members
of the family; because, if it were dependent, it would not
be pgwer. It is therefore absolute or definitive; because,
if it were not, it would be de endent, and there would be
a power greater than it, that of disobedience.

In short, nature had destined women to play the role of subordinate
intemmediaries:
The mother, placed by nature between the father and
the children, between the power and the sub'ect, and by
the means or the ministgx through which is accomplished
productive and preservative action, the mother receives
from the one in order to transmit to the other, obeys
the former in order to have authority over the latter. . .
Thus, if she partakes of man through reason, she partakes
of the child, as all physiologists have observed, through
the delicateness of her organs, the sensitivity of her
nerves, the changeablenesz of her moods, and we could
call her a homme-enfant.1
In addition to the general effect of its ministry on the atti-
tudes of male and female parishioners, the Church played an institutional
role that touched women in a number of ways. It consistently opposed
divorce, for example, which was unavailable in France from 1816 to
188h.17 In education it exercised a powerful influence, and, as a re-

sult of the Falloux Law of 1850, acquired a near monopoly of girls'

schools.18 Within the economy, where women constituted one-third

 

15Vicomte Louis de Bonald, Demonstration philosophique du
principle constitutif de la société_(Paris, 1830), 102.

16Ibid., 103-h.

17In his Syllabus of Errors (1864), Pius IX specifically con-
demned divorce as one "of the principal errors of our time.” It was
wrong to believe, Pius maintained in error #679 that "by the law of
nature, the marriage tie is not indissoluble, and in many cases di-
vorce properly so called may be decreed by the civil authority.”

Anne Fremantle, ed., The Pa al Enc clicals in Their Historical
Context (New York, 1955,, 1&3-50.

18The 1850 education reform bore especially hard on women.
”It provided that nuns could teach without obtaining the certifi-
cate of capacity which was obligatory for lay teachers. The
congregations' schools were thereby given an enormous competitive

 

 

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17
of the labor force, the Church, through its convent workshops, under-
cut wages, provided supervisors for "sweated labor," and, on at least

19

one occasion, permitted nuns to break a strike of women workers.

The Economy

Economic conditions and practices formed a third constraint
in the systéme masculiniste.20 Although most French women did not hold
jobs, women nevertheless comprised more than a third of the non-agri-
cultural work force in France during the second half of the nineteenth
century. ‘Most feminists, however, considered the distinction between
working and non-working women to be a factor of secondary importance.21
Vbrking women confronted discrimination on a vast scale, in employment
opportunities, in pay rates, in work conditions, etc. But those who did

not have to work found themselves in a state of dependence, unable to

 

advantage over the secular schools and quickly outnumbered them."
Persis Hunt, "Feminism and Anti-Clericalism under the Commune," The
Massachusetts Review, x11 (Summer, 1971), 419.

l91n 1869 the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul sent a hundred
women to replace strikers at Paris' Magasins du Louvre. Ibid., 420.

20Unless otherwise noted, the data in this section are drawn
from: Erelyne Sullerot, fligtoire et sociologie du travail feminin
(Paris, 1968); Jean Daric, L‘Activite professionelle des femmes en
France (Paris, 1947); and Madeleine Guilbert, Les Femmes et l'organi-
gationgsyndicale avant 1914 (Paris, 1966). See also: Kaethe Schirmacher,
[Lg Travail des Femmes en France (Paris, 1902); Alva Myrdal and
Viola Klein, WOmen's Two Roles: Home and work (London, 1956); Michel de
Juglart, ”L'Emancipation juridique de la femme en France et dans le
monde," Histoire mondiale de la femme: sociétés modernes et contem-
poraines, published under the direction of Pierre Grimal (Paris, 1965),
295-346; and Clark, The Position of women in Contemporary France.

21For an elaboration of this point of view, see Hubertine
Auclert's articles in La Citoyenne, of 24 July 1881, 50 July 1881,
May 1885. "With only minor variations, every census since 1906 showed
women as forming roughly one-third of the working population (36.6 per

cent in 1906, 33.7 per cent in 1926, 54.8 er cent in 1946) . . . .
The structure and composition of this fema e labour force in France has,

 

 

All;

-._—._I '

 

......

came by thei
children. So:
to the swarm-u.
In rat.
oozen angled
9" of the fix
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and ma‘afiriCu
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1936, for 913.:
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‘96 bracket.
Barried in t1“
the uj°rity (
opportunities

Republic. Be:

411d Expmion

we 1111:er of

18
ensure by their own efforts the welfare of either themselves or their
children. Some women who needed employment but could not find it turned
to the systéme's most exploitative occupation, prostitution.

In raw numbers, excluding agricultural occupations, working
women totaled over 2.7 million in 1866 and approached 4.5 million on the
eve of the First world War. The size of the female agricultural work
force expanded at approximately the same rate, growing from slightly
over 1.8 million in 1866 to more than 3.2 million in 1911. As a percen-
tage of the entire female population, which exceeded the male total
throughout the life of the Third Republic, women workers, agricultural
and non-agricultural alike, amounted to slightly less than 25% in 1866
and nearly 40% in 1911.

Among women workers the young and the single predominated. In
1906, for example, over 43% of the women aged 18 and 19 held non-agri-
cultural jobs, as did more than one-third of the women in the 20 to 39
age bracket. Only 20% of the non-agricultural female work force was
married in that year. Domestic service, clothing, and textiles attracted
the majority of women workers, but a significant shift in occupational
opportunities occurred during the first two generations of the Third
Republic. Better education for women, restrictive labor legislation,
and expansion of the tertiary sector brought about a marked increase in
the number of women clerks and secretaries and a marked decrease in the

number of female domestics.22

 

of course, changed in these decades, but its total strength in relation
to the male working population has remained more or less constant.”
Myrdal and Klein, Women's Two Roles, 46.

22The number of women in domestic service declined from
1,050,735 in 1866 to 781,200 in 1906. The number of women employed
by banks and commercial establishments rose from 238,000 in 1866 to

 

 

: cal-t

 

.1. u-.

Severt
tance of the f
confronted a c
rose throughou
less than thei
progress, for
1531-3 women's
Seine and 2.113
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who “filed 0111;

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771,930 in 19 H
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hacked ‘ Prof:
has at: Var:

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the c ‘02:)!

m.
Off,“ 1 ._ an,

19

Nevertheless, despite the size and, by implication, the impor-
tance of the female work force to the French economy, women workers
confronted a complex array of discriminatory factors. Industrial wages
rose throughout the century for both sexes, but most women received far
less than their male counterparts. After several decades of relative
progress, for example, a study by the Office du Travail revealed that in
1891-3 women's pay averaged 3 francs per day in the Department of the
Seine and 2.10 in the rest of the country, compared to 6.15 and 3.90
respectively formen.23 These figures did not include female "cottage"
workers, who numbered nearly a million at the turn of the century and

who earned only five to twenty centimes per hour.

 

771,000 in 1906. Guibert, Les Femmes et l'organization syndicale
avant 1214, 14. Wider utilization of women as secretaries also re-
flected a profound shift in attitudes towards woman's place in the
work force. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Alexandre
Dumas pére warned that woman "would lose all her femininity by
stepping foot into an office." Sullerot, Histoire et sociolo ie,
119. Males monopolized that position throughout the first half of
the nineteenth century, which explains the anecdote about

Madame de Persigny, a promiscuous representative of the Second
Empire's titled elite. While her husband served as ambassador to
England, Madame de Persigny's taste for embassy clerks led the
amused to ask: "Mme de Persigny is lost; it is impossible to find
her." "well, have you looked carefully under all the furniture?
The tables, buffets, and secretaries?" Roger L. Williams,‘Ihg

world of Namleon III (New York, 1957), 29.

23women earned excellent pay in only one job category,
the cutting and polishing of precious stones, according to the
Office du Travail survey for 1891-3. In this field, both sexes
received 9.25 francs per day in the Department of the Seine,
while outside the Seine women outearned over 5.15 francs per
day to 4.65. None of the other jobs held by women paid nearly
as well. Guilbert, Les Femmes et 1'organisation syndicale

avant 1214, 18.

ooooo

 

 

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who: were no‘
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to Silon, onc
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Winted out t3
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20

The effect of such low wages on working women, eighty percent of
whom were not married, had been documented some years before. In his
L'Ouvriere (1861) Jules Simon calculated that, barring sickness and um!
employment, a woman could earn about 500 francs per year. But according
to Simon, once rent, fuel, clothing, and other essentials had been taken
care of, a woman would have only 60 centimes per day for food - "enough
not to die of hunger.'2h Female wage rates at the time ranged from 1.30
francs a day in the provinces to 2.10 in Paris, while in the one pro-
fession then open to women, teaching, more than 4,000 schoolmistresses
earned under 400 francs per year. Five year later, Julie Daubié
pointed out the link between subsistence wages and prostitution in her
La Femme pauvre au XIXe siécle:

The inadequate pay of the urban working-woman sometimes
drives her, even during a period of industrial prosperity,
into meeting her budget by selling her body; this is called
the fifth quarter of the day. During periods of unemployment,
this kind of right to work fills the entire day . . . .
Generally the poverty of women is such that among 6,000

rostituteé7 registered in Paris, only 2,000 had any re-
sources. One woman can be mentioned who struggled three days
against the tortures of hunger, before giving in.2

In addition to low pay, hours were long, twelve to fifteen per
day in.most cases, and industrial conditions miserable. Seasonal work
rivaled the business cycle as a cause of unemployment. Seamstresses
labored fourteen hours per day, for example, but only from March to
Mhy'and from.September to January. Competition from.convent work-

shops depressed wages for women in general, and the single girls who

 

2hJu1es Simon, L'Ouvriére (Paris, 1861), cited in.Edith

Thomas, The Woman Incendiaries, trans. by James and Starr Atkinson
(New'York, 1 , .

25Ju1ie Daubié, La Femme pauvre an XIXe sidcle (Paris, 1866),
Ibid., 3.

IUA

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21
worked in them, subject to the rule of silence and unable to leave the
premises unless accompanied by a nun, seldom made more than.150 francs
per year. Factory laws, which most feminists opposed in principle,
proved inadequate to "protect" women because they were difficult to en-
force and, when enforced, they restricted women's employment oppor-
tunities and earnings.26 working women also derived little benefit
from two of the Third Republic's major reforms in the 1880's, education
and unionization. Inadequacy replaced unavailability in women's educa-
tion in that decade, but, except for a possible correlation between
fundamental language skills and secretarial work, the public girls'
schools paid scant attention to job or career training. Trade unions
won legal recognition in 1884, but, for a variety of reasons, women
workers remained largely outside the movement. In 1900, for instance,
wumen accounted for only 6.3% of union.membership even though they

represented 3h.5$ of the work force.

 

26The Factory Law of 22 March 181.1 covered only children with-

out distinction as to sex. The law of 2 March 1848, which also made
no sex distinctions, limited the work day to 12 hours in mines and
factories, but it died with the provisional government that enacted
it. The law of 19 May 1878 forbade night work to women under 21 and to
men under 16; it also forbade all underground work to women. The law
of 2 November 1892 prohibited women, irrespective of age, to work at
night and limited their work day to eleven hours. It also required a
weekly day of rest for women workers and provided for better super-
vision. But, as inspection reports indicate, enforcement proved ex-
tremely difficult and, moreover, the law itself penmitted a great
many exceptions to its provisions. Guilbert, Les Femmes et l'grgani-
gatign syndigale avant lglh, 23—h. For an o inion pro and can on the

law of November 1892 see: Ra rt du Comite de Resistance nr la
defense de la loi du 2 Nevembre 1822 Lyon, 189 and Yves Guyot,|£§
Reglementation officielle du travail :Paris, 1894). Feminists

opposed the 1892 law from the moment debate began, see the article

by Marya Chéliga—Loévy in Bulletin de l'Union Universelle des Femmes,
15 April 1890. The only piece of protective legislation that won
feminist endorsement was the "seat law" of 29 December 1900, which
required shop owners to provide chairs for female clerks. "Feminists,
adversaries of all special legislation in matters of work, have not,

 

 

 

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22

Reinforcing the miserable conditions confronted by female
workers was the pervasive belief that non-domestic labor represented
an illegitimate activity for women. This belief rested on three assump-
tions. First, as minors in the eyes of the law, women ought not to
exercise the male prerogative of choosing among various occupational
roles. Second, as creatures uniquely destined for family service, women
ought not to assume the male responsibility of making contact with the
world outside the home. Finally, as laborers, women ought not to hold
jobs because their presence in the work force depressed male wages and
contributed to male unemployment. Individuals from.various schools of
thought echoed one or another of these assumptions with.mind~affecting
regularity. Liberal republicans like the historian.Ju1es Hichelet
and the journalist Emile de Girardin, both of whom displayed great con.
corn for the plight of working women, sided with positivist August Comte
in asserting that woman's liberation depended on freeing her from labor
outside the home.27 Conservatives and Catholics followed the lead of
Albert dn Mun and Frederic Le Play who, in demanding factory laws to

protect women, subscribed to the ideal expressed in.Pope Leo XIII's

m Ngvagug (1891):
women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a
woman is by nature fitted for home work, and it is that which
is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote
the googabringing up of children and the well-being of the
£31111 IYe

 

so far as we know, protested against this concession, however
humiliating in their eyes for commercial employees." Schirmacher,
Travail des Femmes17351.

27For an interesting analysis of Comte and his views on
women, see Louise-Marie Ferré, Feminisme et Positivisme (Saint-
Le er-en-Yvelines, 1938).

28Fremantle, ed., The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical
Context, 186. The difficulty of establishing a nexus between the

 

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French working-c
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item boon

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23
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the chief mid-century spokesmen for the
French working-class male, propounded another version of this belief.
He proclaimed the congenital inferiority of women, calculating their
worth at 8/27's of men's, and considered women unfit for anything other
than reproduction. Society committed no injustice in discriminating
against women, Proudhon wrote:
Equality of civil and political rights would mean that the
privileges and grace that nature has bestowed on woman would
become bound up with.man's utilitarian faculties. The result
of this bargaining would be that woman, instead of being
elevated, would become denatured and debased . o . This would
mean the end of the institution28f marriage, the death of love,
and the ruin of the human race.
So long as disobedience marred woman's character, Proudhon added, man
should exercise the power of life and death over her. women who worked
deprived men of jobs and should therefore be considered as thieves.

Nature gave women only two options, Proudhon.maintained, "mépggere

gg,courtisane” -— housewife or whore.

Education

Discriminatory education represented a fourth and, for’most
femdnists, a decisive constraint in the systéme masculiniste. Since
the Middle Ages, individuals had complained about the unavailability
and inadequacy of girls' schools; but, as progress through better edu-
cation became a national myth in the post-revolutionary era, such com-

plaints assumed a.more frantic character. "Just as today the majority

 

ideal of woman and the actual conditions under which women lived and
worked is suggested by Sullerot, who pointed out that "prevailing
ideology is insufficient to explain differences in the rates of employb
ment that often run counter to the dominant social norms and reflect
economic or demographic pressures." Sullerot, woman, Society, and

£22122- 111-

29Stewart Edwards, ed., Selected writi s of Pierre-Jose h
Proudhon, trans. by Elizabeth Fraser (New York, 19695, 256.

 

 

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211

of the members of our society admit that economic growth is the essential
objective of the collectivity," wrote a French scholar in 1968, ”so in
the second half of the nineteenth century one believed in education.”30

Statistics reveal the significance of the problem at mid point
in the nineteenth century. Illiteracy affected approximately 40% to
kfifi of the adult population of France in 1851, with women exceeding the
men in this group by a ratio of 3 to 2. Two decades later, the overall
rate of illiteracy had dropped to 31%, but the sex ratio remained conp
stant. In 1872, for instance, nearly eighty percent of French bride-
grooms and military recruits could write their names, compared to sixty—
five percent of French brides. By the time of the Second French
Congress for woman's Rights in 1889, male illiteracy had fallen to nine
percent for bridegrooms and eleven percent for recruits, but illiterate
brides totaled fifteen percent. Only in the next decade did the
illiteracy ratio begin to vary in women's favor. It stood at 6 to 5
for brides and bridegrooms in 1900, and in 1901 illiterate women barely
outnumbered their male counterparts in the population as a whole, 15,9lh
to 15,269.31

This gradual but uneven improvement in literacy during the
course of the nineteenth century stemed in part from public policy.
Francois Guizot created a nationawide system.of primary schools for
boys in 1833, and in 1850 the Falloux Law extended the system to girls.

But neither reform made provision for training women teachers and, out

 

30Antoine Prost, Histoire de l'ensgignement en France 1800-
1262 (Paris, 1968), 191e

31Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy;and Development in the West
(Baltimore, 1969), 113-130.

 

 

 

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25

of deference to the parental prerogative, attendance remained
voluntary. As a result, many comunities refused to establish girls'
schools, and where they did come into existence, the Church exercised
a predominant influence. In the 1860's Louis Napole'on's Minister of
Education, Victor Duruy, attempted to expand as well as refom primary
education for both sexes, and to create a system of secondary schools
for girls. To offset popular fears, Duruy stipulated that only women
could teach needlework and that mothers who had doubts about the program
could accompany their daughters to class. He also attempted to eliminate
religious instruction from state schools, but that step, combined with
his challenge to the clergy's virtual monopoly of girls' education,
aroused the wrath of the Church. Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans condemned
the experiment as inmoral, and wanton Rom, the official papal
journal, threatened Louis Napole'on with the loss of Catholic electoral
support unless he dismissed Duruy. The finperor refused to bow to the
threat, and the Inpress retaliated by enrolling her two nieces in the
Sorbonne, but the scale of Duruy's reforms suffered.32 In 1877, the
French Ministry of Education reported that ”most lay schools have only
one class and employ only one person.”33

All that began to change two years later, and by the end of
the 1880's women had much wider access to education. A law in 1879
required every department to establish a normal school for women pri-
mary teachers. Teachers for these schools would receive their education

at a special normal school in Fontenay-aux-Roses, founded by decree in

 

32Williams, The world of Napgleon III, 173-208.

33Cipolla, Literac and Develo ent in the West, 36.

 

~41

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33

Pro.
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26

1880. Legislation creating a system of secondary schools for girls
passed in the same year, and in 1881 another law located a normal school
for wumen secondary instructors at 85vres. In the meantime, a bill
making primary education free for both sexes passed the Chamber and
Senate, and in 1882 elementary instruction became compulsory. Each of
these measuresreduced the role of the clergy in French education. State
scholarships assisted girls to attend secondary schools, which numbered
sixteenulz£§§§_and nineteen collages by 1886-7. Female teachers also
received the vote and eligibility for the Conseil Supérieure de
1'Instruction Publique, the chief policy making committee in the systems“

As women acquired greater access to education in the 1880's,
the problem of inadequacy came to the fore. Indeed, the growth in the
number of girls' schools accentuated other deficiencies long associated
with women's education in France. Among these deficiencies, failure
to grant equal degrees to women ranked as one of the most important.
Success through education in general, as well as access to higher
education in particular, required a baccalaureat. Julie Daubié, who
earned albgg,through the University of Lyons in the 1860's, opened the
examinations to women, and by 1881 there were eightybeight bacheliEres
in France.35 But, despite Danbie's precedent, the girls' secondary
schools that came into existence in the 1880's could award only an in-
ferior diploma £13 _f_i_._n d'e'tudes secondaires. Women remained eligible to
take the‘bgg examinations, but passage demanded a thorough knowledge

of Greek and Latin, two subjects that had no place in the curriculum of

 

3I‘l'lvelynnartha Acomb, The French Laic Laws 1879-1889
(New York, 1967), 153-82.

3DPI'ostLfluistoire de l'enseignement en France 1800-1967, 263.

 

 

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27
the new girls' schools. Not until 1924 did girls' schools offer the
same course of study and grant the same degrees as boys'.

Another deficiency stemmed from the failure to integrate the
new girls' schools into the preexisting system of higher education.
Even with the‘bgg, women found themselves excluded from most profes-
sional training at the university level. Blanket application of an
1802 decree stipulating that "no woman can be lodged or received in the
interior of‘ngégg and Colléges" had given way to a more liberal atti—
tude in the course of the nineteenth century, but access to specialized
programs remained difficult for women.36 Only in medicine, which Duruy
opened to women in 1868, had there occurred a breakthrough prior to the
founding of the Third Republic. Other breakthroughs occurred after
1870, but these brought women face to face with yet another obstacle,
the resistance of the various all-male professional associations. A
long struggle over internships ensued after Duruy permitted women to
attend medical school, for example, and in law, which become available
to women at the university level in 188h, the male-dominated bar re-
fused to admit women until 1900.37

The apparent contradiction between the significant expansion
of education for French women in the second half of the nineteenth
century and its general inadequacy reflected the interplay of social-
sexual stereotypes and political exigencies. The stereotypes that

infused the educational system emphasized woman's special nature and

 

' 36Francoise d'Eaubonne, Eistoire et actualité'du féhinisme
(Paris, 1971), 108.

37Clark, The Position of WOmen in Contemporary France,
54-5-

 

 

 

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special destin
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28
special destiny. A school inspector at Bordeaux, for instance linked
the two in his 1870 report:

In the girls' schools as well as the boys', the education
offers all the guarantees of morality which famdlies could de-
sire. The schools are run by teachers, both nuns and layh
women, who bring to their task, from the standpoint of moral
education the most attentive care. Both nuns and laity re-
ceive with deference and docility the instructions which are
given them by the administration. As I always say, devotion
and a sense of duty, generally stronger in persons of this
sex, help to compensate for their weakness in other
respects 0 e e

A report for Paris in the same year reiterated the special nature theme:
The women teachers, both lay and religious render perhaps
even greater services than the men teachers . Their knowb
ledge and teaching abi ity leave something 0 be desired, but
they are morally superior, more tactful, and more devoted.39
The political exigencies that contributed to the inadequacy of
women's education grew out of the feeling that women represented a
threat to the republic, and, unless weaned from their superstitious
attachment to Church and monarchy, they would undermine French demo-
cracy. "Women must belong to Science or to the Church," argued Jules
Ferry, one of the chief architects of the expansion. Better education
for girls would not only stabilize the family but would impede the
machinations of the Old Regime, that "edifice of regrets, beliefs,
and institutions which does not accept modern democracy,” Ferry
maintained:
In this combat [Fetween democracy and monarchi7, women
cannot be neutral: optimists who do not wish to see to the

bottom of things imagine that she does not take part in the
battle, but they do not perceive the secret and persistent

 

4 38Hunt, "Feminism and Anti-Clericalism under the Commune,"
19.

39mm. , £120.

 

 

 

 

 

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29

support that she brings to that group which is on the run
and which we want to drive out forever.

Yet educators must take care lest women lose their femininity, Ferry
warned: a woman's knowledge of science need not exceed the require-
ments of domestic life, nor was it necessary to provide her with pro-

fessional training.

Nexes of Constraintg

A fifth and final constraint under which women lived in the
gstéme mascglinigte involved a complex arrangement of attitudes,
customs, influences, assumptions, and practices. Diverse in nature and
variable in impact, these factors could at times interact in such a
way as to give rise to "nexes," the cumulative effects of which added
yet another dimension to the oppression of French women and the problems
faced by French feminists. An impression of how these nexes worked, as
well as a clearer suggestion of what is meant by the term in this con-
text, can be derived from examining three rather speculative themes.

Two of these themes, imobilization and deflection, attempt to pull
together factors that affected women in general. The third deals with
one of the major obstacles confronted by feminists, the idea of feminism
as an aberrant phenomenon.

French women found themselves imobilized in a number of ways.
In respect to spatial movement, the law forbade married women to live
where they pleased or to leave the country without their husbands' con-
sent. No woman, regardless of marital status, could attend political
rallies, according to a little enforced but potentially threatening

law; nor, according to custom, could women sit in the press gallery of

 

“Frost, Elstoiirre de l'enseigiement en France 1800-1967, 268-9.

1
drum-a... .121? m»-

 

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Kathering of
en Ville

30
the Chamber of Deputies}1 Women could appear in public, although their
numbers might be regulated in times of crisis, but in doing so they
risked humiliation at the hands of the Morals Police. They also en-
countered inconvenience in Paris, where municipal restrooms for men out-
numbered those for women 20 to 1. women could buy train tickets, but
few would travel by rail unaccompanied.£12 In respect to personal mo-
bility, the law forbade women to wear pants, while papular styles dictated
dresses of encumbering length, hats of unwieldy size, and corsets of
constrictive and, as a contemporary minority maintained, unhealthy

design.43 Moreover, if the word "movement" can be stretched a bit, the

 

hIObservance of the law excluding women from political rallies
seemed to depend on the prevailing political climate. In 1875, with
fear of reaction in the air, Louis Blane spoke at StéMandJ’to a
gathering of 600 men. The women who accompanied them waited in a nearby
garden while the rally took place behind closed doors and windows. A
year later, women attended political gatherings throughout France, in-
cluding a 1% July celebration at the St-Mandé hall from which they had
been excluded the year before. L'Avenir des Femmes, 6 August 1876,
6 January, 1877.

h2In 1880 the Union Internationale des Amies de la Jeune Fille,
founded earlier by the Federation Bratinnique et Continentale, became
the union des Amies de la Jeune Fills. The importance of the name
change stemmed from.a new service, providing intranational, as well as
international, assistance to young female travelers. In France the
Union had its headquarters at Lyon, with an 150 member branch at Paris.
Paris hosted the union's international congress in 1888. Under the
direction of Mlle. Venet and M. and Mme. Siegried, the union secured
pennission.to post its address in French train stations. Bulletin de

l'Uhiog Qgiyeggellg deg Femmeg, April 1891.

h3The law forbidding women to wear pants was enacted on 9 Bru-
maire IX, and it remains on the books. Sullerot, Presse, 102. For
an interesting article on the corset controversy, see David Kunzle,
"The Corset as Erotic Alchemy: From Rococo Galanterie to Montaut's
Physiologies" in Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin, eds., woman as Sex

Ob ct: Studies in Erotic Art 1 0.1 0 (New York, 1972),
#135?” ' "'1: "' L,“

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31

atmosphere of sexual repression in which women lived not only impeded
heterosexual expression but threatened as well the freedom to explore
their own bodies. Taboos against the "hideous vice" of masturbation
weighed heavily on both sexes, but for women addicted to this form of
”hysteria” an 1864 surgical report recommended excising the clitoris
and suturing the vaginal orifice.&k Given these and other restrictions
on women’s behavior, it is not surprising that exceptional French women
often adopted.male attire, despite the law, or employed male pseudonyms,
as in the cases of George Sand, Daniel Stern, Andre Leo, and the Vicmmte

de Launay. Nor is it surprising that they tended to create "distance"

 

%'MMme, Histoire et actualite' du fe'minisme, 102. In
general in the nineteenth century, wrote John Demos, "the whole subject
of sex was enveloped in a pervasive hush, which remained virtually unp
broken until our own wentieth7'century. . . Masturbation became‘ghg
phobia of the times; 0 practice this secret sin was to risk intem-
perance, insanity and death. . . For'many women, of every status, the
situation was more tortured still an for men . Recent research on
the history of gynecology has uncovered a demand, in an astonishing
number of cases, for the surgical procedure of clitoridectomy. Evi-
dently this was the last resort of women who, contrary to expectation,
found themselves afflected with "sensual" wishes." John Demos, "The
American Family in Past Time," The American Scholar XLIII (Sm-oer,
197k), k37. .A principal cause of female masturbation lay in youthful
drinking, according to an 1886 report to the Société'Francaise de
Temperance. If young girls drank, explained Dr. A.-J. Devoisins, two
consequences would ”almost inevitably” result: premature menstruation
and.;fonanisme. Marital drunkenness would also cause women to bear
idiotic, epileptic, and hysterical enfants. women possessed a
“marvelous" ability to adapt to their "natural destination," but the
traumatic passage through puberty had to come at the preper’moment
without external stimuli: "It is perhaps at that epoch of life when
the sensitivity of woman is the most strangely tormented in a con-
trary sense. It is also without doubt one of the stormiest periods
of her existence. Her nervous system assumes attributes of the most
accentuated susceptability. woman effects due to menstrual hemorhage
an excessive irritability, her imagination takes on an unusual acti-
vity, sometimes even disordered, her senses splinter, and among sub-
jects so predisposed, attacks of hysteria or epilepsy appear or recur.
One also ascertains peculiar caprices, bizarre tastes, and changes in
character, that grow into a dis sition to melancholy, irascibility,
hypochondria, etc." Afihert -J ocepgoevoicino, La Fame at l'alcoolisme,
Paris, 1885, 33-4. For in ornation on the campaign against alcoolisme
in France, see Chapter II.

 

L".‘r’-"l'."~'1‘¢.fl‘i' _ l.

 

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'hinine' ow

32

between themselves and other women, echoing a version of Madame de
Steel's disdainful consent: "1 am glad I am not a man, for if I were
I would have to marry a woman.“5

The theme of deflection involves some of the various counter-
vailing influences that, from a feminist point of view, "guided" fe-
males into "womanhood" and males into ”manhood," rather than both into
personhood. Legal, religious, economic, and educational constraints
figured in the deflection, of course, but other and perhaps equally
powerful influences assisted in the feminine-masculine bifurcation of
French society. Symbols, or the lack thereof, relate to this theme,
from "La Belle France," an expression for the French collectivity with
“feminine' overtones of moral superiority and honor in need of protec-
tion, to statues and street names, almost none of which paid homage to

women.“6 But more harmful in their deflective effect on the women and

 

”Edvard Lewis, ed., The French on Life and Love (Kansas City,
1967), 39. The tendency of women to create distance between each other
and to demeau each other is characteristic of minority groups. As
with racial and ethnic minorities, women tend to accept the dominant
group's stereotyped conceptions, which result in "mea culpa" breast-
beating, applying severe moral standards to other women, preferring to
work under men, and finding the company of women repugnant. In short,
"like those minority groups whose self-castigation outdoes dominant
group derision of them,women frequently exceed men in the violence of
their vituperations of their sex." Helen Meyer Hacker, "Women as a
Minority Group," condensed in Nona Glazer—Malbin and Helen Youngelson
Waehrer, eds., Woman in a Han-Made World (Chicago, 1972), 39-110.

I‘GAccording to Larnac, women represented only eight per cent
of the entries in French biographical dictionaries. Jean Larnac,
gthoii-e de la littérature feminine en France (Paris, 1929), 2118.
Dronsart claimed that the decision by the Paris Municipal Council to
name a street after Maria Deraismes in 1896 represented the first
act of this kind, so far as she knew: "Le quartier n'est pas beau
(square des Epinettes [in the 17th arrondissemen? ), la rue n'est pas
jolie; c'est plutot one impasse, mais enfin 1e principe est sauf."
Marie Dronsart, "Le Mouvement Fe'ministe," Le Correspondant, 10 Octo-
ber 1896. 116. Of the thousands of statues in Paris, according to
Simone de Beauvoir, only ten honor women: three to Jeanne d'Arc and
the others to Madame de Se'gur, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt,

 

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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--------------

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press, and c

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second half
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1832, to ion
their mcces
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six or ,9,”

degree in t1

33

men who feminists sought to convert were female consumerism, the feminine
press, and children's stories.

Female consumerism assumed massive proportions during the
second half of the nineteenth century as municipal entrepreneurs, par-
ticularly Parisians, attempted to tie the provincial market into a new
business phenomenon, the department store. The great names in this
field acquired their start under the Second Empire -— Au Bon Marché in
1852, Le Louvre in 1855, Le Printemps and La Samaritaine in 1865 - and
their success stemmed in large part from tapping female purchasing
power. Middle and lower class women could not afford exclusive shops
or follow the example of "fashionable women" who changed their clothes
six or seven times per day, but they could and would participate to some
degree in the arid but everchanging business of style if two require-
ments were met. Prices had to come down, and the identification of
adornment and self, so characteristic of aristocratic circles, had to
filter into the ranks of the other classes. The great department
stores met the first requirement through stocking less expensive, readya
made goods, and they tackled the identification requirement through ad-
vertisements and other promotional gimmicks. Financially the dual
assault on women proved spectacularly successful. Aristide Boucicaut,
for example, who founded Au Ben Merche’ in 1852 and who “focused his
attention primarily on women, encouraging them to browse and spend

money freely,“ increased his gross tend-fold to five million francs per

 

Madame Boucicaut, Baroness de Hirsch, Rosa Bonheur, and.Maria Deraismes.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex., trans. by sin. Parshley (New York,
1952), 122. Draismes' statue, the only one to a woman active in the
organized feminist movement under the Third Republic, was raised in the
Square des Epinettes shortly after her death in l89hgonly its base re-
mains today.

 

 

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57
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3h

year by 1860.“7 Against this background of success with the female
walk-in clientele, which made the department store one of the few places
where women could move freely, the prospect of capturing the female pro-
vincial market through highly illustrated mail-order catalogues emerged
as the next logical step to take.“8

The feminine press, journals about and directed to women, ante-
dated the consumerist phenomenon by over two centuries. The first of
this genre in France, Lghfln§g_fligtggigng, appeared in 1650. By 1800
thirty-four journals had come out, two-thirds during the opening decade
of the Revolution. Another seventyaone appeared by 18h5, bringing the
total, which included several feminist sheets, to slightly over one
hundred for the period 1650-18h5. Since that time and as a correlate
to improved female literacy, an additional 200 to 300 titles have seen
the light of day. Many of these publications proved to be short-lived.
0f the seventybone that appeared during the first half of the nine-

teenth century, for example, fortyhnine folded within two years and

only sixteen survived five years or more. But the few that did survive,

 

1‘78. C. Burchell, Imperial Masquerade: The Paris of Napgleon III
(New York, 1971), 67—9.

hSBardeche attributed the general improvement in women's educa-
tion to two factors: expanded primary instruction and.mail-order
catalogues sent into the provinces by the large department stores. He
called the newbstyle women ”created" by these stores "la clients-type."
Kaurice Bardeche, Histoire des Femeg (Paris, 1968), 11, 311.49. Fe-
males outnumbered.males throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century in France. According to Daria, there were 38,000 more women
than men in France in 1866, 93,000 more in 1881, h23,000 in 1896, and
617,000 in 1901. Daric, Léfietivjtéhprofessionelle des femmes en France,
15. van de Valle calculated the total female population in France for
these years as l9,27&,100 in 1866, 18,964,700 in 1881, 19,441,600 in
1896, and 19,533,900 in 1901. Etienne van de Walls, The Female Pong:
lation of France in the Nineteenth Century: A Reconstruction of 82
Departments lPrinceton, New'Jersey, 197:7:1125.

 

---------------

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Petit Echo d9
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35

especially those that lasted into or originated under the Third Re—
public, tended to acquire enonmous readerships. Le Honiteur de la Mode
(1843—1919) had 200,000 subscribers in 1890, for instance, while'gg
Petit Echo de la.Mode, which still exists, leaped from a run of 5,000
copies in 1879, the year of its founding, to 175,000 in 1884 and to
210,000 in 1893. Newspapers and magazines of a feminist persuasion, in
contrast, had runs of only a few thousand until 9 December 1897 when,
during the movement's second generation, La Fronde printed 200,000
copies of its first edition}9

In content, the feminine press contributed to deflection by pro-
moting frivolity and by emphasizing neo-traditional roles for women.
The identification of adornment and self that characterized the business
boom in women‘s goodsfound an ally in many of the journals of this
genre. Dozens of publications, some of which depended in whole or in
part on industry subsidies, promoted the latest in "mode," "vogue,"
I'fashion," “toilette,“ "nouveaute," and "ban ton."50 Like the short-
lived figséfi des flodes Parisiennes (1843), they inundated their readers
with "designs of elegant fashions, sketches of ridiculous fashions, dis-

cussions of the latest feminine products, the clamor of the salons,”

etc.51 The emphasis on.women's neo-traditional roles involved an

 

49For information on the feminine press in France, see: Ekelyne
Sullerot, La Pregge Feminine (Paris, 1966) and Sullerot, Presse.‘£§
Fronde'g initial run of 200,000 copies probably reflects an attempt to
advertise the new'venture rather than an indication of the number of
its subscribers.

50Twenty-eight of the seventybone feminine journals that appeared
between 1800 and 1845 employed one or*more of the following words in
their titles: Bode, v0 e, fashion, toilette, 22.1.1. 32.9.9 miroir, boudoir,

M, W, galant. Sullerot, Presse, 217-8.
51Sullerot, La Pressg 1M ' e, 22.

 

 

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36

exaggerated concern for domestic life, reflected in titles such as La
Marc de F ille, La Fame chez Elle, and Le Bon Ange du Foyer. The
first of the Roman Catholic journals of this type, La MEre de Famille
(1833-6), contributed to a trend that grew in strength throughout the
nineteenth century. This trend effected a juncture between moral im-
peratives, the "Duties" of woman as wife and mother, and the social en-
tity that dominated bourgeois society, the conjugal family. The juncture
in turn amounted to a veritable cult, regardless of religious overtones,
in which ”the woman is very forcefully integrated into Eho family] by
tradition and her role is narrowly dictated to her; while at the same
time her moral sense is molded in such a way that she tends to think that
she is the one who deliberately chooses, desires, freely accepts that
place, that role, that destiny."52

The third deflectivo influence, children's stories, arose out of
a combination of factors whose precise formula is as difficult to deter-
mine as the impact of the stories themselves. Heated exchanges over
breast-feeding and swaddling at the end of the eighteenth century en-
gendered a voluminous, wide-ranging inquiry into child-rearing in the
nineteenth century. Woman found themselves doubly burdened as a result,
saddled simltaneously with heavier child-related responsibilities and
fewer outlets for their own creativity. For some, especially those who
wrote for the feminine press, children's stories represented the best
and, to a certain extent, the only available way to reconcile the con-
tradictions of the double burden. Consequently, dozens of literary-
minded, child-oriented, middle—aged, Christian women relieved their
frustrations by devoting their talents to the service of youth. The

 

523uuorot, m, 189.

 

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0...

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37

women who wrote for Lg gogmal deg Fmes (1832-8), for example,
authored enough stories to fill fifteen pages of bibliography. With

reprintings, which numbered thirty in forty years for Alida de Savignac's
Leg Pgtitg gmong d'aprég nature, the quantity of paper consumed by
such works alone proved enomous. "But what influence have they had,
m," one might ask along with Eyelyne Sullerot, "these women story
tellers who soothed the infancy of so many children and inculcated into
then this moral current, these cliche's of vocabulary, these religious
impulses, this subdued Manicheanism and this view of society, their
place and their duties that mark a mentality, a sensibility, even when
the adult does not retain a very clear memory of them!"53

The final theme, feminism as an aberrant phenomenon, concerns
the .ergence of the idea that women's liberation represented an illegi-
timate social objective. Any protest from whatever quarter against the
gzstdme masculiniste might engender potentially ”illegitimizing" counter-
attacks of a particularly virulent nature. Consequently, by mid-century
French feminists confronted a society that not only imposed countless
constraints on women, but perpetuated as well the idea that feminists,
as advocates of an essentially illegitimate cause, deserved a full

measure of contempt and ridicule.“

 

”Ibid., 81-3, 117, 171-1.. Quote is on page 173.

5“Elizabeth Janeway's analysis of myth and role-playing in Man's
"221$ Wm'g Plge (New York, 1971) provides an interesting insight
into the stigma. According to Janeway, the social-sex division of
society rests on myth, and "so old is this partition and so built into
our minds and our cultural background that it produces an illusion of
inevitability and revealed truth." (7) "Now the preservation of the
order of the world is the fomally stated function and consciously held
purpose of myth,” (42) and "the way myths affect individuals is through
holding up roles for then to play.“ (70) These roles can either con-
form to the nous or deviate from it. The most comon form of deviation

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38
The stigma of illegitimacy did not result from organized op-
position to feminism as such. Indeed, by the time Charles Fourier
coined the word "feminism" in 1808, the stigma had already begun to

.spread.55 It appeared occasionally in the early nineteenth century.

 

is the shift from accepted to unaccepted behavior, from positive role-
playing to the mythic opposite, negative role-playing. The effect of
such shifts is to reinforce the prevailing myth by permitting deviants
to be stigmatized as social enemies. Conventional labels illustrate
this for, as Janeway maintained, "if the witch is the dark shadow side
of the mother and the shrew the negative of the public, pleasing women
whose business it is to charm men, the bitch shadows the private, loving
women.” (199) Specific male fears about females -- what d'Eaubonne
called ”gynophobie" in her Histoire et actualité d féminisme, 104 --
and general apprehensions about what may happen next accentuate this
tendency:__"1he role-breaker threatens the order of the universe not
just by [heg/ own challenge to it, but by disturbing the accustomed
connection with this order which is felt by other peoples." (125)
Hence, in addition to the institutional disabilities that weighed
on women, feminists in France and elsewhere confronted a situation
in which their campaign suffered from the ease with which the prevail-
ing social-sex myth could stigmatize them as illegitimate.

One dimension of this process involved vocabulary. In his
study of over 1,500 words that apply to women in France, George C. S.
Adams concluded that "the descriptive terms fall into a number of
groups. In the greatest number of instances unseemly behavior is
designated. Next in importance are terms denoting unattractive physi-
cal appearance. The two types of meaning are often found in combina-
tion. More than half of the terms derive their significance from
the extension of meaning of terms applied to animals (horses, dogs,
etc.), unmentionable parts of the body, and inanimate objects of
various sorts. There are also a fair number of terms used primarily
as injurious epithets. That nearly all of the descriptive terms are
of a derogatory nature is due to the fact that there is a general
tendency, when speaking ill of a person, to sum him up in a word;
whereas when one speaks well of a person, he usually makes use of
locations rather than single words.” George C. S. Adams, Words and
Descriptive Terms for 'woman' and 'Girl' in French and Provengal and
Border Dialects. University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance
languages and Literatures, Number ll (Chapel Hill, 1949), 90.

55Charles Fourier, Théorie des guatres Nouvements et des
destinies générales (1808).

 

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39

Subsequently, as the new word one to be associated with certain critics
and certain types of criticism of the systéme masculiniste, there emerged
a reaction that in retrospect could be called anti-feminist. But not
until the end of the century, when feminism had acquired more support,
did a specific, determined opposition arise. And, even then, this oppo-
sition tended to be both highly individualistic and numerically insigni-
ficant. The'odore Joran devoted a considerable portion of his journalistic
career to combating the "lie of feminimn," for example, but he found it
unnecessary to go beyond literary assault. Existing institutions could

supply Joran with whatever additional support his cause might need. His

work on W won the acclaim of the Acade'mie fran-
caise, while his attack in 1913 on E ngfmg deg fmeg earned him the

m 111 m of the Acadm'sie des sciences morales et politiquesfi6
Rather than a product of determined, organized opposition, the

stigma represented the cumulative effect of a wide variety of general

56’I'he'odore Joran, Le Suffrage des fenmes (Paris, 1911;). In ad-

dition to Le Suffr e des fensne , Joran's works on fe'minism include Le
Mensogge du feminisme (Paris, 1905); Auteur d fe'minisme (Paris, 1903,;
Le Feminisme a l'he actualle (Paris, 19075; An coeur du fe'minisme
(Paris, 19085; La Trouee feministe (Paris, 190 i; and Les Feministes
avant le fe'minisme 2 vols., Paris, 1910, 1935?. He also wrote the
preface to Neera's Anna Radius Zuccar_i7 Les Idées d'une feme sur le
fe'minisme (Paris, 1908). His non-feminist works reflected an interest
in language and education and included Le Pe'ril de la sy_n_taxe et la
cri e de l'ortho he recueil de locutions vicieuses dresse ar
ordre alphabetigge (3th ed., Paris, 1913$and Universite et ensei e-
ment libg, dgg gyotgg‘ eg d'e'ducation (2nd ed., Paris, '1905). In a
review of Joran's S ffr e, the Earl of Cromer agreed that even
moderate feminists showed defects of character that would "render it
undesirable that direct political power should be conferred on women."
Like Jorsn, Craaer identified feminists with a trinity of "anarchism,
collectivism, and anti-militarism," seeing in them a threat to family,
religion and morality. E.B. Cromer, "Fanninism in France," M,
cam (6 Decmnber 1913), 589-93. Some of Joran's letters on femi-
nims can be found in DID, Dossier Him. For feminist reaction to his
opinions, see: L'Entemte, June 1906 and February 1908; Le'on Abensour,

' ’ 3 '— "i (1.2»1' _: '1 c lecti .1'0'- i
7-8; and La Frmaise, 29 November 1908.

     

  
  

 

  

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40

impressions and selectivelybinterpreted incidents. Each had spokesmen
who could command large audiences on occasion, but theirs was less cam-
paign than comment. Few of the spokesmen, despite the virulence of
their attacks, accorded primacy to the struggle against feminism. Nor,
for that matter, did.many of them speak out often on the subject. Yet
the effect of their infrequent, passionate remarks proved substantial.
Preexisting sexist attitudes acquired new, more up—to-date reinforcement,
and, as a corollary, feminists found themselves singled out for specific,
derogatory treatment. On a collective scale anti-feminism assumed a
significance inversely related to either the constancy of its purveyors
or the strength of the movement. In short, the stigma had its roots in
ubiquity.

The stigma of illegitimacy drew its operative force in part frmm
a plethora of ”guilts by association." At the deductive level, feminists
could hardly avoid the popular assumptions that denigrated women in
general. These ran a metaphysical gamut of special natures and special
rules, each of which tended to undermine feminist credibility. women
were only large children in the eyes of JeansJacques Rousseau, for

example, while to others they were even less.57

"0h! Monsieur,"
responded a Breton farmer to an inquiry by Ernest Legouve, "I haven't
any children; I have only daughters."58 For those who admitted woman's

potential for post-infantile development, there existed other negative

 

57Le'on Abensour, La Fame et le :M' an avant 13 re'volution
(Paris, 1923). 374.

58Charles Laurent, Les Droits de la femme: Droits pglitigges
(Paris, 1888), t.

.l.

1114]
‘

41

assumptions. Many believed along with liberal priest Felicité de
Lamennais that women lacked the ability to think: "I have never met a
woman capable of following an argument for half a quarter-hour."59 Or,
if women's minds proved sound, they lacked moral integrity: "Madame,
remember this," adjured Police Prefect Lacour to an Ehlglish abolitionist,
”that women continually injure 9.922%. men, but no man ever injures an
honest woman.“

At an inductive level, feminists found themselves associated with
a salltitude of individual women who had transgressed the standards of
the gzgtéme magcgligigte. These too ran a gamut, the whole of French
history. Sometimes, as with Marie Antoinette, the individual might be
referred to by name. At other times, the reference was less precise.
was the philogophe Antoine-Leonard Thomas thinking of Catherine de Medici
and her role in the Saint Bartholomew Day's Massacre of 1572, for
instance, when he wrote that women "lack that calm strength that knows

how to stop: all that is moderate torments them"?61

Occasionally the
individuals had only a collective identity. The Goncourt brothers, for
example, who considered Rousseau to be a great liberator of women, em-
ployed the phrase "pillow government" to characterize the debilitating
influence of a few women on the Second anire's ruling elite; and a great

many French citizens under the Third Republic attributed the destruction

 

59Joran, Leg Fe'mgllistes avant 1e Fe'minisme, II, 309.

60The objective of the abolitionist movmnent in Europe was to

eliminate the legal regulation of prostitution. The English abolitionist
to whom Lacour spoke was Josephine E. Butler, who needed his permission
to observe conditions in the women's prison of Saint Lazaro in 1874.

Jose hine E. Butler, Personal Reminiscenceg 2f 3 Great Crugade (London,
1896 s 129e

61Joran, Le Fe'ministes avant le Fe'minisme, II, 138.

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112

lring the Paris Consnune of 1871 to another snall group of women, the
:-'troleuses.62 Myth mingled with reality in these attributions, of
>urse, but the effect remained. Feminists suffered from having to con-
and simultaneously with particular assumptions about women in general
ld with the generalized "sins" of their various "sisters" in particular.

The stigma drew additional force from attacks on specific actions
ld practices of women. Some of these attacks bore directly on feminist
ldeavors. In his Alames de l'Episcomt justifie’es par faits (1868),
>r example, Bishop Dupanloup warned against the proliferation of pro-
essional schools for women, for which Elisa L-onnier had founded the
cototype in 1862. After a lengthy tirade against positivism, pan-
leism, materialimn, atheism, and Darwinism, Dupanloup concluded:

The truth is that we are confronted by a profound and vast
enterprise of impiety directed against the faith of young French
women. And it is clear that if such a system of education spreads
and prevails for the girls of our country, it would not take two
generations, it would take only one to make of France a nation of

xfiggodly and a people such as has never been seen under the

ther attacks focused on activities pursued by fmninists and non-
minists alike. Jules Barbey-d'Aure'villy, for instance, seized on
men's literary works to prove that men alone possessed the ability to
link abstractly. "Speak to [womag neither of deduction nor reason,”
lrbey-d'Aure'villy urged, "she will obey nothing other than blind

lreflective impulses."6l‘ The slightest acquaintance with female

 

62For an analysis of the M, see Thomas, The Woman
icendiarigs.

'63Bishop Dupanloup (of Orle'ans), Les Alarmes dol' isco t
lstifiees E! les faits, Lettre 3 2 Cardinal per yr, lgeggge
'Orleans Paris, 18 .

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publications would reveal their sex-determined inferiority: "Study
their works . . . At the tenth line, and without knowing whose they are,
you are forewarned, you smell woman! 9519; dim." Egg .1333 91933, as
Barbey-d'Aure'villy called them, resurrecting a derisive label of English
origin, had forsaken their principal function, reproduction of the
species. They had attempted to become men, but "male faculties are as
radically lacking in them as the organ of Hercules to Venus de Milo."65
Still other attacks had nothing at all to do with the acts of feminists,
although advocates of women's liberation might respond at times. One
such time occurred in 1865 when a committee of women listened to an
angry reply to Procurator General Dupin who had enoriated women's
”frightening” addiction to luxury in a speech to the French Senate.66

A fourth and final way in which the stigma garnered force
stemmed from the belief that "uppity“ women had attempted to disrupt
the natural, albeit revolutionary, evolution of French society. The
National Assembly in 1850 subscribed to this belief and nearly suc-
ceeded in depriving women of their one and only political right, the
right to petition the legislature.” Women's participation in the
utopian socialist movements of the 1830's also aroused hostility be-
cause, as a turn-of-the-century feminist put it, those movements
amounted to nothing more than "an enormous orgy where giants endowed

with the appetite of ogres gorged themselves on monstrous feasts and

 

65Jules Barbey-d'Aure'villy, Les gs—Bleus (Geneva, 1968), niii.
66013113) e Andouard

Le Luxe effre'ne' des Homes discours tenu
dang an. comite gg fmes (Paris, 1E5}.

~678ullerot, Presse, 152.

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till
innumerable loves."68 But, above all, the Great Revolution of 1789
served as the principal source for this belief.

Within philosophe circles preceding the events of 1789,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emerged as the foremost anti-feminist
spokesman, perceived women as depraved beings whose primary duty in
life consisted of constant service to the sex they had "originally"

wronged:

All education of women should be relative to man. To please

than, to be useful to then, to be loved and honored by them, to

counsel then, to console them, to render their livgg agreeable and

sweet: these are the duties of women at all times.
The Marquis de Condorcet articulated a more advanced position, from a
faninist point of view. He urged equal education and the right to vote
for men, and during the Revolution's initial euphoric phase, his
stand seemed to prevail.70 Women contributed significantly to the
course of events, at first through spontaneous actions like the March
on Versailles in October 1789, then through organized endeavors, such
as clubs, vigilance connittees, pamphlets, and manifestoes. But as
euphoria gave way to fear, the Revolution moved leftward and a reaction
set in against women. Condorcet's suicide in 1793 symbolized the shift
in attitude, and the same Terror that hounded hill to death quickly pro—
ceeded to close the women's clubs and to arrest their more prominent
labors. A few women received death sentences, including Olympe de

Gauges who had written a De'claration des Droits de la feline et de la

 

68Jane Hisme, "La Vie et la Mort du fe'minisme," MSS, RID, 26.

69Jean Jacques Rousseau, finile, quoted in Sullerot, Presse, l6.

70Abensour, La Fauna et le PM me avant 1a re'volgtion,
h26-8.

 

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45

Citozenng in 1791 and had petitioned the National Convention for the
right to act as defense counsel to Louis xv1.71

But more important than the individual fate of these women was
the attitude displayed by their persecutors. To the Jacobin Chaumette,
en ex—priest, they were "degraded beings who wish to avoid and violate
the laws of nature.” "Since when,” he asked, "is it permitted to women
to abjure their sex and to make themselves men?”2 Despite women's vir-
tues, pronounced Amar, ”it is nonetheless true that they cannot apply
themselves to work, to fill the jobs or the occupations to which men
are destined."73 Like Chaumette, Amar belonged to the Jacobin faction,
and his views reflected those of his more illustrious colleagues, Marat
and Robespierre. But the Jacobins were not the only ones to espouse
this Rouseauiste interpretation of women. He'bert, although executed by
the Jacobins, subscribed to it, and the Thermidorians who overthrew
Bobespierre ordered women to remain in their domiciles under pain of
arrest if‘more than five assembled together in poblie.74 The regime
created by the Themidorians withstood, in turn, a challenge by a man
of like mind. "French citizens," proclaimed Babeuf, leader of the
Society of Equals, "you are under the regime of c . . . The Pompadours,
the Dubarrys, the Marie-Antoinettes live again, they are the ones who

govern you, to whom you owe a great part of the calamities that assail

 

71Jeanne Bouvier, Les Fame; pendant lg ge'volgtion (Paris,
1931). 283-9.

72Sullerot, Presse , 63—4.
73Ibid., 64.

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116
you and the deplorable retrogression that kills your revolution."75
Three years after Babeuf's execution, Napole’on assumed control of France.
In nurturing what the Convention begot, Napole'on confinned the idea of wom-
an ‘as an inferior race that an undefined and quasi-divine curse ren-
dered irretrievable."76 Thus, in addition to the innumerable institu-
tional and social constraints that impeded their efforts, feminists found
themselves excluded from the principles and at odds with the work of their
nation's revolutionary heritage. Hubertine Auclert must have felt both
regret and anger when she remarked in 1882 that "the fourteenth of July

is not a national celebration, it is the apotheosis of masculinity.”77

The PEI:

The various constraints imposed on women by the systéme 21.9.2“
gglinistg had a specific and imediate objective, to direct women into
family life. There, in the eyes of the systéme's defenders, women would
find what familialists in the next century called "fulfillment": the
satisfaction of accomplishing tasks uniquely suited to the female dis-

position. There too, women would find a haven from the corrupting

 

7'5Ibicl. , so.
761bid. , 66.

77Lo Citozenne, 2 July - 6 August 1882. Without doubt the Great
Revolution set in motion processes of change which, over varying periods
of time, positively effected the material and legal conditions of life
for women as well as men, workers and peasants as well as capitalists.
Nonetheless faninists argued (and continue to argue) that the status of
women, particularly relative to the status of men, did not improve as a
result of these developnents. Indeed, they maintained that the rights
of women diminished while the rights of men increased. "It was the
Revolution which, though it established the political rights of men,
destroyed those of women," wrote Winifred Stephens, "Women's Suffrage in
France," m, ccc1 (31 May 1919), 555.

 

 

.‘sollooo . .....

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descript

1891: 18f

47
influences that abounded in society at large as well as "protection"
from their own mental and physical flaws. "Women belong to the family,
and not to political society," Louis de Bonald had written during the
first half of the nineteenth century, "and nature has made them for
domestic cares, and not for public functions."78 At the end of the
century, during an 1891 debate on labor legislation for women, Count
Lemercier drew cheers from leftists and centrists for articulating the
same idea:

Ah! do not forget that it is woman who makes the family,

and the more you leave her to her domestic hearth, the more
you leave her in her own milieu, the more you assure the
peace and the prosperity of the family. 79

Now, the peace of the family is the peace of society.

Nature, in short, prescribed home and family as the sole, legitimate
sphere for women while simultaneously proscribing all activity outside
the 332;.

However, the type of family towards which the systems gagg-
liniste compelled women in the nineteenth century exhibited a number of
new and startling characteristics. How and why these developed is a
matter of some controversy, but the end product has received apt

description in the imaginative work of Philippe Arias.80

 

738onold, Lé’ielotion rimitive, s14.

79France, gonrnel Official, Chambre des goggtée, 2 February
1891, 185.

8

oPhilippe Arias, Cen ies of Childhood: A Social Histo of
PEI; Life, trans. by Robert Baldick New York, 1960’, 36k.

 

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48
By the nineteenth century, a new concept of family had begun to carry
the day:
This powerful concept was formed around the conjugal family,

that of parents and children. This concept is closely linked

to that of childhood. It has less and less to do with problems

such as the honour of a line, the integrity of an inheritance,

or the age and pemanence of a name: it springs from the unique

relationship between the parents and their children . . . What
counted most of all was the emotion aroused by the child, the

living image of his parents.81

In several respects, particularly in its historical evolution and in its
grip on nineteenth-century French society, the new concept reflected the
aspirations of the middle class. In that sense at least the new concept
can be described as "bourgeois." But, although material need prevented
many of the French from putting the new concept into practice and al-
though the wide-spread utilization of child and female labor in the early
stages of industrialization contradicted the ideal, this bourgeois con-
cept of the family increasingly pervaded the whole of French society.
”Starting in the eighteenth century,” Arids observed, "it spread to all
classes and imposed itself tyrannically on people's consciousness."82

The emergence and institutionalization of the new family concept
had an enormous impact on nineteenthpcentury French women. .As family
life more and more became the only legitimate sphere for women's lives,
woman found themselves harnessed to an institution whose general con-
tours bore little resemblance to earlier family types. Gone were the
days of the "big house” where friends, clients, relatives, and protégés
streamed in and out at all hours of the day. Gone too were the "general-

purpose' rooms where people slept, danced, worked, and ate without aid

 

81Ibid.

82Ibid., 406.

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of time-tables, especially for meals. In their place emerged the cafe',
the office, and the "modern" home with its dining room, drawing room,
bedroans, etc. Within and without, the home had become specialized, no
longer serving as the locus for the larger social dynamic. Everywhere
as the new pattern of home and family spread, wrote Ariés, "it reinforced
private life at the expense of neighborly relationships, friendships,
and traditional contacts."83 "One is tempted," Arias reflected, ”to con-
clude that sociability and the concept of the family were incompatible,
and could develop only at each other's expense."81* Women, as "home-
makers” La; xcellence, thus found themselves "privatized," prohibited
not only from meaningful involvement in public affairs but physically
removed from them as well.85

In addition to its insulating effect on women, the new bourgeois
household fostered other changes of consequence. Where finances per-
mitted, for example, women found themselves simultaneoudy confined to
the home and cut off from the kind of productive labor that generated ex-
change value. This condition not only left women in a state of depen-
dency vis—a-vis the men in their lives, but laid the base for relegating
women's market influence to consumption. Furthermore, through its prac-

tice of spatial segregation, the bourgeois family accentuated class

 

83Ibid.

8“Ib;d., 407.

85For an interesting interpretation of Arias' theses in the con-
text of an unique analysis of the subordination of women, see: Shulamith
Firestone, The Dialectic of s x: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New
York, 1970), 72-10!“ For a comparison of Aries to Erik Erikson, see

David Hunt, Parents and Children in Histo The P cholo of Famil
Lifg in Early Modern France (New York, 1970;.

E
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50
divisions. Physical distance began to take the place of moral distance,
from which Arias adduced that:

It was all as if a rigid, polymorphous social body had

broken up and had been replaced by a host of little societies,
the fuilies, and by a few massive groups, the classes . . .
The old society concentrated the maximum number of ways of
life into the admirers of space . . . The new society, on the
contrary, provided each way of life with a confined space . . .
Each person had to resemble a conventional model, an ideal
type, and never depart from it under pain of exconmunication.
The concept of family, the concept of class, and perhaps else-
where the concept of race, appear as manifestations of the
sale intggerance towards variety, the same insistence on uni-
formity.

Although the general contours of the new'family pattern raised
obstacles of critical importance to feminists, particularly in respect
to issues of class and the ”creeping isolation" that left women divided
and scattered, these broad effects represented only half the problem.
The other half stemmed from transformations within the internal structure
of the family. Each of the family's primary components underwent a pro-
cess of redefinition similar to that of the family unit itself. New
conceptions of fatherhood, childhood, and motherhood emerged and grew
in strength as the extended family gave way to the nuclear family. As
a result, women found their ”legitimate" sphere of life doubly narrowed,
first by being confined to the home when possible and, second, by
playing there a limited, although not necessarily unpleasant, role.
Indeed, the interplay between these new subconcepts within the framework
of the new, overarching family concept gave rise to a question of funda-
mental importance to feminists: how, given that women tended to find life
in the home not unpleasant, could the ranks of the movement and the re-

forms it espoused expand and succeed?

 

86m3s, 025%“ of Childhood, tells-5.

E
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Indin,

51

0f the three subconcepts, fatherhood proved the most ambivalent
and, as a corollary, the most vulnerable to feminist criticism in the
nineteenth century. But this vulnerability derived less frmm the new
family concept than from the legal and institutional prerogatives that
fathers exercised over wives and children. In many respects, these pre-
rogatives meshed well with the new concept, but their origins lay in
another world, that of Old Regime patriarchy and the counter—revolu-
tionary ideology of men like Bonald, do Maistre, and Le Play. Unp-
truaeled paternalism in the form of an absolute right to possess and
to dispose of family matters constituted the essence of this view. “Our
most fatal error," wrote Le Play, ”is to disorganize by State encroach—
ments the father's authority in the family, the most natural and the
most fruitful of autonomies, that which conserves the social bond, in
repressing original corruption, in raising young generations in respect
and in obedience."87 Under the new family concept, in contrast, the
sipificance attached to possession declined in favor of a new prime
idea, affection, ”the most important trait of the modern fmuily."88
Rut at mid point in the nineteenth century, this trait, already a cen-
tury in the foaming, exerted only a leavening influence on the older
idea. Proponents of the new concept attacked advocates of the old with
duocratic rhetoric (and with some success), while reactionaries'lashed
back with forecasts of fully degeneracy and social disintegration. As

a result, a few of the worst patriarchal abuses, notably primogeniture,

 

8‘7F're'de'ric Le Play, L'Qngiggtigg g; 1; gain: selon 1e vrai
were u-.__ 'L-_ ._ - . aces at «e les twos-
aria, 187's , xvi.

88Philippe Arias, "L'e'volutiou des rGles parentaux," in
W (Brawl-o 1968). '15-

gen '33"

m aha!“

points 0:

prerogatj

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52
gave way. But despite the passion expressed by both sides, the clash
was short-lived. The emergent idea of fatherhood easily bridged the two
points of view by adding a dose of familial sentiment to the considerable
prerogatives that remained.

Compared to the new subconcept of fatherhood, which amounted to
little more thn sentimental patriarchy, the subconcept of childhood
and motherhood represented drastic departures from the past. The modern
idea of childhood, unknown in the Middle Ages, developed in the course
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and “as attitudes towards
the child changed, so did the family itself.'89 Indeed, by the end of
the seventeenth century, the child had become ”an indispensable element
of everyday life, and his parents worried about his education, his
career, his future."90 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
|'this return of children to the home" gathered additional momentum. For-
mal education eclipsed apprenticeship as ”it was recognized that the
child was not ready for life, and that he had to be subjected to a
special treatent, a sort of quarantine, before he was allowed to join
adults."91 within the family, which increasingly cut itself off from
the world, all the energy of the group focused on ”helping the children
to rise in the world, individually and without collective anbition.'92
Children, as a result, found themselves subjected to special dress
codes, special vocabularies, special hygenic regimens, etc., with the

 

”mas. W. 355.
90mg" 1.03.
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53
effect that ”fanin and school together removed the child from adult

society."93 Once removed, children became dependent as never before on
their inediate families, which meant, given the privatization of family
life and the outside "responsibilities" of fathers, dependency on their
mothers.

The link between the new subconcept of childhood and the new
subconcept of motherhood can hardly be overemphasized. Without the
counterweight of large-scale social reforms, mothers, or mother surro-
gates, could not avoid the consequences of increasingly dependent
children in increasingly isolated and nuclearized households. 80 long
as men occupied themselves with activities outside the home and
I'sociability“ remained on the decline, women had of necessity to assume
responsibility for the daily care of their children. But regardless of
its causal significance, necessity had little to do with the new notion
of motherhood. Its strength lay, instead, in a series of assmnptions
about men and their motherly instincts, assmnptions so laudatory and
eventually so popular that necessity seemed to reflect virtue. The fe-
male who failed to live up to these assumptions might be called a m
m. But the virtuous, child-centered woman would be called a
mm, or, as in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a
fin my“ As the later term implies, the virtuous woman's pri-
mary responsibility lay in raising children. This responsibility
involved not only coping with her offsprings' extended childhood but
asserting as well a new attitude towards birth itself. No longer would

 

”and" 1.13.
9&Ari3s, "L'e'volution des r61es parentaux," 53.; Sullerot,

gatoirg at gociologie, 78-83.

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51:

she experience, as in the seventeenth century, "a sense of alienation
from the whole reproductive process that reduced [her] to a mere instru-
ment of destiny."95 On the contrary, she would experience that ”modern
invention,” maternal love. Moreover, she could assert this new attitude
and exercise her "educative" responsibilities because, as the new sub-
concept held, she and her children shared a kind of purity. Loss of
purity would result from too much contact with affairs outside the home,
but if WM remained true to their "destiny" by fulfilling their duties
as wives and mothers, they (and the schools) would carry out society's

most precious charge, the fanning of the next generation.

Conclugion
Evelyne Sullerot once asked what the reputation of the National
Convention.(l792-5) would be today if it had treated Jews as it treated
women? The scope of the question might easily be broadened, however, to
include, in addition to those few years, the whole of the French ex-
perience since 1792. ”Racism begins when the definition of the excluded
individual conjures up an allusion to his name," Sullerot wrote:
. o . Consequently, all the individuals who partake of
that m which carries within it the inferiority will be
assimilated to a group, even though certain of the indivi-
duals may be intelligent and others sulpid, certain honest
and others cheats, certain strong and others weak. Therein
is the essence of racism.
"If we bring this up here," Sullerot explained, ”it is not at all to
evoke pity for the private condition of womens"

a a . It is to demonstrate a mechanism: which functioned
for centuries and centimes to survive in many ways, and that

 

95Sullerct, Hggeg, Society, ggd Chggge, 63.

 

 

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98

55

is independent g£.the political ositions taken, at times,
by men of government and men of law.

Unfortunately, from the vantage point of feminists, the systéme
masculiniste exhibited little of that independence. Beneath the fanfare
of revolution and counter-revolution, which lent an aura of profound
change to political developments in nineteenth-century France, the
status of women rapidly and inexorably declined. In that sense at
least, the centuries-old mechanism of ”male racism” and the politics of
the moment went hand in hand. Even in the home, the one sphere where
Inman's ”nature” entailed serious responsibilities, men exercised the
final say-so on all matters of importance. Legalists defended this
situation on the grounds that woman's subordination had nothing to do
‘with sex, but stemmed instead from the need to preserve ”public order”
and to ”maintain the unity and integrity of the famdly.” But, as the
lational Council of French women reported in 1912, there existed ”a
certain number of laws which affect woman and which one can hardly ex-
plain without resort to that idea, no doubt primitive, of the inferiority
of the feminine sex to the masculine sex.”97 In other words, these laws
had their roots in hallocratisme, not pragmatism.98

But the Code represented only one, and perhaps not the most imp

portant, of the constraints imposed on women by the systéme masculiniste.

 

The other constraints, particularly the ones that twisted themselves

around the minds and hearts of women, probably carried more weight.

 

9
6Sullerot, Press , 66-7.

97v 'a Positio in the Laws of nations, 98.

98D'Baubonne, Histoire at actualiti du fiainisme.

 

 

They It!
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56
They were the ones that provided the social-psychological base from
which the laws seemed rightly and naturally to flow. Thus, in their
confrontation with the systéme masculiniste, feminists found themselves
locked in battle with a way of life so "ordinary" as to defy awareness
and so complete as to quell protest. In the form that it assumed at
mid-point in the nineteenth century, the systEme masculiniste amounted

to nothing less than a totalitarianism of the counonplace.

r_ v4" -u nu..—

 

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CHAPTER II
CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTRADICTIONS:

MOTS, NOTES, AND ALTERNATIVES 0F FEMINIST AWAMINESS

Once engaged by their critics, the defenders of the gethe
magflgiste displayed considerable ingenuity. Feminists continually
found themselves at a distinct disadvantage in the weapons of struggle:
money, numbers, access to institutional support, and much else. Feminists
also had to fight for so long on so many fronts that the gstéme's advo-
cates often managed to deflect their assailants into areas of lesser im-
portance, and to offset the loss of one constraint by reinforcing other
constraints. However, the capacity of the defenders to mount counter-
offensives with legal and institutional force represented only one part
of their strength. The other, and perhaps the more significant, part
stoned from their ability to obscure what feminists perceived as the
essential issue, the oppression of women by men. At a time when acqui-
sition of natural rights comanded the attention of most French men, the
M's proponents effectively convinced the vast majority of women
to view their subordination as natural. Through the double myth of
woman's general inferiority and woman's specific domestic superiority,
women were subtly wedged into a narrow niche of illusion and bondage.
Although the M's supporters could deploy defensive weapons when
the need arose, the double myth tended to prevent opposition from
arising in the first place. Men acquired a classic type of suzerainty

57

over ‘
vince

them.i

replac
funds!

also r

- . ' regard
Q . , A . . ........ active

All for

_ . . ' ‘ tent, l

 

 

\ ’.-,. ..... Ivarenc
to reso
sciousn
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1130 3Q

the 111

 

ruCC.4.

 

58

over women, one in which "a dominant group is secure when it can con-
vince the oppressed that they enjoy their actual powerlessness and give
them instead a fantasy of power."1

To shatter the illusion of woman's "natural" subordination and to
replace the "fantasy of power" with substantive power constituted the
fundamental objectives of the French feminist movement. These objectives
also reflected the two chief characteristics of organized feminists who,
regardless of sex, no longer believed in absolute male superiority and
actively sought to transfer at least some power into the hands of women.
All feminists exhibited both characteristics to a greater or lesser ex-
tent, but the will to engage in organized struggle depended on prior
awareness of both the illusion perpetrated by the systlme and the need
to resort to concerted action. This special type of awareness, or con-
sciousness, separated feminists from other reformers who wished to imp
prove woman's lot but only in ways consistent with the illusion. It
also separated organized feminists from the individuals who saw through
the illusion but refused to join the movement. As a result of this
awareness, feminists obtained a unique minority identity within French
society and even within the broader women's rights movement. Feminists
helped to create the National Council of French Homen in 1901, for
example, but ten years later the Council could only count nine femi-

nist affiliates out of a total group membership of 102.2

 

1Sheila Rowbotham, womenI Resistance and Revolutign (New'York,
1972), 39.

2In addition to the nine feminist groups, the National Council
of women included the following types of groups in 1911: work Assis-
tance (7), Charity (20), Circles and Study Groups (9), Cooperatives (3),
Education (17), Emigration (l), Pacifism (1), Provident Societies (6),
Professional (7), women's Syndicate (8), Temperance (2), and

 

 

U)

w'srns

T}
uniformi'
feainlss
its outs;
and coll
the requ
personal
phases 1
duals sh
and some
ties and
11039 ic
ference:
altern‘

Stiousn

M12

59

This activating type of consciousness did not, however, engender
uniformity within the movement. Indeed, conflicts within organized
famdnism often became as intense as conflicts between the movement and
its outside detractors. Such internal conflicts reflected individual
and collective vagaries in the new consciousness. At the point where
the requisite disillusionment commenced, the complex interplay between
personality and illusion-shattering experiences effected divergent em-
phases in individual awareness. At the collective level, where indivi-
duals shared their mutual disillusionment, the ties that bound strained
and sometimes snapped under the pressure of conflicting goals, strate-
gies and tactics. Thus, although organized feminists achieved a unique
group identity, the individuals who built the movement exhibited dif-
ferences in respect to both the roots of their consciousness and the
alternative and contradictory ways in which they translated that con-

sciousness into action.

ngsgiggsness and Personal Experience: The Case of Clémence Roger

Consciousness can be likened to insight. It lends itself to

' and ”I never saw that before!” Its

verbal expressions like ”Now I see,
effects are apparent at times, but its essence is within, the product
of intense personal experiences that slant to the core of self-percep-
tion. In respect to feminists, the concept of consciousness raises

the question of how some people have arrived at an awareness of woman's
oppression. In the specific case of femdnist consciousness in France

during the second half of the nineteenth century, it provokes the

problem of how a relatively small number of men and women acquired

 

Preservation (12). L'Action Feminine Bulletin offigiel du Conseil
Natigggl deg Fggggs Frangaiseg, December 1911, 319.

 

 

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sex and
question

and anti

rm. oi

60
insight into the constraints imposed on women by the gateme w-
liniste.

A lack of sufficient understanding marks the problem. The inter-
nal process of experiential insight has yet to be grasped, even though
the end product may be observed. Especially difficult to understand
are the emphases and boundaries of consciousness. Feminist conscious-
ness hinges on an awareness of woman's oppression, but concern for
women's plight remains neither the exclusive property of feminists nor
their only concern. Marxists, for example, acknowledged the scourge of
W, but only as a consequence of the class struggle. Femi-
nists in turn expressed concern for the working class, but accorded
priority to the sex struggle. Alongside their divergent insights into
sex and class oppression, feminists displayed a passionate interest in
questions ranging from republicanism and anti-clericalism to vegetarianism
and anti-vivisectionism.

Despite its puzzles, the concept of consciousness provides a
frame of reference for assessing the intense personal experiences that
brought a minority of women and men to feminism. If its internal mech-
anism remains unclear, the concept nonetheless focuses attention on the
dynamic interplay between the objective situation and the ways in which
individuals responded to it. Clénence Boyer (1830-1902), for example,
lived at the edge of organized feminism, lending her name and occa-
sionally her presence to the movement while drawing back from a full
cu-iinent to it. Science dominated her endeavors, which included the
first French translation of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and

earned her Eniest Renan's ironic accolade as "a man of genius."3 Royer

 

3RD, Dossier Boyer.

'Il

 

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in a

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61
also displayed a decided elitism, particularly on the suffrage subject.
The electorate included too many incompetent male voters, she argued in
1898, to risk enfranchising women who remained under the thumb of the
Church. But if her interest in science and her aversion to the conteme
porary state of the masses removed her from full participation in
organized feminism, Royer's experience of the systéme masculinistg
mirrored that of those who built the movement. In 1895, a few years
after the Second French Congress for Women's Rights, Boyer expressed
in a ”Testament” her anguish at having been born a woman into the nine-
teenth century:

Victim.of the prejudiced who still oppose the intellectual
development of woman, I have labored all my life without reward,
to enlighten a blind humanity that has done nothing but raise
obstacles to the edification of my philosophical work, closing
schools, [pniversity7 chairs, and laboratories to me. All that
I know I have seized through determined struggle and I have had
to forget all that had been taught to me in order to learn anew
for myself.

I shall carry with me into the tomb useful truths that
others will have to discover again. Because I have had the mis-
fortune to be born a woman, I have lacked all means of expressing,
expanding and defending my thoughts and I have done only the
smallest part of what I could have done. I shall die cursing
human stupidity and deploring having been born into an epoch of
intellectual decadence, into an old world gripped by a senile
dementia, which under the pretext of art, turning its back on
reason, is prepared to return once again to a former time and to
abandon itself to a new era of morbid mysticism that will entail
its retrogression and social dissolution.“

Although Clc'emence Royer exhibited a limited couitment to the
movement, her bitter reflections pinpoint the experiential root of
feminist consciousness. In the objective situation created by the
m masgulipiste, Royer and others confronted two interrelated
phenomena: the relative decline in woman's status during the previous

three or four generations; and the immediate impact of the s at on

 

Ibid.

.
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62
women's lives. Most organized feminists refrained from expressing
Royer's fear of a "new era of morbid mysticism,” but they exhibited a
lively awareness that the contemporary trend in favor of the rights of
man had brought few benefits to women. In immediate impact, Royer's ex-
perience with academic sexism found a greater echo among organized
feminists, but obstacles to women's education represented only one of
the ways in which the righteousness of man contributed to feminist

consciousness.

The Rights and Righteousness of Map

 

The trend in favor of the rights of man introduced a glaring con-
trast between the new constraints that exacerbated woman's long-standing
subordination and the new freedoms that others began to enjoy. In the
sixteen years from 1848 to 1864, legal emancipation came to serfs in
Europe's two major feudal empires, Russia and Austria, and to slaves in
the western hemisphere's emerging industrial empire, the United States.
Throughout the nineteenth century, collectivities achieved liberation
through national independence movements. Italy, Germany and a host of
smaller countries freed themselves from outside domination while women
remained, ”so perfectly colonized that they policed one another."5 Re-
publican and national sentiment mitigated the contrast in some cases.
Feminist affinity for democracy dulled the significance of serfdom's
demise in autocratic Russia, while feminist antipathy towards Germany,
especially after the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, pro-
voked chauvinistic complaints about naturalized Prussian males enjoying

the rights of Frenclnen, rather than a comparison between Germany's

 

sRowhotham, Women Resistance and Revoluti , 39.

 

 

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63
recently attained independence and woman's continuing dependence.6 But
where liberation occurred within a democratic setting removed from
French national interests, the contrast stood out. Abraham Lincoln's
emancipation of American slaves, for instance, prompted French femi-
nists to protest against the implication' that negroes deserved libera-
tion more than women and to see in John Brown a negative model for their
own frustrating campaign.

However, the central feature of the rights contrast lay in the
extraordinary progress made by men under the systéme masculiniste.
French men reaped the benefits of change both in terms of revolutionary
gains for themselves and reactionary gains over women. The reactionary
gains preserved and enhanced male prerogatives in defiance of a protest
by women to the National Assembly of 1789:

You have destroyed all the prejudices of the past, but

you nllow the oldest and the most pervasive to remain, which
excludes from office, position and honour, and above all from
the right of sitting amongst you, half the inhabitants of the

kingdom.7

The execution of Olympe de Gauges, who had drawn up a Declaration of the

 

Rights of Homag to supplement the Assembly's Declaration of the Rights
of Map, symbolized the century-long reaction. Article X of de Gouges'

Declgration hauntingly reads: "Woman has the right to mount the

scaffold; she ought also to have the right to mount the tribune."8

 

6Bubertine Auclert called Prussian males who became nationalized
French citizens "Schwartz's." La Citoyenne, December 1887.

7Rowbotham, Women, Resistagce and Revolgtiog, 39.

8For the complete text of Olympe de Gouges' Déclaration des
Droits de la Femme et de Cito enne, see Bouvier, Les Femmes pendant
1a révolution, 283-89.

g.

9
a
I

 

m Q
a-—-
.

 

64

The positive gains that accrued to men took longer to secure. But
gradually, joltingly, the locus of authority in nineteenth century
France shifted from the hands of one or a few men to many men. Occasion-
ally technical rights for the mass male served as a facade for one-man
rule, as when the Second Empire preserved universal manhood suffrage
(enacted in 1848) but drained its substance into authoritarian institu-
tions. Setbacks also occurred, as when Louis Napoleon reimposed censor-
ship, nullifying press freedoms gained during the Revolution of 1848.
But if the Second Empire sapped universal manhood suffrage of its demo-
cratic content, women had not even the illusion of the vote, and the
principle of female exclusion from the electorate survived throughout
the Third Republic. If Louis Napoleon crippled freedom of expression,
men could at least engage in journalism at all levels, whereas press
laws between 1852 and 1881 denied newspaper directorships and political
commentary to women.9 Advances made in the name of the rights of man
meant exactly that: more power and more privileges to more men. Birth
less and less determined the relationship of males to each other, but
to feminists aware of the growing contrast in rights between women and
men, the emerging social order had all the earmarks of a neo-feudal
”royalty of sex."10

Interrelated but perhaps more critical to feminist consciousness
than the trend in favor of the rights of man was the immediate impact

of those rights on the daily lives of women. Legal, institutional and

 

9F. H. J. Hemmings, Culture and Societ in France 1848-1898:

Dissidents gnd Philistines New York, 1971 , 51-67; Sullerot, Presse,
124.26.

10

 
 

Le Cit enne, 5 February - 4 March 1883.

 

(Ii

 

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65
ideological constraints struck women at every level of French society,
affording innmmerable opportunities for individuals to experience the
righteousness of man. Degrees of personal contact with these constraints
varied greatly, but that often meant little. Feminist consciousness
consisted of an amalgam of experience in which the vicarious often
interacted with the direct. An impression of the centrality of exper-
ience in feminist consciousness can be derived from a brief examination
of the constraint of the double standard, of the limits of education,
and of two of the many incidents that provoked women into print.

The double standard had several legal dimensions: adultresses
faced harsher penalties than adulterers; men could file maternity suits
but women could not press paternity claims; and men, because they com-
mitted more such acts, more often benefited from condonation of ”crimes
of passion.” In their enforcement, the Morals Police focused exclusively
on prostitutes, rather than their male customers, and occasionally arres-
ted innocent women. Feminists voiced unanimous opposition to these prac-
tices, but few experienced them directly. That was unnecessary: women
did not have to commit adultery, bear illegitimate children, kill
lovers, or fall victim to the Morals Police to become aware of the
double standard; they had only to read the daily press. There, amid ad-
vertisements for perfumes and parasols, they could vicariously experience
an endless account of abortions, infanticides, abductions, suicides,

smimdngs, and murders.11 The blood of unfortunate women ran thick across

 

11For instances of maimings and murders, see Madame Anne Levinck,
Lg! Femmes gui ne tuent ni ne vgtent (3rd ed., Paris, 1882), 13-15.
Although estimates vary, the abortion rate in nineteenth-and twentieth-
century France was certainly high. Doctor Andre Cauchois calculated
that there was one abortion for every live birth. Demographic de la
Seine Inférieure (Rouen, 1929), 248, cited in Wesley D. Camp, Marriage

 

, o a o u. o oooooo

these pages,
burned their
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66
these pages, and when life itself was not at stake, acid disfigurements
burned their way into headlines and column-fillers. Anarchist Louise
Michel scoffed at feminists for expecting legislators, even women legisla-
tors, to prevent the prisons and the sidewalks from continuing to vomit
legions of unfortunates one onto another.12 But the object of her con-
cern, as distinguished from her anarchist solution to the problem,
attracted the attention of many. At the turn of the century, French
feminists collected 3,000 signatures on a petition begging Queen Victoria
to spare the life of Louise Masset, condemned to death for infanticide.
They refrained from arguing the merits of Masset's particular case, at-
tributing the crime in part to pressures exerted on women by Britain's

version of the systhme masculiniste. On 9 January 1900, the appeal for

 

mercy having failed, Masset's execution at Newgate ushered in another

13
century.

nd the Famil in France sinc the Revolution: An Essa in the Misto
pf Population (New York, 1961), 113. Simone de Beauvoir estimated that:
in France abortions number each year from 800,000 to 1,000,000 -- about
as many as there are births -- two thirds of those aborted being married
women, many already having one or two children.” Beauvoir, Thp Second
.525: 135.

Most feminists limited their illegal activities to civil disobe-
dience. A few bore "illegitimate” children, Clinence Royer and Marguerite
Durand for example. Doctor Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939) ran afoul of
the law'for practicing abortion and ended her days in an asylum. On the
eve of the First World war, Marie Denizard, editor-in-chief of Le Cri
deg Femmes founded in March, 1914, stood trial for attempted murder after
threatening the life of an officer who tried to evict her for non-payment
of rent. She was convicted, but fined only 25 francs due to a psychologi-
cal report which described her as unstable and megalomaniacal. The report
findings probably reflected Denizard's feminist activity; she ran for
the Chamber in 1910 and for the Presidency in 1913. The only feminist
who committed a crime unrelated to the tactics and goals of the movement
was Hera Mirtel (1868-1931), who was sentenced to twenty years at hard
labor for killing her second husband in 1920. For further information
see the relevant dossiers at the DMD.

12

1325_£;gpgp, 30 December 1899; 10-12 January 1900.

 

La Cit enne, September 1885.

‘1‘

.4;

no

.l‘..4

out.

 

67
Women encountered innumerable alienating obstacles in education,
the constraint that had so enraged Clémence Royer. Some incidents in-
volved matters of relatively minor importance. In 1897 the national
university administration forbade women teachers to wear pants or to
ride bicycles; a year later male students jeered the first women to

attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.la

Others concerned matters of major im-
portance, two of which related to the baccalauréat.

In the early 1860's, at the beginning of the generation that
built the feminist movement in France, thirty-eight year old Julie Daubié
succeeded in passing the ppp.examination before a jury at the University
of Lyon. Her success eventually opened the examinations to other women
in Lyon and elsewhere, but at the time the Minister of Public Education
refused to award her the degree. Moreover, the Minister persisted in
his refusal until a man, Frangois Barthélemy Arlés-Dufour (1797-1872),

traveled from Lyon to Paris, personally confronted the Minister, and re-

turned with the diploma in his pocket.15

 

1“Journal des Femmes, December 1897; La Fronde, 28 November 1898.

When the French parliament opened L'Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts to
women in 1897, the school's administration attempted to circumvent the
reform by setting up auxiliary courses for women. Protests ensued
nonetheless, causing a month-long closing of the school. With the
school's reopening, women secured full student status, but of the 180
who applied for the year 1897-98, only two were admitted. Three women
attended in 1898-99. Almanach Feministe 1899 (Paris, 1899), 52-53.

15Lion Richer, Lg Fglpe libre (Paris, 1877), 100. Daubié was
also the first woman to earn a Eicense £3,1ettres, and in 1871 she
founded the Association pour 1' mancipation de la Femme with Arlés-
Dufour as president. She died in 1874, leaving behind an pnfinished
doctorate and a monumental study of L3 Femme pauvre au XIX silcle
(1866). Her Association died with her. Arlés-Dufour also rose to the
defense of professional schools for girls in a Ré onse l M Du a lou ,
‘membre de l'lnstitut évé ue d'Orléans sur sa Lettre 1 un cardinal,
denoncant les Ecoles rofessionnelles de filles la li ue de 1'ensei e-
ment les 0 rs ublics aut risés 1e matérialisme et l'école de
decine de Paris les francs-ma ons les ositivistes les Saint-
Simoniens, etc,, etc, Paris, 1868) His report was "authored" by

 

 

 

     
  

    

 

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68

In 1899, a decade after the Second French Congress for Women's
Rights, a delegation from the feminist Ligue Frangaise pour 1e Droit
des Femmes paid a visit to Alexandre Millerand, Minister of Commerce
and Industry. Millerand, a socialist who had violated his party's
policy of non-participation in bourgeois cabinets, had previously ex-
pressed support for women's rights. The delegation wanted to know
whether he would live up to his words by hiring ministry personnel with-
out regard to sex. Millerand agreed on condition that women possessed
the requisite qualifications, meaning the 25;. Reminded that girls'
schools could only grant the standard diplee g£_g;g_gf§£2g£§, Millerand
advised the delegation to take its complaint to the Ministry of Public
Education.16

That recourse hardly portended redress. The Ministry of Educa-
tion called on the newly-expanded system of girls' schools to perform an
extremely narrow’mission, typified by the award in 1891 of the Ministry's
woman's prize to Georges Guéroult's Du R61e de la femme dans ngtre reno-
vapion sociple. Guéroult, whose §§l3,a1so won a first prize from the
Soci‘ti Rationale d'Encouragement au Bien, maintained that too much edu-

cation woulddraw women away from agriculture and break up the family.

 

”les membres du conseil aut isé ar Pros er Barthél Enfantin our
llexecution de ses dernilres volontZs."

By 1890, 202 non-femininefl degrees had been awarded to women:
35 medical doctorates, 69 bscs in science, 67 bees in letters, 16
liggpppp, and 2 degrees in pharmacy. Schools in Paris granted 102 of
the 202 degrees. Le Rppit des Femmes, 7 September 1890.

1§£22£2§1_§3§_zggppp, December 1899. Perhaps the delegation

should have been forewarned, for the month before in November 1899,
Millerand had instituted a new pay scale at the Ministry of Posts
and Telegraphs, starting women at 1,000 francs per year with a top
salary of 2,200 -- less than men at both ends of the scale. Lg_

Fr de, 3 November 1899.

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69

Domestic skills and religious indoctrination along the lines spelled

out by Bishop Fénelon in the seventeenth century would suffice to enable
women to accomplish their divine mission as guardians of the home and
raisers of children. "Instead of bachiéres, licenciées. doctoresses,
make good Christians, good housewives, educated women without doubt,"
wrote Guéroult."l am in favor of education as much as can be, having
the honor to belong myself as member and lauréat to a Société d'In-
struction et d'Education Populaires, but an education limited to con-
form.to their sex, their condition, the mission that Divine Providence
has confided to them; make girls modest, pious, reserved, charitable,

thriftyo17

 

17Georges GuEroult, Du R61e de la femme dens notre renovatiop
(Caen, 1891), 7-8. Guéronlt's reliance on Bishop Fénelon

1651-1715) as a guide for women's education under the Third Republic
reflected the belief that the family constituted the basis of society
and that women represented the basis of the family. With that belief
in mind, Finelon had inspired Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719) to create
the first lay school fer girls in France at Saint-Cyr. Through the
instruction provided there, Fénelon hoped to steer women away from
frivolity, which he identified with the French court and which led
Maintenon to reduce reading materials to an absolute minimum, and to
revive the middle ranks of the nobility by training women to become
”professional” wives, mothers, and estate managers. Finelon dis-
trusted women, but he recognized their potential as a collective force
for social transformation. Leaders of the Third Republic also recog-
nized that potential, with the result that, despite the shift from
aristocratic to bourgeois values, they ascribed to women a shailarly
limited but exalted role. Thus, although the Third Republic's educa-
tion reforms affected many more women than Finelon's, the effect was
roughly the meme; to control women and to employ them as a force for
social change, rather than to permit women to develop their individual
talents. See: Carolyn Lougee, ”The Impact of Fénelon and Madame de
Maintenon: Education of Woman for Domestic Fulfillment in the Late
Seventeenth Century,” and Karen M. Offen, “French Feminists Challenge
the Third Republic's Public Education for Girls: The Campaign for
Equal Access to the Baccalaureate, 1880-1924," papers read at the annual
American Historical Association Convention in December, 1973; Madame
Pauline Rebour, 'L'Education civique des Femmes," Bulletin 1914-1916,
(Union Frangaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes), 72-77; Fran ois do Salig-
nac do La Mothe-F‘nelon, Education des filles (Paris, 1687 ; and Larnac,

Miptpire de la litterpture fininine en Frapce, 95-100.

 

 

 

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70

By the end of the movement's first generation, roughly 1889,
feminism had acquired sufficient momentum to generate reams of printed
tracts. But at the outset of that generation, before organized efforts
provided a propaganda base, most printed protests against the systeme
masculiniste took the form of highly individualistic responses to
specific incidents. These responses contributed to the common critique
and engendered an impetus to organization, but their initial motivation
and essential quality was reactive. Stung by displays of the righteous-
ness of man, a few women felt provoked enough to discharge their anguish
in angry protests. Some of these protests barely survived the moment of
their publication. Others lived on for years, depending upon the im-
portance of the provocative incident, the stature of the ”righteous"
opponent, the longevity and prestige of the feminist writer, and whether
or not the protest conformed to the movement's subsequent "line."

An example of short-lived protest occurred in the mid-1860's
after Procurator General Dupin launched an attack in the Senate on wo-
man's ”frantic” addiction to luxury. At least two pamphlets appeared
in reaction. One pointed out the hypocrisy of males who blmmed ”good"
women for dressing well while they themselves lavished finery on
courtesans. It also stressed the importance of the fashion industry to
the French economy.18 The second pamphlet acknowledged the seriousness

of Dupin's attack but turned it against him:

 

18“Uoman creates luxury, luxury creates industry, industry trans-
forms man . . .. The proscription of luxury! but that is suicide for
France, and not only for economic France, but also for artistic France.
Our workers would have to emigrate, and our artists throw themselves
into the Seine with heavy stones round their necks.” Olympe Audouard,

Le luxe des femmes: riponse d'une femme l M. la Procureur General
Dugig Paris, 1865 , 26-27.

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71
A horrifying pest, £3 evil that spreads terror, is ravaging

French society! . . . This scourge, this pestilential evil, this

enemy of all good social economy is LUXURY . . . [8u57 much more

disastrous than the luxury of women is that of men (Oui, trEs-

bien! tres-bien!) You see: these men have invented clothes for

the morning, the afternoon, the woods, the track, the evenin ,

the hunt: useless fantasies, prolific in ruinous expenses.1

The author of these two pamphlets, Olympe Audouard, also expressed

her anger in a book, Guerre aux Hommes (1866). Audouard charged that men
made sport of women, trading on their faults and reputations and forget-
ting the sex of their own mothers, sisters and daughters. Misery ruined
women, not luxury, and that misery was always the fault of men.
Audouard concluded that male egotism constituted the root of social dis-
integration, accounting for why "woman is neither free nor happy in
France."20 The publication of Guerre aux Hommes coincided with the
refusal of the Second Empire to permit Audouard to transform her artistic
and literary journal, Le Pa illon, into a political sheet, a right re-
served to males only. The following year she appealed directly to the
French legislature for women's equal civil and political rights, and,
although she gained no relief, her use of the petition foreshadowed a
tactic repeatedly employed by feminists under the Third Republic.21

Several years before the controversy over luxury, two other pro--

tests of more profound and enduring impact appeared. Both came in

 

19Olympe Audouard, Le luxe effréné des hommes, 5-7.

20Audouard, Guerre aux Hommes, 57. In reaction to the male prac-
tice of categorizing women, Audouard described fifteen "villinous types"
of men ranging from the ”toad" and the "chameleon” to the ”sphinx" and
the "skilled compromise: of women."

21Olympe Audouard, Lettrg gux deputés (Paris, 1867). See also:

Baron Marc de Villiers, Mistoire des clubs de femme! et des ligions
d'Amazons 1793-1848-1871 (Paris, 1910), 381-82; Lion Abensour, Histoire

general du feminisme (Paris, 1921), 267.

 

respons
luence
assault
1866, a
Working
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correla
"Woman

Of the

72

response to the publication of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's La Justice dans
la Revolution et dans l'figlise (1858). Proudhon exercised enormous in-
fluence, particularly among workers in France, and the scope of his
assault on women went far beyond matters of dress and frivolity. In
1866, a year after his death, the French section of the International
workingman's Association paid tribute to Proudhon's persuasiveness by
adopting a resolution barring women from work outside the home. In
Proudhon's eyes, women embodied inferiority. Men exceeded them in
physical strength by a ratio of three to two and, because muscle power
correlated to brain power, men had the same edge in intelligence:
"Woman has a false mind, irremediably false . . . Woman is the desolation
of the just . . .

From the moral point of view as from the physical and intel-

lectual points of view her comparative value is again 2 to 3.

And since society is constituted on the combination of these

three elements: work, science, justice, the total value of man

and woman, their productivity and consequently their portion

of influence, on a comparatéye basis, will be 3 x 3 x 3 is to

2 x 2 x 2, that is 27 to 8.
woman might improve through education, Proudhon conceded, but her destiny
remained uniquely domestic. As housewife she assumed her rightful place
in society; outside the home she became a whore. She must cultivate her
”beauty," her ”charm," and her "juvenile grace" in order to stand in
proper relationship to man: "As the face of woman is the mirror in
which man acquires respect for his own body, so the intelligence of wo-

man is also the mirror in which he contemplates his genius."23

 

22Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et
QIBI.1L£&11££.(3 vols., Paris, 1858), III, 375. Cited in Charles

Thiébaux, Le Feminisme et les sogialistes depuis Saint-Simon jusgu'i
nos jours. Paris, 1906), 88, 91, 92-93.

”Proudhon, De la justice, III, 380. Cited in Thiébaux, _L_e_
Féminisme et les s cialistes, 95. See also Chapter 1. Most French

rep
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73
The first of the two significant publications protesting Proudhon's

ideas appeared in the same year, appropriately entitled Idées anti-

progdhonienneg g3; l'amourI la femmeI et le marigge. Twentybtwo year
old Juliette Lumber wrote the book in just two months, finding it impos-

sible ”to oppose to his reasons mixed with injuries the disdainful silence
that ordinarily rewards those who speak a certain language.” Proudhon,

She wrote,

represents force, since he is man: as for me, weakness, since

I am woman. But there is one thing above force, the truth . . . .
The cause that I defend will succeed, but not without combat and
effort. It needs to be defended against some, against many.
Yesterday, it was against the adversaries of progress; today,
against M. Proudhon; tomorrow perhaps, against the friends of
progress and misunderstood liberty. 4

Lumber feared Proudhon's "power of proselytism":

His doctrines on woman are extremely dangerous; they express
the general feelings of men who, regardless of the party to which
they belong, progressives or reactionaries, monarchists or re—
publicans, Christians or pagans, atheists or deists, would be
delighted to discover the means of reconciling at the same time
their egotism and their conscience in a system that would permit
them to preserve the benefits of exploitation based on force,
without having to-fear protests founded on right.25

 

socialists subsequently repudiated Proudhon's extreme position. "Whore
or housewife!" wrote Jules Guesde in the Socialists of 12 October 1890,
”nothing less conforms to the truth than this famous dilemma of
manpmade sophism . . . . No, the place of woman is no longer in the
home as before. Like that of man, it is everywhere, everywhere where
her industry can and wants to be employed." Jules Guesde, En Garde!

contre les contrefa ons les mir es et la fausse monnaie des ref rmes
bogggeoises; pglemigges (Paris, 1911;, 157-58.
2h

Juliette Lamber, Idées anti- roudhoniennes sur l'amour la
femme et le marigge (2nd ed., Paris, 1831), 13.

25am. , 41.1.2.

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74
Lamber granted that men like Proudhon meant well; she too objected to
woman's passion for frills, and she acknowledged the marked backwardness
of her female contemporaries.26
Proudhon responded graciously to Lamber's book: "If it is the

welfare of women that you wish to serve," he wrote, "then count me among

"27

your partisans. But to Lamber's mind the solution was not to confine

women to the home, as Proudhon maintained, but rather to open new careers
to them:

It is not in limiting the scope of her activity that they
‘will arrest this disorder, but rather by opening up new channels
for the wholesome play of her energy. Women must be educated
thoroughly, and, wherever possible, professionally. They must
be made productive. Work alone has emancipated man. Work alone
can emancipate woman. . .

But do not let me be accused of undervaluing woman's role
in the family; I, like Proudhon, believe that a woman's first
duty is to be wife and mother. But I maintain that family life
need not absorb all woman's activities, physical, moral and
intellectual. The part of a broody hen is honourable without
doubt, but it is not suited t3 everyone, neither is it so ab-
sorbing as it is represented. 8

Lamber concluded that progress depended on the cooperation of men and
women as equals:
A.mere glance at the history of mankind will suffice to

show that among nations civilization is in proportion to the
part played by woman, to her influence, to her moral worth;

 

26As Madam Adam, Lamber wrote in 1885 that ”it seems to me that,
here in trance, ambition comes to women before the search for merit. . .
It is necessary first to require of those we emancipate the proof that
demands for their rights rest on knowledge of their capacity, that is
to say, their duties,” Le Droit des Femmes, 6 September 1885.

27Proudhon, La Pornocratie ou les femmes dans les tggps modernes

(Paris, n.d.), 17. Cited in Thitbaux, £3 Féminisme et les socialisteg,
101.

28Cited in Winifred Stephens, Madam.Adam {Juliette Lumber} La

Grande Frangaise: From Louis Philippe until 1917 (New'York, 1917,
60-61.

 

‘1

 

sajor r
tablish
'Proudh
Decenbe
Proudho

\
pggse a
novateu

d'HEric

75

and as civilization increases, the greater will be the value
set upon the position accorded to woman.2

Two years later, in 1860, Jenny d'HEricourt published the second
major reaction to Proudhon. An older, experienced writer with an es-
tablished reputation, d'Héricourt had already written an article on
”Proudhon and the Woman Question" for the Revue Philosophigpg of

December 1856.30

She seized on the publication of Justice to respond to
Proudhon and others of similar persuasion in Lp Femme affranchig: r63
pgpse i HM, Hichelet,gProudhon, E, de Girardin. A,,Comte et aux autres

novateurs modernes. In a manner similar to Audouard's subsequent Guerre,

d'fl‘ricourt explained her position and declared her objective:

 

22;§£§., 59. According to Lamber, the Second Empire's censors

initially banned all of Proudhon's Justice except for the part that
dealt with women, Idies anti-proudhonienpgp, 12. In her personal life,
Lamber underwent one of the more common experiences afforded to women
by the systime masculiniste. Family pressure drove her into an early
and unsatisfactory marriage. With divorce unavailable, she attempted to
arrange a legal separation. After lengthy negotiations, her husband,
who exercised control over her property and royalties, agreed to settle
for 15,000 francs. His death in 1867 on the eve of the formal agree-
mmmt ended the dispute and led Lamber to record that day as one of the
happiest of her life. A year later she married Edmond Adam. Juliette
Iamber, Hes sentiments et mes idées avant 1870 (6th ed., Paris, 1895),
131‘34e

30Jenny d'fliricourt, La Femme affrpnchie: répppsg I Hichelet,

Proudhon E de Girardin A. Comte et aux autres novateurs modernes
(Brussels, 18605. The Second Empire's censors initially banned‘pp
Femme affranchie, but the Emperor lifted the ban after he received
a personal appeal from d'H‘ricourt. The quotations are taken from

the English edition: Madame d'Héricourt, A Woman's Philosophy pf
W Woma fra chised° swer to Hi helet Pr dh n

Girardin ouv‘ Comte and other Modern Innovators (New York,
18645, 33.

 

 

------

-------

.....

-------

Why, 3
should
Proudh
as bit
only 0

hot sh

Iade a
ferior;
eill-Ploy
novatol

but b1:

76

In marriage, woman is a serf.
In public instruction, she is sacrificed.
In labor, she is made inferior.
Civilly, she is a minor.
Politically, she has no existence.
Sheiis the equal of man only when punishment and the
ppyment of taxes are ingguestiop.

I claim the rights of woman, because it is time to
make the nineteenth century ashamed of its culpable
denial of justice to half the human species.31

Why, she asked, should women criticize Michelet's ostensibly sympathetic
La Femme and L'Amour? ”Because to him woman is a perpetual invalid who
should be shut up in a gynoeceum," she answered. He differed from
Proudhon only in style: ”the first is as sweet as honey, and the second
as bitter as wormwood. . . We will therefore castigate him.[iiche1e§7
only over the shoulders of M. Proudhon, who may be cannonaded with red
hot shot."32
D'Hiricourt's other targets received more gentle treatment. She
made a distinction between Comte's "priestly" assertion of woman's in-
feriority and his positivism, a mode of analysis she hoped others would
employ to a better end. Legouv‘, Girardin, and the "other modern in-

novators,’ mostly utopian socialists, received praise for compassion

but blame for enveloping the woman question in mysticism:

Excuse me, brothers, from joining in your theological dis-
cussion: my wings are not strong enough to follow you into
the bosom of God, in order to assure myself whether he is

spirit or matter, androgynous or not, binary, trinary,

 

311bid., ix-x.

32

Ibid., 17, 20. “Woman, according £p_Miche1et, is a being of
a nature opposite to that of man, wrote Audouard: "a creature weak,
always unded, exceedingly barometrical, and consequently, unfit for
labor. . . Created £25.232, she is the altar of his heart, his re-
freshment, his consolation." (page 17) D'HEricourt's references were
to Jules Michelet's La Femme (Paris, 1860) and L’Amour (Paris,
1858).

l
'i

 

best r.
Emiliht
femini,

of her

77

quarternary, or nothing of all these. It is enough that you all
grant that woman should be free, and the equal of man.

Granting woman free and equal status could not, however, compensate

for their emphasis on men and women as two parts of the same whole:
I permit myself only a single observation; that your notion of
the couple . . . . tends fatally to the subjection of my sex . . . .
12 social ractice, this unity is manifested by a single will,
. . . and the individuality that prevails in our society is that
which is endowed with strength of am;sthe other is annihilated,
and the right given to the couple is in reality only the right
of the stronger. The use that M3 Proudhon has. made of androgyny
ought to cure you of this fancy.

Although d'Héricourt's book was hailed in the united States as the
best reply to Proudhon and the other masculinists, Lamber's Ide'es anti-
W exerted a much greater influence in France.35 Subsequent
feminists appreciated d'He’ricourt's motives, but felt that the "violence

of her words unfortunately negated the force of her argument."36 But

 

33Ibid., 202—03.
3"Ibid., 203.

35Ibid., vii. The unidentified author of the introduction to the
English translation wrote: "This remarkable book of Madame d'He'ricourt on
woman is conceded to be the best reply to these philosophers extent.”
This tribute may have steamed solely from prior awareness. Without men-
tion of Lumber, contemporary American feminists had earlier recorded: "A
very curious controversy, on paper, is going on at present in the Revue
Philoso hi ue et Reli ieuse, between 11. Proudhon and Mme. Jenny d'Hericourt.
The latter defends, with great warmth, the moral, civil, and political
mancipation of woman. Proudhon, in reply, declares that all the theories
of line. d'He'ricourt are inapplicable, in consequence of the inherent weak-
ness of her sex. The periodical in which the contest is going on was
founded and is conducted by the old St. Simoniens." Elizabeth Cad Stanton
et. al., History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., New York, 1969), I [€848-186g,
870.

36Ahensour, Histoire éhérale dn féhinisme, 266. Thiébaux wrote:
”The publication “3‘!sz her maiden name, Lamber,
instead of her married name, Lamessine of Ideas anti roudhoniennes sur
la 1"‘elmneI l'amour et le marige (1858 was an event, from then on
there existed in reality a feminist question and partisans of the one or
the other thesis declared themselves." Le Féminisme et les socialistes, 100.
(Thie‘baux erred in citing the title of Iamber's book in this quotation:
his bibliography has it in the correct form.)

 

other:

‘1 ' 1.. Pablit

. . ‘ diffic

I ' ............ dead,
Madame

Outlix

her bj

 

78
there were other, equally important reasons for her relative disfavor.
She and Lamber both frequented the salon of Charles Fauvety, editor of
the Re a Philoso hi e, where, according to Lamber, d'He'ricourt appeared
as a conceited, bigoted, dogmatic "bluestocking of the most objectionable
type.” lee'ricourt reciprocated, exclaiming to Fauvety: "Would you be-
lieve it, that young lady actually dares to take upon herself to under-
line Prondhon." When Lamber expressed concern about the preparation
of £13293, acknowledging that she lacked the experience of veterans,
d'He’ricourt responded: "Veterans! Veterans! You mean me, doubtless.
Well, if you defend some of us [women , you are very impertinent to
others."37 How much these exchanges, recorded in a biography of Lamber
published during the First World War, affected feminist opinion is
difficult to say. But to the extent that the living interpret the
dead, Lamber had a decided advantage. Not only did she become, as
Madame Adam, one of France's foremost political journalists, but she
outlived her adversary by decades. Lamber died in 1936, a century after

her birth.38

 

37Stephens, Madame Adam, 22, 48.

38hr twenty years Madame Adam promoted the cause of revenge
against Germany through her La Nouvelle Revue (1879-1899). She also
ran a hi 1y influential republican salon, through which she intro-
duced Leon Gambetta to French political life. Throughout the generation
that built the feminist movement in France and despite the importance
of her Ide'es anti- roudhoniennes, Adam stood apart from the struggle
for women s liberation. She differed not only with d‘He'riconrt
but with Cle'mence Royer and Maria Deraismes as well. When Adm finally
rejoined the movement in 1893, her energy went into Schnahl's conser-
vative l'Avent-CogrliEre. In the opinion of Jane Misme, "elle
personnifie a la fois l influence féninine, tells qn'on l'admettait
jadia, et l'action fe'minine come elle est permise aujourd'hui, apdtre
en cola, plus qne par ses gestes proprement féninistes, de l'e'mancipation
dos fumes.” Mime also ranked Imber's work on Proudhon above

{liar 'DWI-r- ' M

 

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79

Considerably more important to the fate of La Femme affranchip
than either its tone or d'He'ricourt's feud with Lamber was another
factor, d'se’rieourt'. failure to adopt the correct "line." Lamber
acknowledged that feminists might confront opposition from the "friends
of progress and misunderstood liberty," but only as a "perhaps" and not
until ”tomorrow.” Consequently, she limited her protest to the imediate
adversary, Proudhon. In contrast, d'He'ricourt sensed that Lamber's
"tomorrow" had come. Revolutionaries, she noted, had abandoned women
twice before, in 1789 and in 1848, and a third betrayal seemed iminent.
She therefore went beyond Proudhon, whose Justice so flagrantly vio-
lated woman's aspirations, in order to expose others whose honey-sweet
sentiments tended to perpetuate male domination. While Lamber paid
lip service to the idea that nations advanced "in proportion to the part
played by women,“ d'He'ricourt believed it. To the advanced thinkers,
to the democrats, to the friends of freedom, to the Michelets, Legonve's,

and Girardins, she issued a stern warning:

 

d'He'ricourt's: ”Les Ide'es antiproudhoniennes furent, de longtemps,
lo soul gage que leur auteur donna an feminisme. Le mouvement

e'tait alors assoupi; l'ide'e, depnis I'Enpire, no se maintenait que
par des manifestations isole’es. Le livre de Mme. La Messine fut sans
contredit la lus e'clatante et la plus efficace. La Femme affranchie,
de Jenny d'Hericourt, qui parut deux ans plus tard et qui repondait
aussi i Proudhon mais sans defendre Daniel Stern et George Sand,

et dans une forme aride, out une porte'e moindre.“ Jane Misme, ”Les
Grandes Figures du Fe'minisme: Madam Adam," Minerva, 1 February 1931.
See also: Stephens, Madam Adam: Joseph 0. Baylen, "Mme. Juliette
Adam, Gambetta, and the Idea of a Franco-Prussian Alliance" Social
Studies No 1., LVII, No. 15 (Stillwater, Oklahoma, 20 May 1966')“;
and Helene Brion, ed., ”Encyclopedia Féniniste," I, 1453 at mm.

For Adam's attitude towards feminisms (in English), see her Humani-
tarian article of February 1897 reviewed in "Position of Women in France,“
Review of Reviews, xv (April, 1897), 480.

AW - Irma-mu _.. '

 

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80

Woman is ripe for civic liberty, and we declare to you

that, from this time on, we shall regard as an enemy of

progress and the Revolution anyone who comes out against

our legitimate claim, just as wei shall rank among the

friends of progress and the Revolution those who speak

out for our civic emancipation -- even if they be your

enemies.

The warning proved prescient but impolitic. By criticizing
others than Proudhon, d'HEricourt challenged the prevalent belief that
political, economic, and social progress for France as a whole would
automatically benefit women. Writing at mid point in the Second Empire,
when republicanism dominated the thoughts of many advanced thinkers, she
asserted in effect that a proper attitude on the woman question alone
should distinguish friend from foe. Lamber disagreed and devoted the
remainder of her life to a brand of chauvinsitic nationalism. But other,
more devoted feminists also disagreed; they viewed republican democracy
as an essential precondition for reforms of all types, including those
affecting women. Thus, in attacking so many "friends of freedom" and
in suggesting that common cause with republicans might disserve women,
d'Héricourt placed herself outside the political parameters that marked
the woman question's "legitimate” field of debate. Towards the end of
the generation that built the movement, feminist Léon Richer remarked
that his greatest error had been to be right at the wrong time.“0
D'Méricourt might easily have said the same, but whereas Richer had been

wrong by only a few decades, d'Héricourt missed her moment by a century

or MICe

The lopsided reaction of subsequent feminists to d'Héricourt's and

Lamber's books reflected attitudes of critical importance to the emergent

 

39Cited in Thomas, The Woman Incendiaries, 24-25.

‘05; Droit des Femmes, 5 January 1889.

‘ 'M I
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81
movement. Later feminists could easily identify with the alienating ex-
perience that prompted the two works; they too confronted articulate
spokesmen for the systeme masculiniste. They could also identify with
the constraining ambience in which d'Héricourt and Lamber wrote; the dis-
criminatory trend in favor of the rights of man and daily contact with the
righteousness of man constituted the roots of their own alienating ex-
periences. Nevertheless, most subsequent feminists could not accept
d'Héricourt's conclusions. From their vantage point, she had permitted
her alienation to flow into the wrong channel, confusing friend with foe.
Hence they repudiated her views. In the long run, that reaction damaged
the cause of women's liberation in France. Yet that reaction also illu-
strated one of the central difficulties of feminist consciousness in the
nineteenth century. For, if alienation lay at the root of feminist con-
sciousness, there were no clear signs marking out which route the

struggle to liberate women should take.

Epstes of Femipést Consciousness

As evidenced by the many alarms, crises, revolutions, and reac-
tions that swept France between 1789 and 1914, expressions of discontent
proved nearly as varied as the conditions from.which discontent flowed.
To every configuration assumed by French society there emerged an al-
ternative, and an alternative to the alternative. Those whose discontent
arose from experiences rooted in the systéme masculiniste faced a be-
wildering array of options. Women could hardly separate themselves from
French society, and in any case feminists had no desire to increase sex-
ist segregation. But what of the systime? Mad it become so pervasive
that only a complete and radical change would eliminate it, or could it

be ameliorated through reforms that left existing institutions intact?

 

And that of ochr-
I

abuse of animalsl
isolation, or mu
|

In principle was
I
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Only one
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them demanded 511 I
”Ci“? had to a.
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express thmselv
those who chafed
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or develop their

W

UtOPian ,

 

 

82
And what of other injustices: war3censorship, mistreatment of children,
abuse of animals? Could the struggle to liberate women take place in
isolation, or must feminism concern itself with all fonms of oppression?
In principle was justice indivisible? In practice could the woman ques-
tion be answered without reference to other questions?

Only one thing was clear; questions like these could not be
answered in the abstract. The alienating experiences that gave rise to
them demanded substantive, concrete relief. In whole or in part French
society had to assume a new configuration. But in order for feminists
to translate their discontent into productive change, they had first to
find doctrines by which to define themselves, channels through which to
express themselves, and allies with whom to align themselves. In short,
those who chafed at the constraints imposed on women by the szstéme Egg:
culiniste had to pick and choose between various available alternatives,

or develop their own.

Utopian Socialism
Utopian socialism provided one alternative. The titular founder

of this school of thought, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), wrote

scarcely a word about women}1 But his heirs accorded an extraordinary

 

hlSullerot, Presse, 1&4. For information on the relationship of

utopian socialism to feminism and women, see: C. Bouglé, Chez les pro-
phetes socialistes (Paris, 1918), 51—110; Edith Thomas, Pauline Roland,
Socialisme et Feminisme aux me siécle (Paris, 1956); Ma'r'gu' erite Thibert,

Le Feminisme dans le Socialisme francais de 18§0 5 1850 (Paris, 1926);
. Dessi 011e, Le Feminisme d a res 1a doctrine socialiste de Charles
Fourier L on, 19035; Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris lNew
York, 1962 , 53-248; Thiéhaux, Le Feminisme et les socialistes;
Abensour, Histoire generale, 205-15. See also: Le Devoir, journal of

the Eamilistere de Guise, and La Renovation, journal of the Ecole
Societaire Phalanstérienne.

 

En-in.l vb‘N" .

inpor
clude
by Ch
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(1788'
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83

importance to the woman question. Books touching on the subject in-
cluded the mystical but insightful Theorie des ngtre Mouvements (1808)
by Charles Fourier (1772-1837), De 1'Ege11ré (1838) by Pierre Leroux
(1797-1871), and the novel nggge en Icarie (1840) by Etienne Cabet
(1788-1856). Newspapers displaying a similar interest included the
Seint-Simonien Le Producteur and Le Globe (edited by Pierre Leroux),
Victor Considirent's Fourierist Le Phalenge and Le Démocratie Pacifi ue,
and the Tribune des Femmes (1832-1834), the first feminist journal to
appear in France since Napoleon suppressed the AthenEe des Dames in
1808.“2

Emphases varied between individual thinkers, but in general uto-
pisn socialists espoused a critique of the systeme masculiniste that in-
volved new definitions of society, the couple, man, and women. women's
Oppression under the systeme found apt description in Cabet's Realisstion
d'Icerie (1846):

Woman is actually a slave, not individually like the negress,

er the ancient slave, or the woman of bygone times over whom

her husband had the right of life and death and especially

repudiation, but women 2; 22.3.2. are the slaves of men £3 m_a_§_s_e_

who leave them ng_rights and impose on them all the laws dic-

tated by their [mslg/ csprice and their [malg/ egotism.“3
The cause of this oppression lay in the past when ”Antagonism," the ex-
ploitation of ”man by man,” reigned supreme. But, as Saint-Simon pointed

out, a new’ers of affection and cooperation had begun to dawn:

National hatred: ere diminishing every day and the people of
the earth who are ready for a total and definitive alliance present

 

42Sullerot, Presse, 153-63.

‘3Etienne Cebet, Réslisetion d'Icerie, Extract from No. 16 of
Populgire (Paris, 1846), 122. Cited in Thiebeux, Le Fininisme et les
s islistes, 73.

ssssss

"” "' " N g iden‘
Enfax
tutit
mate

of t}

........

 

.....

 

84

us with the beautiful spectacle of humanity gravitating
toward universal association.

One impediment to universal association stemmed from the Christian
identification of woman with the flesh and the flesh with sin. Prosper
Enfantin (1796-1864) believed that Christianity, supported by the insti-
tution of private property, had created prostitution, perverting legiti-
mate physical desire and the sacred rights of beauty. To this "disorder
of the flesh," Enfantin opposed the "rehabilitation of the flesh":

we wish to rehabilitate the flesh, and to sanctify physical
beauty by bestowing upon it a social importance which . . .
it must today obtain through fraud. . . , Yes, truly, the
flesh repressed and martyred by the Church for so long is
today free from this heavy burden; but it is in a state of
disorder. Today the flesh causes destruction as it did at
the time of the appearance of Christ, and it is still the
shame of the world. . . .

Look at the people. They sell their bodies to labor;
they sell their blood to war; they sell their daughters'
flesh to pleasure and to shame. For a piece of bread the
world contorts them, commits them to toil and to the
appeasement of passion; it prostitutes ghe peOple both
in their strength and in their beauty.“

In order to overcome "Antagonism" and its associated "disorder,”
men and women had to throw off the burden of the past and adopt a new
social ethic: love. Love would permit the passage from social egotism
to social altruism, from ”Antagonism” to "Associationism." It would

also render violence unnecessary.

 

C. Bougl‘ and Ella Halivy, eds., Doctrine de Saint-Simon, Ex-

ggsition. Premiere glgee, 1829 (Paris, 1924), 164. Cited in Manuel,
The Pro hets of Paris, 172.

bsProces en la cour d'assises de la Seine les 27 et 28 a t 1832
(Paris, 1832), 210-17, 221. Cited in Manuel, The Pro hets of Paris,
187-88.

“6”The word upheaval is always associated with a blfgd and brutal
force having as its goal destruction. . . . This doctrine [of Saint-
Si does not itself possess or recognize for the direction of men any
other power but that of persuasion and conviction. . ." Doctrine de Saint-
§iggg, 278-79. Cited in Manuel, The Prophets of Paris, 181.

1-..“--"4-3’

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85

The vision of a society transformed without violence into asso-
ciations based on love left a critical issue unresolved -- the future
status of women. All utopian socialists called for sex equality. As
Enfantin wrote, "the equality of man and woman, without which there is
exploitation of one half the human genre by the other, is the law of
the future, the sole moral law that it is possible to conceive."47
Some, like Fourier, attributed superior qualities to women: "I am
justified in saying that woman in a state of liberty will surpass men
in all mental and bodily functions that are not ascribed to physical
strength.“8 But how would this "moral law" and these superior
”functions" be expressed?

In their quest for an answer, one faction of utopians stressed
the primacy of the couple and marriage. Single women should have the
same rights as single men, wrote Pierre Leroux, but only love and
marriage could free women:

She loves, she is loved, 12.!iglghfgggg. . . . It is through
marriage that the condition of woman has been ameliorated, it
is through marriage, the equality of love, that the emancipa-
tion of woman will truly take place."9

Couples would freely contract in the reconstructed society of the

future, and to anticipate their break-up ran "contrary to the ideal."

 

 

“7Qggvres complites de Saint-Simon et d'EnfantinI publiées

2a; les membres du Conseil institué par Enfagtin._pour 1 exécution
de ses dernilres volontts (42 vols., Paris, 1865-76), XIV, 39.
Cited in Thiébaux, Le Féminisme et les socialistes, 18.

“BCharles Fourier, Théorie des guatre mouvements, 225.
Cited in Thiibaux, Le Piminisme et les socialisteg, 49.

49Pierre Leroux, De l'figaliti, suivi d'aphorisme sur la
doctrine de l'humaniti (Boussac, 1838), IV, 46. Cited in Thiebaux,

Le thinisme et les socialistes, 39-40.

 

 

 

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86
To Leroux and others like Olinde Rodrigues "the cessation of love,
separation and divorce are tantamount to death before death."50
Another faction attacked marriage for failing to take human

differences into account. Fourier held the institution directly respon-
sible for woman's subordination:

Marriage is the tomb of woman's liberty, the principle of all

feminine servitude. Daughters are compelled to become house-

wives and wives to confine themselves to the home and to be

faithful, even though three-quarters of them have no taste

for family work, are capricious in love5 predisposed to adorn-

ment, to gallantry, and to dissipation.
"Marriage is prostitution by law," exclaimed Claire Demar, one of the
editors of the Tribune des Femmes, whose experience of the contradiction
between conventional morality and the desire to be free drove her to
suicide.52 Some individuals might desire permanent unions, admitted
Enfantin, but couples should endure only so long as they met each
others' needs:

we have profound feelings or lively, enduring, or transitory

feelings: we are reserved, modest, moderate, patient, or very

enthusiastic, loving glory, brilliance, passion, etc. Either

of these forms is good, the one wants to conserve, the other

wonts to ggnovate. . . . The one is immutable, the other is

changing.
For the many who preferred a change of "place, things, habits, society,

and finally husbands and wives,” argued Enfantin, divorce represented a

right, not a misfortune. It cannot he, wrote onof Enfantin's

 

soCited without source indication in Thiibaux, Le Fiminisme et

les gocialistes, 42.

51Fourier, Theorie des guatre mouvements. Cited in Thiébaux,

Le P‘minisnn et les socialistes, 58.
52Sullerot, Presse, 160.

53Oeuvres com lites de Saint-Simon et d'Enfantin, XXVII, 191.
Cited in Thilbaux, Le Feminisme et les socialistes, 25.

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87
followers, "that the exclusive love of one man for one woman lasting
their whole lives is a law or even a universal tendency of mankind:
I deny that this precept conforms and is applicable to the
nature of all men and all_women without exception. . . . I
say, then, that to fight and overthrow the principle of
Christian love we would need merely to declare that a reli-
gion which saw in celibacy the state most favorable to sal-
vation and the one closest to perfection was too ignorant
of human nature to have been capable of giving marriage a
solid and stable base.5“

Enfantin's ideas undoubtedly influenced the turn-of-the-century
feminist who described utopian socialism as a "monstrous orgy where
giants endowed with appetites of ogres gorged themselves on monstrous
feasts and innumerable loves."55 But on the individuals who built the
feminist movement, utopian socialism had a profound and salutary effect.
Through it ”a number of women emerged with a new'conception of their
own dignity and worth,” and "it gave them the confidence to express
themselves and provided them with the courage to formulate conceptions
about their own possibilities, which would have been inconceivable to
women a generation before."56 Even in the late 1870's and 1880's when
French socialism.became less utopian and more mdlitant, Saint-Simonianism

and Pourierism continued to exert a strong influence. Some of the women

who initially subscribed to the new socialisms broke out with them in

 

5“Abel Transon, Afgrgnchissement dea Femmes, predication du ler
1g2vier 1832 (Paris, 1832 . Cited in Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P.
Manuel, eds., French Utopias (New York, 1966), 294. Christian patience
collapsed sooner than Christian principles. The imprisonment of Enfan-
tin in 1832 for outrages against public morality decapitated Saint-
Simonianism and brought about the dispersal of its disciples, some of
whom embarked for Egypt in search of a "female messiah."

55
56

Misme, ”La Vie et la mort du feminisme," 26.

Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution, 52.

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88

order to resume the pursuit of the older utopian version of social
transformation.57

Utopian socialism's appeal stemmed in part from its vague, senti-
mental egalitarianism, which enabled feminists to avoid too narrow a
commitment to any particular reform, and from its advocacy of peaceful
change, which meshed well with the feminist conviction that masculinisme
caused violence. The first feminist newspaper outside Paris, Eugenie
Niboyet's ggpgeiller des Femmes (1833) of Lyon, bore its imprint, and
the first femdnist daily, Niboyet's La Vpix des Femmes (1848), managed
a brief life with the help of subsidies from Saint-Simonian banker
Olinde Rodrigues.58 Many of the reforms proposed during the Revolution
of 1848 reflected the influence of utopian socialists or other pro-
feminist socialists like Louis Blanc and Constantin Pecqueur. Between
1848 and 1849, feminist Jeanne Deroin, a disciple of Saint-Simon and

Cabet, created a women's club, a feminist newspaper, a worker's

association, and ran for a seat on the National Assembly in a

 

57Utopian influence declined during the movement's second genera-
tion, but many of the older, first generation feminists remained heavily
indebted to it. Consequently, they tended to share opinions like
Adolphe Alhaiza's, whose De PhalanstErien l socialiste (Paris, 1900)
branded class-struggle socialists as money hungry, traitorous politi-
cians. With Dr. E. Verrier, who wrote Le Meillepr des socialismes
pratigues: 1e socialisme phalanstirien (Toulouse, 1905), they sub-
scribed to the methode sociétaire, the principles of Fourier, and the
practice of the Familistere de Guise. To first generation feminists,
as to Verrier, the socialism of Guesde and Jaurls represented a "re-
turn to primitive barbarism" and "the annihilation of all social life."
For an examination of women and the newer socialisms, see: Charles
Soworine, Women and Socialism in France 1871-1921: Socialist Women's
Groups from Lionie Rouzade to Louise Saumoneau (unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, Dept. of History, University of Wisconsin, 1973)

58Sullerot, Presse, 186-87.

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89
precedent-setting act of protest against woman's exclusion from the re-
cent enactment of universal manhood suffrage.59 In the late 1860's,
utopian socialism inspired several cooperatives, including Nathalie
Lemel's La Marmite and Marguerite Tinayre's SociEt! des Equitables de
Paris.60 In 1871 the Paris Commune engaged in additional experimenta-
tion along utopian socialist lines. None of these efforts effected
lasting institutional changes of benefit to women, but the tie between
feminism and utopian socialism remained strong. In contrast to the vast
French majority who evidenced hostility or apathy towards women's libera-
tion, utopian socialists not only repeatedly attempted to improve woman's
lot but paid in suffering for their failure. A veritable Whprhflhp’of
socialist feminists figured among those deported or exiled after the
Revolution of 1848 or the Paris Commune of 1871: Pierre Leroux, Louis
Blanc, Victor Considérant, Jeanne Deroin, Pauline Roland, Nathalie Lemel,
Marguerite Tinayre, Andre L50, and Paule Mink.

It was no mere coincidence, then, that the emerging femdnist move-
ment drew heavily on utopian socialist ideals and personnel. Virginie
Griess-Traut, a convinced Fourierist who donated 50,000 francs to the
Ecole Soci‘taire phalanstérienne, actively participated in the founding

of the first ongoing feminist group in 1869, the Sociéti pour

 

s?§§£§., 151-152, 186. Deroin's "utopian” perspective on the

woman question can be seen in a statement she made in 1848: "Woman,
still slave, remains veiled and in silence. She has lost the memory

of her divine origin, she is unable to understand her noble social
mission, she has neither name nor country, she is banished from the
sanctuary, she seems to have accepted shameful servitude. Held down by
man's yoke, she has not even the aspirations towards liberty, man must
liberate her.” Jeanne Deroin, Cours de droit social pour les femmes
(Paris, 1848), 6. Cited in Rowbotham, Woman, Resistance and Revolution,
53.

60Thomas, Woman Incendiaries, 9-11. Bernard Noél, Dictionnaire
de la Commune (Paris, 1971), 103, 234-35, 347-48.

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90
l'Amélioration du Sort de la Femme.61 Arles-Dufour, who had personally
retrieved Daubii's pp; and who served as president of her short-lived
Association pour l'Emancipation de la Femme, remained a loyal follower.
of Enfantin's cult.62 And the Ligue Franpaise pour le Droit des Femmes,
another ongoing group established in 1882, included several practising ’
utopians from the Familistére de Guise, created by Jean-Baptiste-André

Godin in 1859.63

The slogans employed by the movement also reflected
utopian socialist influence. Two came directly from the pen of Charles
Fourier, the earliest and the most feminist of the utopian socialists.
One linked man's liberation to that of woman:

Everywhere where man has degraded woman he has degraded

himself, everywhere where he has ignored the rights of woman
he has himself lost his own rights.64

 

61Le Journal des Femmes, January 1899; La Fronde, 11 December
1894; BMD, Dossier Griess-Traut.

62Manuel, Prophets of Parip, 191.

63Jean-Baptiste-Andr! Godin (1817-1888) made a fortune through
developing new smelting processes. Influenced by the ideas of Saint-
Simon, Robert Owen, Cabet, Fourier, and Considérant (whose abortive
utopian experiment in Texas cost Godin a third of his wealth), and
despite the opposition of the Second Empire (which stripped him of
his patents for espousing radical notions), Godin created the Famili-
stire de Guise between 1859 and 1865. The Sociiti du Familistlre de
Guise secured legal recognition on 13 August 1880 as a cooperative
association capitalized at 4,600,000 francs. Its journal, Le Devoir,
first appeared in 1878. Between the period 1879-80 and 1898-99, the
Familistlre de Guise and its branch at Schaerbeek served approximately
1,500 to 2,000 people each year. Louis Lestelle, Etude sur 1e

3 (Paris, 1904). See also: Fernand Duval, J,-B,-A,

ngin et le Familistkre de Guise (Law thesis, University of Lille,
Paris, 1905); Verrier, Le Socialisme halanstérienne, 9; Bulletin de
l'Union Universelle des Femmes, 15 April 1890; and Godin's works listed

in the Catalogug général des livrps igprimis de la Bibliothegue
nationale Paris, 1924), LXI, 662-64.
6l'F'rom.Paul Gide and Adhemar Esmein, Etude sur la condition

priv‘e de la fggpp gens le droit ancien‘ et modegpe (Paris, 1867), 7.
Cited in Thiébaux, Le Féminisme et les socialistes, 47.

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The other linked women's liberation to progress in general, and became
the most popular of the slogans cited by French feminists:
The change in a historical epoch can always be determined
by the progress of women towards freedom, because in the re-
lation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory
of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of
emancipation of women is the natural measure of general eman-
cipation.65

To sum up.,the extention of privileges to women is thg
general principle of all social progress.66

Another frequently quoted statement came from the Second Empire's most
illustrous exile, Victor Hugo. Hugo acknowledged his debt to Enfantin,
and upon hearing of the death of socialist Pauline Roland in11854, he

wrote: ”The eighteenth century was the century of man, the nineteenth

will be the century of women."67

Republicanism

Republicanism provided another channel for feminist discontent.
Indeed, the French feminist movement developed such close ties to re-
publicanism.that the interplay between the woman question and the poli-
tical question eventually emerged as the dominant factor in the struggle
to liberate women. Or, to put it more pointedly, the republican connec-
tion became the tie that bound feminima to an impotent "politics first"
orientation. With the exception of Jenny d'Hiricourt, however, none of

the feminists who helped forge the tie anticipated the extent of the

 

65Fourier, Thiorie des guatres mouvements, 43. Cited in Row-
botham, Resisgpnce and Revolution, 52.

66Fourier, Theorie des uatres no vements, 195. Cited in Thie-
baux, Le Fiainisme et les socialistes, 47.

'7Cired in an article by Elizabeth Renaud that originally
appeared in the Rappel: ”Glimpse of the Femdnist Movement in France,"
vaiew pf Reviews, XLIV (September, 1911), 335.

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92
subsequent republican "betrayal." Nor, in retrospect, is it easy to see
how feminists could have avoided the republican attachment.

Like utopian socialism, republicanism offered an attractive com-
bination of ideas and actions to those whose alienation sprang from the
systEme masculiniste. Republicanism, particularly radical republicanism,
meant democracy, the lifting of all constraints from and the vesting of
all authority in the people. In the middle decades of the nineteenth
century it comprised a blend of logic and sentiment, effecting a fervor
of quasi-religious enthusiasm:

The Democrat Z;ap7 usually an emotionalist, a sentimentalist

in bpth the good and the bad sense of_tha£_much ill-used term;
he [wap7 a mqsgip, and his politics [werg/ to him a faith that
often replacelg/ religion; hig_be1ief in the Republico-Democra-
tic organization of society (wag? largely a matter of intuition,
of the heart having its reasons that Reason knoweth not -- a
faith that made him risk prison, exile and deportation, and

that kept alive during the four years of bitter disillusionment
that were the Second Republic and the eighteen years of the
half opira bouffe, half tragedy that we call the Second Empire.

The democrat believed in the potential goodness of ordinary men,
making Republicanism more akin in its origin to Socialist than to Liberal
thought. In a sense, the republican was an "underdeveloped socialist":

[Shg7 what differentiateld? him from the Socialists [;h37 often

a matter of tactics rather than of principle; be believeld? first
in the conquest of political weapons: phe vote, the abolition of
the hereditary principle, and relegateZQ/ £9 a distant future the
economic reo‘ganization of society which [wag7 the Socialist's
primary aim.

In time republicanism would also relegate femdnismis primary aim

to a distant future. But in the context of the 1860's the republican

ideal portended a society freed of the old injustices and open to reform

 

68Roger Henry Soltau, French Political Thought in the 19th Cen-
tp;y_(New‘York, 1959), 95.

69Ibid., 95-96.

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93
from below. This ideal appealed all the more to the Second Empire's
feminists who could reflect on how, after 1789 and 1848, political
reaction had gone hand in hand with misogynist backlash. At worst, re-
publicanism promised an open society in which feminists could conduct
their campaign without having to contend with repression and harassment
like the brief ban imposed on d'Héricourt's L§_Femme;gffranchie or the
interruption by Imperial police of a speech on divorce by Olympe
Audouard.7o At best, republicanism might produce a society cleansed of
Church, Code and other sexist fetters. Republicanism seemed to comple-
ment much of what the utopian socialists espoused, with the added advan-
tage that it would encompass the whole of society. Subordinating social
ends to political means thus made sense to feminists who, holding the
Second Empire responsible for woman's plight, imagined that a republican
France would not only respond to their demands but permit them to parti-
cipate as equals.

This hope had a pragmatic as well as an ideological dimension.
Republican sentiment prevailed among the Second Empire's several thousand
exiles and deportees, maintaining a link of opposition to the Empire be-
tween feminists in revolt against woman's contemporary condition and

others who sought social change through political action.71 Within

 

7oOlympe Audouard, La Femme dans 1e mariageI 1a separation et
divorce, conférence faite 1e 28 fivrier 1870 (Paris, 1870). Audouard

embarrassed the Imperial police who interrupted her speech by pointing
out that the Emperor himself had recommended divorce as a means of in-
suring family morality in his Des IdEes NapolEoniennes. written during
his detention at Ham in 1839. Villiers, Histoire des Clubs des
Femmes, 382.

71In the course of transforming the Second Republic into the
Second Empire, Louis Napoleon initiated a reign of repression that
resulted in 27,000 arrests, 1,500 expulsions, and 9,800 deportations
(9,500 to Algeria and 300 to Guiana). Paul A. Gagnon, France since
1789 (New Vork, 1964), 163.

 

 

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94

France, the radical (and not so radical) republican opposition to Louis
Napoleon included a number of prominent historians, journalists and poli-
ticians who expressed concern for women: Emile Deschanel, Paul Leroy-
Beaulieu, Edouard de Laboulaye, etc. Their opinions tended to the
traditional, in line with Michelet who wrote of La Femme: "she must
have a household, she must be married"; but they nonetheless focused
attention on the woman question.72 They also demanded reform of some of
the worst legal abuses. In 1866, for example, a committee of republican
legal experts recommended marital equality through abolition of Article
213 of the 9295, which required wives to obey husbands.73

The individuals who inspired or participated in the emergent
feminist movement had multiple contacts with republicanism. Juliette
Lamber and Jenny d'Héricourt belonged to the republican salon of Charles
Fauvety, and a few years after her publication of Idées anti-proudhon-
igppgp,meber established her own salon, through which she introduced
Lion Gambetta to Parisian political life. Maria Deraismes, the principal
organizer of l'Amélioration in 1869, also ran a republican salon and in
the 1880's founded the Républicain de Seine-et-Oise. Lion Richer,
Deraismes' closest collaborator and founder of the longest-lived of the
feminist newspapers in nineteenth-century France, began his career as a

journalist for Adolphe Guérolt's moderate republican Opinion Nationale.

 

72Michelet, La Femme, 34.

73The Committee met at the home of Jules Favre and included, in
addition to the host, Vacherot, Courcelle-Seneuil, Joseph Garnier,
Andri Cochut, Dr. Clavel, Charles Lemonnier, Hirold, Clamageran, Jules
Ferry, Jules Simon, Paul Boiteau, Henri Brisson, and Emile Acollas.
Paul Granotier, L'Autorité du mari sur la ersonne de la femme et la
dogtrine fémipiste (Law thesis, University of Grenoble, Paris, 1909),

37. See also: Misme, "La Vie et la mort du reminisne," 32.

 

the
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95
Deraismes and Richer led the conservative wing of French feminism
during the 1870's and 1880's, but in the 1860's nearly all feminists
shared their faith in republicanism as the necessary first step to
woman's liberation.74 Even after the founding of the Third Republic in
1870, when a feminist minority began to recognize that the new "democracy"
had perpetrated the old systime masculiniste, faith in republicanism re-
mained strong. Against the reality of the new political order, feminist
critics continued to oppose the model of republican democracy that had

engendered such high hopes at the end of the Second Empire.

Reformism

An explosion of reformism rocked France during the second half of
the nineteenth century. It exerted a powerful influence on feminism for
several reasons. 0n the one hand, it enabled feminists to focus in
detail on obnoxious aspects of the systlme masculiniste without having
to await the day of final utopian socialist or republican reckoning.
0n the other hand, reformism drew so heavily on associationist and demo-
cratic ideals that feminists could demand piecemeal changes without
either doing damage to their social and political principles or having
recourse to the bug-a-boo of violent revolution. Reformism also brought
feminists into contact with organizations whose social critiques enhanced
consciousness and whose members bolstered the movement's ranks. Routes
between feminism and reformism ran two ways, with the result that many
feminists devoted considerable effort to altering features of French
society that bore only indirectly on woman's oppression. But in return
feminists could draw on varying degrees of support from their reformist

colleagues.

 

7“For information on Deraismes and Richer, see Chapter III.

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The goals and efforts of reformism interacted with feminism in a
variety of ways. Efforts to eliminate the corset received unanimous
endorsement but little direct participation from feminists. Re-establish-
ment of divorce drew a great amount of participation from feminists, and
Lion Richer drafted the divorce law that Alfred Naquet guided through
the French parliament in 1884, but very few feminists ever made use of
the new law.75 Attempts to outlaw vivisection and to regulate animal
abuse left most feminists cold, but attracted the passionate interest of

a few like Maria Deraismes and Marguerite Durand.76 Temperance appealed

 

75Lion Richer, Le DivorceI projet de 101 pricédé d'un expose
des motifs et suivi des rinci aux documents officiels se rattachant
I la question, avec une lettre-préface ppr Louis Blanc (Paris, 1873).

76Maria Deraismes belonged to both the Sociiti Frangaise contre
la Vivisection and the Ligue Populaire contre 1'abus de la Vivisection;
see her Discoura sur la vivisection (Paris, 1884) and Chapter III.
Marguerite Durand displayed a sensitivity towards her "inferior
brothers" by founding a dog cemetery at Aanilres. BMD, Dossier
Durand, ”La Vie d'action de Marguerite Durand,” 5. A Société Protec-

trice des Amimaux received official authorization in 1878 (L'Avenir
des Femmes, 3 March 1878), but by then the idea was at least two

decades old. See: Alexis Godin, Lettre i S, M. l'empereur sur les
rapports de la civilisation avec 1'Etat des animaux et de l'agricul-
ture suivie de lusiers lettres et documents sur le méme sujet
(Paris, 1858) and Sociéti protectrice des animauxI Loi GrammontI
jurisprudence de la Cour ce cessation. Mémoire lu a la Société

protectrice des animaux, dans sEance du 28 avril (Paris, 1859).
Godin also founded Le Protecteur, "the legislator and friend of

animals" (1856-57). The American Society for Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals was established in 1866 by Henry Bergh, following the lead
of Britain's Earl of narrowly. The perspective of feminists on
animals is suggested by Lida Gustave Heymann in ”Woman's Suffrage and
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," Jgs Spffragii, November 1913,
29-30.

 

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to many second generation feminists but to almost none of the movement's
founders.77 Vegetarianism also won approval from the second generation,

but perhaps more in theory than in practice.78 Reforms in the realm of

 

77Within a decade of the founding of the Woman's Christian

Temperance Union in the United States in 1874, a concern to combat
alcoholism exploded in France. From the late 1880's on, that concern
increased and several national organizations emerged to limit excessive
drinking. First generation feminists acknowledged and applauded the
trend but displayed little active interest in it. Second generation
feminists felt differently and developed extensive ties with the
temperance movement. The Ligue d'Electeurs pour 1e Suffrage des Femmes
(founded in 1911) published an article on "Le Suffrage des Femmes et
l'Anti-alcoolisme" in the second issue of its Bulletin (July-October
1911), 46-48, and the Union Frangaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes
(founded in 1909) cooperated regularly with the Ligue National contre
Alcoolisme. (see: Lg Vie Féminine, 5 May 1914, and the Bulletin of
the Union Fran aise pour 1e Suffrage des Femmes for 1913 and 1914).

The coming together of these two movements on the eve of the First
World War reflected a gradual erosion of feminist influence within the
broader women's rights and woman suffrage movements, as well as a ten-
dency, initiated by conservative feminists in the late 1880's, to align
the campaign for women's liberation with the many philanthropic and
single-issue movements oriented towards the "moral regeneration" of
French society. For additional information on anti-alcoholism in France
see: P. Ladame, De la prostitution dans ses ra orts avec 1'a1coolisme,
1e crime et la folie (Neuchatael, 1884); Devoisins, La Femme et
l'ilcoolisme; Em. Cauderlier, "L'Alcoolisme et le Question sociale,"

La Socifiti Nouyelle, X, (1889), 166-71; F. Domelia Nieuwenhuis,
“LiAlcoolisme," La Société Nouvelle, IX (1889), 253-63; M. 1e Docteur
Villy, De 1'Alcooligme du point de vue socipl_(lssoudun, 1891); Mme.
Kuntzel, R81e de la femme dans la lutte contre l'Alcoolisme, fippport
prisenti au ler Congrdsipptional contre 1'a1coolisme (Paris, ca. 1905)
[Kuntzel cites seventeen works on the subject of temperance asfiwell as
two journals of the Union Fran aise Anti-alcoolique, L'Alcool and
L'Etoile Bleue? Dr. Legrain, Le Repos dp Dimanche comme remide i

1 Alcoolisme Paris, 1905); Henri Chabasse, Le Probleme de 1 alcoolisme
rinci element en France (Bordeaux, 1914) [Finot's book was published
by L Alphas: Soci t3 Frangaise d'Action contre l'Alcoolisme, founded
in 1913/; Ernest Barron Gordon, The Anti-Alcohol Movement in Europe
(New'York, 1913). For a similar work on the vice of smoking, see: Dr.
Emile Laurent, Le Nicotinisme (Paris, 1894) and the review of it in

La 80 late Nouvelle, XIX (1894), 847-9.

78In 1900 the Congrls de Vigitarisme and the Congrés des Oeuvres
et Institutions Féminine met at the same time and in the same place,
Paris' Palais des Congrés. But the two congresses had more in common
than accidental proximity, wrote feminist theoretician Jeanne Deflou:
"Co-me 11 y a des blocs d'Edifices, 11 y a des blocs d'idées. En un
meme bloc sont certainement compris le v‘égé’tarisme et le fé'minisme."
Vegetarianism represented a newer idea than feminism, according to

 

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thought and belief influenced many feminists. Positivism, minus its
misogynist popularizer Auguste Comte, provided Hubertine Auclert's Lg
Citpzpnng with its first motto: Littre's description of the future
citizeness as ”la femme qui jouit du droit de cit! dans un itat."79
In religion, some first generation feminists displayed an affinity for
Spiritualimm, in which Olympe Audouard achieved an expertise second

only to that of Allan Kardee (1804-1869).80 For the most part, however,

 

Deflou, but both had old and numerous enemies and both attracted the
proponents of Wmoral progress.” In Deflou's opinion, the eating of
meat led to intemperance, which in turn caused cruelty, folly, sen-
suality, and criminality. "Good” animals ate vegetables, whereas

the barbarous Huns and ”bad” animals preferred rawflmeat. The poor un-
fortunately associated well-being with the meat-eating habits of’the
well-to-do, but feminists, vegetarians, and others recognized that
moral improvement required eliminating such emulation. Jeanne Deflou,
”Feminisme et Végitarisma,” Les Droits de la Femme, 15-31 August 1900.
A Societt des Vigitariens had been established in France at least as
early as 1881, see the article written by its president in Le Libera-
teur, 1 May 1881.

7?;._£l£gzsnn£, 13 February 1881. See also: Perri, Feminisme
2E a81t£71£gg
80

Spiritualism began as an organized religion in 1848 at Hydes-
ville, New York, where the Fox sisters experienced a strange tapping
noise in their home. Its fundamentals had been expressed the year be-
fore in Andrew Jackson Davis' The Princi les of Nature Her Divi e
gpvelations, ppd a Voice to Mankind (New York, 1847), cited in Frank S.
Mead, ed., Handbook of Denominations in the United States (New 5th ed;
Nashville, 1970), 205. According to D. G. Charlton, Segular Religions
in France 1815-1870 (New York, 1963), ”the eighteenth century, still
more than the seventeenth centurg7, witnessed not only the spread of
freemasonry, swiftly expanding throughout Western Europe and North
America, but also a marked enthusiaem for astrology, mesmerism, and
theosophy in all its varied forms.” (127) Occultism influenced re-
formers like Enfantin, Rodrigues, Fourier, Leroux, and Jean Reynaud,
”all of whom linked their utopian socialism with theories of metem-
psychosis, intersteller migration, progress towards universal harmony,
and the like -- and even, in the case of Reynaud, with druidiem."
(130). Practioners of Spiritualism considered it to be both a science
and a religion, and its spread at mid-century gradually cut into the
popularity of hypnotism, developed by the German Hemmer (1733-1815).
Mesmer's ideas continued to exert influence, however, and Lion Richer
attempted to boost subscriptions to his Droit des Femmes by offering

free copies of the Jppgppl dp Magpgtisgp. Lg Droit des Fgmmes, 21
December 1890. According to the BN Catalogup, II, 319-27,

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the impact of these reform.movements proved limited, either because they
attracted too few feminists or because they involved individuals and
organizations that shied away from social activism. Much more important
to feminism were reforms focusing on anti-clericalism, education, paci-
fism, Freemasonry and, to a lesser extent, philanthropy.

Anti-clericaliem and its correlate, free-thinking, went hand in
hand'with republicanism, which perceived the Church as a bastion of
superstition and an enemy of progress. Feminists had their own bone
to pick with the Church, literally in the sense that the myth of Adamfs
rib continued to serve as a justification for woman's subordination, and
figuratively inasmuch as institutionalized Catholicism.underpined the

sgstime masculiniste.“ Mutual hatred of clericalism thus formed one of

 

Allan Kardec‘Ziippolyte-Léon-Denizard Rivail7 published at least 18 works
on Spiritualism between 1857 and his death in 1869. He also edited the
vaue Spirite from 1858 to 1868. Before the turn of the century his
works went through no less than 175 editions, with four books exceding
thirty reissues: Philosophie spiritualiste. Le Livre des esprits, gon-

enant les rinci es de la doctrine s irite (Paris, 1857); Le Spiritisme
sa lus si 1e ex ression ex osi sommaire de l'ensei ement des
esprits et de leurs manifestations (Paris, 1862); Resume de la loi des
htnomenes s irites ou Premiire initiation i 1'usa e des ersonnes
gtrgpgers ‘ la connaipsance de spiritisme (Paris, 1864); and Caractlrep
de la rEvCIation spirite Paris, 1868). Olympe Audouard wrote L'Amour,

1e materialisteI 1e spiritualiste, le cggplet et divin (Paris, 1880).
For an indication of attitudes towards Spiritualism and hypnosis in the

early years of the Third Republic, see the following articles from‘Lp
Sogiiti Nouvelle: E. Lagrange, ”Le Spiritisme sciantifique,” V, (1887),
69-74; Ph. Linet, "Fascination Hypnotique, Les expiriences de Donato,"
V, (1887), 146-50; Dr. Jos. Sach-Lorthior, ”Les PhenomEnes du spiri-
tisme contemporain,” XVIII, (1893), 338-60. Louise Michel figured among
the many female practioners of Spiritualism at its outset: "Elle est
encore spiritualiste en 1861, i la maniire de Hugo, quand ell icrit

Plps d'idiotp, plus de fous.” Edith Thomas, Lopise Michel ou La Velléda

81The prevalence of Biblical imagery in feminist writings can be
seen in the titles of Maria Deraismes' two principll works: Eve contre
Monsieur Dumas fils (Paris, 1872) and Eve dans humaniti (Paris, 1891).
Audouard mockingly reversed the standard 'rib" interpretation by ar-
guing that what came last was best. As humans were superior to mollusks,
so women were superior to men, because ”the divine Creator wanted to

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the strongest ties binding feminism to republicanism as well as one of
the issues on which an extensive exchange of ideas and personnel took
place. Under the Second Empire, Guéroult's Opinion Nationale specialized
in exposing clerical immorality, the subject of Richer's weekly column,

82 Michelet's his-

"Lettres d'un libre-penseur I un curE de village."
tories elaborated a more sweeping, sophisticated version of "liberty at
war with the Church," inclining feminists other than d'Héricourt to
react ambivalently to his opinions on women.83 In the early years of
the Third Republic, especially after 1877, feminists took advantage of
the relaxed political climate to redouble their attacks on the Church.
They assiduously attended gatherings of free-thinkers, and Deraismes
played an instrumental role in organizing the first anti-clerical con-
gresses. Aversion to clericalism also made Positivism and Spiritualism
all the more attractive to feminists and brought them into even greater
contact with several important republican sub-groups, particularly the
Freemasons and the Protestants.

Education presented one of the principal battlegrounds on which

the ”forces of change" confronted the "forces of order" in nineteenth-

century France. Both camps believed that to built a new society or to

 

finish the act of creation with the most perfect, most complete creature:
Guerre aux Hommes, 19.

82Lion Richer, Lettres d'un libre- enseur 1 un curE de illa e,
prtcedé d'une introduction par M. Ad, Guéroult (2 vols., Paris, 1868-69).
For an example of Richer s continuing interest in "priest-baiting," once
feminism.became his primary pursuit, see the report he published on
Abbi Baque, a young priest who seduced a parishioner. The girl in ques-
tion received five years imprisonment at hard labor for infanticide;
Baque received a transfer. Le Droit des Femmes, 4 September 1887.

83John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870-1914 (New
York, 1972), 14-15.

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reinforce the old depended on capturing (enlightening?) the minds of
youth. Feminists shared this belief passionately. In their eyes the
systtme masculiniste had reduced women to a state of enforced ignorance,
and then, after centuries of exclusive concentration on men's minds,

"nature."

had perversely attributed woman's intellectual torpor to her
Hence, to feminists improved education represented not only a prerequi-
site for woman's equality but the confirmation of a thesis. Learning
reforms also struck feminists as a logical extension of the neo-tradi-
tional g§£3,€ducatrice ideal. Consequently, as one of the many "forces
of change" in education, feminists entered into contact with a host of
groups and individuals who shared a desire to make schooling universal,
compulsory and lay. These contacts coincided with self-help efforts
like the establishment of the first professional school for girls in
1862 by Elisa Lemonnier and the founding a few years later of a Société
de la Rivendication du Droit des Femmes, whose primary objective
centered on improving woman's education.84 But the contacts enabled
feminists to reach beyond their limited following and to enlist the
support of individuals like Ferdinand Buisson, a Protestant educator
who eventually became the foremost male advocate of woman's suffrage,
and the backing of groups like La Ligue de 1'Bnignement, founded in
1866 by Jean Macé. The success of the Ligue, which acquired 17,856

members grouped into fifty circles by 1870, provided an organizational

model for Lion Richer's Ligue Franpaise pour 1e Droit des Femmes,

 

8“Charles Lemonnier, Elisa Lemonnier, fondatrice de la Sociéte
pour l'enseigpement professionel des femmes (Saint Germain, 1866), For
a later assessment of professional education for girls in France see:
Climence Royer, ”L'Enseignement professionnel en France," L;
Sociéti Nouvelle, X (1889), 306-29.

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created in 1882, while Macé himself displayed an active interest in
feminism through contributions to Deroin's short-lived Opinion des Femmes
in 1849 and membership in Richer's Ligue.85

Maci’also participated in the upsurge of pacifist activity that
swept France in the 1860's. He joined a Ligue pour la Paix in 1862 and
in 1867 he collected forty-eight signatures, half German and half French,
against war from both sides of the Rhine in the neighborhood of his home-
town, Beblenheim, Alsace.86 At Paris in 1867, Frederic Passy founded
La Ligue de la Paix, which later called itself the Société des Amis de
la Paix and finally the Sociite de 1'Arbitage, and several men, inclu-
ding divorce advocate Naquet and Code critic Acollas, created La Ligue
de la Paix et de la Liberti. Earlier, between 1858 and 1863, a third
major peace organization had come into existence, the Ligue do Bien
Public.87 None of these Ligues and Sociétés espoused conscientious paci-
fism like the Quakers, but all demanded abolition of permanent armies and
international arbitration of disputes. Feminists rallied to pacifism of
this type out of a concern for human welfare and, more specifically, be-

cause they perceived war as the inevitable result of the male egotism

cultivated by the systéme masculiniste. Furthermore, pacifism represen-

 

ted a logical feminist counter to the widespread belief that woman's

subordination derived of necessity from the greater sacrifices made by

 

85

Michel Tricot, De l'Instruction publigue } l'education perma-
nente (Paris, 1973), 29.

A Comité des Dames de la Ligue de 1 Enseigne-
ment included Madame Jules Ferry, Paul Bert and Ferdinand Buisson.
Louli Sanua, Figures feminines 1909-1939 (Paris, 1949), 69.

86Tricot, De l'Instruction ubli ue, 28.

87Edmond PotoniE-Pierre, Historigue de Mouvement Pacifigue
(Berne, 1899), 83-89.

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men on the battlefield. Peace advocates reciprocated feminist enthu-
siasm for their cause by emphasizing woman's emancipation. In 1868,
the second congress of La Ligue pour la Paix et la Liberte passed a
resolution endorsing equal social and political rights for women, and
initiated a study of the practical steps required to secure that end.88
”War against war" summed up the pacifist objective, and Emile de Girar-
din wrote a series of articles under that heading. The slogan itself,
however, came from the pen of Edmond PotoniE-Pierre, whose wife Euglnie
helped lead feminism through its first generation.89

In 1868 F. Santallier, the director of the Journal du Havre,
created a Union de la Paix. The new Union had its own journal with

1,500 subscribers, and Saint-Simonian Arlés-Dufour figured among its

honorary members. Much of its support, however, came from several

 

88Jules Tixerant, "Le Mouvement féministe sous le second Empire,"
Ligue Franpaise pour 1e Droit des Femmes, Bulletin Trimestriel, April
1911, 3.

89Potonii-Pierre, Historigue du Mouvement Pacifigue, 88. Pacifism
eventually became a determinant for participation in the feminist move-
ment and the larger women's rights coalitions. Anti-pacifists had either
to remain aloof, like Madame Juliette Adam, or risk expulsion. In 1909,
for example, the National Council of French Women announced the disaffi-
liation of Jeanne Deflou's Groupe Franpais d'Etudes Feministes and the
Comiti ariigeois de Progrls FEminin for their opposition to pacifiem.
L'Action Féminine, 1 April 1909. With the outbreak of war in 1914, the
Interior Ministry ordered an investigation of the major women's and
feminist groups, only to discover that their earlier espousal of paci-
fism had largely ceased with the onset of hostilities. The investiga-
tors praised French feminists for boycotting a peace conference at the
Hague, a gathering that arose “from a manner and from a spirit that are
very particular to people of Germanic origin and affinity." The report
concluded that, a few individual exceptions notwithstanding, the vast
majority of feminists had not responded to foreigners' perfidious peace
propaganda. France, Ministry of the Interior, AN F7 13266, "La Cam-
pagne faministe en faveur de la paix" (1915). Prior to the war and with
non-pacifists excluded from feminist ranks, the chief debate within the
movement revolved around whether or not feminists should endorse mili-
tary service for women. Some supported such service in the name of sex
equality, others opposed it in the name of peace.

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Masonic lodges in the vicinity.90 The year before a professor at the
lycée of Metz founded the first branch circle of the Ligue de l'Enseigne-
ment. The Prefect at Moselle immediately authorized the circle, but the
local bishop excommunicated the professor, who also headed Metz's
Masonic Lodge. Throughout France other Lodges sponsored Ligue circles,
and Macé, a Mason himself, wrote of the connection: "The two institu-
tions are certainly independent of each other, but they are sisters as
well, very certainly, their principle being the same: war on ignorance
and on intolerance."91

Thus emerged ties that increasingly brought French Freemasonry in-
to extensive contact with reformism. Feminists recognized this deve10p-
ment and strove to make common cause with it. They too perceived their

' Freemasons exclu-

struggle as a "war on ignorance and on intolerance.’
ded women from membership, but they shared feminism's aversion to
clericalism and its interest in pacifism and education. Like Gu€roult's
Opinion National, moreover, Freemasons benefited from.Imperial indul-
gence at the end of the Second Empire, despite their republican
sympathies. Hence, in addition to similar ideals, feminists could
utilize the freedom enjoyed by Masonic forums to spread their message
about woman's plight. Above all, however, Masonry constituted one of
the most important groups through which the future politicians of France
passed, enabling feminists to engage the attention of at least a portion

of the political establishment.92

 

90Potonit-Pierre, Histori ue de Mouvement Pacifi ue, 88.

91Tricot, De l'Instruction ubli ue, 25.

92Georges Heill wrote that "under the Empire, as under the
Restoration and under Louis-Philippe, the directors of freemasonry sub-
mitted to the orders of the government; the Grand-Orient came to accept

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Compared to its ties with anti-clericalism, education reform,
pacifism and Freemasonry, feminism's link to philanthropic reformism.was
relatively weak. Feminists assisted the downtrodden, especially stranded,
working and imprisoned women, but their objective went beyond the simple
alleviation of misery. They hoped to effect a fundamental alteration of
French society to the end that charity, if it continued to exist at all,

would play only a minimal role. Feminists perceived their charges not

 

without murmur the grand master imposed by Napoleon III, Marshal Magnan;
but he did not prevent the lodge "Renaissance par les emules d'Hiram"
from becoming, under the direction of Massol, a foyer of republican
ideas. In the Scottish Rite the grand master was Crimieux; lodge 133
had as Venerable Henri Brisson, as orator Floquet, among its members
Gambetta, Ferry and the brothers of Fonvielle. More than one lodge
served as a point of departure for a very precise political action."
Histoire du Parti Républicaig:en France 1814-1870 (Paris, 1928), 359.
Mildred J. Headings has described the political importance of
Masons under the Third Republic: "By the late [eighteeg/ eighties the
Freemasons claimed that the large majority of the deputies, ministers,
councillors of all kinds, and officials, were Freemasons. Prime mini-
sters who were (or had been) Freemasons included Jules Simon, Jules
Ferry, Gambetta, Fallieres, Brisson, Rouvier, Tirard, Floquet, Charles
Dupuy, Bourgeois, Miline, Combes, Monis, J. Caillaux, Doumergue,
Viviani, Millerand, G. Leygues, A. Ssrrsut, Camille Chautemps, and
Blum." In the critical post of Minister of Public Instruction, femi-
nists had to deal with a number of Freemasons: Jules Simon, Jules
Ferry, Spuller, Paul Bert, Lockroy, Fallilres, Bourgeois, Dupuy,
Leygues, A. Rambaud, ChaumiE, Bien-venu Martin, Doumergue, M. Faure,
Viviani, Augagneur, A. Ssrrsut, Lafferre, and Chautemps. French Free-
masonry Under the Third Republic, The John Hopkins University Studies
in Historical and Political Science, Volume 66 (Baltimore, 1949), 79-80.
Jose-Maria de Hirédia, politician, Mason, and feminist, expressed
the common concern of Masons in respect to women at an Adoption Lodge
ceremony in 1878: "Freemasonry does nothing more than reflect the opin-
ion of French democracy: it sums up all the aspirations of republican
opinion: it does not need to have recourse to force or to ruses, because
it indulges in no Machiavellian projects; but what it wishes to conquer
above all is woman, because she is the last fortress that the spirit of
obscurantism opposes to human progress.” Cited in Marianne Monestier,
Les SociEtSs secrEtes feminines (Paris, 1963), 129. See also: Elaine
Brault, Le Franc-Ma onnerie et l'émanci ation des femmes (Paris, 1953):
Gaston Martin, Manuel d'histoire de la franc-ma onnerie fran aise (Paris,
1929); Jacques Mitterrand, La Politigue des Francs-Masons (Paris, 1973);

Charles Laurent, Les Droits de la femme: Droits Politi ues; Docteur
Henri Fischer, Le R8le de la femme conference faite 5 la lo e "1e Lien
ZBrussels, 1904); Robert Freke Gould et a1., eds.,‘A

deg peuples."

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106
so much as disadvantaged and in need of assistance from the well-to-do,
but as oppressed. The cure to the ill lay in justice not alms. In ad-
dition to the difference in orientation towards the unfortunate, femi-
nists had little direct contact with Catholicism, one of the major agents
of philanthropy, and only relatively more with Protestantism, the other
chief philanthropic force. Given their hatred of clericalism, femdnists
could hardly cooperate with the world of Catholic charities and, in any
case, the ”priest-ridden" women in charge of such activities viewed
feminism as part of a larger Masonic plot to destroy society. In con-
trast, feminists had much in common with Protestants, particularly li-
beral Protestants. Both opposed clericalism, espoused republicanism,
and sought improvements in education. Go the few occasions when the
Third Republic enacted legislation of benefit to women, liberal Protes-
tants occupied government posts in numbers inversely related to their
percentage of the population at large.93 But there remained a world of
difference between even the mild religiosity of liberal Protestants and
the free-thinkers who dominated femdnismfs first generation. Consequently,
while feminists groped to consolidate their ranks and to formulate their

views in the period prior to 1889, Protestants developed a kind of

 

Library of Freemasonry (Londog, 1906), III, 391-449. For a hostile
opinion, see: J. Tourmentin [l'abbi Henry-Stanislas-Athenase Joseph7,

Femme chez les francs-ma ons d'a res les derniers convents du G '
Og'. ZParis, 19025. i

93in the cabinet of 2 February 1879, for example, six out of ten
ministers wore Protestants. Prominent Protestant politicians included
Haddington, Freycinet, Lion Say, Le Royer, Engine Pelleton, Mefftzer,
Riville, Jaureguiberry, and Paul Bert. Jules Ferry married a Protes-
tant in a civil ceremony. A prominent Protestant feminist and educa-
tor, Ferdimamd Buisson, felt that free-thinking and Protestantism had
much in common inasmuch as both beliefs emphasized a positivist ap-
proach to free examination and opposed reliance on dogmas, miracles
and priests. Acomb, The French Laic Laws, 54-58.

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parallel organization, one part of which engaged in charitable acti-
vities, the other adumbrating a decidedly reformist but limited program
of women's rights. Throughout, individual feminists and Protestants
cooperated, but at the time of the 1889 revolutionary centennial their

distinctiveness surfaced in separate Women's Congresses.94

Extremism

Although utopian socialism, republicanism, and reformism repre-
sented the most important alternatives through which feminists acquired
new ideas and new recruits, schools of thought both further right and
further left occasionally had a similar effect. The Duchess d'UzBs
(1847-1933) turned to feminism in the 1890's after a long association
with right-wing politics that included the financing of General Bou-
langer's abortive attempt to topple the Third Republic in 1889, and in

1896 Marie Maugeret's Le Féminisme Chrétien signalled the persistence of

 

the conservative, Catholic family-centered cult of woman initiated by

95

Madeleine Sirey's La Mere de Famille in 1833. D'UzEs and Maugeret

 

approached the woman question in earnest, but at times a disingenuous

 

9l'lvlriting in 1896 of the philanthropically-oriented official
Congrzs International des Oeuvres et Institutions Feminines of 1889,
Marie Dronsart recalled that ”a large number of femdnine societies and
institutions were represented there by their delegates, whose dis-
courses and reports were very interesting, but the well-known sentiment
of the majority against Catholicism removed the representatives from
the religion‘which is that of the immense majority of French women; if
Mae. 1a comtesse de Verneuil and her daughter-in-law had not come to
open the golden book of Catholic charity and to give the list of its
admirable works for children and adults, one mdght have believed that
our country included only Protestants and Isrealites." Dronsart, "Le
Mouvement Feministe,” 115.

95Sullerot, Presse, 187-9. The Duchess d'Uzes (Marie-Adrienne-
Anne-Victornienne Clementine de Rochechouart Mortemart) served as presi-
dent of Schmahl's l'Avant-Courridre, to which Madame Adam also belonged.
Susanne Dudit, "La Duilsse d'UsIs n'est plus,” Minerva, undated news-
paper clipping at BMD, Dossier Duchesse d'Uies.

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quality characterized feminism of the right, as with Edouard Drumont's
endorsement of woman suffrage:
Can you imagine in Parliament deputies more avaricious, more
stupid, more corrupt, more estranged from all feelings of
justice and respect for the rights of others, more basely
persecutory, more indifferent to the interests of the state
and to the honor of the country, more ready to squander the
millions in the budget than those who today comprise the
majority? -- Assuredly no.

From the left the most famous convert waited until the eve of
the First World War to declare herself. Severine (1855-1922) was too
young to participate in the movement's founding, and in the 1880's she
refused to collaborate with it on the grounds that she felt too femi-
nine, objected to joining any group, preferred the "social struggle,"

and considered her work on the Cri du Peuple more important. She

retired from public life in 1888, but returned over two decades

 

9§L;§£g_§ggglg, 9 June 1906. Jules Lemaitre agreed:_rI believe

that universal suffrage would be less bad, for some years [to comg/, if
women voted. But again, universal suffrage strikes me as idiotic."
Unidentified press clipping at BMD, VOT 396, 1910. In his preface to
Camille Rouyer's Les Chemins de la vie: La Feme dans l'Administrgtion
(Tours, 1900), Drumond expressed approval of Rouyer s attempt to pro-
vide women job-seekers with employment information, given the unfor-
tunate state of French society: "In respect to fendnism, as with many
other contemporary questions, every man who observes and reflects is
obliged to have two opinions: a theoretical opinion, and a second
opinion dictated by the facts, imposed by the practicalities of life,
by th3,incoherent spectacle of a society where no one is any longer in
his [or her? place, and that, under the cloak of refined civilization,
returns little by little to chaos and to the savagerie of prhnitive
times.” In theory, women should remain at home and avoid competing
with men. Maternity represented woman's highest duty, wrote Drumont,
but "in today's society, which pretends to be egalitarian and which is
only a despotic oligarchy where Jews and Freemasons reign and govern,
woman is-no more than an instrument of pleasure or a tool of work and
of profit easier to control and less costly than others: she is a
beast of burden or a small, gentle anhnal of the philosophers of the
eighteenth century, a being who dresses herself, prattles about, and
undresses." Hence, so long as social disruption continued, women had
to have practical advice about employment opportunities. (7-9).

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later as a feminist and organizer of a giant women's day celebration
on 5 July 1914.97

Overall the links between feminism and the more extreme right
and left involved only a handful of individuals and evolved only after
the movement had established itself. Yet such links nonetheless illu-
strate vagaries in the interplay between woman's discontent and the
ways in which that discontent might express itself. Indeed, the non-
feminist right -- Catholic, royalist, anti-Masonic, and opposed to
separation of Church and State -- rallied hundreds of thousands of
French women at the turn of the century to groups like La Ligue des
Femmes Frangaises, founded at Lyon in 1901, and its offshoot, La Ligue
Patriotique des Frangaises. From 1909 a Fédération Internationale des

Ligues Catholiques Féminines provided a forum for coordinating the ac-

tivities of these groups.98 For French feminism the significance of

 

97Se’verine (Caroline Rémy, dame Guebhard) repeatedly scoffed at'
invitations to join the feminist movement in the 1880's and 1890's, see:
Lg Citoyenne, September 1885; La Matin, 18 December 1892; La Revue
Feministe, October 1895, 3-5."BUT‘Ufl‘the eve of the First world War,
she spearheaded an effort to create an Entente Fédérale des Sociétés
pour le Suffrage dea Femmes and to make Condorcet's death date, the
eighth of April, the annual day of feminist celebration, see: L'Aurore,
3 June 1914; La Frangaisg, 5 July 1914; and an unidentified clipping at
BMD, Dossier VOT 396 1910.

98The Ligue des Femmes Frangaises was founded at Lyon in 1901 as
a vehicle to oppose the law on religious congregations. Its infiltra-
tion by royalists and Assumptionists led to a split at the time of the
1902 elections, from which emerged the Ligue Patriotique des Fran aises.
Together with the Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Frangaises, the
Ligue Patriotique formed the nucleus of the Action Liberale Populaire,
the political arm of Catholic women. The social arm.of the Ligue
Patriotique cooperated with the Action Sociale de la Femme, established
by Jeanne Chenu in 1900. Catholic women of various countries worked
through the Association Catholique Internationale des Oeuvres de Pro-
tection de la Jeune Fille, founded at Fribourg in 1896. The composite
goal of these groups was to improve the lot of women, to promote the
Catholic religion, and to reform the parliamentary system.

 

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110
this penomenon was twofold. First, it highlighted the complexities of

consciousness, revealing how alienating experiences could, if misdirected,

 

By 1909 the split between the royalist Ligue des Femmes Fran aises
and the Ligue Patriotique had partly healed, and, in any case, the iatter
had organized 400,000 members into over 900 committees. By 1913 the
Ligue Patriotique had 1,042 committees and 500,000 members. In the same
year a report to the Interior Ministry noted the considerable influence
of the Ligue Patriotique: "It is uncontestably the most powerful of the
feminine organizations; it clearly dominates the Ligue des Femmes Fran-
gaises whose sympathies are with the royalist party." Report F. 1633
of 27 May 1913 in AN F7 13215. During the First world War another report
depicted the Fédération International des Ligues Catholiques Féminines,
founded on the initiative of the Ligue Patriotique in 1909, as politi-
cally and religiously reactionary but very patriotic and anti-pacifist.
Report 6852 of 5 September 1915 in AM 37 13215.

In the eyes of the Ligue Patriotique, feminism represented a dan-
ger to faith and socigty: "The ideas of the International Council of
figmen [founded in 1888/ arg_anti-Catholig, The president of its French
(section? is a sectarian lie. Protestan£/. One of the most visible
personalities of this association_is a free-thinker. . . . It would be
imprudent to take part in these [feminist/ congresses where Catholic
women will always be in a minority and where they will confront questions
that violate our principles." Report to the Service Internationale des
Liguss Catholiques Fiminines par une correspondsnte de la Fédération,

AN F 13215. Catholic women held their own women's congress in 1900,
and, beginning in 1904, they held annual Jeanne d'Arc Conferences.

Spokesmen for the Ligue Patriotique viewed feminism as a "terror
polluted by a horde of foreigners, of freemasons." Octave Chambon,‘Lg
Devoir social de la femmejfrangaise. Address delivered at Ploermel 21
December 1902 (Auxerre, 1902), 22. Freemasonry represented a "monster
from.hell." Madame J. Drujon, Ligue Patriotique des Femme Frangaises.
Address to the women of the Ligue at Tarascon (Avignon, 1911). On the
issue of woman suffrage, the Ligue Patriotique took the position in
1914 that ”it is not a question of combating or approving women's vote,
but to state that it is not utopian, an impossibility." Undated clip-
ping from Echo de la Li ue Patrioti ue des Fran aises in AN F 13215.
The Ligue attributed the absence of woman suffrage in France to Pro-
testant fears of Catholic women. After the First World War, Catholic
suffragists founded the Union Rationale pour le Vote des Femmes, which
cooperated closely with Chenu's Action Sociale de la Femme. The Duchess
de la Rochefoucauld served as the Union's president.

In addition to the Ligue Patriotique and the Ligue des Femmes,
Catholic women could turn to other organisations, such as the Comiti
des Dames of La Patrie Frangaise, created in January 1899 with the aid
of Jules Lemaitre, and to a number of journals, like La Femme Con-
tggporaine founded by J. Lagardere in 1903. Needless to say, the
rapid growth of these Catholic women's organizations and journals
after the turn of the century reflected the failure of first genera-
tion geminists to make inroads among the vast majority of women in
France. For information on this subject, see: AN F 13215 for the

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111
provoke a reactionary strengthening of traditional ideas about women.
Second, the objectives of these conservative women's Ligues mirrored in

reverse the various reforms with which feminists strongly identified.

Eggggism and Feminism

Alongside the various socialist, political, and reformist move-
ments that provided alternatives through which the systeme's alienated
could acquire a sense of direction, there existed two additional outlets
for the discontented, womanism and feminism itself. "Womanism" refers
to a trend that, growing in strength throughout the nineteenth century,
focused attention on many of the problems confronted by women. It
could hardly be called a movement, however, because it lacked both or-
ganization and ideology. Highly issue-oriented it overlapped feminism
in pinpointing specific abuses, but its central characteristic was sim-
ple concern. In searching out and revealing the plight of women, it
represented a form of what Americans at the turn of the century called
"mockraking." At the point where new consciousness might begin, womanism
abetted feminism by exposing gynophobic sores in the French social body.
Beyond that its value to feminism proved limited, and if anything its
specificity tended to obscure the more general problem of woman's
oppression.

Womanism manifested itself in a variety of ways, in novels like

Andri Lio‘i Un mariage scandaleux (1862), Une :ieille fille (1864), and

Un divorce (1866); in documentaries like the third edition of Alexandre

 

 

Ligue Patriotique des Femmes and AN F7 13229 for the Comite des Dames:
Comtesse de Keranflech-Kernezne, Madame Chenu 1861-1939 (Paris, 1940);

Madame M. Penson, Le R81e actuel de la femme, Conference faite i la

Li ue Patrioti ue des Fran aises (Bordeaux, 1911); and Madame Anna
Lampériere, Le R51e social de la femme (Paris, 18981

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Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchztelet's two volume study De la Prostitution

dans la ville de Paris (1857) and Louis Reybaud's Etudes sur le regime

 

des manufactures, Condition des ouvriers en soie (1859); in histories
like Clarissa Bader's La Femme dens l'inde antigue (1864) and La Femme
bibligue (1866); in drama like Alexandre Dumas' La Dame aux camélias

(1852) and L'Ami des femmes (1864); and in a host of newspaper and maga-

 

zine articles, pamphlets, brochures, and university studies.99 Between
1864 and 1869 at least three works addressed the subject of "women in

the nineteenth century,’ and towards the end of the century the number

of law dissertations on women increased from 14 in 1884-85 to 30 in
1894-95 and 51 in 1904-05.100 Fifty-four percent of these dissertations
related to issues arising out of marriage, but, regardless of the focus,
they reflected the growing trend of popular, professional, and academic
concern for one or another aspect of woman's condition.

The other alternative through which the systdme's alienated could

find direction was feminism itself. Once the movement acquired a

 

99Andri Lie [Léodile Champseix7, Un mariage scandaleux (2nd ed.,
Paris, 1863), Une vieille fille (Paris, 1864), and Un divorce (new ed.,
Paris, 1869). Alexandre Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchfitelet, De la Prosti-
tution dans la ville de Paris (3rd ed., 2 vols., Paris, 1859). Louis
Reybaud, Etudes sur le rigime des manufactures, Condition des ouvriers
en soie (Paris, 1859). Clarisse Bader, La Femme dans l'Inde anti ue,
études morales et littéraires (Paris, 1864) and La Femme bibligue, sa
participation au developpement de l'idée religieuse (Paris, 1866). After

1870 Bader wrote: La Femme grecgue; Etude de la vie antigue (2 vols.,
Paris, 1872), La Femme romaine: Etude de la vie antigue (Paris, 1877),

and La Femme fran aise dans les tem s modernes (Paris, 1883). Alexandre
Dumas fils, La Dame aux camelias; drame en cing actes (Paris, 1852) and
L'Ami des femmes; comédie en cing actes (Paris, 1864).

100Ernest Legouv‘, La Femme en France au dix-neuviime siicle
(Paris, 1864). Paul Thouzery, La Femme au XIXe siecle: Ce u'elle est
Ce u'elle doit etre (Paris, 1866). Eu Sne Pelletan, La Femme au XIXe
siScle (Paris, 1869 . Catalogue g3; thgsgpg£,écrits académigues:
Annie scolaire 1884-85. 1894-95. 1904-05 (Paris, 1885, 1895, 1905).

 

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113
semblance of organization, it provided an obvious channel into which
discontent could flow. Soon after leaving the convent in which she
grew up, Hubertine Auclert heard about feminism and immediately left for
Paris to join the movement.101 Marguerite Durand, actress turned
journalist, drew an assignment to cover the 1896 Women's Rights Congress,
and stayed. The next year she founded La Fronde (1897-1905, 1914), the
first newspaper entirely run by women.102 Isabelle Bogelot joined the
movement almost as a matter of course; she had been raised in the home
of feminist Maria Deraismes.103 But these and other later-day recruits
enlisted in an effort that had already achieved a degree of consolidation.
Such was not the case for the movement's initiators, who had to fashion
an organization out of whole cloth.

However, the whole cloth presented at least three workable
qualities. The first consisted of convoluted snags and rips, comprising
the experential basis of woman's alienation under the systzme masculiniste.
From.a femdnist point of view, women had been drop-stitched out of the
otherwise progressive fabric of French society. The second and third
qualities might be likened to threads: one running backwards into time,
the other stretching across national boundaries. The one enabled femi-
nists to draw on the past for support; the other brought sustenance and
direction from foreign contemporaries.

When French feminists looked backward, they saw’not only a pattern

of increasing male oppression but repeated attempts by individuals and

 

101See Chapter IV.

102BMD, Dossier Durand.

103BMD, Dossier Bogelot.

 

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114
groups to throw off that oppression. Since the fourteenth century,
when Christine de Pisan published the first of her protests against
masculinisme, Epitre au Dieu d'Amour (1399), "forerunners" of feminism
had advanced arguments in favor of women's liberation.104 In the fif-
teenth century, these forerunners included Louise Labbe, Frangoise de
Billon, Henri Estienne, Pierre de Bourdeille (Brantame), and the woman
who ”did the most for the cause," Marguerite de Navarre.105 In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, salons provided forums for collec-
tive protest, while Marie de Gournay, Poulain de la Barre, and the BELLE:
ggphgggwrestled individually with what had become known as the ”woman

"106 The revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 engendered new

question.
pleas for woman's liberation and new forms of protest, particularly
women's clubs.

Thus, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the systeme's
critics could look back on a tradition hundreds of years in the making.
Nothing like a consistent ”line" had arisen, but the legacy of protest
at least enabled the discontented to avoid an historical vacuum and to
experience a sense of continuity. The legacy also supplied useful heros,
models, and myths. Heros included the Marquis de Condorcet, whose death

date became women's annual day of celebration on the eve of the First

World War, and Jeanne d'Arc, whose image inspired femdnists until

 

104Lulu McDowell Richardson, The Forerunners of Feminism in French
Literature of the Renaissance The John Hopkins Studies in Romance Litera-
tures and Languages, Vol. XII (Baltimore, 1929), Larnac, Histoire de la

litterature féminine en France.

05Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 120.

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Catholic women partially coopted her at the turn of the century.107
Feminists could find positive models in what women had done in the past,
and negative models in what men in the past had prevented women from
doing. The historical mixture of female expression and male repression
led nineteenth-century feminists to put a premium on freedoms of speech
and association, and to become increasingly concerned with the political
question lest another masculine backlash should occur. Typically enough,
the most pervasive myth involved a lost Golden Age. Relative to men,
women had in fact been better off within the parameters of the old
order. "Neither feudalism nor the Church freed women," de Beauvoir has
written, "but with the abolition of serfdom "husband and wife lived on
a footing of equality in small rural communities and among workers; in
free labor woman found real autonomy because she played an economic and
social part of real importance."108 Consequently, woman's denigration,
which evolved slowly during the Middle Ages and rapidly after the six-
teenth century, left a longing for customary law and the Gaulois tradi-
tion. This longing exaggerated women's Gaulic freedoms, but historical
accuracy meant little to women exploited by the systeme masculiniste.109

Through contacts with international feminism, French opponents of
the m W managed to avoid a sense of geographical isola-

tion. Foreign feminists took a keen interest in the French movement

because, wrote Kaethe Schirmacher of Germany, ”the European woman's

 

107Lydie Martial quoted an advocate of women's liberation who ex-
pressed the typical feminist impression of the "Maid of Orleans;" "A
woman, Jeanne d'Arc, has certainly saved France, feminism can certainly
save society." Lydie Martial, La Femme intégrale (Paris, 1901), 40.

108Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 114.

109Sullerot, Presse, 13-14.

 

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116

rights movment was born in France; it is the child of the Revolution
of 1789."110 In turn, French feminists repeatedly cited foreign advances
in woman's rights, hoping to prod France into emulation and to create an
impression of progress that the French situation could hardly impart by
itself.

Foreign develOpments influenced French feminism in several ways.
Among the most widely-read works on women in nineteenth-century France,
two came from England, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman (1792) and John Stuart Mill's The Suhjection of Women (1869),
and another came from Germany, August Bebel's Woman Under Socialism

(1883).111

The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries appeared as beacons
in respect to both organized feminist efforts and practical legislative
gains. American women held the first Women's Rights Congress at Seneca
Falls, New York in 1848, while Wyoming Territory led the western world in
granting full political rights to women.112 In 1851 Jeanne Deroin and

Pauline Roland wrote from their prison cell in Saint-Lazare: "Sisters

of America! your socialist sisters of France are united with you in the

 

110Schirmacher, The Modern Woman's Ri hts Movement, 175-
111

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with
Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (New York, 1967). John Stuart
Mill, The Subjection of Womeg (1869) in Alice S. Rossi, ed., Essays on Sex
Eguality._John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill (Chicago, 1970), 125-242.
August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism, trans. by Daniel de Leon from original
German of the 33rd edition (New York, 1971). For a feminist reaction to
Bebel's work, see Euginie PotoniE-Pierre's three-part review in La Cito enne,
5 July, 19 July, and 2 August 1891. Although Wollstonecraft's Vindication
is perhaps the best known of the late eighteenth-century works on women,
Melanie Lipinska considered Theodore Gottlieb Hippel's Uber die bfirgerliche
Verbesserung der Weiber (1792) to be the best contemporary examination of

the subject. Mélanie Lipinska, Histoire des femmes médecines depuis anti-
guité jusgu'i nos jour§ (Paris, 1900), 291.

112For an interesting account of woman suffrage in the American west,
see Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York, 1967).

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117

vindication of the rights of woman to civil and political equality."113
In response, the Second National Woman's Rights Convention, meeting at
Worcester, Massachusetts, delegated Lucretia Mott to correspond with French
feminists. Those with first-hand knowledge of the United States included
Olympe Audouard, who traveled there in the late 1860's, and Communard

Elie Reclus, who paid a brief visit to a couple of American utopian com-

114 Not until 1881 did French feminists

munities during his post-1871 exile.
send an official representative to the United States,but by then extensive
contacts had already developed between French advocates of women's libera-

tion and their counterparts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Conclusion
By the late 1860's the stage was set for a revival of organized

feminism in France. In std of itself that was not unusual. Somewhat in

 

113Miriam Schneir, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Write
ings (New York, 1972). For the complete text of this communication, see:
Stanton et. al., History of Woman Suffrage, 1, 234-37.

11“Olympe Audouard, A traversf1:Améri ue le Far-West (Paris,
1869) and Atrpvers l'Amérique.North;America, Etats-Unis Constitution,
moe rs usa es lois institutionngsectes religieuses (Paris, 1871 .
Elie Reclus, "Etudes Sociologiques: Visite aux perfectionnistes d'
oneida," and "Etudes Sociologiques: Visite aux shakers du mount libanon,"
La 80 i‘té Nouvelle, III (1885-86), 5-29, 45-71. Americans acquired an
impression of the French situation through the works of French feminists,
like Andri Léo's The American Colony in Paris in 1867 (Boston, 1868), and
the works of Americans in France, like Theodore Stanton's chapter on
"France" in his edited collection The Woman Question in Europe (New York,
1884). Based on Stanton's reports, Americans arrived at fairly accurate
pictures of the general situation of feminism in France: ”For the moment,
the woman question in Europe is pushed into the background by the all-
absorbing struggle still going on in various forms between the republi-
can and the monarchical principle, between the vital present and the mori-
bund past . . . . During the second empire, in spite of the oppressive
nature of the government, the movement took on a more definite form; its
advocates became more numerous; and men and women who held high places
in literature, politics and journalism, spoke out plainly in favor of
ameliorating the condition of French women. Then came the third repub-
lie, with more freedom than France had enjoyed since the beginning of the
century. The woman movement felt the change, and, during the past ten
years, its friends have been more active than ever before." Stanton, et. al.,

 

a. inlets ,‘1..Ir' ‘

. . 1!:

 

118
advance of Eastern Europe and somewhat behind the Anglo-American-Scan-
dinavian world, the emergent French feminist movement fell neatly into
line with the general impetus to women's liberation that swept the west
in the nineteenth century. Feminist consciousness in France bore the
imprint of two broad types of interrelated experiences. One type of
experience reflected the general situation of women in the western world;
the other stemmed from specific characterisitics of contemporary French
society.

As part of an international reaction to the general situation of
western women, the energence of the French movement raises the larger
question of why, at roughly the same moment in time, so many women and
men, in so many places, sought (or fought against) woman's emancipation.
The answer perhaps has to do with the convergence of two trends. One
trend involved the images of 32553. More so than men, whose images had

' women had been

traditionally been flexible and open to "allowances,'
measured absolutely against abstract ideals and myths. Some of these

images revered woman, as with medieval Mariolatry and the Saint-Simonian

 

"female messiah." Others denigrated ypgpp, as with Tertullian's belief

in hpg_as the "devil's gateway" and Prefect Lacour's conviction that a
"bad” woman could always ruin a "good" man. But, although women occasion-
ally suffered the effects of prevailing reverential or denigratory images
(no doubt women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have
preferred the courtly "pedestal" to the inquisitors' witch-btmnhg stake),
the specific content of these images was less important than the per-

sistent tendency to envelop women's lives in myth. So long as women

 

Histoy of Woman Suffrage, 111 [fan-18827, 896-96. Considerably less
accurate was the selection of Alexandre Dumas fils and Victor Hugo as the
only two French "Eminent Advocages of Woman Suffrage." Stanton et. al.,

History pf Woman Suffrage, IV 1 1883-1900), 1084.

119
remained "objectified" as woman, they stood little chance of deve10ping
their full potential:
A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a cer-
tain sex; it goes without saying that he is man. The terms masculine
and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on
legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite
like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive
and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate
human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative,
defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity . . . . Thus human-
ityis male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to
him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being . . . . For him she
is sex -- absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated
with reference to man and not him with reference to her; she is the
incidental, the inessential as opposed to the esiegtial. He is
Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other.

The other trend involved the changing objective conditions of
women's livess habitation patterns, economic practices, reproductive
relations, political arrangements, etc. These varied greatly over time
but always reflected some "mix" of environmental and human factors, which
determined a society's general configuration and the specific parameters
within which people lived. Whether any particular social configuration
and its associated parameters realized the optimum potential of the two
factors at a given time is beside the point; even a fully-realized poten-
tial could fall short of what might be imagined. Thus, despite the fact
that variations in the mix occasionally engendered alterations in social
configurations, there usually remained a great many gaps between the
actual, the possible, and the imaginable.

One of the most important of these gaps had a direct bearing on
the general situation of western women over the centuries. So long as
limited possibilities coincided with extreme images of woman, women

could take advantage of the gap to live in relative freedom. In other

words, so long as the images of woman tended to the poles of the good-

 

115Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xvii-xix.

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120
evil spectrum and so long as objective conditions imposed parameters
far removed from those images, women's daily existences remained rela-
tively unaffected by the prevailing myths. Hence, although some women
attempted to approximate the reverential ideal, which usually involved
virginal desexualization, and others fell victim to the counter-ideal,
most women could partially, if not wholly, avoid the worst effects of the
objectified images of 32252.

But what if new images and new objective conditions evolved and
then converged? The gap would close, and women would no longer enjoy
their experiential freedom of former times. Precisely such a conver-
gence occurred in France and elsewhere during the nineteenth century.

The image of the mere educatrice prescribed a rather pedestrian destiny
for women compared to the older dichotomized images. As guardians of the
household and tenders of children, women lost much of their previously
assumed power to save or ruin society directly. Instead, the new image
shifted woman's salvational burden to children, whose number and quality
became the essential criteria for distinguishing "good" women from "bad."

Regardless of the specific strictures, however, the central charac-
teristic of the mere educatrice ideal was its realizability. Unlike
past images, the mere educatrice meshed well with objective conditions
created out of evolving commercial and industrial abundance. Women of the
working and rural classes had to await a time of even greater abundance
before their condition could merge with the new ideal, but for women of
the middle class the gap between the possible and the imaginable underwent
a steady diminuation in the nineteenth century. Consequently, as the first
to undergo the loss of their former experiential freedom on a large scale,
bourgeois women found themselves in a position where they had either to

accept the unusually constraining parameters on their daily lives or to

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rebel against them. The inclination to rebel drew added strength from
the fact that "the gap between women's narrowed sphere and men's expanding
one appears to have reached its greatest extent at a time when liberal and
libertarian ideas were in ascendance."116

Taken together, the closing of the image-conditions gap and the
widening of the gap in rights between women and men left an increasing
number of women in a state of idea-structural bondage and provided the
victims of the systdme masculiniste wdth a core of experiences common to
many women in the west. Yet, if feminist consciousness in France arose
in part out of experiences that transcended national boundaries, certain
peculiarities of contemporary French society also had a profound effect
on the movement. Once the requisite discontent had set in, the systEme's
alienated had to identify the causes of woman's oppression and the remedies
for alleviating it in their own society. French feminists had to acquire,
in short, a directed consciousness. In pursuit of that end, they turned
their anguish against the more obvious institutions of male domination,

especially the Church and Imperial "despotism,' and aligned themselves
with a wide variety of social critics: free-thinkers, utopian socialists,
republicans, Freemasons, and so on. Some of these critics espoused
feminism for positive ends, hoping to employ women's energy and talent to
remake society; others saw it as simply necessary, fearing the potential
destructiveness of an unenlightened womanhood. Still others cared hardly
at all about woman's liberation but cooperated with feminists in opposi-
tion to common enemies. Thus, although its main outlines reflected ideas
and conditions common to the contemporary west, French feminism also dis-

played characteristics uniquely "determined" by the socio-political

peculiarities of the society from which it emerged.

 

116WilliamL. O'Neill, The Woman Movement: Feminism in the United
Wises. (ChicasO. 1969). 17-

 

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CRISIS AND COOPERATION:
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STRATEGY 01? pp BIIECIIE, AND ms CONGRESS OF 1878

A double division cut through the twenty years that elapsed
between the publication of Juliette Lamber's Idées anti-proudhoniennes
in 1858 and the first French Congress for WOmen's Rights, convened at
Paris in late July 1878. One division came at roughly the end of the
first of those two decades. By the late 1860's, feminism had overcome
the masculine backlash that had reduced the movement to silence in the
aftermath of the abortive 1848 revolution. More works of womanist or
feminist orientation appeared under the Second Empire than in any other
epoch of nineteenth—century France.1 These in turn laid the literary
foundation for the emergence of organized feminism in the second de—
cade. An obvious link tied the literary phase to the organized phase,
but the transition from isolated protests to concerted action repre-
sented a significant development in the evolution of French feminism.

The other division split the organized phase into two parts.
Within a few years of the initial attempts to establish a collective
effort, French feminists confronted a series of disruptive events: the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the cone

volutiona of the early Third Republic. Each of these events had

 

lTixerant, ”Lo Mouvement féhinist sous la second Empire,” 2.

122

 

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123

multiple immediate and long-range effects on the movement. The inter-
national conflict led to an instant suspension of feminist activity, as
concern for women's liberation gave way to a general concern for national
liberation. France ended the conflict by signing a disastrous armistice
in January 1871, whereupon the Paris Commune arose, causing civil war and
a further interruption of feminist activity. Finally, after the collapse
of the Second Empire in September 1870, feminists became involved in the
long, drawn-out dispute over the new political order.

The long-range effects of these disruptive events included the
loss of feminist militants like Juliette Lamber, who as Madame Adam in-
creasingly withdrew from the movement in order to trumpet "revenge"
against Germany, and dozens of Communards whose fate ranged from death
to imprisonment or exile. The war and the Commune altered the objective
conditions of French society sufficiently to permit women to play new
roles in industry, in nursing, and occasionally in combat. But these
roles proved temporary, due to a general tendency to employ pre-war
models for postwar reconstruction in the case of women and a specific
disinclination to honor women who had acted outside limits prescribed
by the‘gégg educatrice ideal. Indeed, the most powerful of the conflict-
induced impressions of woman, the image of the fanatic Comnard
pétroleuse, spawned a wave of "petrophobia" that strengthened the pre-
vailing belief in two types of women, the "bad", who went berserk under
stress, and the "good", who either remained at home or performed social
nurturing like nursing. However, the issue that had the greatest effect
on French feminism.involved the ongoing debate over the Third Republic.

JFeminists could not imagine women’s liberation in,a nonp

democratic society. Perceiving women as the "voiceless" oppressed,

I I.D.FI.
-....I. .

 

12h

feminists demanded a political order in which change could come from be-
low. For women to be free, France had to be free, which required the
abolition of authoritarian institutions and the establishment of a
democratic republic. Hence, although feminists acquired an unique social
identity as a consequence of their struggle to emancipate women, their
attachment to the republican prerequisite tended to undercut their pri-
mary goal whenever political threats arose. Such threats abounded
throughout the Third Republic, but in the 1870's the dangers seemed par-
ticularly acute. Five years passed before a constitution emerged in
1875, and it was not until 1877 that the republic seemed safe enough for
feminists to advance their cause.

The following year, 1878, feminists organized the first French
Congress for Yemen's Rights. Most of its participants retained a lively
fear of political reaction, due in part to recent harassment and an
awareness that masculinisme had accompanied authoritarian resurgences
after 1789 and 1848. But by its eighth year the Third Republic had
already outlived its republican predecessors. This longevity, coupled
with republican victories in the 1877 elections, lent an aura of sta-
bility to the political scene. Moreover, the organizers of the 1878
Congress had developed an approach to the feminist-republican dilemma
that they hoped would permit renewed efforts on behalf of women's
liberation without jeopardizing the fragile democracy.

This approach was called _l_a_ Me. As a strategy designed to
reconcile the primary goal with the larger political prerequisite,

"the breach. emphasized the need to secure civil rights for women by
attacking the systeme‘mascgliniste at its weakest points. Rather than

press for political rights, advocates of "the breach" maintained that

125

once women assumed full civil equality with men, enfranchisement would
follow as a matter of course. Imediate enactment of women's suffrage
represented the quickest but most difficult and dangerous path to women's
liberation, given the systéme's anticipated resistance to such a reform
and the prospect of a clerical reaction fueled by Catholic, female
voters. If "the breach" strategy foreshadowed a lengthy struggle to at-
tain only piecemeal benefits, as suffrage-oriented critics claimed, it
nonetheless offered the possibility of at least a few gains without risk
to the republic. In outline form, ”the breach" closely resembled the
reformist approach of the Opportunists who, confronted by a plethora of
problems in the 1880's, decided "é 22.9.9: les ggestions” -— take up the
issues one at a time. Above all, however, it reflected the judgment

of the movement's two principal figures, Maria Deraismes and Leon Richer.

Eggggism and the Liberal Empire

The initial steps toward an organized feminist movement occurred
at the end of the Second Empire. After 1859, the regime of Napoleon III
gradually shed some of its more authoritarian practices, and by the
late 1860's a variety of reforms had significantly liberalized imperial
rule. Feminists remained attached to the democratic prerequisite, but
like many republicans they "were prepared to leave Napoleon III in
office if he would only accept the principle of responsible government."
Such a prospect seemed in the offing. Several reforms opened the poli-
tical system to greater influence from below, and in.May 1870 a
plebiscite revealed a large majority in favor of a recently decreed
quasieparliamentary experiment, "combining an autocratic monarch with a

2

responsible cabinet." As "minors” in politics, women gained nothing at

 

2Wright, France in.Hodern Times, 191-2.

 

I n v4.1.1

EnvhyLa-F . . t

126

the time, but the liberal drift led Maria Deraismes later to reflect
that female suffrage had been close at hand in the Empire's last days.3
In other areas, the liberal Empire proved immediately beneficial to
feminists. Advances occurred in education through the opening of‘bgg
examinations and Paris' Medical School to women, while Duruy's proposals
simultaneously raised expectations for system-wide reform.and heightened
feminist Opposition to clericalism. Concessions to workers in the form
of condoning unions and strikes also helped feminists. But even.more
important were two general reforms, the restoration of press and assembly
freedoms, which penmitted feminists to organize and to propagandize with
only occasional interference from the authorities. Proponents of better
education like Jean Mace, pacifists, republicans, and others benefited

as well from Napoleon's "liberalized authoritarianism,” with the result
that the organizational efforts undertaken by feminists coincided with
similar attempts by those with whom feminists already agreed in prin—
ciple.

Relaxation of press and assembly restrictions, officially en-
acted in 1868, provoked an explosion of conferences. Within a year,
over three hundred took place involving nearly.3,000 discourses on a
wide range of topics. Spokesmen for an assortment of communisms and
socialisme vied with mutualists, cooperativists, and anarchists,
haranguing audiences on the complexities of credit, salaries, unemployh

ment, interest, capital, and so on.“ Specific women's issues

 

3Oeuvres complEtes de Maria Deraismes (Paris, 1895), i.

“Gustave de Mblinari, Le Mouvement socialiste et les reunions
pgbligues avant la revolution du & septembre 1879. Paris, 1872 ,
3-7, 374-

 

127

constituted only a small proportion of the topics discussed, but "to-
wards the end of the Empire, the most ardent feminists organized a

«5

veritable campaign of conferences. The topic of marriage and divorce
attracted audiences for four months at PréLaux-clercs, and at the vaux-
Hall a series of conferences led to resolutions calling for general
equality between the sexes, admission of women to the liberal professions
(especially medicine), amelioration of conditions for female workers,
development of professional education for girls, and establishment and
secularization of girls' schools. These conferences left an impression
on popular Opinion, and "the journalists in their reports were astonished
at the aplomb of women speaking in public."6

The vanx-Hall conferences drew well; a session on women's work
attracted more than 2,000 people in June 1868. Their organizer was
Leon Richer, who had initiated a program.of Sunday free-thinking
"philosophical conferences" at the Masonic GrandFOrient, 16 rue Cadet,
in January 1866. Assisted by philosopher Charles Fauvety, the patron
of Juliette Lamber andeen y d'Héricourt, and two of his Opinion
Nationale colleagues, Adolphe Gue'roult and Jules Labbe’, Richer took ad-
vantage of the Empire's indulgence towards both free-thinking and
Freemasonry to raise a number of critical issues, including women’s
rights. The assembly law of 1868 permitted Richer to expand his opera-
tions by holding public meetings outside Masonic lodges. It also enabled
him to enroll more female speakers, like Aner Le'o and Paule Kink who

linked women's liberation to proletarian.emancipation and looked askance

 

5Villiers, Histoire des Clubs de Femmgg, 380.

6Tixerant, ”Le.Mouvement feministe sous la second Empire," 3.

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128

at the bourgeois character of French Masonry, and to increase the verbal
reach of his prize recruit, Maria Deraismes.7

Deraismes' conversion to feminism resembled Juliette Lamber's,
except that the antagonist was different. Rather than Proudhon, who had
died in 1865, Barbey-d'Aure'villy represented Deraismes' 33333 392;.
Barbeybd'Aurevilly singled out women writers as the worst of the
ba§=blggg, and on 7 February 1866 he published another of his derisive
critiques in the EEQEBJgggg, focusing on the ”faults" of sixty-seven year
old feminist Eugenie Niboyet. This attack overcame Deraismes' initial
reluctance to speak out in public, and later that same month she ac-
cepted Richer's invitation to mount the rostrum.at the Grand—Orient.
Shortly thereafter she delivered a second series of lectures at the salle
des Capucines, so that by the time the Vaux-Hall conferences began
Deraismes had polished her style to the point where even the unsympa-
thetic went away impressed by her poise and knowledge.8

Despite their early collaboration and Deraismes' success as an
orator, neither Deraismes nor Richer enjoyed any special prominence in
the years 1866 through 1868. Indeed, Richer played no role at all in
the liberal Empire's most important feminist organization, the Société
pour la Revendication des Droits de la Femme. Founded in the home of

Aner’Léo in 1866, the new society included such disparate individuals

 

7The Imperial government authorized the Freemasons to hold
public conferences in 1865. For information on these conferences, see:
Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feminists en France de 186 a1 lk (Paris,
1934), ll; Marianne Monestier, Les Societes secretes afeminines, 12h;
Eliane Brault, La Franc-Maconnerie etll‘emancipation des femmes, h9—51;
and the article frmm the Nouvelle Revue Llnternationale of 1 July 1889
in BMD, Dossier Deraismes.

8For Barbeybd'Aurevilly's attitude towards women, see
Chapter I. For sources on Deraismes, see below.

 

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129

as Paule Mink, Louise Michel, Néomie and Elie Reclus, Maria Verdure,
Madame Vincent and her sister Madame Mauriceau, Louise David, Ranvier,
Claire Demars, Madame Jules Simon, Caroline de Barreau, Maria Deraismes,
and the Society's host, André'Léo. Republican sentiment and an interest
in woman's lot held the group together so long as the Second Empire pre-
vailed, but grave differences divided Revendication's membership:
Anti—clericals like Deraismes objected to the moderate Catholicism
espoused by Madame Simon and her husband Jules; Caroline de Barreau's
interest in Saint-Lazare's ex—prisoners reflected the group's concern for
prostitutes but represented a philanthropic tendency out of step with
the activist orientation of Mink, Leo, and.Michel; and in general the
group split along class lines, as evidenced by the eventual Communard
careers of the Reclus, Mink, Michel, Leo, and Verdure. Consequently,
Revendication elaborated a two-point program that, given the innumerable
constraints on women, represented a consensual minimum: better girls'
education and higher pay for working women to prevent prostitution.9
Revendication survived into the Third Republic but lost much of
its m 9233 once girls' education began to improve in the late
1870's and 1880's. In 1881, Revendication and its sizable treasury
merged with the Société'pour l'Amélioration du Sort de la Femme, pro-
ducing the Société'pour l'Amélioration due Sort de la Femme et la

Revendication de ses Droits. By then l'Amélioration had established

 

9Noel, Dictionnaire de la Commune, 258; Helene Miropolsky's
obituary of Madame Vincent in l'Excelsior, 12 March 191%; Li Dzeh-Djen,
La Presse feministe, 29; Villiers, Histoire des Clubs de. Femmgg, 382;
Thomas, Louise Michel, 60 and The WOman Incendiaries, 33; Dronsart,
"Le Mouvement feministe," 112; and Supplement to Bulletin of the
Union Francais pour le Suffrage des Femes, 19111, 15- .

 

 

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130

itself as the dominant organization within the feminist movement.
Created in April 1870 as the Association pour le Droit des Femmes,
l'Amélioration also provided the collective base from which Deraismes
and Richer imposed their personal leadership on feminism's first genera-
tion.10 Their propaganda arm had appeared the year before in April 1869,
when, with financial backing from.Arles-Dufour and in the face of a
"formidable burst of laughter," Richer used the 1868 press law to found
Le Droit des Femmes.11 oRicher served as both president of llmmélioration
and editor-in-chief of Le Droit des chnes, but it was Deraismes who con—-
ducted the group's daybto-day activities and helped to keep the fledgling
newspaper alive with additional monetary and literary contributions. On
11 July 1870, Deraismes, assisted by Richer, presided over the first

12

feminist banquet in France. Eight days later France declared war on

Prussia.

International and Civil war

The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1 and the Paris Commune of 1871
elicited a response similar to that of 1789. VOmen rallied first to the
13

defense of‘lg'patrie and then to the cause of social transfonmation.

 

101,1 Dzeh—Djen wrote of the 1870 Association pour le Droit des
Femmes: tCe fut l'origine de l'organisation actuelle de feminisme."‘£g
Presse feministe, 28.

”Sullerot, La Presse fe'minine, 31. Hubertine Auclert, Le Vote
des fennes (Paris, 1908 , 102. """'""""

”Monestier, Socie'te' secretes fe'minines, 130; Brault, Franc-

!ggonnerie gt l'émancipation des femmeg, 92.

13For information on women during the Franco—Prussian War and
Paris Commune, see: Villiers, Histoire des Clubs de. Femmes; Joseph
Turquan, Les Femmeggde France 1870,71 pendant l'invasion (Paris, 1893);
Hunt, "Feminism and Anti-Clericalism under the Commune;" Noel,
Dictionnaire de la Commune; S. Froumov, La Commune de Paris et la

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Workshops drew heavily on female labor, and the growing casualty list
attracted women to nursing. Bourgeois women founded the Société de
Secours pour les Victimes de la Guerre to care for the wounded, and both
Madame Adam and.Maria Deraismes set up treatment centers. Jules Allix's
Comite' des Femes, whose 1,800 members included Andre' Le'o and Elizabeth
Dmitrieff during the siege, combined nursing with efforts to establish
commmmal workshops and educational facilities for women. Unlike its
bourgeois counterpart, it also emphasized the idea of equality between
the sexes.

The Second Empire fell on A September 1870; two weeks later the
Prussians invested Paris. WOmen joined men in the streets, demonstra-
ting their support for the new republic and urging more stringent action
against the invaders. A few engaged in the fighting, while a larger
number played prominent roles in various vigilance committees, es-
pecially that of the 18th arrondissement founded by Mesdames Collet,
Sophie Poirier, and Louise Michel. women's clubs also proliferated.

But as defeat followed defeat and rumors of surrender spread, represenp
tatives of these committees and clubs, led by Léh, Michel, Poirier, and
Beatrix Excoffon, once again took to the streets, protesting against
government ineptitude and cowardice. The government responded by closing
the clubs, outlawing newpapers, and ordering the arrest of demonstrators.

France capitulated on 28 January 1871. Six weeks later Paris
revolted against the National Assembly sitting at versailles. Parisian
radicals, who had opposed Napoleon III's declaration of war, blamed the

Assembly for the republic's humiliation. Economic hardship, especially

 

democratisation de l'éhole (Moscow, 1958); and Thomas, Louise Michel,
The Heman Incendiaries, and ”The UOmen of the Commune," The Massachu-
setts Revie , x11 (Sumner, 1971), 1.09—17.

 

 

 

132

the cessation of a moratorium of debts, exacerbated the situation.

When the Assembly tried to seize Paris' cannons in mid-March, the city
responded by establishing a revolutionary municipal government. Radical
women, led by Karl Marx's friend Elizabeth Dmitrieff, indicated their
support for the Paris Conmmne in April by organizing the Union des Fenmes
pour le De'fense de Paris et les Soins aux Blesse’s. Inspired by the
International's expectation of European-wide class struggle, the Union
des Fe-es called for annihilation of all privileges and inequalities,
branding female supporters of the armistice as "an anonymous group of
reactionaries."

The Union des Fen-ses did not represent all women during the
Col-rune, not even all radical women. Louise Michel, though a member of
the International, did not belong to it, and Aner Le’o's membership is
open to conjecture. Rival organizations included the 18th arrondisse-
29.9.2.9. vigilance comittee and the mnnerous clubs which reappeared under
the Comune. Duplication and competition marred the comon effort,
though all engaged in similar tasks: nursing, working, propagandizing,
and ferreting out draft dodgers. In general, they hoped to abolish
woman's double exploitation as worker and female, staking their future
on a call to arms, constant vigilance, and the development of a new
revolutionary consciousness.

Comunards of both sexes viewed education as the key to pro-
gress. Militant women of various political persuasions strove to
establish free, compulsory lay schools to promote republican citizen-
ship. Better orphanages and day nurseries for working women drew
support from several groups, including the Socie'te' des Amis de

l'Enseignement and Jules Allix's La COImmme Sociale de Paris. The day

 

 

 

 

133

before Versailles' troops entered Paris, the municipal government
raised teaching salaries, eliminated pay differences between male and
female instructors, and appointed a committee composed of Mesdames
Perier, Reclus, Sapia, Leo, and Anna Jaclard to reorganize and to super-
intend girls' schools. The Commune also took steps to sanction working-
class morality. In early.April it granted pensions to the families of
fallen Communards, regardless of whether a legal marriage had taken
place. Common-law wives benefitted immediately, and children found
themselves freed frmm the stigma of legal illegitimacy.

The Commune died during the "Bloody week" that ended 28 May 1871.
In its last days women fought on the barricades, sometimes with.more de-
termination than their menfolk, but to no avail. Many who survived
faced trial, imprisonment, or exile. In all the Councils of war dealt
with 1,051 women, acquitting 850 for lack of evidence. Death, insanity,
and additional acquittals reduced the number even more, until in the end
157 women received sentences ranging from probation to death. No execu-
tions took place, but several women, including Louise Michel and
Nathalie Lemel, drew sentences of deportation to New Caledonia. Others
had to flee France. Mink, Leo, and Dmitrieff escaped to Switzerland,
and Tinayre, accompanied by her five children, wandered from Geneva to
Saxony, eventually settling in Budapest. A partial amnesty in 1879 and
a general amnesty in 1880 permitted.most of the deported and exiled to
return to France, but by then the feminist movement had reestablished
itself under less radical leadership.

Of the role of women in the Commune only the harmful myth of
the petroleuse remained. Fires ravaged Paris throughout "Bloody week,"

creating mass hysteria. Opponents of the insurrection suspected a

(lili’ll '9
.

.fl—

 

 

134

women's plot to burn the city. In the course of the fighting, Ver-
sailles' troops killed hundreds of poor, ill-dressed women caught with
baskets, boxes, or'milk bottles. No proof exists that women systemati-
cally planned to destroy the city, although Communards employed arson

to halt government forces, and the Union des Femmes' statutes mentioned
the purchase of kerosene as a war measure. Nevertheless, the myth

spread, strengthening the old prejudice that woman's emotions would lead
her to run amok in times of crisis. Alexandre Dumas fél§.reflected the
popular conviction when he remarked that it was better not to speak of
these female animals out of respect for decent women, whom they resemble-

when they are dead.1&

Maria Deraismes

With the cessation of international and civil hostilities,
feminists resumed their struggle. The interregnum had cost them.mo-
mentum, militants, and "respectability.” Although the Second Empire
had fallen and a democracy seemed in the offing, neither the recovery
of the movement nor the establishment of a republic seemed certain.
An ever-present fear of masculine backlash and political reaction re-
mained. Resurrecting the movement thus required a deft socio-political
touch. The individuals who possessed that touch were Maria Deraismes
and Leon Richer.

When Maris Deraismes accepted Leon Richer's invitation to

speak at the Grant Orient in 1866 she was thirtyhseven years old.15

 

1"Villiers, Histoire des Clubs de Femmes, 412.

15For biographical information.on Maria Deraismes, see: BMD,
Dossier Deraismes; Abensour, Histoire éhérale, 269-71; Brault,
Franc-Maconnerie et l'émancipation des femmes, 62-126; Louli Sanua,
Figures feminines 1909-1939, 127-8; Suzanne Grinberg, Historique

(72 .I. «.1 ratio n IE~I~S~LTU F~2fi eu~nW<flU<hflmcx

 

135

Born in Brittany, she spent her youth at Pontoise (Seine-et-Oise) in a
VOltairian milieu fostered by her father, a liberal republican. One of
five children, of whom only her elder sister survived for long, she
benefited from.an education usually reserved for sons. She mastered
Latin and Greek, studied law and political science, and probed the posi-
tivism of Comte. Financially she was secure. Her father amassed a for-
tune as a wholesale merchant, trading with America out of an office on
the rue Saint Denis in Paris. His death in 1852, followed by that of
Deraismes' mother nine years later, left her a wealthy rentiére with an
income of 50,000 to 70,000 francs per year. Intelligence and wealth
reinforced Deraismes' independent disposition. unlike her sister Anna,
she remained a life-long celibate, due in part to chronic poor health,
but more so to an aversion to male dominance. Perhaps the most impor-
tant man in her life, from a personal point of view, was Alexandre

Weill, author and journalist, but nothing permits the supposition that

 

du mouvement suffr iste depuis 18118 (Paris, 1926), 59-73; Avril de
Sainte—Croix, Le Feminisme (Paris, 1907), 85-6; Jane Misme, ”La Vie et
la mort du feminisme," 35; Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 23-27;
Theodore Zeldin, ed., Conflicts in French Society: Anticlericalism,
Education and Morals in the Nineteenth Centugy (London, 190), RT—
Dronsart, "Le Mouvement feministe," 110-37; Jeaanernard asserieu
"Netice," in Oeuvres completes de Maria Deraismes, vav; Bulletin de
l'Union Universelle des Femmes 15 March 1891; Helene Brion, ed.,
Efiéyclopedie feministe, MSS, I, at RMD; Monestier, Les Societes secretes
feminines, 124-54; Sullerot, La Presse feminine, 30-1; Beauvoir, The
Second Se;1 137; Thomas, Louise Michel, 60-1, 280; Acomb, The French
Laic Laws, 117, Genevieve Gennari, Le Dossier de la femme (Paris, 1965);
Jeanne E. Schmahl, "Progress of the WOman's Rights Movement in France,"
Forum (September, 1896), 81-6; Almanach Fe’ministe 18 (Paris, 1899),
36:7; Ladouceur, Conference sur la feminisme et les revendications
feministes (Orange, 1897); Tourmentin, La Femme chez les France-
Magons; Journal des Femmes, FebruaryAMarch 189k, August 1898;
Dictionnaire do Biographie Franpaise, X (Paris, 1962), 1118; Eugen
Lennhoff and Oskar Posner, eds., Internationales Freimaurerlexikon

(Austria, 1932) , 335.

 

 

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136
their relationship was anything other than fraternal. In a conversation

with Jean-Bernard Passerieu, Deraismes laughingly explained her single

status:

Why am I not married? There could be several reasons, but
the truth is that I have not met 3 man who pleased me, or if I
have met him, I did not see him.1

Marriage might have improved her image in the eyes of traditionalists,
but Deraismes recognized that under French law single women had more
freedom than those who married. Marriage was also time consuming, and
she had other things to do.

In 1934, a student of French feminism described Deraismes as
"the first French‘ggggdg‘bourgeoise to consecrate her high intelligence,
her vast erudition, her eloquence, her fortune and all her life to
the cause of women."1‘7 But, though woman's liberation remained her
principal goal, Deraismes' career was far more complex. Ultimately
she wanted to create a more perfect society based on equality of
the sexes. But to achieve that, certain preconditions had to be met.
Woman's emancipation required above all a society open to debate
and reform. She could not accept d'Héricourt's notion that anyone
who opposed woman's "legitimate” claim” was an enemy of progress.
For Deraismes feminism could not be so easily divorced from politics.
Some enemies, especially monarcbists and clericals, were simply
too reactionary to be condoned, regardless of their stand.on women.
Progress for both women and society demanded a congenial milieu, and

to Deraismes that meant a viable lay republic.

 

16Jean-Bernard, "NOtice," LIV.

l7Li Dzeh—Djen, La Presse feministe, 23,

 

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137

Republicanism drew as heavily as feminism on Deraismes' time
and.money. During the Second Empire her salon served as a meeting place
for Napoleon III's republican opponents. She rejoiced at the collapse
of the imperial regime in September 1870 but feared for the survival of
its successor, the Third Republic. During the Franco-Prussian War she
ran an infirmary at one of her properties in the Faubourg Saint-Denis,
but a bout of emphysema kept her out of Paris at the time of the Commune.
While convalescing she joined the Republican Committee of Saint Male and
accepted an invitation from the local municipal council to speak at a
neighboring theater. She chose the subject "Republic and.Monarchy,"
and although "the success was considerable . . . she paid for this success
by vomiting blood and her shaky health forced her to remain silent for
four years."18 In 1873, she published France et progrds, a tract ex-
tolling the virtues of republican patriotism.19

Deraismes feared for the safety of the young republic.
Bonapartists, Legitimists, and Orleanists, hoping to restore their

respective dynasties, gradually infiltrated the government, and Thiers'

 

18Jean-Bernard, "Notice," xix.

19Maria Deraismes, France et progrés (Paris, 1873). In addition
to France et ro rés, Deraismes published works include: L‘Ancien devant
le nouveau lParis, 1869)° Aux femmcs riches (Paris, 1865); Les Droits
de l'enfant (Paris, 1887 ; Epidemie naturaliste: Emile Zola et la
science,_discours pronounce au profit d'une societe pour l'enseignement
en 1880 (Paris, 1888); Lettre au clerge'francais (Paris, 1879); Egg
principes et nos moeurs (Paris, 1868); and ThérJSa et son époque
Paris, 1865 . She also wrote several plays: A bon chat bon rat
Paris, 1861 ; Le Pére coupgble (Paris, 1862); Retour 3 ma femme
Paris, 1862 ; and Un neveu, 3 i1 vousgplait (Paris, 1862). Her
Szincipal feminist‘works were: contre Monsieur Dumas fils and
dans l'humanite. Her Oeuvres completes were compiled after her
death by her sister, Madame Anna Féresse-Deraismes.

 

-------------

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138

fall in 1873 signalled the beginning of an anti-republican crusade. Its
leaders correctly identified Deraismes as one of their opponents and
Interior Minister Buffet outlawed her feminist group. Richer pleaded
l'Amélioration's cause in his newspaper, but the ban continued until the
seize mai crisis restored republican power the following year and the
1878 WOmen's Rights Congress demonstrated the movement's moderation. In
the course of the struggle Deraismes rallied her home district and
succeeded in securing the election of the first republican deputy from
the department of Seineuet—Oise, M. Senart:

The men of 16 May, who had undertaken that unhappy escapade,
had been refused the right to meet together. Maria Deraismes byh
passed the authorization; she invited the inhabitants of Pontoise
to the grand salon of her beautiful property of Mathurins; flou-
archist Premieg] M. de Broglie would very much have liked to pre-
vent a property owner from inviting her neighbors to visit over
a cup of tea, but he did not dare. After tea, they talked, and
Maria Deraismes improvised household conferences whose success
drew people there from the entire department; often several hunp
dred came; during those days, the salon was too small and they
trampled on thg prohibitions of M. de Broglie and on the flowers
in the garden.“

In 1881 Deraismes expanded her political clout by founding a newspaper,
Le Republicain dc Seine-et-Oise. Its demise five years later'marked
her withdrawal from.fonmal politics, but she had accomplished her ob—
jective. In the election of 1885 Deraismes' hand-picked republican
slate swept the balloting. Her salon in Paris on the rue Cardinet
continued to attract leading radical republicans. Through it she led
her friends in opposition to General Boulanger in the late 1880's,
personally offsetting in part the influence of his foremost backer,

the wealthy Duchesse d'Uzés.

Deraismes' exertions on behalf of republicanism dovetailed

with another equally important effort, the struggle against Church

 

20Jean-Bernard, "Notice," xxv.

 

f".

 

139

influence in France. Her earliest public appearances had been under the
auspices of Freemasonry, an organization which shared her attachment to
anti-clericalism. Richer was a Mason, Véhérable Maitre of the Lodge

Mars‘gt les Arts, and free-thinking dominated the "philosophical con—

 

ferences" he sponsored at the Grand Orient. Deraismes saw in these
gatherings an opportunity to promote both republicanism and a lessening
of the Church's control over women. She applauded Masonic emphasis on
the need for lay education, one of the principal goals of the feminist
society she helped found with Andre Leo in 1866. It saddened and angered
her that Masons excluded women from full membership, for she believed
the effect of that policy was to drive women into the clerical camp.
But as long as the Church opposed rational scientific progress, she
maintained, it was necessary to support its opponents. And despite a
constitutional prohibition against admitting "slaves, women, fools,
stupid atheists, imoral and dishonored people,” a minority of Masons
like Richer actively sought to open the ranks to women. Deraismes hoped
one day to join.21

The end of the immediate threat to the Republic in the late

1870's permitted Deraismes to expand her campaign against "the empire

 

21French Freemasons had accorded official but inferior status to
women since 177&, when the Grand Orient de France recognized loges
d'Adoption. With special initiation ceremonies and rituals, these
”adopted lodges" bound personnes.ggmgg§ to chastity, fidelity, charity,
modesty, gentleness, etc. Few ”adopted lodges" remained under the
Second Empire, and the minority of Masons who wished to admit women
directly into their ranks had to weigh women's participation against
another issue, the indulgent attitude of the imperial government to-
wards Masonry. The Grand Orient's tacit acceptance of Napoleon III's
rule led a number of lodges to formoa new Obedience, La Grande Loge
symbolique. This new Obedience received the Grand Orient's approval,
but the thirty-six lodges that eventually fonmed the new coalition,
which included many of Deraismes' friends, tended thereafter to shy away
from pressing for women's admission for fear of jeopardizing their own
recognition. ‘Monestier, Les Societes secrEtes feminines, 105-31.

p
u

 

1A0

of the Church and the authority of the priest."22 In a "Letter to the
French Clergy,” written in 1879, she attacked the notion of Catholicism
as a civilizing force. Two years later at the Grand Orient, she co-
hosted with Victor Schoelcher the first Anti-Clerical Congress in
France, which called for separation of Church and State, civil intern—

23 Local supporters

ment, divorce, and equal rights for men and women.
recognized her leadership in 1885 by electing her president of La
Federation des Groupes de la libre pensée de Seine-et-Oise.

In the meantime, Deraismes achieved one of her life's ambitions:
admission to Freemasonry. A rebel lodge in the neighboring town of
Pecq (seine—et-Oise) admitted her in January 1882. "The door you have

opened will not be closed again on me or on all the legion that will

 

2Oeuvres com létes de Maria Deraismes, 270.

23Due to Schoelcher's infrequent attendance, Deraismes, as vice-
president, assumed overall direction of the 1881 Anti-Clerical Congress.
Of the Congress' various resolutions, the one that aroused the most
controversy involved civil internment. Participants swore an oath to
that effect, pledging to bequeath their wealth to charity in the event
of a death-bed recantation. Deraismes died in 189A and was buried with
secular rites. At the end she said to her doctor: "Justice! Ah! dear
doctor, in it I believe with all my soul, but I have looked for it in
this world and I have not found it: perhaps it will be elsewhere; but
if it is not there so. . .” To her critics. like Marie Dronsart, these
words reflected "un.ma1aise moral, une inquiétude de l'au-delé, qui se
traduisirent la vielle de sa mort." To her admirers, like Jean-Bernard,
her last utterance raised only the I'terrible probIEme que les esprits
les plus degagés de préjugéh ne se posent pas sans une certaine anxiété."
Dronsart, "Le Mouvement feministe," 113. Jean—Bernard, "Notice," xxvi-
xxvii, Liii. The resolution on women, proposed by Deraismes and adopted
by the Congress, read as follows:

"Le Congrés emet 1e voeu que les hommes, et surtout les libres—
penseurs, fassent de leurs femmes leurs compagnes dans leurs reunions,
cercles, comices, et travaillent a les fairs reconnaitre legalement
comme leurs égaIes.

Il est entendu que le droit politique est compris dans la
formle: Egalite’."

Jeaanernard, "Notice,” xxvii-xxviii.

 

1&1

follow me," she exclaimed to her Masonic brethren. Six months later the
door closed. Pecq's parent organization suspended the lodge until the
summer of 1882. Pecq recanted, barring Deraismes once again from.the
temple. A decade passed and then in 1893 Deraismes retaliated by
establishing a special lodge with the cooperation of Senator Georges
Martin, a former municipal councillor of Paris. Called the Grande Loge
Symbolique Ecossais de France: Le Droit Humain, it admitted men and wo-
men on an equal footing. Traditional lodges refused to recognize the
new hybrid, but it flourished nonetheless, spreading to several European
countries, Africa and America. It survives today as the Droit Humain
Mixte at International.

Other causes also attracted Deraismes, especially those of
governmental decentralization and international peace through arbitra-
tion. Convinced that moral improvement represented the essential form
of progress, she also campaigned against novels, "with their contemptible
heroes, their exploitation of scandal and their destruction of 'princi-
plea and sentiments'." Duty must temper pleasure lest the family col-
lapse: "The phalanx of bastards and foundlings are the innocent victims
of this pleasure."24 The same perspective prompted her opposition to
vivisection. She belonged to both the Societé Francoise contre la
Vivisection and the Ligue Populaire contre 1'Abus de la Vivisection. "I
see you full of blood, of blood up to your necks, but it is not yours,"
Deraismes wrote of those who experimented on animals.

Ah! What a he py generation you prepare for us there [Eh
your laboratorie§7¥ Look a bit therefore at all those adolescents

 

2l‘Maria Deraismes, Nos Princi es et nos moeurs, 208-50, cited
in Theodore Zeldin, "The Conflict of Moralities," in Zeldin, ed.,
Conflicts in French Societ , 44-5.

 

‘L‘illllr .llv
o

. «L

 

O...

 

142

who, under the pretext of studying and learning, petrify
their heart, blind their sentiment, killing, finally, in
them the principle of all emotion; praising themselves for
seeing suffering and remaining unaffected . . .
Coupled with Darwinism, vivisection portended euthanasia or worse. In-
deed, a young man imbued with just such ideas had not so long ago killed
a woman who befriended him because, according to Deraismes, he considered
her a "vulgar being who lived more vegetably than intellectually." "I
am convinced,” she concluded, that France "will disabuse itself of this
new invasion of barbarians, and will justify, one more time, its imp
perishable mottos‘gggit, 'ustice, humanite'."25 But like republicanism
and anti-clericalism, these causes had one ultimate objective for
Deraismes: the creation of a society conducive to woman's emancipation.
Deraismes' career elicited a variety of reactions. Those who
remained unconvinced of the need for women's liberation identified her
with the revolutionary and philosophical excesses so long associated
with feminism. To them she was simply a more refined version of the
étroleuses, dangerous to moral and social order and destructive of the

26

family. Even a majority of the Masons viewed her as "a kind of
monster," possessed of an essence distinct from that of other women.27
In general, the bourgeoisie suspected her for her ideas while working
people distrusted her because of her class. Even Deraismes' vast
erudition, which earned her entry into the Société'des gens de lettres,

hampered the effectiveness of her appeal: Deraismes "gave “to

feminism a cerebral character that removed from it all possibility

 

25Maria Deraismes, Discours contre la vivisection, 26—9.

26

Abensour, Histoire énérale, 271.

27Monestier, Les Societes secrétes feminines, 128.

 

a

 

1&3

of action on the majority of women of her epoch. . ."28

Even more important, some of those who shared Deraismes' prin-
cipal goal, in whole or in part, felt that her temperament and outside
activities compromised their cause. One such critic was Jeanne Schmahl,
an English woman by birth, who founded a very conservative feminist
group, l'Avant-Courriére, in 1893 - a year before Deraismes' death.
Schmahl's career coincided with the fragmentation of the movement, and
she pinned the blame on Deraismes. Maria "was despotic," Schmahl wrote
in 1896, "and lacked that primordial quality of great leaders - a quality
which has ever been one of the distinctive characteristics of all great
generals - the ability to recognize and utilize talent or merit in the
rising soldiers of her army." Deraismes' concern for politics and re-
ligion had also been a great error. "Until women have got the franchise
they can neither be Republicans nor'Monarchists," Schmahl explained, "it
is therefore foolish to stamp them beforehand as belonging to this or
that political camp." French women have rallied slowly to feminism "not
only because they are profoundly ignorant of its signification," con-
cluded Schmahl, "but because they disapprove of the socialistic and
irreligious attitude of most of the leaders."29 Another critic was
Jane Misme who, a decade after Deraismes' death, founded the leading
feminist newspaper in France, La Frangaise. Misme, like Schmahl,
blamed Deraismes for permitting feminism to become identified in the
public mind with causes "more or less revolutionary." "One can

suppose," Misme reflected, "that Deraismes' political passion impeded

 

286ennari, Le Dossier de la femme, 12—3.

29Schmahl, "Progress of the Hemen's Rights Movement in
France ," 81-60

 

w,

L

L]

'n‘.-..

 

144

her feminist activity," so that what she gave to women with one hand she
retracted with the other.30
A similar complaint came from.Marie Dronsart, who conceded that
"Maria Deraismes was assuredly someone; one should acknowledge and de-
plore it all the more that she put her beautiful intelligence to the
service of many erroneous and subversive ideas." Fortunately, since 1889
the situation had begun to change, wrote Dronsart two years after
Deraismes' death: "Moderation and patience were entering into feminine
councils, and the omnipotence of Maria Deraismes was weakening; other
women were coming to the fore and making themselves heard; that was
very painful to her'zgn the last days of her lifé7,‘because for twenty
years, she could say: {Lg feminisme, c'est moi.'" As an advocate of
religious, bourgeois "family feminism," Dronsart also found fault with
Deraismes' anti-clerical and political behavior:
Christian morality is treated more than contemptuously;
its divine founder has discovered nothing; the priests, with-
out exception, are condemned as malefactors, born-enemies of
societies, of light and of justice. . . There is what the ad-
mirers of Maria Deraismes style as the 'dialectic without
passion.‘ . . . State socialism was dear to her and the so-
called free society of which she dreamt would have been so
protected, guarded, regulated, that individual initiative
would be annihilated in a stroke and roped 53.33 m m
‘ " like no theocracy or autocracy would have known
how to invent.
Deraismes' domination of Seine-et—Oise's political fortunes
left her susceptible to charges of hypocrisy as well. Suffrage—
oriented feminists led by Hubertine Auclert repeatedly castigated her

in the 1880's for devoting and donating so much to republicanism in

 

30Misme, from an undated, unidentified press clipping at
BMD, Dossier Deraismes.

31Dronsart, "Le Mouvement feministe," 113-5.

 

1&5

her home department and so little to the struggle for women's political
rights. Her wealth evoked further words of reproach, especially at the
time of her death. An obituary notice of March 1894 pointed out that
Deraismes left her entire income to her sister, making no provision for
the movement:
So rich, would she leave nothing to continue her work of

feminine emancipation? . . . She permitted the hope that after

her death, she would not forget the emancipators. There are

some grave deceptions here. Poor groups who went into debt

to buy the wreath.ZEor Deraismes' funeral7 are spreading re-

crhminations in hindsight against what they call forgetful-

ness, not to say treason. “
Shortly thereafter, a motion to add Deraismes' name to the official
title of the group she founded ended in failure. A.majority of its
members, while acknowledging her leadership, felt such an honor would
be a slur on the reputation of other pioneers.33

Despite the criticism, Deraismes remained first and foremost a

feminist. Detractors might question her means, but they recognized the
devotion she brought to her cause. Wmman's Rights constituted for
Deraismes the final step on the ladder of progress, and her concern for
intermediate rungs served only to enhance what lay at the end. Civili-
zation had reached a turning point, and "the liberation of women was

.34

the key to a new era.

 

32Unidentified newspaper clipping of March 189& at BMD, Dossier
Li e Francaise pour le Droit des Femmes. An obituary notice on
Feresse-Deraismes, who died 19 January 1910, accused.Maria of using
Anna as a stand-in for photographs. The notice described Maria as
a supreme coquette who wished to employ Anna's beauty in order to
enhance her own image in posterity's eyes. La Fran aise,
30 January 1910.

33Ame'lioration, Bulletin, October-December 1896.

3(Quoted in Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 28.

 

1&6

What prompted Deraismes to identify with oppressed womanhood
is an open question. Certainly the liberal atmosphere of her home life
clashed with the conservatism that prevailed under Louis Philippe and
Napoleon III. Though only a young girl at the time, she reacted strongly
to the Revolution of 1848, refracted no doubt through the eyes of her
republican father. Deraismes' status and talent, in a society that fre-
quently denied both to women, also played a part. Her wealth, which in
male hands would have assured success, revealed to her the social dimenp
sions of woman's plight. A superior education provided her with a
breadth of perspective rare among her colleagues and an escape from the
cultural prison in which most women languished. Through it she en-
countered bold avant-garde thinkers, not the least of whom was John
Stuart Mill.35 She also experienced frustrations, as when a youthful
attempt to write comedies received a lukewarm.response. Her restless
and independent spirit sought an outlet. She found in feminism a cause
worthy of a life's work.

Deraismes' initial feminist forays were literary. In 1865 she
published two woman's rights pamphlets: Aux femmeg riches and ThérESa.36
Then came a series of articles for Nain gaune, Le National, Le Grand
Journal, and L'Epggue. When Richer founded Le Droit des Femmes in 1869,
Deraismes contributed to its introductory number. In the meantime, she
had accepted Richer's invitation to speak at the Grand Orient, though
nervousness kept her away from feminist themes at first. But she

could not permit Barbey-d'Aurévilly's misogynism to go unanswered for

 

ensour, Histoire éhérale, 270.

36Brault, Franc-H onnerie et l'émanci ation des femmes, 62.

 

 

 

147

long, and as her confidence grew she addressed herself to woman’s con-
dition. Applause and admiration greeted these efforts. The effect on
Deraismes was decisive. She emerged from the experience convinced that
the rostrum served her talents best. Thereafter, she frequently sought
opportunities to convey her message in person.

In the preface to the first edition of her Oeuvres complétes
(1891), Deraismes recalled that success, including woman's suffrage,
was near at hand when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Once hostili-
ties ceased all thought went into rebuilding the country, a task to which
she also devoted herself.37 The immediate postwar period was therefore
not propitious for carrying on a woman's rights campaign. Nevertheless
two incidents compelled Deraismes to defend women. The First involved
the condemnation of the petroleuses. The Fourth Council of war, a
military tribunal, sentenced three Communard women to death for arson
in September 1871. Deraismes disclaimed any sympathy for their conduct,
but excoriated the verdict as unjust and discriminatory, a perfect
example of masculine justice. The Council, she maintained, failed to
take into account extenuating circumstances and the collective nature of
the crime. The condemned women had followed orders issued by men who
were both older and better educated. In short, "there were petroleuses
because there were pétroleurs." ‘Yet of the seventeen male leaders of
the Commune who had recently undergone prosecution, she pointed out,
only two had received death sentences. Even.more gelling to Deraismes,
because of the attitude it revealed, was the Council's implication

that the convicted women had shamed their sex. The two sexes are

 

37Oeuvres complétes de Maria Deraismes, i.

.‘Ilullll'.r.I-'.r

.! I,»

 

 

148

equally human, she asserted, and the one should not be judged more
severely than the other.38
The second incident stemmed from a‘ggggg célébre, "l'affaire
Dubourg." In 1872 a gentleman of that name summarily executed his
adulterous wife. As crimes of passion were not uncommon, no particular
importance attached itself to the slaying until Henri d'Ideville in-
trepidly suggested in Le Soir that women like the late Madame Dubourg
ought to be pardoned, not killed. The result was a veritable explosion
of print, very little of which supported d'Ideville. Alexandre Dumas
filg'proved especially violent. First he published a bookplength de-
fense of Monsisn?Dubourg's act, aptly titled Tue-1a ("Kill Her"). Next
he issued a brochure, l'Homme-femme, in which he reiterated the biblical
stricture that woman is to man as man is to God. The Creator conceived
man as movement, Dumas explained, whereas woman was but form. It
followed therefore that if a wife sullied her husband's good name, he
had every right to kill her; indeed honor required it.39
Deraismes rose to the defense of d'Ideville and women in general
in Eve contre Dumas fils (1872), which, coupled with Eve dans l'Humanité,
constitute her principal feminist works. In Eve contre Dumas fils
Deraismes flogged her antagonist as poorly educated and uncreative, the
fortunate legatee of a well-known father. Dumas‘filg could pass as a
ggzggt’only in the eyes of people who knew nothing. But more important,

she asked, ”what had been the result obtained by the servitude of

women?" Humanity found itself weakened, she answered, deprived of half

 

38L'Avenir des Femmes, 24 September 1871.

39Alexandre Dumas fils, L'Homme-femme, Repguse BAN: Henri
d'Ideville (Paris, 1872). Forty editions of L'Homme-femme appeared

during its first year; fortyhfive had appeared by 1889.

J!’

 

." t.—

149

its forces. A schism divided society into two camps, the one vying with
the other in general discord, while morality, the foundation of all or-
der, had vanished due to the duplicity of man's double standard.
Fortunately, Deraismes observed, the principle of democracy logically
and necessarily entailed the liberation of women. The Revolutions of
1789 and 18h8 had begun a process that the new republic would continue:
"The Republic seems this time to want to strengthen itself, and the
rights of the women who march at its side are beginning to be a question
that must be reckoned with. Let us persevere in our efforts. All truth
has its hour."l‘0

Eve contre Dmmas filg reflected the strident and aggressive

tenor of Deraismes' feminism, at least in theory. At the first woman's

 

0Oeuvres com letes de Maria Deraismes, 222. Other responses
to Dumas fils included: Guy de Charnace, Reponse a l'homme-femme de
1H._A. Dumas-(Paris, 1872); Hermance Les uillon, L'IIommeI repgnse a
3M, Alexandre Dumas fils (Paris, 1872); émile de Girardin, L'Homme et
la femme: 1'homme suzerain la femme vassale lettre a M.A. Dumas
fils (Paris, 1872;; Henri Amedee Le Lorgne Comte dTldeville, L'Homme
ui tue et l'homme ui pardonne, Précéde d'une lettre a Alexandre

Dumas fils Paris, 1872); and three anonymous pamphlets: A propos du
sermon L'Homme-femme écrit par Dumas fils au'ourd'hui en reli ion
gFra Alessandro (Paris, 18727; La Femme-Hommengarri e-Adultere-
jDivorce. Reponse a M. Alexandre Dumas fils (Paris, 18725; L'Homme
gui sait. Ltude frangais: "olo igue par une mere._a M. Alexandre
Dumas fils (Paris, 1872 i. A friend of Jean-Bernard reported Dumas
fils' reaction to Deraismes' charges: "Toutes les raisons que peut
donner Mlle Maria Deraismes m.'importent peu; dites-lui que j 'ai gagne
cette annee quatre-vingt mille francs de droits d'auteur, et, quant
a ses theories, je mien f. . ." Jean-Bernard, "Notice,” xxiv. .At
the same time as Dumas fils aroused the feminist in Deraismes, Vic-
torien Sardou [Eules Pelissié7 excited the republican. Sardou's
Rabggas, comédie enAS actes en prose (Paris, 1872) provoked protests
from a number of republicans, including Jules Claretie of l'Opinion
Nationale and Edmond About, and drove Deraismes to denounce the play
in a speech at her favorite salle des Capucines. JeanZBernard,
"Netice," xx-xxiii. See also: Maria _Deraismes, Le Theatre de

I --‘--—-——-———
M Sardou conference faite le 21 September 1875,_a la salle de
Capgcines IParis, 18755.

 

 

 

 

 

 

150

rights banquet a listener challenged her for neglecting to speak of
woman's duties. Woman's duties had received too much attention, she

41 The roots of woman's

snapped: "What we claim is what we do not have."
oppression, Deraismes said on many occasions, branched deep into the
soil of intolerance. In past ages women had often dominated their
menfolk, just as in more recent times individual women of exceptional
merit had led armies and governed nations.&2 The lot of most women,
however, had worsened over the years. Revolutions had offered brief
glimmers of hope, as had the doctrines of Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier.
But men had abandoned women in both 1789 and 1848, and the new schools
of thought had attracted too few followers.“3 It was therefore necessary
to begin anew. Since the uddpnineteenth century, Deraismes remarked in
1883, the struggle for woman's rights had all but collapsed. "I have
resuscitated it; I have once again put it into the limelight; I have
examined it, studied it under all its points of view, under all its
aspects."4&

Deraismes held the Church primarily responsible for woman's
oppression. Its theology deprecated woman, its obscurantism reason.
And in Maria's opinion, no society could advance without the total parti-
cipation of the one, and the full employment of the other. women must
escape from the influence of priests through universal, rational,
scientific, and patriotic education. women must also guard against

false science. Many still believed that the father alone determined

 

klMonestier, Les Societes secrEtes feminines, 130.

0 Q
l“'Oeuvres completeg de Maria Deraismes, 4, 259.

l“Revue International, 1 June 1899, 303.

theuvres complétes de Maria Deraismes. 263.

 

151

the character of offspring, despite proofs to the contrary by Linné and
Buffon. Others sought evidence of female inferiority in skull measure-
ments, but according to Deraismes such research had produced no conclu-
sive results. woman was in a state of transition, Deraismes observed:
Man-made institutions, not natural laws, had retarded her, and only
through experience could she overcome her defects}5
Without the aid of woman, Deraismes asserted, the Third Republic
could not hope to survive. It was rent through with contradictions:

46 Its

"Founded on rights, it had at its base the violation of rights."
governmental structure permitted a fraction to represent the nation, a
sex all humanity. Its leaders denied woman a voice, claiming her senti-
mentality would disrupt the political process. But it was impossible to
separate feelings from reason, Deraismes maintained, and.men as well as
women were guided by both}!7 Republicans rightfully feared the Church's
influence over women, but why then did the men who governed allow

priests to operate? Could they not see that to escape fromtbondage

woman had only two choices, the fanaticism of religion or the license of

prostitution?l‘8 Politics, far from being an exact science, was among
the most general of disciplines. Its school was life, and its goal
the synthesis of all factors. Progress required the fusion of two

elements, the male and the female. "When woman has taken the place

 

“51bid., 260, 266.
116

Ibida , iv.

47From Deraismes' printed report to the 1893 Congress of
women in Chicago. BMD, Dossier Deraismes.

8Oeuvres com létes de Maria Deraismes, 2&0, 287.

 

 

152

assigned to her by nature," Deraismes told her Masonic brethren at Pecq
in 1882, "you will have strong chances of assuring to the republican
edifice durability and indestructibility."’*9
An enfranchised womanhood would bring special benefits to
France. For "by her constitution and the nature of her mandate,"
Deraismes proclaimed, woman would become "the moral and pacific agent
par excellence."50 Woman possessed innate talents in four critical
areas: Educationally, she presented a superior example to children, being
more reserved and more in possession of herself than man. Morally, "the
senses have less of a grip on her; she has come to regulate passion, to
subordinate it to duty."51 Economically, woman knew through her house-
hold tasksu both the price and the sanctity of life. Finally, woman was
a peacemaker. "It is banal to repeat that war and anmed peace are the
obstacles of all real progress," Deraismes reflected, "but the elimina-
tion of woman from universal suffrage necessarily means the prolongation
of the bellicose spirit."52 Reason had already begun to displace martial
glory as a source of grandeur, she claimed, and we "can strongly affirm
that this weakening of military prestige is the sign of the advent of
woman."53

Deraismes' emphasis on the link between the advance of reason

and woman's innate qualities lent her feminism a paradoxical appearance.

 

“9Ibid., 261.

50 . .
BMD, Dossier Dera1smes.

51Oeuvres comp15tes de Maria Deraismes, 276.

521bid., 2&5.

531bid., 278.

. iv.‘i

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C.

153

Her attitude resembled that of the eighteenth-century‘philosophes, who
perceived.man as inherently good but in need of reason. Deraismes felt,
for example, that marriage would benefit as girls, through better educap
tion, brought rationality to bear on the selection of a mate. Constancy
was a distinguishing characteristic of reasonable people, she thought,
and women, who already possessed this quality, would choose like-minded
husbands if they could only employ their intelligence. The resultant
"association of camaraderie" would guarantee the sanctity of the home
against male abuses.5& Traditional calculations about wealth and status
in marital planning struck Deraismes as irrational. What she called
for - and it was typical of most French feminists - was a blending of
hearts through the instrument of the mind. Improved education would
therefore release what she assumed to be immutable in the oppressed sex.
woman, the inborn teacher and moralist, the natural economist and paci-
fist, required only a dose of reason in order to cure her own and
society's ills. Therein lay the vision; therein lay the contradiction.
Towards the end of her life, Deraismes acknowledged the exis-
tence of two schools of feminism, liberal and protectionist. Protec-
tionists stressed woman's unique character and advocated selective re-
forms such as the prohibition of female night labor. Liberals eschewed
special legislation and demanded integral reform, desiring all laws to
apply equally to the two sexes. Deraismes, as her frequent pronounce-
ments suggest, sided with the liberals. Indeed, in 1889 she helped
organize an independent woman's Rights Congress because the directors
of that year's centennial exposition intended to impose as president of

the official women's congress Alphonse Daudet, a leading exponent of

 

541mm. , 70-6.

--Ii.-.
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154

special laws for women. Liberty represented the first need of all human
beings, Deraismes intoned at the opening session, and it alone fostered
initiative, development, and progress. The rights that made it possible
were indivisible, and granting privileges to women would demean the sex
legislators intended to serve.

However, Deraismes' integralism contrasted sharply with the actual
program she pursued. In theory she called for wholesale reform; in prac-
tice she sought much less. She felt that the feminists of 1789 and 1848
had erred in demanding too much too soon. She also recognized that the
young Republic offered little hope for widespread change. What evolved
therefore was the strategy of 13 M, which had the full support of
her chief collaborator, Léon Richer. Its objective was to secure the
easiest reforms first in order to lay the groundwork for future advances.
In practice it meant shelving all measures that tended to excite even
moderate opposition. woman's political rights went first, leaving only
civil disabilities as the target for reform; even then Deraismes focused
on only a handful of issues.

Some of Deraismes' proposals, such as improved girls' education
and laws permitting divorce and paternity suits, offered new opportuni-
ties to many women. Others, the ones she pressed.most, would benefit
fewer. Her frame of reference reflected the class to which she belonged.
‘Working women aroused her sympathy, at least from the standpoint of the
relationship between sweated labor and prostitution, but women of pro-
perty evoked a more determined response. Three pet projects revealed
this tendency in Deraismes: One called for a wife's right to dispose
freely of her income. Another urged that women be permitted to witness

public and private documents on the same footing as men. And a third

 
 

155

demanded a voice for "commergantes" (business women) in the selection of
judges for the Tribunaux gg Comerce.

The proposals regarding a wife's income and woman's witness
rights made no headway during Deraismes' lifetime. In fact it took
another feminist, Jeanne Schmahl and her l'Avant-Courriére, fourteen
years (1893-1907) to obtain them. The third proposal, however, won
approval from the Senate in 1894, five years after it first passed the
Chamber of Deputies. .ngmercantes received the right to vote for the
judges who regulated their enterprises. In many respects the Senate's
action represented a personal tribute to Deraismes, whose death coincided
with the bill's passage. Years before, she had sent out 17,000 circulars
to female merchants and shopkeepers, attempting to enlist their support.
She received only two responses, one of which was slightly abusive.55
Then in 1883 she petitioned the Chamber of Deputies in the name of
1'Amelioration. Six years later the Deputies capitulated, but the Senate
stalled after a survey revealed that seventyhnine of ninetybsix local
Chambers of Commerce objected.56 When the Senate, led by'Jean.Macé,
finally came round, it amended the bill to prohibit women from holding
the judgeships themselves. Nevertheless, the comercante vote repre-
sented a significant achievement and crowned.Maria's career. She had
overcome both female indifference and male opposition, and had created

a small breach in the masculine edifice.

 

55Schmahl, "Progress of the woman's Rights Movement in
France," 850

I56Madame Vincent, "Le vote des femmes dans les élections
consulaires,” La Revue feminists (5 Nevember 1895); Deraismes,
Eve dans l'humanite, 35 77.

 

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The pivotal importance of Maria Deraismes to French feminism
did not, however, stem from practical legislative success. The business
woman's vote was not an isolated advance; several reforms in the 1880's
and the 1890's opened new opportunities to women, especially in the
fields of education and administration. But by then the cancer that
eventually took Maria's life had largely removed her from.the struggle.
Her principal contribution lay, instead, in a legacy. To subsequent
militants, many of whom she personally recruited, she bequeathed an im-
petus to action. Earlier feminist rumblings, particularly those of 1789
and 1848, had attempted to do the same and had failed. Deraismes suc-
ceeded: She helped to break the vicious cycle of feminist stillbirths.
Her "consoeurs" could therefore take another step, bolder and at variance
in some cases with her own cautious objectives.57 They would no longer
find it necessary to remake the past. Thanks in part to Deraismes the

Age of Ridicule had begun to recede.

Le'on Richer
Deraismes' closest associate in the movement was Leon Pierre

Richer.58 Compared to her, the "talented polemicist” and ”golden voiced"

 

572Maria Deraismes coined the word "consoeurs" in an address to
a group of women writers. Jeaanernard then polled twenty female wri-
ters for their reaction to the neologism. Six approved: Deraismes,
Vincent, Eugenie Pierre, M3-L. Gagneur, Nelly Lieutier, and Eug‘ e
Garcia. Six abstained from endorsi the word: Marie-Louise Neron,
Gyp, Severine, Astie de valsayre, Clemence Royer, and Juliette Adam.
Eight opposed: Leonie Rouzade, Blanchecotte, Pauline Savary, Andre
valdes, Lydia Rostopchine, Mie dFAghonne, Henry Greville, md Georges de
Peyrebrune. Jean-Bernard, "Notice,” XL-Lii. Within the Droit Humain wo-
men called men "mon Frére;" men called women."ma Soeur.” ”Les Soeurs y
forment une collection de bas-bleus, dont 1e moindre défaut est une pré—
tention plut6t exagérée," wrote the hostile Tourmentin, La.Femme chez
les Francs-Macons, 25.

58F'or biographical information on the life of Richer, see:
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 137; Misme, "La Vie at la.mort du feminisme,"

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157
"59

orator, he was a "tranquil and serious man. He shared Deraismes'
republican and anti-clerical interests, but felt less need, perhaps be-
cause of his sex, to put them on display. As a male he met the essential

Masonic entrance requirement, and at the time of their first meeting he

held the post of venerable Maitre in the Lodge Mars'gt les Arts.

 

Marriage represented no threat to him, and both his wife and a son Paul
assisted him in the feminist movement. His origins were relatively
humble, at least in contrast to Deraismes'. Born in 1824 at Oigle (or
Oagle) in the Department of Orne due west of Paris, he worked for eleven
years as a notary's clerk for the Orleans Railroad. Journalism consti-
tuted his major avocation, and towards the end of the Second Empire he
quit his job in order to pursue a newspaper career. He contributed to
léglliance Religieuse and the Libre Conséience, both directed by Henri
Carla, and to Adolphe Guéroult's Opinion Nationale, for which he wrote

a controversial weekly series entitled “Lettres d'un libre-penseur é un
cure de‘villgge.' Sometime later he became editor-inpchief of the daily

Republigue radicals. In response to his ”letters of a free-thinker,“

 

33-37; Sullerot, La Presse feminine, 30; D'Eaubonne, Histoire et
gctualité du feminisme, 138; Monestier, Les Societes secretes feminines,
128; Brault,'Lg;Franc-Maconnerie et l'émanci ation des femmes, 49-12 ;
Thomas, Louise Michel, 63; Trevor Lloyd, Suffr ettes International:

The Werld-Wide Campaign for WOmen's Rights {London, 1971), 14; La
Frangaise, 30 December 1906:—25 June 1911; Le Droit des Femmes (letter
from Paul Richer), 24 June 1919; Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 11—
22, 51-71; Abensour, Le Problem feministe, 126 and Histoire generale,
274; and Victor Poupin's introduction to Richer's Le Livre des femmes
(Paris, 1872).

59Sullerot, La Presse feminine, 30.

 

 

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158

atheists and materialists reproached him for not going far enough, and
priests from all corners of France sent him their maledictions. For the
first of many thmes he found himself branded as a destroyer of faith,
troubler of consciences, and arch enemy of the family.60 When he ap—
plied for permission to found his own newspaper in 1869, the prefect of
police reported his financial situation as sound and his political views
as liberal.61

Richer's devotion to feminism won him.the title of “l'homme‘ggg
fgmmggf from his contemporaries, and Simone de Beauvoir described him as
"the true founder of feminism in France."62 His conversion to feminism
grew out of an awareness of women's legal subordination, a byproduct of
his years as a clerk. In the mid-1860's he organized a series of "philo-
sophical conferences" with the aid of Jules Labbe, Adolphe Gueroult, and
Madame Adam’s friend Charles Fauvety. Parisian Freemasons sponsored the
gatherings, taking advantage of their friendly ties with the government.
From the start women attended free of charge, but none spoke until
Richer induced Deraismes to do so on 7 February 1866. Masonic tradition
designated females as ”persons of sex” and forbade them membership,
which led some of Richer's brethren to object to the presence of women
in their hall. He managed without difficulty to override the objection,

but failed in his effort to reverse the discriminatory membership

”licyo

 

60Le Droit des Pass, 5 January 1890.

61“! F18 3390

62Brault, Franfiflonnerie et l'e'mancipgtion des fmes, 51.
Beauvoir, The Secogg Se}, 137.

{”5

159

Richer shared Deraismes' faith in the tactic of ''tha breach.” A
eulogy at the time of his death in 1911 praised him for avoiding utopian
schemes and for seeking social "amelioration without disruption."63
While he lived, however, suffrage-oriented feminists considered him ”a

64 In theory he favored woman's politi-

rsactionary and an opportunist."
cal rights, but feared their practical effect on the Republic's future.
“The feminine mind," he remarked, "was still too crushed by the yoke of
the Church."65 If women had the franchise the Republic would not last
six months: "It is enough for us to have to struggle against reaction-
arias of the masculine sex without giving to these partisans of defeated
regimes the support of millions of female votes subject to the occult
domination of the priest, the confessor.”66

Richer therefore concentrated on removing man's civil disabi-
lities. Every issue of the journal he edited between 1869 and 1891
carried a critique of French law. On the inside cover in two columns
he listed relevant points of the m and how he proposed to amend them.
In the mid-1870's the program centered on male abuses outside marriage
and woman's subordination within it. Specifically he railed against
loopholes in the law that punished men only when they habi
corrupted minors or used £9.33. in seducing girls over fifteen. Woman,
he said, ought to have the right to file paternity suits, just as men

could initiate maternity inquests, and guilty fathers should be held

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responsible for the care of an m naturel. Betrothals should be
treated as contracts, enabling the jilted party to sue for breach of
promise, and woman's right to bear witness in criminal proceedings should
be extended to cover all public and private acts. Within marriage,
ficher called for conjugal equality in controlling children, handling
personal wealth, disposing of household property, and belonging to Family
Councils. As for adultery, he felt the penalities for wives should ap—
ply equally to husbands, eradicating the double standard that condoned
male immorality outside the family domicile. In order to guarantee the
sanctity of marital unions, he demanded divorce in place of the hypocrisy
of legal separation, "which breaks marriage without dissolving it,
separates spouses without disuniting them, and opens the door to shame-
ful compromises."67

Between 1873 and 1883 Richer published three books on the woman
eunuch.“ Two, 1.. Fame libre (1877) and Le Code des Felines (1883)
struck at a wide range of problems. The third, which caused a sensation
when it appeared in 1873, was entitled Le Divorce. Louis Blane wrote
the introduction, and the text elaborated mcher's ideas for a model act.
Alfred Naquet, ”The Father of Divorce," took up the proposal and managed
it through the legislature eleven years later. The final version, which

Richer termed "a magnificent victory,” restored a right suppressed since

 

67 'A ni de F , January 1876. For the complete text of
Richer's program in the 1870 s, see APPENDIX A.

68Le'on Richer, La Femme libre; Le Code des femes; Le Divorce.
In addition to these works and the many newspaper articles that he
published, mcher also wrote: Alerte! (Paris, 1869); Lettres d'un

libre— enseur a un cure' de vill e; Lettres parisiennes. La pglitigge
en 18 (Paris, 1871;}; Le Livre des femes; Proms d'un mecreant
Feeds, 1868;; Le Tocgin (Paris, 1835); and [In ggige honteux

PMS, 1876

 

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1816.69

Richer viewed the new law as imensely beneficial to women,
pointing out that of the 3,286 legal separations in 1882 wives had
secured 86$.70 But the grounds for divorce fell short of expectations.
The law of 1881: required demonstration of cause in the form of adultery,
grievous injury, or criminal conviction. A Senate amendm&t had struck
divorce by mutual consent from the bill. Feminists nevertheless approved
of it. Deraismes expressed pleasure that the grounds of adultery applied
equally to either spouse, and suffragist Hubertine Auclert saw in
Naquet's decade-long campaign a source of inspiration for future efforts.71
Although it had benefited from a clear-cut Napoleonic precedent
as well as a sporadic campaign covering two monarchies, an empire, and
two republics, the 188k divorce law engendered euphoria within feminist
ranks. Its passage appeared to confirm Richer's belief that the con-
temporary epoch was ripe for refonn.‘72 But the euphoria rapidly
vanished. Richer ranked woman's right to file a paternity suit next in
importance to divorce. He demanded it for years, as did Deraismes for
the cmergante vote, but failed repeatedly. Not until 1912 did the
Senate approve the bill, and by then Richer had been dead for several
months. In the meantime other aspects of his progrul fared better,
especially women's witness rights and wives} control over their income.
But perhaps Richer's greatest achievement in a career that spanned a

half century was his first. Be, as much as anyone else, deserved credit

 

69Le Droit des Femes, 6 July 1881:.
7o;§id., February 1883.

”Oeuvres co lEtes de Maria Deraismes, 355. La Cit°EE29
June 1884.

72L'Avenir des Femmes, January 1876.

_. t-..

an.

ya...

A

162

for opening baccalaure'at examinations to women. Shortly before the
Second Rnpire struck down the Faculty of Medicine's sex barrier, a fight
in which he also played a prominent role, Richer threw his influence be-
hind Julie Daubie"s struggle. The victory they won paved the way for

many subsequent breaches of the male-dominated education system.

La Socie'te' pgur l'Ame'lioratJign du Sort de la Femme

In April 1870, in one of their last acts before the deluge of
foreign and civil war, Deraismes and Richer established l'Association
pour le Droit des Femmes. Imperial officials, as well as those of the
subsequent republic, objected to use of the word “droit," holding that
only governments could define legal rights. The group therefore changed
its name to l'Association pour l'Avenir de la Femme.73 The journal
Richer founded in 1869, Le Droit des Fe—es, elicited the same objection,
forcing it to appear throughout most of the next decade as l'Avenir des
m. In 1873 l'Association joined the New York based International
Woman's League and altered its name once more, emerging as La Socie'te'
pour 1'Ame'lioration du Sort de la Feme.7l‘ Regardless of names, between
l'Ame'lioration and l'AEnig, Deraismes and Richer controlled the organi-
zation and propaganda of the movement. No one challenged Richer's paper,
due in part to restrictive press laws prohibiting women from directing
journals until 1881. Lune‘iieretien had two rivals, but Julie Deubié'e
l'Association pour l'financipationde la Fame folded with its founder's
death in 1871.,75 end Hubertine Anclert's naverick suffrage group,
established in 1876, did not come into its own until the 1880's.

 

7""Brault, Fran onnerie et l'e'manci ation des femmes, 71:.
“2232-: 92- We 2“ June 1919-

75Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 202.

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163

Richer served as president of l'Ame'lioration until shortly after
the Congress of 1878. Deraismes then occupied the post until her death
in 1891:, followed by her sister, Anna Fe'resse-Deraismes. Only on the
eve of the First World War did its leadership pass outside the "family.”
Despite the wealth of the Deraismes sisters, the group was not well off
financially until the early 1880's, when it merged with Andre' Le'o's
Socie'te' pour la Revendication des Droits de la Pens. The fusion of the
groups brought nearly 20,000 francs into l'Ame'lioration's coffers, giving
it a degree of security unprecedented within the movement. It also
brought about a lengthening of the group's nmne, which became La Socie'te'
pour l'Ame'lioration do Sort de la Fame et la Revendication de ses
Droits;76

In accord with Deraismes' fear that women voters would undermine
the Republic, l'Ame'lioration excluded political rights from its progrm
in the 1870's, stressing instead the "complete identification of man and
woman from the point of view of legal possession and the exercise of
civil rights." Specifically the platfolm called for equality within
marriage, one morality for all, reestablisheent of divorce, and the "pro-
gressive initiation of woman into civic life.” It also demanded complete
educational parity “without other limits than aptitudes and will,” free
access to all careers and professions, and equal pay for equal work.”

The greatest crisis in l'Ame'lioration's history occurred in
Dec-ber 1875 when Interior Minister Buffet outlawed the group.

 

76he‘lioration, m, July-September 189&.

”mm. 1 April 1877. For the text of
l'Ame‘lioration a program in the 1870's, see APPENDIX B.

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Monarchists dominated the government at the time, and they viewed the
group's republican and anti-clerical tendencies as a threat to public
order. Richer, who suddenly found himself president of an illegal or-
ganization, denied the charge. In a series of editorials for l'Avenir
and in an open letter to the press he depicted l'Ame'lioration as a force
for ”moral order," whose sole purpose was to improve woman's lot. Foreign
newspapers, Richer reported, wondered how a group devoted to stmnping
out prostitution, "that most hideous expression of debauchery," could be
considered a threat. But 1'A£_r_l_ir dared not print their con-ants for
fear of also being outlawed. Richer speculated that Victor Hugo's ob-
vious sympathy for the group, as well as Garibaldi's adherence, had
prompted anfet's action, and he accused the Interior Minister of dis-
liking anyone who was not Bonapartist or clerical. But for the moment
nothing could be done about it. He advised patience to l'Ame'lioration's
“bars and urged them to carry on its work as individuals. Buffet
could not last long, Richer predicted, because the current ministry
would soon give way to one more liberal. In any case, subscriptions to
m had increased. "And that is how, in wanting to weaken us, the
Minister of Interior has fortified us," Richer observed: ”Thank you! A
thousand times thalkyou."78

Subsequent events proved Richer correct. L'Ame'lioration began
to regroup clandestinely in March 1877. Two months later, on the six-
teenth of May, a serious constitutional crisis erupted. Monarchists
wanted to broaden the president's powers and appealed to the country

for support. Republicans rallied in opposition to the idea and won an

 

78 id., January 1876, 6 January 1877, 6 February 1877.

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165

impressive victory at the polls. L'Amélioration benefited from the
trend, but did not immediately recover its official authorization.
Richer complained a year later that the sanction his group deserved had
gone to another worthy, but less elevated cause, a Société'Protectrice
desAniJmaux.79 But despite the technical continuation of the ban,
l'Amélioration renewed its campaign for woman's rights. Finally on
3 August 1878, shortly after the Women's Rights Congress of that year,
it reacquired the authorization. Several months later, Richer took ad-
vantage of the liberal trend to restore his journal's original name,
Le Droit des Femmes.80

.At the time of the ban Richer cited smallness as a point in
l'Amelioration'e favor, implying that regardless of political orientation
it hardly constituted a threat. He estimated in 1876 that although its
membership, including foreigners, totalled 150 to 160, its meetings

drew only ten to twelve of the more militant.81

An 18911 Bulletig of the
group listed seventeen individuals and one organization, La Solidarite'
of Geneva, as founders. Seven of the original seventeen were men, in-
cluding three who became deputies and one departsental councillor.
within that group the most militant by far was the deputy from Finistbre,
)1. Joseph de Gaste'. All of the women but two, Maria Deraismes and

Mlle. Charlotte Duval, had married. Several others were widows. By

82

18915 nine of the seventeen, including Deraismes, had died. Absent

 

”paid" 3 March 1878.

80M" 1 September 1878. 3 November 1878.

2214.. January 1876.

M'lioration, Bullgtg, April-June 1891;. For Ame'lioration's
189k roster, see APPENDIXC

1.

9-‘1'0‘.

Commemomea

 

166

from the list of founders were Richer, Victor Hugo, and Garibaldi. It
seems clear therefore that many of l'Ame'lioration's more active members
joined after the 1870—1 interregnum. Women such as Hubertine Auclert,
Aline Valette, mlgenie PotoniJ—Pierre, and Madame Vincent, all younger
militants, joined in the 1870's. Eventually, all four also drifted
away from l'Ame'lioration in order to found their own journals and or-
ganizations.

Next to the Deraismes sisters and deputy de Gaste, Virginie
Griess—Traut played the most prominent role of the original seventeen.
Her husband also helped found l'Ame‘lioration. A convinced Fourieriste,
Virginie believed that social transfolmation required the full coopera-
tion of woman. She spent freely and at one point contributed 50,000
francs to l'Ecole Socie'taire phalanstirienne. Within l'Ame'lioration she
rose to the position of vice president and worked closely with Maria on
the cmenante vote. She belonged to two other feminist groups as well,
the Ligue francaise pour 1e droit des Femes and the Groupe de la
Solidarite' des Femes, established in 1891. One of her major interests
was a cause dear to all feminists, prostitution. She objected to its
regulation by the Morals Police, which she felt stamped prostitution with
govemment approval. Virginie discounted hygenic and disease justifi-
cations, claiming that such arguments served as a smokescreen to disguise
male lust. Abolish the Morals Police, she urged, or grant their wards
pensions as state employees. Virginie also subscribed to the notion of
woman as peacemaker. After the Franco-Prussian Var she demanded neutral-
ization of her native Lorraine, rather than Emche. She belonged, as
did l'Ame'lioration as a group, to her old friend Charles Lemonnier's

Ligue International de la Paix et de la Liberte'. She also served on the

."‘- -«o

167
administrative council of the Socie'te' Frangaise d'Arbitrage entre
Nations, and presided over a group that united both her passions, l'Union
Internationale des Fennes pour la Paix. She died 9 December 1898 at the
age of eighty-five from injuries caused by a fall. A life of serious
devotion to just causes had preserved her youth, a former colleague re—

flected, making her an excellent example for others.83

L'Avenir des Femvefig

Though president of l'Ame'lioration throughout most of its first
decade, Richer's primary concern was propaganda. He therefore turned
the group's daily operationaerin the Deraismes sisters and Virginie
Griess-Traut, and devoted himself to convincing doubters that a feminist
newspaper could succeed. He viewed the effort as a further extension of
what the Saint-Simonians and Laboulaye' s Histojitre morale des Femes had
begun.“ He brought to the task several years of joumalistic experience,
a tenacious faith in woman's rights, and a belief that his was an epoch
of refom. Ris past record, as well as his moderation, brought him the
support of influencial journalists and men of letters, including La;
M3 anile de Girardin, Camille Flmarion, Jules Claretie, Fran-
cisque Sarcy, Victor Hugo, and Louis Blanc.85

In order to announce the reappearance of l'AMr after the in-
terruption of the war and the Comune, Richer staged a sumptuous banquet

in July 1872. One hundred fifty people packed the Corazza restaurant at

 

”We. January 1899. an), Dossier

Griess-Traut.
8“L'Avenir des Femes, 6 January 1877.

85Brault, Franc-M onnerie et l'e'manci ation des femes, 76.

Monestier, Leg Societes secretes feminglles, 128.

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168

the Palais Royal to hear Victor Hugo endorse the struggle for woman's
rights. Louis Blane covered the event in a series of articles, and in
general the press raised a great noise about it.86 But publicity was
not money, and Richer found it increasingly necessary to cut costs.
Already l'Anni; had become a monthly instead of the intended weekly.
For a brief period in 1873 it appeared only every other month. To re-
duce contributors' expenses Richer wrote articles under the pseudonyms
of GeorgesBath and Jeanne Mercoeur. To increase circulation he sent out
costly complimentary copies and reduced rates for second and third year
renewals from ten to seven and five francs respectively}.7 Donations pro-
vided some relief -- the Deraimnes sisters regularly gave forty francs
per issue - but not enough. By March 1877 l'Avenir had accumulated a
debt of 1,200 francs. Richer salvaged the paper by incorporating.88
Poor health forced him to suspend publication indefinitely in December
1891. By then his journal had survived twenty-two years -- longer than
any of its pro-World War One rivals.

W finances also suffered from Richer's stand on the
issues. Divorce in particular proved costly. Protests of "extreme
violence” inundated the journal's headquarters at Clermont (Oise). A
reader from Nantes engaged Richer in a protracted exchange of published

letters, and sixty or seventy Lyonnaise pledged no longer to read

 

m. Richer estimated that altogether over two hundred cancelled
86W. 6 January 1877.

87“ Duh-Dian. We 51-
Bih'mm; deg games, '5 March 1877.

 

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169

their subscriptions at a "dead loss" of 2,000 francs per year.89 His
other major proposal, woman's right to file a paternity suit, likewise
excited opposition, although the monetary impact is unclear. Jeanne
Deroin, the militant feminist who fled France in 1851, wrote from England
that the most certain effect of such a law would be an increase in
infanticides.90 More unpopular than either, however, was Richer's plan
to legitimize incestuous unions rather than leave the parties in a state
of public concubinage. Be limited approval to “certain exceptional
cases” and recognized that it would take fifteen or twenty years, "per-
haps less," to secure the measure. In the meantime he anticipated re-
newed vilification for sapping the "sacred base of the family.” But
always, he proudly confessed, ”my greatest wrong has been to be right
too soon."91

Richer subtitled km a Revue mlitigh litteraire. at
W. He hoped not only to promote feminist reforms, but
to interest women in larger issues. L'Amr frequently expressed
opinions on crucial national problems. In particular, Richer sought to
sway his readers in favor of disamament and an end to conscription,
separation of Church and State, tax cuts, abolition of capital punish-
ment, and peace through arbitration.92 After the crisis of 16 May 1877
his republican sympathies led him to warn against specific dangers. He
pointed out the continuing clerical threat, and accused Louis Veuillot's

 

89W. 5 January 1889.
9°14 Mob-Dion. law 53-4.

9W. 5 Janna-y 1889.

921.1 Dzeh—Djen, La mgse gm gtg, 64. L'Amir des Femmes,
5 August 1877.

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170

l'Univers of attempting to involve France in a war with Italy on behalf
of the Pope.93 He also condemnedmas reactionary, citing as
evidence its attacks on the republicanism of the Deraismes sisters.94
The time was not ripe for woman suffrage, he maintained, but loyal demo-
crats needed the support of woman's influence.

Richer himself made a bid for the Chamber of Deputies in
February 1876 at Troyes. The effort failed, but what disturbed Richer
more was that only two other candidates, linile Acollas and Alfred Naquet,
subscribed to l'Aygnir'g program.95 Subsequent elections produced better
results, due in part to Richer's influence, but years passed before the
Chamber could form a feminist caucus. Soon after his electoral defeat,
Richer turned to expanding feminism's organizational base. In 1876 he
applauded Hubertine Auclert's new group and served on its committee of
initiative.96 The following year he urged each commity throughout the
land to establish a group of its own, and published the statutes of
another Parisian socie'te' named Egalite', as a mode1.9‘7 A serious inci-
dent occurred late in 1876, however, when Celeste Hardouin created a
Ligue francaise pour l'ame‘lioration du sort des femmes. The outgrowth
of a Congress of Women Workers, Hardenin's Ligue focused on improving
female labor conditions. Richer approved the goal, but objected to the
use of a name so similar to that of his recently banned l'Ame'lioration.

When Rardouin rejected his plea to adopt a different title, Richer

 

9 'Aveni de Femes, 1 July 1877.
91;

M" '1 November 1877.
95M" 5 March 1876.
96:333., 3 December 1876.
97943., 6 May 1877.

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171

dashed off a letter to the press explaining that the new group should

not be confused with his own.

Le Coggres International du Droit des Femes of 1828

Still there remained the question of national coordination.
Richer had been active in the movement for a decade, and with Deraismes
he had tossed around the idea of a feminist convention. The crisis of
16 May 1877 interrupted their plans, however, and it was not until the
following January that the idea could be taken up again. Paris played
host to an Exposition that year, and though time was short, they de-
cided to go ahead. In late July 1878 the first French Coggrés inter»-
national du Droit des Felmneg opened at the Grand-Orient, the scene of
Deraismes' public debut twelve years before. It ended two weeks later
with a grand, six-franc banquet at the S3193 £133 Familles of the
restaurant Maurice.

Eight representatives from four foreign countries served on
the Congress' twenty-seven member Comittee of Initiative: three
Italians (a deputy, a doctor, and a countess): three Americans (Julia
Ward Howe, Theodore Stanton, and Mary A. Livemore): and one each from
Switzerland and Holland. The remaining nineteen were French: two
senators (Victor Schoelcher and Engine Pelletan): five deputies (Louis
Codet, Tiersot, Charles Boudeville, finile Deschanel, and A. Charles
Laisant): three municipal councillors from Paris (Antide Martin,
Georges Martin, and Severiano de Heredia): and Richer and eight femi-
nist associates. The real work fell to the all-French fifteen member
Comittee of Organization. Richer served as CEssaigg ge'ne'ral £12
2295?};- H. de Rerodia and Anna Deraismes shared the treasury, and
Mlle. Euge'nie Pierre took on the secretarial duties. The remaining

172

eleven included Maria Deraismes, Hubertine Auclert, and Virginie
Griess-Traut.98
The Congress operated on a budget of 3,350 francs, donated by
eightybone individuals and three groups. Most of the contributions were
small; over eighty per cent fell into the two to twenty franc range.
The bulk of the sum came from a handful of wealthy donors. The Deraismes
sisters gave eighty francs; two couples, the Griess—Trauts and the Henri
Krohns of Passy, gave fifty and one hundred respectively: the New'York
based Association for Women's Suffrage sent 250: and Count and Countess
Malliani of Italy provided 2,000. Two-thirds of the total defrayed the
cost of printing the final report. The rest paid for the Congress it-
self: AOO francs for printed matter, 500 for rent of the hall, and 90
to buy meals for fifteen newspapermen at the closing banquet. The final
twentybfive francs went for a tip to the GrandFOrient's concierge. Cem-
pared to the problems feminist groups and journals faced in their daybto-
day operations, the Congress had no serious money troubles.
The official roster of delegates named 220 people frmm eleven
nations, and sixteen groups.99 Women held a slight overall majority,
113 to 107. But within the French delegation they represented only
fortybfive per cent, 77 of 168. In contrast 69$ of the fiftyhtwo dele-
gates from.outside France were women. Even.more significant, the

British and American contingents, reflecting perhaps a.more advanced

 

98For information on participants in the Congress, see Ibid.,
7 July 1878. For a roster of the 1878 Congress, see APPENDIX.D.

99Ibid. The lone representative from Gemany was a French wo-
man from.Alsace-Lorraine. Rumania, Brazil, Belgium, and Holland also had
only one representative each. The largest delegation, next to the French,
was the sixteen member American, followed by Britain (13), Italy (8),
Russia (6), and Switzerland (4). In.some cases residents of France ap-
peared on the roster as foreigners due to their place of birth.

O O

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173

stage of the movement, provided 83$ females, 21: of 29. In respect to
organizations, the head start of foreigners was also evident. Of the
sixteen officially participating only two came from France, whereas nine
represented Britain and the United States. France should have had three,
but l‘Ame'lioration -- the group most responsible for the Congress --
could not figure on the published roster because it had not yet recovered
its governmental authorization.

One of the French groups was the Socie'te' des Dames Re'unie’s of
Lyon. The other was the Chambre Syndicale des Ouvriires Lingdres,
Couturii‘lres, Brodeuses et Confectionneuses of Paris, which along with a
similar group from London gave working women a voice at the Congress.
Only two organizations, both from the United States, espoused woman
suffrage. Julia Ward Rowe, a suffrage delegate, also represented the
third American group, the New England Women's Club. Three of the six
British associations existed to combat governmental regulation of prosti-
tution, a goal made clear by one name, the National Association for the
Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. Two London based groups, in ad-
dition to the worker's society, rounded out the British contingent,
L'Assoeiation de Vigilance pour la De'fense des Droits Personnels and
La Ligue Protectrice et Providentielle des Feamles. From Italy cmse
l'Asscciation De'mocratique of Milan, the masonic lodge Concordia of
Florence, and the Comite' de Naples pour l'ananoipetion des Felmaes
Italicnnes, represented at the Congress by Richer. Geneva sent one
specifically feminist society, La Solidarite', which relied on Virginie
Griess-Traut and Charles Luonnier as its spoke-Ian, as well as the
group Lmsonnier himself founded, La Ligue de la Paix et de la Liberte’.

171:

The fact that only two groups represented working women under-
scored the bourgeois character of the Congress -- an impression rein-
forced by the relatively high number of known professionals among the
French male delegates. Frenchmen constituted eighty-eight per cent of
all the men who officially attended, and nearly half of them, 1:2 of 91,
pursued occupations in one of three areas. Politics contributed nine
deputies, two senators, five Parisian municipal councillors, and two
"former representatives of the people." Five, not counting the politi-
cians, had legal training, an m, a licggcig g m, two Qgteggs
E m, and a student. Publicists stood as the largest subgroup, ten
in all, and four othem accepted the label, m; g; lgttrgg. A final
four listed themselves simply as doctors, and a lard indicated his status
as retired. Frenchwomen, forbidden by law to hold elective office,
manage newspapers (until 1881), or attend law school, went undesignated
for the most part. However, their presence implies two things rarely
found in proletarian circles, some money and more time. Finally the
figure of 220 delegates is somewhat deceptive. Twenty-five family units,
mostly married couples, contributed fifty-nine individuals, so that the
official roster counts only 188 different summes. Others, in addition
to the official delegates also attended the Congress; the first session
drew over six hundred spectators.

The main work of the Congress fell to five sections, each dealing
with an aspect of woman's situation. The History Section, which reported
first, assumed the task of exuining woman's role and influence, for
good or evil, everywhere and at all times. The discussion centered on
groups and individuals that had promoted women's rights in the past and

the reasons for their failure. It also surveyed developsents in

175

countries which enjoyed strong contemporary movements, hoping to un-
earth the determinants that made for success. The History report ended
with an affilmative answer to two rather rhetorical questions: "Is this
movement a fatal, inexorable law of the historical development of hu-
manity? Is it a logical consequence of the moral, social, and political
progress accomplished until new?"100
The Education Section reported next, and like the three sub-
sequent sections it proposed a series of resolutions. It operated on
the dual and somewhat contradictory promise that both sexes partook of
the same humanity and that the care of children was a uniquely female
concem. Citing the higher mortality rate among infants fanned out to
wet nurses, it called for mothers to breast feed their own children.
Where poverty made this difficult, it demanded that municipalities pro-
vide aid to women during the first eighteen months of their infants'
lives. For pre-schoolers, the Education section urged the establishment
of kindergartens which would subscribe to "the gystéme Froebel or better
yet the methgdg W31” Children of all ages should attend
sexually integrated classes, which - as the American experiment showed—

served as ”a powerful stimulant for the progress of studies and of moral-

ization." And lastly, "considering that the essential vices of education

 

maid” 7 July 1878.

101According to Prost, Froebel was a pioneer in early childhood
education. A disciple of Pestalozzi and a representative of the
rougseagistg tradition, he founded a maison d__q premiere education in
Switzerland in 1837. In 1840 he described his school as a ja rdin d'e_l_l_-
fan ants. "He practiced there a pedagogy of which certain aspects were too
systematic, but that accorded an essential role to the spontaneity of
children." He attached great importance to games, as did Pauline
Kergomard, who in 1887 made games the principle activity in France's
icgleg ategelles, the only co-educational level in the Franch school
systms. Prost,L Ill-ha i ement France 1800-1,283—86.

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176

are the result of social inequities that separate into distinct classes
the citizens of the same country . . . [and] that integral education
will be established only when Schools will be absolutely distinct from
Churches," the Education Section demanded that all instruction be free,
lay, and obligatory."102
Two days later the Economic Section met, chaired by Richer.
From its deliberations emerged several resolutions, all of which re-
flected the theme that woman deserved the same freedom and right to work
as man. Traditional claims, such as equal pay for equal work and open
access to all professions, topped the agenda. Once again the link be-
tween low wages and prostitution received an airing. The section also
affirmed the value and merit of household tasks. Its more specific
recommendations, however, related directly to the lot of working women.
To improve their bargaining power, it urged the creation of female
unions, and the admission of women to the conseils _d_e_ prudhonmles -
elected agencies charged with regulating industrial disputes. To im-
prove their competitive position, it called for strict supervision of
convent and prison factories, and enactment of a special tax to equalize
the cost of free and ”compulsory" production. It also recomended fe-
male cooperatives and factory associations. Liberty should be the
essential base of republics, the Economic section concluded, and liberty
required I'the suppression of all laws restrictive of the right of

assembly and the right of association."103

 

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177

Prostitution headed the agenda of the Morality Section, presided
over by Deraismes. The section ' attempted to elaborate a uniform sys-
tem of values for both sexes in order to bring human laws into line with
moral precepts. It repeated the oft-heard feminist assertion that state
regulation of ”public women" had no hygenic justification, and accused
the government of sanctioning “the imoral prejudice that debauchery is
a necessity for man.“ It demanded the abolition of where houses and an

1011

end to official regulation of prostitution.‘I Beyond that, it urged

 

10“The medical profession aroused a good deal of controversy
within the ranks of feminists and other refolmers in the nineteenth cen-
tury. aninist concern steimned in part from the fact that most doctors
were men (male hysicians outnumbered female 15,668 to 112 according to
the 1896 census but more so from the prevailing tendency to define
women solely in respect to their reproductive function. In general, a
physical, pro-Freudian "anatomy is destiny” premise underlay many of the
popular assumptions about woman's role in society, which made feminists
especially susceptible to the impact of physicians' pronouncements.
These pronouncements served the feminist cause at times, as with con-
damnation of the corset as unhealthy, and most feminist groups enlisted
the support of at least a few doctors as members. But on certain issues
the medical profession adopted positions contrary to feminist goals.
State regulation of prostitution constituted one such position. Medical
opinion sided with the practice, maintaining that agencies like the
Morals Police helped to protect society fun sex-related diseases. To
feminists, however, this argument mounted to nothing more than a msoke-
screen: behind which men could exercise their lustful passions with im-
punity. A rt to the Paris Municipal Council in 1899 by the feminist
group Egalite stressed that in places where "regulation" did not exist,
like at Colmar, “statistics prove that maladies have diminished in the
civil and military hospitals of the city.” In retrospect it seems that
medical opinion tended to accentuate some of the worst assumptions about
women, particularly in areas like hysteria, masturbation, etc. (see
Chapter I), but state supervision of prostitution struck f-inists as
especially offensive because it provided legal sanction to a medical
thesis. As a result, feminists perceived themselves in conflict with
a kind of “medical-political complex." Other reformers detected the
machinations of this ”complex“ in the trend towards compulsory vaccina-
tion, required by law in Britain since the early 1880's. A Socie'te'
pour l'Abolitien de la Vaccination Obligatoire emerged in London to
oppose the legislation, and many dissenting physicians agreed with
Doctor H. Caron of Paris, who wrote that "I positively refuse to vac-
cinate, and I regard vaccination as a joke.“ Even in rhetoric, femi-
nists and anti-vaccinationists spoke a similar language of "progress:"
”Faith in vaccine is an old prejudice from that time of obscurantism

‘1.

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178

ordinary hospitals, rather than prison infinnaries, to accept "women of
the street" for treatment. Special half-way houses under lay direction
should be created to help female ex-convicts adjust to freedom without
falling victim to male lust. And in a rather curious resolution, it
demanded that inasmuch as "celibacy is one of the great causes of pros-
titution,‘ all laws which gave rise to that state should be repealed.
Perhaps, given the anti-clerical tenor of the Congress, the recomen-
dation sought to restore priests and nuns to marriageable status. Or
it may have emanated from Deraismes' personal aversion to wedlock, if
in fact she refused to marry because of the legal imprisonment such a
step entailed. In any case there can be no doubt about the intent of
the section's other two resolutions: woman's right to file a paternity
suit and stiffer laws to protect minors from seduction.105
The Legislation Section concluded the fomal work of the two-
week long Congress. Two of its resolutions reiterated those of earlier
sections: the abolition of the Morals Police and the passage of a pa-
ternity suit bill. In a related action, the section called for
eliminating the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children,
making all offspring equally eligible to share in their father's legacy.
But its main thrust came in the areas of adultery, marriage, and divorce.
Both sexes should suffer identical penalties for ahltery, regardless of

where the act occurred; and marriage promises should assume contractual

 

when science had hardly begun to establish itself; but as it was lucra-
tive, one should not be surprised at its persistence into our epoch."
Schirmacher, .15 Tragil des fenmes en Frange, 355; Ra rt adress'e
Conseil ic 1 de Paris de la Societe Femini te "L'E alite ‘Paris,

, 13; Ph. Linet, "Imitilite et dangers de la vaccine," La Societe
Nouvelle, XIX (189k), 310-23 and.XXI (1895), 375—89.

lofilbid.

    

 

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179

status, enabling the jilted party to sue for damages. More important,
because "the indissolubility of marriage is contrary to the principle of
individual liberty," divorce must be reestablished. The section asked
the legislature to specify the details, perhaps due to an inability to
agree on them itself, but its intention left no room for doubt; "Divorce
is necessary from the point of view of humanity, of morality, and in a
word, of the social future."106

Perhaps the foremost significance of the 1878 Congress was
ordinal: It constituted not only the first international woman’s Rights
Congress, but "the first important act of feminism in France."107 Richer
claimed.more, seeing in it proof that "the sentiment of right, of justice

108 He took particular pride in the unanimity ac-

penetrates everywhere."
corded to most of the resolutions, and wrote soon after the event: "The
question of women is no longer a narrow question, the utopia of some
empty'minds; it is a universal question."109 But in the opinion of
another participant, the Congress proved only that the majority of French
women.were indifferent to their rights.110 Moreover, though many leading
feminists attended, no permanent association emerged. Disorder marred

the movement's subsequent growth, until eleven years later a second Con-

gress attempted to provide overall direction. One cause of the

 

107m Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 15.
loayAvenir deg Feuxnes, 1 September 1878.
1”bid.

110Schmahl, "Progress of the women's Rights Movement in
France," 85.

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180

fragmentation steamed directly from the 1878 gathering. Deraismes and
Incher, anxious to avoid irmnoderation, refused to allow Hubertine Auclert
to speak on her favorite subject, woman suffrage.111 Auclert bolted the
Congress and assumed leadership of a suffrage wing within the movement.
Thus, public opinion -- so crucial to Richer's plans - found itself sub-

jected almost imediately to divergent appeals.

Conclusion

The Congress of 1878 reflected the ideas of its two principal
organizers, Deraismes and ficher. Between them they created a distinct
school of feminism -- one that dominated the movement for a generation.
The school's two outstanding characteristics were the priority accorded
to woman's civil rights and the close link between feminism, republi-
canism, and anti-clericalism. In the 1870's both characteristics served
the movement well. Republicans welcomed the support and in return
raised little objection to the limited feminism. A few even actively
assisted the woman's rights campaign. But once the republic consolidated
itself, some of the movement's younger recruits grew restive. Militants
who desired a broader program, particularly the inclusion of suffrage,
rejected the Deraismes-Richer School as conservative and opportunist.
Other militants, who accepted the civil rights priority but wished to
broaden the movement's base, accused the school of political and anti-
clerical radicalism. The result was that by the turn of the century
it no longer occupied the movement's mainstream. Indeed in 1925 an

epponent of woman's suffrage defended his stand with a lengthy tract

 

anrinberg, Histogigge d3 Mouvement Suffrggiste, 72.

181

praising Richer.n‘?' Yet if it eventually had a retrograde impact,
Deraismes' and Richer's feminine served the 1870's and 1880's well.

The combination of a moderate woman's program and a radical political
stance won sufficient acceptance to permit for the first time in a cen-

tury a new generation of feminists to build on the old.

 

112Fernand Goland, Les Fe’ministes frangaises (Paris, 1925). For
a contemporary American appraisal of the 1878 Congress, see Theodore

Stanton's account in Stanton et al., Histog of Woman Suffme, III,
896-99.

a...

CHAPTER IV
CONFLICT: HUBERTINE AUCLERT

AND THE STRATEGY OF L'ASSAUT

The Woman's Rights Congress of 1878 coincided with several events
that propelled French feminism along new paths. Since the late Empire,
proponents of woman's rights had marched in lockstep with advocates of
republicanism. They had fought together in opposition to Napoleon III's
personal rule, and during the first seven years of the Third Republic,
from its proclamation of 4 September 1870 through the g£i£3.mgi_crisis
of 1877, they had deemphasized the struggle to liberate women in order
to concentrate their energies against authoritarian and clerical oppo-
nents of the new’democracy. In the next two years, from 1877 to 1879,
republican victories at the polls lessened the immediate political dan-
ger, which encouraged feminists to organize the 1878 Congress. By then
the Third Republic had outlived its 1848 predecessor; and with the
resignation of Marshal MacMahou in December 1878 and further republican
gains in the Senate in January 1879 ”a kind of divide had been crossed,
irrevocably this time. The era of experiment and uncertainty was over;
France was permanently a republic."1

Permanence was not stability. Many feminists mistook subsequent

incidents for full-blown crises, and Maria Deraismes in particular

 

lwright, France in Modern Times, 295.

182

 

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183

redoubled her political activity in the early 1880's. In reality, how-
ever, the essential precondition for which feminists had temporarily
sacrificed their campaign had materialized. France had its republic,
which by definition meant a society open to debate and reform from below.
In theory, therefore, feminists should have achieved a rapid implementa-
tion of their program. what actually happened was quite different.
Defeat of their common foes revealed divisions within republican ranks.
A new spectrum of radical, moderate, and conservative politicians
emerged, none of whom possessed sufficient strength to govern alone. As
a result, power fell to men who labeled themselves Opportunists, a
shifting coalition comprised of moderates and a handful of radicals led
by Léon Cambetta. Their motto was "_s_é_r_i_g_i; Leg Questions” -- take up the
issues one at a time -- which resembled the ”breach” strategy of
Deraismes and Richer. But unfortunately for the movement, the Oppor-
tunists accorded a very low priority to the woman question.

Rule by the Opportunists in the 1880's brought reforms in only
two areas of specific concern to women, education and divorce. By femi-
nist standards, however, the expanded system of girls' schools, with its
special curriculum and inferior degrees, simply institutionalized woman's
subordination on a larger scale.2 In contrast, the 1884 divorce law'had
at least two positive features; it permitted wives to escape from brutal
husbands legally, and it partly eliminated the double standard for
adultery.3 Its great drawback stemmed from the fact that, in addition to
the absence of divorce by mutual consent, the 1884 law completely side-

stepped what to femdnists was the root of the problem, woman's servitude

 

25.. Chapters I and 11.

3See Chapter III.

184

in marriage. Furthermore, from the standpoint of the movement's appeal
to non-feminists, the enactment of these two reforms, despite (or perhaps
because of) their limitations, partially stripped the organized effort of
its two most popular issues.

As a result of these developments, feminism.and republicanism
reached a fork in the road in the early 1880's. The republican pre-
condition had materialized, and the top-priority feminist demands, educa-
tion and divorce, had received at least a degree of attention. Even be-
fore the divorce law of 1884 had passed, a minority of feminists had
begun to recognize the end of the honeymoon. From then on, though many
advocates of woman's rights were slow to realize it, the Republic itself
became the chief obstacle' to women's emancipation. On several occasions
feminists rallied again to the defense of the Republic, but it persis-
tently refused to reciprocate. Its primary interest in women was to
insure through education a sufficient supply of obedient, cultured wives

and loyal republican camp followers.

Hubertine Auclert
One of the first to recognize the limits of mutual interest be-

tween republicanism and feminism.was Hubertine Auclert.A Like Deraismes

 

l'l“or information on the life of Harie-Anne-Hubertine Auclert (10
April 1848 - 8 April 1914), see: misme, "La Vie et la mort du feminisme,"
36-38; La Frangaise, 18 April 1914; Thomas,Louise Michel, 186; Brion, ed.,
En lo édie Feministe, I; Harie-Héléne Lefaucheux.g£,gl,, "Omen in a
C u in World: The 1 St of he International Council of women
sings 1888 (London, 1966), 9-11; Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 38-50;
Vital Gougeon, Du Vote des Femmes (Law thesis, University of Rennes,

Rennes, 1907), 40-75; Clark, The Position of Women in Contemporary France,

217-18; Abensour, Histoire générale, 275; Dictionnaire de Biographie
fran aise, IV (Paris, 1947), 327; Alcyone, "Les Femes voteront-elles?

er ne Auclert, la premibre des suffragistes frangaises," La Lumiere,
16 February 1935; Stanton 3£_g;,, His or of Woman Suffra e, III, 899 and
IV, 23, 27; Sowerwine, Women and Soci lism in France 1871-1921, 7-12,

, \
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.
4
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.
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185

and Richer, with whom she worked closely in the 1870's, Auclert held
strong republican convictions. But she placed a greater priority on
women's liberation than they did. She therefore bolted the 1878 Congress,
convinced that the tactic of 13_§5g£hg'offered little prospect of success.
Well in advance of most of her feminist colleagues, Auclert perceived that
the Republic, though in theory open to debate and reform, had become a
bastion of male domination. France's seventeen million women would remain
slaves to an equal number of men, Auclert wrote in 1881, unless females
shared power: ”Therefore, it follows from all evidence that political
rights are for women the passkey (glg£_g£.ygg£g) that will give her all
other rights."5
Auclert was thirty years old at the time of the 1878 Congress.
She was born at Tilly in the commune of Saint-Priest-en-Murat, 150 miles
south of Paris in the department of Allier. The fifth of seven children,

she spent her early youth in relative ease, displaying contemporary signs

of ”feminine" precocity.6 Throughout her life she remained financially

 

44-49; BMD, Dossier Auclert and Dossiers VOT 396 for the period 1880-1914;
"Hubertine Auclert" by her sister, Marie Chaumout, in Auclert, Les Femmes
au Gouvernail (Paris, 1923), l-9l; Lg Droit des Femmes, 15 April 1914;

Jean Maitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographigue du mouvement ouvrier fran-
ais (Paris, 1973),X , 165-66. Henri Avenel, Histoire de la presse

frangais depuis 1789 jusgu' a nos jours (Paris, 1900), 818.

5La Cito enne, 13 February 1881.

6Recalling their youth together in the family home, Auclert's
sister wrote: ”Already at that moment, the petite fille manifested
precious gifts, she was admired for the manner in which she dressed
her dolls, the ease with which she knew how to pull apart the tiniest
piece of moire or taffeta to fashion beautiful robes for them unita-
ting those of dames. She embroidered jus£_as_marvelously and took an
interest in all the details of domestic [lifg/, she thus acquired all
the qualities of an accomplished woman of the house." Marie Chaumout,
"Hubertine Auclert," 1-2.

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186

secure, but tragedy marred her later youth. The death of her parents
and the apparent absence of parentally-inclined relatives or friends
left her an orphan. She spent the remainder of her minority in a con-
vent.
Under the tutelage of local nuns, Auclert acquired an awareness
of social injustice and perhaps the martyr-like attitude that charac-
terized her campaign for woman's rights. But the Church itself did not
appeal to her. Throughout her career she passionately encouraged anti-
clericalism in her fellow feminists. Her stay in the convent undoubtedly
limited her access to a broader education, and, in comparison to
Deraismes, "she possessed only an average culture."7 Neither philosophy
nor literature attracted her. She spoke well and wrote in a journalistic
manner. Polemics were her forte, impulsiveness was her style. Whatever
the precise circumstances, the cumulative effect of Auclert's youthful
experiences had a decided impact on her beliefs. "I have been a rebel
against female oppression almost since birth,” she later recalled, "so
much brutality of man towards woman, which terrified my childhood, pre-
pared me at an early age to demand for my sex independence and considera-
tion."8
Auclert's exitu from the convent coincided with two events of
crucial significance to her subsequent career. The first was the
Franco-Prussian War. Distance protected her community from direct in-

volvement in the conflict, and the French Red Cross had not yet pene-

trated into the provinces. Auclert spent the war years caring for the

 

7Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 38.

8Chaumout, "Hubertine Auclert," 3-4.

187

victims of another scourge, smallpox. As she grappled with the epidemic,
news of the Empire's collapse reached her home town, sending her into
transports of joy. The vision of a democratic France filled her with
hope; and, although her devotion to women's liberation was to provoke
many confrontations with the Third Republic, she never abandoned faith
in her twin idols, "ma patrie et ma republique." "0 ma patrie," Auclert
exclaimed, "you must be incomparable because I prefer to live here in
slavery than to be free elsewhere."9

The second event brought her into direct contact with the feminist
movement. Accounts of the first feminist banquets had begun to reach
the provinces in the late 1860's and early 1870's. When.Auc1ert heard
of them she immediately set out for Paris to meet their organizers. Upon
her arrival in the capital, she joined a "comité’féministe," either
Deraismes' l'Amelioration or Daubié'sAssociation.10 Which one is un~
clear, but she came to know Deraismes well (Daubié died in 1874), and
Encher took her on as secretary of l'Avenir des Femmes. .At the time,
however, Victor Hugo made the greatest impression on her. From hhm, the
most famous of the feminist banquet luminaries, she heard the words that
guided her campaign to the end: "In our legislation, woman is without
political rights; she does not vote, she does not exist, she does not

count. There are male citizens; there are no female citizens. This

 

91bid., 4.

10It was Auclert herself who described the group she joined in
the early 1870's as a "comite' fe'ministe," but, in addition to the problem
of identifying the particular group, the word "feminist" had not yet
come into popular usage. Auclert first used the word in a letter to
the prefect of the Seine in 1882. Ibid., 5. The first women's rights
congress in France to use the word "feminist" was held in 1892. Clark,
The Position of Women in Contemporary France, 218.

.....

- -.
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cept tt
approac
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188

is a violent state; it is necessary that it cease."11

La Sociét§5;5_proit des Femmes

From the outset Auclert was an integralist. She refused to ac-
cept the strategy of civil rights first. Rather than the piecemeal
approach of $2.23gghg, she advocated lfggggg£'-- attacking all sex bar-
riers at once.12 Initially, however, the choice between lg_b£§ghghand
lf£§§£g£_did not arise. During the Second Empire, Richer and Deraismes
frequently espoused woman's political rights. So long as France re-
mained under autocratic rule, they viewed the extension of the franchise
to £31233 as a step in the right direction. Indeed when Auclert joined
the movement much the same rhetoric could still be heard. Only in the
second half of the 1870's, after the Third Republic had achieved a degree
of stability, did the problem of strategy crop up. Auclert then found
herself out of step with the majority of her colleagues. Her position
had not changed, but theirs had. For them integralism entailed too many
risks. Prior to 1870 it meant toppling an oppressive regime; now, they
thought, it would cause the reversal of the Republic.

The first overt incident in the estrangement between Auclert and
her colleagues occurred in 1876, when she founded the Société le Droit
des Femmes. Richer, whose l'Amélioration had been outlawed the previous

December, applauded the new group and served on its Initiation Committee}3

 

uMisme, "La Vie et la mort du féminisme," 34. Auclert later re-
called that ”in citing our great poet, the Press awakened among the ex.
ploited the idea of rights and, within a year, I was not the only
recruit, who came from a hundred places to enroll in the feminist army
. . ." Auclert, Le Vote des femmes, 102-3.

lzIbid., 36.

 

13L'Avenir des Femmes, 6 January 1877.

189
But his support was less than whole-hearted. The Société's program con-
sidered "the political emancipation of woman as the sole means of

"14 It was an

arriving at the economic and civil emancipation of woman.
organization bent on lfgggggg, Richer could hardly disavow the group,
since he had just urged all communities to establish feminist organiza-
tions.15 But six years later he founded the Ligue Frangaise pour le
Droit des Femmes, one of whose purposes was to offset the Société's radi-
cal image.16 The following year, in 1883, Auclert brought the name of
her group into line with its objective. From then until the First World
war it was known as the Société 1e Suffrage des Femmes.

In addition to political rights, the program of Auclert's Société
stressed common feminist themes such as equal pay for equal work, co-
education, the right to file a paternity suit, and divorce -- in a phrase,

"equality of both sexes before the law."17

The group also professed neu-
trality in matters of politics and religion, but words could not disguise
its obvious republican and anti-clerical orientation. The same conserva-
tive government that outlawed l'Amélioration rejected its request for

authorization in 1877 and ordered it dissolved. The Société obeyed pub-

licly, but continued to meet in private until the political situation

 

 

ll'Hubertine Auclert, Historigue de la Societe 1e Droit des
Femmes 1876-1880 (Paris, 1881 , 6.
15

L'Avenir des Femmes, 6 Hay 1877.

16Misme, "La Vie et la mort du féminisme," 37.

l7Auclert, Historigue, 7. For the Société's program, see
APPENDIX E.

190

improved after the crisis of 16 Hay 1877.18 Finally on 28 September 1879
it received official approval.19

According to its statutes, either sex could join the Société,
though all members had to support the goal of woman's suffrage and eligi-
bility. Dues were three francs per year, and an annually chosen three-
member Control Committee oversaw the group's finances. Administration
fell to a ten-member Executive Committee, elected each year along with a
general secretary, corresponding secretary, and a treasurer. The group
had no permanent president, and each assembly chose its presiding officer
by a show of hands.20 Its headquarters were at 21 rue Cail in the 10th
grrondissement, the home of its perennial general secretary, Hubertine
Auclert.21

Richer lived only a few blocks away at 6 rue des Deux Cares; but
whereas a middle class cadre rallied to him and Deraismes, Auclert
managed to attract "numerous sympathetic working women" to the cause.22

In the mid-1870's, while serving on l'Avenir, she initiated a subscrip-

tion drive on behalf of a female cooperative workshop which netted over

 

lalbide , 10-110
19La Cito enne, 1 May 1881.
20

Taken from the statutes of the Société le Suffrage des Femmes
in a two page handout distributed sometime after 1903. BMD, Dossier
Auclert.

21_l_.fAvenir des Femmes, 6 January 1877.
22L'Amélioration, Bulletin Bimestriel, June - July 1897. Of the
twenty-six people who signed Auclert‘s protest against the counting of
women in the census, six lived in Auclert's 10th arrondissement, seven
lived in the 18th, three each lived in the 11th and 20th, two each
in the 8th and 19th, one each in the 5th and 17th, and another at Pantin.
La Cito enne, l9 - 25 December 1881.

‘ljjl

191

128 francs.23 In October 1879, she travelled to Marseilles, and per-
sonally induced the first French Socialist Congress to adopt a resolution
supporting the political and social equality of the sexes. Her success
there represented ”the first effort to bring the working class movement
to adopt a more progressive view of the role of women."24 She also de-
manded amnesty for the Communards and in July 1879 created a committee to
aid women returning from prison and deportation.25 When Louise Michel
arrived at the Care Saint-Lazare in November 1880 after ten years of
exile, Auclert stood among the thousands who greeted her with the cry of
"Long live the Commune! Long live the social revolution! Long live
humanity!"26
Auclert's initial appeal for members, carried in October 1876 by
Le Ra el, La Tribune, and Les Droits de l'Homme among others, emphasized
the similarity between workers and women. "Women of France," Auclert
'wrote, "despite the benefits of our revolution of 1789, two kinds of in!

dividuals are still enslaved; proletarians and women. Male workers con-

tribute luster and richness to the nation, she maintained, only to die of

 

23L'Avenir des Femmes, 5 March 1876.

24

Sowerwine, Women and Socialism in Frange 1871-1921, 7. Pages

7 to 12 of Sowerwine s work provides the best account of Auclert's role
at the 1879 Marseilles Congress. See also: Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse
faministe, 41. Richer applauded the Marseilles Congress for discarding
the Proudhonian perspective on women and for adopting Auclert's resolu-
tions, but he rejected the collectivist ideal as contrary to human
nature and inimical to individual liberty. He recognized the gulf be-
tween classes, but maintained that an even greater gulf separated women
from men. He also faulted the Congress for focusing on sweeping change,
which violated his own preference for "practical" reformism: "Progress
is not made by brusque jumps, by sudden changes. There is, in the
facts, a logical order, a natural sequence." Le Droit des Femmes,
December 1879.

25Auclert, Histori ue, 19-20.

“Thomas, Louise Michel, 186.

192

misery. Working women are worse off; for the same tasks they receive
less than half the wage of men. And, regardless of income, all women
suffer from "vexations and injustices in a legislation that restricts
the circle of activity in which they move, that exploits and atrophies
them.” The proletariat has begun to free itself, Auclert concluded, and
women must follow'its example; "It is time to abandon indifference and
inertia in order to protest against the prejudices and laws that humil-
iate us. Let us unite our efforts, let us associate; the example of the
proletariat invites us; let us learn from it how to emancipate our-
selves."27

Prospective members could find Auclert at home every Tuesday and

Friday afternoon.28 Twenty joined the first week;'bome others'

 

27Auclert, Historique, 8-10. Auclert's compassion for the working
class and her emphasis on the analogous subordination of the proletariat
and women did not mean complete acceptance of the socialist perspective.
Sex oppression ran deeper than class oppression, she maintained, because
male domination struck wealthy and poor women alike. "Those who go off
to war against the monopolies of capital forget that men are like the
rich. . . . Men exercise monopolies over lucrative work, public func-
tions, employment, rights and sovereignty. . . . The question of women
is the new Gordian knot that, once severed, would permit resolution of
the social question, but, so long as women have their hands tied by
civil laws and are, from a political point of view, gagged, the econoldc
transformation advocated by collectivists will only operate to the pro-
fit of men." La Citoyenne, May 1885. Socialist women disagreed. "The
difference that exists between the most advanced demands of bourgeois
feminism and the socialist Party is that those demands form the maximum
program of the former, whereas they represent the minimum program.of the
socialist Party," wrote Louise Saumoneau, La Femme Socialiste, July 1902.
worker solidarity must take precedence over sex solidarity, because ”the
general interests of the female bourgeoisie, being attached to the in-
terests of their parasitic class, are in profound antagonismwwith those
of the female proletariat, attached equally to the interests of their
exploited class,” explained Saumoneau, Le Mouvement F§ministe Socialiste
(Paris, 1903), 3. For more on Auclert's attitude towards the collec-
tivists, see Chapter XXVIII, ”Le Socialisme n'aurait pas pour résultat
l'affranchisement de la femme," in her Les Femmes au Gouvernail, 359-64.

28W. 6 Jtnuary 1877.

193

later.29 By February 1877, enough had enrolled to convene a private
meeting at the Salle Sax in the Saint-Georges quarter of Paris.30 Armand
Duportal, deputy from Toulouse, presided, assisted by deputy Charles
Laisant (Loire-Inférieure) and Municipal Councillor Ferdinand Buisson.
Discussion centered on woman's civil condition, especially the right to
file a paternity suit. Whether suffrage came up is unclear -- Richer's

31 Also unclear is the status of the

account omitted the issue entirely.
three men; were they members or simply guests? Buisson at least may have
joined, inasmuch as he eventually emerged as the chief parliamentary
sponsor of woman suffrage in the decade before the First World War.32

At the time, however, the question of membership quickly became moot.
Shortly after the meeting, the government refused to authorize the new
Société, which probably caused some resignations. In any case, when the
group openly reemerged two years later, it embarked on a campaign that

appealed only to the most ardent feminists.33

Launching the Assault

On only one occasion during the movement's first generation did

 

Auclert suspend her campaign for woman suffrage. At the height of the

 

29Auclert, Historique. 10.

Ibid.

 

31L'Avenir des Femmes, 4 March 1877.

32Buisson assumed leadership of the woman suffrage faction in the
Chamber of Deputies upon the death of Paul Dussaussoy (Pas-de-Calais),
who introduced a measure for granting women the vote in municipal, £5:
rondisement, and general council elections in 1906. Dussausoy died in
1909. Buisson served as president of the Chamber's Committee on Univer-
sal Suffrage. His views on the issue can be found in Ferdinant Buisson,
Le Vote des Femmes (Paris, 1911).

33For a roster of Auclert's followers, see APPENDIX F.

1911
1877 political crisis, she called on feminists to concentrate their
energies against the danger of reaction: "The republican ideal excludes
the aristocracy of sex as it excludes the aristocracy of caste; but we
would be wrong to speak of social questions in the face of the dominant

3“ With the return of republican stability,

necessity of the present."
however, she redoubled her efforts to obtain the franchise for women.

She expected to raise the issue at the Woman's Rights Congress of 1878,
and she served on the Congress’ Initiation Commission and Organizational
Committee. But when Deraismes and Richer forbade the matter, she quit
both committees and boycotted the Congress. The address she had hoped to
deliver appeared soon thereafter as a pamphlet: Le Droitgpolitigue des
femmes; Questiop_ggi n'est_pas traitée au Coggrés Internationgl_des
Eggmgg,as In January 1879, she repeated the pamphlet's theme in a press
release. The time has come for women to seize their liberty, Auclert

announced: "Man makes laws to his advantage and we are obliged to bow

our heads in silence. Enough of resignation. Pariahs of Society, stand

up!"36

The stepped-up campaign involved a variety of actions.37 In ad-
dition to her personal role at the Marseilles Socialist Congress in 1879,
delegates from her Société attended the Congres de la Paix in 1878 and
the Congris regional du Centre in 1880. The Seciéti resumed public

meetings, with two at the salle Petrelle in March and July 1879, another

 

 

3“Auclert, Historigue, ll.

35Hubertine Auclert, Le Droit politique des femmes; Qgestion gui
p'estpas traitée au Congrés International de Femmes (Paris, 1878).

36Auclert, Histori ue, 18-19.

37Ib1do’ 15-200

195
at the Oberkampf theater in March 1880, and two more in May and July 1880
at the gell£.Levis and the §2115_Rivoli. Petitions proliferated. Early
in 1878 the Soci‘t‘ appealed to the Senate for a paternity suit law. A
few months later it demanded of the Education Minister that women
teachers be given visiting privileges at the National Exposition equal
to those of men instructors. In May 1879, the Société petitioned the
President of the Republic to offer amnesty to the Communards. At the
end of the year, in December, the group brought the plight of abandoned
children to the Interior Minister's attention. The Société also found it
necessary to petition the Chamber of Deputies in defense of woman's right
to petition. Clerical apposition to Ferry's education reforms had pro-
voked some republicans to propose the striking of female signatures from
Catholic protest petitions. Auclert viewed the proposal with abhorrence.
While disclaiming any sympathy for the Church's position, she lashed back:
"If one did not continually deny the rights of women, if one gave to them
knowledge and power, one would not find so many female clericals.“ The
petition represented the only legal means of political protest available
to women, Auclert pointed out: "We who are not, we protest equally against
the ideas that have guided the [clericaj7petitioners and against the in-

justices of men, who deny to women their right to petition."38

In February 1880, the Société moved to more direct action.39
Auclert and a handful of followers first attempted to register to vote.
In addition to considerations of principle, they based their attempt on
the fact that no law specifically forbade woman's suffrage. They argued

that legally and constitutionally the temm les frangais applied to all

 

381bid., 22.

39Ibid., 23-4.

196
citizens regardless of sex. Women had to obey laws and to pay taxes under
that designation, and they should therefore be entitled to vote. The
major of Paris' lOth arrondissement disagreed, however, pointing out that
every judicial and administrative decision since 1789 had reserved poli-
tical rights to the exclusive use of men. To alter that tradition would
exceed the limits of his authority, he maintained, and until legislative
reform brought change, lg; frangais would centinue to exclude women from
the franchise.

Auclert's Société denounced the mayor's ruling, comparing it to
the doctrine of original sin and the pretensions of the French nobility,
both of which assigned all or part of humanity to hereditary ignominy.“o
It also employed the ruling as the basis for another protest. In April
1880, Auclert informed the Prefect of the Seine that, having been denied
representation, she would no longer submit to taxation:

Having wished to exercise my rights as a French citizen, having
demanded during_the revision‘period my inscription on the elec-
toral lists, [the authoritigg/ have responded to me that 'the law
confers rights only to men and not to women.’

I do not admit this exclusion gg_masse of ten million women,
who have not been deprived of their civic rights by any judgment.

In consequence, I leave to men, who arrogate to themselves the
privilege of governing, arranging, and alloting the budgets, I
leave to men the privilege of paying the taxes that they vote and
divide to their liking.

Since I have no right to control the employment of my money,

I no longer wish to give it. I do not wish to be an accomplice,
by my acquiescence, in the vast exploitation that the masculine
autocracy believes is its right to exercise in regard to women.
I have no rights, therefore I have no obligations; I do not
vote, I do not pay.

Twenty women joined Auclert's protest.42 At least eight were‘wi-

dows; the rest were probably single like Auclert since husbands controlled

 

aoIbide. 24-5.
41

Ibid., 26.

azibid., 27. Grinberg, Histori ue du Mo vement Suffra iste, 76.
Auclert named eight of her fellow tax-strikers on 8 April 1880 in a

197
family finances. Most lived in Paris, though a few resided in Mar-
seilles, Lyon, and Pout-Lieu. In the end all but three backed down when
the authorities demanded payment. Auclert and two widows, Bonnaire and
Leprou, held out, appealing to the Conseil de Prefecture and the Con-
seil d'Etat. Neither appeal succeeded. Auclert continued the protest
until an officer of the court attempted to seize her furniture. Where-
upon, having made her point, she paid the back taxes.“3 Subsequently,
although French suffragists repeated the registration tactic, the advo-
cates of women's liberation abandoned the tax strike.

"It would take too long to recall here," Auclert remarked at the
time, ”the noice that the demand for the inscription of women on the
electoral lists made in the great Parisian press."44 A later feminist
confirmed that Auclert's “refusal to pay taxes particularly caused

"“5 Predictably, hostility characterized much of

whves of ink to flow.
the reaction, and the conservative Le Figaro caustically inquired if,

after women, cattle would vote.“6 Yet, several journalists, including

 

press release: J. Coulassez, Marie Chevassus (of Lyon), and six widows
(Lodoue, Blondit, Marc, Rioux, Dupénet, and Jamier). Unidentified
press clipping of 11 April 1880 at BMD, Dossier Auclert.

43Chaumont, "Hubertine Auclert," ll. This account by Auclert's
sister indicates that Auclert paid the back taxes. Other accounts dis-
agree. According to an official history of the International Council
of Women, "Hubertine Auclert, future founder of the French Women's
Suffrage Movement allowed her household goods to be seized by baliffs
rather than pay taxes in obedience to laws she had not voted." Le-
faucheux ££_gl,, Woman in a Chan in World, 9-10. Clark maintained that
Auclert went to prison rather than pay. Clark, The Position of women
in Contemporary‘France. 217. Auclert's tax bill came to 30 francs and
85 centimes based on her rent of 550 francs. The applicable law of
1852 exempted rents under 400 francs. Le Soleil, 12 August 1880. Wi-
dow Leprou had her furniture seized, according to La Cito enne, 2-8
January 1882.

bhAuclert, Historigug, 25.
“SMisme, "La Vie et la mort du féhinisme," 39.
“6Cited in Hubertine Auclert, Le Vote des Femmes, 107.

198
Auguste Vacquerie, Albert Delpit, and Henri Fouquier, rallied to
Auclert.A7 Fouquier praised the tax strike as courageous, expressed
agreement in principle with woman suffrage, but warned against rapid en-
franchisement due to woman's lack of education.“8 Most surprising of all,
however, was the conversion of Alexandre Dumas filg, who reversed his

earlier stand and endorsed woman suffrage in Les Femmes ggi Eggnt et les

femmes gui votent.“9

Dumas'

about-face stemmed in part from Auclert's campaign, as well
from another £3233.c612bre -- the trial and eventual acquittal of Madame
du Tilly, who had bathed her husband's mistress in acid.50 The vote,
Dumas felt, would enable women to bring laws into line with changing
values, thus stabilizing marriage. Once enfranchised, women would no
longer have to resort to illegal and disruptive acts in order to protect
their homes. With the ballot, they could perfect their roles as wives
and mothers and provide society with a reinvigorated domestic base.

They should not, however, exercise greater power, as distinct from
greater influence. Family life constituted their "natural" sphere, and
they would betray themselves, as well as the social order, if they as-
pired to hold office directly. Government ought to remain under the
exclusive direction of men, Dumas concluded, because men alone defended

it with their blood.51

 

A7Hisme, "La Vie et la mort du féminisme,” 39.

heflenri Fouquier, from an unidentified newspaper clipping of
30 July 1880 at BnD.

A9A1exandre Dumas filg, Les Fem! gui tuent et les femes gui
vgtgnt (Paris, 1880).

50Grinberg, Historigue du Mouvement Suffrggiste, 65.

Slgggg,, Hisme, ”La Vie et la mort du féminisme," 39-40.

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199

Despite the essentially anti-feminist thrust of Dumas' Opinions,
Auclert welcomed his support. Several years later she went further and
offered him the leadership of her Société. Dumas declined, declaring
that ”I would aid you more by remaining independent; if I accepted the
presidency that you offer me, they would say to me: 'You are with
Hubertine Auclert' . . . and I would no longer be heard at the
Académie.”52 Precisely what Dumas meant by ”with Hubertine Auclert" is
unclear, but perhaps it can be explained in part by an incident that
occurred in April 1880. In that month, Auclert accompanied a wedding
party to the gaggig,of the 10th arrondissement, the place where she had
attempted to register two months before. Upon completion of the vows,
she complimented the newlyweds for marrying in a civil ceremony and urged
them to disregard the Code's subordination of the wife just as they had
thrown off the shackles of the Church. Much ado followed until the Pre-
fect of the Seine, critical of Auclert's lack of respect for the law,
barred her from speaking at the 252515.53 The ban lasted four years,
but mattered little. For within a year of the Prefect's decree, Auclert

found a more powerful means of propaganda. In February 1881 the first

issue of La Citoyenne rolled off the presses.

The Founding of La Citoyenne

 

Auclert founded La Citoyenne with the aid of two attorneys, Lion
Giraud and Antonin Lévrier. Giraud had a doctorate in law and a pro-

lific pen, which he employed in his own name and under two pseudonyms,

 

52Auclert, Le Vote des Femmes. 107.

SBIbid. , 60-1.

200
Camille and Draigu.54 Lévrier possessed a license in law and an interest
in journalism. Both had participated in the 1878 Woman's RighuBCongress.
Of the two, Auclert worked more closely with Livrier, who served as her
legal counsel in the tax strike appeals of 1880 and 1881. He also ex-
cited in her an interest beyond woman's emancipation, and in 1888 they
married. The timing of the nuptials coincided with Lévrier's appointment
to a judgeship in Algeria. Auclert followed her husband to his new post,
leaving one of her associates in charge of La Citoyenne. Four years la-
ter, after Lévrier's death, she returned to Paris, but by then‘Lg
Citoyenne had passed out of her hands.55 Its last issue appeared in
November 1891.

La Citoyenne began as a weekly and nearly one-third of its 187
issues appeared the first year. Lack of money, the scourge of the
French feminist press, forced it to switch to monthly publication in
April 1882. Auclert tried to forestall the cutback by raising the sub-
scription rate to ten francs from the original six, and by offering in-
ducements. Semi-annual subscribers could receive a bottle of Pinaud
perfume for five francs, half the regular price, and those willing to

sign up for a full year could purchase a ”superb revolver" for a

 

saGiraud's works on women include: Le Roman de la femme

ghg§tignge, §§ggg histgrigpe gveg ung Lettre-préface par Mlle Hubertine
Agglert (Paris, 1880); Les Femmes et les libres-penseurs, Reponsg a

H, Benjamin Ggstinegugpour sa brochure TLes Femmes et les PrGtres.”
(Paris, 1880); Essai sur la condition des femmes en Europe et en
Amérigug (Paris, 1880); La Femme et la nouvelle loi sur le divorce
(Paris, 1885); L£;V€rit€ sur lg rechereche de la Paternité (Paris,
1888); and Contradictions du Code Napoléon et nécessité de la réviser
(Paris, 1889). He also wrote an account of the first feminist con-
gress: Souvenirs du congrEspour le drgit des femmes.gtenu 3 Paris en
aoGt 1878 (Paris, 1879).

55Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 42.

 

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201
nominal eight francs.56 Purchasers of the Christmas edition of 1881 got
a free copy of l'Historigue de la Société le Droit des Femmes.57 Auclert
found it necessary to remind contributors, who had begun to ask for pay,
that their articles represented an act of devotion, not a source of fi-
nancial gain.58 She herself doubled her output, as had Richer when
faced with the same problem, by writing under a pseudonym, Jeanne
Voitout.59 But nothing, not even incorporation in February 1882, solved
the money squeeze. The next 108 issues appeared monthly at an annual
subscription rate of one and a half francs. Only in July 1889, when her
successor devoted three editions to the second Women's Rights Congress,
and in 1891, when the new management brought it out fortnightly, did the
publication tempo increase.

La Citoyenne might not have survived the first year, let alone a
decade, had it not been for an elderly politician named Joseph de Gasté.
Auclert early created a special fund ”for the propagation of the journal{'
but donations came infrequently and in small amounts. Then in May 1881
Auclert sent a questionnaire on woman's rights to each deputy. De Gasté,
who had just introduced Deraismes' proposal for the cggggrgante vote in
the Chamber, responded affirmatively with the first of a series of fifty
and one-hundred franc gifts. Altogether, he gave close to ten thousand
francs, a boon Auclert attempted to repay by repeatedly supporting his

reelection. Others also gave, but in 1889, for example, de Gasté

 

56La Citoyenne, 29 Hay 1881.

571b13., 19-25 December 1331.

5§12£1., 11-18 September 1881.

59Li Dzeh-Djen, La Presse feministe, 42.

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202

donated 1200 francs of the 1358 collected in the special fund.60 Little
wonder that Auclert's successor dubbed him the John Stuart Hill of
France.61

De Gasté's generosity, which earned him a reputation for eccen-
tricity in the Chamber, contrasted sharply with the passivity of most
Frenchwomen. Auclert could count on her group to support La Cito enne,
particularly after she raised yearly dues from three to five francs to
include the monthly subscription cost.62 She also found some support
in the provinces. A speaking engagement at Nimes in the spring of 1884,
for example, netted 220 francs in donations and one hundred newreaders?3
But most women remained indifferent, lacking in courage and paralyzed by
fear of ridicule. John Brown died in 1859 because Blacks failed to fol-
low him, Auclert complained upon her return from Nines: how'many £552;_
$31352_were making the same mistakeleh Liberty required financial
sacrifice, she asserted later in the year, drawing attention to the
death of an "archimillionnaire" who had subscribed to La Citoyenne but
left no money to the cause.65

At the beginning of La Citoyenne's fourth year, Auclert created
a second group called the Cercle 1e Suffrage des Femmes. Similar in name

to her other organization, which the year before had become the Société

le Suffrage des Femmes, the Cercle reflected perhaps the influx of a

 

6oLa Cito enne, 1889.
61Ibid., June 1890.
62

Ibide. JCDUCTY 1885e
631313., February 1334.
'“Ibid., April 1334.
65

Ibid., December 1885.

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203

new and higher class of supporters. De Gasté belonged to it, but its
prime mover was a wealthy young Russian woman, Mademoiselle Marie de
Kapcevitch. It may also have originated as a result of the collapse of
Auclert's projected Société Nationale 1e Suffrage des Femmes, which
never got beyond the planning stage. The Cercle initially met at 31 rue
Paradis-Poissonniere, a few blocks from Auclert's residence, but ran a-
foul of an unsympathetic landlord, who tore down its posters and ordered
it to move. Finally in November 1885, thanks to Kapcevitch, it found
new headquarters at 8 Galerie Bergére in the southeastern corner of the
9th arrondissement.66 The Société 1e Suffrage des Femmes began to meet

there as well, and between them the two groups provided activists for
La Citoyenne's cause.

The Case for Woman Suffragg
la Citoyenne was an organ of l'assaut. In theory it aspired to
print all things of interest to women, but in practice it relentlessly

67 When less

and singlemindedly pressed for woman's political rights.
sweeping proposals found their way into its pages, Auclert hastened to
point out that piecemeal efforts would no longer be necessary once wo-
men had the vote. In contrast to the "Old School," which restricted its
program to ”1e droit fractionni,” Auclert conceived La Citgyenne as the
voice of the "Young School," whose goal was ”1e droit integral." In the

past, feminists had waited for male legislators to grant their demands,

she explained, but now the time had come for women to capture power

 

661bid., a December 1332 - 7 January 1383; 5 February - 4 March

1883; February 1884: March 1884: April 1884: November 1885.

671313., 6 March 1331.

204

themselves. The age of beggars pleading for alms had given way to that
of creditors claiming their legitimate due.68

In pursuit of woman's "legitimate due," Auclert capitalized on
one of France's most liberal press laws. Promulgated in July 1881, the
new regulation permitted almost anyone to direct a newspaper -- Maria
Deraismes, for example, took advantage of it to create a political jour-
nal, the REpubliggin de Seine-et-Oise. But more important to Auclert
was the decriminalization of g§1153_gfo inion, printed statements ”in-
citing to hatred and contempt of the government or outrages against the
government."69 Thus freed to attack with impunity the constitution,
laws, and beliefs that subordinated woman to man, Auclert proceeded to
elaborate arguments that would serve three generations of French suf-
fragists. Subsequent activists tended more than Auclert to accentuate
the positive. They also abandoned much of La Citgyenne's virulence,
partly because moderates eventually adopted suffrage as the primary
feminist objective. But despite changes in emphasis and rhetoric, Lg
Citoyenne's sweeping, assertive defense of woman's political rights re-
duced later suffrage advocates to the status of mimics.

Auclert's defense of woman suffrage drew on two interrelated
themes, the welfare of society and the freedom of its individual mem-
bers. The Republican ideal would forever remain an empty abstraction
unless women shared power, she maintained. Sovereignty was indivisible;
the strength of a nation depended on the total participation of all citi-

zens. Until all adults possessed the right to vote, French democracy

 

68Ibid., 5 February - 4 March 1883.

69Roger L. Williams, Henri Rochefort: Prince of the Gutter Press
(New York, 1966), 176.

 

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205

would never function properly. The time had come to say :13; to elec-
tions that were little more than "public comedies" in which "the feudal
noblemen of the nineteenth century" chose "557 monarchs" to sit in the
Chamber of Deputies. If France refused to jettison its male "royalty
of sex," Auclert predicted, revolution would once again stalk the land.70
Several aspects of French political life in the 1880's rein-
forced Auclert's case. She pounced on males who abstained from voting as
an illustration of the demoralizing effect of a truncated electorate.
WOmen naturally paid little attention to politics since they lacked the
vote, she claimed, and as a result men refused to take elections
seriously. Wives also wanted their husbands with them on Sundays, the
traditional French election day, which further discouraged men from
voting. Deputy Letellier of Algiers had proposed the obligatory vote,
Auclert acknowledged, but that reform would not alone improve the Repub-
lic because suffrage, the machine of progress, required two motors: the
male and the female. Therefore, the only certain cure for political
apathy was to enfranchise women, which would eliminate abstentions by
making politics a subject of family discussion. Woman suffrage was not,
however, the only way of providing the family with a larger political
role. In the fall of 1881 a retired chief engineer suggested that male
heads of households should receive additional votes for their wives and
children. Auclert objected to the idea, but conceded that, in contrast
to the obligatory male vote, the so-called family vote at least recog-

nized the non-representation of women.71

A

701219., 20 February 1881; 6 May - 6 June 1881: 2 July - 6 August

1882; 6 August - 3 September 1882: 6 November - 5 December 1882:
January 1885.

7'121g,, 4 September 1881: ll-18 September 1881; February 1889.

 

 

206

Auclert also made use of the continuing controversy over the
nature of electoral districts and the make-up of the legislature. Radi-
cal republicans, led by Léon Gambetta, hoped to replace single member
constituencies, scrutins g'arrondissement, with larger distracts,

scrutins d

liste, composed of several deputies. Auclert endorsed the

 

reform on the grounds that it would subordinate personalities to issues
and permit male feminists to protest against female disenfranchisement
by writing in women's names for all available seats. She did not, how-
ever, expect it to repair the body politic; no amount of tinkering could
compensate for the exclusion of half the population. When France tried
the system in the election of 1885, Auclert noted that not only did the
ggrgtin g5_lig£3.cost women more -- an extra 303,008 francs for twenty-
seven additional deputies -- but defenders of the Republic nearly lost
their majority. Had reactionaries attracted another 337,000 votes, Lg
Citoyenne charged, they would have killed democracy without the consent
of half the nation.72

Debate over constitutional reform.served Auclert too; though, as
with electoral reform, she held that no advance would result unless wo-
men participated. Suffrage restricted to males, not the limited elec-
toral base of the Senate or the lack of Parisian autonomy, caused
France's problems. In their present masculine form, Auclert explained,
both Senate and Chamber violated the spirit of true republicanism. Order
required either despotism or universal suffrage, and so long as only men

' Man's sense

voted there would always be ”too many or not enough kings.’
of superiority had raised him to such lofty heights, Auclert charged,

that he had lost sight of the realities of life. An enfranchised

 

721219,, 22 May 1881; April 1885; November 1885.

 

 

207
womanhood would restore honesty, hard work, and dignity to the nation.
WOman suffrage would insure that fundamental decisions emanated from the
sane atmosphere of the home, not from the alcoholic vapors of the
cabaret.73

While Auclert found it relatively easy to join the general chorus
of complaint about French political life, it was quite another thing to
convince anyone that woman suffrage would improve the situation. She
could do little to convert the large minority who rejected the idea of
mass suffrage regardless of its sex composition. This minority included
most of the political right, as well as Madame Adam and Clémence Royer,
who wished to see women in high office, but within the framework of an
elitist system that clashed with Auclert's democratic beliefs. She
therefore appealed primarily to republicans who had fought for and still
believed in manhood suffrage, hoping that they would transfer to the
cause of women the sense of injustice that had led them to demand the
vote for men. From the outset, however, Auclert recognized that repub-
licans fell into two camps. One adamantly refused to make the transfer;
the other accepted it but urged delay.

Those who rejected Auclert's attempt to evoke an identification
between man's previous political servitude and woman's contemporary con-
dition usually subscribed to certain g_p£iggi_notions about woman's na-
ture. They were the men, according to Auclert, who wrote ”equality? on
the walls of Paris, but denied women the vote because of assumptions

about sex roles. Duty imposed a variety of roles on people, Auclert

 

7';21g,, 7 - 13 November 1881: 2 April - 6 May 1883: October 1884;

December 1885; June 1886; December 1887. For a synopsis of these and the
other arguments advanced by Auclert in support of woman suffrage, see
her Le Vote des femmes and Les Femmes au Gouvernail.

208

observed, but no duty implied the loss of inherent rights. To deny the
vote to women for keeping house and raising children made no more sense
than to disenfranchise bakers for kneading dough, cobblers for making
shoes, or lawyers for pleading cases. Except for childbirth, all apti-
tudes existed independent of sex, and women had a taste for legislating
just as men had a taste for cooking. Indeed, woman's acknowledged su-
periority in the home and the importance of home and family life to
French society raised the possibility that women might become better
politicians than men. Women and men frequently engaged in the same tasks,
such as writing and farming, and when their jobs differed, society bene-
fited from the resultant specialization. No one performed a duty so low
as to jeopardize inherent rights. Nor would women become ugly if they
exercised such rights. Happiness, not slavery, produced beauty, and with
suffrage women could only become more attractive.74

One of the chief "role" objections to woman suffrage centered on
man's military obligation; because women did not fight they should not
vote. To Auclert, this argument amounted to nothing less than making a
civilized right dependent on barbarous conduct. No one could deny that
men paid a blood tax, Auclert admitted, but what of woman's maternity
tax? More women died in childbirth for creation than men on the battle-
field for destruction. Reproduction had no seasons, and if wars were to
cease, as Auclert confidently predicted, women would continue to run the
risks of procreation. Women could fight, of course, as Jeanne d'Arc had
demonstrated in the fifteenth century and the Fernay sisters during the
revolution of 1789; but adding the blood tax to woman's already heavy

burden would unnecessarily aggravate France's depOpulation problem. No,

 

7‘Le Cito enne, 3 May 1331; 19-25 February 1332; April 1334.

209

Auclert cried, women should no more have to fight in order to vote than
men should have to give birth. Besides, many men displayed a marked re-
luctance to serve in the military. Prior to 1848, any male who could
had bought his way out of the army. Later, so many students, teachers,
clerics, and sickly escaped that fewer than half the annual recruits saw
duty. In the Seine Department alone, she pointed out, exemptions let
off sixty percent of the young men in 1883. Yet, regardless of whether
they served or not, all men -- except for those on active duty -- enjoyed
the right to vote. In the absence of woman suffrage, this practice could
effect no other result than the perpetuation of domestic and inter-
national strife.75

As with all La Citoyenne's propaganda, Auclert drew heavily on
contemporary incidents to bolster her attack against the militarist ob-
jection to woman suffrage. Soon after publication began, France launched
an invasion of Tunisia reminiscent of the "criminal chauvinism” that had
brought war in 1870. Had women sat in the Chamber of Deputies, Auclert
claimed, they would have prevented the invasion because, unlike men,
their dreams do not rest on mountains of dead. African barbarians‘might
benefit from Western ideals, but never through conquest -- which wasted
lives for war-mongering financiers -- and not by France so long as it
persisted in treating women in an uncivilized manner. Ongoing conflict
in Algeria, Senegal, and Tunisia also provided Auclert with an oppor-
tunity to propose a national nursing corps, whose purpose was not so
much humanitarian or patriotic as a device to force men to recognize wo-
man's value. But a three-month campaign involving two letters (one hand

delivered) to the War Ministry and a personal visit by Auclert brought

 

75;21g., 20 March 1881; 6 August - 2 September 1883.

210

only bureaucratic run around and outright rejection in December 1881.
French intervention into Indochina three years later gave La Citoyenne
another chance to attack man's criminal chauvinism. If women had poli-
tical rights, Auclert asserted, they would apply to the imperialist
premier Jules Ferry the policy of a former Chinese Empress who had
stopped a war by ordering her generals into the front line.76

After the Franco-German war scare of 1887, Auclert altered tack
somewhat, urging France to prepare for the anticipated conflict by
granting equal rights to women. She called on Frenchmen to show war-
minded Germans that sex discrimination no longer disunited the nation.
France must add women's names to voting lists alongside the "Schwartzs,"
expatriate Prussian males of dubious loyalty whose sex alone would
qualify them for the French franchise. Woman suffrage would rekindle
French patriotism, she declared, just as institutrices kept French cul-
ture alive in Alsace. It would also prevent repetitions of "immorality"
such as the 1891 Paris performance of Wagner's Lohengrin, whose composer
once spit in the face of vanquished France. Beyond its effect on the
great issues of war and peace, the immorality of male militarism also
provoked "incidents" on the domestic scene. Shortly after the new'year
1882, for example, a suicide occurred near the garrison of Vosges. The
victim, a seventeen-year-old girl, had taken her life after the officer
who seduced her refused marriage. Seduction was always wrong in
Auclert's eyes, and she assailed the military for limiting the officer's
punishment to retirement for scandal. But the marriage refusal itself

stemmed fromrthe fact that the girl's parents were too poor to pay the

 

7°1b13., 17 April 1331; 3 May 1331; 19-25 September 1331; 12-13

December 1881: September 1884.

L...

 

211

dowry required by army regulations -- 28,000 francs in the case of a
second lieutenant. Low salaries prevented officers from supporting
penniless wives, Auclert admitted, but the solution to the problem was
simple -- the military should enroll women to perform duties such as
nursing, accounting, sewing, and cooking. Officers could then marry
their auxiharies in arms, who would continue to work in order to supple-
ment their husbands' salaries. With the ranks open to women, recruit-
ment would also become easier, military costs could be cut by eliminating
middlemen, and above all army morality would improve through reducing
recourse to seduction.77

More frustrating to Auclert than the g_pgiggi_objections to woman
suffrage were the hesitations premised on considerations of timeliness.
Some republicans agreed that women as a group constituted the latest
oppressed constituency, acknowledging the justice of Auclert's demand.
But in practice they maintained that the hour had not yet arrived to
translate her proposal into law. They perceived woman as intellectually
and politically backward, with neither the education nor the experience
requisite for the franchise. They conceded that time would correct wo-
man's deficiencies, but for the moment they refused to support a further
expansion of the electorate. Rather than benefit French democracy, pro-
ponents of delay repeatedly stressed, immediate enactment of woman suf-
frage would bring about its downfall. Besides, they claimed, few
women outside Auclert's small band displayed any great desire to vote

in the first place.

 

77L§Lfl., 9-15 January 1882; 16-22 January 1882; December 1887;

1 November 1891.

212

Auclert responded to these objections by pointing out that not
all males wanted the vote when manhood suffrage became law in 1848, nor
were they well educated or politically experienced at that time. But
once enacted, manhood suffrage acquired legitimacy through practice,
just as woman suffrage would. Men made it difficult for woman to over-
come her backwardness: girls' schools lacked funds and adult women could
not legally attend political rallies. But all that was beside the point,
Auclert stressed. Suffrage should be construed as the means, not the
reward, for acquiring public knowledge.78 Serious contact with admini-
strative and legislative matters constituted the best political pedagogy.
In short, "women must vote in order to be able to educate themselves."79

In reaction to the oft-repeated accusation that woman suffrage
would fortify the Church, Auclert blamed men for having turned France
into a "vast monastery." Men always propped up their despotic institu-
tions with religion, she charged, the better to enslave women. Men let
priests vote and voted for priests; men also opened each legislative ses-
sion with an obligatory prayer and appropriated funds for the Church.
Men even sent ambassadors to the Pope. When the anti-clerical Jules
Ferry visited Leo XIII in 1885, Auclert wrote that she could hear the
Holy Pontiff excusing his errant parishoner for having married a Pro-

testant in a lay ceremony:

I know, my son, that you have been badly counselled by your
concubine: the devil haunts the spirit of this woman who lives
with you without having gone before our holy altars; calm your-
self, it is against this free thinker, who has badly advised you,
that are directed the thunderbolts of the Church.80

 

791b13., 10 April 1331.
so

Ibid., May 1335.

Li

213

Men could practice religion and still vote, so why should women forfeit
their political rights for worshipping? "All these illogisms are stupe-
fying to human reason," Auclert snorted, especially when universal suf-
frage would cure woman's addiction to clericalism.81 Once enfranchised,
Auclert predicted, women would involve themselves in public affairs and
adopt scientific and rational ideas. Freed from their endless domestic
routine, they would abandon religious escapism and devote themselves to
civic duties. Armed with the vote, women would no longer resort to
prayer.

Moreover, for every potential misfortune ascribed to woman suf-
frage, Auclert cited dozens of actual disasters attributable to its
absence. Male negligence, for example, had caused the deaths of twenty
people when a bullfight arena collapsed near Marseilles in 1881, and
the loss of ten times that number in the 1887 fire at Paris' Qpéggz.
Comigue.83 Detached from practical problems familiar to women, men had
also permitted the Seine to become polluted, which caused an outbreak of

84 Prior to the divorce law of 1886,

typhoid fever in the late 1880's.
Auclert blamed "criminal senators" for murders and maimings born of

marital passions and infidelities. And throughout La Citoyenne's de-
cede, down to the paternity suit law of 1912, she held male lawgivers

responsible for infanticides:

The culpable one is the legislator who, in order to keep his
seductor's passport, much prefers to preserve infanticide,

 

8'1b1d., 3 April 1331.
lebid.
83

Ibid., 21 August 1881.
84

Ibid., July 1337.

21%

rather than permit a paternity search. It is with justice
that a philosopher has said that one must attribute daily,
to each deputy, the death of a hundred new born or about-

to-be-born infants.

Men possessed great expertise in applying principles selectively
whenever it suited their ends, Auclert pointed out. They used woman's
testimony to send criminals to the scaffold but refused to permit her to
witness certificates of birth or marriage.86 They prized woman's ma-
ternal instinct but reserved the administration of public assistance,
welfare, and childcare to themselves. "If one were paid for bringing
children into the world," Auclert wrote in 1883, "I truly believe that

men would find the means to monopolize the job."87

When the Municipal
Council of Paris censured the Prefect of Police in 1881 for misuse of
city money, it never considered the fact that women had no control over
the taxes they paid. When five years later the government expelled a
group of royalists for attempting to usurp power, it paid no heed at all
to how all men had become usurpers in relationship to women. Men could
even enlarge the electorate, as in 1889 when they re-enfranchised wine
and food merchants previously convicted of fraud, but never see that
women needed the vote as much as ex-criminals. Indeed, from Auclert's
point of view, no man could style himself a democrat unless he stood for
woman suffrage. He who opposed the rights of woman, Auclert pronounced,

would sooner or later attack the rights of man.88

 

85Cited in Marie Chaumont, "Hubertine Auclert," l8-l9.

86La Cito enne, 12-18 March 1882.

871b13., 7 May - 3 June 1333.

8812;9., 3 April 1881: 24-30 October 1881; July 1886;

March 1889.

fl

215
La Citoyenne employed several mottoes during its decade. The
first, lifted from positivist Emile Littré, defined the woman citizen as
a person who possessed "1e droit de cité" in the state.89 Another, taken
from Dumaslgilg, optimistically forecast that "before ten years women

90

will be electors like men." A third described the liberated woman as

one "who enjoys the integrality of her rights and is irreproachable in

"91 But the best expression of Auclert's

the accomplishment of her duties.
objective relied more on visual effect. For years La Citozenne ran a car-
toon depicting two voters standing beside a ballot box. One, a man, held
a vote marked "war." The other, a woman, held a ballot marked "peace,"
The caption stated what sight made obvious -- peace, social harmony,

and humanity's well-being would exist only when women helped men make

1"3e92

Expanding the Assaulg

 

From.the outset, Auclert had no intention of confining lfggggggb
to words. Propaganda might heighten the determination of the faithful,
but only action could attract new recruits and bring the plight of women
to the public's attention. To this end Auclert employed La Citoyenne to
inform her readers about books on the woman question, newspaper opinion,
politicians' attitudes, and domestic and foreign feminist activities.
And then, on the basis of this information, she urged sympathizers ”to

dare and to resist" ~- dare to claim woman's rights and resist unjust

 

8912$§., 13 February 1881.

901349... 5‘11 FCbN.” 1881.

91Ibid., 7 January - 4 February 1883.

Ibid.

216

laws. Respecting legality, she explained, meant submission to the arbi-
trary whims of masculinisme. Except for violence, which man's superior
physical strength rendered useless, all means were legitimate. With
freedom at stake, slaves could not afford to observe traditional
loyalties.93

La Citoyengg regularly critiqued the latest in printed opinion
on the woman question. Books that won its endorsement included Draigu's
Le Roman de la femme chrétienne, with a preface by Auclert; Les Droits
de la femme by Jean-Louis Vaisse, a politician from.Toulouse; and
Deputy Yves Guyot's La Prostitution.§tudes de physiologig sociale.
Tracts that drew La Citoyegg£:3_wrath included Doctor Icard's La Femme
pendant la period menstruelle, which linked menstruation to pyromania
and other female psychic disorders.9b

Analyses of the press loomed even larger in La Citoyeng's columns.
Auclert and her collaborators cited over three dozen newspapers by name
during the period 1881 to 1891. Some, like La Femme dans la Famille et
dans la Société. Le Voltaire, and La Presse, displayed open hostility to
woman's rights. Others proved more sympathetic, such as the Radical
Dépeche de7Toglousg_and Prosper Lissagaray's socialist Bataille. Still

others vacillated. The Petit Nation 1, for example, praised La Citoyegge

 

931b1d., 2-3 January 1332.

9l'Ibid., (in order of appearance) 20 March 1881; 10 April 1881;
6 September - 1 October 1882; April 1890. La Citoyenne also endorsed
F.-C.-P. d'Esterno's La Femme envisggée au point de vue naturaliste,
spiritualiste. philosophigue.Aprovidentiel, Angély Feutre's Contra 1e
meriage actue11gtout en fazeur des enfants (Paris, 1882), Bebel's L3
Femme dans le passé;>legprésent.¥et l'avenir, Louis Bridel's La Femme
et le droit, and the chapter on women in Charles Secretan's Les Droits
de l'humaniti, see respectively: La Citoyenne, 6 November - 5 December

1882; April 1885; 1 June 1891; 1 March 189I.

217

as a model of journalism but abhorred its woman suffrage objective. .Lg
Gaulois' Guy de Maupassant limited his support to La Citoyenne's critique
of marriage. Le Figaro endorsed political rights for women on the grounds
that expanding the electorate could hardly make things worse. Indeed, it
said, the proposal had more merit than its principal proponent; single
women in particular should vote, but Auclert's behavior could only jeo-
pardize their enfranchisement. The poles of the press debate on woman's
liberation found expression in Alphonse Laffitte's reiteration of
Fourier's dictum about women's status and social progress in L'Qpinion
and Monsieur Delaunay's reverse contention in La Revue Scientifique.
Regardless of the specific pros and cons, however, Auclert sensed a
growing awareness of her campaign in the press, and, in addition to
Alexandre Dumas £113, she could count on support from La Rappel's

Auguste Vacquerie, La Paris' Albert Delpit,95

Le National's Paul Foucher,
Le XIXe SiEcle's Henri Fouquier, and La Revue Philosophigue's Charles
Secretan, a Swiss correspondant of the Institut de France.96

The relationship of opinion to power also prompted Auclert to
explore the world of politics. Shortly after La Citoyenne's birth,
Auclert sent a questionnaire on woman's rights to every deputy. Only

two responded affirmatively, Joseph de Caste and Alfred Talandier.97

 

95The faithful could waver, however, and in 1335 Delpit wrote in

Le Figaro that citizenship had not been extended to women in ancient
times and that to enact woman suffrage under contemporary conditions
would produce a grotesque mixed legislature. For that, Auclert branded
himn"Delpit -- L'Apostat? La Citoyenne, March 188 .

96La Citoyenne, (in order of appearance) September 1884; August
1885: May 1886; November 1884; 5-11 December 1881; 2 July - 6 August
1882: 12-18 March 1882: 26 September - 2 October 1881.

97Ibid., 29 May 1881. Unlike the highly independent de GastE,
Talandier sat on the extreme left of the Chamber where Auclert often
found supporters. Born at Limoges in 1822 into a family of magistrates
and soldiers, Talandier obtained a law degree in 1844. Caught up in the

218
Shortly thereafter, the national elections of 1881 returned a third femi-
nist, Clovis Hugues.98 In addition to these three, whose terms in the
Chamber did not completely coincide, Auclert could count on perhaps a
dozen deputies at most. Among them were: Jean-Louis Vaisse, author of
Les Droits de la femme; Sigismond Lacroix (1883-1889), a role who even-
tually abandoned politics to devote himself to French Revolutionary
history; Severiano de Hérédia (1881-1889), a Cuban whose electoral suc~
cess Auclert hoped would not result in "platonic feminismg" Paul Eugene

Delattre (1881-1889), a horticulturist and a Radical: and Yves Guyot

 

revolutionary fervor of 1848, he suffered a two year imprisonment at
Poitiers followed by eighteen years of exile in England. After the
collapse of the Second Empire in September 1870, he returned to France
where he continued to pursue a variety of causes. Disciple of Pierre
Leroux and friend of Louis Blanc, Talandier played an active role in
Freemasonry, the International, and the cooperative movement. His
political career included a two year stint on the Paris Municipal
Council, 1874-1876, and nine in the Chamber, 1876-1885. He shared
Auclert's aversion to Opportunism as well as her interest in lay edu-
cation and amnesty for the Communards. Perhaps his most notable ser-
vice to Auclert's cause came in 1883, when he sought to bring her
petition for woman's municipal suffrage to the floor of the Chamber.

Jean Maitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographigue du mouvement ouvrier
frangais, IX, 170-71.

98In contrast to 48ers like Talandier and Louis Blanc, Hugues
represented a new generation of socialists. Born in 1851 at Menerbes
(Vaucluse), he grew up in Marseilles where his outspoken support for
the Paris Commune earned him four years in prison. Six years after his
release, with a narrow electoral defeat behind him, he began a career
in the Chamber that, except for a brief retirement between 1889 and
1893, lasted until 1906. An independent, he helped organize the first
socialist caucus in the Chamber in 1886. The caucus included at least
two other feminists, Charles Laisant (Loire-Inferieure 1876-1885,
Seine 1885-1893) and Michelin, who accepted honorary membership in
Auclert's Cercle in January 1886. In addition to politics, Hugues
wrote poems, novels, and plays, which brought him the patronage of
Victor Hugo. Perhaps his chief service to feminism during La
Citoyenne' s decade cmme in the summer of 1882, when he drew. the
ChamberT s attention to Auclert' s thousand-signature petition for woman
suffrage. Alexandre Zévals, Ombres et s_lhgg3ttes: Notes. Mé'moirsI et
Souvenirs (Paris, 1928), 213-43. Jean Jolly, ed., Dictionnaire des

parlementaires frangais (6 vols., Paris, 1970), VI, 1975.

219

(1885-1893), moderate Radical and ardent free-trader. Guyot, author of
La Prostitution, particularly endeared himself to Auclert because he
alone of Paris' Radical-Socialist candidates in 1881 included sex
equality in his platform. He lost that year, as did several other "se-
cret" advocates of woman's rights, but it seems unlikely that anti-
feminists caused his defeat.99 Indeed, on only one occasion during the
1880's did a candidate attribute his loss to a stand on sex rights.
Auclert's companion Lévrier charged early in 1881 that the press refused
to endorse his bid in the 6th arrondissement due to his support for Lg
gigoyenne's program, and on election eve a virulent affiche attacked
his views. However, as the nominee of the minor Parti de l'Autonomie
Communale, LEvrier probably had no chance of success in any case.100

The feminist contingent in the Senate was even smaller. In the
upper house of the French legislature, only Victor Hugo, Alfred Naquet,
Victor Schoelcher, Emile Deschanel, and Jean Macé evinced regular in-
terest in woman's rights, and all five preferred the Deraismes-Richer
line to that of Auclert. More promising than either national body were
local councils. An original member of La Citoyenne's committee, Pierre
Leroux's son-in-law Auguste Desmoulins, who had been proscribed in 1851
like Talandier, won a seat on Paris' Municipal Council in late 1881.101
By the end of the decade, nine incumbent councillors had endorsed wo-

men'a rights in their platforms.102 At the department level, the

 

99La Citoyenne, 17-23 October 1881. Digeon at Narbonne and

Gambon at Nibvre were feminists who made it to ballotage but lost.
Ibid., 28 August 1881.

loolbid” 28 November . 4 December 1881; 19-25 December 1881.
101

Ibid., 26 December 1881 - 1 January 1882.

lozlbid., June 1337.

220
General Council of the Seine also included a relatively large number of
feminists. In 1885 Auclert petitioned the Council for a resolution in
favor of woman suffrage. Thirty-seven voted against the idea after its
1gpporteur, Georges Berry, vehemently attacked it, but eleven cast their
ballots in favor.103 More important than the outcome, however, was the
fact that at last an elected group had brought the issue to a vote,
something the Chamber and Senate had studiously avoided. As a result,
although Auclert never gave up on the national legislature, she increas-
ingly turned to local political bodies. Through them she hoped to
pressure Senators and Deputies into taking suffrage seriously. In
1907, twenty-two years after her initial request, the General Council
of the Seine reversed its 1885 decision and endorsed woman's municipal
suffrage. After that the precedent gained ground, and in the years im-
mediately preceding the First World War over two dozen councils at the
department, municipal, and arrondissement level passed resolutions in
favor of the reform.

Despite the eventual conversion of many politicians to woman
suffrage, opponents continued to outnumber supporters. Auclert was more
than willing to employ La Citoyenne on behalf of any femdnist candidate,
but avowed advocates of woman's rights were scarce. Much easier to
identify were the outright opponents and, in some cases, the backs
sliders. The latter were few in number, but Auclert's warning to de
Héridia against "platonic feminism" illustrates the problem. Not until
1885, four years after La Citoyenne's founding, did the Chamber hold
its first debate on women suffrage. Its initiator, Deputy Piéye (Gard)

performed a "brave act,“ but where, Auclert asked, had the other suffrage

 

'031b13., January 1886.

221

advocates been all these years?104 Even Deputy Michelin, an honorary
member of Auclert's Cercle, had betrayed the cause. He first failed to
press for woman's right to vote in the conseils gg_p£gg'hggmgg, elected
committees that oversaw labor disputes, and then, in 1888, he proposed
constitutional revision without providing for woman's participation.105

Among outright opponents cited by Lg_§itoyenne in 1881, two had
earlier shown sympathy for woman's plight. Eugéne Pelletan, one of “the
five” republicans under the Second Empire and a vice president of the
Senate until his death in 1885, refused to take a stand on woman suf-
frage despite the liberal attitude of his essay on La MEre.106 Jules
Simon, whose Ouvriére had revealed the misery of working women, drew
criticism for asserting the need for masculine dominance within the

107 Simon also exercised a decisive and deleterious influence

family.
on education reform. The wholly inadequate law creating girls' sec-

ondary schools bore the name of Camille SEe, Auclert pointed out, but
Sée had entered the Chamber under Simon's protection and could hardly

have ideas larger than his mentor's.108

 

1“lbw” April 1335.

105Ibid., December 1888.

106Ibid., 26 June 1881. Despite Pelletan's refusal to promote
woman's rights actively, L2_Citoyenne's obituary praised him for his
republicanism.and for his interest in revising the Code. La Citoyenne,
January 1885.

107Ibid., January 1335.

108Ibid., 3 July 1881. Perhaps the worst of the political oppo-
nents of woman suffrage was Henri Brisson, a vice president of the
Chamber, who wielded his influence on behalf of anti-divorce clericals.
He apparently led an unblemished personal life, however, because Sena-
tor Camparau's opposition to divorce earned him La Citoyenne's exposure
as an adulterer. La Citoyenne, April 1884. Nonetheless, Brisson's
delay of Naquet's divorce bill led Lévrier to charge him with complicity

 

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222
The Sée reform especially angered Auclert because it created a

false impression of progress. To believe, Auclert charged, that this
”sterile law" represented a new level of equality in France was a "pro-
found error: before, as after the law's promulgation, the gggggghggg
continues for women." Women will obtain a useless "honorary diploma"
upon graduation, which will stifle their aspirations to higher education
and profitable careers. The worthless diploma will also alienate parents:

Those who are rich will prefer to give their daughters, through

particular professors, the knowledge required by the University

for a bachelor's degree. Those who are_1ess fgrtunate will not

bother to assume the sacrifice. . . . [Insteag/ they will make

sacrifices in order to provide a dowry for them.
Moreover, the new law placed a heavy financial burden on departments. If
its sponsors had sincerely wished to improve women's education, they
would have voted two billion francs immediately, or, preferably, opened
boys' schools to girls. In a co-educstional system, "the children, re-
ceiving the same substantial education from infancy, would have shared
their mutual qualities: the rude nature of man would have taken on
something of the soft character of woman, the woman would have acquired
from man the energy that her nature lacks." Seated alongside each
other, the two sexes would have become comrades, ”respectful of each

other and no longer the two enemies who they are today.“109

 

in every marital murder and to urge the voters of seint-Denis and Saint-
Martin to defeat him. La Citoyenne, 7 August 1881. In a similar poli-
tical intervention, Auclert embarrassed a socialist's bid for the
Chamber in 1881 by pointing out that, in addition to being "an enemy of
women's rights," he had served as MacMahon's doctor during the seize
mgi,crisis. La Cito enne, 19-25 December 1881.

109Cited in Marie Chaumont, "Hubertine Auclert," 35-40.

 

(‘CO ‘e

".’il\

n'i‘n

223

Of all the potential and actual office holders during Lg
Citoyenne's decade, however, the most disappointing to Auclert's small
band of suffragists was Lion Gambetta. Auclert credited Gambetta with
saving France in 1870 and the Republic during the ggigghmgi crisis. But
once in power, he had done nothing to prevent the exclusion of half the
citizenry from politics, thus "besmirching his system'with sterility."
He had failed to recognize, despite high-flown rhetoric to the contrary,
that the French nation comprised both men and women. La Citoyenne had
frequently supported him, Auclert recalled, but in return Gambetta had
"opportunistically" betrayed women by blocking their demands in the
Chamber and by dragging his feet on divorce. During his brief premier-
ship, he had also rejected Auclert's advice to appoint women to the
ministries of agriculture and beaux-arts. Instead of full human repre-
sentation, all the more necessary because women represented a numerical
majority, he turned the Republic over to a masculine coterie, which made
politics a game and retarded the day of social well-being. Only in death,
which struck prematurely in 1883, did he lend support to Auclert's cause.
Ignorant men had long reinforced their sexist prejudices with false
criteria, La Citoyenne noted, but an autopsy revealed that Gambetta,
whose intelligence was universally acknowledged, possessed a brain no
larger than a woman's.110

Outside literary and governmental circles, there existed addi-
tional barometers of feminist sentiment: parties and organizations. As

early as 1868, the second Congrés de la Ligue pour la Paix et la Liberté

 

1101. Citoyenne, 7 January - a February 1333; 22 May 1331;

7 August 1881: 21 August 1881; 21-27 November 1881: 5-11 February 1882;
5 February - 4 March 1883.

2211

had endorsed sex equality.111 Over the next two decades a wide spectrum
of groups officially committed themselves to similar stands: the Congrés
Anticlerical of 1881, which chose Deraismes and Royer as vice presidents;
the Republican Reunion of 1881, which praised women for courageous oppo-
sition to Louis Napoleon; and the Ligue du Bien Public in 1882. Women
also won brief admission into Hasonry, through Deraismes' short-lived
induction at Pecq in 1882, and more permanent representation in the
Cercle Républicain Progressiste of Normandy, one of several Paris-based
organizations that promoted provincial interests in the capital. Or-
ganized free-thinkers dragged their feet at first, but in 1883 Auclert
announced their conversion to woman suffrage in an article entitled
"L'Ostacle Supprimé."112

More problematical was the attitude of "organized" socialists.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1879 Marseilles Congress, Auclert
played an instrumental role in founding a Paris section of the Party,
and one of her Société's lieutenants, Citoyenne Keva, became its trea-
surer. Keva then helped organize the second national Socialist Congress,
held at Havre in 1880, but during its proceedings she inexplicably sided
with the mutualists (reformist Proudhonians) in opposition to the domi-
nant Guesdists. As a result, the Paris Union Fidérative du Centre ex-
pelled Auclert's Societe, isolating its eighteen dues-paying,members

from further direct participation in the workers"movement. Auclert

managed to maintain her ties with several prominent socialist feminists,

 

111Tixerant, "Le Mouvement feministe sous le second Empire," 3.

112La Cito enne, 22 Hay 1881; 7 August 1881; 21 August 1881;
21-27 November 1881; 5-ll February 1882; 5 February - 4 March 1883;
7 January - 4 February 1883.

225
particularly Leonie Rouzade and Eugénie Pierre (later Eugénie Potonié-
Pierre after her marriage to Edmond Potonié), but the gulf proved un-
brideable. Auclert or her followers occasionally attended subsequent
regional or national socialist congresses as delegates of La Citoyenne,
but the profound difference in orientation between socialists and femi-
nists, as well as internecine rivalries, prevented anything but momentary
cooperation. The stand adopted at Marseilles remained unique: "The
socialists never again produced a bill of women's rights to equal this

«113 In 1:; place, they substituted a

in its breadth and profundity.
workers-first, women-second resolution adopted at the Paris' Regional
Congress of July l880: "The Congress, while proclaiming the equality of
the sexes, Declare: 'That the question of women's rights‘will be resolved
and will only be resolved with that of labor, by the collective appro-

'"114 Yet, despite the

priation of all instruments of production.'. . .
relative deemphasis of woman's liberation by socialists, the exclu-
sionary policy of Freemasons, and the clerical fears of many republicans,
Auclert and other feminists could at least count on verbal support from
a growing number of free-thinking, democratic, and collectivist groups.
While attempting to keep abreast of the forces at work in the
larger social setting, Auclert sought to strengthen the suffrage wing of
the French femdnist movement. In January 1883 she tried to expand her

following by creating a Société Nationale du Suffrage des Femmes‘with

its own monthly journal, Franco.115 when that failed, she founded the

 

113Sowerwine, Women and Socialism in France 871-1921, 12.

11‘1313., 22.

llSLa Cito enne, 5 February - 4 March 1883.

226
Cercle le Suffrage des Femmes, which survived without appreciably en-
larging suffragist ranks. Consequently, Auclert's cadre remained small.
Her total following throughout the 1880's, combining the staff of £3
Citoyenne with the membership of the Société and the Cercle, barely ex-
ceeded a hundred, with many fewer than that available at any particular
moment. Deraismes' l'Amélioration and Richer's 1882 Ligue were only
slightly larger if counted separately, but taken together they out-
numbered Auclert's supporters by more than three to one. As a result,
strength became more a matter of doctrine than numbers, which led
Auclert to devote increasing attention to maintaining orthodoxy within
her own ranks, avoiding too close an identification with more radical
women, and pointing out feminist opponents of woman suffrage.

The problem of orthodoxy came to a head in August 1881 when the
Sociité expelled two members, Commandant Claude-Cilestin Epailly and
Marie-Jeanne Drouin, a writer who employed the pseudonym Louise de
Lasserre. Epsilly was the chief culprit. He edited Le Libérateur, or-
gan of the two-hundred member Sociéti des Amis du Divorce, whose fourth
issue had lightheartedly ridiculed Auclert's Bastille Day demonstration
of the previous month. Such ridicule had no place within a movement
whose outside detractors too often resorted to playful sarcasm, and
Epsilly's less than serious reportage represented the public reason for
his and Drouin's expulsion. The other reason involved a complex dis-
agreement between Epsilly, Auclert, and Lévrier over who should run
against divorce opponent Henri Brisson in the 1881 elections. Epailly
suggested Auclert's candidacy or his own. Auclert declined the honor,
but Livrier, who also wanted to run, objected to Epsilly's candidacy.

Epsilly discounted the objection, ran, and lost. The purge occurred

227
the day after the balloting, 22 August 1881, and provoked a series of
suits and counter-suits, each side accusing the other of character
defamation. Nothing came of the legal actions with one exception:
Lévrier received a ten franc fine for calling Drouin an entremetteuse.116
Thereafter, wdthin Auclert's group at least,the'horrect 1ine" went un-
challenged.

Hore troublesome than internal dissent was the possibility that
radical non-feminists would tarnish Auclert's image. Shortly after‘Lg
Citoyenne's founding, for example, Auclert felt compelled to defend
herself against the charge that she advocated free love. Marriage con-
stituted woman's "supreme desire," she countered, but new laws were
necessary to insure family sanctity. Neither traditional matrimony nor
mariages parisiens met woman's need for security and independence, be-
cause men exploited both situations. Therefore, she concluded, to
criticize marriage in its contemporary form.implied no approval of
union libre.ll7

Another problem arose when the Communards finally received am-
nesty. Auclert had urged that step throughout the 1870's, petitioning
the President of the Republic on their behalf and organizing a committee
to aid their return. But once back in France, they included within their
ranks the indomitible personality of Louise Hichel. Michel and Auclert

had much in common. Both felt a devotion to the oppressed, regardless

of sex, and both opposed the prevailing Opportunism of the 1880's.

 

1161b1d., lO-l6 October 1331; 31 October - 3 November 1331. .15
Lihfifgtggr, 23 July 1881; 20 August 1881. The expulsion vote was 29 to
2, although neither Epsilly nor Drouin attended the dismissal meeting.
For a roster of Auclert's followers, see APPENDIX F.

117La Cito enne, 26 December 1881 - 1 January 1882-

228
Auclert frequently linked woman's plight to that of the working class,
while Michel, a convinced anarchist, displayed a decided interest in
feminism. Michel exhibited that interest upon her return by founding
La Ligue des Femmes to enlist women of all nations in the struggle
against war and prostitution. She also demanded equal pay for equal
work, though ultimately she felt women should abandon exterior labor and

118 Auclert disagreed

confine themselves to attributions naturelles.
with the latter goal, hoping instead to create a society where home and
work would not be in conflict, but their greatest point of difference
was over means. Woman suffrage struck Michel as stupid. Each.must
choose her own weapon, Michel responded in rejecting a symbolic candi-
dacy in 1885, ”but the ballot is less than ever mine.” "I believe,"
she explained, ”that women in the Chamber would not prevent the absurdly
low pay of women's work, and that the prison and the pavement would cone
tinue no less to vomit, one onto the other, legions of unfortunates."119
More threatening to Auclert than Michel's rejection of woman
suffrage was her advocacy of violence. Auclert's sympathy for the
Communards never included their destructive conduct, and, except for
the breaking of a ballot box towards the end of her career, she eschewed
force absolutely. In contrast, Michel persisted upon her return in the
behavior that had earned her a decade of deportation, and three times
during La Citoyegge's life she suffered imprisouent. Such conduct

caused French suffragists to fear for their public image. In the spring

of 1883, Auclert accused the press of confusing Michel's violent acts

 

“arbour, Louis; Michel, 219-20.

“99“., 230-1. Richer printed Michel's rejection of the syn-

bolic candidacy in his L Droit des P es, 6 September 1885.

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229

with the peaceful transformation of society envisaged by feminists.120
She also reprinted a letter, originally published in L5_§gi;, in which
Levrier inveighed against anarchism and excused his presence alongside
Michel at a demonstration as purely accidental.121 As for the notorious
woman herself, La Citoyenng took an indulgent tact; During Michel's
trial in 1883, one of Auclert's collaborators described her as old and
devoid of new ideas, an extreme representative of an unrepresented sex.
Fault lay not with the person, however, but with a society which forbade
legislative careers to women. Denied a seat in the Chamber, where
reality would have mellowed her theories, Michel had rejected the Re-
public as it had rejected her. Regardless of her ideas, society must
bear the blame for having deprived her of legitimate means of expres-
sion.122

Auclert hoped that women like Michel and Séverine, a well-known
socialist journalist who stood aloof from the movement until 1913,
would one day rally to woman suffrage. But until that day there was
still much to do, particularly within the feminist movement itself.
”Old School” civil rightists, advocates of ;3_g;gi5,frggtigg2$, sub-
scribed to a strategy of stagnation in Auclert's opinion, while far
too many women outside the movement rejected feminism, expecting others

to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.123 'Toung School” proponents

of 1;,droit intégrgl had, therefore, to combat the platonic, wasteful

 

120La Citoyenne, 5 February - 6 March 1883.
IZIIbid., 2 April - 6 March 1333.

1221b1d., 2 July - 5 August 1333.

123

Ibid., 5 February - 4 March 1883: 1 October - 5 November 1882.

230

dreams of fémigistes gpportunistes and point them down the more practical

path of woman's political rights, the "clef de voute de tous les autres
droits.”12‘
In pursuit of this goal Auclert reevaluated the careers of old
and new feminists alike. When EugEnie Niboyet died at the age of eighty-
five in 1883, for example, La Citoyenne recounted her lengthy career,
particularly her role in the woman's rights movement of 1848, and cone
cluded that she had been only a weak feminist. She had once declined
the presidency of a woman's club and had persistently avoided the issue
of divorce. But above all, L3 Citoyenne charged, she had opposed woman
suffrage.125 Even Isabelle Bogelot received equivocal praise when in
1888, as the representative of l'Oeuvre des Libérées de Saint-Lazarre,
she became the first Frenchwoman to attend an American feminist congress.
"Let us render thanks to Madame Bogelot,” Lg Citgzegue wrote of her
trip to Washington, D.C., ”who has not feared to carry out a long
journey to represent her sisters; although she is not, properly speaks
ing, one of us and she limits herself to works of rehabilitation and
charity, we are united by a community of pity for numerous unfortu-

126 let in Auclert's eyes, Niboyet's and Bogelet's mistaken

n‘te3o'
orientation paled in comparison rs that of the decade's two most promi-

nent feminists, Deraismes and Richer.

 

12“Ibid., 5 February - a March 1333.

lzslbid.

1261b1d.. June 1333.

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231

Shortly after La Citoyenne‘s birth, Auclert's Sociité passed a
resolution condemning Deraismes for rejecting a symbolic candidacy in
the 1881 election.127 "One ought to know how to do one's duty," remarked
tax-strike participant Leprou; ”she [Deraismes7 has not done it."128
But a year later, after Deraismes had delivered a speech in favor of
suffrage, Auclert commented on how far l'Amélioration's president had
come since the Congress of 1878. And in 1885 Deraismes actually stood
for office, though in Auclert's opinion she refused to invest sufficient
time and money. Instead of campaigning, Auclert lamented, Deraismes had
waited at home for Prince Charming the elector to call. When he did
not, the fault lay first of all with masculine prejudice, but secondly
with Deraismes' attitude. Between 1881 and 1885, while she edited the
Républigain do Seigg-gt-Oise, Deraismes had made and unmade deputies,
but refused to exert her full influence on behalf of woman suffrage.
She had also spread herself too thin. La Citgyggge frequently carried
Amelioratiou's various appeals as a gesture of solidarity, but the
W vote and peace through arbitration would come sooner,
Auclert felt, if women possessed political rights. Doraimmes' campaign
against vivisection was especially tangential. Male dominated society
had already deprived women of heart and reason, Auclert exclaimed, and
would continue to do so until they had the power to prevent their own
vivisection.129

Although insufficent in Auclert's eyes, Deraismes' hesitant sup-

port of suffrage contrasted sharply with Richer's persistent opposition.

 

127I§id., 12 June 1331.

1281b1d., 19 June 1331.

1291b13., 1 October - 5 November 1332; October 1335; May 1885:

8 October - h November 1883.

 

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232

Richer accorded an absolute priority to civil rights, arguing that any
other orientation would delay woman's enfranchisement and endanger the
Republic. In turn, Auclert and her followers accused him of legalimm,
Opportunism, and bad faith. He acknowledged Auclert's ”good intentions,"
but castiaged her for playing into the hands of royalists and clericals:
"Given at this time the general state of women's mentality in France,
their upbringing, their tendencies, if tomorrow'women voted, the day

(1."130 Richer accused

after tomorrow'monarchy would be reestablishe
Auclert of alienating thousands of excellent republicans with her
haughty manner, thus detaching "from.the cause of women most of those
who were prepared to sustain it." ”You compromise coldly,‘wittingly
the goal, the just cause you pretend to defend," Richer fumed; "I wash
my hands of your imprudences and your faults."131
Richer looked with particular disfavor on a scheme developed by
Auclert's favorite deputy. In 1890 de Gasti proposed a revision of the
constitution that not only called for woman suffrage, but for equal re~
presentation of the sexes as well. Professing his ultimate belief in
woman's political rights, but at the proper moment, Richer asked if the
Deputy from Finistdre were really serious. If so, do Gast‘ had chosen
a disastrous route. Men and women had conflicting interests, Richer
admitted, but there was also "an opposition of interests between me-

ployer and employee, between capitalist and worker; to resolve social

questions it would be necessary therefore to demand election of as many

 

rich as poor, as many employees as employers.'132 More serious yet was
130
Le Droit des Fat-es, 17 May l885.
1311b1d., 15 March 1335.
132

ibldo’ 15 Jun. 1890a

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233
the timing of the ”freakish deputy:"

__we are on the eve 2f seeing discussed in the Senate a law
[the commerpante votg/ conceding to women the exercise of
civil rights, a law already received with favor by the pre-
ceding Chamber of Deputies, and is this the moment when a
member of parliament, who calls himself a partisan of woman's
emancipation, should trouble minds? . . . Had Monsieur de
Caste wished to defeat our law he could not have conducted
himself otherwise.133

 

Richer also attempted to dissuade Auclert from appealing to
foreign experiments. "The situation in France is not at all the same as
in the United Kingdom,” he alleged:

I have often explained this. In England the right to

vote is not attached to the person; it is inherent in pro-
perty. It is not individuals who vote and are represented;
it is the soil. From that, ballots can as well be cast by
woman as by man. Is it the same thing with us? Who would
dare to pretend it? . . . Above all, let us think of the
Republic against which are leagued: on the one hand, the
Bonapartists, allied to the royalists; on the other, the
opportunists, sustained by the clericalsol3“

In spite of Richer's warning, Auclert tried to align French femi-
nism with the international movement. Foreign activists acknowledged
the French Revolution as a pivotal event for women's liberation,despite
its strong misogynist overtones. Since l851, when American feminists
had delegated Lucretia Mott to correspond with Pauline Roland and
Jeanne Deroin, imprisoned in Saint-Lazare for their socialist-feminist
activities, there had been at least minimal contact between the United
'States and France. Auclert had hoped to expand the contact through her
still-born Sociiti Nationale le Suffrage des Femmes. But even without
the Soci‘tt nationale, American feminists recognized Auclert as ”the

head of the agitation in favor of woman's political rights" in

 

13“Ibid., 20 September 1885.

23k
rance. . In 188h she became a corresponding secretary in the American-
based National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1869.136
Auclert also recognized the propaganda value of foreign developments.

By the time Lg_§iigxgnng,appearcd, women had acquired local suffrage, usu-
ally dependent on property qualifications and sometimes subject to proxy re—
gulations, in parts of Germany (first enacted in Westphalis in 1856), Aus-
tria—Hungary (1362), Sweden (1362), Australia (1362), Finland (1362), and
England (1869). Even Russian women voted in municipal elections, although
men had to drop their ballots into the voting urn. By 1891, the year Lg
Citoyennc folded, women had received the local franchise in Scotland (1881),
Canada (1332), Iceland (1332), Madras (1335), and.New Zealand (1336). With-
in the United States, only Kansas (1887) had followed suit, but the territor-
ies of Wyoming and Utah had given full political rights to women in 1869

and 1870 respectively. Outside North America, with the exception of unique
places like Pitcairn Island, only the Isle of Man had enfranchised women on

137

and equal basis with men. Compared to France, however, where the only
women who could vote for anything were school teachers, the rest of the
western world seemed far ahead.

France had not completely lost its prominent position in the strug-

gle for progress, Auclert felt, but signs of slippage were more than

 

135

136Ibid., Iv, 27.

Stanton et. al., History of WOman Suffrggg, III, 899.

137Ibid., I-IV. Seven hundred women out of a total population of
42,000 received the full franchise on the Isle of Man in 1881. After the
assassination of Alexander II in 1881, Auclert reported that the mayor of
St. Petersburg, Baranoff, permitted women to drop their own ballots into

the urn. La Citoyenne, 31 October - 6 November 1881.

 

235
abundant. The British Parliament abolished official regulation of
prostitution in 1883 -- a demand of long standing in France -- and
narrowly defeated a bill to enfranchise single women. Britain also
permitted municipal woman suffrage in Canada -- French at heart,
according to Auclert -- giving the lie to anti-feminist claims that
woman's emancipation would violage Latin traditions. What the French
government failed to see, Auclert maintained, was that Britain had not
only supplanted France in North America, but ruled it more justly.
Furthermore, if Britain could enact wise legislation, so could other
countries. Would Germany, she asked, also surpass France? Utah and
wyoming had already begun to reap the benefits of woman suffrage, Auclert
claimed in 1881. Women there had abandoned ”the futilities of coquetry,"
and wifely virtues had increased ”to a surprising degree." ”In France,

woman's vote will have the same moralizing influence."138

Without it,
she predicted, the French would surely fall behind their Angledsaxon
neighbors.

The reasons for the slippage were as clear to Auclert as the
slippage itself. Paralyzed by fear of ridicule, the vast majority of
Frenchwoman exhibited ”a sheep-like docility that surprises even the

"139 Only Jewish women, ”veritable modern Judiths,” sup-

shepherds.
ported feminism 33 m. Accustomed to persecution, Auclert explained,
they alone saw that sex equality entailed human equality without dis-
tinctions of race or cult. Outside France, in contrast, feminism at-

tracked leading women. President Cleveland's sister zealously pursued

 

1381.. Citoyenne, 6 March 1881; 1. December 1882 - 7 January 1333;

6 June -lJuly 1883; 6 August - 2 September l883.

139Auclert, Le Vote des Femmes, 207.

 

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236

woman's rights, and in Britain over a thousand women belonged to the
Sommerville Club, named after a female member of the Royal Society.
Quality and quantity had come together with impressive results. It
took months to obtain a thousand signatures on a French suffrage peti-
tion in 1881-82, for instance, but British feminists submitted 36,748
names on 686 petitions to Parliament in one year alone (1884).) Above
all, Auclert reflected, French women lacked unity, the key to the success
of foreign feminists as well as the instrument of masculine tyranny. we
must unite in order to free ourselves: ”Let us do as the men do."140

Aware that Paris had no center where women could meet, Auclert
attempted to establish a Cercle George Sand in 1882, modeled along the

1‘1 But like her Soci‘té Nationale

lines of London's Sommerville Club.
of the following year, the enterprise never got beyond the suggestion
stage. On the eve of her marriage six years later, she elaborated an
even more ambitious scheme. In a letter to Susan B. Anthony, who had in-
vited her to attend the 1888 Washington Congress, Auclert observed that
"the women's movement of all countries is presently too platonic." The
theoretical phase had lasted too long; the time had come to put ideas
into practice. Specifically, she called for the creation of female
shadow legislatures, which would demonstrate women's capacities and

give feminists everywhere the standing and activity they needed. Bach
women's parliament would follow the calendar of its male counterpart

and use the national agenda to avoid wandering. These parliaments

would have no legal authority, but their moral influence would be

 

ll.ola Cit e, 19-25 March 1882; 5 June - 2 July 1882; 6
August - 2 September 1883; September 1884; January 1885.

1“Ib1d., 19-25 March 1882.

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237
great -- much like that of Paris' conference des avocats -- and feminists
of both sexes could signal their devotion to the cause by footing the
bill, Irrespective of details, Auclert concluded, fortune would favor
the audacious.“2 Nothing came of the proposal, however. Forty years
later French feminists organized several Women's Estates General along
similar lines, but in La Citoyenne's decade large scale efforts proved
impossible. Auclert never commented on Anthony's reaction to the idea,
if indeed the American suffragist had one, and the project silently
joined her other failures.

Yet there was much that a small band of determined activists could
do. Final victory might depend on better organization, but that in turn
required more recruits and constant agitation. Perhaps the third volume
of History of Woman Suffragg, published in 1886, best expressed the
function of Auclert's movement:

The most logical beginning for a sketch of the woman move-

ment on the continent, and indeed of any step in advance, is
of course France, where ideas, not facts, stand out the more
prominently; for, in questions of reform, the abstract must
always precede the concrete, -- public opinion must be con-
vinced before it will accept an innovation. This has been
the role of France in Europe ever since the great revolution;
it is her role to-day. She is the agitator of the old world,
and agitation is the lever of reform.143

French law permitted femdnists little scope for legal agitation.
Except for small street demonstrations and letters, their only constitu-
tional means of protest was the petition,‘which involved two difficulties.
Despite Auclert's promdse to protect the identity of signers, few'women

had the courage (or the inclination) to commit their names to so public a

 

1“Ibid., March 1333.

143Stanton 35H;;., Histogy gf Vgggn Suffragg, III, 896.

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238
document.144 La Citoyenne's headquarters at 12 rue Cail reserved Tues-
days from 12:00 to 5:00 p.m. for petition signing, but it took.more than
a year to collect a thousand signatures in support of woman suffrage.
”Never has a more important manifestation been produced in France in
favor of women's political rights," Auclert wrote at the time, but
never again in the decade did so many women participate.145 Host of
Auclert's petitions carried only her own name and those of her chief
lieutenants. The second difficulty related to the fate of the petitions.
Parliamentary rules required them to pass through a petitions committee
which consistently blocked action. Individual legislators could circum-
vent the committee by carrying feminist claims to the floor, but few
were willing to do so. Even Clovis Hugues, who submitted the thousand
signatures in 1882, refused to challenge the petition committee's rejec-
tion by a direct appeal to the Chamber.

Nevertheless, Auclert drew'up numerous petitions -- more than a
dozen in the 1880's alone -- and though their fate was certain, they
provoked considerable publicity. La Citozegge cited eight newspapers
by name and alluded to ”a great many others” that supported Auclert's
1884 plan for an extraparliamentary watchdog commission, composed of
both sexes, to oversee government spending.146 Almost as many endorsed

her demand to include women in the constitutional revision process --

an issue that came to a head in the samejyear.147 The response to

 

ltha Cito enne, 6 August - 3 September 1882.
l"511nm, 5 June - 2 July 1832.
146

Ibid., March 1884. The eight newspapers mentioned by name

were La Rappel, Le Tem s, Le Gil Bl s, La Presse, Le Cri du Peu le,lgg
Journal des Débats, L'Electgur, and La Justige.

1‘71bid., September 1884.

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239
Auclert's petitions also revealed a growing moderation on the part of
certain legislators. Deputy Frédéric Thomas called feminists fools for
demanding a voice in the revision process in early 1882, whereas Deputy
Godefroy de Cavaignac's rejection of woman suffrage later in the year
stressed only its momentary inappropriateness -- a line that the hostile
Eggggg condemned because it could encourage Auclert to persevere in her
false idealism.168 Four years later, Vicomte de Livia-Mirepoix refused
to advance another suffrage petition, but the rejection's wording, ac-

cording to La Citoyenne, buoyed faith in eventual success.149

 

The petition rejected by LEvis-Hirepoix had a second significance.
It called for extending the franchise only to single women. An identical
request made in 1886 spent a year in committee, and then sparked the
Chamber's first debate on woman suffrage when Deputy PiEye (one of
Auclert's monarchist "friends" according to Richer) put the issue on the
order of the day. The origin of the demand dated back to La Citgyenne's
birth. In its thirteenth issue, Auclert asserted that if only fifty
women sat in the Chamber their sex dolidarity would protect the interests
of all women. Limited woman suffrage violated her avowed integralism,
she admitted, but some power would be better than none. In defense of
the gélibataire vote, she argued that single women lacked the indirect
representation afforded to wives by husbands -- a central claim.of the
anti-suffragists. After Piiye's initiative failed, she whittled her
demand even more. On the assumption that inequality in liberty was

preferable to equality in servitude, she proposed enfranchising women

 

1“°131d., 2 July - 6 August 1332.

laglbid., December 1866.

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240

who could pass an examination or had actively claimed the vote for more
than one year. But when the Chamber greeted the idea with indifference,
she reverted to the célibataire plan. As in war and games, she ex-
plained, one must devise a strategy to win. Levis-Mirepoix agreed,
warning that the célibataire vote would open the door to broader woman
suffrage and lead to demands for eligibility. Men alone should sit in
the legislature, be countered; women, the guardians of morality, should
stay at home.150

Letters and manifestos constituted another form.of protest for
French suffragists. Some went directly to individuals or groups, others
appeared as editorials, and taken together they covered a.wdder range
of issues than the petitions. In 1882 Auclert urged the Interior
Ministry to establish centers for unemployed women, financed by a national
lottery. These would give refuge to destitute females, and permit the
identification of hard-core prostitutes, who could then be deported to
the colonies. Two weeks later, she condemned the Municipal Council of
Paris for excluding women from the banquet inaugurating the newly re-
built HStel de Ville. Women's taxes had helped finance the edifice, she
wrote; if women were unworthy to eat there, they should not have had to
pay for it. Five months before La Citoyenne folded, Auclert informed
Pope Leo XIII that she was an ardent believer in justice, as well as a
free thinker, and implored him to consecrate his reign to the equality
of men and women. Editorials carried demands for public halls where
women, especially institutrices, could instruct men in civic virtue;

equal pay for women teachers, who should also instruct girls to support

woman suffrage; the posting of a Declaration of women's Rights in girls

 

150mm. 3 May 1331; April 1335; November 1335; December 1335;

November 1886.

241

schools; and a tax of one hundred francs per year on the men, dubbed
Hommes-Filles by Auclert, who took female jobs.151
In addition to written protests, whose publicity value far out-
weighed their practical effect, Auclert employed direct action to bring
her ideas to the public's attention. She and her followers, carrying a
rose and blue suffrage banner, joined the million.mourners who bore Victor
Hugo's casket from the Arc-de-Triomphe to the Pantheon in 1885.152 Fur-
ious protests greeted every Bastille Day, which became for feminists the
"Day of Dupes," the forerunner of the paper Bastille known as the Code.
"July 18 is not a national festival," Auclert pronounced, "it is the a—
potheosis of masculinity." Auclert and a handful of supporters staged
a typical counter—demonstration in 1881. Under a banner wreathed in the
black of mourning, they marched the two and one-half miles fromwgg
Citoyenne's headquarters to the Place de la Bastille, where, amid taunts
and jeers, Auclert and Lara Marcel denounced the Revolution. Rather than
the lhth of July, Auclert asserted, France should celebrate the 30th of
May, the date of Jeanne d'Arc's death. She had once saved the nation,
and her female descendants, if enfranchised, would likewise save the
Republic. To dramatize her stand, Auclert led her Cercle to the Place
des Pyramides in 1885, where she laid a wreath on Jeanne d'Arc's monument.
However, successive governments rejected both the date change and a re—
lated demand to enshrine her in the Pantheon, and after the Dreyfus Affair
Catholic women largely co-opted the Maid of Orleans as the symbol of

153

their own conservative movement.

 

151Ibid., 7 August 1881; 10—16 October 1881; 6 Maybh June 1882;

2 July~6 August 1882; 6 August-3 September 1882; March 1885; 1 June 1891.

1521bid., June 1335.

153For Auclert's attitude toward Bastille Day and Jeanne d'Arc,
see ibid., 10 July 1881; 17 July 1881; 23 July 1881; 2 Julyafi August

 

 

2&2
More controversial than street demonstrations was Auclert's cam-

paign against the census.154 Shortly after the Conseil d'Etat thwarted
her tax strike, the legislature discarded the scrutin d'arrondissement
in favor of a departmental scrutinlgg'ligtg. Under the reform, political
parties ran slates of candidates, each of whom represented an equal nump
ber of citizens. Auclert supported the change in principle, but demanded
that only males should figure in the apportionment process. This would
reduce the size of the Chamber by fiftyefive seats, she reasoned, thus
lessening woman's tax burden. When the legislature rejected the demand,
Auclert and twenty-four others signed an appeal urging all French women
to boycott the census. Married women should report only male members of
their households, and single women should withhold their name, age, civil
status, religion, and profession. Do not fear reprisals, Auclert counp
selled; the state would never call out the military against women as it
had in 1838 when residents of Toulouse resisted a door and window census.
No arrests resulted, due undoubtedly to the small number of boycotters.
But Richer, who ridiculed so many of Auclert's actions, found the census
tactic especially objectionable. "Deputies are not only the representa-
tives of those who name them," he responded, "they are the prepresenta—
tives of all [the people]. M13 principe3"

Eh! bien, what have the women who obey Mlle. Auclert done? They have

pronounced against the republican principle, against the democratic

base . . . . They are sacrificing, without doubt, the Republic to
their rancor.

 

1883; 2 Ju1y56 August 1882; July 1884; June 1885; October 1889; Le
Libe'rateur, 23 July 1331; Marie Chaumont, "Hubertine Auclert," 66:63.

lshLa Citoyenne, 29 May 1881; 17 July 1881; 12-18 December 1881;
January 1884; November 1886.

155Le Droit des Femmes, 5 April 1885.

. .

. M

can

243
Unfortunately, from Richer's standpoint, there was nothing he or anyone

else could do to curb the suffragists' chief tactic —- the shadow campaign.

The Shadow Campaigg of 1885

Shadow campaigns reflected frustrations born of the Third Repub-
lic's first decade. In 1871, when the nature of the Second Empire's
successor was still very much in doubt, Amélié'Bosquit unsuccessfully
petitioned the National Assembly for woman suffrage, and Daubié'pressed
for the celibataire vote until her deafllin 1874. The founding of Auclert's
Societe 1e Droit des Femmes in 1876 provided woman suffrage with a perma-
nent organization, but even Auclert's passionate devotion to the cause
had to await the outcome of the _s_c_e_i_z_g .m_a_i_ crisis. Only at the end of the
decade could anything more than lip-service be paid to the issue, and
even that proved too much for the 1878 Woman's Rights Congress. Aban-
doned by most of her former colleagues, Auclert used the registration
drive of 1880 to first test the administrative resistance to woman suf-
frage. When that effort failed, Auclert next employed the tax strike to
force a ruling on the legal question. On 31 March 1881, the Conseil d'
Btat (called the "tribunal of injustice" by Auclert) affirmed woman's
exclusion from the electorate. Thereafter, although Auclert and others
continued to raise the issue before administrative and judicial bodies,
the struggle for woman suffrage became increasingly political. Unless
legislators could be pressured into enacting reform, women would never
obtain the vote.156

As a tactic designed to exert such pressure, shadow campaigns

offered several advantages. Elections occurred regularly and frequently,

 

156See the ruling by Judge Carré'below.

244
like Bastille Days. Chamber renewals took place every four years with
partial Senate and local balloting in between. Electoral procedures also
provided staged opportunities for agitation. Male voters had to meet
citizenship, age, and residency requirements, and register in advance of
actual balloting. Town halls reserved specific times for this, and
Auclert, on the pretext that sex was not one of the requirements, re-
peatedly urged women to register despite the adverse rulings of 1880 and
1881.157 When the Court of Cassation at Nimes ruled in 1882 that electors
could restore their names to the voting lists at any time if they had
not received notification of removal, Auclert argued that, inasmuch as
women had never received the requisite notification, they could likewise
demand registration whenever they pleased.158 Subsequent to the regis-
tration stage came the campaigns prOper, which afforded women opportuni—
ties to press their demands on politicians as well as illegally attend
party rallies. women could also offer themselves as candidates, the most
active phase of shadow campaigns. Finally, once the balloting ended,
suffragists could file protests against officials who refused to count
the votes cast for women.

The greatest advantage was numerical. Unlike the tax—strike and
census boycott, which needed widespread support to succeed, shadow camp
paigns required only a handful of determined women. "It would take too
long to recall here," Auclert wrote of the small registration drive of
1880, "the noice that the inscription demand of women on the electoral

"159

lists made in the major Parisian newspapers. In 1881, enthused by

 

157La Citoyenne, 23-28January 1882.

158Ibid., 5—11 March 1332.

159Anc1ert, Histori ue, 25.

 

 

245

the previous year's success, Auclert and thirteen others repeated the
drive.160 Shadow campaigns also attracted individuals outside the capi-
tal. In 1881, while Leonie Rouzade polled fiftyhseven votes in Paris'
12th arrondissement, three women received five votes at Thorey (Meurthe-
et-Moselle), Madame Jules Lefebvre garnered a few at Grandpre (Ardennes),
and.Madame Augustine Debouis nearly won a seat on the municipal council of
Niévna Three years later, women polled majorities in local elections at
Houquetot (Seine-Inferieure) and Vornay (Cher), though their victories
were immediately annulled. Nevertheless, Auclert viewed the totals as
symptomatic of better times. She cited Le Figaro's endorsement of female
municipal councillors and stressed the prospects of acquiring elegibility,
if not the vote. With legislative elections only one year away, she
proclaimed in 1884, women.must rally for an all-out effort.161

The shadow campaign of 1885 marked a turning point for France's
embryonic suffrage movement. Final victory lay several generations into
the future, but the advance of suffrage as the number one feminist
issue acquired irreversible momentum. Twelve years after the event,
l'Amélioration's Bulletin recorded that the campaign of 1885 had produced
"such a reverberation that one can say that since that time the feminist
movement, which before had lain dormant, has openly taken a new upward
direction."162

Although Auclert inspired the year-long effort and issued the

initial call for the campaign, she held herself somewhat above the battle.

 

160La Citoyenne, 13 February 1881.

161The results of these women's candidacies appeared in La Citoyf
enne, 19-25 December 1881; 20 February 1881; 10 April 1881; June 1884; and
July 1884. The name of the woman elected at Vbrnay was Madame Gressin.
Auclert's call for an all-out effort in 1885 came in La Cito enne, July 1884.

162amelioration, Bulletin Bimestriel. June-July 1897'

235
abundant. The British Parliament abolished official regulation of
prostitution in 1883 -- a demand of long standing in France -- and
narrowly defeated a bill to enfranchise single women. Britain also
permitted municipal woman suffrage in Canada -- French at heart,
according to Auclert -- giving the lie to anti-feminist claims that
woman's emancipation would violage Latin traditions. What the French
government failed to see, Auclert maintained, was that Britain had not
only supplanted France in North America, but ruled it more justly.
Furthermore, if Britain could enact wise legislation, so could other
countries. Would Germany, she asked, also surpass France? Utah and
Wyoming had already begun to reap the benefits of woman suffrage, Auclert
claimed in 1881. Women there had abandoned ”the futilities of coquetry,"
and wifely virtues had increased ”to a surprising degree." "In France,

woman's vote will have the same moralizing influence."138

Without it,
she predicted, the French would surely fall behind their AngloeSaxon
neighbors.

The reasons for the slippage were as clear to Auclert as the
slippage itself. Paralyzed by fear of ridicule, the vast majority of
Frenchwomen exhibited ”a sheep-like docility that surprises even the

139 Only Jewish women, "veritable'modern Judiths,” sup-

shepherds."
ported feminism 33 £933. Accustomed to persecution, Auclert explained,
they alone saw that sex equality entailed human equality without dis-
tinctions of race or cult. Outside France, in contrast, feminism at-

tracted leading women. President Cleveland's sister sealously pursued

 

1381.. Citoyenne, 6 March 1331; a December 1332 - 7 January 1333;

h June -1Ju1y 1883; 6 August - 2 September 1883.

l‘39Auclert, Le Vgte des Pas, 207.

 

 

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2'56

woman's rights, and in Britain over a thousand women belonged to the
Sommerville Club, named after a female member of the Royal Society.
Quality and quantity had come together with impressive results. It
took months to obtain a thousand signatures on a French suffrage peti-
tion in 1881-82, for instance, but British feminists submitted 36,748
names on 686 petitions to Parliament in one year alone (1884). Above
all, Auclert reflected, French women lacked unity, the key to the success
of foreign feminists as well as the instrument of masculine tyranny. We
must unite in order to free ourselves: “Let us do as the men do.”140

Aware that Paris had no center where women could meet, Auclert
attempted to establish a Cercle George Sand in 1882, modeled along the

1‘1 But like her Sociéti Nationale

lines of London's Sommerville Club.
of the following year, the enterprise never got beyond the suggestion
stage. On the eve of her marriage six years later, she elaborated an
even more ambitious scheme. In a letter to Susan B. Anthony, who had in-
vited her to attend the 1888 Washington Congress, Auclert observed that
”the women's movement of all countries is presently too platonic." The
theoretical phase had lasted too long; the time had come to put ideas
into practice. Specifically, she called for the creation of female
shadow legislatures, which would demonstrate women's capacities and

give feminists everywhere the standing and activity they needed. Bach
women's parliament would follow the calendar of its male counterpart

and use the national agenda to avoid wandering. These parliaments

would have no legal authority, but their moral influence would be

 

l‘oLa Cito e e, 19-25 March 1882; 5 June - 2 July 1882; 6
August - 2 September 1883; September 1884; January 1885.

1“Ibid., 19-25 March 1332.

r\

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.4
.l‘
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237
great -- much like that of Paris' conférence des avocats -- and feminists
of both sexes could signal their devotion to the cause by footing the
bill, Irrespective of details, Auclert concluded, fortune would favor
the audacious.142 Nothing came of the proposal, however. Forty years
later French feminists organized several Women's Estates General along
similar lines, but in La Citoyenne's decade large scale efforts proved
impossible. Auclert never commented on Anthony's reaction to the idea,
if indeed the American suffragist had one, and the project silently
joined her other failures.

Yet there was much that a small band of determined activists could
do. Final victory might depend on better organization, but that in turn
required more recruits and constant agitation. Perhaps the third volume
of History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1886, best expressed the
function of Auclert's movement:

The most logical beginning for a sketch of the woman move-

ment on the continent, and indeed of any step in advance, is
of course France, where ideas, not facts, stand out the more
prominently; for, in questions of reformg the abstract must
always precede the concrete, -- public opinion must be con-
vinced before it will accept an innovation. This has been
the role of France in Europe ever since the great revolution;
it is her role to-day. She is the agitator of the old world,
and agitation is the lever of reform.143

French law permitted feminists little scope for legal agitation.
Except for small street demonstrations and letters, their only constitu-
tional means of protest was the petition, which involved two difficulties.

Despite Auclert's promise to protect the identity of signers, few'women

had the courage (or the inclination) to commit their names to so public a

 

1“Ibid., March 1333.

laBStanton ££H;;., Histogy gf Woman ngfrage, III, 896.

0-.

to .-

0-.-.-4

.-o.

238
document.laa La Citoyenne's headquarters at 12 rue Cail reserved Tues-
days from 12:00 to 5:00 p.m. for petition signing, but it took more than
a year to collect a thousand signatures in support of woman suffrage.
”Never has a more important manifestation been produced in France in
favor of women's political rights,” Auclert wrote at the time, but
never again in the decade did so many women participate.1A5 Most of
Auclert's petitions carried only her own name and those of her chief
lieutenants. The second difficulty related to the fate of the petitions.
Parliamentary rules required them to pass through a petitions committee
which consistently blocked action. Individual legislators could circum-
vent the committee by carrying feminist claims to the floor, but few
were willing to do so. Even Clovis Hugues, who submitted the thousand
signatures in 1882, refused to challenge the petition committee's rejec-
tion by a direct appeal to the Chamber.

Nevertheless, Auclert drew up numerous petitions -- more than a
dozen in the 1880's alone -- and though their fate was certain, they
provoked considerable publicity. La Citoyeggg cited eight newspapers
by name and alluded to ”a great many others” that supported Auclert's
1884 plan for an extraperliamentary watchdog commission, composed of
both sexes, to oversee government spending.“6 Almost as many endorsed

her demand to includd women in the constitutional revision process --

an issue that came to a head in the sameyear.147 The response to

 

l“La Citoyenne, 6 August - 3 September 1882.

lkslbid., 5 June - 2 July 1882.

146Ibid.. March 1884. The eight newspapers mentioned by name

were La Rappel, Le Ten 3, Le Gil 81 s, La Presse, Le Cri du Peu le,‘Lg
Journal des Débats, L'Electgpr, and La Justige.

la7lbid., September 1884.

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.
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-1.
v.

S)

,0

239

Auclert's petitions also revealed a growing moderation on the part of
certain legislators. Deputy Frédéric Thomas called feminists fools for
demanding a voice in the revision process in early 1882, whereas Deputy
Godefroy de Cavaignac's rejection of woman suffrage later in the year
stressed only its momentary inappropriateness -- a line that the hostile
gggggg condemned because it could encourage Auclert to persevere in her
false idealism.“8 Four years later, Vicomte de Levis-Mirepoix refused
to advance another suffrage petition, but the rejection's wording, ac-

cording to La Citoyenne, buoyed faith in eventual success.149

 

The petition rejected by Livia-Mirepoix had a second significance.
It called for extending the franchise only to single women. An identical
request made in 1884 spent a year in committee, and then sparked the
Chamber's first debate on woman suffrage when Deputy Pilye (one of
Auclert's monarchist ”friends" according to Richer) put the issue on the
order of the day. The origin of the demand dated back to La Citoyenne's
birth. In its thirteenth issue, Auclert asserted that if only fifty
women sat in the Chamber their sex dolidarity would protect the interests
of all women. Limited woman suffrage violated her avowed integralism,
she admitted, but some power would be better than none. In defense of
the gélibataire vote, she argued that single women lacked the indirect
representation afforded to wives by husbands -- a central c1aim.of the
anti-suffragists. After Pidye's initiative failed, she whittled her
demand even more. On the assumption that inequality in liberty was

preferable to equality in servitude, she proposed enfranchising women

 

148Ibid., 2 July - 6 August 1882.

149Ibid., December 1866.

0-.

240

who could pass an examination or had actively claimed the vote for more
than one year. But when the Chamber greeted the idea with indifference,
she reverted to the gélibataire plan. As in war and games, she ex-
plained, one must devise a strategy to win. Lévis-Mirepoix agreed,
warning that the célibataire vote would open the door to broader woman
suffrage and lead to demands for eligibility. Men alone should sit in
the legislature, he countered; women, the guardians of morality, should
stay at home.150

Letters and manifestos constituted another form of protest for
French suffragists. Some went directly to individuals or groups, others
appeared as editorials, and taken together they covered a wider range
of issues than the petitions. In 1882 Auclert urged the Interior
Kinistry to establish centers for unemployed women, financed by a national
lottery. These would give refuge to destitute females, and permit the
identification of hard-core prostitutes, who could then be deported to
the colonies. Two weeks later, she condemned the Municipal Council of
Paris for excluding women from the banquet inaugurating the newly re-
built HStel de Ville. women's taxes had helped finance the edifice, she
wrote; if women were unworthy to eat there, they should not have had to
pay for it. Five months before La Citoyenne folded, Auclert informed
Pope Leo XIII that she was an ardent believer in justice, as well as a
free thinker, and implored him to consecrate his reign to the equality
of men and women. Editorials carried demands for public halls where
women, especially institutrices, could instruct men in civic virtue;

equal pay for women teachers, who should also instruct girls to support

woman suffrage; the posting of a Declaration of women's Rights in girls

 

1501mm, a May 1881; April 1885; November 1885; December 1885;

November 1886.

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schools; and a tax of one hundred francs per year on the men, dubbed
Hommes-Filles by Auclert, who took female jobs.151
In addition to written protests, whose publicity value far out-
weighed their practical effect, Auclert employed direct action to bring
her ideas to the public's attention. She and her followers, carrying a
rose and blue suffrage banner, joined the million mourners who bore Victor
Hugo's casket from the Arc-de-Triomphe to the Pantheon in 1885.152 Fur-
ious protests greeted every Bastille Day, which became for feminists the
"Day of Dupes," the forerunner of the paper Bastille known as the Code.
"July 14 is not a national festival," Auclert pronounced, "it is the a—
potheosis of masculinity." Auclert and a handful of supporters staged
a typical counter—demonstration in 1881. Under a banner wreathed in the
black of mourning, they marched the two and one-half miles from'Lg
Citoyenne's headquarters to the Place de la Bastille, where, amid taunts
and jeers, Auclert and Lara Marcel denounced the Revolution. Rather than
the lhth of July, Auclert asserted, France should celebrate the 30th of
May, the date of Jeanne d'Arc's death. She had once saved the nation,
and her female descendants, if enfranchised, would likewise save the
Republic. To dramatize her stand, Auclert led her Cercle to the Place
des Pyramides in 1885, where she laid a wreath on Jeanne d'Arc's monument.
However, successive governments rejected both the date change and a re-
lated demand to enshrine her in the Pantheon, and after the Dreyfus Affair
Catholic women largely co-opted the Maid of Orleans as the symbol of

153

their own conservative movement.

 

1511bid., 7 August 1881; 10-16 October 1881; 6 May-4 June 1882;

2 July-6 August 1882; 6 August-3 September 1882; March 1885; 1 June 1891.

0
15"Ibid., June 1885.

,
1)3For Auclert's attitude toward Bastille Day and Jeanne d'Arc,
see ibid., 10 July 1881; 17 July 1881; 23 July 1881; 2 July-5 August

2&2
More controversial than street demonstrations was Auclert's cam-

paign against the census.1511 Shortly after the Conseil d'Etat thwarted
her tax strike, the legislature discarded the scrutin d'arrondissement
in favor of a departmental scrutin'ngligtg. Under the reform, political
parties ran slates of candidates, each of whom represented an equal numy
ber of citizens. Auclert supported the change in principle, but demanded
that only males should figure in the apportionment process. This would
reduce the size of the Chamber by fifty-five seats, she reasoned, thus
lessening woman's tax burden. When the legislature rejected the demand,
Auclert and twenty-four others signed an appeal urging all French women
to boycott the census. Married women should report only male members of
their households, and single women should withhold their name, age, civil
status, religion, and profession. Do not fear reprisals, Auclert coun-
selled; the state would never call out the military against women as it
had in 1838 when residents of Toulouse resisted a door and window census.
No arrests resulted, due undoubtedly to the small number of boycotters.
But Rucher, who ridiculed so many of Auclert's actions, found the census
tactic especially objectionable. "Deputies are not only the representa-
tives of those who name them," he responded, "they are the prepresenta-
tives of all [the people]. m lg principez"

Eh! bien, what have the women who obey Mlle. Auclert done? They have

pronounced against the republican principle, against the democratic

base . . . . Thgy are sacrificing, without doubt, the Republic to
their rancor. 3)

 

1883; 2 Julyb6 August 1882; July 1884; June 1885; October 1889; Le
Liberateur, 23 July 1881; Marie Chaumont, "Hubertine Auclert," 65:63.

15Z‘La Citoyenne, 29 May 1881; 17 July 1881; 12-18 December 1881;
January 1884; November 1886.

155Le Droit des Femmes, 5 April 1885.

 

at

no

243
Unfortunately, from Richer's standpoint, there was nothing he or anyone

else could do to curb the suffragists' chief tactic —- the shadow campaign.

The Shadow Campaign of 1883

Shadow campaigns reflected frustrations born of the Third Repub-
lic's first decade. In 1871, when the nature of the Second Empire's
successor was still very much in doubt, Amelie Bosquit unsuccessfully
petitioned the National Assembly for woman suffrage, and Daubié'pressed
for the célibataire vote until her deafliin 1874. The founding of Auclert's
Société’le Droit des Femmes in 1876 provided woman suffrage with a perma-
nent organization, but even Auclert's passionate devotion to the cause
had to await the outcome of the ggig£.mgi crisis. Only at the end of the
decade could anything more than lip-service be paid to the issue, and
even that proved too much for the 1878 woman's Rights Congress. Aban—
doned by most of her former colleagues, Auclert used the registration
drive of 1880 to first test the administrative resistance to woman suf-
frage. When that effort failed, Auclert next employed the tax strike to
force a ruling on the legal question. 0n.31 March 1881, the Conseil d'
Etat (called the "tribunal of injustice" by Auclert) affirmed woman's
exclusion from the electorate. Thereafter, although Auclert and others
continued to raise the issue before administrative and judicial bodies,
the struggle for woman suffrage became increasingly political. Unless
legislators could be pressured into enacting refonm, women would never
obtain the vote.156

As a tactic designed to exert such pressure, shadow campaigns

offered several advantages. Elections occurred regularly and frequently,

 

156See the ruling by Judge Carré'below.

244
like Bastille Days. Chamber renewals took place every four years with
partial Senate and local balloting in between. Electoral procedures also
provided staged opportunities for agitation. ‘Male voters had to meet
citizenship, age, and residency requirements, and register in advance of
actual balloting. Town halls reserved specific times for this, and
Auclert, on the pretext that sex was not one of the requirements, re-
peatedly urged women to register despite the adverse rulings of 1880 and
1881.157 When the Court of Cassation at Nimes ruled in 1882 that electors
could restore their names to the voting lists at any time if they had
not received notification of removal, Auclert argued that, inasmuch as
women had never received the requisite notification, they could likewise
demand registration whenever they pleased.158 Subsequent to the regis-
tration stage came the campaigns proper, which afforded women opportuni-
ties to press their demands on politicians as well as illegally attend
party rallies. women could also offer themselves as candidates, the most
active phase of shadow campaigns. Finally, once the balloting ended,
suffragists could file protests against officials who refused to count
the votes cast for women.

The greatest advantage was numerical. Unlike the tax-strike and
census boycott, which needed widespread support to succeed, shadow'cam-
paigns required only a handful of determined women. "It would take too
long to recall here," Auclert wrote of the small registration drive of
1880, "the noice that the inscription demand of women on the electoral

159

lists made in the major Parisian newspapers." In 1881, enthused by

 

157La Cito enne, 23-28January 1882.

1581bid., 5-11 March 1882.

159Auclert, Histori ue, 25.

 

245

the previous year's success, Auclert and thirteen others repeated the
drive.160 Shadow campaigns also attracted individuals outside the capi-
tal. In 1881, while Leonie Rouzade polled fifty-seven votes in Paris'
12th arrondissement, three women received five votes at Thorey (Meurthe-
et-Moselle), Madame Jules Lefebvre garnered a few at Grandpre (Ardennes),
and Madame Augustine Debouis nearly won a seat on the municipal council of
Niévna Three years later, women polled majorities in local elections at
Houquetot (Seine-Inferieure) and Vbrnay (Cher), though their victories
were immediately annulled. Nevertheless, Auclert viewed the totals as
symptomatic of better times. She cited Le Figaro's endorsement of female
municipal councillors and stressed the prospects of acquiring elegibility,
if not the vote. With legislative elections only one year away, she
proclaimed in 1884, women must rally for an all-out effort.161

The shadow campaign of 1885 marked a turning point for France's
embryonic suffrage movement. Final victory lay several generations into
the future, but the advance of suffrage as the number one feminist
issue acquired irreversible momentum. Twelve years after the event,
l'Amélioration's Bulletin recorded that the campaign of 1885 had produced
"such a reverberation that one can say that since that time the feminist
movement, which before had lain dormant, has openly taken a new upward
direction."162

Although Auclert inspired the year—long effort and issued the

initial call for the campaign, she held herself somewhat above the battle.

 

160m Citoyenne, 13 February 1881.

161The results of these women's candidacies appeared in La Citoyf
enne, 19-25 December 1881; 20 February 1881; 10 April 1881; June 1884; and
July 1884. The name of the woman elected at VOrnay was Madame Gressin.
Auclert's call for an all-out effort in 1885 came in'EQCitoyenne, July 1884.

162Amélioration, Bulletin Bimestriel, June-July 1897-

 

 

2&6
She participated in the registration phase in both the 9th and 11th
arrondissements and later protested against the refusal of officials to
tally votes cast for women. She also drew up petitions to exclude women
from the electoral census and to obtain the célibataire vote. But during
the most important part of the campaign, she refused to play an active
role. When asked to become a candidate, she declined. "I am profoundly
touched by the honors you do me and I thank you ever so much," Auclert
explained:

But you understand that having these last ten years put so much
determination into resuscitating the question of woman's political
rights; that having, for seven or eight‘zyearé7 especially, seized
all occasions to protest against masculine autocracy and to demand
that taxpaying and responsible women participate in the government
of the country, it would be completely 0 t of place for me to claim
for myself the benefits of my campaign.133

Selflessness aside, Auclert also opposed the scope of the tactic, warning
that too many candidates would dilute the suffrage vote and provide
authorities with an excuse for discounting favorable ballots.164

The original impetus for a shadow campaign in 1885 came from

Auclert's Cercle and initially focused on running a single candidate, the
rich and influential Maria Deraismes. But others in the Cercle also
wished to run, with the result that organization and direction quickly
passed out of Auclert's hands and into those of Louise Barberousse and
Jules Allix.165 Both had close ties with l'Amélioration, which accounts

perhaps for Deraismes' tepid and reluctant participation in the campaign.

Mademoiselle Barberousse (1836-1900) was a life-long teacher. An ardent

 

163Richer mocked Auclert's refusal to run, pointing out that "a
brave officer is not content to push his soldiers into battle, he marches
at their head." Le Droit des Femmes. 6 September 1885.

16I‘La Cito enne, October 1885.

165Auclert, Le Vote des Femmes, 111.

Ethan:

2’17

free thinker and devotee of science, she entered the profession at
Niévre, the place of her birth, and, after a sojourn in Britain, arrived
in Paris in time for the seige of 1870-71. It was proably then, while
serving as a nurse, that she met Allix, who founded a Comité des Femmes
in the 5th arrondissement and displayed a passionate interest in educa-
tion reform. In 18835he resigned the directorship of the Free School of
the rue Jean-Lantier in order to join him in a new venture, the rue
Saint-Honoré's school for girls. In December of the followdng year,
Barberousse and Allix founded the Ligue de Protection des Femmes,
through which they attempted to implement Auclert's call for electoral
action.166 White-haired and bespectacled in 1885, intelligent and adept
at assimilating ideas, Barberousse had incurred Auclert's emmity.
Barberousse lacked originality compared to Deraismes and Rouzade, wrote
Auclert.167 The Ligue to which she belonged represented a group of
"noisy non-entities, of adventuresses lacking merit and intelligence."
It might have a hundred members, but "not one single serious woman."168

In the career of Jules Allix (1818-1897) the Ligue represented
only one in a series of fantastic enterprises. Sixtybsix years old at
the time, he had spent a third of his adult life in forced exile, prison,

and insane asylums. Born at Fontenayale-Comte (Vendée) of bourgeois

parents (his brother once served as Victor Hugo's personal physician),

 

166Amélioration, Bulletin, JanuaryhApril 1900. La Citoyenne,
October 1885.

167La Cito enne, October 1885.

Sowerwine, women and Socialism in France 1821-1221, 46.
According to Sowerwine, Auclert's distaste for Barberousse became public
knowledge when Le Figaro published a private letter by Auclert denouncing
Barberousse and her handling of the campaign.

2’18
he became a licencie’ £3 £13221; but preferred the titles of professeur £12
gymnastique and professuer‘ggg sciences. His militant, mystical socialism
and cooperativism brought him seven years of banishment under the Second
Empire and eight years incarceration at the beginning of the Third Re-
public. During the siege and Commune, he held several important positions
and won notoriety for two unique ideas. To protect Frenchwomen from
Prussian rapists, he proposed the 22332 russi ue, a fingerbshaped rubber
tube designed to discharge acid on impact. And to improve communications,
he suggested escargots s athi es, telepathic snails. Freed by the
amnesty of 1879, Allix turned increasingly to feminism and education as
means of social and moral improvement. In addition to belonging to
Auclert's Cercle, he founded a short-lived Comité'des Femmes in 1880 and
served as l'Amélioration's secretary for over a decade. In 1881, he and
Barberousse represented the Comité’des Femmes at the Congrés Universel

169

de la Libre Pensée. In education he rejected rote memorization and

mechanical exercises. With new methods, he claimed, students could
master reading in fifteen hours and definitive French in sixmonths.170
These goals underlay the Saint-Bonoré'girls school, which also served as
the Ligue's headquarters.

The opening phase of the 1885 campaign focused once again on

registration. Under the auspices of the Ligue de Protection des Femmes,

 

169Ibide , IiSe

170Maitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographique, IV, 108-09. The snail
proposal, which Allix repeatedly advanced, involved raising two snails
together from birth. The two snails would then develop a bond of empathy
which would permit them to communicate with each other as adults. At
that point they could be separated and employed as transmitters and
receivers. The sender of a message had only to move his snail to a spot
on a lettered board, which would cause the "paired" snail to do likewise
some distance away.

2&9
Barberousse, iarie Picot, the widow Jeannot, and Auclert demanded in-
scription on the voting lists. Immediately repulsed at the administrative
level, all except Auclert appealed to the courts. Barberousse's case drew
the most attention. On 6 February 1885, Lébn Giraud, one of La Citoyenne's
co-founders, and Jules Allix presented her plea before Justice of the
Peace Carre in the lst arrondissement. Giraud spoke first:

Whence do women derive the right that they demand? From.the very
texts of the law which have never made a distinction between the
sexes. What a strange pretension it is, in fact, on the part of men
to attribute sovereignty and political power to themselves alone,
and is this not a veritable criminal outrage on the part of one group
of citizens against another? If they persist in.maintaining the ex-
clusion of which women have been the object until now, they will
create thereby o sort of caste, similar to that of India's pariahs, and
they will render legitimate certain opposition to the law that they
have witnessed in times past.

Allix then asked, after a brief historical review, "by what right is

the legislator the legislator if woman does not vote? By what right is
O

the law the 1aw7"17“

In response, Carré cited numerous constitutional and legislative
texts, dating back to 1791, which omitted specific mention of woman's
political rights. He then summarized the law of 7 July 1874, which re—
quired voters to possess full civil and political rights. Enumerating
the areas in which women lacked these rights, including the Chamber's
rejection of the commergante vote in 1883, Carré'concluded "that if women,
repudiating the privileges of their sex and inspired by certain.modern
theories, believe the hour has come for them to break the tutelar bonds
with which traditions, mores, and the law have encompassed them, it is

not before the courts, but before the legislative power, that they should

carry their demands." Thus, he ruled, "there is no reason to register

 

171Le Droit des Femmes, 1 March 1885.

1721bid.

250
demoiselle Barberousse on the electoral lists." Carré‘s lengthy ruling
also applied to Madame Picot, Barberousse's co-plaintiff. The widow
Jeannot's appeal, pusued in the Faubourg-Montmartre quarter of Paris

(9th arrondissement), elicited a much shorter but equally negative re—

1
ply. 73

Denied administrative and judicial redress - a second appeal
failed before the Cour de cassation in March -— Barberousse and Allix

174

turned to the upcoming national elections. Over Auclert's objec-
tions, they resolved to run a full slate of shadow candidates. The po-
litical vehicle they chose was the Fédération Republicaine Socialiste,
created in the fall of 1884 and to which Auclert also belonged. One of
the many new parties that hoped to take advantage of the scrutin 22
.lléifiv the Federation shared the Ligué's headquarters at the girls school.
It wrote political equality for women into its platform in October 1884,
and, after several months of inpfighting, the Federation agreed in Feb-
ruary 1885 to add women to its candidate list. Those who opposed that
step quit the party, leaving "Allix, Barberousse and Co." in command of
"the wreckage of the old Fe’de’i~ation."175
Altogether the Federation RepubliCaine Socialiste invited twentya
sevcn women to become candidates. Fifteen accepted, ten refused, and
two were dropped, actress Sarah Bernhardt and Mademoiselle Rousseil,

"176

"notoriously known for her clericalism and her faith at Sacre—Coeur.

 

173Ibid.

174Louis Frank de Bruxelles, Essai sur le condition politique de
la femme (Paris, 1892).

172ngflgtgillg, 13 September 1885. Cited in Sowerwine, WOmen and
Socialism in France 1871-1921, #5, 66.

176Le Droit des Femmes, 6 September 1885.

251

Those who refused included Magdeleine Godard, concert violinist;
Caroline de Barrau, director of l'Oeuvre des Liberées de Saint-Lazare;
and Eugdnie Pierre, one of Richer's collaborators who, like Auclert,
objected to the excessive number of candidates. Three women on the left
also balked, primarily for ideological reasons. Communard Paule Mink
wrote from Algeria that illness compelled her to retire from.pub1ic life;
in any case her candidacy was out of the question "because I do not
believe that women will have their situation ameliorated by the conquest
of their political rights, but only by the social transformation of our
old world." Séverine, director of the socialist Le Cri de Peuple, de-
clined because she felt too feminine, objected to joining any group, and
preferred the "social struggle."177 And anarchist Louise Michel, whose
attitude was already well known, persisted in her conviction that woman
suffrage represented a mirage "that we shall be offered because it means
nothing . . . . It is in the struggle for progress, for universal peace,
that we must take our place."178

Less expected, judging from Auclert's vehement reaction, were the

refusals of two staunch republicans, Céleste Hardouin and Madame Adam.

Hardouin, an institutrice who had led a petition drive to secure amnesty

179

 

for Louise Michel in 1879, at first figured on the acceptance list.
But in August 1885 she corrected the error:

To Monsieur Jules Allix, who came to make me a rather ridi—
culous proposition a week ago, I responded that I had enough
occasions to prove my devotion to the cause of the people in
giving to the girls who are confided to me an education conforming

 

177La Cito enne, September 1885.

178Thomas, Louise Michel, 322.

179Ibid., 181.

 

252

to the esprit republican, without searching elsewhere for another
outlet for my activity.mo

Madame Adam, director of the chauvinist Nouvelle Revue had helped launch
the faninist movement a generation earlier. By 1885, however, she had
acquired a rather dim view of French womanhood:
If I were English or American, I could accept a candidacy, because
in England and America most men admit that one can, without danger,
make a place for women in the administration of public affairs. Also
the women of these two countries work with the laudable goal of being,
when the time comes, worth’of sharing‘Zresponsibiliti7.

It seems to me that, here in France, ambition comes to women
before the search for merit. My principle of reform is that it is
necessary first to require of those who one emancipates the proof
that demands for their rights rest on knowledge of their capacity,
that is to say, their duties.

Bardouin's description of the proffered candidacy as a "rather ridiculous
proposition" especially piqued Auclert, who asked if her love of liberty
was no greather than that of the Negroes who abandoned John Brown. As
for Madame Adam, Auclert questioned her avowed patriotism. Citing the
law that deprived Frenchwomen of their citizenship when they married
foreigners, Auclert pointed out that the first duty of a patriot is to
put one's own nation in the forefront of progress. Rather than denigrate
Frenchwomen, Auclert concluded, Madame Adam should battle for woman's
rights, the surest means of safeguarding French integrity.182

The tenth refusal represented a unique case, an outgrowth of

183

the affaire Morin. In 1883 Dame Lenormand, who had a reputation for
beauty under the Second Empire, sought grounds for separation from her

second husband. Convinced that Monsieur Lenormand had a mistress, she

 

180Le Droit des Femmes, 6 September 1885.

181Ibid. Thomas incorrectly identifies Madame Adam.as one of
the organizers of the 1885 shadow campaign. See: Thomas, Louise Michel,
280.

182La Citoyenne, September 1885.

183Zéva58, Ombres et silhouettes, 234—43.

1‘

253

hired a private detective, Monsieur Morin, to uncover the correspondent.
Unfortunately, he fingered the wrong woman, the wife of Deputy Clovis
Hugues. Hugues and his wife immediately sued for defamation of character,
and Morin lost. Faced with 2,500 francs in fines and two years in prison,
Morin launched a series of appeals in the courts and a flurry of poison-
pen letters at Madame Hugues. In November 1884, nearly a year after the
original verdict and five minutes after Morin won another stay, Madame
Hugues did what Rficher thought any honest woman might.184 She emptied
six shots into Morin, killing him instantly in the middle of the Palais
de Justice. Tried for murder, she secured an acquittal in January 1885,
though a civil trial awarded 2,000 francs in damages to Morin's father.185
Shortly thereafter came a bid from the Federation Republicaine Socialiste,
which, despite her husband's feminist sympathies, Madame Hugues rejected.
"I regret to announce to you," she informed Jules Allix, "that it is imp
possible for me to accept this candidacy, which I hardly expected in the
first place, because I have never accomplished any political act which
would call me to the attention of my fellow citizens."186

Of the fifteen who undertook to run, Maria Deraismes equivocated
most. She abandoned Le Republicain de Seine-et—Oise and agreed to ful-
fill the duties of office if elected, but declined to do more than lend

her name to the campaign. "I do not refuse," she indicated to Barberousse,

"but I do not propose."187 Frenchwomen were as ready to vote in 1885 as

 

18lilticher asked what honest woman would have the courage to

cast the first stone at Mme. Hugues, and concluded by saying that she
"has avenged her outraged honor, her sullied daughter, and her tarnished
home." Le Droit des Femmes, 1 December 1884.

185Ibid., 1 February 1885.
186Ibid., 6 September 1885.

187Ibid., 20 September 1885'

254

were men in 18h8, she believed, but the electorate must decide. She also
felt that if women could obtain suffrage without soliciting it, their
cause would be strengthened. According to Richer's report, "Mademoiselle
Deraismes made known that she would take no part in the electoral battle,
that she would attend no public meetings, that she would put up no posters,
distribute no leaflets, in a word that she would abstain from all ini-
tiative."188

Seven of the other candidates, though perhaps less passive than
Deraismes, were suffragists of mediocre stature. In Auclert's and
Richer's extensive coverage of the campaign, they appear only as names:
Augustine Bouhin, Louise Martane, Marie Schacre, Angéle Charrier,
Amélina Olivier, Clara Rougier, and Madame Esquiron.189 Better known
were Barberousse and the remaining six candidates, one of whom had run
for office before. In 1881 Leonie Rouzade received fifty-seven votes
from Paris' 12th arrondissement. Grand-daughter of a deputy to the Third
Estate in 1789, disciple of Cabet and Fourier, Rouzade was born at Paris
in 1839. Raised by a brother after her parents' death, she worked as
an embroiderer until her marriage to Auguste Rouzade at the age of twenty-
two. Fortybone years of happiness followed, due, according to Auclert,

to Auguste's immunity to "the stupid pride of sex."190

Encouraged by her
husband, Rouzade wrote several books on social questions - Le begge de
Théodose d l'ile de l‘Utopie, Le Roi Johanne, Le Monde renversé'- and

stumped France on behalf of socialism and feminism. "I am a socialist

without revolutionary or other adjective," she informed Jules Allix, "because

 

188Ibid.

189La Cito enne, September 1885.

190Ibid., October 1885.

255

the means to arrive at the goal are necessarily verifiable according to
events, circumstances, whereas the goal is not; I am content therefore
to march there with all my strength, without preoccupying myself with
what manner one will arrive. That is all there is to say; I am with
you."191

Five years younger than Rouzade, candidate Madame Vincent (nee
Eliska Girard) ranked as one of the founders of French feminism. Born
at Me’zieres (L‘ure-et—Loir), she arrived in Paris in time to help Andre
Leo and Deraismes establish the Société pour la Revendication des Droits
de la Femme in 1868. Her role in the 1885 campaign represented one of
many actions on behalf of woman's rights, the most important of which were

r) I e
19“ Both Rouzade and Vincent were neophytes next to Leonie

yet to come.
Maniére. Described by Auclert as an "old battler" and "well-known," Maniére
was born at Marey—sur—Tille (CSte-d'Or) in 1826. Widowed and left with

a large family, she secured a brevet'g'institutrice at the age of forty.

She sympathized with the Paris Commune of 1871 and openly criticized the
Republic. Nevertheless, with the help of a friend at the Banque de France,
she had secured a public subsidy by the time she joined the Federation's
ticket in 1885. Youngest of the candidates was Lara Marcel, whose poetry,
written under the male pseudonym of René'Marcil, included Les Satires mar-
cilienncs and La Féodalite littéraire. Marcel, like several of the others,

belonged to Auclert's Societe; Newest of the candidates was the widow

Jeannot, whose feminist career began with her registration bid in the

 

191Le Droit des Femmes, 20 September 1885. For an interesting
sketch of Rouzade, see: Sowerwine, Women and Socialism in France 1871-
1221, 12-18, 30-44.

192L'Union Frangaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes, Bulletin,
JanuaryeMarch 1914. Amélioration, Bulletin, September—October 1903.
In 1911, Mme. Vincent became the president of the Union Franpaise pour
le Suffrage des Femmes, founded in 1909.

256

9th arrondissement earlier that same year. In contrast to Rouzade's
marriage, Jeannot's had failed. Her husband, a notary, had squandered
her dowry before his death. Forced to work, she was a seamstress in
1885.19:5

Rounding out the Fédération's slate was Emilie Saint-Hilaire, whose
birth at Naillat (Creuse) in 1818 made her sixty-seven at the time of
the election. Prior to the Commune of 1871 she had apparently lived the
quiet life of a Parisian boarding house keeper and wine seller. Once the
insurrection began, however, she embraced the revolution with ardor. Her
son, who served in a Communard artillery unit, died during the fighting,
tuullhfilie herself was subsequently deported, like Louise Michel, to New
Ca1edonia.19h Amnestied in 1879, she returned to Paris and immediately
joined Auclert. She also took up writing under the pseudonym.Madame
Godot. When offered a candidacy in 1885, she remarked pluckily, "I want
my share of the ridicule."195 That she got, As the October election ap-
proached, the FédEration's list aroused a storm of vituperative comment.
Later feminists interpreted the decline of ridicule as an indication of
growing public sympathy, but in 1885, with ridicule coming from all sides,
Auclert drew a different conclusion. Citing hostile articles in Gil Blas,
Le National, and Le Figaro (which ran favorable notices as well), she
claimed that men had begun to panic. Male cynicism, sarcasm, and
boycott of feminist news, she felt, was a sure sign of progress -— and

196

perhaps it was, at least compared to apathy. Whatever its meaning,

however, abuse showered the candidates, particularly Saint—Hilaire.

 

193La Citoyenne, October 1885.

 

.I
19iMaitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographique. IX: 77-

 

,.
19)I D t 223 E§m§§s 6 September 1885.
196

La Citoyenne, September 1885.

257
Voltaire's "Dame Voilee," for example, announced that "definitely the
feminine candidates are very sick:"

After successive refusals by all women having some intelligence,
some good sense and some celebrity, the famous committee presided
over by the sympathetic friend of snails, Monsieur Jules Allix, has
had to show little discrimination in its choices and to take at ran-
dom, to help itself, to the first women who came by . . . .

There is one especially, much ignored by the public, but well
known in the offices of newspapers and the bureaus of publishers that
she besieges, and whose comic physiognomy will carry the last blow to
Mademoiselle Barberousse's attempt and kill it under ridicule . . .

She is Madame Saint-Hilaire, her true name Madame Godot'zsié7.

Oh! she is a type, a curious type, amusing as possible.

You must have often seen, descending in small steps from.the
heights of Montmartre to the rue du Croissant, a small wizened old
lady carrying under her arm a packet wrapped in newspaper -— those
are her works -— and followed by a hideous dog, always horribly dirty,
a kind of seeing-eye dog belonging to no known species . . . .

One would spontaneously take her, thanks to her get-up and gait,
for one of the quadrupeds of the Corvi circus . . . .

Absolutely illiterate . . . . and of an ignorance that exceeds
all limits, she has dreamed for ten years of living by her pen and
she rails against Monsieur Zola, Monsieur Daudet and the others who
congest the paths of celebrity; against editors and journalists who
do not understand her or who envy the originality of her talent . . . .

She will ask you seriously if you have heard of someone named
Miraheau e e o 0

She believes that Raphael is a nineteenth century painter, takes
Rembrandt for one of our contemporaries . . . .

Nearly twenty years ago she was thrown in with Victor Hugo at
Guernesey; she calls him with pridelmgg confrére . . . .1 7

The campaign left little concrete evidence of its impact. Henri
Rochefort, "prince of the gutter press," headed the Federation's ticket
in the Seine, where about one-third of Barberousse's cohorts presented
themselves.198 Nearly five hundred candidates sought the Seine's thirtya
eight seats, and when no list secured a majority on the first turn the
Fédération withdrew from the campaign. Rochefort, who seemed primarily

concerned with drumming up support for his Intransigant, accepted the

 

1971A? Voltaire, 21‘ August 1885.

198Ibid.

258
thirty-eighth spot on a Guesdist-Blanquist list for the ballotage.199
The Federation's other candidates apparently ran outside the Seine,
perhaps as part of the nine-woman contingent presented by Les Femmes
independantes de Versailles. Election officials refused to count votes
cast for women, however, so the magnitude of the defeat remained unknown.
Equally unclear was the effect of La Citoyenne's call to support pro-
feminist males on the second ballot.200 Only the village of Saint-Sever
(Landes) produced a feminist statistic. Two women voted there on 4 Oct-
ober, bringing its mayor, Monsieur de Dubedout, a 200 franc fine.201

The election results provided suffragists and their opponents
with propaganda. Republicans fared badly at the first turn, but recovered
in the ballotagg. With fifty-six percent of the vote, they secured 367
seats in the new Chamber of Deputies, compared to the Right's 202.202
In Auclert's eyes, the outcome simply sanctioned the most scandalous of
royalties, that of sex. Rightist gains also revealed that, despite havb
ing possessed the ballot for years, men lacked political education. Only
woman suffrage, Auclert exclaimed, could correct that fault and.make men

203

conscious of their duty. Richer, in contrast, accused the Federation

of siphoning off Republican votes and alienating feminism's natural

 

199Roger L. Williams, Henri Rochefort: Prince of the Gutter
Press , 195a
200 . . .

La Citoyenne, October 1885. Sowerwine Cites the vote totals
for the Fédération's list, which included several prominent advocates of
women's rights: Allix, Lissagaray, Lockroy, Michelin, Elinée Reclus, Tony
Reveillon, and vaillant. Only three of the Fédération candidates received
fewer votes than Allix's 171. Lockroy, an incumbent, received the most,
272,650. Sowerwine, Women and Socialism in France 1871-1921, 50-1.

0
“OlLa Citoyenne, January 1886.

202Gagnon, France since 1789, 2&2.

203m Citoyenne, October 1885.

259

supporters. "I have no intention," he claimed after the election, "of
dwelling anew on the disastrous consequences of the electoral campaign so
maladroitly provoked by Mlles. Barberousse and Hubertine Auclert . . . .
[Sht7 the cause that we have to defend meets enough hostility already and
includes enough adversaries that we must have the prudence not to divide
ourselves." Many peeple misunderstand our demands, Richer continued, so
we must "unite our efforts, 2 femmes! in order that it can no longer be

said that you are your own worst enemies:"204

Within the suffrage camp, Auclert and others persisted in their
criticism of the inordinate number of candidates, which accounted for
why "the most determined suffragists abstained from taking part in the

005

demonstration."" Unfortunately, Auclert implied, some women had put per-
sonal ambition ahead of women's rights. If fewer women had run, she charged,
their votes would have been counted like Rouzade's in 1881.

The Fédération had alsolflundered in neglecting to send a delegate
to the‘22££i_ouvrier, which had sponsored Rouzade's earlier bid.206 Never-
theless, subsequent activists looked back on the campaign as a turning point
for woman suffrage. Prior to the outbreak of the First WOrld war at least
four doctoral dissertations in law gave close and favorable scrutiny to
Barberousse's registration claim.207 And before the year was out, the

shadow campaign of 1885 helped provoke the General Council of the Seine to re-

cord the first vote by an elected assembly on woman's political rights.

 

204Le Droit des Femmes, l Nevember 1885.

205

206 .
La Citoyenne, October 1885.

Auclert, Le VOte des Femmes, 111.

207Vital Gougeon, Du VOte des Femmes; Antoine Martin, De la situa—
tion politique des femmes (Law thesis, University of Paris; Paris, 1902);
Jean le Couteulx du Molay, Les Droits politiques de la femme (Law thesis,
University of Paris; Paris, 1913); Paul de Poulpiquet, Le Suffrage de la
femme en France (Law thesis, University of Caen; Paris, 1912).

260

Une Vie Isolée: Auclert's Diary 1883-1886

As an advocate of a minority point of view within a movement
that had little else to draw on except enthusiasm, Auclert frequently
despaired. In the first of twenty-five diary entries covering the
period from June 1883 to March 1886, she wrote:

I work harder than a mercenary but I am not rewarded like
one -- The mercenary finds instant satisfaction in the results
of his labor, and, after a hard day of toil, the supreme re-
laxation: affection! love!

As for me! Nothing! but . . . suspicion, envy, ridicule, hate!

All along the line negative results. I stand alone against the
prejudiced and when I sense the goal close at hand, having over-
come the greatest difficulties, I am hurled back to the gtarting
point. What I do would seem sublime if I were rich [bug] being
poor it is only ridiculous.

I fight exclusively for women. I exert myself to liberate
them, to exalt their qualities, to conceal their faults, and
these vile slaves would repay me for defending them so ardently
by spitting in my face if they could.

Those who understand me have no faith in me. People like me
reject a place in the world and wish to make the most extensive
changes that have yet occurred in the social order.

However much I may seem reckless to all, I am.sensitive and
small. Rather than make excuses for my audacity, I would better
disarm.my enemies perhaps if I knew how to make the most of myself.

However hopeless the struggle may seem and as I have been
created equal, I have an unquenchable faith. One ofoghis Christian
belief must toil hard and long to quell the beasts.

The themes in this first entry reoccur throughout the diary.
Auclert perceived her cause as unquestionably just, but its advocacy
left her isolated. Mockery and disappointment were her constant com-
panions. Enemies despised her; friends had no confidence in her.

Every anticipated success vanished, forcing her to wage the same battles
over and over again. She lacked the credibility that wealth might con-
fer, and she refused to disarm her opponents by adopting a typically

feminine stance. Even women would have spit in her face if given a

 

208Hubertine Auclert, "Diary,” MSS (Provisional Code 4248) at
Bibliothique Historique de la Ville de Paris, entry for June 1883.

261

chance. Pitted against a society of beasts, she vacillated between the
easy optimism of a martyr possessed of the truth and the pessimism.born
of an awareness of the personal price her faith exacted.

The diary also offers an unusual insight into the problems that
plagued the daily operations of groups like Auclert's. In an entry on
the difficulties of finding vendors for La Citoyenne, she noted a day
spent going "up and down the exterior boulevard in front of benches
filled with human brutes, dandies, bums, etc.” Finally, she discovered

” whom she approached

"a figure slightly less repulsive than the others,
"timidly and with a suppliant's air" amid "jeers and dirty jokes.” He
agreed to the work, which meant showing up the next day at Auclert's
aparnment. Others also agreed, but out of more than a hundred ”hooli-
gens” who tramped to her door to pick up their newspapers not one returned
with the proceeds. ”So much time, so much pain, so much suffering use-
lessly wasted,” Auclert reflected after the "sale."209 Occasionally
her vendors came back, Auclert wrote a few months later, which required
her "to wait sometimes until ten o'clock." And then, they returned
"reeling, insolent,” and, instead of turning over the proceeds, they
demanded additional "bottle money.” Refused, they left ”cursing all
the while as they descended the stairs," while the ”building reverber-
ated from the vulgar insults."210
Auclert's friends worried for her safety in dealing with so

many street people, but she discounted the danger.211 More bothersome

were the constant interruptions. A typical day found her finalizing

 

2091bid.

21°Ib1d.. 2 March 1884.

211Ibid., June 1883.

.Fl
I‘____4_'

 

262

La Citoyenne's copy for the printers and receiving a request frommég
figgig for an article that had to be in by midnight. Then a vendor
stopped in and, after a few minutes of chit-chat, left without his news-
papers. Tired and hungry, Auclert quickly threw a outlet on the grill.
Three more vendors came by, asking about prices, and the outlet burned
while Auclert answered their questions. One bite later, a subscriber
rang, and, fearful of making a bad impression, Auclert left her meal for
yet another conversation. When at last she returned to her table, the
meal was cold, and she was so hungry that she could not eat.212
Auclert's difficulties stemmed in part from a lack of able assis-
tants. ”Jesus in the Garden of Olives had faithful apostles,” she bit-
terly complained; "as for me I feel that I have truly no one with me;
the end of each meeting, seeing that it has been useless, is my Calvary,

”213 “I am always at the same point,“ she repeated

my Garden of Olives.
on another occasion, "much hated and little heard. These brave imbe-
ciles after whom I chase to help me rely on me to do Z;verything7' and

"21“ Difficul-

believe themselves destined to play the role of critic.
ties also grew out of crossed signals and unanticipated developments.

A week's preparation for a meeting at the ggllg.ggg_Capucines want for
naught, for example, when Auclert found out at the last minute that the
hall had mistakenly been let to another party. "These things only

happen to me,” she recorded. ”My life is a continuity of wasted ef-

 

forts."215 Two months earlier, in April 1884, a similar problem arose
212Ibid., 2 March 1884.
213
Ibid., 24 September 1883.
21"Ibid., 24 April 1335.
215

Ibid., 14 June 1884.

263

when, with a hall secured, the principal speaker attempted to bow out.
"In truth I am a singular imbecile," Auclert wrote disparagingly, and
then despairingly: "What is the best thing in life? It is death!”216
Auclert lived in terror of having to speak before large audiences.
She lacked confidence in her ability to reach listeners, and she feared
the cutting remarks that her words so often provoked. A brief entry on
one of her forays during the 1885 shadow campaign reflected both concerns:
At an electoral meeting at the salle Moliére for the feminine
candidates, I was forced to mount the rostrum. Certainly the
listeners were much deceived in seeing me so ineloquent; much
applause and I finished with a blunder in proposing a collection
for posters and for these women. Not a hand went up in support
of my proposal.
As I climbed down from the rostrum to leave the hall, I heard
three women say: 'That Hubertine Auclert what gall she has to
mount the rostrum to pick.men's pockets.’ 1
The principal speaker who attempted to avoid the meeting of April
1884 was Doctor Eugene Verrier, a phalanstérien who published a pamphlet
the following month on La Femme devant la science.218 His reluctance
to attend, however, fell far short of the searing disappointment that
others induced in Auclert. These others included Paule Minck and Louise
Barberousse. In 1883 a frightful English woman had insulted Auclert;
in 1884 the insults had come from Barberousse. "Why?” asked Auclert,
"Because as small as I make myself I still annoy the ambitious."219

Most disappointing of all was Victor Hugo, who, like Dumas fils, de-

clined to assume a position in Auclert's groups. In light of his

 

216Ibid., 18 April 1884.

217;b1d.. 12 September 1885.

218Engine Verrier, La Femme devgnt la science, considérie au
point de vue du szsteme gérébral (conference at the salle Rivoli on

28 May 1883), Paris, 1883.

219Auc1ert, "Diary,” 31 October 1884.

 

 

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264

subsequent actions, his failure to do so led Auclert to speculate about
his motives:

Victor Hugo, who refused the honorary presidency of the Sogiété

du Suffrage has just accepted the presidency of the Societe contre

la Vivisection. Why this difference? Because those who asked him

to join the suffrage society of progress were poor, while those who

urged him 530101“ the anti-scientific anti-vivisection society

were rich.
Yet Auclert mourned Hugo's death in l885 with characteristic fatalima:
"Ah, why stupid death did you not take me, the lonely, the sad, the
hopeless, in place of this god of the earth so loved and adored?"221
She and other members of her Cercle also marched in Hugo's magnificent
funeral cortege, where, despite ten hours without anything to eat or
drink and placement by reactionaries at the rear of the procession,
their suffrage banner elicited numerous tippings of hats and wavings
of handkerchiefs.222

The individual who engendered the most profound ahbivalence in

Auclert was Antonin Lévrier, the man she married in 1888. Their working
relationship covered at least the previous decade, and one of the ear-
liest entries in Auclert's diary reveals a personal attachment of long
standing. In August 1883, after a separation of nine months, Auclert
traveled to the coast to meet him. Strangeness born of absence provoked
a coolness between them at first, and they talked of ”indifferent
things” until they rediscovered each other over dinner.223 However,

separation continued to plague their relationship. In March 1885,

Auclert wrote:

 

220

Lbid., 7 February 1884.
221Ibid., 22 May 1885.
222Ibid., 1 June 1885.

223

Ibide. 11 August 1883a

265

How'my character has changed! I now‘Lexperiencg/ more than any-
one else the anxiety of love. I am indifferent to life and death,
but not yet indifferent to politics. I passionately attend the
meetings of the Fegeratign Républicaine Socialiste.

I think that Azntonig/'will not return to Paris. What effect
time has on the livliest of emotions. We write letters as stran-
gers, which is funny as well as sad.224

Auclert prefaced these observations with a typical lament:

Life would be good if I were alone by myself! But I am alone
everywhere, alone in public life as in private life! Alone at home,
alone at the Société le gagfrage, alone at the journal, always
alone, everywhere alone.

A year later, the tension between the cause she loved and the
man she loved reached a peak. On 12 March 1885, Auclert noted the
dilemma:

I sensed a feeling of well-being, I was happy for several days.
Then this morning I received a letter from Antonin that turned my
joy to tears; it announced that he was about to be sent tg_Tahiti
to replace the imperial procurator at a salary of 4,500 [francg7l
I cried, cried, cried, rummaged through an atlas. Marie tried to
comfort me, but everything has become bleak for me. This will pass
and if I went with Antonin to the end of the world, I would never
forgive myself for having sacrificed Marie, my liberty, the cause,
my quasi-well-being to a man who has always brought me more pain
than joy. Love was always thus, so fragile, so easily broken!
Howwmuch I have scarificed as I have loved to be loved so little.
Beautiful women have the joys and triumphs of love. Ugly me has
had only its sorrows and sacrifices. Is nature so cruel as to put
into the bodies least made for love the hearts most avid for love?226

By month's end, Lévrier confirmed Auclert's worst fears. "Despite all
my prayers and supplications Antonin is leaving. He told me coldly

without hesitation: 'I have no choice but to stab you to the heart.”227

 

22"Ibid., 6 March 1885.

225ibid.

226Ibid., 12 March 1886.

227Ibid., 29 March 1886.

266

Conclusion

Three years after the shadow campaign of 1885 and two years after
the Tahiti crisis, Auclert married Lévrier. They immediately embarked
for Algeria, settling at Frendah where Lévrier had accepted an appoint-
ment as justice of the peace. How’much Auclert felt the distance would
affect her cause by then is unclear. Nor is it clear how long she in-
tended to remain in North Africa. She designated Maria Martin, whose
name first appeared on La Citoyenne's masthead in June 1888, as the
journal's new director. From across the Mediterranean she kept in
touch with metropolitan events and continued to write for La Citoyenne.
She also drew on the North African situation to develop new charges
against the gystéme masculiniste. like the complicity of Frenchmen in
permitting polygamy to thrive among their Muslim subjects.228 As the
months passed, however, Auclert's influence declined. The new director
gradually assumed complete control of the journal, and by the time
Livrier died and Auclert returned to Paris in 1892, La Citoxenne had
disappeared. Its last issue, number 187, bore the date 15 November 1891.
Back in the capital, Auclert took an apartment at 151 rue de la Roquette,
near Livrier's tomb at Fire Lachaise.229

Under Maria Martin's direction, La Citoyenne reappeared as‘Lg
Journal des Femmes, which survived from December 1891 until Martin's
death in January 1911. The Journal's program differed from its prede-
cessor's in only one respect: it slightly deemphasized woman suffrage

in favor of other feminist objectives. Bitterness from the take-over

lingered on, however, and even after a lapse of seventeen years Auclert

 

228La Cito enne, 1 August 1891.

229Marie Chaumont, ”Hubertine Auclert," 44-45.

e‘

267

could do no better than refer to her former colleague as "that woman."
The "indelicate proceedings" provoked a single satisfaction: Deputy de
Gasté completely dissociated himself from the new'venture and withdrew
his subsidies.23o Auclert never attempted to found another newspaper.
She regrouped her Société as best she could -- Martin had also created
a new group called Solidariti -- but confined her writings to selected
journals, pamphlets, and books. Between 1896 and 1909, she contributed
at least fifty-four articles to Le Radical, as well as others to‘Lg
Mggig,‘gg_gibre Parole. and the feminist daily La Fronde (1897-1905).231
In addition to her 1878 Le Droit politique de la femme and her post-
humous Les femmes au gouvernail (1926), she published Les femmes arabes

en Algérie (1900), Le vote des femmes (1908), and three pamphlets,

L'Egalité sociale et politique de l'homme et de la femme (1879),

W (1904). and Le Nom de 1. femme (1905).232

The milieu that confronted Auclert upon her return from Algeria
was singularly hostile to woman suffrage. In her absence, Deraismes
and Richer had staged a second Woman's Rights Congress during the 1889
Revolutionary centennial, which, like the Congress of 1878, banned the
discussion of woman's political rights. A third major congress in 1900
followed suit, and it was not until 1908 that feminists accorded woman
suffrage an official airing. Nevertheless, Auclert persisted in her
attempt to convert both feminists and the public at large. Petitions

continued to flow from her pen. She induced Clovis Hugues to submit

 

230Auclert, Le Vgtg des femmes, lll.

2318MB, Dossier Auclert.

232Hubertine Auclert, Les Femmes arabes en Algeria (Paris, 1900);
L' Egalité sociale et politigue de 1' homme et de la femme (Marseille,
1879); L' Argent de la femme (Paris, 1904); Le Nom de la femme (Paris,
1905).

268

3,000 signatures to the Chamber on behalf of the célibataire vote in
1901,233 and in 1904 she urged Premier Emile Combes simply to decree
suffrage in order to enlist republican women, his "best auxiliaries,"
in the struggle to separate church and state.234 Demonstrations also
proliferated. In 1904 Auclert and several supporters protested against
the centenary of the Code by ripping a copy to shreds at the base of
the Venddme column.235 Four years later she invaded a polling booth in
the 4th arrondissegggg and smashed a collection urn.236 A few'months
after that she led a band of twenty suffragists into the Chamber, but-
ton-holed Deputy Charles Benoist and flung suffrage billets onto the
floor from the gallery.237 She also introduced two new'forms of pro-
test. In 1901 her Sociité issued suffrage stamps designed to appear
alongside regular letter postage -- a technique that American feminists
and the French Radical-Socialist Party later adopted. And a short time
afterward, she devised a series of pro-vote postcards.238

The net effect of Auclert's persistence brought her little per-
sonal support. During the first decade of the twentieth century, large
segments of the feminist movement rallied to woman suffrage, but Auclert
offended many of the converts. They chose to concentrate on the muni-

cipal vote, whereas Auclert, who had often advanced restricted proposals

in the past, pressed increasingly for full political suffrage. Most new

 

233Auclert, Le Votg des femmes, 178.

23“Gougeon, Du Vote des femmes, 41.

235Le Journal des Femmes, December 1904.

236Auclert, Le Vgte des femmes, 120.

2378MB, Dossier 398 VOT.

238Auclert, Le Vgte des femmes, 120.

 

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269

suffragists also subscribed to lg suffragisme réformiste, which attemp-
ted to adapt the tactic of lg_bg§ghgjto the new priority. Auclert, in
contrast, represented lg_suffragisme révolutionnaire, which stood for
repeated frontal assaults on all male bastions.239 Their differences
came to a head in 1908. The Woman's Rights Congress of that year final-
ly placed suffrage on its agenda, but Auclert felt that the time for
talk had passed: "After having employed all legal means to obtain their
political rights, feminists are forced to resort to revolutionary

240 Few feminists agreed, however, and two years later Auclert

means.”
lashed back. She accused newcomers of self-seeking, and protested a-
gainst their attempts to stifle the initiators of the movement. Thanks
to them, she spat, ”the discord of suffrage claimants, more than the
indifference of women, retards feminine emancipation."2l.1
Auclert's opponents within the movement identified her with the
violent tactics of the Women's Social and Political Union, founded in
Britain by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903. They made a distinction between
peaceful, law-abiding "suffragists" and disruptive "suffragettes" like
Auclert,'khose temperament was that of English or American militants
and who was a suffragette before the word [Ehme into existenc§7. . . ."242
They also chastised her for imitating the feminist radicals of the
French Revolution, for "not taking into consideration that the recollec-

tion of the uproarious proceedings of those women was perhaps uppermost

in the minds of the men who reelaborated the laws which will -- until

 

239Molay, Les Droits politiques de la femme, 261.

240Auclert, Le Vote des femmes, 121.

“Ire Matin, 23 March 1910.

2l'zAbensour, Histoire énérale, 275.

 

r.

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270

they are abolished -- prove an insurmountable obstacle to the admission

of women to the franchise."243

Consequently, Auclert found it very dif-
ficult to play a part in the expanding suffrage movement. She refused
to represent the National Council of French Women, founded in 1901, at
an international suffrage conference in 1906.244 Shortly after, she
accepted the chairmanship of the Council's suffrage section, but re-
signed a few'months later. When Jeanne Schmahl, one of her most persis-
tent critics, helped create the French Union for women's Suffrage in

1909, Auclert declined to participate.245

 

Despite the criticism, provoked in part by her own uncompromising
attitude, Auclert inspired several advances. Municipal and national
suffrage eluded her, but working women secured the vote for cgnseils
gg’prud'hommes in 1907 and eligibility in 1908. Auclert also played
an instrumental role in the ”seat law” of 1900, which required employ-
ers to provide chairs for salesgirls. More important, however, was her
service to the movement. Through a protest published in Le Temps in the
early 1880's, she introduced the word ”feminism" to the French public.

So broad was her defense of woman suffrage that the case for the vote

1
J“

remained essentially unchanged, and so sweeping were her protest tactics

 

that most subsequent feminists became her imitators. Her testing of the
administrative and judicial channels clarified woman's subordinate po-
sition, and awakened reformers to the need for legislative action. Her
devotion to the cause provided a model of determination that even her

severest critics could not deny. On 13 March 1914 she presided over a

 

243Schmahl, "Progress of the Women's Rights Movement in France,"
83’8“.
244
Le Journal des Femmes, June 1906.
245

Grinberg, Historigue du mouvement suffragiste, 9l.

 

 

271

suffrage meeting in the llth arrondissement. Twenty-two days later,

at the age of sixty-six, the doyenne of the French suffragists died.

CHAPTER V
COUNTERATTACK: THE LIGUE FRANCAISE POUR LE DRDIT

DES moms AND THE CONGRESS OF 1889

The activities of Auclert's small band of suffragists provoked
consternation within the movement in the 1880's. No advocate of women's
liberation objected to suffrage in theory, and a few like Deraismes
tried to straddle the issue, perhaps out of a desire to preserve feminist
unity. But most considered it premature. They feared that Auclert's
attempt to substitute ym for 33 m would undermine the move-
ment by alienating potential supporters or destroy the republic by
delivering millions of female votes into the hands of clericals and non-
archists. Consequently those whom Auclert dubbed the ”Old School” rallied
in opposition to the new strategy. They turned to Le'on Richer, who re-
sponded in 1882 by founding the Ligue Francaise pour le Droit des Panes.
Almost overnight the Ligue became the largest of the feminist groups in
France, and, although it suffered alarming membership losses in the last
half of the decade, it successfuly met the suffragist challenge. In
1889, with Auclert off to Algeria, Richer and Deraismes co-hosted the
second French Congress for women's Rights, which once again forbade dis-
cussion of the vote issue. Poor health forced Richer to retire the fol-
lowing year, end Deraismes died in 1891s, but by then “moderate feminism
had acquired such standing that the agitation of the very small Socie'te'
fie Suffrage des Fame; . . . appeared as scarcely more than puerile
gestures in the face of the measured and methodical campaigns conducted

272

273
by the other side for all women's rights, including the right of suf-

frage."1

La Ligue Prangaise mur 1e Droit deg Femes
Richer had little desire to create a new group. Re preferred

the role of pnpagandist to that of organizer, and soon after the 1878
Congress he resigned the presidency of Deraismes' l'Ame‘lioration. For
the next few years he devoted full attention to his monthly Le Droit des
m and later became editor-in-chief of the daily Régubligue radicals
His program of civil reforms remained intact but largely unaccomplished.
A law permitting divorce seemed close at hand, but only in education had
significant breakthroughs occurred. Yet, as a convinced proponent of l;
m, Richer viewed the two developnents as portents of better times.
Cautious, patient determination during the 1870's had sewn the seeds of
reform, and barring major mishaps the new decade would produce a rich
harvest.

Auclert's aggressive campaign threatened Richer's easy optimism.
In short order, she denounced the 1878 Women's Rights Congress, appealed
successfully to the 1879 Socialist Congress, and caused waves of news-
paper ink to flow in reaction to her registration drive, tax-strike, and
census boycott. Two years after Richer stepped down as l'Ame‘lioration's
president, Auclert created La Citoyenns and through it enlisted the sup-
port of several prominent journalists and politicians, particularly
ds Gaste'. The next year, in October 1882, Auclert applauded a speech by
Deraismes in favor of woman suffrage and approvingly noted how far

l'Ame'lioration's leader had come since the 1878 Congress.2

 

llamas, "La Vie st la mort de feminisme,” 38.

2La Citoyenne, 1 October - 2 November 1882.

 

 

C.

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OQUOJ'

274

Richer reacted quickly. Within weeks of Deraismes' speech, he
announced the founding of the Ligue Francaise pour le Droit des Femes.
The names of its initial sixty-six members appeared in the December 1882
issue of Le Droit des Felines, and the Ligue held its first general as-
sembly the following month. For a moment the new organization and its
rival had nearly identical titles, but Auclert relinquished the word
"droit" to Richer when she renamed her group the Socie'te' 1e Suffrage des
Fen-les.

Shortly after the Ligue's birth, Richer published Le Code des
m (1883). a handbook spelling out ”the most urgent reforms” and "the
easiest to realize inmediately."3 Designed as a legislative guide, Le
Code deg Pennies demanded revision or elimination of sixty-five provisions
in the Civil Code and Article 339 of the Penal Code.“ As in his 1873
Le Di res, Richer supplemented his critique with model laws, hoping to
find others like Alfred Naquet, the "father of divorce,“ who would press
within parliament for women's civil rights. Consistent with la brdche,
Richer excluded woman suffrage from his program. He also eschewed tac-
tics of confrontation, so clearly identified with Auclert's campaign.
Even legal confrontation might alienate potential allies, whereas Richer
intended to respond "to the preoccupations of those — a large lumber I
am sure--- who do not much believe in the efficacy of petitions addressed
to the chmlbers. We shall therefore proceed less by way of petition

than by the introduction of laws. Will they say now that we are not

 

3Richer's emphasis. Le Droit des Felines, December 1882.

hmcher, Le Code des Fetmnes, 374-400. Article 339 of the Penal
Code sanctioned the double standard for adultery. Richer's Civil Code
proposals touched on woman's condition in respect to witness rights,
choice of residence, adultery, matemal power, second marriages, separa-
tion, illegitimate children, paternity, paternal power, nationality, and
guardianship. For the Ligus's principles and program, see APPENDIX 6.

275

practical people?"5

Richer initially perceived the Ligue as the spearhead of a mass
movement. He took as his organizational model the Ligue de l'lhlseigne-
ment, founded in 1866 by Jean Mace'. It ”had done so much so well” to
promote free, lay, obligatory education, noted Richer, and during its
first four years it had acquired fifty-nine circles comprising seventeen
thousand members.6 Richer may also have hoped to duplicate the feat of
Le'o Taxil, a brother Preemason like Mace", who federated another seventeen
thousand men and women into an Anti-Clerical League in the early 1880's..7
In any case size held the key to success. Auclert's premature campaign
might require only a small band of hardcore activists, wrote Richer in
November 1882, ”but for a Socie'ts' that wants to be reformist, it is cer-
tain that a large number of adherents means success."8 The Ligue's more
influential members had so far come from the ”most advanced groups" in
parliament, he admitted the next month, but recruitment should not stop
there:

For my part I ma going to force myself -- and I intend to succeed --

to recruit members from among the diverse nuances of the republi-

can majority; our legal projects will then have defenders on all

benches.9
Furthermore, the Ligue had a distinct advantage over Hood's ventures

We can do so much better because to achieve the program of the

Ligue de l'Enseignement the State had to spend millions; -

whereas to give us satisfaction neither the State, nor the

departments, nor the communes will have to disburse a son . . . .
I do not say that this [t'hs elimination of woman's civi_l

 

5Le Droit des Felines, December 1882.

6Ibid.
7Hesdings. French Freemasom under the Third Refllic, 99.
8

Le Droit des Pennies, Nomber 1882.

91bid. , December 1882.

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276

disabilitieg can be done in a day, but we shall succeed with

perseverance - and time. Be patient, and success, I predict,

will crown our efforts.10

Richer designated 31 December 1882 as the cut-off date for found-
ing members, but granted a month's extension to accomodate latecomers.ll
In the end one hundred forty—two enrolled under that appellation, and an
additional fifty-two joined by the end of 1883. Males comprised nearly
half the total, ninety-six of one hundred ninety-four, and included
twenty-one politicians: two senators, thirteen deputies, three Paris
municipal councillors, two general councillors, and a mayor, Charles
Riveau of Grenouille (Charente-Infe'rieure), who also served as the local
dg'le'nlle' cantonal mg; lg gmillance 92 M. Fifteen men, including
several of the politicians, lived by the pen as journalists, authors, or
293312 93 lettres. Education contributed three professors (mathematics,
physics, and music), an instituteur, and two students, one in.1aw and the
other in pharmacy. Two lawyers, an architect, and a doctor represented
the professions; two merchants, a broker (3% g_e_ chgge), and a dis-
tiller, business. From the ranks of white collar workers the Ligue drew
a lithographsr, a bookseller, a practicing accountant, a retired accountant,
an inspector of weights and measures, and six clerks. Skilled labor sent
two tailors, a sculptor (statspire), a barber, and a mechanic. The mili-
tary contributed two retired officers. Only one male engaged in a lower
class occupation, cab driver (cocher) Jules Poisson from Nantes.

0f the ninety-eight women only fourteen worked. Eight, including
a Swiss professor, were educators: two ingtigtrices, one institutrice-

W, a director of a girls school, and three other professors (piano,

 

loIbid.

llLe Droit des Felines, December 1882 through December 1883. For
the roster of the Ligue's membership in 1882-1883, see APPMIX H.

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277

singing, and German). Two considered themselves 35% £3 lettres, two
more engaged in peintre dauoise, and another performed as an artiste
lniqge £1 dramatifl . Only one professional woman joined, Doctor

Gue'not of Paris. Three others simply managed their wealth, one as a
rentiére and two as proprie'taires. None worked in comerce or industry,
according to Richer's list. Kore than two-thirds had married, of when

at least four were widows. One of the latter, Madame Marie Horst,

lived at the Pamilistérs de Guise and married its founder, J .-B.-A. Godin,
in 1886. Three women and four men refused to permit Richer to publish
their full names.

Fifteen of the Ligue's members lived outside Francs, four in
Switzerland, one each in Belgim! and Italy, and nine in England. The
British contingent included the Second Republic's expatriate feminist
Jeanne Deroin and her daughter Cécils; Helen Blackburn, who in 1902
published A Recog gf the Women'g ngfmg figment in fig Bgtigh Isles;
and three officials of the Bristol woman Suffrage Society. The most im-
portant foreigner resided in Switzerland, )ladelaoisslle Mary Vincent of
Vernox-Hontreux. She had followed the French movement for over a dozen
years, and Richer described her as “the true founder of the Ligue Pran’aise,"
possibly because she donated eleven hundred francs to the fledgling or-
ganization.12

Within France the Ligue drew members from twenty-five of the
nation's eighty-eight departments. But fifteen of the twenty—five
contributed only a single adherent, and another six just two each. Eleven
members, including six deputies, came from seven departments forming a

rough triangle between Lyons, Marseilles, and Nice. About a dozen adherents

 

12L!) Droit des Pass, March 1883.'

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278

spread equally thinly, lived in departments dotted across France from

the Swiss border (Doubs) to the channel (Seine-Infe'rieure and the Some).
With the exception of loire-Infe'rieure where the Ligue established a
branch at Nantes, Charente-Infe'rieure's five members gave it the highest
total of any department outside the Seine. Elsewhere within metropolitan
France only Lot-et-Garonne contributed a member, Ernest Cabral of Agen.
Three joined from Algeria.

Outside the capital, Richer's greatest success was in Nantes,
whose sixty-odd members represented nearly a third of the Ligue's total.
Led by a retired infantry captain, Pierre-Louis Goron, the mg nautaise
held its first meeting in February 1883. A month later a second meeting
chose Charles Laisant, a deputy, as honorary president. As with the
Ligue as a whole, almost half the Nantes group's members were male and
two-thirds of the females had married. Richer hoped that other towns
would follow Nantes' example, but in April 1883 he admitted its unique
status: "After Paris it is the only city in France where we count enough
adherents to form a local group."13 Yet, considering the predominantly
Parisian make—up of Deraismes' and Auclert's organizations, the Ligue's
branch at Nantes represented a significant achievement. For the first
time in France a feminist association with headquarters in Paris had
established a solid following in one of the provinces.

Nevertheless the Ligue's real strength lay in its Parisian cadre,
which reflected the moderate and influential clientele Richer hoped to
recruit. Fewer than half of the Ligue's mmbers came from the capital,
but many of these held positions within "the diverse nuances of the re-

publican majority“ that Richer prized so highly. Fifty were men, among

 

13Ibid.. April 1883.

 

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279
thm the two senators and thirteen deputies as well as the majority of

professional and literary figures. Over half the employed women, including
the doctor and the three professors, also lived in Paris. Several of the
other women, who numbered thirty-three in all, belonged to charitable
and philanthropic organizations. The Ligue's eleven member executive
comittee, elected by the first general assembly on 21 January 1883, was
entirely Parisian. Its six women included Ame'lie Germance, the Mists
lEiqgs .e_t_ dramatigug, and the wives of Georges Martin, physics professor,
and Lucien-Victor Meunier, 33.91.29. d3 lettres. In addition to Richer, its
five males included two writers, Paul Bonnstain and Charles Ge‘rsrd, and
two deputies, Laisant and Guillot. The first general assasbly also elected
two honorary vice-presidents, Maria Deraismes and Auguste Vacqusrie, edi-
tor-in-chief of Ram. Victor Hugo served as honorary president.
Richer drew on Hugo's acceptance conditions to embasize the Ligue's mod-
eration. "You yourself promise me not to throw in exaggerations, to main-
tain your program intact?," the illustrious poet and senator asked, “then
I accept. I have known you for a long time. Moreover it is you who di-
rects [t’he Ligug], is it not?” "Parfaitment," responded Richer. ”Then
use my name,” Hugo concluded with a cordial handshakeclk

The size of the Ligue fell far short of Incher's expectations.
Its nearly two-hundred recruits initially surpassed the combined member-
ship of Deraimses' l'Ame‘lioration and Auclert's Suffrage des Felines, and
among feminist groups only the Ligue had a provincial branch. But Richer
had anticipated more. The Ligue de l'Ehseignement had grown spectacularly
after its first year, whereas the Ligue never exceeded its original total.

Alexandre Dumas fils eventually joined, as did Jean Mace, and its delegation

 

ll'Ihid" February 1883.

 

«Owooo-ce

280

in the Senate increased from two to five. But its representation in the
Chamber, despite the addition of four new deputies, decreased from thirteen
to six, mirroring the overall decline in mmnbership. A decade after its
creation the Ligue numbered only ninety-five individuals, fifty-five of
whom resided in or around Paris. Of those who joined the first year only
forty remained in 1892.15

Among potential recruits, subscribers to Le Droit des Fmes
proved the most disappointing to Richer. Senators, deputies, and muni-

cipal councillors had joined the Ligue, Richer wrote in December 1882,

“but it is especially to our subscribers that we address ourselves."16

If dues stand in the way, he said, "once again we repeat that this point
is secondary"

Without doubt in such an affair money is not to be scorned;
we need much of it — a great deal even — especially if we
wish to act effectively on public opinion, to expand our prop-
aganda, to organize conferences, meetings, to hold numerous
gatherings in Paris as well as in the departments; - but we
need numbers above all.

Therefore let dues stop no one.

We have received contributions of 25 francs, 13 francs, 10
francs. But we have also received those of 50 centimes, 25
centimes, - and even less.

Consequently one would be wrong to permit oneself to lag due
to this dsteil.17

The lag never slackened. After 128 founding members had enrolled,
Richer admitted the prospect of defeat: "I am the first to recognize that
the largest nrsnber of male and female subscribers to our journal still

have not responded to the appeal."18

 

lstr the Ligus's 1892 roster, see APPENDIX I.

16he Droit deg Femes, December 1882.

17Ibid.

18Ibid., January 1883.

 

281
The response of Richer's fellow Freemasons also caused disappoint»-
ment. Both the Ligue de l'Enseignement and Taxil's Anti-Clerical League
drew heavily on Masonic support. In its first two years, for example,
Mace"s organization attracted fifteen entire lodges, a large umber of
individual Masons, and the endorsement of the 1868 International Masonic

Congressol9

Richer drew heavily on individual Masons, two of the five
men on the Ligue's first executive comittee belonged as did the husband
of one of its female members, Madmne Jeanne-Victor Meunier, and in 1892
at least a third of Richer's truncated male following held Masonic rank.
But whereas lay education and anti-clericalism received over-whelming
support from the various lodges, the struggle against the gsténe gag-
5;;an left Masons divided. They continued to exclude women, as the
Deraismes episode at Pecq illustrated, and no entire lodge ever adhered
to a feminist group. As a result, “the few societies concerned with
women's rights, such as the League for the Protection of Yemen and The
Right of Women, although encouraged by individual Masons, were not sup-
ported by Masonry as a whole."20
Lacking a steady influx of new recruits fro. groups like _L_g
Droit des Fmes' subscribers and the Masons, the Ligue began to shrink.
Deaths, including Victor Hugo's in 1885, took a small tell. Two other
names vanished from the roster when mcher stopped listing his pseudonyms,
Georges Bath and Jeanne Mercoeur, as separate tubers. Others simply
quit, some out of defeatims, a few outof optinin. In 1887, Richer

assessed the situation in an address to the Ligue's general assusblyx

 

”Headings, men Egonasom under 3.2. mag Remblic, 95-6.

20Ibid., 98. A comparison of the Ligue's 1892 roster with the
Masons mentioned by Readings indicates that eleven of its thirty-three-
nen had once been Masons; Vacqueriernarodet, Deschanel, Guyot, de He're'dia,
Laisant, m6, Martin, Richer, Thulie', and Viviani.

 

 

‘ O

U

era.”

DA

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IQ.

282
A certain number of adherents have retired giving the pretext of

business stagnation, and for the detemining motive, for the same
reason, that we are attaining nothing. They no longer want to
accept useless sacrifices. Others, -— and the fact needs to be
Z??3§§§.1§'i§2.3‘ Ltfiiififiln°22§hx§§§§§1°mmd’ m" i“
Members must judge for themselves "these two contradictory allegations,”
Richer concluded, but “the truth is that the spirit wanes and that devo-
tion grows weary.”22
The decline also reflected an inability to achieve internal
harmony within the Ligue. Throughout the 1880's, expulsions and angry
defections sapped its strength. One of the first individuals to go was
Paul Bonnetain (1858-1899), a prominent 112933 9.3 lettres, who had helped
edit Le Droit des Femmes and served as the Ligue's secretary. His
"crime ,F' comitted within months of the Ligue's creation, consisted
of publishing a book on women that conflicted with the Ligue's program.”
With him when he left went his wife and parents, all of whom had enrolled
as founding members.21‘ A second major expulsion one three years later
when Deputy Maurice Vergoin (Seine—et-Oise), a member of the Ligue—'s
executive comittee, turned up as one of the principals in the de Sombreuil

affaire. The messy business, which involved the shuttling of Mademoiselle

 

21Le Droit de Felines, 15 May 1887.

22222.

23Ibid., June 1883. The book in question was Charlot s'amuse
(2nd ed.; Brussels, 1883). According to the out by P. Leguay in the
Dictionnaire de bio ra hie fran aise (Paris, 1951. , v1, 1028-29), Paul
Bonnetain published his first work at Brussels in 1882, Le tour du monde
d'un tromigr: "He truly made his debut the following year, and by a
work of scandal, Charlot s'amuse, a case study in pathology, filled with
all the extreme naturalistic details in vogue at the time. Charlot brought
its author, in December 1884, before the cour d'assises of Paris.3
Bonnetain was acquitted, "but the author seemed drawn to rowdy literature."

24
A quarter of the Ligue's initial strength one from couples and
family groups; fifty members bore one or another of twenty-one :summnes.
Le Droit de Femme , December 1882; January 1883.

 

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283

Schneider de Sombreuil in and out of Paris and ended in Vergoin's divorce,
threatened the Ligue's public image. Richer eventually had misgivings
about tho Deputy's "guilt," but at the time tho scandal broke (April 1886)
he executed the Ligue's unanimous verdict to demand Vergoin's resignation.25

Most crippling of all was the defection of the Nantes group, which
announced its withdrawal from the Ligue in September 1885. Richer con-
ceded that it had every right to become autonomous, but the group's hos-
tility left him puzzled. "The rupture is today complete,“ he informed the
1886 general assembly, but the origins of the split ”remain and will truly
always remain an enigma for us." On at least five occasions, according
to Richer's reports, the ex-branch had censured the parent organization.
It had first accused Richer of "financial operations" and failure to pub-
lish the Ligue's accoxmts. Richer denied the charge and referred ”the
defamatory group" to several specific issues of Le Droit des Pennies. He
also pointed out that the Ligue had barely enough income to meet fixed
expenses let alone engage in speculation. Then the Nantes group had
shifted its attack, accusing the Ligue of spending too little. "That is
the highest comedy," Richer countered, citing the Ligue's meagre 1,511;
franc reserve. Indeed, pronounced an exasperated Richer, “the proof of
the inanity of the reasons invoked to justify this strange attitude stems
from the contradictory resolutions voted by the m nantaise." But
unable to prevent the defection, he could do no more than urge his fol-
lowers to look beyond it: "let us not attach, Mesdames and Messieurs,
to this incident, however regrettable it may be, more importance than

26

it warrants.”

 

25Ibid., April 1886, May 1886, August 1886, November 1886.
Vergoin accused Richer of obtaining his information from the conservative
press. Richer denied the charge.

26Ibid., 6 September 1885, 1 November 1885, 2 May 1886.

 

,g’I

284

Perhaps the growing dependence of Le Droit des Femmes on Ligue sub-
sidies angered the Nantes group. Like other feminist newspapers, Richer's
constantly flirted with bankruptcy. Expenses always outran subscription
income, despite attempts to improve circulation through reduced rates for
extra copies, free oil portraits painted from photographs, and complimentary
issues of the Journal du Magnetism, monthly organ of the French Hypnosis
Society. Rucher repeatedly pleaded with subscribers to pay on time and
urged recipients of free copies to subscribe, for at ten francs per year
"the sacrifice is not of a nature to burden a budget very heavily." In
February 1885 he attempted to boost revenues by shifting from monthly to
fortnightly publication. To attract more purchasers he lowered the price
from eighty to forty centimes, and to cut costs he reduced the pages from
sixteen to twelve. The maneuver failed, leaving Le Droit des Femmes depenp
dent on gifts and subsidies. The Deraismes sisters donated several hun-
dred francs each year and others gave smaller amounts, but the crucial dif-
ference came from the Ligue's coffers. Beginning with an initial gift of
#00 francs in 1885, its annual general assemblies regularly appropriated
six-hundred francs to the enterprise. That amount represented nearly fif-
ty percent of the Ligue's limited receipts. Richer claimed that the Nantes
group contributed only fifty francs in dues to the yearly budget, for
which it received the newspaper free of charge. But whatever the amount
forwarded by the branch, the subsidy may have prompted the split.27

Hficher tried to take the sting out of the Nantes group's defec-
tion by attributing it to natural law. .All new organizations suffer

losses, he asserted, as time winnows those lacking in enthusiasm and

 

27For information on Le Droit des Femmes' financial problems,
see the following issues: February 1882, 4 January 1885, 1 February 1885,
15 February 1885, 3 May 1885, 6 September 1885, 15 November 1885,
3 January 1886, 6 May 1888, 21 December 1890, 2 August 1891.

285
conviction. New recruits would take their place. In the past year, he
informed the Ligue's 1886 general assembly, another deputy had joined,
Michelin, as well as the president of Paris' municipal council,
Abel-Alexandre Hovelacque; the general secretary of the Ligue pour le
Relévement do la Moralite' Publique, Tomy Fallot; and Doctor Henri rhulio’,
author of the "beautiful book entitled La F—e."28 A new branch had also
come into existence, the Gironde group, which centered on Bordeaux and took
the title Cercle Louis-Blane. But the Gironde group had too few members
to offset the net effect of deaths, expulsions, and defections.29 As
a result, Richer gradually abandoned his original emphasis on size and
began to adopt a stance worthy of his rival Auclert. "Besides," he ex-
claimed in 1886, "these losses are for us so much less sensitive as
indifferent [participantg in a Ligue such as ours are a cause of weak-
ness rather than a real source of strength."30 By the following year, he
had completely discarded the stress on numbers:

Indifference has invaded hearts. And I maintain that it manifests
itself everywhere, even in politics.

However, a faithful melons rmnains with us, and these I hope
will not weaken, will not abandon us. I estimate our number at one
hundred. That is few. But above the quantity of numbers, I place
firmness of convictions. . . . The best are still with us. . . .
Perseverance is strength; let us persevere.

Richer blmned much of the Ligue's decline on women. He contrasted

his dwindling cadre to that of the expanding feminist groups in the
United States and Britain. Even in France, he pointed out, Madame

Koechlin-Schwartz's Union des Femes de France, the national Red Cross

 

28Ibid., 2 May 1886.
29Ibid., 1 March 1885. The Gironde group had twenty-nine members.
30Ibid., 2 May 1886.

31Ibid., 15 May 1887.

~. ..‘C“.

286
affiliate, had doubled its size to twelve thousand members in the course of
a single year, 1887.32 In 1888, he asserted that men outnumbered women in
his organization two to one.33 In at least two respects, however, the
thrust of Richer's charge is open to question. For one thing, it seems
unlikely that men formed so large a majority within the Ligue in 1888.
No membership list appeared for that year, but the 1892 roster named
sixty-two women and thirty-three men - the reverse of Richer's earlier

31‘ For another thing, once the Ligue failed to generate mass

assertion.
support, its relative smallness had little effect on its daily operations.
Without doubt, more women would have helped, just as more members of
either sex would have boosted morale, increased income, and enhanced the
prospects of success. A larger following would also have lent greater
weight to petitions and street demonstrations, if Richer had approved of
such Auclert-like tactics. But the Ligue publicly turned out in force on
only one occasion, to grace Hugo's 1885 funeral cortege with ”a magnifi-
cent wreath of natural flowers" costing one hundred fifty iraucs.35
Hence, although thousands of additional recruits might have transformed
the Ligue into a popular movement, a few dozen more could not have made

much difference. Despite Richer's criticism, the Ligue remained at the

end of the decade what it had always been, a pressure group.

 

32Ibid.

33Ibid., 1 February 1888.
“See APPENDIX I.
35W, 2 May 1886. Victor Schoelcher

replaced Hugo as honorary president of the Ligue upon the latter's
death.

 

287

The Politics of La Brécho
As a small pressure group attached to the strategy ofilg'brEche,
the Ligue relied almost exclusively on its male contingent. women re-
presented nearly seventy percent of new recruits between 1882 and 1892,
but the presidency remained in.Bficher's hands and the activities of its
men dominated the pages of Le Droit des Femmes. .Richer complained in
June 1891 that Ligue women had refused to have their names published, but
when an up—dated roster appeared the following year a footnote indicated
that "the preceding list contains the names of:"
Two members of the Institute: Mo Alexandre Dumas, member of
the Academic Francaise, and.M. Frederic Passy, member of the
Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres,
Two former ministers: MM. Yves Guyot and de Heredia;
Five senators: MM. Frederic Petit, H. Couturier, Emile
Deschanel, Jean.Mace, and Victor Schoelcher;
Six deputies: MM. Barodet, Ch. Boudeville, Yves Guyot,
Hovelacque, Laisant, and Victor Poupin.
'One sees by this simple ennumeration," the note concluded, "that men and

"36 The good company that

women who come to us are in good company.
Richer emphasized was entirely male.
Richer's reliance on the Ligue's male contingent stemmed from
tactical and political considerations rather than from reservations
about women's rights. In theory he not only espoused the integralist
theme of complete equality of the sexes but also demanded reforms, such
as the abolition of restrictions on incest and the legal sanction of
"free love" marriages, that placed him in advance of many of his feminist
colleagues. In practice, however, he recognized that women had few

opportunities for effective action. They could lend financial and pro-

paganda assistance to the Ligue, but necessity dictated a subordinate

 

36Ma’ 7 June 1891, 22 May 1892.

288

role to them. So long as the systéme masculiniste permitted men to
dominate French institutions, no program of reform could succeed without
male support. Yet, in Richer's view, no amount of male support could
improve woman's lot if the Republic succumbed to monarchical and clerical
reaction. Richer thus found himself in an unenviable and somewhat con-
tradictory position. WOman's liberation depended on rights that men alone
could grant, and in order for men to do so they had to have access to a
democratic political process. In numbers, however, less than three per-
cent of France's national legislators endorsed women's rights in the 1880's,
whereas many, many more looked upon the Republic with disdain. Precisely
how many is unimportant because, in a psycho-political sense, Richer
perceived the Republic as always on the brink of disaster. Sincere male
feminists, from whose ranks Richer excluded all men of the Right, had
therefore to band together with anti-feminist republicans to protect the
institutions of refonm. The result was predictable, in retrospect at
least; the institutions of reform remained in the hands of men who conp
sistently opposed women's liberation.

In the circumstances as he perceived them, Richer could see no
viable alternative to.l2‘br5che. Reforms would.come slowly or not at all.
The campaign to reestablish divorce took years, he noted, and resulted in
a "very bad" law when the Senate forbade suits based on mutual consent.
But the 1884 bill also represented a "brilliant victory" inasmuch as it
broke with the ultra—clerical tradition of the Restoration.37 "In all
things," Richer adjured the partisans of'l'assaut in 1885, "order and

method are necessary:"

 

37Ibid., 6 July 18811.

289

All progress is measured, linked, coordinated. Never would it

occur to an architect to begin construction of a house with the

roof; he would commence with the foundation. This is element-

ary . . . . How often have I cried out to the impatient: 'For

pity's sakes in your own interest do not put the cart before

the horse.'
In other words, when conflicts arose between the political question and
the woman question, feminists should give priority to the former.

Richer's sense of priorities also reflected his personal "con-
nections." Other feminists devoted equal attention to the political
question, particularly Deraismes, and most, like Auclert, had at least
one or two "friends" in the legislature. Indeed, Richer and Auclert
frequently relied on the same feminist politicians to advance their
respective proposals, and, as a source of model legislation, Deraismes'
influence on the 1894 commersante vote resembled that of Richer on
Naquet's divorce bill. But as a man in possession of his full civil
rights with untrammeled access to political rallies, the Chamber's press
gallery, etc., Richer was in a position to achieve a much greater degree
of intimacy with the political establishment than female feminists.
While partisans of'l'assaut waged their shadow campaign in 1885,

for example, Richer participated on an extrapparliamentary committee that
drew up a legislative proposal to grant full civil rights to unmarried
women. Richer had hoped to extend the same rights to wives, but the
politicians on the committee feared that too broad a bill would invite
defeat. In the event, even the restricted version failed, but Richer
was elated because the committee had at last moved "the question of

women's rights from the domain of pure theory into the domain of parlia-

mentary discussions and public discussions."39 At the end of the year,

 

381bida’ 15 MarCh 18850

39Ibid., 2 May 1886.

 

290

on 6 December 1885, the Ligue sponsored a banquet for its parliamentary
delegation at the Grand Hotel. The guests of honor included Senators
Victor Schoelcher and Alfred Naquet and Deputies Ernest Lefevre and
Yves Guyot, all of whom had worked on the committee with Richer. At
twelve francs per head the cost of the celebration came to nearly two-
hundred francs, about one—sixth of the year's expenditures. In response
perhaps to criticism of the expense, Richer informed the next general
assembly:

If in organizing the banquet we have burdened the Ligue with an

exceptional and relatively heavy expense given the meagreness of

our resources, you will recognize that it was a productive expense.

let me repeat mesdames and messieurs, were we to obtain only

this result [parliamentary discussion of the civil rights proposal7

we would lose neither our money nor our 1abor.‘1l0

Experiences like his 1885 committee assignment provided Richer

with an insider's perspective and a sense of progress shared by few
outside the Ligue. Not until 1904, when Avril de Saint-Croix served on
an extra-parliamentary committee to study vice laws, did a woman dupli-
cate the feat. Richer recognized that much remained unaccomplished, but
rather than disparage the past he viewed it with measured satisfaction.
Before the same general assembly that listened to his banquet explanation,
he recalled some of the reforms that had won approval since the founding
of Le Droit des Femmes seventeen years earlier: "the admission of women
to the baccalaureats, their admission to 1ycécs and collages féminins as
well as ecoles gfenseiggement su drieur, the reestablishment of divorce,

etc. . . ."41 He also predicted passage of the committee's civil rights

 

492219, In a thirteen.month period spanning 1885 and 1886 the

Ligue spent 1,283.55 francs: 195.80 on stationary and other operating
expenses, 400 on the subsidy for Le Droit des Femmes, 150 on flowers for
Hugo's funeral, 345 on circulars explaining the Ligue's program, and
192.75 on the banquet.

411bid.

291

bill. When things went wrong, he tended to pin the blame on structural
defects in the political system itself. In 1883, for example, he made
constitutional revision "the first article of our program," throwing the
Ligue into the struggle to suppress or at least to modify the conservative
Senate. "It is beyond doubt," he wrote at the time, "that revision of
the constitution alone can lead to the emancipation of woman . . . ."42
But when the amendment campaign failed, Richer continued to emphasize
the positive. The Ligue had partly offset its losses, he informed the
members in 1886, by entering into an informal alliance with Tommy Fallot's
Ligue pour le Reldvement de la Moralité Publique, and, in the area of
substantive reform, Ligue member Camille de Chancel had opened the Crédit
Foncier's bureau of central administration to women employees.43
The assumptions that dictated the Ligue's moderate reformism.also
provided the grounds for Richer's opposition to radical feminism. Parti-
sans of'l'assaut stood for an "absolutely irrefutable" position in theory,
he repeated again and again, but in practice they "gravely compromise
the cause that they claim to defend." "No one is more in favor of woman's
right to vote than I," Richer exclaimed at the time of the 1885 shadow
campaign. "Since the year 1869, well before Mlle. Barberousse, Mme. Picot
and Mme. Jeannot dreamed of it, when Mlle. Hubertine Auclert was still in

a convent, I proclaimed this right."l‘ll

 

“21bid., April 1883.

thbid., 2 May 1886. At the end of 1886, RiCher announced with
evident pride that Senators Schoelcher, Naquet, Couturier, and Georges
Martin had joined with Deputies Passy, Lefevre, Laisant, Guyot, and
Victor Poupin to form a parliamentary caucus on women's rights. Ibid.,
19 December 1886.

lll‘Ibid” 15 March 1885.

 

292

Yes, woman should possess the vote. She is human; she has her own
interests; she is in business, industry and.[;ubject té7licensing;
she participates in the maintenance of the State; she pays, like us,
direct and indirect taxes, that is to say the personal assessment,
the real estate levy, the tax on bread, meat and drinks; she is
judged in our courts° she pays her blood - the blood of her son (is
not this blood hers?$ - on battlefields; she shares our miseries,
as she would share our triumphs and joys. All that we touch touches
her. Her exclusion from common rights is not only a denial of
justice, an act of individual oppression, it is a social crime}5

The fault of lfassaut lay not therefore in its goal but in its means,
Rucher stressed: "One point alone divides us: how to proceed."l‘6

The correct way to proceed meant ordering priorities in a manner
consistent with the strategy of'lg'bréche. Court decision had made it
perfectly clear that "no one could vote if he‘zzr shé7 did not enjoy the
plenitude of his.[;r heg7'civi1 rights," Escher wrote in the spring of 1885:

WOman is grouped with minors, convicts, habitual criminals and
individuals struck by infamous condemnation. So long as this injur-
ious analogy exists, woman cannot be inscribed on electoral lists.

What, from this, should be the path to follow? Good sense indi-
cates it: first relieve woman of her legal incapacities.

Once in possession of all her civil rights, woman becomes the
equal of man; the principal argument - the only one, I would dare
say, that one can invoke to contest her electoral right - will
disappear.“7

Some have maintained that an exception should be made for women, that

they should receive the vote prior to their civil emancipation. But,
Richer countered, "if in the state oflzgur curren£7 legislation, we recog-
nized women's right to suffrage, it would be necessary to recognize it

equally for criminals."z‘8

 

45Ibid., 5 April 1885.

Ibid.

47Ibid., 15 March 1885.

“81bid.

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293

Even authout the contrary legal decisions and the prospect of
felons securing the vote, political realities compelled prudence. Few
within the republican majority acknowledged woman's capacity to deal with
questions of government, foreign policy, and taxes. "This is inept,"

49

Richer admitted, but undeniable. However, many of these same men exp

pressed concern for woman's civil status. Their attitude bore marks of
"the ohlprejudice" that "woman is a being apart, having to fulfill
special functions in the family, having distinct duties," but at least

50

their minds were not entirely closed. Furthermore, their support or

opposition would determine absolutely the fate of all reform.efforts.
"Unfortunately," Richer lamented, "there are impatientlzzheé7'among us,
who, by their intemperate exigencies, detach from.aur cause a goodly

"51

number of those who had asked no more than to sustain it. A.man who

had assiduously attended feminist meetings for three months had just sadly
informed him, Richer recounted, that he had "had enough" after hearing
52

an address by Auclert in early May 1885. The newly formed and pre-

viously sympathetic Union Socialiste Republicain of 1885 had also begun
to regret its committment to woman's emancipation.53 While in the Chamber,
where patience was especially necessary, Auclert's extreme demands had

54

undermined the cause by inviting defeat without debate.

 

“91bid.
51Ibid.

521bid.

5l‘Ibid” 5 April 1885. When Deputy Escanyé'(Pyrenees-Orientales)
rejected one of Auclert's numerous suffrage petitions in 1885, Richer
wrote that, although partisans oful'assaut might take satisfaction from
Escanyé‘s choice of words, the effort had been useless: "But galantry

 

294

Graver still was the apparent indifference of.l'assaut strate-
gists to the Republic and republican principles..Haunted by the specter of
counter—revolution, Richer never tired of repeating that premature
wmman suffrage would destroy French democracy:

I believe that at the present time £58887, it would be dangerous -
in France - to give women.the political ballot. They are, in
great majority, reactionaries and cleriggls. If they voted today,
the Republic would not last six months.

City women of republican persuasion should participate in political
campaigns, and democratic parties should encourage mixed attendance at
their meetings. Business women should have the commergante vote. But
womanhood suffrage on a national scale must await the advance of repub—
lican education. "The antechamber of the polling booth," wrote honorary

Ligue vice president Auguste Vacquerie, "is not the church, it is the

,
school.")6 "Let us not repeat the sad experience of 1848," added

Rdcher:

I am not of those (no one will doubt it) who regret the brusque
enactment of universal Zfihnhood7suffrage. I saluted with enthusiasm
the decree initiated by Ledru—Rollin, affirming to the great astonish-
ment of Europe, the principle too long misunderstood, of national
sovereignty. To that decree I owe my political freedom. But I can!
not forget that that reform, so equitable, so necessary, brought us
the Second Empire. The ignorance of the peasants caused all the evil.
Suddenly called upon to vote, without prior preparation they raised
to power the man who, three years later, executed the‘zgoup of

2 December [18517.57

 

has nothing to do with these types of questions. Compliments are not
reasons. Does one contest the princi 1e? ~It is necessary to know that
above all. The deputy from Prades'ZEgcanyé7 has not explained that. He
simply asked the Chamber to throw out the proposal: that was enough for
him. For my part I would have liked the question to be discussed in depth
. . . . To flatter women who, in fact, one brutally dismisses to their
trinkets and to their stoves, does not prove that one has a very great
esteem for them, nor that one is a gentleman; it proves only that one
lacks candor. That is all."

55Ibid., 20 May 1888.
561bid., 7 September 1884.

57Ibid., 17 May 1885.

295

Until enlightened in the ways of democracy, women represented an
ever present danger to the Republic. Self-seeking politicians would
appeal to them, Rdcher warned, without paying the slightest heed to their
real grievances. Leon Gambetta had done it as a republican in 1878, and
the Right had produced his imitator a decade later in the person of General
Boulanger. "No one, not even the‘ZGeneralflé7 closest friends, would
dare maintain that he is exempt from all personal ambition," Richer comp
mented. He "turns to women, not in order to say to them.that he will work
for their emancipation, but to adjure them, like Gambetta to preoccupy
themselves with the grand interest of _l_g patrie." Re assigns to women
only one mission in life, according to his L'Invasion allemande (1888):
"Give us a vigorous generation , solidly tempered morally and physically,
and you will have worthily accomplished your task." “As for your personal
interests, as for restoration of your dignity, as for your rights," Richer
concluded, "M. l£_géhéra1 Boulanger troubles himself no more than Gambetta
did previously. Not even a discreet allusion. Net a word of hope for
the future!"58

In comparing the two men, Richer absolved himself of any "vain
satisfaction" at catching Gambetta in a contradiction. He also admitted
a lack of specific knowledge in respect to Boulanger's attitude on the
woman question. Furthermore, there was certainly nothing unusual about
two statesmen opposing woman suffrage: “A great many politicians are not
content to retard provisionally the accession of women to the exercise of
the right to vote, they reject it in principle; at no time do they want
it." Instead, the point was simply that whatever politicians might think

of woman's rights, "it does not prevent them, when they believe that the

 

58Ibid., 20 May 1888.

296

support of women can be useful to their ambitious aims, from appealing to

f' .
")9 Sincere democrats had therefore to

them in warm and solemn terms.
maintain constant vigilance, because the vast majority of women, whether
enfranchised legally or aroused to political action on behalf of a would-
be despot, could not be trusted to reinforce the Republic.

Richer's impression of the male electorate heightened his fear of
woman suffrage. Many men continued to Oppose the Republic, despite better
education and previous voting experience. Thirtybseven percent of the
deputies elected in 1889 represented reactionary views by Richer's count,
and half the rest, who called themselves republicans, objected to further
democratic reforms.6O For women the situation was worse. 0f the nine
million who might have voted in 1877: according to Richer's estimates,
only a few thousand had escaped from the confessional.61 This was trans-
ference, the application to women of perspectives drawn from.men's ex—
periences. But rather than a transfer of rinci 1e, as Auclert demanded,
Richer applied the practice of men to the condition of women.

Belief in'lg‘bréche may also have fed Richer's fears. According
to this strategy, once women obtained civil equality, political rights
would follow as a matter of course and without additional struggle. In-
deed, Richer had dared to say in 1885, only the absence of complete civil
parity had so far kept women from voting.62 In light of his impression
of women's political inclinations, however, that was tantamount to saying

that their civil disabilities had so far prevented the destruction of

 

59Ibid.
60 .

Ibid., 20 October 1889.
61Ibid., 7 September 1884.
62

Ibid., 15 March 1885.

297

French democracy. A contradiction thus arose between.lg,bréche, which
anticipated women's enfranchisement the instant they became civil equals,
and political democracy, which could not survive for long if women voted.
Richer's response to the contradiction was simple: create a new type of
woman,one which would guarantee a democratic future through unwavering
devotion to republican ideals. In the meantime, while waiting for the
new type of woman to emerge and multiply, he urged patience and extreme
caution. The few women who already subscribed to the proper political
ideals should cooperate with their male counterparts to achieve civil re-
forms but, more importantly, to demonstrate their loyalty to the Republic.
Everything hinged on political rectitude, in short, and right-thinking
women had to lead exemplary lives - exactly what Auclert refused to do.

Two of Auclert's proposals struck Richer as especially unexemp
plary. In asking the Chamber to exclude women from the apportionment
process, she had demonstrated a disdain for popular sovereignty, the
essential base of any democratic polity. "Those who do not vote, even
when they are unjustly excluded from balloting - soldiers on active duty
for example - have interests that should be defended.” Auclert and her
partisans had undoubtedly overlooked that point, Richer conceded, "but
voluntarily or not, they nonetheless do much evil."63 The other proposal
called for woman suffrage, which always engendered a negative "situational"
reaction from Richer but did not violate his thoeretical sensibilities.
Instead, Auclert aroused his ire by submitting her petition to the Congress
of Versailles. The Congress consisted of Senate and Chamber sitting to-
gether as the National Assembly and had the statutory power to alter the

constitution - precisely the goal that Auclert had in mind. But in

 

631mm, 5 April 1885.

298

Richer's eyes, the Congress had no right to speak in the name of the
people due to the unrepresentative character of the Senate. Sincere
democratic women should therefore avoid any act that might legitimize
that institution. The goal she sought had been bad enough, given the aid
it would bring to the clerical camp, Richer wrote, but 'I especially re-
gret that in claiming woman's right to vote before the Congress of ver~
sailles,‘[;uc1erfi7has committed a grave fault that will remain in every-
one's memory as an argument against women's political capacity."6
Worse than Auclert's unexemplary proposals were the effects of

her actions and the company she kept. Rficher acknowledged that allegiance
to common principles left room for legitimate differences, but he refused
to condone behavior that might benefit the Republic's enemies. The 1885
shadow campaign constituted a perfect example of such behavior. Republi-
can candidates will suffer, Richer warned two weeks before the balloting,
because, as the reactionary Figaro's endorsement of the campaign proves,
"you will favor, by this ill-considered, useless, culpable displacement
[3f voteé7, the success of our enemies and yours."65 Treachery also
marked Auclert's petition to eliminate women from the apportionment
count. Its fifteen signers included royalist Deputy Pieye, and its Chamber
sponsors numbered the reactionary and anti-nationalist Count de Rays and
M. Ribot, ”the friend of the princes of Orleans." Auclert's ultimate ob-
jective had merit, Richer exclaimed once again, "but when blunders succeed
blunders, I cannot remain silent:"

I understand when women unjustly deprived of the right to vote defend

their cause, but not in this manner or by similar arguments. If
they wish to return to a restricted electorate, then let them say so;

 

6l’lIbid" 7 September 1884.

651bid., 20 September 1885.

299
if, in.z;pposition té7 republican principle, they wish to substitute
the doctrines of the Second Dmpire,6%et them avow it. At least we
shall know in whose company we are.

Although Richer tended to single out Auclert as the movement's
most divisive personality, others also drew his fire. One came from.the
ranks of the Ligue's founding members. In April 1885, Ligue member Joanny
Rama employed Auclert's La Citoyenne to brand Richer "a legalist" and "a
fake republican." Rama questioned the genuineness of Richer's oft-
repeated espousal of woman suffrage and accused him of sacrificing justice

67

to a narrow interpretation of the statutes. Richer counterattacked with
a charge of disruptive behavior: "It is pleasing to M; Rama, as to Mlle.
Auclert, Mlle. Barberousse, and Mme. Picot, to follow a compromising
course and the detestable effects of it will not take long to be felt."68
As for the label "legalist,".Richer continued, "that signifies, in the
thinking of M. Rama, that I put the law above right - which is inexact."
When a law exists, however had it may be, even if unjust, I
submit to it.
But in submitting, I do all that I can to reform it.
Does not H. Rama himself obey existing laws? Willingly or
by force, does he not submit?69
‘As for being a "fake republican," Richer concluded, hardly anyone could
avoid that label so long as true republicanism.meant "the line of conduct
traced by Mlle. Auclert and Mlle. Barberousse." But in respect to what
counts most, at least "I do not make alliances with royalist deputies."70

Perhaps the most frustrating proposal encountered by Richer was

the ”fantastiqP "eccentric," and "bizarre" scheme advanced by Auclert's

 

66Ibid., 5 April 1885.

67La Citoyenne, April 1885.
68Le Droit des Femmes, 19 April 1885.
Ibid.

7°Ibid.

300

friend and backer, Deputy de Gasté. De Gasté advanced a plan for consti-
tutional revision that would have guaranteed to women not only the vote
but half the seats in the legislature. "I would not like to be unpleasant
to M. de Gasté," Richer commented, "but I ask myself if he has been truly
sincere, or if he has wanted to play a dirty trick on women and to mock
them." Why propose a constitutional amendment in the first place, when a
simple law would suffice? Moreover, what principle of democracy would
sanction parliamentary sex quotas? "After having taken sides between the
sexes, it would be necessary to take sides between the classes, so many
‘Zdeputieé7 for the bourgeoisie, so many for the proletariat, so many for
the liberal careers, so many for manual workers." The amendment also
threatened passage of the commergante vote, which had finally moved from
the Chamber into the Senate. "Had M. de Gasté'wished to defeat our law,"
Richer charged, "he could not have conducted himself otherwise." When a
Ligue member defended de Gasté’on grounds that he might obtain a little
by demanding a lot, pointing out that the commergante vote had languished
in the legislature for six years, Richer virtually threw up his hands in
disgust. The Senate and Chamber would never entertain de Gasté‘s "unfor-
tunate proposition," he wrote:
Yes, I shall go to the end. I accept the fight. But by God! by un-
justifiable blunders, by inexcusable impediments, one must not con-
tinually compromise the great cause of equality and justice that I
have defended, in my modest sphere, for more than thirty years.71
Richer's pained outcry stemmed in large part from a heightened
sense of betrayal. Practical reforms moderately pursued constituted the

essence of'lg‘brEChe. Most women failed to see that, Richer felt, a

majority out of indifference born of confinement in narrow family circles,

 

71.1.2320, 15 June 1890, 6 July 1890.

 

301
a minority out of reckless disregard for political realities.72 Conse-
quently, and although he complained about it, he expected very little
support from women. During the bitter recriminations of the 1885 shadow
campaign, Richer ruefully recalled the words of warning that he had heard
from the lips of a "great publicist" (probably Victor Hugo) at the time
of Le Droit des Femmes' founding in 1868: "YOu are undertaking a very
heavy task. It is not from the side of men that the greatest difficulties

n."73

will come to you, it is from.the side of wome "The prediction is
fulfilled," Richer added as the campaign unfolded. Henceforth, as always,
woman's liberation would depend on right-thinking, republican.men, who
realized the need "to proceed by successive reforms."74 Outwardly at
least, de Gasté represented precisely that type of person -— a male, a
republican, a legislator, and a feminist. His advocacy of.lfassaut there-
fore amounted to a kind of ultimate betrayal. At a moment when lg breche
seemed on the verge of delivering a long-sought reform, his proposal

could only arouse unnecessary opposition. Moreover, the year was 1890,
and, whatever the effect of de Gasté‘s behavior on the parliamentary

front, his scheme jarringly contradicted the intent of the woman's Rights

Congress organized by Deraismes and Richer the year before.

The WOman's Rfights Coggress of 1889
The idea for a second woman's Rights Congress originated indirectly
with Monsieur R. Davenne, president of the Ligue's Cercle Louis-Blane at

Bordeaux. Shortly after the 1885 shadow campaign, Devanne wrote a series

 

721bido, 1 February 1888.
”Ibid., 17 May 1885.

71‘Ibid., 1 November 1885.

302

of articles for Le Droit des Femmes on how the Ligue might expand itsacti-
vities in the provinces. The campaign in the capital received almost no
local press coverage, he pointed out, and in any case Frenchmen tended to
read little and remember less. A greater effort to provide outlying areas
with speakers, tracts, and newspaper releases would help some, but regional
congresses offered the best prospect for success. They would attract
reasonable people who had no desire to join the Ligue itself and guaran-
tee publicity, inasmuch as local journals could hardly ignore an event
lasting several days. In addition to his native Bordeaux, Davenne re-
commended seven key cities as sites for such congresses: Lyon, Marseilles,
Toulouse, Bourges, Rennes, Lille, and.Nancy. The campaign to reestablish
divorce had successfully brought an issue and the masses together; re-
gional congresses would do the same for women's rights.75

Richer endorsed Davenne‘s proposal and, characteristically, urged
the Ligue's parliamentary deputies to implement it. Before they could
act, however, attention shifted back to the capital. In the fall of 1886,
the government appointed a commission to organize the centennial cele-
bration of the 1789 Revolution. Auclert immediately protested the com-
mission's make-up, forty-three men and no women, and demanded the inclusion

76

of seven female members. The commission rejected the demand but event—
ually made a concession to the growing interest in woman's condition by
sanctioning an official congress on the subject.

Two Ligue members spearheaded the move for an official congress,

Deputy Yves Guyot, who served on the centennial commission, and

 

75.13251" 3 January 1886, 17 January 1886, 7 February 1886,
21 February 1886.

76La Citoyenne, November 1886.

303

77 De Morsier (1844-1896), a Calvinist apostate

Madame Emilie de Morsier.
to free-thinking and Buddhism, became the general secretary of the re-
sultant Congrés International des Oeuvres et Institutions Feminines. Her
interests made her a logical choice for the post. She represented a
point of view and a constituency that had little in common with either
the partisans of l'assaut or the advocates of _l_a_ breohe. With close ties
to France's Protestant community, de Morsier stressed the need for moral
reform and philanthropic alleviation of misery. Although she belonged to
the Ligue and supported the campaign for women's rights, she focused her
attention on the Oeuvre des Libérées de Saint-Lazarre and the crusade to
abolish governmental regulation of prostitution. She had been a disciple
of Josephine Butler, Europe's foremost abolitionist, since 1875.78
Isabelle Bogelot, the director of the Oeuvres des Libérées de Saint-
Lazarre and a self-proclaimed "philanthropic feminist," assumed a vice
presidency in the official congress.

Many regular feminists also participated in the official
congress, including Auclert's replacement at La Citoyenne, Maria

79

Martin. But the word feminine in the congress' title revealed its

extremely moderate orientation. When the congress convened at the mairie
of Paris' 6th arrondissement in July 1889, it strictly forbade any dis-

cussion of "sect and dogma, militant politics, and class struggle."80

 

77The idea for an official congress originated with de Mersier,
who convinced Guyot in June 1888 to raise the matter within the commis-
sion. The commission delayed its approval until February 1889.
E, osition universelle internationale de 188 : Actes du Co rés Inter-
national des Oeuvres et Institutions Feminines Paris, 1890 , i.
ereafter cited as Actes .

      

 

78Le Journal des Femmes, February 1896.
79

Actes, vi.

aolbido ’ iv.

304

In his opening remarks, honorary president Jules Simon ruled the issue of
woman suffrage out of order: "Very simply, having other things to do, we
shall do other things. I hope that this is well understood."81 Maria
Martin presented an historical summary of La Citoyenne's development to
the assembled delegates, but she emphasized that Auclert's interest in
political rights reflected a desire to regulate male passion and to re-

0
store stability within the family.8“

 

On the grounds that each nation had special qualities, the offical

congress pledged to confine its activities to the unique character of

 

the French. Its work fell to four sections: philanthropy and morality;
arts, sciences and letters; education; and civil legislation. In the
course of the six day event, over 120 individuals delivered addresses on
issues ranging from "Enseignement par la musique" to "Le Regime vagétarien
au point de vue de l'éducation." Charitable and moral concerns dominated
the proceedings, with dozens of reports on subjects like "l'Oeuvre de la
Mason Israelite de refuge pour l'Enfance."83

The topics discussed and the composition of the delegates essen-
tially confirm Dronsart's claim that the official congress could lead out-
siders to believe that France was a nation of Jews and Protestants.84
Only the Countess de verneuil and her daughter explored the role of Catho- i.
lic charities. In contrast, the delegates listened to five reports on
Jewish institutions and many times that number on those of Protestants.

More than 550 individuals attended the congress, nearly 400 of whom lived

 

811bido ’ Xe

82Ibid., 442-45.

83Ibid., 535-39.

8I‘Dronsart, "Le MOuvement Feministe," 115.

305

in France. Within the French contingent, women outnumbered men by three
to one, a ratio that reflected the traditional involvement of middle and
upper class women in social missionary work. The eightyhodd.men included
six pastors and grand rabbi Zadoc-Kahn. Baronesses James and Edmond
de Rothschild also participated, and one of the reports dealt with a
"Notice sur l'orphelinat de Rothschild."85

Despite its conservative tenor, the Congrés International des
Oeuvres et Institutions Feminines represented an advance in the eyes of
many feminists. This feeling grew over the years, particularly after
1900, when, with the founding of the National Council of French Wamen,
the moral and philanthropic concerns of the 1889 event came increasingly
to dominate the movement. At the time of the congress, according to
Maria Martin, feminists could look upon the porceedings with satisfac-
tion for two reasons. In sanctioning an official congress, France had
become the first nation to accord governmental approval to the "mouvement
progressiste feminine." And, indirectly at least, the official congress
had begun to reveal the full scope of woman's social role, which, coupled
with the congress' emphasis on woman's duty, should help to dispel notions
about feminine inferiority and bolster the claim for equal rights.86 More-
over, if the congress' agenda reflected a feminine rather than a feminist
orientation, it nonetheless raised issues of common concern to both camps,
and, equally important, three-quarters of the congress' delegates belonged
to the broad woman constituency on whose behalf the movement fought.

While most feminists, including Richer, could see some good in

the official congress, a few could not. Among these few was Maria Deraismes.

 

85Actes, 523—39.

86La Citoyenne, April 1889, May 1889. Richer expressed measured
satisfaction for the official congress, to which he also adhered, in
Le Droit des Femmes, 16 June 1889.

306

Eight years after the event, l'Amélioration's secretary, Jules Allix,
voiced her general objection to the official congress by charging it with
failure to achieve anything of significance.87 At the time, however,
Deraismes expressed two very specific objections to "the conditions of
the Exposition." The first related to Alphonse Daudet, the centennial
commission's initial choice to head the congress. Deraismes opposed the
nomination because Daudet was a protectionist who had recently used his
influence as a Senator to push a bill through the Chamber forbidding
night work to women.88 In contrast to liberals like herself, who desired
equal laws for all, Deraismes perceived Daudet as one of the many reformers
who employed the notion of women's special qualities to deprive them of
their liberty. She absolved Guyot, the congress' sponsor on the com-
mission, of any culpability; he had ardently opposed the night work law.
But she refused to participate in the official congress if Daudet“ pre-
sided.89

The centennial commission then changed its mind and appointed
Jules Simon to the presidency, a decision to which Deraismes also objected.
In her opinion, Simon had long before severed the tie that had once bound
the author of L'Ouvriére to the cause of woman's liberation. In recent
years he had opposed the reestablishment of divorce and condoned reli-

90

gious teaching in the schools. Simon had thus become a clerical in
Deraismes' eyes, which was as incompatible with her free-thinking as
Daudet's protectionism was with her liberalism. In the fall of 1889,

Deraismes abandoned any attempt to reconcile the dispute and announced

 

87Ame'lioration, Bulletin Bimestrial, Junquuly 1897.

8The night work prohibition became law in 1892. See Chapter I.
89

BMD, Dossier Deraismes.

9

0
Schmahl, "Progress of the WOmen's Rights Movement in France," 86.

 

307

her intention of organizing a separate congress.

In the meantime, Richer had begun to plan a congress of his own.
His ideas on the subject went back at least to Davenne's 1886 proposals,
although the centennial allure of Paris overrode the earlier interest
in provincial sites. Richer shared little of Deraismes' aversion to the
official congress, but the centennial commission delayed final approval
of the event until February 1889, sometime after his own plan had taken
shape. It was also clear that the official congress, once sanctioned,
would pursue a very conservative program and reflect a constituency that
had only tenuous links to the movement. In addition, both Richer and
Deraismes must have felt that far too much time had already elapsed since
the 1878 Congress, and Richer undoubtedly expected a Ligue-sponsored
congress to boost the morale and membership of his group.91

The prospect of two woman's rights congresses competing with the
official congress caused alarm within the movement. French feminists
had neither the numbers nor the money to support two such events in the
same year. Disunity would also look bad to foreigners, who made very
little distinction between the movement's factions. In soliciting ad-
herents to the 1888 American Waman's Rights Congress, for example, Susan
B. Anthony sent invitations to Richer as well as Auclert, and the woman
who represented France in Washington, D. C., Isabelle Bogelot, belonged
to both the Ligue and l'Amélioration. Furthermore, the 1888 American

Congress created the International Council of women to encourage and

 

91The eleven years that elapsed between the 1878 and 1889 Woman's
Rights Congresses was the longest of such intervals. The next longest
interval was between the 1900 and 1908 Congresses, which placed feminists
under considerable pressure: "The principal reason for the feminist
Congress of 1908 was this: no feminist congress had been held in France
since1900, the year of the great exposition." Oddo Deflou, ed.,
Cong§Es National des Droits Civils et du Suffrage des Femmes (Paris,
1910 , v.

308
coordinate national women's coalitions in all countries. French women
lacked an effective coalition of that type until 1900, and just prior to
her death in 1894 Deraismes lamented that "France alone remains behind,

"92 On the eve of the centennial cele-

and this is not to its advantage.
bration, however, these foreign developments interacted with the movement's
meagre resources to create considerable pressure for some kind of reconp
ciliation between Deraismes and Richer.

Negotiations between l'Amélioration and the Ligue took place
throughout November and December 1888. ‘Although l'Amélioration had
applauded the 1888 Copenhagen Women's Congress for according first priority
to woman suffrage, the two groups espoused nearly identical programs
while eschewing the strategy of _l_'assaut in favor of 12 bréche.93
Instead, procedural differences dominated the discussions. As with the
Ligue, Richer had already announced that his congress would be open to all
and free of charge for those who could not pay. Deraismes objected,
conceding that anyone could attend but only the paying should vote. Uhp
able to reconcile the difference but under pressure to arrive at some
kind of agreement, Richer and Deraismes finally decided to hold a unity
conference.9h

The conference met at the home of Deraismes on 23 January 1889.
Each side was entitled to fifteen delegates, but the Ligue managed to
muster only eight. Outnumbered but with entente at stake, Richer's
”95

"minority bowed before the votes of the majority. Maria Deraismes

 

92
93
9h

0 vre com lete de Maria Deraismes, 356.
La Cito enne, August 1888.
Le Droit des Femmes, 3 February 1889.

95Ibid.

309

became the Congress' president by a vote of 19 to 2, with one abstention,
and l'Amélioration members secured four of the six subordinate posts.
Deraismes' sister was elected treasurer. With one dissenting ballot,
perhaps his own, Richer emergedas hmamry president. On the key issue
of participation, Richer reported that "contrary to our views, there

have been established several categories of members for the Congress."96
Each participating organization could send three voting delegates, and
any individual could attend as a "sympathetic member." But only
honorary members and ten franc donors could vote. The ten franc rule
permitted two exceptions: foreigners who lived outside France and, as

a concession to Richer, individuals who enrolled prior to publication of
the agreement. "All this is very complicated," Richer admitted, "but
again the majority having thus decided, we are forced to accede."97 The
cut-off date for those who wished to vote without paying the full ten
francs was set at 10 February 1889.

Upon learning of the agreement, Ligue members passed along their
"observations." Indeed, Richer wrote, "I would almost say'zghey aré7
recriminations." One member complained that "it is not democratic,"
and another added "and this, in 1889!" Richer agreed in principle with
the complaints but refused to sunder the entente: "What is voted is
voted." Deraismes and her friends might be protesting now, if our full
delegation had attended the unity conference. Should we have broken
the alliance because we lost? Should we have tried to hold our own
congress?

We did not think so.
To cause division at this moment, at this date, before foreign

 

96Ibid.

97Ibid.

 

. 1“}Pl,’
1 I.

310
[Spinio§7, would appear culpable.

We have yielded.

Patriotism, as well as the interest we share in the great cause

about to be fought, would make it our duty [to submit].

Union! Union! Union!!!98

The second French Congrés International du Droit des Femmes
opened at the end of June 1889 in the ggllgugg_Géographie —- three weeks
prior to the official congress. Richer's appeal for union apparently
worked because the Ligue enrolled the larger number of delegates. Both
sponsoring groups solicited participants independently, with the names
appearing in separate columns of Le Droit des Femmes.99 L'Amélioration
signed up sixty—six individuals and five groups; the Ligue 110 and eight
respectively. A few like Clemence Royer, who joined Richer as an honorary
president, figured on neither list. Only eight attended as official
"sympathetic members," although dozens paid less than ten francs. The
combined total of the various categories of individuals and groups came
to almost two hundred.

As a raw number, the almost two hundred represented about one-
third the total of the official Congrés International des Oeuvres et
Institutions Feminines. It also represented a fourteen percent decline
from the total of the 1878 Congress. That decline, however, resulted
from a drop-off in foreign participation. In contrast to the first
Congress, which attracted fifty-two foreigners, the second Congress enrol-
led only seventeen: one each from Switzerland and Germany (Alsace-Lorraine),
two from Italy, three from.Sweden, four from.Britain, and six from
Belgium. Foreign groups slipped frmm fourteen to two: Stockholm's
Societe suedoise pour.A.S.F. and Josephine Butler's British, Continental

and General Federation for the Abolition of Regulated Prostitution. The

 

98Ibid., 17 March 1889.

99For information on the make-up and sources for the 1889
WOman's Rights Congress, see APPENDIX J.

311

number of French participants actually increased by at least six and
perhaps a dozen in 1889.

The ten franc rule guaranteed that the second Congress would be
at least as bourgeois as the first. Neither of the two workers' groups
that attended in 1878 participated in 1889. Deraismes' list provided no
job information, and Richer's named only one woman who might have worked,
although it is not clear whether "Madame Lecomte, 93% § gag de Charleval
(Eure)" and a five franc contributor, labored in the factory or owned it.100
The Congress' economic section expressed concern for working women, but
even equal pay for equal work could not have raised wages enough to per-
mit female laborers to attend. Labor unions could have sent delegates,
but women had been slow to take advantage of the 1884 waldeck-Rousseau Law,
which gave unions legal recognition for the first time since 1791. Mini-
stry of Commerce statistics cite only one mixed union in 1884 and none
exclusively female. Between 1894, when the Office du Travail initiated
a monthly bulletin on labor organizations, and 1900, mixed unions inp
creased to fifty-six and women's to twentybfour. But by then the femi—
nist movement had acquired new leadership as well, and.Marie Bonnevial,
secretary-general of the Ligue and the first woman appointee to the
Conseil Superieur du Travail, could write that "feminist Congresses,
particularly those of 1896 and 1900, although attended by only a small
elite of the female proletariat, have also made excellent propaganda

Z;h.behalf of working wome§7;"101 Such was not the case in 1889.

 

100Le Droit des Femmes, 3 February 1889.

101Marie Bonnevial, "Le Mouvement Syndical Feminin en France,"
Revue de Morale Sociale (September, 1901), 263. Bonnevial points out
that the statistics of the Ministry of Commerce and the Office du
Travail did not include mixed or all-women unions that failed to register
legally. HOw many of each type that failed to register is unclear.

 

 

312

Other than Madame Lecomte, eight women indicated job qualifica—
tions. All were professionals: six doctors, including Elizabeth
Blackwell, the first nineteenth century woman to receive a medical
degree, and Blanche Edwards, who pressured the Director of Public Assis—
tance to open internships to Frenchwomen in 1885; one practicing teacher,
Madame Ferrand of La Rochelle; and one non-practicing lawyer, Marie
Popelin, whose life-long exclusion from the Belgian bar made her a femi-
nistiggggg celEbre. Nearly half the male participants came from politics
and the professions, as in 1878. The office holders included three
senators (Couturier, Mace, Georges Martin), four deputies (Boudeville,
de Caste), a former minister (Barbe), a former Parisian municipal coun-
cillor (Puteaux), and the mayor of Sartrouville (Monsieur Nicolle).
From the professions, the Congress drew six doctors, three publicists,
three military men, and a lawyer.102

The most striking difference in participants between the two
Congresses appeared in the sex ratio. WOmen barely outnumbered men in
1878 and comprised only forty-five percent of the French delegation. In
1889 they represented seventy percent overall, and Frenchwomen exceeded
their male colleagues by a count of approximately 130 to 50. Comparatively,
Frenchwomen nearly doubled their representation between 1878 and 1889,
while males declined by half. .A much higher percentage of women had
also remained faithful to the movement, with women accounting for nineteen
of the twenty-five hold-overs from 1878. The larger relative representa-
tion of women at the 1889 Congress began to bring French feminism into

line with the sex ratio of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian movements,

 

102
Senator Georges Martin was one of the six doctors. Richer

was one of the publicists. Two of the military men had retired by the
time of the Congress. See APPENDIX J.

313

where, it seems, men had already become a small numerical minority. In
its significance to personalities within the French movement, the trend
in the direction of male exclusion left Richer as the last of the great
male feminists in France. With his retirement after the 1889 Congress,
women consolidated their domination of the movement's top positions by
taking over the Ligue's presidency as well. Ferdinand Buisson eventually
emerged as a man of comparable stature, but the Ligue d'Electeurs pour

le Suffrage des Femmes that he helped found in 1911 consisted entirely

w

of males.10)

The 1889 Congress had no financial difficulties. During the
intra-League dialogue of 1886, Davenne considered money as the chief
impediment to creating a series of provincial congresses, although he
expected a second national congress to raise at least as much as the
first. The entente wdth l'Amélioration resolved the problem. Although
Deraismes' contingent represented only thirty-five percent of the par-
ticipants, it raised nearly fifty-seven percent of the proceeds. None
of Deraismes' subscribers paid less than ten francs, a a third donated
more. Deraismes and her sister gave one hundred francs each, as did
two others. Two hundred francs came from both Paul Barbé'and.Madame
Dusautoy. As a group, l'Amélioration contributed an additionalffive
hundred francs, a sum matched by the Municipal Council of Paris. Nearly
half the participants on Richer's list slipped below the ten franc
standard, and only a sixth exceeded it. An "important error" in report-
ing cost Richer his lone one hundred franc donor, although two women gave

fifty francs each. Richer's larger contingent reached a rough parity

 

103For the Ligue d'Electeurs pour le Suffrage des Femmes and
Buisson's role in it, see Ligue d'Electeurs pour le Suffrage des Femmes,
Bulletin, 1911-14.

314
with that of Deraismes due to a one thousand franc donation from.a woman
identified as "Madame L.-J., Paris." Together the receipts from the two
lists totaled A,794 francs, fifty percent more than in 1878. When ex-
penses fell short of that amount, the Congress ended with a five hundred
franc profit, two-thirds of which went to l'Amélioration for providing
the Congress' seed money.104 It seems clear in retrospect that, although
the ten franc rule may have hurt Richer's solicitations, the Ligue would
have been hard pressed to finance the event by itself.

There was never any doubt about the strategic orientation of the
Congress. Auclert's marriage had removed the foremost partisan of
lfassaut from Paris. Barberousse and Allix, the leaders of the 1885
shadow campaign, donated ten francs to the Congress through their Societe
pour la Protection de la Femme, but Richer pointed out in Nevember 1888

105 To forestall any

that they had played no role in planning the event.
last minute disruptions, the Congress decided to exclude the public from
its sessions. The co-sponsors of the Congress had a slight overall major-
ity, with half the Ligue's members and about one-third of l'Amélioration's
participating. But each had allies. Deraismes could draw on support from
the Federation des Groupes de Libre-Pensée de Seine-et-Oise, while Richer
could rely on the Paris and Marseilles branches of Fallot's Ligue Fran-
gaise pour le Relévement de la Moralité'Publique. Both probably had ties
with the Masonic Loge Jerusalem Ecossaise. More independent perhaps were
several of the other participating groups: La Société'Nantaise: Les Droits

des Femmes; socialist Astié de valsaynis Groupe des Femmes Independantes

de France; and La Societe l'Avenir des Femmes of Nimes. Richer had helped

 

10h ) . . .
Amelloratlon, Bulletin, Julbeeptember 1894. For information
on individual donations, see: APPENDIX J.

105Le Droit des Femmes, 4 November 1888.

 

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315
to create the Nimes group and held honorary membership in it, for example,
but its local founder, widow Fabre, had derived her initial inspiration
from reading Auclert's 1888 letter to Susan B. Anthony.106 Fabre
designated La Citoyenne's Maria Martin as one of her group's delegates
to the Congress. Moderate feminists in all camps might have received
additional support from activists in the peace movement had not the
CongrES de la Paix chosen the same June dates for its convention.107

The format of the 1889 Congress resembled that of its predeces-
sor with one exception - advances in education since 1878 had obviated
the need to hold a special section on that subject. The four remaining
sections, which met on consecutive days from 26 June to 29 June 1889,
dealt with history, economics, morality, and legislation. Clemence Royer
chaired the history section, Attorney Popelin the legislation section,
and Deraismes the other two sections. .Altogether the delegates listened
to about fifty addresses, some of which exceeded the twenty minute time
limit, spread evenly over the four days. Due to the fact that signifi-
cant reforms had occurred during the previous decade in only two areas,
education and divorce, the concerns expressed at the 1889 Congress largely
reiterated those adumbrated at the earlier event.108

In contrast to the similarity in format, the goal of the second

Congress differed markedly from that of the first. Consistent with the

 

O .
1 6La Citoyenne, July 1889. For Auclert's letter to Anthony, see
Chapter IV.

107Ibid., May 1889.

108Co rés Fran ais et International du Droit des Femmes (Paris,
1889). This, the offic1al report on the 1889 Congress, presents a
slightly different picture of the participants and donations than the
above account, which was taken from Le Droit des Femmes and is summarized
in APPENDIX J. The official report lists 206 individual and group par-
ticipants and toal receipts of 5,034 francs.

 

 

 

316

purpose of Richer's Le Code des Femmes (1883) and the orientation of his
Ligue, the 1889 Congress strove to limit resolutions to immediately
realizable reforms. Rather than duplicate the dozens of sweeping demands
made in 1878, the centennial Congress passed only nine resolutions, calling
for:

l. A wife's right to control her own income and woman's right
to defend her financial interests through participation on regulatory
boards.

2. Equal pay for women teachers.

3. Access of women to all liberal careers and to the practice of
law.

A. Admission of women to Bureaux de l'Assistance Publique as
employees, investigators, and visitors.

5. Establishment of work shelters for women and the transfer
of apprenticeship programs from workshops to schools.

6. Suppression of the morals police.

7. Demolition of the prison of Saint-Lazarre and the erection of
women's refuges in all arrondissements.

8. Revision of the Code to conform to the principle of justice
and absolute equality.

9. Abrogation of Code article 3&0 forbidding women to file
paternity suits.109

The Congress concluded its work by attempting to formulate a
response to the international woman's rights movement. Under pressure
to cooperate with foreign activists but wary of slipping into an even

more subordinate position, Richer announced the creation of a new ten

 

lO .
9Ibid., 258. The 1878 Congress passed four pages of resolutions

under twentyhsix major headings. L'Avenir des Femmes, 1 September 1878.

 

 

317
nation Federation Internationale pour la Revendication des Droits de la
Femme. Paris would serve as the Federation's headquarters, with Le
Droit des Femmes as its official organ. The Ligue would represent
France, but other French feminist groups could participate by cooperating
with the Ligue.110 As president of the Federation, Richer acknowledged
a similarity between his coalition and the recently formed International
Council of Women, which sent a representative to the 1889 official congress,
but he did not expect the new organization to succumb to its tacit rival.
Inasmuch as the goal was to succeed, he pointed out, the more combatants

the better.111

Conclusion

As the last grand act in a career devoted to moderate reformism,
the second French Congress for Woman's Rights represented a personal
triumph for Richer. Aside from defeat on the procedural question,
Richer achieved nearly all that he had desired. Partisans of'l'assaut could
not be entirely excluded from the Congress, but the advocates of.l§‘breche
effectively muzzled them. Jules.Aflix managed to read a long and favor-
able report on Barberousse's 1885 electoral bid, for example, but, when
he eXpressed "an injurious qualification against the Chamber," Deraismes
censured him and struck the statement from the official record.112 The
Congress then proceeded to pass resolutions whose limited number and
specific scope reflected the cautious program.that had already become

Richer's hallmark. Finally in laying the basis for the Federation Inter-

nationale, Richer emerged from the Congress with a vehicle through which

 

llO

 

Le Droit des Femmes, 21 July 1889.
111Ibid., 18 August 1889.
112

Congres Frangais et International du Droit des Femmes, 1&6.

 

 

318

to rejuvenate the fortune of the Ligue, maintain the dominance of la
bréche within the French movement, and assert that movement's claim for
greater international recognition.

Richer's triumph proved short-lived. Under controlled circum-
stances the Congress had bent to his will, but once the final gavel
sounded the realities that he had managed to exclude from the Salle
de Geographie quickly rendered his "victory" illusory. For about a week
the Chamber sustained Richer's belief in limited, specific reform pro-
posals by again debating and at last passing the commergante vote, but
the Senate blocked the measure for another five years. None of the
Congress' other eight resolutions fared even that well. The Federation
also foundered. Hardly anything could be done about it during the summer,
Richer explained in the fall of 1889, and in April 1890 he added a new
subtitle to Le Droit des Femmes: "Revue Internationale du Mouvement

113 But more

Fe’minine: Organe Officiel de la Fe'de'ration Internationah"
words on the masthead failed to reverse the attrition that had already
halved the Ligue's strength, and, like Auclert's Federation six years
before, Richer's expired in silence.

Illusion also marked the momentary dominance of.lg‘breche over
.l'assaut. De Gasté's 1890 constitutional amendment in favor of woman
suffrage and proportional sex representation particularly angered Richer,
but by then the strategy controversy had already wrecked the Congress'
apparent unity. No sooner had the event ended than Lébn Giraud accused
Richer of deleting a woman suffrage motion from.Le Droit des Femmes' co-

verage of the Congress. While Maria Martin absented herself from Paris

due to illness, Giraud pressed his case in La Citoyenne. He claimed to

 

113Le Droit des Femmes, 3 November 1889, 6 April 1890-

 

 

319

have personally inserted a demand for "the civil and political emancipa—
tion of woman" into the text of the resolution on wives' financial
rights. In Giraud's opinion, Rdcher also had confused civil with penal
rights and, as a consequence, had acquiesced in relegating women to the
status of convicted criminals.llh

Richer disclaimed any intent to delete anything. The words
referred to by Giraud were so obscure, Richer maintained, that even‘Lg
Citoyenne had not cited them as a suffrage motion at theiime. Moreover,
if taken literally, Giraud's insertion would imply that only working
women should vote, "that is, if salaries were sufficient and work days
not so excessively gong, or if all women lived off their rentes, there

115 Re_

would be no reason to claim political emancipation for them."
peating that all women should be enfranchised but that civil rights must
come first, Richer also mocked Giraud for writing under the feminine
pseudonym "Camille" and suggested two alternative explanations for the
controversy. The first, and less important, explanation was that, what-
ever the motion meant, Giraud had inserted it at the last possible second
when hardly anyone remained in the hall. The second shifted the debate
to new ground, the rights of illegitimate children. Continuing a heated
exchange that had occurred at the Congress in the course of formulating

a paternity suit resolution, Richer charged Giraud with criminal culpap

bility for siding with the "Code de Bonaparte" against the rights of les

 

ltha Citoyenne, August 1889, September 1889.

115Le Droit des Femmes, 18 August 1889, The controversial resolu-
tion said: "The Congress, considering that the question of women's work,
their insufficient salaries, their excessive days, cannot be resolved
except by legal and constitutional reforms, demands the civil and political
emancipation of women, that will give notable to the wife the [frog] dis-
pensation of her salary, and to woman in general a representation for her
economic interests, consequently for the salaries of women workers."

320

enfants naturels. He challenged Giraud to a formal debate on the issue,
which never took place, and, after a double set of press forays, the
dispute got lost in another controversy, the 1889 shadowcampaign.116
The 1889 shadow campaign barely materialized. NOne of the 1885
activists participated, and no woman presented herself as a candidate.

Its sponsoring organization was the Ligue Socialiste des Femmes, created

in the fall of 1889 to bridge the gap between bourgeois indifference to '

 

the working class and socialist indifference to women. But hardly had “
the Ligue come into existence before it dissolved amid innumerable quarrels.
Indeed, the entire demonstration could easily have escaped Richer's at-
tention had not one of the Ligue's founders also been one of Le Droit des
Fermnes' principal editors, Euge’nie Potonié—Fierre. She had rejected a ‘
candidacy in 1885 because too many women had run. On the occasion of
the revolutionary centennial, however, she felt the need to make at least
a minimal protest against woman's political disabilities. Even the threat
of General Boulanger could not dissuade her:
Various journals have accused us, my two colleagues and me, of playing
into the hands of boulgggisme by diverting a certain number of
republican votes. I repeat here [in Le Droit des Femmes7what I have
said in many Parisian newspapers. I have only wished, in accepting “r;
the candidacy offered to me, to make an act of propaganda in favor
of an ardent conviction, that of the equity of the demand for Woman's
civil and political rights, which I have not ceased to claim since I
took up the pen. Iwas and remain convinced that the few isolated
votes that might go to women would exeiiése no influence on the strug-
gle between the Republic and reaction.
Richer naturally objected, warning that "ten votes taken from a republi-

can candidate could assure victory to a reactionary." He acknowledged

PotoniéLPierre's sincerety, "but I say that, given the gravity of the

 

116Ibid., 15 September 1889.

117Ibid., 6 October 1889.

321
circumstances the moment was badly chosen for p££_manifestation feminine."118
The campaign collapsed in any case when PotoniéLPierre learned from the
press that the Prefect of the Seine, who refused to communicate with her
directly, had ruled against her candidacy.119
The conduct of Giraud, PotoniéLPierre, and de Gasté in the
immediate aftermath of the 1889 Congress, coupled with the slow pace of
reform and the collapse of the Federation Internationale, reflected the
inability of Richer to impose his particular orientation on the French
feminist movement. Through the Ligue, Le Droit des Femmes, and the
second Congress, he had reasserted the preeminence of'la'breche and per-
haps contributed to the frustration that led Auclert to leave Paris for
marriage. But he could neither annihilate the partisans of.l'assaut
through direct attack nor undercut their campaign through his own suc-
cesses. He hung on for two more years until December 1891, when age, poor
health, and disappointment combined to effect the suspension of Le Droit
dos Femmes. Thereafter, his service to the movement evoked an occasional
article in the feminist press, and the Ligue honored him with a four franc
banquet in 1902.120 Otherwise, his retirement separated him.almost com-
pletely from the cause that he had done so much to create. He died on
25 June 1911 at the age of eightybseven. He had written what might pass
for his epitaph in January 1889, at the beginning of the year that brought
him so much joy and sorrow: "Always, I have been wrong in being right too

soon!"121

 

11 . .
9Ibid. Sowerlne, WOmen and Socialism in France 1821-1921, 100.

120
Le Journal des Femmes, May 1902; La Frangaise, 30 December 1906,

25 June 1911; La Fronde, 25 May 1902.

121Le Droit des Femmes, 5 January 1889.

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CHAPTER‘VI

CONCLUSION

The Woman's Rights Congress of 1889 represented a transitional
event for the feminist movement in France. At roughly that point in the
struggle to liberate women, the collective effort underwent an internal
process of regeneration. Literal and figurative death carried away
many of the movement's creators, while those who came next looked back
on that year as a time of beginning. This dovetailing of one generation
into another marked a significant departure from previous feminist
initiatives, but the 1889 transition also involved a severe fragmentation
of the movement and a partial repudiation of the movement's founders.

In particular, the second generation proved critical of the first's
liberal politico-femdnism. More important than that, however, was the
failure of the first generation, despite its success in establishing

an ongoing collective effort, to resolve several critical issues. Conp
sequently, although the movement's first generation managed to group
individual discontent and to perpetuate the struggle, it failed to
develop clear guidelines for either itself or its successors in

respect to the effort's organization, goals, and rationale.

Regengration 33d Cogtinuation
Despite the relative anonymity of the individuals whose names

appeared on various feminist rosters, it seems clear that the movement's
first generation suffered extensive losses in the late 1880's and early

322

 

323

1890's. Each of the three principal founder—organizers succumbed between
1888 and 189A, with Auclert's withdrawal at the earlier date, Richer's
retirement in 1891, and Deraismes' death during the later year. The
much younger Auclert eventually returned to the movement, but her four
year absence from 1888 to 1892 undercut her authority at about the same
moment that Richer and Deraismes relinquished theirs.

At the level of the rank and file, at least three indicators
suggest a large turnpover in the immediate era of the 1889 congress. One

is l'Amc’lioration'. roster for 1894, which reveals that half of Deraismes'

 

sixteen original colleagues had died by the time of her death, while two
of the remaining seven had reached advanced age, Deputy finile Corneau
(1826-1906), who retired from the Chamber in 1893 at the age of sixty-
seven, and Virginie Griess-Traut (1814-1898). who passed her oightieth
birthday in 1894. Nearly as old as Griess-Traut was Jules Allix, who
served for years as l'Amelioretion's secretary and died in 1897 at
seventyanine. Outside 1'Amélioration's official ranks but also genera-
tionally indicative were the deaths of Eugenie Niboyet in 1883, Caroline
de Barren in 1888, Olympe Audouard in 1890, and Jeanne Deroin in 1894.

.hmdlie Bosquit, who submitted a woman suffrage request to the National

 

Assembly in 1871, lived until 190% but reached her eightieth year in
1895. Among politicians who supported women's rights during the first
generation, Alfred Talandier died at seventybeight in 1890, Joseph do
east; at eighty-two in 1893, and Charles Boudeville at seventy-one
in 1895.

Second, only twentybfivo individuals who participated in the 1878
Congress also attended that of 1889. .Although the reasons are unclear,

this small number out of a total combined attendance of roughly four

 

be

324

hundred implies a significant rate of attrition in the course of the
1880's. The third indicator is the decimation of the founding members
of Richer's Ligue Francaise pour le Droit des Femes between 1882-1883
and 1892. Although expulsions and defections accounted for much of the
decline, the inability of the Ligue to retain no more than forty of its
original members would seem to reflect either the natural demise of an
aged cadre or the active repudiation by younger members of old leaders.
In any case, the evidence seems to indicate that the "death-end” of the
regenerative process struck Richer's Ligue, Deraismes' I'Ame‘lioration,
and the movement as a whole. at a moment coinciding in time with the
second Woman's Rights Congress.

Numerous attestations reinforce the complementary conclusion
that the events of 1889, either the Woman's fights Congress or the
official congress or the two together, represented an instant comparable
to birth.1 The authorised report on the Congres Francais at International
du Droit des Pemes (1889) stressed that in comparison to "all the
Ether] Congresses held during the Exposition Universelle du Centenaire,
that of Woman's Rights attracted the most attention and obtained the
most publicity; the total of foreign as well as French articles devoted

to the subject surpassed 600!"2 In the eyes of subsequent feminists,

 

lSeveral analysts of the movement have asserted or implied that
the Congress of 1889 was the first such act in France. Geneviive Gennari
said precisely that in her E Dossier de la fge (Paris, 1965), 37.
Louis Bardéche implied as much in referring to the 1889 Congress as a
"brilliant sortie" in his Histoire deg felines, II, 337. Even Le’on
Abensour wrote at times as if the 1878 Congress had never taken place.
”The Congresses began to appear, and that of 1889, the first, opened in
an atmosphere of sympathetic attention," wrote Abensour in his 'gtoire
e'ne'ral , 2715.

2Cogrég Franggis st Igternatiogl d3 Droit deg Femmes, i.

 

.g

5"

‘c. e

I ~

325

moreover, the events of 1889 completely eclipsed the first Congress.
Avril de Saint-Croix emphasized the importance of 1889 for the careers
of Jeanne Schmahl and Hat-ya Che‘liga, two second generation leaders of
imigrant background. "It is from that date," wrote Saint-Croix in 1906,
”and thanks as well to the contribution brought to it by two talented
foreigners, that feminism definitely came of age."3 Che'liga herself had
earlier written that the 1889 Congresses represented "incontestably the
beginning of a prosperous epoch for the French feminist movement."‘1
Jules Allix also cemented that ”one can very well say that, from these
two Congresses of 1889, truly date, in principle, all the munerous groups
that have since emerged one after the other, and still exist [In 1891735
Even the otherwise hostile Maria Dronsart paid grudging homage to the
importance of the two gatherings:
These two congresses drew no more than a thousand people. Party
divisions somewhat confused the foreigners, and the nation ig-
nored [the eventg7. Howeveg, they were the point of departure
for a kind of organization.
In the long view, sunmed up by Li Dzeh-Djen in 19311, 1889 constituted a
decisive date for the French movement by "posing the first bases of a
national and international tactic."7

The regenerative process of 1889 also separated the collective

feminist effort under the Third Republic from previous movements.

 

3Avril de Saint-Croix, he-Fehinisme (Paris, 1906), 133-3h.

“Marya Che'liga, "L'Hvolution du Feminisme,“ Revue Encyclope'dimie
(November, 1896), 912.

5Ameiioration, galletin, June-July 1897.

6Dronsart, ”Le Mouvement Feministe," 115.

7L1 Dzeh-Djen, E Presse fe'minigte, 35.

 

iJ

 

 

0-. .9

.-I.

326

Although struggles to liberate women had occurred earlier, particularly
in 1789 and 18118, none had lasted more than a few years. In contrast,
the generation whose demise coincided with the era of the second Woman's
Rights Congress not only set a record for longevity in respect to its own
efforts, but managed as well to help create a second generation. Hence,
in addition to its significance as the end of one generation and the
beginning of another, 1889 also signalled the moment when organized
feminism in France achieved sufficient momentmn to break the historic

pattern of interruption and to replace it with continuity.

Frmentation and Remdiation

The movement continued, however, in only a very rudimentary form.
Auclert reestablished her Socie'te' le Suffrage des Femmes when she re-
turned to Paris in 1892, and l'Ame'lioration passed into the hands of
Fe'resse-Deraismes upon the death of Maria Deraismes in 1891:. Both
groups survived at least until the First World War. The Ligue Francaise
pour le Droit des Femmes also survived, with Maria Pognon as the first
of Richer's several successors, and it exists to this day. But the pre-
eminent structural and ideological position once held by these three
groups quickly disappeared after 1889. Despite the emergence of a second
generation out of the first, the continuation took the form of framen-
tation and repudiation in the critically important areas of organization
and ideas.

Disunity had characterized the movement throughout its first
generation. After a few years in the ranks of Andre' Le’o's Socie'te' pour
la Revendication des Droits des Fumes, Deraismes collaborated with Richer
in founding the Socie’te' pour l'Ame’lioration du Sort de la Femme. Six

years later, Auclert created the Socie’te' 1e Droit des Femes, and, after

327

another six years, Richer fashioned the Ligue Francaise pour le Droit
des Femes. Auclert then launched her abortive Socie'te' Nationale du
Suffrage des Femes, and, at the time of the 1889 Congress, Richer an-
nounced his equally unsuccessful Fe’de’ration Internationale pour la
Revendication des Droits de la Fame. In the meantime, each of the three
groups experienced inmnnerable crises resulting in defections and ex-
pulsions. Indeed, the only instance of consolidation during the entire
period was l'Ame'lioration's cooptation of Le'o's Socie'te' in the early
1880's, and that act amounted to little more than a transfer of funds.
With the emergence of a second generation, however, the tri-
partite disunity of the earlier period gave way to fragmentation. From
within the ranks of the movement, as usual, a host of individuals re-
volted against the old groupings and proceeded to found their on organ-
izations. The first to do so was Madmne Vincent, who anticipated some
of her younger colleagues by creating the Socie'te' Feminists "Egalite‘l' in
1889.8 Next came Che'liga's Union Universelle des Femmes, which grew out
of the 1889 Woman's Right Congress and succeeded on a smaller scale in
founding the international movement that Richer had hoped to lead.9
Thereafter and in short order, there appeared, along others, Astie' de
Valsayre's short-lived Ligue de l'Affranchissement des Fumes (1890),

which mnnbered de Gaste' among its members and imposed higher dues on

 

81MB, Dossier Madame Vincent.

9m1etig de ygrggg Univergellg deg Fmes, May 1891. An
assortment of non-feminist groups also took a stand in favor of women's
rights at this time. Perhaps the oddest was formed in 1890 at Nantes,
the Socie'te' d'Altruisme, which displayed opposition to individualism
through anonymous editing of its L'Anti-gofste. It called for woman's
rights in the one of "altruistic so idarity. Le Droit des Femes,
21 September 1890.

 

 

 

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..eo-ao

v.0

 

328

men to symbolize women's inferior wages;10 La Socie'te' 1a Solidarite'
des Femes (1891), which represented another effort by Potonie'oPierre
to bridge the gulf between socialist and bourgeois women and enrolled
La Citoyenne's Maria Martin as provisional secretary;11 and Jeanne
Schmahl's l'Avant-Courridre (1893), whose conservative cadre included
the Duchess d'Uzés and Madams Adam.12
In the course of this proliferation, the various feminist groups
made one more effort to unite. The initiative came from Jules Gerbaud,
editorial comittee chairman of the Protestant La Fm. In an ad-
dress to the 1891 general assembly of the Union Universelle and in an
article for the Union's Bulletin, Gerbaud deplored the "polyfederal
epidemic” that, if not cured, would soon leave each feminist with her
or his own group.13 Potonié-Pierre supported the idea in articles for

both La Citoyenne and £2 Droit des Femmes, although she first raised

doubts about Gerbaud's feminist experience and expressed alarm at the

Union's authoritarian tendencies.“ Finally, once those and other

matters had received an airing, eleven groups joined together in

 

10La Citoyenne, November 1890. La Ligue de l'Affranchissement
des Funnies charged monthly dues of twenty centimes for women and
thirty for men. Women could also join directly, whereas men had to
have the personal endorsement of someone who already belonged to the
Ligue. The Ligue pledged to protect the identities of those who
wished to remain anonymous.

nLa Ciggzgnne, 1 July 1891. Sowerwine, an and Socialism in

{meg 1821-12219 99‘110e
12Schmahl, ”Progress of the Women's Rights Movement in France,"

 

79-92.

1 c

let d on Univer el e de Fem s, June 1891.

”a Citoyenne, 1 September 1891, 15 September 1891, 1 November
1891. Le Droit de Feline , 20 September 1891.

 

at

.90

0-90‘0

B...

somoo“

329

15

December 1891 in a Fe'de'ration Francaise des Socie'te's Feministes.

Five months later the Federation sponsored a Congress, but be-
fore it could undertake further endeavors Petunia-Pierre quit the new
coalition in a dispute over her authority as its secretary.16 For a
few months, the Fe'de’ration continued to function without direction.

Then it silently disappeared into that realm where the proposals of
Auclert and Richer had already gone. Meanwhile, the philanthropically
oriented Protestant "feminists," who had dominated the official Con-
gress, organized a series of annual Versailles Conferences, the first
of which convened in 1890.17 As a result, the movement as a whole found
itself more fragnented in the 1890's, despite yet another Congress in
1896, than it had been during the previous generation.

The second generation also repudiated much of what its imediate
forerunners had stood for. This was particularly true of the many hy-
phenated feminists who put the woman cause second. Catholic-feminists
objected to the first generation's lay passions, for example, while
socialist-feminists excoriated its bourgeois outlook. But those who
assmned control of the movement and professed feminimn as their principal

interest also repudiated the first generation. Le'on Abensour reflected

 

15Le Droit des Femmes, 20 December 1891. The eleven groups were:
L'Allaitem—ent ha"te"rn"e'l'""et 1". Refuge pour les femes enceintes; La Socie’te’
pour l'Amelioration du Sort de la Femme et la Revendication de ses Droits;
Le Groupe Etienne Dolet; La Fe'de'ration de la Libre-Pense'e; La Ligue
Franqaise pour le Droit des Felines; La Ligue du Bien Public; La Ligue
pour la Reforms du Costlnne Feminin et la Liberté du Costume; Le Patronat
du 6e arrondissement; Le Patronat de la rue de Buci; L'Union Universelle
des Fs-es; and La Solidarite' des Felmnes. Several more groups joined
before the Federation finally collapsed.
16W, March 1892, April 1892, May 1892, June

17Almanach Feminists 18fl, 31—36.

 

 

 

 

V..-

330

the second generation's thinking of its predecessors when he wrote in
1921 that ”perhaps France would have little by little accustomed itself
to feminimn, if some militants had not too hastily wanted to pick still
unripe fruit and to pass on to direct action."18 The shadow campaigns
had been especially disastrous, in Abensour's opinion: "From such
demonstrations, which reinforce the facile jests whose influence is
so strong on the public, undoubtedly flowed more bad than good for the
cause."19

Among key activists who devoted considerable energy to repu-
diating the movement's founders, two stand out: Jane Misme and Jeanne
Schmahl. Misme, who founded La Frangaise in 1906 and played a dominant
role for the next thirty years, sought to draw a sharp line between the
moderates she represented and the ”impulsive" partisans of EM in
Auclert's "radical party."20 Until she herself rallied to woman suffrage

in 190?, Minna considered the vote ”utopian."2l

After that date, Misme
complained of Auclert's ”gaudy demonstrations" and refusal to employ
"discreet envelopment" against apathetic women.22 Misme could not avoid
acknowledging Auclert's devotion, which she praised on the latter's
death, but, even then, she conceeded only the possibility of l'mys

appropriateness to times past.23

 

18Abensour, Hi toire e'ne'rale, 2711.

19Ibid., 275.

20Misme, "La Vie at la mort du féninisme," 36.

21La Franggise, 30 December 1906.
22Ibid., 29 November 1903.

23Ibid., 18 April 1914.

 

 

 

w-......

 

331

Schmahl, whom Misme described as "remarkably intelligent and dis-
tinguished," refused to concede even that?“ Shortly after forming
l'Avant-Courriére, Schmahl cemented on the first generation in an
English language article for m. Auclert drew criticism for engaging
in "uproarious proceedings" reminiscent of women militants during the
French Revolution. As for Deraismes, Schmahl considered her "despotic”
and lacking in the "ability to recognize and utilize talent and merit“
possessed by her followers. More reprehensible than individual faults,
however, was the first generation's involvement in religious and political
causes. The campaign in the late 1860's for lay girls' schools "was
undoubtedly a mistake," Schmahl wrote: "This mixing up of politics and
religion with the women's question has been one of the great reasons of
the unsuccess of the movement in France." Early feminists had also acted
prematurely in declaring their democratic sympathies: ”Until women have
got the franchise they can neither be Republicans nor Monarchists; it
is therefore foolish to stamp them beforehand as belonging to this or
that political camp.” The net effect of the founders' behavior was what
one might expect, Schmahl concluded: women remained the greatest ob—
stacle to feminism ”not only because they are profoundly ignorant of its
signification, but because they disapprove of the socialistic and ir-

religious attitudes of most of the leaders."25

 

2“Misme, "La Vie et la mort du féninisme,” 2.2.

25$chmahl, "Progress of the Women's Rights Movement in France,"
81-81:. The Abbe’ Lecoeur, director of l'externat Join-Lambert, described
Schmahl in 1897 as a "woman distinguished by talent, mind, and character."
"She has resolutely separated herself from Maria Deraismes, especially
from Louise Michel," Lecoeur continued, "and has oriented feminism in a
practical way where moderation will lead to victories in the near future."
Lecoeur estimated in the same year that ”in Paris alone, one counts
eighteen feminist groups comprising thirty-five thousand members." Abbe'
Lecoeur, ”Le Mouvement Feministe," agatre Conferences Blanches (Bouen,
1897)s 123s 131.

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332

Viewed against the regenerative process' attritional effect on
first generation personnel, the movement's post-1889 tendencies to
fragmentation and repudiation reinforce the simple but important im-
pression that feminism's formative phase under the Third French Republic
represented the work of individuals who collectively displayed rather
distinct characteristics in respect to both their life spans and their

atti tudes a

Liberal Politico-Feminism

Analysts of the recent movement for women's liberation make a

distinction between two types of participants, "politicos" and "feminists."

In their present fem, both types manifest characteristics that reflect
peculiarities of the contemporary milieu as well as longstanding trends.
For the purpose of this study, however, the significance of the dis-
tinction stems from the general applicability of the two types to other
times and places. "Politicos" perceive the woman question as an im-
portant but subsidiary aspect of larger socio—political questions. With-
out any lessening of concem for women's oppression, they focus primary
attention on the struggle to alter extra-sex facets of the total society.
In contrast, "feminists" perceive the woman question as 3'29. question, and,
rather than wrestling with issues of class or political authoritarianism,
they focus the struggle on the narrower dynamic of inter-sex rivalry.

In the most uncritical sense, the disagreement can be "somewhat loosely

defined as feminists seeing 'man as the enemy,’ politicos, 'the system.”

 

26Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York,

1971), 116. With reservations, the onset of the recent upsurge of in-
terest in women's liberation can be traced to Betty Friedan's The

Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963).

26

 

 

a-

333

In light of the above distinction, it seems clear that politicos
dominated French feminism's first generation. Their particular per-
ception of the system's faults differed markedly from that of their
twentieth century counterparts, who increasingly adopted a Marxist point
of view, and the ranks of the movement often included individuals of a
slightly different persuasion, notably Auclert. But in respect to both
the premises on which the strategists of .12.. m took their stand and
the age-correlated experiences of the first generation, it appears that
the movement's founders represented a liberal politico-feminist orienta-
tion.

Between Deraismes‘ practical involvement in republican politics,
notably her salon and her Re’ blicain de Seine-et-Oise, and Richer's
constant reiteration of republican principles and friendly ties with
Radical legislators, there would seem to be little doubt about the
priority they accorded to erecting and protecting a liberal, democratic
society. "When at the proper time, I shall call for political equality
[for womeg], as I call today for civil equality,“ Richer wrote during
the convoluted debate with Giraud in 1889, "I shall not speak in the
name of particular class interests, but in the name of lofty principle,
in the name of right, in the name of justice; I shall rest my case, with-
out distinguishing between categories, on the quality of the [individual]
human being which encompasses woman as much as man."27 Deraismes sub-
scribed to similar ideals and frequently expressed her contempt for
collectivists and communists:

Thank God, we can rest reassured, because that faction [the
CWStgig composed of only the most ignorant and least

 

27Le Droit des Femmes, 18 August 1889.

 

 

 

 

 

334

honorable individuals. . . . Communism is repugnant to nature.

. . . It is absurd. Certainly, it is not impossible to seize

riches violently, but what remains inalienable, indivisible,

immovable are the sources that produce them: talent, genius,

knowledge, character, beauty, health, etc. These are riches

that cannot be expropriated and cannot be held in common.
Eliminating class antagonism constituted the ultimate social objective,
Deraismes asserted, "because that opposition of interests forcibly
creates a multiple, heterogeneous politics, inevitably engendering dis-
order and perturbation." In place of such antagonism, there should
emerge a "persistent crusade against misery" in order to establish "the
most favorable conditions for [individnag physical, intellectual, and
moral development."

To these fundamental assumptions about the need to promote inp
dividual liberty and to ameliorate class antagonisms, Deraismes and
Richer added the standard fare of contemporary Radical republicanism:
anti—clericalism, to eliminate the Church as a vested interest; univer-
sal, lay education, to provide individuals with development opportunities
and to offset religious indoctrination; procedural political democracy,
to thwart authoritarianism and unrepresentative government in either
its imperial fonm, as under the Second Empire, or in its oligarchic form,
as with the Third Republic's Senate; and, to a lesser extent, pacifism,
to abolish the scourge of war through international arbitration and
mediation. Extensive reforms had thus to be undertaken, they believed,

but caution had also to be exercised. In.matters of’method, Deraismes

explained, moderation must prevail:

 

28Maria Deraismes, France et ro r33, cited in Oeuvres complétes
de Maria Deraismes, 186—87.

29Ibid., 187. For an opinion on commism similar to that of
Deraismes and Richer, see Georges Guéroult's assessment of the First
International reprinted in Deraismes' France et ro rds, 249-53.

 

Q.

335

In order to obtain this result, is it a question of turning

society upside down, of displacing injustices, of raising on

high what had been on low and 322.2 m? Not at all. It is

a question of successively introducing, after hard examination,

profound study, and partial experimentation, the modifications,

the reforms, where they are indispensible and the most legiti-

mately clailned.30
Change pursued moderately required in turn a political system that would
respond to such a method, whether the cause was woman's rights or class
solidarity. For Deraismes and Richer and their followers, only liberal
democratic institutions could meet that requirement. "To effect these
changes, to organize the relations of workers and capitalists on new
bases," Deraismes emphasized, ”the republican form appears to be the
indispensible preliminary."31

Relative to the develomeut of other socio—political orienta-

tions, especially those of the Left, the liberal-democratic credo of
Deraismes and Richer had lost many of its ”revolutionary” overtones by
1889. Indeed, in the 1890's, (he to its grip on the movement, "the
possibility of an alliance between feminism and socialism was dimin-
ishing."32 Yet, however "mainstream" or "conservative" this outlook
eventually became, it remained a dynamic doctrine to the movement's
founders. An important part of the reason for that would seem to be
the age composition of the first generation. Many feminists reached
at least their sixtieth year by 1889, which provided the movement's
founders with a succession of national experiences quite different from

those of most second generation activists. The movement's creators

spent nearly a third of their lives under monarchical and imperial

 

3oIbid.

3lIbid., 226.

32Sowerwine, Women and Socialism in France 1821-1221, 1111.

 

 

336

regimes antithetical to their own political beliefs. They also came to
maturity at the moment when utopian socialist.ideas exercised a strong in!
fluence on certain sectors of the French populace, including that to which
the movement's leadership belonged. Richer cooperated with Arlee-DufOur
and representatives of the Familistere de Guise, for example, while
Phalanetérienne Virginie Griess—Traut played an important role in
Deraismes' l'Amélioration. In contrast to the communism she loathed,
moreover, Deraismes praised the doctrines of Saint-Simon and Fourier
for their "just and incisive critique of our current [social] organi-
zation."33 Liberals had no cause to fear them, she explained:

Of all the socialist ideas, the bourgeoisie has, by design,

only held back from communism, inasmuch as neither Saint-

Simon, nor Fourier had ever professed the division of riches.

They wanted, on the contrary, that salaries become proportional

to capacities and they accorded a very large role to genius,

to talent.34

This symbiosis between utopian socialism and liberalism, which

undoubtedly reinforced the first generation's expectation that "anta-
gonism" would one day disappear as a result of’moderate reforms in the
essential areas of class and sex oppression, provides further evidence
of the "dated” socio-political orientation of thetmovement's founders.
The point worth emphasizing, however, is that individuals who subscribed
to this orientation grew to maturity in circumstances that thwarted its
realization. Born within a few decades of 17899 weaned around 1830,
in full youthful bloom.in 1848, and.middle aged during the critical
1868-1878 authoritarianprepublican transition, they experienced a se-

quence of events that simultaneously reinvigorated their liberal faith

 

33Deraismes, France et pro res, cited in Oeuvres completes de
Maria Deraismes, 183.

3"Ibid., 185-6.

 

 

 

337

and heightened their concern about its successful implementation. Having
witnessed reaction, they never overcame their fear of it, which definitely
set them apart from their younger colleagues in the 1870's and 1880's and
from the majority of second generation feminists. These latter proved no
less devoted to the Republic, and Auclert for one preferred slavery in
"democratic" France to freedom elsewhere, but their life spans, despite
the debacle of 1848, brought them to maturity when the "forces of change"
seemed inevitably ascendent. The generation of Richer and Deraismes
could not abide such complacency. All progress hinged on the republican
prerequisite, and, even after the Third Republic achieved relative sta-
bility, they brought to its defense the cumulative fears and frustrations
that had once gone into its creation. ‘Without that system, they believed,
no one could enjoy liberty. Consequently, the woman question.had to
await final resolution of the political question, which, in light of the
influence exercised by Richer and Deraismes, meant that liberal-politico

feminism would dominate the movement's first generation.

Movement Implications of Liberal Politico-Feminism
The political priority of Deraismes, Richer, and their like-

minded followers had multiple effects on the movement. In the ongoing
and unresolved controversy over strategy, for instance, the assumptions
of liberal politico-feminism underlay the dispute between advocates of
lg M and partisans of l'w. Woman suffrage and the tactics
employed by its proponents provoked angry objections from.the first genp
eration's moderate majority, not because the vote conflicted with
feminist theory, but because it seemed to threaten the Republic. Liberal

politico-feminism also left the campaign overly dependent on the males

 

 

338

who had already found a niche in the evolving democratic infrastructure,
and siphoned off into political activity a considerable amount of the
movement's all too meagre human and.material resources.

Against these negative implications, however, those who sub-
scribed to this point of view derived one significant advantage, the

psychological satisfaction of participating in the successful develop-

 

 

ment of the Third Republic. Liberal politico-feminists perceived their
struggle to liberate women as equally important, of course, but they

l
dared not press it to its full extent until the political question had

received a permanent and definitive answer. In the interim, they looked
back on the transition from Second Empire to Third Republic with measured
pleasure, despite their fears of reaction, and transferred the resultant
sense of progress to the feminist side of the cause. Those of younger
age, like Auclert, and those who desired a more radical answer to the
political question, like Eugenie PotoniéLPierre, thus found themselves
at least partially cut off from an important source of psychic sustenance
at a time when movement affiliation required enormous inner strength.
Whether considered as a matter of principle, class, or psychology,

however, the dominance of liberal politico-feminism during the first

 

generation raises a fundamental question: what type of movement did it
manage to create? Throughout this study, the word."movement" has been
used in the most general sense, i.e., a collective effort to achieve
something. The reason for so broad a definition was simply to permit a
focus on group endeavors to the exclusion of isolated, individual protests
against woman's subordination, particularly those of a literary nature.
However, political scientists employ a distinction that provides a.more

critical frame of reference for analyzing collective efforts. According

339

to this distinction, such efforts tend to assume one or another of two
basic foms. One form is the movement p_e_r_ £13, or what is usually referred
to as a social movement. It tends to be goal-oriented, idealistic, and
concerned with fundamental change. The other fem is the party, which
tends to be power—oriented, realistic, and concerned with the capture of
offices. Neither form can easily avoid taking on some of the other's

characteristics; social movements may resort to political means to

 

achieve their sweeping reforms, while parties may present their office-

 

seekers in the name of basic grievances. In some cases, moreover, the

two felms are so intemingled that the collective effort tends to lose its

sense of direction. One such case was the French Socialist party under

the Third Republic; another would seem to be the feminist movement during

its first generation.”
In the case of the feminist movement, a contradiction imediately

arose between the goal sought and the means employed. The goal, which

will be examined in greater detail below, was simply to liberate women

from the constraints of the systeme masculiniste. In scope alone that

was an enormous undertaking. On behalf of a female population numbering ~r.

from eighteen to twenty millions, the collective effort managed to muster

less than a thousand activists during its first generation.36 Viewed “a.

pragmatically, this imense discrepancy undoubtedly influenced the move- .

ment to shift tactical locus from its amorphous constituency to the halls

 

35See the note in Donald N. Baker, "Seven Perspectives on the
Socialist Movement of the Third Republic," Historical Reflections, I
(Winter, 1971.), 171.

36Even when double and triple counted, the total membership of
Deraismes' l'Ame’liorstion, Auclert's Suffrage des Femmes, Richer's Ligue,
and the two Women's Rights Congresses (1878 and 1889) came to less than
900. See Appendices C,D,F,H,I, and J.

“-C.‘.

340

of parliament, where sympathetic legislators might give to all women.what
only a few demanded forthrightly. In that sense, at least, the tendency
of the collective effort to abandon.mass action in favor of small group
pressure tactics represented a realistic response to an extremely dif-
ficult situation. Moreover, this shift would not in itself prevent the
collective effort from retaining predominant characteristics commonly
associated with social movements.

Instead, the source of the contradiction stemmed from.the fact
that the feminist movement assumed party characteristics in at least two
critical respects. While it never officially constituted itself as a
party and practical difficulties affected its methods, the collective
effort displayed a powerborientation in matters both of principle and of
personnel. Despite differences in emphasis, all first generation fend-
nists, as well as a great many'nonpfeminists, subscribed to republicanism,
which as a simple belief would not necessarily lead to direct involvement
in office seeking. Under liberal politico-feminist leadership, however,
the movement accorded priority to building a democratic power base in
France. The fervor with which it attached itself to that principle, more-
over, led to extensive participation in the larger effort to promote re-
publican candidates and issues and to thwart the forces of reaction.

The movement contributed a number of candidates directly - Richer,
Lévrier, Allix, etc. - and Deraismes emerged as the dominant political
figure in the Department of Seine-et-Oise. The net effect of these
partyblike endeavors was twofold. First, as long as the political
question retained its primacy, the movement refused to cpen its ranks to
nonprepublicans, and, conversely, nonprepublicans refused to join an

effort controlled by Radical-Socialists, Freemasons, and free-thinkers.

 

E
u.

 

341

Second, although the struggle to liberate women represented the movement's
£933.92. ya, the priority accorded to republican power invariably pro-
duced a governing elite whose attitude on the woman question bore little
resemblance to that of its liberal politico-feminist backers. Consequently
the first generation not only found itself cut off from Catholics (due to
its free-thinking), workers (due to its bourgeois outlook), and the rural
masses (due to its urban locus), but dependent on the dominant Radical-
Socialist Party, which waited until the eve of the First World War to
create a woman's rights group. Even then, the Federation des Feumes
Radicales et Radicales-Socialistes excluded woman suffrage from its

37

progrmn.

Feminism and the Feminist Movement in France

If, as a collective force for change, the movement suffered from
the contradiction between its self-appointed social mission to liberate
women and its majoritarian conmlihnent to republican democracy, it none-
theless concentrated on alleviating the constraints of the systems Egg-
culiniste. Indeed, although second generation feminists like Schmahl
occasionally faulted the movement's founders for excessive political in-
volvement, it is not at all clear that political indifference would have
strengthened the first generation's position. Nor is it clear that po-
litico-feminism represented an obstacle to deve10ping a critical analysis
of sexist Oppression, despite ancillary endeavors acting as a drain on
the movement's limited energies. It seems quite likely in fact that
liberal politico—feminism produced an unintended but important result.

Once liberals achieved their political ends, the woman question emerged

 

37La Francaise, 9 May 1914.

 

 

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3102

in starker relief. The same can perhaps be said for other versions of
politico-feminism, particularly those influenced by Marxist thought,

which have tended to draw attention to woman's oppression while simul-
taneously entangling the problem in a morass of additional considerations.
This is not to say, of course, that the woman question can be completely
isolated from other questions. Woman's liberation may indeed require

the abolition of political authoritarianism, class domination, racial dis-
crimination, and much else. But, over the past few hundred years it seems
clear that where successes have occurred in these other liberation efforts,
the effect has been less to increase woman's freedom than to reveal the
unique dimensions of woman's subordination.

Yet, if later events revealed new facets of woman's plight, the
first generation quite successfully focused contemporary attention on ru-
diments of the problem. In particular, the movement served as a conduit
through which individuals could express their shared discontent and in-
itiate actions of scale beyond the capacity of the systéme's otherwise
isolated victims. Relative to the enormity of the problem, the miniscule
size of the collective effort virtually guaranteed failure in the area of
substantive reform. But in order for change to occur at all, the woman
question had first to be resurrected. To a significant degree, the move-
ment's first generation accomplished that.

Other than that, however, the movement essentially failed. Many
setbacks occurred where the movement had little control over events, as
with its reform program. Strategists of 22 95521.2 and l'm undoubt-
edly weakened the collective effort by their incessant wrangling, but
there is no reason to believe that solidarity on the issue of woman suf-

frage would have hastened its enactment. Where reforms succeeded,

 

 

 

.‘F-L“

343

moreover, they either touched very few women, as with the opening of inp
temships in public hospitals to female medical students, or they repre-
sented "coattail" victories of dubious merit, as with the politically and
anti-clerically motivated expansion of girls' education and reestablish-
ment of divorce. The movement also failed to keep its own house in order,
with the result that the collective effort displayed a propensity for

squabbling and doctrinal disputatiousness akin to that of emigre' revolu-

 

tionaries. But, just as emigre's might receive exoneration on grounds of
relative impotence, so analogically could French feminists receive at
least partial absolution in light of their status as quasi-foreigners in
their own country.

However, the movement's most grievous failure occurred where it
had exclusive and undisputed control. It never developed an adequate in-
terpretation of either the roots of woman's subordination or the routes
to woman's liberation. Throughout the first generation, the movement
drew heavily on the anguish of individual women, whose direct and vicarious
experiences of sexist oppression provided an emotional bond for collective
endeavor. It also managed to articulate certain inequalities reflective

of the enormous gap that had evolved between the narrowed social sphere

 

accorded to women and the much wider sphere enjoyed by men. But at that
point, where psychological alienation met institutional description, the
movement tended to come to rest. Abeusour characterized the result in
one of his last works on the subject, the aptly named Probléme fe'ministe:
In fact, feminism is at the same time a reaction of the individual
conscience, and the collective conscience of women against the in-
justice and the illogicality of the condition that certain societies

have imposed on them. . . . It appears less as a political, philo-
sophical or social doctrine than as a state of mind.

 

38Abensour, Le Problems re’niniste, 159.

344

In other words, the movement's first generation failed to develop
a theory adequate to explain either the conditions in need of reform or
the means to effect the necessary changes. The movement exhibited an
awareness that women had been relatively better off in the past and that
men alone had benefitted from France's several revolutions, but that re—

cognition also tended to stay fixed at the level of comparative descrip-

 

tion. Barring sophisticated analyses, moreover, "history" had little use-
value for French feminists. Even the comparative descriptions had to be
handled with care, lest the movement find itself juxtaposing "progressive"
feudalism to the recent "reactionary" revolutions. Such a juxtaposition
would have been generally accurate from a feminist point of view, and
Abeusour has suggested that, in reaction to woman's quasi-equality, anti-
feminism preceded feminism in the middle ages, rather than the other way
around as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.39 But on other
grounds, especially those of political and religious import, the indivi-
duals who comprised the movement could not repudiate the present in the
name of the past.

Instead, the movement found itself virtually compelled to adopt

a position that somehow the "progress" that had brought so much to so

 

many men would soon bestow benefits on women as well. In a very real
sense, although the movement arose in response to the anguish of women
whose freedom of choice had become increasingly circumscribed, the col-
lective effort rode along on a kind of moral syllogism, to wit: Oppres-
sion is wrong; women are Oppressed; the Oppression of women is wrong.
Coupled with the implicit anticipation that the wheel of progress was

about to stop on woman's number, this feeling that justice demanded

 

39Abensour, La Femme et le feminisme avant la revolution, v.

 

 

0-5.--

 

345

woman's liberation permitted the movement's first generation to display
an optimism considerably out of proportion to the magnitude of its task.
The prosaic titles of the movement's journals and groups, which empha—
sized woman's "future" and woman's "rights," convey this impression, and
Richer took pride in reversing Bismarck's "Might makes Right" as the
motto for his Le Droit des Femmesf‘0 Not until the end of the second

generation did journals appear bearing titles more in keeping with the

 

extent of the problem: Le Combat Feministe (1913-14), Le Cri des Femmes

(191a), and La Lutte réniniste (1919-21).

 

Carried along by moral indignation and optimism but without an
adequate theory to guide them, the movement's participants found it ex-
tremely difficult to give direction to their own efforts, or, equally im-
portant, to elaborate an explanatory framework for their successors. In
part this difficulty stemmed from the movement's interest in effecting
change, which seemed under the circumstances to require action rather than
study. Second generation feminists noticed this defect and attempted to
compensate for it in 1898 when Madame Oddo-Deflou founded the Groupe
Francais d'Etudes Feministes et des Droits Civils des Femmes, which also ’1:
strove to disentangle the woman question from the first generation's po-
litical and anti-clerical passions}1 With the possible exception of
Deraismes, the founders of the movement also lacked intellectual creden-
tials. Their chief collective talent was journalism, which led to reams
of reportage and polemics but few in-depth analyses. Finally, given the
great disparity between woman's rights and those of men, it seems clear

that the movement considered sexist injustice so self-evident as to

 

hoLe Droit des Femmes, 5 April 1885.

hlLa Fran aise, 5 July 1915.

 

 

346

obviate the need for theoretical disquisitions. Yet, regardless of the
reasons for the neglect, the first generation displayed crippling incon-
sistencies in respect to constituencies, goals, and rationale.

The basic constituency seemed obvious enough. It was woman, and
the movement assumed the charge of liberating all in that category -
slightly more than half the population - from.man, whose standing with-
in the sxstéme masculiniste brought him political, economic, social, and
ideological dominance. On the surface, therefore, the lines of struggle
seemed clear; women would have to engage in a "war on men," as Audouard's
1866 title suggested. But many women accepted and even defended their
own subordination, while at least a few men passionately fought against
sexist tyranny. As a result, the movement could count women among its
enemies and men among its friends, even though the ostensible objective
was to free all women from their subordinate relationship to all men.
First generation feminists were not so naive, of course, as to think that
all women would instantly rally to the cause, and the movement exhibited
an awareness of how socialization had instilled deference and docility
into women. But whatever the explanation for individual attitudes, the
point is simply that the effort to resolve the woman question pitted two
sides against each other whose internal composition, if defined by sex,
included both "friends" and "enemies." The second generation eventually
brought the two sides more into line with the apparent sex division
through increasing the ratio of women to men in the movement. But, al-
though later feminists viewed this as a practical necessity due to women's
conditioned deference to man, nineteenth century feminists seemed to have
moved in that direction because, in the absence of theory, only their

female constituency could provide the cause with definition.

 

 

 

----------------

347

Feminists had more difficulty in determining their relationship
to other groups. As only one of many collectivities in French society,
and constantly in need of allies, the movement repeatedly had to decide
with whom and against whom to align itself. Such decisions proved rela-
tively easy for the first generation's majority so long as its liberal
politico frame of reference could serve as a guide. Republicans secured
feminist support in opposition to monarchists and Bonapartists, for ex-
ample, as did anti-clericals, Freemasons, utopian socialists, and lay edu-
cationists. Individuals from each of these groups reciprocated to a cerb
tain extent, particularly during the transition from Second Empire to
Third Republic when the political question dominated the activities of the
tacit coalition. In the course of the 1880's, however, the situation
changed. Stability had come to the Republic by then, and the new demo-
cratic Establishment relied heavily on personnel drawn from groups with
which feminists had cooperated. But, once in power and once the educa-
tion and divorce reforms became law, the movement's political "friends"
proved extremely reluctant to tamper with the systéme masculiniste.

Auclert anticipated this republican reluctance to work for changes
specifically related to women when she founded her Société'in 1876. Stra-
tegists of'lg‘brEChe assailed her for endangering the Republic, but al-
though they never relinquished their opposition to lfassaut, they too be-
came aware during the next decade that their political ties had failed to
generate mass support for their feminist objectives. In the course of
the 1880's, in short, the movement reached a point where liberal politico-
feminism seemed insufficient to advance woman's liberation. As a result,
the movement began to search for new partners. But in the absence of an

adequate theory to provide overall direction, the movement lacked a

 

 

 

 

348

"liberation standard" against which to evaluate potential allies. Only
the time-worn liberal-politico perspective remained as a guide, which led
the movement to continue to exclude right wing political and Catholic
groups from its ranks at a moment when its former partners exhibited dis-
interest in woman's emancipation. Stronger ties with socialists represen-
ted another alternative, particularly in light of utopian socialism's ing

fluence on feminist thought; but although Auclert, PotoniéLPierre, and

 

others explored that link, the conflict between class and sex orientation,
as well as Proudhon's lingering impact on the working class, proved inp
surmountable.

One other alternative remained: the numerically significant but
philanthropically-minded moral reform organizations. Throughout most of
the first generation, feminists worked alongside these groups without em?
bracing their orientation. They held separate congresses in 1889 and again
in 1900. Yet they had much in common. Both were largely bourgeois with
large numbers of women in their ranks. Both expressed interest in woman's
lot and demanded rights for women. Finally, they held similar views in
respect to republicanism and anti-clericalism. Consequently, as its for-

mer partners became less dependable, the movement gradually began to seek

 

more extensive ties with moral reformers. This process did not come to a
head until 1901, when the National Council of French women emerged out of
the two 1900 congresses. But the impetus to that type of coalition, which
eventually swamped the movement in a sea of moral zeal, commenced in the
1880's. Indeed, if a specific moment could signify the beginning of

this evolution, it would be 2 May 1886, the date when Richer announced
that his dwindling Ligue had entered into an informal alliance with

Pastor Tommy Fallot's Ligue Francaise pour le Relévement de la Moralité

349

hQ
Publique.

The movement's goals also seemed obvious enough. The systéme imp
posed countless constraints on women. Those had to go, along with anyb
thing else that prevented women from realizing their full potential. In
practice, however, the movement tended to focus exclusively on woman's
rights. This may have been due to deep-rooted traditions, as the Belgian
theorist, Henry de Man, maintained in respect to working class aspira-
tions:

In Britain and the United States, the workers are led by their long-
ing for equality to demand freedoms from the State; in continental
EurOpean countries, the workers clamour for rights. In the English-
speaking lands, the demand is that the State shall not hinder the
process of social change. In Latin countries, the demand is that
social changes shall be regulated by law.43
Or the emphasis on rights may have reflected, once again, the movement's
failure to formulate a theory against which to evaluate the goals of its
struggle. In any case, by focusing on rights, the movement contributed
to a trend that affected nineteenth-century feminists in France and else-
where. That is, by directing the struggle against legal constraints, the
movement became increasingly ends oriented. This is not to say that
rights were immaterial, but, whatever their intrinsic importance, the

movement could not determine their significance to women due to its

failure to develop a general concept for woman's liberation.

 

hZLe Droit des Femmes, 2 May 1886. Lack of an adequate theory
probably accounts as well for the movement's praise of such nonpfeminist
activities as vegetarianism. It also seems that another unintended
benefit of the first generation's liberal politico-feminism was that
it tended to hold the moral reform organizations at arm's length from
the movement.

43Henry de Man, The Psycholo of Socialism, trans. by Eden
and Cedar Paul from the 2nd German edition lLondon, 1928), 121. Cited
in Baker, "Seven Perspectives on the Socialist Movement of the Third
Republic," 179.

 

350

Much of the movement's difficulty stemmed from the failure to
elaborate a clear—cut answer to the question: Why should women.enjoy
greater liberty? The movement took it for granted that women should be
free, which provided the collective effort with an enormous constituency
and a cosmic goal. But it never developed a consistent outlook about the
women it purported to represent. Despite the movement's clamor for
women's rights, it displayed a marked ambivalence about why women should
have those rights. Were women the equals of men, as some feminists main-

tained, or only equivalent, as others asserted? Perhaps they were both,

 

equal in some respects, equivalent in others? "Feminism," wrote Nelly
Roussel, "is the doctrine of natural equivalence and of social equality
of the two factors of the human genre."4& Schirmacher expressed a like
notion: "Woman, in her peculiar sphere, is entirely the equal of man in
his."&5 Richer suggested that "man and woman are equivalent. In this
sense one can say EQUAL: - that is, equality in dissimilarity."4

In immediate impact, this ambivalence led the movement to employ
two rather contradictory "liberation” themes. At times, the movement
portrayed women as an integral part of a larger unit -— the nation, the

west, all humanity - and demanded their emancipation in the name of uni-

 

versal justice and right. At other times, the movement emphasized woman's
special relationship to smaller units, particularly the family, and
claimed her freedom in the name of unique "feminine" qualities. Often

the two themes merged, especially in the assertion that woman's unique

 

hkLe Petit Almanach Feministe pour 1902, 4.
[1"
‘)Schirmacher, The Modern woman's Rights Nevement, xiv.

Richer, Le Livre des femmes, viii.

351

characteristics would contribute to a more peaceful, harmonious social
order. Deraismes typified the movement's tendency in this respect when
she stressed the potential benefit of woman's domestic virtues to the
whole of society: "She will bring to public life her beautiful qualities:
sagacity, perseverence, abnegation."217 Without full utilization of these
virtues, moreover, society must necessarily suffer:

Woman being one of the two great factors of humanity and civili-

zation, all good as well as evil resulting only from the mixed

action of the two sexes, let us recognize that any law, any insti-

tution that does not bear the imgrint of the human duality will

be neither Viable, nor durable.’1

In its long range impact, this ambivalence inclined the movement

to expediency. During the previous few generations, the trend in favor
of the "rights of man" had completely bypassed woman, and, try as they
might, feminists could not effect a transfer of those "people" principles
from one sex to the other. In the meantime, popular belief had increas-
ingly enclosed woman in a prison of sexist metaphysics. The notion that
woman possessed innate aptitudes constituted the basic ideological as-
sumption on which the systéme masculiniste rested. Therefore, when fem?
inists drew attention to woman's "beautiful qualities," which they tended
to stress more and more as appeals to principle failed, they simply rein-
forced the already wide-spread belief that sex represented a legitimate

criterion for discrimination. Furthermore, to the extent that women oc-

casionally secured new legal rights in the name of their "equivalent"

 

47

h81bid., 279. The assumption that women possessed a special nap

ture underlay Abbé'Lecoeur's endorsement of Schmahl's campaign for women's
rights and led him to claim the Church as an ally of feminism: "In a
word‘z;hmaé7‘wants to have rights, I do not say equal, but equivalent to
those of man, in keeping with her innate faculties and with her provi-
dential creation." Lecoeur, "Le Mouvement Feministe," 138.

Oeuvres com létes de Maria Deraismes, 273.

 

-
.
U
‘
I \
-
0" C C. 4 0 CC.
, A
0-0.1... o-o.
.1 U..IC.IoII...I.....DIA‘....IC...C
‘ ..-

   

 

352

natures, the net effect was to strengthen the metaphysical notion that
underpinned the systéme in the first place.

The most powerful of the metaphysical notions with which the
founders of the movement had to contend was that of the BEES educatrice.
According to this image, woman possessed an innate aptitude for two roles,
mother and wife. To fulfill these two roles, woman had to confine herself
spatially to the home, where she could then devote herself exclusively to
maintaining domestic order and to guiding the next generation through
childhood. Implementation of this ideal required a husband who earned
enough to keep a full-time bed-mate and propagator, insuring that, al-
though the image applied to all women, the first to suffer it in practice
would come from the ranks of the bourgeoisie. It is understandable,
therefore, that middle-class women dominated the movement, because, in
addition to the requisite time and money at their disposal, their freedom
from material want made them all the more aware of their oppression as
women. It is also understandable that, given its class composition, the
movement tended to limit its demands to the "bourgeois" rights already
enjoyed by men.

Less understandable is the inability of the movement to develop
an adequate critique of the‘gégg'éducatrice, the essential myth on which
the systéme masculiniste based its idea-structural constraints. Due to
this myth and the objective conditions that transformed it into a "living"
reality for a growing segment of the population, women experienced a
unique type of oppression. Unlike other subjugated groups, they found
themselves isolated from one another and in daily "loving" contact with
their "superiors.” In their child-rearing capacity, they also found

themselves charged with the unprecedented responsibility - for "inferiors"

finJ-qv

~0w _._-

 

1
.'

 

 

 

 

 

353

at least -— of molding the society's future. Together, the various con-
straints combined with the one exalted mission to deprive women of any
real choice over their own lives. Indeed, so long as the ideal of the
mézg'éducatrice prevailed, women would continue to face the Proudhonian
predicament of "housewife or whore."

The movement not only failed to develop a theory to counteract
the ideal of the‘gégg educatrice, however; if anything, the collective
effort strengthened the myth by increasingly relying on "special nature"
arguments to obtain the rights that increasingly became ends in themselves.
As a result, although women's legal status gradually improved, their
gains in law were more than offset by the movement's simultaneous reinp
forcement of the ideological premise that lay at the root of their oppres—
sion. At the beginning of the first generation, d'Héricourt had protested
against the tendency of utopian socialists to envelop the woman question
in "theology," while Lamber had asserted that "I, like Proudhon, believe

"49 Unfortunately, and

that woman's first duty is to be wife and mother.
somewhat paradoxically, the movement also subscribed to Proudhon's pri-
ority. Thus, despite the fact that the movement's first generation.man-
aged to organize an ongoing collective effort, it failed to formulate a

critique of woman's liberation sufficient to guide either its own or the

next generation's struggle.

Not so very far from the Cathedral of Saint-Denis, where dogs and
lions of stone continue to bear witness to the historic subordination of

women in France, is the Square des Epinettes, a small park in the 17th

 

th'Réricourt,‘A Neman's Philosophy of WOman or woman Affranchised,
202. Lamber, Idées antieproudhoniennes, cited in Stephens, Madame Adam,

61.

354

arrondissement bordered on the west by the rue MariapDeraismes. Inside
the Square, close to the fence at its southern end, a weathered block of
granite attracts children, who playfully launch themselves into space
from its flat surface, and adults, who employ that same surface for an
occasional repast. Perhaps stone should always serve some such end. But
that particular stone once had a different service to perform. On 3 July
1899, after several years of fund raising and to the applause of several
dozen onlookers, the sculptor Barrias raised on it a statue to Maria
Deraismes. Some years later, probably during the Second world war, the
statue disappeared. Today, unadorned, the pedestal remains, a mute

symbol to the difficulty still faced by women in a world defined by men.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

PROGRAM 0? THE JOURRAL LjAVENIR DES

FEHHES OF 1876

THE LAW SAYS:

The girl, from fifteen years of age
is alone responsible for her virtue.

Seduction is not a crime (délit). (1)

Corruption, even of a female minor,
is not a crime. (2)

The search for paternity is for-
hidden.

Illegitimate children (lgg_enfents
naturals) are the sole responsi-
bility of the mother.

Every promise of marriage is null,
-- even following the abandonment
of the child.

 

(1)

which violence is required.
is not.

(2)

WE DEMAND: I

That the young girl, even older
than fifteen years, should be

guaranteed by law against adven- ‘
turers (coureurs gfaventures).

 

That seduction should be punished.

That corruption should be
punished.

That the search for paternity
should be permitted, as is the
search for maternity.

That the natural father should be
responsible.

That the illegitimate child should
be the responsibility of its two
authors.

That a promdse of marriage should
not be considered less serious
than a promise of sale, and that
it gives a right, in case of rup-
ture, to moral or other repara-
tions, proportionate to the
damages caused.

 

Simple seduction does not fall under the arm of the law, for
VIOLATION and RAPE are crimes, seduction

Here is the text of the law: -- "Anyone who has violated

morality in exciting, favoring, or facilitating habitually the debauchery
or the corruption of an individual below15hghggg,g£,twent -one, will be
punished by imprisonment from six months to two years and fined from fifty
to five-hundred francs.” (C.P., 424) -- Consequently, the law does not

punish accidental, isolgted corruption;

it is necessary, to constitute a

crime, that it be a habit, a skill, that is called, in a word, proxénétis-

355

356

The male, in marriage, alone exer-
cises paternal authority

For children to marry, the father's
consent suffices; if the mother
refuses hers, it does not matter.

The husband administers the per-
sonal wealth of his wife.

The husband can sell, if he so de-
sires, the family's goods (13.

mobilier conjugal).

He can dispose of all movable effects,
securities, furniture, jewels, etc.,
without consulting his wife, and

that free 2; char e, and even to the
profit of a third person (read: to a
Concubine).

The wife can neither make nor receive
a donation, even from.a member of her
family, without her husband's con-
sent.

Ineligible to be tutors or members

of family councils, minors, gonvicts,
mgg,g£_pgtorious misconduct. i2:
dividuals condemned £g_loss 2£.civil
rights. . . . and WOMEN!

 

The husband's adultery, perpetrated
outside the conjugal domicile, is
not punishable.

The wdfe's adultery, in whatever
place it has been consumated, is
punishable.

The murder committed by the husband
on the wife as well as on the ac-
complice, in the instant when he
surprises them 22 flagrant délit

in the conjugal home, is excusable.
The murder committed by the wdfe,
in the same circumstances, £3.22;
excusable.

 

That authority over children
should be common to the father
and to the mother.

That the consent of the mother
should be as necessary, for mar-
riage, as that of the father.

That administration of personal
wealth of the wife should not be-
long of right and exclusively to
the husband.

That the husband cannot sell, with-
out the consent of his wife, goods
outfitting the home.

That he cannot dispose freely and
alone, either free of charge or
as a debt (2Dtitre onéreux), of
securities or movable effects
necessary to the community or be-
longing to one of the spouses.

That the wife can make and receive
donations without the consent of
her husband, in conformity to the
prescriptions of law.

That she ceases, in what concerns
family councils, to be grouped
with minors, imbeciles and 22?

bitual criminals.

That the husband's adultery should
be assimilated to the wife's
adultery; that is to say that
adultery perpetrated by the hus-
band, outside the home, should be
as criminal as adultery in the
common residence.

A judgement of the correctional tribunal of Niort, of 7 December 1861,
conveyed the following: It is in principle and in jurisprudence that
the individual who has excited to debauchery in order to satisfy his

pr ‘3
4513;.

 

 

357

The woman cannot be admitted as a That the witness of the woman
witness in the acts of birth, counts (fasse Egg) in civil acts
marriage, or death, wills, leases, and public acts, as it counts
sales, family property divisions before criminal tribunals.

or public acts; HER SIGNATURE

cmxss no VALUE (2.6. {an E“ £01). we DEMAND IN ADDITION:

There is what the law says: -- and a In the name of the sanctity of
host of other offensive things, that marriage itself.

women ignore or that they only learn In the name of moral purity.
of too late, when misfortune itself In the name of morality.

has charged them to open their eyes. That the hypocritical law of
separation, -- which breaks mar-
raige without dissolving it,
separates spouses without dis-
uniting them and opens the door
to shameful compromises, -- should
be replaced by divorce encom-
passed with all the legal
guarantees judged necessary.

 

 

The problem thus posed, there is not a honest woman, a mother
anxious about her dignity and her interests, of the dignity and the
interest of her children, who refuses to join us.

This is why we appeal to all, without distinction of opinion, of
rank and of fortune, begging them to help us, by all the means in their
power, in the accomplishment of the great task that we have undertaken.

Our goal is to revise the law.

If it is said that the hour is inopportune, it is in epochs of
social and political reorganization like that through which we pass,
that it is good to think of reforms. 1

No moment would be more propitious.

 

own passions, is not at all regarded as coupable by our legislation.
-- We could multiply the examples.

lLfiAvenir des Femmes, January 1876.

 

APPENDIX B

renew or me socxm POUR L'MIELIORATION
DU soar DE LA mam OF 1887

Complete identification of man and woman in respect to the pos-
session and exercise of civil rights.

Preservation by woman of the plentitude of her rights in marriage:
No more subordination of the wife to the husband; right of the
mother equal to the right of the father.

Reestablishment of divorce.
Progressive initiative of woman into civic life.

A single morality for the two sexes: what is excusable for the one
cannot be blamable, sometimes even criminal for the other.

Absolute right for woman to develop her intelligence through study,
to cultivate her reason, to extend the circle of her knowledge,
without other limits than those resulting from her aptitude and
her will.

Free access of women to all professions and to all careers for
which they will prove, in the same degree as men, and after
similar examinations, the necessary capacities and aptitudes.

Rigorous application, without distinftion of sex, of the economic
formula: "Equal pay for equal work.”

 

1L'Avenir des Femmes, 1 April 1877.

358

 

L

-‘u

‘9

its..-

DI'.~M',

APPENDIX C

LISTE GENERALE DE MEMBERS DE LA 500mm POUR L'AMELIORATION
DU sour DE LA mete ET LA REVENDICATION DE 333 DROITS EN 189:.

Membres Fondateurs

Mme Deraismes (Maria) (fen).

Mme Peresse-Deraismes.

M. Barbe, *. député, ancien
ministre (fen).

M. Griess-Traut (fen).

Mme Griess—Traut (Veuve).

Mme Dusautoy (fen).

Mme Sallé (fen).

La Solidarité, de Genéve

Mme Ve Guérin (fen).

A Titre de

M. Mayer (Ernest-Maurice).
M. Besnard.

Mlle Duval (Charlotte).

Mme Henry.

M. Gasté (de), député (fen).

M. Corneau depute.

M. Koechlin.

M. Arnaud (Leonin).

M. Petit (Frederic) conseiller
general Amiens .

Mme Ernesty d') (fen).

Mme Brochard (fen).

Dons

M. Guillerault conseiller
municipal (Orleans).

Membres Titulaires

x. Allix (Julesg.
M. Ameuille (Dr
M. Barodet.
Mlle Barberousse (Louise).
Mme Beauquier.

M. Bernhard (Alphonse).
Mme Berthoin.

Mme Bequet, de Vienne.

“a Be'thOIBUde

M. Bogelot.

Mme Bogelot.

Mme Busquet—Pagnerre (Vve).

Mme Cantagrel Veuve).

Mme Castanier la generals).
Mme Ce'cilia (1.).

Mme Champseix (Andre-Leo).
M. Chassaing (Dr).

Mme Corniau (la comtesse).
”a Couturier.

M. Coulbeaux (Alfred).

Mo Cilife

M. Francolin Gustave).

Mme Fringnet Alphonsine).
Mme Gatineau.

Mme Gatineau.

Mme Gaudin.

Mme Gesnouinpd'Arsonville.
Mme Goute' (He'loise).

Mme Gouthéraud.

Mme Grandmottet.

Mme Griess-Traut.

M. Hamel (Ernest).

Mme Rayem.

Mme Heredia (de).

Mine Roury.

Mme Hubbart (Veuve).

Mme Jannot.

Mme Janvier.

Mme Brun-Jaret de la Mairie.
Mme Jullien.

Mme Koatven (Germaine) (de).

Mme Fonseque gfilisabeth).

359

360

Mme David (Louise).

M. Damoiseau.

Mme Desinge-Carpentier.

Mme Dupuis-Vincent.

Mlle Duval (Charlotte).

Mme Fanton Germaine).

Mme Peresse-Deraismes.

Mlle Floch.

M. Ponséque.

Mme Koatven (Germaine) (de).
Mme Koppe (Louise).

M. Lacretelle (Henri de).
Mme Leboeuf (Paul).

Mine Leduc.

Mme Leflére.

Mme Levare (Ernest).

Mme Levy (Maurice).

Mme Lieutier (Nelly).

Mlle Lindsay.

x. Lutaud (Dr)

Mme La Madeléne (Jules de).
Mme Marc (Edouard).

M. Martin (Georges).

Mme Mauriceau (Florestine).
Mme Ménétrier.

H. Helmet.

Mme Meyer (Maurice).
M. Millet Charles
M. Moigneux.

M. Montaut.

Mme Montaut.

M. Morel.

M. Morin.

M. Nicolle.

Mme PfahlerbMillet.
Mme Paraf.

Mme Parpalet.

M. Perthuis.

Mme Petti (Olga).
“a Plants

Mme Poloce.

Mme Raymond Pognon.
Mme Preuilly (de).
M. Puteaux (Lucien).

Mme Ray.

Mme REPOtele

M. Rodriques (Hippolyte).
Mme Rogelet.

Mme Salis.

Mme Shli penbach.

Mme 566 (Mare).

Mme SChIDBlle

M. Soller.

 

361

Mlle Staub (Henriette).
Mlle Staub Marie).

M. Thibaudin (le general).
Mme Thibault.

Mme Thouvin.

M. Thorel.

Mme Tinayre.

M. Vauthier (Louis-Leger).
Mme Vincent.

Mme Voisin.

M. Weill (Alexapdre).

Mme Wiggishoff.

 

 

lLa Société'pour l'Amélioration du Sort des Femmes et la
Revendication de ses Droits, Bulletin Trimestriel, April-June 1894,
29-30. Of the eighteen founding members only four were still active in
the group in 189A: Mme Féresse-Deraismes, Mme Griess-Traut, Mlle Charlotte
Duval, and Mme Houry. Their names were repeated on the list; without
the repetitions the total membership in 1894 came to 109.
duals who had associated with Amélioration from the beginning were
either left off the list, like Leon Richer, or given only member status,

like Mme Vincent.

.A few indivi-

 

 

l.
2.
5.
h.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
ll.
l2.
13.
1h.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
2h.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.

51.
32.
35.
5h.
35.

APPENDIX D

LISTE ALPHABETIQUE DES

Mil-{BEES DU commas or 18781

M. Camille Adam (France).

M. Jean Alesson, homme de lettres (id).

M. Alfred Assolant, home de lettres (id).

Mme Atman (Angleterre).

Mme Aubé (France).

Mlle Hubertine Auclert (id).

Mme Vve Bailly (France).

Miss Anna Balland (Angleterre).

Mme Baronet (France).

Mme Caroline de Barrau (id).

M. Bazire (id).

Mme Sophie Beale (Angleterre).

M. Bertani, membre de la chambre des deputés d'Italie.

Mme Béseaud (France).

M. Bibal (id).

M. Boreau (id).

M. Ch. Boudeville, depute de l'Oise (France).

Mme Ch. Boudeville (France).

Mme la contesse de la Bourdonnaye (id).

M. Arthur Bourmensé (id).

Mlle Marie Boutteville (id).

Miss Myra Bradwell (Angleterre).

M. Albert Brisbane, de Newaork (Amerique).

Mme Brisbane (id).

Miss Brown (Angleterre).

Mme Catherine Bussy (France).

Mme Brucker (id).

Mlle Cage (France).

M. Constantin Calligari (Roumanie).

Mme de Caqueray (France).

Mme Carraz (France).

M. Germain Casse, deputé de Paris (France).

Mme Germain (id).

M. Rodolphe Cerf (id).

Mme Cimino Folliero de Luna, designée par le gouvernement
italien pour les questions scolaires (Italie).

 

lL'Avenir des Femmes, 4 August 1878.

362

O O.

--o.

36.
37a
38.
39.
to.
Al.
A2.
#3.
AA.
1.50
A6.
#7.
A8.
1‘9.
500
51.
520
53.
5h.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
63.
6A.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
7h.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
8A.
85.
86.
87.
88.

363

M. Camille Chaigneau (France).

Mme Elisabeth Chalmers (Amerique).

M. Maurice Champion home de lettres (France).
Mme Chaplin Ayrton ( leterre) .

M. Emile Chaté (France .

Mme Elisa Chaté (id).

Mme Chilliet (id).

Mme Vve Christin (id).

M. Louis Cadet, député de la Haute-Vienne (France).
M. Colfavru ancien représentant du peuple (id).
Mme Cortet (France).

Mlle Anne-Marie Cortet (id).

Mlle Aline Cuvelier (id).

Mme Dalencourt (France).

Mme Louise David (id).

M. DéCembre-Alonnier (id).

Mme DéCembre-Alonnier (id).

Mme Demars (id).

Mlle Maria Deraismes (id).

M. Derode, avocat (id).

M. Emile Deschanel depute de la Seine (id).
Mme Vve Destriché (France).

M. Auguste Desmoulins, publicists (id).

Mme Lucie Dissat (id).

M. Disch (id).

Mlle Marie Drouin (id).

M. Du uesne (id).

M. Clement Dulac, ancien representant du peuple (id).
Mlle Charlotte Duval (id).

Mme Dwernicka (Rnssie).

Mme d'Elhom (France).

Mme Fanny Faron (France).

M. Fauvety, publiciste (id).

Mme Feresse-Deraismes (id).

Mlle Floch (id).

M. de Font-Reault (id).

M. Gustave Francolin (id).

Mme Froissart (id).

M. Fuzillier (id).

M. Gagnenr, depute de Jura (France).

Mme M.-L. Gagneur (France .

M. G..... (demissionnaire .

M. Eugéne Garcin, ubliciste (France).

Mme Eugene Garcin id).

M. Marcel Gay, docteur en droit (id).

Mme Gibbons de Pensylvanie (Amerique).

M. Giraud, docteur en droit (France).

M. Godissart, depute de la Martinique (France).
Mme Marie Goegg, de Geneve (Suisse).

Mme Catherine Gontcharoff, docteur en medecine (Russie).
M. Goron (France).

M. Griess-Traut (id).

Mme Griess-Traut (id).

364

89. Mme Cuérin (id).

90. Mme Heaterley (Angleterre).

91. M. 1e docteur Hebert (France).

92. M. de Hérédia, membre dn Conseil municipal de Paris (France).

93. Mlle Herzen (Russia).

9%. M. 1e colonel E. V. Higginson (Amerique).

95. M. le Dr Hoffman.

96. Mlle Hoskens (Angleterreg.

97. Miss Hotchkiss (Amérique

98. M. Houry (France).

99. Mme Anna Henry (id).
100. M. 1e Dr Huguet (id).
101. M. Aim; Humbert, de Neufchatel (Suisse).

102. M. Robert Hyenne, homme de lettres (France).
103. M. Arthur Jame (France).

10%. M. Frédéric Jones Amérique).

105. M. Fernando Jones id).

106. Mme Graham Jones (id).

107. Mlle Geneviéve Graham Jones (id).

108. Mme KellerbDorian, de Mulhouse, (Alsace-Lorraine).
109. Mme Klumple (Anériquc).

110. Mlle Klumple (id).
111. Mile Klumple France).

112. Mme Krohn (France).

113. M. Krohn (id).

11&. Mme Amalia Laforgue (France).

115. M. Laisant, depute de la Loire-Inferieure (France).
116. M. le Dr Edouard Landowski.

117. He 19 Dr P8111 Isa-ndOVBkie

118. M. Lavy (France).

119. M. Leger (id).

120. Mme Leger (id).

121. Mme Vve Lejosne (id).

122. M. Lemaire, licencié en droit (id).

123. M. Ch. Lemonnier, publiciste (id).

12h. Mme Level (France).

125. M. 1e Dr Level, conseiller municipal de Paris (France).
126. M. Antonin Levrier, publiciste (id).

127. M. Edouard Levy, étudiant en droit (id).

128. Mme Nelly Lieutier, publicists (id).

129. M. Ch. Limousin, publicists (id).

130. Mme Malval (France).

131. M. Mancel (id).

132. Mme Lara Marcel (id).

133. Mme Marshall (Angleterre).

13%. M. Antide Martin, conseiller municipal de Paris (France).
135. M. le Dr Geor es Martin, conseiller municipal de Paris (id).
136. Mme Martinet France).

137. M. Mauro-Macchi, déhuté italien.

138. Mme de Meysenbur (Russie).

139. M. Molet (France).

12.0. Mme Molet (id).

1&1. Mlle nélénc Molet (id).

142. Mlle Marie Molet (id).

 

Ill-5o
14%.
11.50
1&6.
1&7.
1&8.
1&9.
150.
151.
152.
155.
15%.
155.
156.
157.
158.
159.
160.
161.
162.
16}.
16h.
165.
166.
167.
168.
169.
170.
171.
172.
173.
17k.
175.
176.
177.
178.
179.
180.
181.
182.
183.
184.
185.
186.
187.
188.
189.
190.
191.
192.
19}.
19%.
195.

365

Mlle Mornncé (id).
Mme Montéran id .

M. 1e Dr Mora (Italic).

M. Salvatore Morelli, député italien.

M. Morin, conseiller municipal de Paris (France).
Mme de Morsier (France).

Mlle AnnapMaria Mozzoni (Italic).

Mme Nina Olivetti (Italie).

M. Parisot (France).

Mme Party (Amérique).

M. Frederic Passy (France).

Mme Paulin (id).

M. Payart (id).

M. Eugene Pelletan, séhateur (France).

M. Perrau (France).

Mme Perrau (id).

M. Férucocn (id).

M. Petrot (id).

M. Philippe (id).

Mlle Eugenie Pierre (id).

M. Pignon (id).

M. Gaetano Fini (Italie).

M. Edouard de Pompéry, publiciste (France).

M. Auguste Raimon (France).

M. Rama (id).

M. Louis Ratisbonne, publiciste (id).

Mnc Ragnault (id).

Mme Louise Retoux (id).

Mme Revillon (id).

M. Tony Revillon, ubliciste (France).

M. Regnier (France).

M. Leon Rdcher publiciste (id).

Mme J. Richer id).
Mme Rosen (Suisse
M. Rosen (id).

M. Rouzade (France).
Mme Léonie Rouzade (id).
Mme Clemence Royer id .

Mme Jenny Sabatier-Herbelot (France).
Mme Louisa Santhworth (Amérique).

M. Sancelot (France).

M. Santa-Anna vé (Brésil).

M. Savary (France .

M. Serge de Scharapov (Russia).

M. Victor Schoelcher, sénateur (France).
Mme Schmahl (Angleterre).

M. Charles Silvain (France).

Mme Henriette Silvain (id).

Mlle Skwarzoff (Russia).

M. Theodore Stanton (Amerique).

Mme Stenshmer ( leterre).

Ms Terson (France a

Mme Tessier (id).

 

197.
198.
199.
200.
201.
202.
203.
209.
20'.
206.
207.
208.
209.
210.
211.
212.
213.
219.
215.
216.
217.
218.
2190

366

M. Tiersot, depute de 1'Ain (France).
M. Charles Traut (France).

Mme Julie Traut (id).

Mme Van Calcar (Hollande).

Mlle Van des Slyden (id).

Mme Emilie Venturi (Angleterre).

Mme Eugene Véron (France).

M. Verrier (id).

M. Virey (id).

M. Carl Von Bergen (Belgique).

Mme Sephie Von Bergen (id).

M. Von Vreitschwert (id;
Mlle Walker (Angleterre .

M. Halter de Selys (France).

Mme Julia Hard-Howe (Amerique).

Mme Barriére (France).

Mme Berline, docteur en droit.

Mme Goetz Steinhelmer (France).

M. Lenoel-Zevort (France).

Mme Lenoel-Zevort (id).

M. Lenoir (id).

Mme Eugenie Niboyet (id).

M. Talandier, depute de Paris (id).
M. 1e docteur Georges Mickam (id).

 

Adherent

M. Gustave Goegg, de Genéve (Suisse).

Societes officiellement representées

1.

2.

3.

k.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

10.

.L9 Solidarité, association pour la défense des droits de la femme,
ayant son sigge 5 Genéve (Suisse); - representee par Mme Griess-
Traut et M. Ch. Lemonnier.

L'Association Nationale d'Ame'rique pour _l_g suffra e 9.9.9. femmes;
- reprgsentée par Mme Graham Jones, de Chicago (Illinois).

L'Association nationale d'gpgleterre pour‘lp_rappe1 des Actes
(The national Association for the repeal of the contagious

discaserases sic Acts); - representee par Mme Emilie A. venturi.
L'Association democratigue de Milan (Italic); -— representee par
Mlle Maria Mozzoni.

_L_e_ Comité’dg Naples pour l'e'mancipation p133 femmes italiennes; -
representee par M. Leon Richer.

La loge maconnique 1a Concordia, de Florence (Italic); - repréL
sentée par M. Gaetano Pini.

La Société des dames reunies de Lyon (France); —- repreésentée
par Mme d'Elthom.

_L_g._ Lige £13 1_a_ Paix pp 93 _1_g Liberte', de Genéve; --repre'sente'e
par M. Ch. Lemonnier.

L'Association américaine pour'lg suffrpge.dgp femmes; - repréL
sentée par Mme Julia Hard-Rowe.

Le Club des femmes de la Nouvelle-Apgleterre, de Boston; -
representee par la meme.

 

 

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-. .u .u -... c -. . .sp-u . _-- .‘-
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- .4.“an no -- ~<<. . .77.\-« \\

11.

367

La Federation britannique, continentale et generals Hour
1'aholition de la prostitution, specialement envisa ee comme
institution le ale ou toleree, dont 1e siege est a Liverpool;

-— representee par Mme Caroline de Barrau.

L'Association nationale contre le vice re lemente, dont le siege
est a Londres; - representee par Mme —Emilie A. Venturi.

L' Association de vi ilance gou rla defenselggg droits personnels,
cont 1e siege est aussi a Londres; —- egalement representee par
Mme Emilie A. Venturi.

La Ligue protectrice et 29 videntielle des femmes, de Londres; —-
representee par Mme Heatherley.

La Societe dos ouvrieres couturieres, modistes et confectionneuses,
de Londres;— - representee par Miss Brown.

La Chambre sxndicale_ des ouvrieres 1i eres, couturiéres,‘2£2r

deuses et confectionneuses, de Paris, - representee par

Mme Goetz Steinhelmer.

APPENDIX E

PIBGRAM 0F HUBERTINE AUCLERT'S LE SOCIETE LE DWIT DES FDIMESI

The Société, considering the political emancipation of woman as
the sole means of obtaining the economic and civil emancipation_of woman,
writes into its program the exercise 0; the ight to voteLandj the
right to eligibility for women in theLloca Comunity, as in the State.

The Societe writes into its program integral education for
woman. No need to burden the budget to obtain this goal; i suffices
that lyce'esLandj existing schools be mixecho—educational} schools
open to girls as well as boys.

The Societe demands for woman access to all careers, to all pro-
fessions and equality of salary with man for equality of production.

The Societe demands the search for paternity.

The Societe believes that marriage should be an association freely
contracted and based on equality between spouses. At the present time,
it [the Sociétéj'advocates the regime of separation of goods.

Like every association, marriage should be dissolvable, the
human being can much less alienate his person and his freedom than his
interest.

The right of spouses to separate does not reduce the duty im-
posed on them to raise their children.

The 50.1616, desiring impartial justice, wants women to be named
consular judges, civil judges and jurors.

Finally, the Société wants for woman, of whom.is demanded the
fulfillment of all duties, the recognition and exercise of all rights:
The equality of the two sexes before the law.

 

lAuclert, Historique de la Societe le Droit des Femmes
1826-1880, 6-7.

368

 

 

APPENDIX F

ROSTER 0F AUCLERT'S FOLLOWERS IN THE LATE 1870's AND 1880.8

The following roster represents an attempt to compile a list of
the individuals who associated with Auclert. These individuals fall
into several categories: members of Auclert's Sociét‘ and Cercle, signers
of petitions and letters, contributors to La Citoyenne, etc. The roster
does not include individuals who only spoke at Auclert's meetings, wrote
favorably of her in the press, or rendered other incidental services to
her cause. The numbers in parentheses indicate the source and the type
of association. (l) LfiAyenir des Femmes. 7 October 1877 (signers of the
Societi‘s appeal to defend the republic during the seize ggibcrisis).
(2) La Citoyenne, 28 August 1881 (members of the Société at the time of
the expulsion of Epsilly and Drouin). (3) La Citoyenne, 19-25 December
1881 (signers of Auclert's appeal for a census boycott), (4) L3
Citoyenne, May 1885 (signers of Auclert's appeal for opening electoral
meetings to women). (5) La Citoyenne, 17 July 1881 (spoke'with Auclert
at anti-Bastille Day protest of 1881). (6) La Citoyenne, 28 August 1881
(signers of letter to Lévrier about Epsilly affaire). (7) Le Libérateur,
23 July 1881 (self-identified). (8) La Citoyenne,? January - 4 February
1883 (contributor to La Citoyenne). (9) La Citoyenne, 5 February -
a March 1883 (members of committee of initiative for Auclert's proposed
Sociéti Nationale du Suffrage des Femmes). (10) La Cito enne, February
1884 (organizers of Auclert's Cercle). (11) La Cito enne, July 1884
(signers of a letter from the committee of the Société to Senator
M. Dumole). (12) La Citoyenne, January 1885 (Société delegates to the
Federation Républicaine Socialiste). (13) La Cito enne, January 1886
(accepted honorary membership in Auclert's Cercle). (14) Sowerwine,
Women and Socialism in France 1871-1921, 12 (Société delegate to early
socialist congresses). (15) Press clipping of 11 April 1880 at BMD,
Dossier Auclert (tax-strikers named by Auclert). (16) La Cito enne,
3 December 1884 (contributor to La Citgyegne). (17) La Cito enne, 2 -
8 January 1882 (tax-striker).

1. Abeille (ll)

2. M. Jules Allix (ll)

3. M. Oscar d'Angirey (7)

4. Elisa Aubé (3)

5. Hubertine Auclert (l, 3, A, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12)
6. Jeanne Avézard (3)

7. C. Bel (2)

8. Louise Barberousse (ll)

9. Barbie: (2)

10. Rose Beauquis (3)

369

11.
12.
13.
16.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
26.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
36.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
60.
61.
62.
63.
66.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
50.
51.
52.
53.
56.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
66.
65.

370

Mlle Besson (3)

Mme Besson (3)

Maria Blain (3)

M. Blin (2)

Mme Blin (2)

Uidow Bonnair (2, 3)

widow Brunet (3)

M.-A. de Cagnenray (l)

Charton (6)

Constance Contet (3)

Céleste Dehau (11)

Widow Demars (2, 3)

Widow Dembourg (2)

Auguste Desmoulins (9)

line Amélie De’sormeaux (9)

Mlle Marie-Jeanne Drouin (pseu. Louise de Lasserre) (2)
Mme Dupré (2)

Charlotte Duval (1)

Commandant Claude-Célestin fpsilly (2, 6)
Anna Fassano (3)

Marie Félin (3)

Joseph de Gasté (6, 9, 10, 11)
Amelie Ceslin (3)

Lion Giraud (9, 12)

Berthe Gosselin (3)

Virginie Griess-Traut (8)

Julie Guyot (3)

Yves Guyot (9)

Clovis Hugues (9)

Mme Janssen (2)

Mlle Marie de Kapcevitch (9, 10)
Keva (16)

Catherine Kremer (3)

Widow Vincent Labarthe (6)
Lionie Lacore (3)

Mme Lacorre (2)

M. Lacorre (2)

Lagrue (6)

Augustine Leveau (3)

Antonin Livrier (2, 9)

Lara Marcel (pseu. René Marcil) (5, 9)
Henri Maret (9)

M. Andre Marque (2, 6, 6)

Louise Martane (Mlle Gravetot) (6, 12)
Adrien Martin (6)

Maria Martin (2, 6, 11)

Merle (6)

Michelin (13)

Mlle Molet (2)

Mme Blanche D. Mon (6)

Amelie Morancé (l)

Mme Célina Niche (9)

Gustave Normand (6)

Mme Josephine Nouveau (9, 10, 11)
Mme Ogier-Clavelle (2)

 

BAH '5

i

 

 

66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
76.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
86.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
96.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
106.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.

371

Madona Olivetti (6)
Mme Rose Perée (9, 10)
Jules Pascaly (9)
Péruf (6)

Rosalie Petit (3)

Mlle Pigeaire (2)
Edmond Potonié-Pierre (6)
Eugenie Potonié-Pierre (6)
Rama (6)

Raux (2)

Emilie Saint-Hilaire (1, 2, 6)
Mme Salés-Saxton (9)
Fanny Savary (1)
Charles Schacre (11)
Mme Schacre (10)
Sophie Schoenloh (3)
Catherine Schvach (3)
Louise Sinet (6)
Libussa Slavenko (3)
M. Soreuil (2)

Mme Louise Soreuil (2, 3)
Souty (6)

Louise Suchet (1)
Alfred Talandier (9)
Amelie Tessier (1, 2)
M. Tourney (2)

Mme Tournay (2)

M. Tournemol (2)

Mme Tournemol (2)
Louise Tournemolle (3)
Vallere (2)

Catherine Venir (3)
Doctor Verrier (9, 10)
M. Verriere (2, 6)

Mme Viard (9)

V. Viardot (6)

J. Vinhalek (2)

Widow Blondit (15)
Marie Chevassus (15)
J. Coulasses (15)
Widow Dupénet (15)
Widow Jamier (15)
Widow Ladoue (15)
Widow Leprou (l7)
Widow Marc (15)

Widow Rioux (15)

Mme de Tissoniere (l6)

 

 

APPENDIX G

museums m) Pmoam OF mcrmn's LIGUE
FILXNCAISE POUR LE DROIT om moms

Our Principles

The question of civil and civic equality for women is posed
everywhere.

It makes in England, in Switzerland, in Italy, in America, rapid
and considerable progress.

France cannot remain behind.

Our most eminent thinkers, our best known writers, our most in-
fluential political men, pronounce themselves in favor of a prompt re-
vision of the restrictive laws that place so heavy a burden on an entire
half of the human species, particularly on wives and mothers.

It is incontestable that woman occupies, neither in society, nor
in the family, the place that is her legitimate due.

Everywhere she is inferiorized, everywhege she is sacrificed.

The code makes her a minor and an unfitL person]; customs make
her almost a slave.

Even in work, this duty for all, this supreme necessity for the
poor, she confronts, in suffering, the inferiority of her sex.

Such a state of things cannot be maintained for long.

Man and woman hgye g_right to the same rights.

There must be [bull/'one law, permitting to woman what is perv
mitted to We -

There must be [only] one morality, and what is reputed as a
crime or an infraction for woman must not be a licit thing for man.

Every woman must be able to live honestly on the product of her
labor, without being forced to turn to the filthy resources of public or
clandestine prostitution.

It is in order to defend these principles and to seek their ap-
plication that the Revue Le Droit des Femmes had been founded in 1869.

The goal to achieve is clearly determined. In these conditions,
with the problem thus posed, there is not an honest woman who can re—
pudiate it, not a mother concerned for her dignity and her interests,
for the dignity and the interest of her children, who can legitimately
refuse us her support.

That one might say that the time is not right. It is precisely
in epochs of social and political reorganization, like those that affect
France at present, that it is good to think of reforms.

No moment would be more propitious.

372

373

Already we have obtained the reestablishment of divorce.

Already we have obtained the creation of ecoles su érieures,
the creation of colleges and of lycées for girls.

We have obtained the admission of women to faculty examinations.
Thanks to our long and presevering efforts, women can today be
hacheliéres‘égrlettres, bachelieres égrsciences, licenciées, docteurs.
They can practice medicine.

There is yet to resolve the question of civil equality, to
ameliorate the situation of women in marriage.

In order to bring about this second part of our work, we appeal
to the devoted support of women themselves.

That they help us to expand our action; that they join our ranks,
as members of the Ligue Francaise. The next step is up to them, the
future of their daughters is put in question.

Our Program

1. Complete identification of man and woman, in respect to the
legal possession and exercise of civil rights, while waiting for the
legal possession and exercise of political rights.

2. Retention by woman of her full rights in marriage. No more
subordination of the wife to the husband. Rights of the mother equal to
the rights of the father.

3. Revision of the divorce law.

6. Search for paternity.

5. Progressive initiation of woman into civic life.

6. One and the same morality for the two sexes: what is excusable
for the one being no longer unexcusable - sometimes even criminal - for
the other.

7. Abolition of regulated prostitution; immediate closing of all
whore houses; suppression of the police improperly designated by the name
Police 223 moeurs.

8. Absolute right for woman to develop her intelligence through
study, to cultivate her reason, to extend the circle of her knowledge,
without other limits than those resulting from her aptitudes and her will.

9. Open access of women to all professions and to all careers
for which they prove, in the same degree as men and after identical
examinations, the necessary capacities and aptitudes.

10. Rigorous application, without distinction of sex, of the
economic formula: "Equal pay for equal work.”

 

1Circulaire of the Ligue Francaise pour le Droit des Femmes of
1892, at BMD, Dossier Ligue Francaise pour le Droit des Femmes.

1.
3.
I“

5.

6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
16.

P

l).

16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
23:
26.

25.

26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.

APPENDIX H

nosrxn.op THE LIGUE FRANCAISE POUR.LE
1111011 mas mums FOR 1882-18831

M. Andre, ancien officier cavalrie, Nantes
M. Andrieux, lithographe, Nantes *
Mme Andrieux, Nantes *
Mlle Andrieux ainée, Nantes *
Mlle Andrieux (Evag, Nantes *
M. Arnould (Arthur homme de lettres, Paris *
Mme Asseline (Louis), professor of piano, Paris-Batignolles *
Mlle Aubry, Paris *
M. Audigier, Nantes

Mme Audigier, Nantes

M. 1e docteur Autun, conseiller general, Oran (Algerie) *

M. Barberon (Paul), licencié en droit, Paris *

Mme de Barrau (Caroline), Paris *

Mlle Bayonne, Nantes *

Mme Beddoe, vice-presidente de la Societe pour le suffrage des femmes
de Bristol (England)

Mme Benucci-Petit, professeur d'allemand, Paris-Batignolles *
M. Berruyer, Medecin, Nantes *

Miss C. A. Biggs, London (England) *

Miss Blackburn (Helene), Bristol (England) *

Mlle Blandin (zélie), Paris-Batignolles *

Mme Bogelot (Isabelle), Paris *

Mlle Bon (nuance), Aumagne

Mlle Bon Emma), Aumagne

M. Bonnetain (Emile), Paris *

M. Bonnetain Paul), secrétaire de la redaction de Droit des Femmes,
Paris *

Mme Bonnetain, mEre, Paris *

M. Bonnetain, pEre, Paris *

M. Bordan, commis de la marine, Croisic (Loire-Inferieure)
M. Boudeville (011.) de’pute’ (1e l'Oise *

Mme Boudeville (cm), Me'ru (Oise) *

Mlle Boure (Melanie , rofesseur de chant, Paris *

Mme Bourgeois, proprietaire, Nantes

M. A. Bourgeois, distillateur, Nantes *

 

The list is compiled from issues of Le Droit des Femmes between

December 1882 and December 1883. Names followed by asterisks are those

of

founding members.

37’!

36.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
(in .
61.
62.
63.
(1’1 .
65.
’16 .
-’1 7 .
’18 .
’1").
50.
51.
52.
33.
5’1 .
53.
56.
57.

r
- O

59.
60 .
61.
62.
63.
64.

66.
67.

69.
70.
71.
79-
73.
7".
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
86.

85.
86.

\21
~J
\Jl

Mme Bourgeois, Nantes *

Mlle Bourgeois (Julie), Nantes

Mlle Burel (Louise), Nantes *

M. Cabrol (Ernest), Agen (LotPet-Garonne) *

M. Germaine Casse, députd, Paris

M. Casse (Nathan), employé, Nantes

M. Casse Gaston , tailleur, Nantes

M. Casse, pere, tailleur, Nantes

M. Castuy, comptahle au Credit Lyonnais, Nantes

M. Camille de Chancel, Paris

M. Champury (Ed.) homme de lettres, Nantes *

Mme Champury (hd.), Nantes *

M. Chatelain, lithographe, Chaumont (Haute-Marne) *
Mme Collard (J.) Paris *

Mlle Comheau (A.) institutrice-adjointe, Aumagne *
M. Cosseret (Paul), homme de lettres, Paris

M. Cosson, Levallois-Perret (Seine)

M. Couturier (M.), depute de l'Isére'*

Mlle Curot (Leontine), propriétaire, Dourdan (Seine-et—Oise) *
Mme Ballet 3.), Familistere de Guise (Aisne) *

M. Dejeanjean (J.-M.), employé, Nantes *

Mme Delalande, Paris *

Mme Deroin (Jeanne, Vve Desroches), London (England) *
M. Deschanel (Khule), professeur on College de France, senateur
inamovihle, Paris *

Mlle Desroches (céeile), London (England) *

M. Dietrich (Auguste), publiciste, Paris *

Mme Durand 13.), Troyes (Auhe) *

Mme Durand veuve), Dourdan (Seine-et—Oise) *

Mlle Duval Charlotte), Paris *

Mme Ebstein rue Laffen, Nantes

M. Ferrand (Alexis), instituteur, Aumagne *

Mme Ferrand (8.) institutrice, Aumagne *

Mlle Ferrand (J. , Aumagne *

Mlle Ferrand E. , Aumagne *

M. le docteur Fiaux (Louis) *

Mme Floquet (A.), Paris *

Mme Franck, Nantes *

Mme Frouard, Nantes *

M. Frouart, professeur do mathematiques, Nantes *
M. Gaboriau, etudiant en pharmacie, Nantes

Mme Gagneur (M.-L.), femme de lettres, Paris

M. Garcin (Eugdne) Paris *

Mme Garcin (Eugene), Paris *

M. Gegout (Ernest), Paris

Mme Gegout (Marguerite), Paris

M. Gerard (Charles), homme de lettres, Paris

Mme Germance (Amélie), artiste lyrique et dramatique, Paris *
M. Goren, capitaine en retraite, Nantes *

Mlle Goron, rentiere, Nantes *

Mme Gos (Caroline), Chaux-de-Fonds (Suisse) *

M. Alan Greenwell, vice-president de la Societe pour le suffrage des
femmes de Bristol (England)

Mme Guénot, docteur en medecine, Paris

Mme Guillon (veuve Ch.), Lyon *

87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
911.
95.
96.
97's
98.
99.
100.
101.
1012.
103.
106.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
116.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
1200
121.

100

123.
126.
12’.
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.
131.
132.
133.
136.
135.
136.
137.
138.
139.
160.

M. Guillot (Louis), depute de l'ISEre *

M. Guyard (E.) agent comptable en retraite, Nantes *

M. Guyot (Yves), ancien vice-president du Conseil municipal, Paris *
M. Herbert, Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine) *
M. de Bdredia, daluté de Paris *

M. Hugues (Clovis), depute de Marseille *
Mme Hunziker professeur, Aarau (Suisse) *

Mine Isalay, a If.... (Marne) *

M. Jean-Bernard, publiciste, Paris
M. de Lacretelle (Henri), deputé de Saone-et—Loire, Paris *
M. Lacroix, m5canicien, Saint-Nazaire

Mme Lacroix, Saint-Nazaire

Mme Lagrave (Louise), Angers (Maine-et—Loire) *

M. Laguens, agent do change, Nantes

Mme Laguens Nantes

M. Laisant 11.), de’pute’ de la Loire Infe’rieure *

Mlle Landais, institutrice communale, Nantes

M. Lavalenne, negociant, Nantes *

Mme Ledoux, Paris *

M. Lefévre (Ernest), depute de Paris *

M. Leguerre, depute

Mlle Lemoine (E.), Vincennes (Seine) *

M. Lepage, Montme'dy (Meuse) *

Mme Lepage (Marie), Montmédy (Meuse) *

Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie (Marie), Angers (Maine—et—Loire) *
M. Lesclide (Richard), home de lettres, Paris *

Mme Lesplau Marie), peintre danoise, Paris *

M. Lessard, ooiffeur, Nantes *

Mme Lessard Emilie), Nantes *

M. Limousin Ch.-M. , publiciste, Paris

Mme Lockert, Montmorency (Seine-et-Oise) *

Mme Lore (veuve), Lusigny (Aube) *

M. Loreau ancien receveur de l'enregistrement, Paris *
M. Louis (Désire), 'ournaliste, Paris *

M. Maillot (Jacques), statuaire, Paris *

M. Mancel, Nice *

M. Margain (Georges), professeur de physique, Paris-Batignolles *
Mme Margain, Paris *

M. 1e docteur Martin (Georges) *

M. Martinet (Camille), commis encaisseur a la TournilliEre, Nantes
Mme Meunier (veuve), rue Frédéreuse, Nantes

M. Meunier (Lucien-Victor) homme de lettres, Paris *
Mme Meunier (Jeanne-Victor , Paris *

M. Meyns Célestin), architecte, Paris *

M. Morel A.-L.), libraire, Nantes *

M. Moret A.), Paris *

Mme Moret (Marie), Familistére de Guise (Aisne) *

Mme de Morsier (Emilie), Paris *

M. Mourlet, Alger Mustapha (Alge’rie) *

Mme Mourlet, Alger Mustapha (Alge’rie) *

Mme Mundt (linilie) peintre danoise, Paris *

Mme Naudin (Le’onie), Rouen *

Mme Nelly-Lieutier, Paris *

Mme Nicot, Nantes

 

 

u. -" .-

1"110
162.
163.
166.

165.
166.
167.
168.
160.
150.
151.
152.
153.
156.
155.
156.
157.
158.
159.
160.
161.
162.
163.
166.
165.

166.
167.
168.
169.

170.
171.
172.
173.
176.
175.
176.
177.
178.
179.
180.
181.
182.
183.
186.
185.

186.
187.
188.
189.

377

M. Nus (Euane), auteur dramatique, Paris *

Mme Oegger—Autas, Hydres (Var) *

M. Pagny (Jules), negociant, Saventheim (Belgique) *

M. Passy Frederic), membre de l'Institut, depute de la Seine,
Neuilly (Seine) *

M. Pegand (Gilbert), ParisAMontmartre *

M. Pelloutier, commis principal des telegraphes, Nantes

Mme Pelloutier, Nantes

M. Petit (Frederic), conseiller general, Amiens (Somme) *

M. Picard (Rene), Nantes *

M. Plumat, rofesseur de piano, Aumagne

M. Poisson Jules), cocher, Nantes *

M. Poupin (Victor , publiciste, Paris

M. 1e docteur Odoardo Porro, Crémone (Italie) *

Mme Queroy (H.), Parc-st—Maur (Seine) *

M. Rama, Bourg-la-Reine (Seine) *

Mlle Rapt (Léonie), at v.... (Seine) *

Mlle Regnault (Leontine), Courbevoie (Seine) *

M. Revel, employs, Nantes *

Mme Revel, Nantes *

M. RKvillon (Tony), doputé de Paris *

M. Richer (Leon) redacteur en chef du Droit des Femmes, Paris *
Mme Richer (Leon), Paris *

M. Richer (Paul), Paris *

Mme Rigondet, Paris *

M. Riveau (Ch.), maire et délégué cantonal pour la surveillance des
éholes, Genouille (Charente-Inférieure) *

M. Rivet (Gustave), homme de lettres, Paris *

Mme Rivet (0.), Paris *

Mme Riviére (veuve), Nantes *

M. Roncin, verificateur des poids et mesures, Paimboeuf (Loire-
Inferieure)

Mme Roullier, Nantes

Mme Rousseau directrice d'une ecole communale de filles, Nantes
M. Rousseau G.), étudiant en droit, Nantes

Mme Rouyer—Barbier, Vricourt (VOsges) *

M. Schoelcher (Victor), senateur inamovible, Paris *

M. Segeunot, at X ...... *

Mme Simpson (Therese C.), Serville-Portobello (Ecosse) *

M. Smyth (James), Jouy-surbMorin (Seine-eteMarne) *

Mlle Terrisse (Marie), Bale (Suisse)

Mme Tirlet, Nantes

Mme Touzin (Jenny), femme de lettres, Paris *

Mme Turneau de la Templerie, Nantes

M. Vesco (Albert), avocat, Toulon (var) *

Mme Villemain Paruots par Lac—ou—Villiers EDoubs) *

Mlle Vincent (Mary , Vernex—Montreux, vaud Suisse) *

Miss Williams, membre de Comite central de la Societe pour le
suffrage des femmes, London (England)

He Assess, Nantes

“118 Le Cece, Nantes

Mlle Se Case, Nantes

M. H. 1..., Nantes

 

378

100. M. P. M..., London (England) *
191. Mme P... Nantes *

102. M. X... (Georges Bath), redacteur du Droit des femmes, Paris *

193. Mme X... (Jeanne Mercoeur), redactrice du Droit des femmes, Paris *
19h. M. x. z..., Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhone)

llmmrarL Members
195. M. Hugo (Victor), honorary president

196. Mlle Deraismes (Maria , honorary vice-president
197. M. Vacquerie (Auguste , director of Ra e1, honorary vice-president

APPENDIX I

ROSTER or run LIGUE FRANCAISE POUR LE
DROIT DES FEHHES FOR 18921

paisxoeurs D'HONNEUR:

lat Victor Hugo (1)
2nd Victor Schoelcher, aénateur

HEMBRES HONORAIRES:

H. Auguste Vacquerle, directeur de Raggel
Mlle Marla Deraismes

HEMBRES A VIE

Mme Vve A..., Perla.

Mme Berry (Amille), a la Sabartarié (Tarn).

Mme Brochard, a Vouvray (Indre-et-Lolre).

Mme Vve David, l08, boulevard Arago, Paris.

Mlle C. van Harcke, a Gruxelles (Belgique).

H. Petit (Frédérlc), aénateur, a Amlens (Somme).
Mme Rlvet Helnguet, a Nantes (Lolre-Inférleure).

MEMBRES ADHERENTS

H. Barodet, deputé, avenue dea Bobellna, Paris.

Hlle B...., 3 Honthlers (Alene).

Hme Bertlllon (Caroline Schultz), 24, rue de Penthlévre, Paris.
Mlle C. Besaeyre, a Aurouge (Haute-Lolre).

Hlaa Blackburn (Héléne), i Londres (Angleterre).

Hlle Blandin (Zille), 14, rue Lécluse, Paris.

Mme Bogelot (Isabelle), 4, rue Perrault, Perla.

H. Boudeville, député, a Méru (Oiae).

Mme Boudeville, a Méru (Glee).

 

(1) Ce non llluatre noua rester ‘ternellement attache; 11 en
aera de meme de ceux de tous les présldents d'honneur.

 

1Report of the annual general aaaembly 2f the Ligue Francalse pour
le Drolt des Femmes of 22 Hay 1892 (Clermont [913:7} 1892), 10-12.

379

 

a
.0.
O
1‘
§
0..
..

380

Mme B...., a Auteuil (Seine).

Mme Vve Christin, 6, place des Batignolles, Paris.

Mme Collard, h}, rue Saint-Petersbourg, Paris.

Mme Contamin, 13, avenue Gourgaud, Paris.

Mme Couche, 38, boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris.

M. H. Couturier, senateur, 82, rue de Rennes, Paris.

Miss Cozens, a Londres ( leterreg.

M. R. Davenne a Bordeaux Gironde

M. Deschanel (finile), se'nateur, 69, av. Marceau, Paris.

Mme Vve Desroches (Jeanne Deroin), a Londres (Angleterre).

Mlle Desroches (Cécile), a Londres (Angleterre).

M. Dumas (Alexandre), membre de l'Académie francaise, 98, avenue
de Villiers, Paris.

Mme Dupuis-Vincent, a Arcachon Gironde).

Mlle Durand (Emilie), a Troyes Aube).

Mme Vve Durand, a Dourdan (Seine-et-Oise).

M. Ferrand (Alexis), a La Rochelle (Charente—Infér.).

Mme S. Ferrand, 5 La Rochelle (Charante-Inférieure).

Mlle J. Ferrand, 3 La Rochelle iCharante-Inférieureg.

Mlle E. Ferrand, a La Rochelle Charante-Inférieure

Mme Fidel (Clemence), au Parc Saint-Maur (Seine).

M. Garcin Eugene), 8, rue Saint-Paul, Paris.

Mme Garcin (BugEnie), 8, rue Saint-Paul, Paris.

Mme G..., a Mulhouse (Alsace).

Mme J. Grandin, 3, rue Lafayette, Paris.

Mme Guénot, 19 boulevard de la Madeleine, Paris.

M. Guyot (Yves), depute, ancien ministre, 95 rue de Seine, Paris.

Mlle H.... (Alsace .

M. Hammer (Richard , 77, rue Blanche, Paris.

Mme Hammer (Amelie , 77, rue Blanche, Paris.

Mlle Hammer (Thilda Germance), 77, r, Blanche, Paris.

M. Herbert, a Rennes (Ille—et-Vilaine).

M. de Hérédia, ancien ministre, 177, rue de Courcelles, Paris.

Mlle Heutte (Louise), a Monthiers (Aisne).

M. A. Hovelacque, depute, 38, r. du Luxembourg, Paris.

M. 1e Dr. H. Huguet, 27, rue de Londres, Paris.

M. A. Laisant, depute, 162, avenue Victor-Hugo, Paris.

Mme VVe E. Lefévre, 8, rue Dumont-d'Urville, Paris.

Mme Le Grand, 15, avenue Gour and, Paris.

Mlle E. Lemoine, 3 Vincennes (Seine).

Mme Lieutier (Nelly), 1, place de la Croix—Rouge, Paris.

Mme Vve Lore, a Lusigny (Aube).

M. Macé'(Jean), senateur, 5, rue de Poitiers, Paris.

Mme Marchand, au Prieuré, Vaiges (Mayenne).

Mme Margain, 14, rue Lecluse, Paris.

M. Martin (Geor es), ancien senateur, 115, rue Mouffetard, Paris.

Mme de Morsier (Emilie), 71, rue Claude-Bernard, Paris.

M. Mourlet, a AlgerbMustapha (Algerie).

Mme Mourlet a AlgerbMustapha (Algerie).

Mme Naudin (Leonie), a Darnetal (Seine-Inferieure).

M. Nus (Eugene), 80, rue Bonaparte Paris.

Mme Parren (Callirhoe), a Athenes (Gréce).

M. Passy (Frederic), membre de l'Institut, a NeuillyasurbSeine (Seine).

381

Mme Pognon (Raymond), 7, rue Clement—Marat, Paris.
Mlle Pognon (Mathilde), 7, rue Clement-Marat, Paris.
M. Poupin (Victor), depute) 66, rue de Rivoli, Paris.
Mme Rngo b—Darid, a Tribny (Marne).
Mlle R... (1.), a Paris.
Mlle Rennault (Leontineg, a Courbevoie (Seineg.
Mme Reinschmit (Paulina , a Varsovie (Pologne
Mlle Rengnet (Mvrtile), 10, rue de Chateaubriand, Paris.
M. Richer (Leon), h, rue des Deux-Gares, Paris.
Mme J. Richer, h, rue des Deux—Gares, Paris.
M. Richer (Paul)S 16, rue Clauzel, Paris.

9

Mme Richer (Paul 16, rue Clauzel, Paris.

Mme Vve Rouyer-Barbier, a Vricourt (Vesges).

M. Roy (Smile) a Poligny (Jura).

M. Schoelcher (Victor), senateur, 64, rue de la Victoire, Paris.
M. Schloesinv Emile), a Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhsne).
M. de Simon 3P.), 5 Gendve (Suisse).

Miss Simpon TherESe), 5 Selville Portobello (Ecosse).
M. 1e Dr Thulié (H.), 31, boulevard Beauséfiour, Paris.
M. Trial (Louis), a Nimes (Gard).

Mme Vaillant a Troyes (Aube).

Mme Valette £A.), 5h, rue Lepic, Paris.

Mme Venturi Emilie), a Londres (Angleterre).

M. Viviani (Rene), 85, boulevard du Pare-Royal, Paris.

APPENDIX J

ROSTER OF THE 1889 CONGRES FRANCAISIET
INTERNATIONAL DU DRDIT DES FEMMES

l. Mme la baronne d'Adlesparre, Stockholm 1

2. M. Ajuti (Mario), Paris 1 l
3. Mme Ameuille S 10
a. Mme Audrat (Mathilde) 3 10
5. M. 1e Dr. Autun, Saint-Florentin (Ybnne) 1 1
6. Mme Autun, Saint-Florentin (yonne) 1
7. Mme Baer 5 10
8. M. Barbe (Paul), ancien ministre 3 200
9. Mme Bariol, Paris 1 5
10. M. Barodet, deputy, Paris 7 5
11. Mlle Basset (A.) Paris 1 5
l2. Mme Béfiuet (Lébn), préeidente de la Ligue pour la
Propagation de l'Allaitement maternel, Paris 1 5
13. Mme Berry (Amelie), Sabartaire (Tarn) 4 20
1h. Mme Berthoin 3 50
15. Mlle 1a baronne R. de Bieberstein, Bruselles l 10
16. Doctor Elisabeth Blackwell, Hastin (England) 1 13
17. Mlle Blandin (z. , Paris 10
18. Mme Bloch (Simon 3 10
19. M. Rodin, Paris 1 5
20, Mme Rodin, Paris 1 5
21. Mme Bogelot (Isabelle), directrice de l'Oeuvre des
Liberées de Saint—Lazarre, Paris 1 5
22. Mme Bonnaire 3 25
23. Mme Bonnemain 2L.) Hanoi (Tonkin) 2 10
2h. M. Boudeville Ch.) ancien deputy, Méru (Oise) 2 10
25. Mme Boudeville (Ch. , Méru (Oise) 2 10

 

1The number in the right hand column indicates the number of
francs donated by the individual or group to the Congress. The number
after the name indicates the issue of le Droit des Femmes that published
the person's adherence. Both Deraismes and Richer compiled lists, which
were published in separate columns. Richer's lists included residence and
occupation information; Deraismes' did not. The number after the name cor-
responds to the following issues of le Droit des Femmes: 1 Richer's list of
17 March 1889; 2 Richer's list of 21 April 1889; 3 Deraismes' list of 21
April 1889; 4 Rdcher's list of 5 May 1889; 5 Deraismes' list of 2 June
1889; 6 Richer's list of 2 June 1889; and 7 Richer's list of 16 June 1889.
Altogether Richer submitted 118 names and Deraismes 65. "Adhérents sym-
pathiques" (AD) were announced on 17 March 1889.

382

26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
site
35.
‘56.
37.
38.
39.
no.
Al.
#2.
#3.
Ah.
hr.
#6.
[17.
RB.
49.
50.
51.
59.
53.
5,10
55-

57.

r
O

59.
60,
61.
62.
63.
6h.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72-
73.
7".
75.
76.
77-
78.

383

Mme Boussuat—Robertson, Auteuil (Seine) 1

M. Breton 5

Mme Cazamajor 5

Mme 1a Cécilia (Marie), Yseure (Allier) l

Mlle Chevalier, Paris 1

Mme Christin, Paris 1

M. Colfavru, deputé, Paris 1

Mme Collard, Paris 1

M. In Dr. Couturier (h.), senator, Paris 1

M. Cuif 3

M. Davenne (R.), publiciste, Bordeaux (Bironde) 1
Mme David 5

M. David 5

Mme Dallet, Familistere de Guise (Aisne) l

Mme Day-Falette 3

Mme Feuve Depaulis, L'on (Rhfine) l

Mlle Deraismes (Maria) 3

Mme Deroin (Jeanne) vve Desroches, London (England)
Mme Deschamps (Alix) 5

Mme Desportes, Paris 1

Mlle Desroches (Cécile), Deroin's daughter, London 1
Mlle Didier, Paris 1

Dietrich (Auguste), publiciste, Paris 1

M. Dufilhol, officier supérieur en retraite, Marseille 6
Mme Dupuis—Vincent, La Testede-Buch (Gironde) 1
Mlle Durand, Troyes (Aube) 1

Mme Vve Durand, Dourdan (Seine-et-Oise) 1

Mme Dusautoy 3

Mlle Duval (Charlotte; 3

Mlle Edwards (Blanche , doctor, Paris 1

Mme Fe’resse—Deraismes 3

Mme Ferrand, institutrice at La Rochelle (Charente-In-
ferieure) 2

Mme Fonséque 3

Mme Garnier 3

M. de Gaste, ancien depute 5

Mme Gatineau 5

Mme Gaucher 3

Mme Giraud-Bouttier 5

Mme Vve Godin, Familistere de Guise (Aisne) l

M. Goron, Nantes (Loire-Infe'rieure) 1

Mme Goudchaud 5

Mme Le Grand, Paris 1

Miss Greatorex, London (England) 1

Mlle Greeck 5

Mme Griess-Traut, vice-president of l'Amélioration 5
Mlle Grulher, Bruselles 1

Mlle Haaz, Barr (Alsace-Lorraine) l

M. Herbert, Rennes (Ill-et—Vilaine) 1

Mme de bargain 5

Mlle Louise Heutte, chateau de Monthiers (Aisne) l
Mme Houry 5

M. 1e docteur Huguet, Paris 1

Mme La Forgue (Amelia), NeuillyhPlaisance (Seine) l

20
10
10

10

10
10
20
20
10
10

100

200
10

100

10
10
10
35
50
10
10
10

100
50
12
10
10

10

50
10
10
20

79,
80.
81.
82.
83.
8b.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89,
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
l02.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109,
110.
111.
112.
113.
llh.
ll5.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.
126.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129,
130,

384

Mme Leboeuf (Amelie-Paul) 5

Mme Lecomte, usine 3 gas de Charleval (Eure) 1
Mile Lemoine (Eudoxie), Vincennes (Seine) l

M. Letermelier, Constantine (Algerie) l

Mme Lientier (Nelly), Paris 2

Mme Lingé 5

Mlle Longchamp (Marie), Poligny (Jura) l

Mme veuve Lori, Paris 1

M. le Dr. Lutaud 5

M. Mae‘ (Jean), senator, Paris 1

Mme de la Madelene 3

Mlle de la Mairie 5

Mme Margain, Paris 1

M. 1e Dr. Martin (Georges), senator, Paris 1
Mme Martin (Maria), director of La Citoyenne, Paris 1
Mme Martin, mother 5

M. Martini 3

M. Maecil (Rene), Paris 1

Mme Massor 3

Mme Maugeret, Mureaux (Seine-et-Oise) 1

Mme Mauriceau 5

Mlle Mesnard, medical doctor, Bordeaux 1

M. Millet (Charles) 5

Mme Morsier (Emilie de), Paris 1

Mme Mouchet, Vincennes (Seine) l

M. Moureu (Leon), Bordeaux 1

M. le Dr. Mourlet, Alger (Algérie) l

Mme Mourlet, Alger (Algeria) 1

Mme Moutier, Caen (Ca1vad.) l

Mme Naudin, Rouen (Seine-Inférieure) l

M. Nicolle, Mayor of Sartrouville 3

M. Nielly (A.), Alger (Algérie) l

Mme Olivetti-Madona (Italienne), Paris 1

M. Pagny (Jules), Bruxelles l

Mme Parpalet 3

M. Passy (Frédéric), deputy, Neuilly (Seine) l
Mlle Perot (Jeanne), Paris 1

M. Patti (Georges) 3

Mme Petit 5

Mme Pillouse 5

Mlle Popelin, lawyer, Bruxelles l

Mme Potonit-Pierre (Eugenie), Vincennes (Seine) l
M. Potonii-Pierre, Vincennes (Seine) l

M. Poupin (Victor), deputy, Paris 1

M. Puteaux, former municipal councillor 3

Mme Quiroy, Parc-Saint-Maur (Seine) l

Mme Regan (Amélie), Paris 1

Mile Regnault (Leontine), Courbevoie (Seine) l
Mlle Reuts (Anna), chateau de Monthiers (Aisne) l
M. Richer (Leon), Paris 1

Mme Richer (Leon), Paris 1

M. Richer (Paul), Paris 1

 

100

lCorrected to 50 francs in le Droit des Femmes, 21 April 1889.

 

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131.
132.
133.
134.
135,
136.
137,
138.
139,
140.
141.
142.
143.
144.
145.
146,
147,
148.
149,
150.
151.
152.
153.
154.
155.
156.
157.
158,
159.
160,
161.
162.
163.
164.
165.
166,
167.
168.
169.

170,
171.
172.
173.
174.
175.
176.
177.
178.
179,

180.

181.
182.

385

Mme Rivet-Minguet, Nantes (Seine-Inférieure) l 2
M. Rodrigue (Hippolyte) 7 4O
Mme Roncier (Lefevre) 5 25
Mme Rouyer-Barbier, Vrécourt (Vosges) l 5
Mme Rouzade 5 10
M. Roy (Emile), Poligny (Jura) l 5
Mlle Sandstein (A.), Stockholm (Suede) 1

M. Sealier (Eugenie), Saint-Mandi (Seine) 2 25
Mme Schmal 3 10
M. Schneider 5 10
M. Schoesing (Emile), Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhane) l 20
Mlle Schoug (Thalia), Stockholm (Suide) l

Mlle Schultz (Caroline), medical doctor, Paris 1 5
Mlle Térisse, Geneva (Suisse) l 5
Mme Thibaud 5 10
M. le général Thibaudin 3 25
M. le Dr. Thulii (H.), Paris 1 20
Mme Vaillant, Troyes (Aube) l 5
Mme Valette, Paris 1 2
Mlle Van-Diest, medical doctor, Bruxelles l 25
Mlle Verenet, chSteau de Monthiers (Asine) l 20
M. le Dr. Verrier 5 10
Mme Vattier 5 10
Mme Viggshoff 5 25
Mme Villemin, Pargots (Doubs) 1 3
Mme Vincent 5 10
Mlle de Virte (Luisa), Pise (Italie) l 18
Mme Viviani (Héléne), Sidi-Bel-AbBEs (Algérie) 1 10
M. Viviani (Rent), lawyer, Paris l 10
Mlle Mild (8.), Paris 1 10
Mme Ziélinstra (Isa) 3 10
Mme de A. 5 10
M. Ch. B., Paris 1 1
M. le baron L..., (Als.-Lorr.) l 5
Mme L.-J., Paris 1 1,000
Mme S. L. 5 10
Mile L. P,,, Versailles (Seine-et-Oise) l 5
Mme Vve R..., Paris 1 20
One anonyme de Bruxelles (Belgique), par l'inter-

midiaire de Mlle Van Diest 6 100
On anonyme 3 100

M. Boureau (Henri), Paris AD

Mme Vve Boureau, Paris AD

Mlle Brette (Anna), Paris AD

Mme Deutz (Esther), Paris AD

Mlle Formstcher (Bertha), Paris AD

Mlle Mess (Elise), Paris AD

Mlle Morel (Alice), Paris AD

Mlle Theo (Jeanne), Paris AD

Comité parisien de la Ligue Francaise pour 1e Relévement

de la Moralité Publique, Paris 1 10
Le Comit‘ regional marselllais de la Ligue Francaise pour

le Relevement de la Moraliti Publique, Marseille l 30
Conseil municipal de Paris 3 500

Pidération des groupes de Libre-Pensee de Seine-et-Oise 4 10

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183.

184,

185.
186.
187.
188.

189.

190.
191.

386

Fédération britannique, continentale et général pour
l'abolition de la prostitution réglementé (founded by
Josephine Butler) 4

Le Groupe des Femmes indépendantes de France (Mme Astié
de Valsayre delegate) 7

La Loge Jerusalem Ecossaise 5

Ligue Francaise pour le Droit des Femmes 4

Société l'Avenir des femmes, Nlmes (Card) 1

Société pour l'Amélioration du Sort des Femmes et la
Revendication de ses Droits 3

Société pour la Protection de la Femme, versé paerle
Barberousse 5

Societe Nantaise: Les Droits de la Femme, Nantes 2

La Société Suedoise pour ASP de Stockholm 7

10
10

30

500

10
42

BIBLIOGmPHY

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

ArchivesI ManuscriptsI and Public Documents
Archives Nationales (AN).

The French National Archives has several cartons of documents,
newspaper clippings, etc. on the activities of militant women.
Information on the right7wing Ligue Patriotique des Francaises
can be found in carton F 13.215 and P 13.229, which also

c vers the Cemité des Femmes of La Patric Franpaise. Cartons
P 13.086, P 13.266, F 13.349, and F l3.374-13.376 relate
to the issue of pacifism, which attracted.many French feminists
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carton F
13.266 also touches on the subject of woman suffrage. The re-
port of the Prefect of Police on Richer'slgpplication for peru
mission to found a journal is in carton F 339.

Bibliothéque Marguerite Durand (BMD).

HOused in the mairie of the 5th arrondissement, the Biblio-
théque Marguerit3_DErand was founded in the mid—1930's as a
repository for the library of its namesake. Its holdings in-
clude thousands of letters, pamphlets, newspaper clippings,
hand-outs, etc., catalogued under the names of individuals,
titles of groups, or subject headings. These dossiers cover all
of the principal and.many of the minor feminist activists and
organizations. For this study, the following dossiers proved
especially relevant: Auclert, Richer, Deraismes, Durand, Royer,
Mirtel, Ligue Prancaise pour le Droit des Felines, l'Ame'lioration,
La Sociétéble Suffrage des Femmes, and a series on.woman suffrage
designated as VDT 396 for various years.

Manuscripts

Auclert, Hubertine. "Diary." MSS. Bibliothdque Historique de la Ville
de Paris. Provisional Code 4248.

Brion, ne‘lene (ed.). "EncycIOpédie Fe'ministe."5v'ols. MSS. Biblio-
théque Marguerite Durand.

Misme, Jane. "La Vie et 1a,mort du féhinisme." MSS. Bibliothéque
Marguerite Durand.

387

388

"La Vie d'action de Marguerite Durand." MSS. Dossier: Marguerite
Durand. Bibliothéqne Marguerite Durand.

Public Documents

France. "Le Campagne feministe en faveur de la paix." Report to the
Ministry of the Interior. 13. 266.

France. Journal Officiel, Chmabre des Dép_utés. 2 February 1891.
France. Procés en la conr d'assises de la SeineI les 22 et 28 abet.

Paris, 1832.

Books and Pamphlets

Alhaiza, Adolphe. De Phalanatérien 3 socialiste. Paris: Imprimerie
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. Le Spiritisme 5 ea 213s Ogle egression, egose’ sommaire de
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Almanach Féninioto 1822. Paris: Edouard Corne'ly, 1899.

 

A re s dn Se L'Homme-F écrit a file au'ourd'hui en
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Arlee-Dufour, Franpois-Barthelemy. Repgnse a M, DupanloupI membre de
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noncant les ecoles professionnelles de fillesI la ligge de

1 enseiggement, les cours pgblics antgrisesI 1e materialisme

et l'ecole de medecine de ParisI les francs-magonsI les pgsiti-
vistes les Saint-Simoniens etc etc. Par les membres du con-
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ses dernieres volontes. Paris: de Dubuisson, 18 .

Auclert, Hubertine. L'Argent de la femme. Paris: Pédone, 1904.

 

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Eugenie, 1878.

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Marseille: A. Thomas et Cie., 1879.

. - e
v e -
m — ‘ o
I O ‘
o l

I O m m e . . » o
. ~
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e o m e a D u e -

-m“..“J—".

\
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l n
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9

389

. Les Femmes arabes en Algerie. Paris: Lamarre, 1900.

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. m . e .

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391

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392

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L'Avenir des Femmes. 1871-1879. Director: Leon Richer. (Appeared as
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La Bataille. 13 September 1885. Director: Lissagaray.

Baudrillart, Henri. "L'Agitation pour l'émancipation des femmes en
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Chéliga, Marya. "L'Evolution du Feminisme," Revue Encyclopédigue
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Le Combat Feministe Journal Mensuel. Droit a la Vie: 3 la Vie Individuelle
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Le Cri des Femmes, Pour 1a paix, pour le vote politigge des femmesI contre

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L'Excelsior. 12 March l9lh.

La Femme. 1879-191%. Founder: Mlle. C. Delpech.

La Femme ContemporaineL Revue Internationale des interets feminine.
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La Fronde, Journal Fenlniste. 9 December 1897 — 1 March 1905, July 1914.
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Le Journal des FemmesL Organe du Mouvement Feministe. December 1891 -
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