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There has been much debate in French historiography concerning the role of women in society and particularly in relation to the slow and often regressive policy changes in
182 Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Third Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century French
Republican Thought (Oxford, 2001) p. 295.
183 Forrest, Napoleon's Men, p. 188.
relation to women being part of the active citizenry. These debates often centre around the restrictive Napoleonic Civil Code and the late enfranchisement of women, some thirty-six years after their peers in Britain or Germany.185 Despite the frequency with which suffrage in France is referred to as ‘universal’ from 1848, only half the adult population were able to vote until roughly a century later. The most frequently cited and ‘republican-friendly’ reason for this delay is that granting women the vote would simply boost the power of the anti-republican Catholic right, given that women were generally assumed to be far more pious than men (and, indeed, attended church with greater frequency). This is the main explanation Sîan Reynolds offers in terms of the regular blocking by the Senate during the interwar period of bills attempting to widen the franchise to include women.186 Sudir Hazareesingh provides a broader range of reasons, beyond the immediate political implications, for such a slow realisation of electoral equality in the Third Republic:
[S]ince the Revolutionary era, moderate republicans had always taken a restrictive view of equality, always defined in civil as opposed to social or physiological terms…
[There were] elite republican concerns – probably well-founded – that enfranchising women would give an enormous boost to the Catholic Church and its political allies…
[A] socio-cultural argument could be offered, drawing out the “bourgeois” nature of republicanism and identifying the normative constraints on the equalization of gender roles…
Republican anti-feminism thus arose through a combination of these factors together with the fact that many powerful women in nineteenth-century France deliberately eschewed a robust form of feminism…[advocating] feminine difference rather than feminine equality.187
No doubt all of these explanations had some influence in society but they are all based on negative reasoning, on anti-feminism or restrictive equality or, as the clerical argument would suggest, even an anti-democracy. None of these ring true with the largely positive
185 De Gaulle announced the inclusion of women into the franchise in Algiers in 1944, prior to the invasion of France by the Allied forces. They were first able to exercise this right in 1945 and it was enshrined in the constitution of the Fourth Republic in 1946.
186 Sîan Reynolds, 'Outsiders by Birth? Women, the Republic and Political History', Martin S. Alexander (ed.)
French History Since Napoleon (London, 1999) p. 132.
rhetoric of republican ideology which stems from the Revolution. Robert Tombs has noted that the ‘lack of a vote for the female half of humanity should perhaps have posed an important philosophical problem, but it did not’, yet he fails to consider why this was the case.188
As this chapter has argued, both in historiography and in artistic representations, republican citizenship is represented as a positive trait and intrinsically related to the heroic and dynamic figure of the citizen soldier. The relationships between citizenship and enfranchisement, and citizenship and the citizen soldier are intrinsic, and it is here that the reasons behind women’s political inequality lie. ‘National imageries’, as T. G. Ashplant has noted, are ‘centred around the idealized figure of the masculine soldier’ and nowhere is this more true than in republican France.189 Unlike the largely professional traditions of Britain and Germany, the French army is centred around the figure of the citizen soldier and has been since the first levée en masse. Thus, to be a republican citizen was synonymous with being a citizen soldier, a pathway not open to women. As such, the calls for votes for women remained stunted, less because they were women than because they could not be citizen soldiers.
The gendered nature of republican citizenship was not an inevitable ideological outcome of the Revolution. Abbé Sièyes considered the Revolution’s purpose to be one of overcoming such divisions, or at least eradicating their impact on citizenship:
Advantages which differentiate citizens from one another lie outside their capacity as citizens. Inequalities of wealth or ability are like inequalities of age, sex, size, colour, etc. In no way do they alter the nature of the equality of citizenship; the rights inherent in citizenship cannot attach to differences.190
It was the militarisation of society from the Revolutionary wars that tied gender so intrinsically to citizenship through the imagery of the levée en masse. Alan Forrest considered this imagery to be ‘highly gendered’ as women ‘occupied the wings or played a secondary role in the action… there to encourage their sons and brothers, husbands and lovers, to
188 Tombs, France 1814-1914, p. 63.
189 Ashplant, Dawson and Roper, 'The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration', p. 21.
190 Sièyes, What is the Third Estate?, pp. 161-162. Italics in the original, although in an editor’s note accompanying the translation, S.E. Finer notes that Sièyes’s use of capital letters ‘was erratic as it was lavish’ so perhaps the punctuation should not be given too much importance.
urge them to put their love for the Republic above such feelings as they had for the women in their lives.’191 Women could thus be sacrificial, but not heroic in the manner of men.192 In contrast to the heroics of masculine citizen soldiers, women who take a more active role during periods of conflict become threatening and even savage, visions which are particularly in evidence around the myths of the tricoteuses of the Terror and the pétroleuses of the Commune, as well as the jibes against the ‘idea of battalions of “Amazons”’ during the Second Republic.193 Karine Varley utilises this trend to explain why, in French artistic representations of the iconic defence of Bazeilles during the Franco-Prussian war, women are absent from accounts; there was a fear of associating the savage image of pétroleuses with an episode of heroic resistance.194 Charles Berheimer, in a study of cultural representations of prostitutes in the nineteenth-century, has argued that their prominence in art was a method ‘to control and dispel her fantasmatic threat to male mastery.’195 The prominence of the prostitute as a figure in cultural representations, particularly after the defeat of 1871 (in the paintings of Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet for example, but especially in the short stories of Guy de Maupassant which feature the figure of the prostitute in direct relation to representations of the war) are potentially a reaction to the threat to masculinity after military defeat; a way of re-emphasising the control and power of the citizen soldier in relation to a debased view of women.196
On the other hand, positive depictions of women in art after the 1871 defeat place them in very controlled bourgeois environments. Albert Boime contrasts Gustave Caillebotte’s Jeune homme à sa fenêtre (1876) with his Intérieur, Femme à la fenêtre (1876) in which the former is ‘unabashedly authoritarian’, in a masculine stance surveying his territory, whereas in the
191 Forrest, 'La Patrie en danger', pp. 18-19.
192 Such a representation of women on the sidelines is also familiar to the immediate post-war understanding of women in the Resistance. See Margeret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free
France, 1940-1945 (Chichester, 1995).
193 Tombs, France 1814-1914, p. 13; Pilbeam, Republianism in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 193. 194 Varley, Under the Shadow of Defeat, p. 157.
195 Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (London, 1989) p. 2.
196 Gordon Millan, Brian Rigby and Jill Forbes, 'Industrialization and its Discontents (1870-1914)', Jill Forbes and Michael Kelly (eds), French Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford, 1995); Guy de Maupassant, 'Boule de suif', Les meilleurs contes (New York, 1996); Guy de Maupassant, 'Mademoiselle Fifi', Les Meilleurs Contes (New York, 1996). Millan el al make the beginnings of this argument about the debasement of women in these painters’ works. I am less convinced by the notion that these images are intended to be ‘debased’ as I cannot, for the most part, interpret them as negative, some are even celebratory. But there is certainly an underlying warning about the danger of power in the hands of women and as such they relate very much to the tropes of the pétroleuses who were frequently considered to be synonymous with prostitutes.
latter the equally bourgeois woman ‘is denied the same degree of hierarchical control’, her stance more tentative and her space infiltrated by a man seated in the foreground of the picture.197 The contrast between the sexes is even more evident in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize. Near the beginning of the novel, Michelle Fléchard, peasant mother of the children who the Marquis de Lantenac would later kidnap, is happened upon by a group of revolutionary soldiers from Paris. They question her allegiances in ways which are entirely alien to her:
‘Quelle est ta patrie?’ ‘Je ne sais pas, dit-elle.’
‘Comment! tu ne sais pas quel est ton pays?’ ‘Ah! mon pays. Si fait.’
‘Eh bien, quel est ton pays?’
La femme répondit: ‘C'est la métairie de Siscoignard, dans la paroisse d'Azé.’ Ce fut le tour du sergent d'être stupéfait. Il demeura un moment pensif. Puis il reprit: ‘Tu dis?’
‘Siscoignard.’
‘Ce n'est pas une patrie, ça.’
‘C'est mon pays.’ Et la femme, après un instant de réflexion, ajouta: ‘Je comprends, monsieur. Vous êtes de France, moi je suis de Bretagne.’
‘Eh bien?’
‘Ce n'est pas le même pays.’
‘Mais c'est la même patrie!’ cria le sergent.
La femme se borna à répondre: ‘Je suis de Siscoignard!’198
The confusion is evidently one of etymology and the inability to distinguish between pays and patrie, the latter of which is more than an indicator of geographical location but ‘expresses in addition the concept of a parent-child relationship between an area and its inhabitants, a filial bond to a political entity which Michelle Fléchard, the natural mother,
197 Boime, Art and the French Commune, pp. 89-92.
198 Hugo, 'Quatrevingt-treize'. [‘Which is your side?’ / ‘I do not know,’ she said. / ‘How? How do you not know your own country?’ / ‘Ah, my country! Oh yes, I know that.’ / ‘Well, where is it?’ / ‘The farm of Siscoignard, in the parish of Azé.’ / It was the sergeants turn to be stupefied. He remained thoughtful for a moment, then resumed: ‘You say – ?’ / ‘Siscoignard.’ / ‘That is not a country.’ / ‘It is my country,’ said the woman; and added, after an instant’s reflection, ‘I understand sir. You are from France; I belong to Brittany.’ / ‘Well?’ / ‘It is not the same neighbourhood.’ / ‘But it is the same country,’ cried the sergeant. / The woman only repeated, ‘I am from Siscoignard.’ Victor Hugo, 'Ninety-Three, trans. Unknown (London) [1874]]
cannot understand.’199 The soldiers, on the other hand, have a clear sense of the usurping importance of the patrie and represent the republic, something of which Fléchard cannot conceive; there is a degree of security in ‘belonging to a gendered national collectivity’.200 The artistic representations of the early Third Republic are a reassertion of masculinity taking place after the defeat of the heroic citizen soldier. The formation of citizenship into an essentially masculine entity has become ubiquitous in republican culture. In essence, even when defeated, war acts as a boost to the gendered nature of citizenship precisely because it is evidence of the active nature of republican citizenship through the citizen soldier.
The combination of gendered citizenship and war would effect the status of women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the highly militaristic society of the First Empire, the introduction of the 1804 Civil Code drastically demoted the legal status of women, even losing their French nationality altogether if they married a foreigner.201 This particular clause was only removed in 1924 when natalist concerns brought on by fear of the rise of Germany took precedent; women’s nationality became important again once their purpose as mothers to citizen soldiers became paramount.202 It is possible even to suggest that the enfranchisement of women in the aftermath of the Second World War was in recognition of their role as citizen soldiers in the Resistance, although it may be stretching the point somewhat. It is certainly not a coincidence that the legal recognition of women as citizens is so temporally close to the breakdown of the citizen soldier narrative which this chapter has documented.
Robert Aldrich touches upon but does not explore a key element to gendered citizenship when he writes, the ‘very acts of colonisation – exploration, conquest, development of natural resources, pacification of indigenes, the governance of new domains – were associated in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought with the male gender.’203 Essentially, for the most part, such acts were pursued by the army. It is not surprising, therefore, that with the retreat from the colonial territories which had been at the very heart of the French army, most particularly Algeria, that these inherent links of gender, soldiery and citizenship begin to be redesigned. Whilst the gendered element of citizenship
199 Petrey, History in the Text, p. 54. 200 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, p. 282.
201 Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. 2, p. 27; Weil, Qu'est-ce qu'un Français ?, p. 14. 202 Weil, Qu'est-ce qu'un Français ?, p. 73.
loses its prominence just at the same moment the image of the citizen soldier does, an opposite – an ‘other’ – surfaces to stand as the contrast to, and thus help freshly define, the French republican citizen. This is the revolution in republicanism which occurred during the Algerian war. The second part of this chapter will argue that the Algerian war led to a redefining of republican citizenship in relation to race.