La femme française 1: The Birth of French Feminism
La Liberté guidant le peuple, Eugène Delacroix (image credit: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
In her column ‘La Femme Française, Helena Pruszewicz explores the history of feminism in France, from its birth during the French Revolution to the effects of the movements of the twenty-first century.
Exhibited in the famed halls of the Musée du Louvre in Paris is an oil painting by the great French Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix. The Notre Dame takes shape through the thick smoke of the streets of Paris. Dark figures in the background become clearer until they take the shape of men, sharing the same look of grim determination and clutching guns and swords. One man has fallen at the feet of their leader, looking up in desperation. This leader, the sole woman in the painting, a rifle in one hand and the tricolore in the other, urges her followers forward. This is, of course, La Liberté guidant le peuple which depicts the 1830 July Revolution through a female-centric framework. A woman leads her people to freedom against adversity. But did women play this symbolic role in the revolutions that have characterised the nation since the eighteenth century? And did Liberty bring them any greater liberty?
Calls for equality between men and women in France appeared long before Delacroix’s painting, as early as the Renaissance or even the Middle Ages. The roots of cohesive French feminist movements, however, did not appear until the political and social turmoil of the eighteenth century. Under the Ancien Régime, the vast majority of women had neither civil nor political standing in society. French women remained under the authority of their father until they married and the control was handed over to their husband. Those who worked were restricted to domestic roles or found themselves in underpaid, laborious trades such as the lace industry. There were, however, certain idiosyncrasies in the Ancien Régime through which particular groups of women were able to gain a fragment of political prestige. Women were able to act as regents. Those in religious orders and some noblewomen were permitted to send representatives to the 1789 meeting of the Estates General. Token emancipation through inconsistency, however, was insufficient for French women weary of the lip service surrounding the campaign for the rights of man, while there existed an utter failure to recognise the pressing need for female liberation.
The chaos of the Revolution provided women with the ideal opportunity to make their voices heard. Enraged by the unaffordable price of bread, thousands of market women from Paris marched on the Palace of Versailles in October 1789 in one of the earliest events of the Revolution. This march was crucial as it forced Louis XVI to return to Paris, signifying a momentous shift in the balance of power, one brought about by the collective power of women. In 1793 the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was formed. While their focus was primarily economic, there are two surviving accounts of their meetings showing discussion of women’s ability to govern. In November 1789, the Women’s Petition to the National Assembly was presented to the French National Assembly, imploring the abolition of male privilege and the opportunity for equal rights and advantages for both men and women. This demand is hugely significant in the history of French feminism as it saw a collective of women face men in a sphere that the latter wholly dominated. This, however, was not welcomed by the National Assembly. This effort to attain equality was deemed no more than the consequence of female hysteria.
Spurned by the failure of the Women’s Petition to the National Assembly and disenchanted by the lack of discourse surrounding the rights of women, Olympe de Gouges, playwright and ardent feminist, took matters into her own hands. De Gouges joined the Amis de la Verité in 1791 to push the campaign for sexual equality in political and legal rights, which had been all but neglected by the Revolution. In September 1791 she published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, in response to the Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen (1789). De Gouges used her work to highlight the hypocrisy of the original declaration. Her famous Article 10 exposes the failings of the Revolution regarding sexual equality: ‘Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they should likewise have the right to mount the rostrum.’ Her outspoken ideas on rights for women and her association with the Gironde faction made her a target of the Jacobins and she was imprisoned in June 1793. Unable to mount the rostrum, de Gouges mounted the scaffold, becoming another victim of the Reign of Terror as she was forced to face the guillotine. Her execution was a signal of suppression and hostility towards French feminists, made abundantly clear in the Feuille de salut published after her death: ‘It seems the law has punished this conspirator for having forgotten the virtues that suit her sex’.
Olympe de Gouges not the only feminist martyr of the Revolution. One of the few leading men of the Revolution who supported women’s equality was the Marquis of Condorcet. He was an advocate for women’s suffrage and for equal access to education. He died in a prison cell in 1794, likely murdered as he was too respected and well-known to be publicly sent to the scaffold. Théroigne de Méricourt personally participated in the attacks on Tuileries Palace during the Insurrection of 10 August 1792, and encouraged other revolutionary women to form their own militia. She was certified insane and sent to an asylum in 1794. This was a revolutionary period in France, where kings and queens were publicly executed, yet granting women the same rights as their male counterparts was deemed too radical, and those propagating such ideas had to be stopped.
In spite of the political contributions women made during the Revolution, in its wake, their efforts were dismissed by the newly formed Republic. The organisation of French electoral law meant that any peculiarities that had allowed certain groups of women to vote during the Ancien regime were discarded. Women were barred collectively from voting in a Republic which they had helped form. The hope of equality in a post-revolutionary France quickly fell through. Any prospect of emancipation was further impeded by the introduction of the Napoleonic codes in 1804. Women were wholly disenfranchised, refused civil and political rights of any sort, removed from professions and could no longer enter into a contractual agreement without consent from either their husband or father.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century, French suffrage movements began to form. Universal male suffrage had been granted in 1848, and the fight for women’s right to vote in France really found its feet in 1909 with the formation of the French Union for Women’s Suffrage. By 1914 there were over 120,000 members in 75 of the French departments. The Union chose to suspend its efforts, however, during the First World War in order to support the government. It assumed this sacrifice would be recognised and rewarded later down the line, yet this hope was in vain. In 1919, while the Chamber of Deputies passed a woman’s suffrage bill, the Senate blocked it, continuing to do so each time it was reintroduced. It would take another world war for women to be granted the right to vote.
The total denial of female equality in France at the turn of the twentieth century puts into question the achievements, if indeed there were any, of feminist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The feminist groups of the Revolution were highly factional, with political loyalties usurping any kind of female comradery. A lack of male allies also proved significant, as it meant when the First Republic was formed, the value of égalité was not extended to women. Opposition to female suffrage came primarily from the political left, claiming to support women’s emancipation yet fearing that a woman’s vote would change the balance of power. Time and time again, the efforts of feminist movements have proved unattainable and have been ignored. Yet this is not indicative of utter failure. What these movements did was provide the foundations upon which French feminism could grow over the course of the twentieth century. The birth of French feminism saw the first instance of collective groups of women not only demanding their wishes be heard in a political setting, but also actively participating in revolutionary actions that changed France’s entire political landscape. While the short-term achievements of these movements can be hard to see, the long-term accomplishments rest upon the struggles of these early feminists.
All images are author’s own.