France and Women, 1789-1914

Gender, Society and Politics

James McMillan, Professor James F Mcmillan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134589579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

France and Women, 1789-1914 is the first book to offer an authoritative account of women's history throughout the nineteenth century. James McMillan, author of the seminal work Housewife or Harlot, offers a major reinterpretation of the French past in relation to gender throughout these tumultuous decades of revolution and war.
This book provides a challenging discussion of the factors which made French political culture so profoundly sexist and in particular, it shows that many of the myths about progress and emancipation associated with modernisation and the coming of mass politics do not stand up to close scrutiny. It also reveals the conservative nature of the republican left and of the ingrained belief throughout french society that women should remain within the domestic sphere. James McMillan considers the role played by French men and women in the politics, culture and society of their country throughout the 1800s.

Part I (1789–1815)
Redefining women’s sphere

Chapter 1
Defining womanhood

The legacy of the Enlightenment

The eighteenth century was in many respects a good time to be a woman—at least for a female elite. As the Goncourt brothers suggested in a classic work, never before, perhaps, had women appeared to be so powerful or so sexually liberated.¹ At Court and in the world of the Parisian salons, brilliant society women wielded immense influence in their aristocratic and upper-class milieu. Royal mistresses such as Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry, or society hostesses such as the wealthy Mme du Deffand or the scandalous Mme du Tencin, mother of the philosophe d’Alembert, were only the most obvious examples: and to these could be added independent women who succeeded in earning their own living as writers, like the Marquise de Châtelet, the translator of Newton’s Principia and friend of Voltaire, or as artists, like the painter Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Just as men were known (if not expected) to indulge in extra-marital affairs, so too in polite society female sexual infidelity was tolerated, provided it was not flaunted and the honour of a husband not impaired. The French aristocracy undoubtedly practised birth control, which was the main reason that the birth rate in the families of the nobility fell from 6.5 in the seventeenth century to 2 in the eighteenth century, and this in turn could only have diminished women’s fears of the dangers of childbirth, as well as of male sexual aggression.² In practice, if not in theory, the double standard of morality no longer applied to many women of the French upper classes.

Yet, as the Goncourts also recognised, women simultaneously appeared in another and less flattering light in the period. Anti-woman prejudice remained strong in the eighteenth century, and in many ways the unconventional behaviour of women of the elite succeeded only in making it stronger, as we shall see. The birth of a female child was not necessarily greeted as good news in eighteenth-century France. In the words of the Goncourts, families regarded the new arrival as ‘a blessing which they accept as a disappointment’. Maternal love was not to be wasted on the little girl: she would be sent away to a wet nurse, then, on her return home, consigned to a governess and later dispatched to board at a convent school. As soon as possible, she would be married off to a husband chosen for her by her family.³ The inference from such usages seems plain enough: under the Ancien Régime, women were regarded as a ‘second sex’ whose inferiority to men could scarcely be doubted.

Redefining women’s nature: medical discourse and the female body

In this regard, the eighteenth century was the inheritor of a misogynistic tradition which had come down from the ancient and medieval worlds and which, in a body of texts about women (all of them written by men), defined women as ‘other’ and affirmed their subordination. The occasional dissentient female voice of a Christine de Pisan in the early fifteenth century or of a Marie Jars de Gournay in the early seventeenth century struggled to be heard.⁴ Neither the intellectual changes associated with the Renaissance and the Reformation eras nor the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century had contributed to any substantial re-evaluation of women’s position. Scientific opinion, which questioned many of the theses of medieval and classical authors, reinforced rather than undermined assumptions about women’s inferiority. Seventeenth-century champions of Aristotle may have clashed with contemporary disciples of Galen on points of detail concerning the female anatomy, but all were agreed that women were the dangerous sex, driven by more powerful sexual urges than men. Some leading doctors still subscribed to Plato’s theory of the ‘wandering womb’ (the idea that the womb ‘wandered’ when not sufficiently activated by sexual intercourse and reproduction, thus giving rise to disturbed behaviour and ‘hysteria’).⁵

What had happened in the early modern period, it would seem, was that in many quarters, convictions about women’s inferiority actually hardened. The celebrated preacher Bishop Bossuet was not alone in regarding childbirth as women’s punishment for the sin of Eve in leading Adam astray: ‘Fecundity is the glory of woman’, he affirmed: but ‘that is where God inflicts his punishment: it is only at the peril of her life that she is fertile…the child cannot be born without putting its mother in danger. Eve is wretched and accursed in all her sex’.⁶ Likewise, the saintly François de Sales, without being quite so brutal, encouraged pregnant women to pray to God with the words: ‘At my confinement, fortify my heart to support the pains which accompany it and which I accept as the effects of your justice on my sex, for the sin of the first woman’.⁷ For both Catholic and Protestant authorities of the period, the ideal woman was the pious and submissive spouse who accepted her husband’s authority without question and spent the greater part of her time in prayer.⁸ Jesuits and Jansenists, at odds on so many other issues, concurred about women’s role in society. The Jesuit Father Desmothes, in a work dedicated to Mme de Maintenon, wrote that women’s foremost duty was to be well informed about their religion. Young girls should shun worldly pleasures, especially dancing (‘a school of prostitution’), in favour of domestic cares. The less they were seen in society, the higher they would be esteemed.⁹ The Jansenist abbé Duguet counselled likewise, advising women ‘to set no store by amusements and pleasure, or to engage in them only through necessity, and because you have need of them for your health’.¹⁰

The originality of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was to shift the centuries old debate on womanhood on to a new plane. Breaking both with the limitations of the older querelle des femmes, which debated women’s qualities in terms of their moral worth, and with appeals to the authority of Christianity, of whatever variety, Enlightenment thinkers addressed themselves to the question of women’s ‘otherness’ and attempted to explain the essence of sexual difference in the light of the advanced thinking and scientific discoveries of the day.¹¹ For medical science in particular, the difference between the sexes was a subject of endless fascination in the late eighteenth century. Men such as Pierre Roussel, author of Système physique et moral de la femme (1775) which went through five editions before 1809 and continued to be cited as an authority throughout the nineteenth century, and Pierre Cabanis, who published Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802), sought to identify and clarify the elements of a specifically feminine nature which rendered women distinctive as human beings.¹²

Rejecting time-honoured beliefs about the similarities between men’s and women’s genitalia and about women’s voracious sexual appetites, the doctors now pronounced the sexual organs of men and women to be entirely different. The key to women’s nature lay in their reproductive function, which gave them not only their sexual identity but also their social identity. According to Julien-Joseph Virey, a prolific populariser of the medical discourse of the Enlightenment, woman’s existence was only a fraction of that of man’s. She lived not for herself alone but for the multiplication of the species, in conjunction with man. This was the single goal which nature, society and morality prescribed for woman. It followed, therefore, in Virey’s logic, that woman ‘is only a being naturally subordinated to man on account of her needs, her duties, and above all because of her physical constitution’. Because nature decreed that woman should be submissive in the sexual act, she was born for sweetness, tenderness, patience and docility, and obliged to submit to constraints without protest, for the sake of peace and concord in the family.¹³ In the view of Cabanis, ‘woman is rightly frightened of those labours of the mind which cannot be carried out without long and deep meditation; she chooses those which demand more tact than science, more vivacity of conception than of strength, more imagination than reason, those in which a facile talent, so to speak, can lightly remove the surface of the objects’.¹⁴ Such ideas found a resonance in the writings of the philosophes. No less a person than Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie, stated that woman was at bottom in thrall to her uterus, ‘an organ subject to terrible spasms, which rules her and rouses up in her phantoms of every sort’. It was because women were governed by their reproductive organs that they were weak, sensitive creatures, unfit for intellectual endeavours.¹⁵

But the doctors insisted further that women differed from men not just because of their reproductive organs but on account of their entirely distinctive anatomy and physiology. Roussel affirmed that the essence of sexual difference was not confined to a single organ, but spread to all aspects of the body¹⁶ Likewise Virey, in his De la femme sous ses rapports physiologique, moral et littéraire (1823), insisted that ‘sexual differences between men and women are not limited solely to their generative organs: but all parts of their bodies, even those which seem undifferentiated in the sexes, come under their influences’.¹⁷ Eighteenth-century doctors inferred such differences from simple comparisons of male and female skeletons.¹⁸ Thus, in medical discourse, women were represented as above all sexual creatures, ‘the Sex’, victims of their own bodies and of biology, which determined all aspects of their behaviour, physical and moral. At the same time, however, their sexuality had been completely redefined: for, if medical science confirmed some traditional notions of sexual difference— men were rational, orderly, masterful, whereas women were irrational, disorderly and emotional—it no longer supported the view that women were more highly sexed than men. In opposition to the discourse which, down the centuries, had made women out to be the dangerous sex, the Enlightenment proclaimed them to be more spiritual than sexual, and not so much a sexual threat as in need of protection against male sexual aggression. The ideology of separate spheres, which identified women primarily as wives and mothers whose destiny was domesticity and the reproduction of the species, was now legitimised by the authority of science and the best philosophical opinion of the day.

The philosophes and women

Of course, medical discourse on its own was not responsible for a universally accepted redefinition of femininity. For a start, doctors still disagreed among themselves about female sexuality, as was evident from their disputes over ‘maladies des femmes’, those disorders which supposedly derived from women’s sexuality, such as hysteria. At a popular level, too, traditional beliefs about gender difference persisted well into the nineteenth century.¹⁹ The new medical ideas would only become dominant later, in the wake of considerable political, economic and social upheaval, as we shall see. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to underline the degree to which the Enlightenment transformed the debate on women’s nature, not only raising it to a new level but providing a new language and a new frame of reference within which to discuss what would thereafter be known as the ‘woman question’. Here the contribution of the philosophes was fundamental. Seeking to reshape government and society by the application of reason to human affairs, they addressed themselves to the question of the proper social role for women both explicitly and implicitly. For some, indeed, the status accorded to women was the measure of how far a given society had evolved. In the Persian Letters (1721) Montesquieu employed the metaphor of the seraglio to denounce despotic rule in general and the exploitation of women in particular. In the Spirit of the Laws (1748), he went on to argue that both men and women should have the right to divorce, though, ominously, he also expressed fears about the pernicious effects of ‘licentious’ behaviour on the part of women which, he thought, might be detrimental to the common good. Diderot attacked the legal disabilities to which women were subjected by male legislators, while Jaucourt in his article for the Encyclopédie argued for equality within marriage. Male dominance, in his view, was a consequence not of nature but of man-made laws.²⁰

Yet it would be a mistake to exaggerate the degree to which Enlightenment thinkers devoted themselves to the issue of ending women’s subordination. On the contrary, in the vast oeuvre of Voltaire, for instance, there is only the odd reference to women. He supported divorce, but more out of his deep-seated animus against the Church than out of any genuine feminist sympathies. A number of philosophes were overtly misogynous. Helvétius, for example, (who was known to the police of the Ancien Régime as a sexual pervert with a taste for flagellation) was in favour of placing women’s bodies at the disposition of the state.²¹ Nor did the Encyclopédie speak with one voice on the subject of women (any more than it did on other matters). In contrast to Jaucourt, the dramatist and associate of Voltaire Demahis penned an entry on ‘Woman, Morality’, which repeated hoary shibboleths about women’s alleged weakness, timidity and duplicity.²² Barthez, who wrote on ‘Woman, Anthropology’, discussed with all seriousness the extent to which a woman was an imperfect man (un homme manqué), though he graciously conceded that, after all, women might not necessarily be as feeble-minded as their detractors made them out to be.²³

Some modern scholars have suggested that the recycling of traditional misogynous opinion in the Encyclopédie was a cunning strategy to deceive the censors, and that, just as it sought to undermine orthodox attitudes to religion and custom, so too it wanted to subvert conventional wisdom about man’s alleged superiority over woman. The plates, as opposed to the texts, of the Encyclopédie represented women positively in active occupations, and articles not ostensibly dealing with women such as Le Roi’s ‘Man, Morality’ made the point that women’s arrested cultural development could be attributed to male jealousy and control.²⁴ Enlightenment thinkers undoubtedly broke with the past in their willingness to speculate in new and daring ways about human nature. According to Paul Hoffmann, it is unfair to accuse the authors of the Age of Light of being antifeminist since merely by recognising the concept of femininity they were refuting the Aristotelean and Christian idea that ‘the mind has no sex’. Their understanding of women’s liberation may have been one which involved individual temperament and outlook rather than political rights, he suggests, but it was no less real for all that.²⁵

Anachronism is one of the cardinal sins of historical scholarship and Hoffmann’s point about the dangers of applying labels such as ‘feminist’ and ‘antifeminist’ to thinkers of an era where the concept of feminism had yet to be invented is salutary. He overstates a good case, however. The fact remains that the great majority of Enlightenment thinkers viewed woman as an inferior creature not simply because of their oppression by man-made laws but because nature had so ordained. Entirely representative was Antoine Thomas, author of Essai sur le caractère, les moeurs, et l’esprit des femmes (1772), which recognised that women’s inferiority was attributable, at least in part, to the laws and customs of different societies. Thus in Periclean Athens women were unable to participate in the rich intellectual life of the age, since the Athenian ideal prescribed a secluded role for wives and deemed their greatest achievement to be invisibility, so that they went unnoticed either to receive praise or blame. On the other hand, according to Thomas it was unthinkable that women could ever be men’s intellectual equals: their minds were ‘more pleasing than strong’. Such was the will of nature.²⁶ Diderot, who in his own essay Sur les femmes (1772) taxed Thomas with underestimating women’s feelings, sufferings and emotions, did not dispute Thomas’s gendered representation of the natural order. For Diderot, woman was more delicate and spiritual than man, but also less cerebral.²⁷ Indeed, as he elaborated in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772, published 1796), there was much of the savage about women, which could only be held in check by conventional codes of civilised behaviour.²⁸ Diderot educated his own daughter entirely in conformity with received wisdom.²⁹ Even in the most enlightened circles —and Diderot was the epitome of enlightened thought—women’s otherness and inferiority were taken for granted.

Salon women and their enemies

Glaringly absent from the eighteenth-century philosophical (and medical) discourse on women’s nature was any significant contribution by women themselves. France did not produce a female philosophe, and in that sense it is possible to claim that for French women the Enlightenment—like the Renaissance—was a non-event.³⁰ Such a verdict, however, ignores the larger context within which philosophical debate took place. The Enlightenment project of changing existing ways of thinking required the creation of an intellectual community dedicated to the spread of Enlightenment ideals—a new Republic of Letters. Central to the exchange of ideas was a forum where philosophes could meet. In France that forum was provided by the Parisian salon, and the salon was a quintessentially feminine institution, presided over by a literary hostess, or salonnière, who was responsible for ensuring the success of her gatherings.³¹

Dating from the time of the Marquise de Rambouillet in the late sixteenth century, the salon acquired celebrity in the course of the seventeenth century thanks to the précieuses—self-consciously intellectual ladies who forsook marriage and domesticity to dedicate themselves to culture, learning and the pursuit of a model of civilité altogether at odds wi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I 1789–1815 Redefining women’s sphere
• Part II 1815–50 Public man, private woman?
• Part III 1850–80 Discourses on ‘woman’
• Part IV 1880–1914 Gender relations in crisis?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index