Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  In 1872 Maria Desraismes of the Society for the Amelioration of Women’s Condition issued a firm riposte to Alexandre Dumas fils, whose pamphlet The Man-Woman urged men to reassert control over their wives, killing them if they committed adultery. She argued, as Jenny d’Héricourt had, that it was not the emancipation but the servitude of women that was a threat to society and civilization, and that the new Republic should grant rights to women.57 Despite the failure of the First and Second Republics to grant those rights, Desraismes took the view that the Third Republic offered new hope and should therefore be defended at all costs. The banning of her society by the conservative Moral Order regime in 1875, and its reauthorization by the republicans in August 1878, indicated that she might be correct. Neither was she prepared to move faster than republican opinion would take. In this she came up against a young rival, Hubertine Auclert, an orphan who had cut her anticlerical teeth in a series of convent schools and who tried to raise the question of female suffrage at the Women’s Rights conference organized by Desraismes and her colleague Léon Richer in July–August 1878. When this was rejected as premature she broke away to found her own Society for Female Suffrage, sustained after 1881 by a paper called La Citoyenne. She followed the line of most French feminists that women’s rights would strengthen and moralize the nation. However, she was not prepared to wait for the vote and sought publicity for her cause by trying to register to vote, refusing to pay taxes (until the bailiffs arrived to take her furniture) and by organizing a demonstration with a banner wreathed in black at the place de la Bastille on 14 July 1881.58

  Three times as many feminists stayed with Desraismes and Richer than followed Auclert. Desraismes made it a priority to defend the Republic from the right, and turned her Pontoise country estate into committee rooms for the republican cause in the elections of 1881 and 1885, and her Paris salon into a headquarters against Boulangism. She chaired many of the meetings of the Anticlerical Congress in 1881, believing that women had urgently to be freed from the grip of the Church. Richer, who set up the French League for Women’s Rights (LFDF) in 1882, was also of the opinion that ‘it is enough for us to have to struggle against reactionaries of the masculine sex without giving to these partisans of defeated regimes the support of millions of female ballots subject to the occult domination of the priest, their confessor.’59 In the meantime, Hubertine Auclert had tried to harness the re-emerging socialist movement to her cause, perhaps remembering the attempts of Flora Tristan to do the same in the 1830s. Auclert attended the first socialist congress since the Commune at Marseille in October 1879, and obtained a resolution from it in favour of women’s social and political equality. But a year later the Le Havre socialist congress fully committed itself to Marxism, and subordinated women’s rights to the class struggle. Louise Michel, returning from exile, might have become an ally of Hubertine, but preferred to take the socialist line. Declining to run as a candidate she said that ‘Women in the Chamber would not prevent the absurdly low pay of women’s work and the prison and the pavement would continue no less to vomit, one on to the other, legions of unfortunates.’60 The only leading figure to take Auclert’s side, paradoxically, was Alexandre Dumas fils, who had undergone a strange and sudden transformation, arguing that women could vote in elections for school boards in New York and thus that ‘there should be women in the Chamber of Deputies. France owes the civilized world the example of this great initiative.’61 Hubertine Auclert married a government official and followed him to Algeria when he was posted there in 1888. The following year, coinciding with the centenary of the French Revolution, Richer and Desraismes presided in triumph over the Women’s Rights Congress which brought together middle-class and professional women such as Blanche Edwards, to make such moderate demands as equal pay for women teachers, the opening up of the professions to women, control of their earnings by married women, and the abolition of regulated (and thus legalized) prostitution, which humiliated working women and endorsed the infidelity of their husbands.62

  The French feminist scene received a new boost in 1897 with the conversion to the cause of Marguerite Durand. Thirty-six years younger than Desraismes and twenty-six years younger than Auclert, Durand, one of the generation born around 1860, was the illegitimate daughter of a general, fled her convent school to become an actress at the Comédie Française, married the politician Georges Laguerre who moved from radicalism to Boulangism, and became the ‘Madame Roland of Boulangism’. She divorced in 1891, and wrote a column in Le Figaro, by which she was sent to write a witty article on the Amazons attending the congress of the 1896 French League for Women’s Rights. In the event she was converted, and launched her own women’s newspaper, La Fronde, making a bid to become a new Delphine de Girardin. La Fronde brought together a galaxy of women writers including Séverine, who wrote ‘Notes of a Frondeuse’, Clémence Royer, who had translated Darwin, Avril de Sainte-Croix, the leading campaigner against legalized prostitution, Pauline Kergomard, the chief inspector of nursery schools, and Maria Vérone, a law student who wrote the paper’s legal column and became in 1907 only the fifth French woman admitted to the bar.63 The great achievement of Durand was to combine feminism with femininity, and indeed to use femininity for political ends. She espoused the cause of women who wanted to emerge from the private sphere without risking the accusation that they were becoming mannish, bluestockings or cocottes. She later wrote,

  I was not much more than thirty when I founded the Fronde. The fact of seeing a woman who was still young and not totally out of favour, who made her life seem easy, who was interested in the lot of other women and who made that her preoccupation… all this was at first astonishing and then interesting. Feminism owes a lot to my blonde hair.64

  Durand’s feminism was bourgeois and dreyfusard and did not command universal support. One of her ambitions was to encourage women to improve their lot by joining trade unions, and Jeanne Bouvier was introduced to the dressmakers’ union by a private client who read La Fronde.65 But the International Women’s Rights Congress which Durand sponsored in September 1900 was divided over whether maids should be given a whole day off a week. The Feminist Socialist Group of Élisabeth Renaud, the widow of a printworker who had worked in a Jura watch factory and as a governess in St Petersburg and now kept a boarding house in Paris, and a seamstress, Louise Saumonneau, who defended the maids’ holiday, clashed with the wife of the mayor of the 18th arrondissement who declared, ‘So I’m to cook lunch for my maid? I’m not a saint!’66 On another front, Durand broke with Gyp who was engaged to provide a drawing a week for La Fronde, until Durand objected to their anti-Semitic nature. Gyp became an outspoken campaigner for the antidreyfusard cause, called as a witness to give evidence at Déroulède’s trial in the high court in 1899 and famously giving her occupation as ‘antiSemite’. Similarly Durand fell out with the editor of the anti-Semitic La Libre Parole, Gaston Méry, when she refused to give money to help the widow of Colonel Henry and he accused her (possibly alluding to her liaison with Baron Gustave de Rothschild) of being ‘a bad mother, a prostitute with Jewish lovers’.67

  Not all French feminism in the Belle Époque was so colourful. One of the powerful streams it emerged from was religious philanthropy, whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish. A leading light of Protestant philanthropy was Sarah Monod, from a great family of Protestant academics and churchmen, whose main commitment was to fight social injustice, but who also sought ‘a definition of feminism which would reconcile the demand for rights with an edifying conception of the femme au foyer’.68 She chaired a congress on Women’s Charities and Institutions in June 1900 which dealt with the social issues of prostitution, alcoholism and access to higher education for women, and also favoured the extension of sweated labour as a way of helping working mothers to combine work and motherhood. In 1901 she became chair of the National Council of French Women (CNFF), the French branch of the International Council of Women founded in Washington DC in 1888. Its leading lights were Protestant –
Sarah Monod, Julie Siegfried – or Jewish – Madame Weill, Madame Salvador – and it was still basically philanthropic, with some interest in civil, but not political, rights. Catholics, troubled by the domination of women’s movements by Protestants, Jews and freethinkers, went their own way, but still tried to combine social action with the cult of the home and family. Marie Maugeret, who founded a periodical called Christian Feminism in 1896, wrote in 1899, ‘the fact that a woman develops her mind with all sorts of serious matters does not make her any less able to be her husband’s companion and child’s educator. The Christian woman respects her husband’s authority as head of the family and takes the place that is rightly hers in the home.’ Catholic women did become involved in politics after the Dreyfus Affair, but in the context of defending the Catholic family and education. Baroness Reille, who was among the founders in 1902 of the Ligue Patriotique des Françaises, whose watchwords were ‘Fatherland, property and liberty’, was against contraception, abortion, the godless school imposed by freemasons and the takeover of the country by the Bloc des Gauches. She was not interested in campaigning for female suffrage but told an audience at Toulouse in 1903, ‘Be honest, ladies, if you do not drop a ballot in the box, you guide the hand that does.’69

  In the teeth of the pressure of family values and social reform a limited suffragette movement did take shape in the years before 1914, but it failed to get the better of a more sedate suffragism, which entrusted itself to the regular political process and parties and made very little headway. The suffragette movement was led by Hubertine Auclert, who had returned to Paris from Algeria after her husband died there in 1892 and recruited a knot of younger militants including Caroline Kauffmann, an unhappily married child-labour inspector, and Madeleine Pelletier, now a psychiatrist at the Villejuif asylum. Symbolically, in 1904 when the centenary of the Civil Code, which in so many ways imposed the constitutional inferiority of women, was being officially celebrated, Auclert led a procession of fifty feminists to the statue of Napoleon in the place Vendôme where they tore out pages from the Code. In May 1908, during municipal elections, Auclert, Kauffmann and Pelletier marched into a polling station in the 4th arrondissement, overturning a ballot box, then threw stones at the windows of another. Auclert was sent for trial but the authorities decided not to make a martyr of her; the hostility of public opinion was already doing the job. Pelletier wondered why the feminists did not follow them, and concluded, ‘Marching in the streets seemed vulgar to them; this was suitable for working-class women. A respectable woman should stay at home.’ To see how suffragettes managed it in Britain, she attended a 500,000-strong demonstration in Hyde Park on 21 June 1908, and later wrote, ‘If I had Pankhurst’s troops, I would certainly attempt a violent demonstration.’70

  Just as the suffragette movement picked up militancy in Great Britain, however, so it lost it in France. Emmeline Pankhurst herself was no stranger to France. The daughter of a Manchester calico-printer who did much business in France, she was educated in the 1870s in a boarding school on the avenue de Neuilly, Paris, and her best friend was Noémie Rochefort, ‘daughter of that great Republican, Communist, journalist and swordsman, Henri Rochefort’, in exile in New Caledonia following the Commune. She gained an entrée into French literary circles and almost married a French man of letters, but her father would hear nothing of foreign husbands and dowries and summoned her home to marry an Englishman. Women dressed as Joan of Arc figured prominently in processions organized by the Women’s Social and Political Union, which she founded in 1903; her daughter Christabel fled to Paris in 1912 to avoid arrest after the campaign of smashing shop windows in the West End, and edited the Suffragette from there; and after Emmeline was sentenced to three years’ hard labour in 1913 for setting fire to Lloyd George’s country home her suffragette supporters left the Old Bailey singing the Marseillaise. This militancy, however, did not rub off on French feminists. The British state did not avoid confrontation with suffragettes. Arrests led to trials from which political capital was made, imprisonment led to hunger-strikes and renewed militancy. In 1912 the WSPU launched a campaign of violence, pouring acid into postboxes, cutting telephone cables, slashing paintings in art galleries, setting fire to public and private buildings. In 1908, however, Hubertine Auclert, aged sixty and ten years older than Emmeline Pankhurst, attended a meeting of the National Congress of Civil Rights and Universal Suffrage that was designed to federate all movements seeking reform of the Civil Code and votes for women. Publicly, to a standing ovation, she apologized for her use of violence, which had achieved nothing. She had no successors in terms of militancy. The initiative now shifted to the suffragists around Jeanne Schmahl, a doctor who had just piloted through parliament a law of 1907 giving married women control of their earnings and who launched the French Union for Women’s Suffrage (UFSF) in 1907. This was the French equivalent of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, set up in 1897 by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the sister of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, which limited itself to constitutional agitation.71

  The progress of suffragism by legal means depended of course on obtaining the sponsorship of a major party. Here French suffragists faced the same problem as their British allies, who were blocked by the ruling Liberal Party and unable to persuade the Labour Party to place votes for women ahead of the votes for all adults, disfranchised workers included. After the separation of Church and state in France in 1905 the anticlerical work of the Radical Party was complete and hope for a series of reforms was pinned on the new premier, Aristide Briand, a former socialist turned moderate.72 Schmahl went to see him in October 1909 about votes for women, but he was clear: the country was not yet ready for it.73 No more help was forthcoming from the socialists. Madeleine Pelletier lobbied Jaurès and spoke to the SFIO congress at Nancy in August 1907, but they still insisted that class came before the concerns of educated women.74 Marguerite Durand then hit on the publicity stunt, which was not endorsed by the UFSF, of high-profile feminists running in the parliamentary elections of 1910 in Paris: she in the 9th arrondissement, Auclert in the 11th, Pelletier in the 5th. In the event, Pelletier was offered a nomination by the SFIO, not in the 5th but in the unwinnable 8th, the fief of royalist deputy Denys Cochin. In this respect French campaigners were ahead of their British counterparts, who did not stand themselves but campaigned to unseat MPs of the Liberal Party, such as Winston Churchill in Manchester in 1908. They were divided, however, by the issue of femininity. The former suffragettes felt ill at ease on the election platform in the company of Durand, who flaunted her beauty. Auclert was critical of her ‘regiment of lovers’, while Pelletier, who cropped her hair and wore masculine dress, complained, ‘I do not understand how these ladies don’t see the vile servitude that lies in displaying their breasts. I will show off mine when men adopt a special sort of trouser that shows off their…’75 The women candidates in Paris secured about 4 per cent of the vote. The only success story, with 27 per cent of the vote, was that of Élisabeth Renaud, standing at Vienne (Isère), who was supported by socialists strong in the town council as well as feminists, particularly the local union of institutrices seeking higher pay. Ironically, she was removed from the Group of Socialist Women in 1913 by her former comrade Louise Saumon-neau, who wanted to orientate the group towards a ‘proletarian feminism’ closely tied to the SFIO.76

  Feminist politics was defeated in the end by opinion. The more feminists demanded, and the more aggressive their political tactics, the more they found themselves isolated, not only from French men, but also from women who saw themselves as wives and mothers, and even from feminists who did not want to sacrifice their femininity. Marguerite Durand fell out with Hubertine Auclert and Madeleine Pelletier on the issue of femininity, all these were isolated from Protestant and Catholic feminists who would put a toe in the water only if marriage and the family were not called into question, while men, who controlled the political citadel, were not minded to lay down their defences. With some poetic licence,
Georges Clemenceau wrote in 1907, ‘If the right to vote were given to women tomorrow, France would all of a sudden jump back into the Middle Ages.’77

  14

  Modernism and Mass Culture

  The successful writer, artist or musician at the end of the nineteenth century had access to three indispensable resources. The first was connections and patronage, which could further a career, and might be provided by an influential salon in Paris or official recognition in the annual Salon sponsored by the Académie des Beaux Arts or by the prizes and membership of the Académie Française. The second was the dialogue, comradeship and support that could be offered by fellow writers and artists, who often met in favourite cafés and restaurants and reviewed each other’s work in journals and newspapers. Conflict between different approaches was common, a sense of betrayal was rife, and friendships often came to a bitter end, but all this was grist to the mill of literary, artistic and musical innovation. The third was public recognition and a market for their work in the growing consumer society. Not every writer or artist had access to all three resources. Official recognition in the Salon or Académie Française was generally confined to those who subscribed to the classical French canon as laid down by those institutions and did not seek radical or avant-garde approaches. Avant-garde writers and artists scorned official institutions and canons, or at least affected to do so. They also affected to scorn the demands of the mass market, which they denounced as ignorant and philistine, although they could not entirely eschew the oxygen of publicity and the income to live. For a mass culture was developing, which was something different from both elite culture and popular culture: a culture demanded by a largely urban society, shaped by mass education and craving instruction and entertainment more than cultivation, and supplied by a mass media of books, newspapers, universal exhibitions, music halls, cinemas, sports stadiums and race tracks. Classical and avant-garde or modern art and the mass consumer society were locked in a tension, but the art, literature and bohemian lifestyle of Paris were themselves becoming national assets, widely commented upon in Europe and America and drawing in foreign writers, artists and tourists.