Children of the Revolution Read online

  Napoleon’s idea of a public role for women was charity. In 1810 he revived the Society for Maternal Charity and placed it under the patronage of his new queen, Marie-Louise. Through this organization, which spread from Paris to provincial towns, women of the social elite both raised money for charitable works such as nurseries and homes for fallen women, and supervised the institutions they funded. The presidents of the different branches were generally the wives of the mayor, prefect or highest magistrate, and they undertook in the realm of care and relief what their husbands were undertaking in the realm of public order. The Society exhibited the social order, for the presidents were invariably noble. The bourgeoisie mimicked them, and in 1860 the wife of the cotton king and deputy Augustin Pouyer-Quertier was invited to assume the presidency of the Rouen branch of the society. The charitable sector, in which the maternal role and morality found expression outside the home and in some sense domesticated society, was regarded as entirely fitting for women of society.42

  Some women, of course, were not content with such a role and demanded greater involvement and recognition in the public sphere. Marie-Madeleine Poutret de Mauchamps ran a salon under the July Monarchy and, alongside her husband, edited the Gazette des Femmes. In 1837 the Gazette published a petition to the Académie Française requesting that women artists be allowed to compete for the major prizes in painting, sculpture, architecture and music, and the following year another was submitted to the king and Chamber of Deputies requesting that women be admitted to university courses and become eligible to qualify as doctors and lawyers. This campaign to open doors to educated women provoked a backlash against what was termed the bluestocking, who was attacked for sacrificing her femininity and indeed family to her thirst for knowledge. Daumier’s series of cartoons of Les Bas-bleus in the Charivari of 1844 ridiculed women who left their husbands to feed the baby and mend their own trousers, suggesting that infidelity was around the corner.43

  The jibes of Daumier were one thing, but the campaign of the Gazette did not even command full support among women who were making their mark in public debate. Delphine de Girardin, whose husband owned La Presse, wrote a column for it under the pen-name of the Vicomte Charles de Launay. This ‘Courrier de Paris’, which ran between 1836 and 1848, retailed the gossip and social issues that revolved around her salon and elsewhere. Her success, said Gautier, was due to ‘a very feminine finesse of observation and a rather virile common sense’.44 In 1844, however, she responded impatiently to one of the petitions demanding that women be eligible for chairs at the Académie Française. ‘Why should women have a chair in a country where they cannot sit on the throne? Why would you give them a pen when you refuse them a sceptre?’ She continued, six months later, ‘Today we declare that the first duty of a woman is to be beautiful.’45

  Marie d’Agoult, who, tired of travelling with Liszt, returned to Paris in 1839 to develop her salon, wrote an Essay on Liberty under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern. In this she rejected arguments that women were inferior, incapable, even perverse, which condemned them, according to their social class, to be either ‘a useful servant or a gracious slave’. Her answer, however, was not legal or political emancipation. Society was not ready for this. ‘Flirtation’, she asserted, ‘is the revenge of weakness.’ In her opinion women achieved ascendancy not by demanding degrees and jobs but by using their femininity to the best advantage. ‘In all civilized societies,’ she wrote, ‘flirtation has become a science as profound as the science of politics. Since society leaves them outside real action, they have easily learned to make use of a man’s desires to make him, at least temporarily, her slave.’46

  Other women under the July Monarchy were more assertive in their demand for rights. Most significant were the mainly lower-class women who were involved in the Saint-Simonian movement of utopian socialism. Désirée Véret, a seamstress, Jeanne Deroin, a shirtmaker, who was studying to take her teacher’s certificate, embroiderer Suzanne Voilquin, married to a man who turned out to be syphilitic, and Eugénie Niboyet, a mother and writer from an intellectual Protestant family, were attracted by the Saint-Simonian project to reorganize society on the basis of dividing labour according to aptitude and talent and remuneration according to work. In practice this meant the emancipation of workers, ‘the most numerous and poorest class’, and of women. However the movement’s charismatic leader, Prosper Enfantin, saw the emancipation of women coming essentially from free love and set up a commune at Ménilmontant on the outskirts of Paris as cholera raged there in 1832. Politically, he announced, women were still minors and could not take part in the mission: their calling was that of ‘muse and madonna’. The free-love commune resulted in Enfantin being condemned to a year in prison for immorality in August 1832, while his female followers were consternated. ‘Your caresses and kisses have brought me back to life,’ Désirée Véret wrote to him, ‘but you have caused a real anarchy within me, just as it is in society.’47

  The Saint-Simonian women broke away to found their own journal later in 1832, La Femme Libre. The liberty they demanded would come not from free love, they argued, but from the possibility of divorce, greater educational opportunities for women (Jeanne Deroin secured her teacher’s certificate after several attempts) and the opening of professions to women. Characteristically, however, they based their demands for emancipation on their qualities as mothers. ‘Women, rely on your title of mother to reclaim your equality from men,’ wrote Suzanne Voilquin in 1834. ‘Motherhood is our most beautiful quality.’48 Marriage and motherhood, in fact, soon slowed down the campaign. Jeanne Deroin married the bursar of a retirement home in 1832, Désirée Véret went to England in 1833–4 and married Jules Gay, who translated Robert Owen into French. On the other hand Suzanne Voilquin separated from her husband in 1833, went to Egypt in 1834 to seek a spiritual Mother for their cause, and subsequently qualified as a midwife.

  Perhaps the Mother or Female Messiah of whom Enfantin had spoken was, in the short term at least, Flora Tristan. At the age of fifteen she discovered that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Peruvian aristocrat who had died when she was four, and travelled to Peru in order to recover her inheritance. Her uncle fobbed her off with a small allowance, which he stopped after she exposed the imprisonment in Peruvian convents of women abandoned by their lovers in her 1838 Peregrinations of a Pariah. Before that she had worked as a colourist in a lithographic shop, married her employer, had two sons and was pregnant with a daughter when she fled the home. She battled in the courts for control of the children and petitioned the Chamber of Deputies in 1837 for the restoration of divorce; the following year her husband shot and wounded her in the street and was sentenced to sixteen years’ hard labour.

  At this point, like the Saint-Simonians, she decided that the emancipation of women workers must accompany that of workers, another pariah class, and that such women needed to mobilize workers as their allies. In 1843 she launched a Workers’ Union scheme to build workers’ palaces in every town, providing work, education and training for male and female workers and accommodation for old and sick ones. ‘What education, what teaching, what direction, what moral or physical development does the woman of the common people receive?’ she asked. ‘None.’ ‘I demand rights for women because I am convinced that the ills of the world come from this forgetfulness and scorn that until now have been inflicted on the natural and imprescriptible rights of the female,’ she declared, and implored the workers to ‘free the last slaves who still remain in French society’.49 Unfortunately, as she toured the country to rally support, she discovered that the working classes did not live up to her ideal as allies. Compagnonnage was fragmented and deeply sexist, acknowledging only its own mothers in each town. And while the workers of Paris and Lyon had some education, of the weavers of Roanne and ribbon-makers of Saint-Étienne she complained, ‘They all speak patois and wear clogs… They are quite simply peasants from the mountains, with the stupidest expression on their faces.’50

  The qu
estion of the political rights of women was not really posed until the Revolution of 1848 proclaimed universal suffrage, but for men only. On 18 March 1848 the provisional government announced, ‘Dating from this law there are no more proletarians in France. Every Frenchman of mature age has political citizenship. Every citizen is an elector. Every elector is sovereign.’ This provoked an immediate response from Jeanne Deroin and Eugénie Niboyet, who set up a Committee for the Rights of Women and headed a delegation to the mayor of Paris on 22 March to insist that if women were not given the vote there would still be seventeen million proletarians in France.51 Deroin and Niboyet backed up their campaign with a paper, La Voix des Femmes, in which Niboyet couched the claim to be citizens in the duties of motherhood. ‘The mother, natural educator of the child, devoted to her family,’ she wrote, ‘must participate in the common progress by dedicating herself to the Fatherland, to the Republic.’52

  To heighten their profile La Voix des Femmes approached George Sand to run on their behalf as a candidate in the elections to the National Assembly. There was a frosty response. Sand claimed not to know any of the radical women of the clubs and papers and did not want to become ‘the ensign of a feminist coterie’. She did not think the time had come for women to take part in politics; first they had to secure the civil rights that marriage confiscated from them. At the same time, however, by her connections with the republican elite, notably the interior minister Ledru-Rollin, she was anonymously drafting proclamations to the people in the Bulletin de la République. ‘Here I am,’ she boasted to her son, now the mayor of Nohant, ‘already busy like a statesman.’53 Marie d’Agoult did not even use her connections to seek influence, convinced that politics was not for women. In her History of the Revolution of 1848 she dismissed both the ‘mere agitation’ of George Sand and the ‘legion of women of doubtful morals’ who ‘failed to take account of dominant attitudes, clashed head-on with usage and custom instead of trying to persuade minds… rather than advancing step by step, prudently, as opinion came round, they indulged in impolitic gestures, noisily opening clubs which immediately became the target of ridicule… publishing papers that nobody read’.54

  Marie d’Agoult’s reference to opinion might have come from Madame de Staël’s Delphine. There was no point in demanding rights if society was not yet ready for the political woman. Many of the prejudices about the inferior nature and subordinate role of women voiced by Maréchal at the beginning of the century were still current or being reworked by a new cohort of sexists, appalled by the agitation of the viragos of 1848, and it was against these prejudices that women now had to fight. Jenny d’Héricourt, a Protestant from Besançon, who had separated from her husband, been secretary to the Society for the Emancipation of Women in 1848 and trained at the Paris Medical Faculty as a midwife, wrote an article in the Turin journal La Ragione in 1855, denying that ‘nature made men rational and women emotional; it is education and morals that made them thus.’55 She continued her campaign in the in-house journal of a philosophical circle she attended, the Revue Philos-ophique et Religieuse, which was aimed squarely at Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who had famously argued in 1846 that, while the husband’s sphere was production and exchange, that of the wife was saving and consumption: ‘housewife or courtesan, I see no middle way.’56 His marriage in 1849, while in prison, to a working-class girl who bore him three daughters did not change his ideas. He responded in 1858 with his De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, in which he reiterated his position on ‘the physical, intellectual and moral inferiority of woman’. ‘Woman is a receptivity,’ he continued, ‘unproductive by nature, inert, without industry or understanding, without justice or shame, she needs a father, brother, lover, husband, master, a man.’ He went on to attack women who by stepping outside their allotted sphere became men. George Sand, for instance, was ‘no longer even of her sex, she wears men’s clothes and retains of womanhood only that which serves for making love’.57

  This tirade provoked a double response, both from Jenny d’Héricourt and from a young, unhappily married woman who frequented the philosophical circle, Juliette La Messine née Lamber. For two months, she noted, ‘I shut myself in my room at night, alone with my daughter, while my husband was more occupied with one of the servants than me,’ and penned Les Idées anti-Proudhoniennes.58 She rejected the prejudices that women were physically, intellectually or morally inferior to men. She argued that women had a calling outside the home as doctors to women and children and mairesses supervising wet-nurses, crèches, nurseries, schools and charities. More than that, she argued that ‘the civilization of a society is proportional to the role, influence and moral dignity of women in that society’, for the history made by men was nothing but ‘battles, massacres, rivers of blood, oppression, injustice, treachery’.59 This splash led to her becoming the protégée of Marie d’Agoult, to leaving her husband, and to setting up her own salon in 1865. For her part Jenny d’Héricourt counter-attacked with La Femme affranchie in 1860, announcing to Proudhon that ‘I am raising the standard under which your daughters will one day shelter, if they are worthy of the name they bear.’ She argued that the inferiority of women imposed by society in fact ‘undermined our modern civilization’, not least by causing women to abandon the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 that had granted them no rights and had then failed. Marriage, she insisted, was an association of equals and there was no possible objection to women becoming doctors, chemists or mathematicians.60 Still not done, Proudhon published his La Pornocratie ou les femmes des temps modernes in which he saw marriage as ‘the union of strength and beauty’, pronounced that women had smaller brains and that ‘all women who dream of emancipation lose, ipso facto, a healthy soul, a lucid mind and the virginity of the heart’.61

  In practical terms, Marie d’Agoult was correct that the time was not right to demand political rights for women. Her own tactic, and that of Juliette La Messine, was to preside over salons where male political figures met and to seek to influence events through them. During the 1850s the republican opposition to the Second Empire was split between those who refused to take the oath to the regime and therefore could not run for parliament, and those who were prepared to take the oath in order to acquire a parliamentary platform to press for liberal reforms. The star of Marie d’Agoult’s salon was Émile Ollivier, who married her daughter by Liszt, Blandine, in 1857, and therefore leaned more to those who wanted to liberalize the Empire from within; the salon of Juliette La Messine, by contrast, became the haunt of intransigent opponents of the Empire, including a former journalist of Le National, Edmond Adam, whom she married in 1868, and indeed the launch-pad for the career of Gambetta.62 An alternative tactic was to link moderate demands for women’s rights to the freemasonry network. For though freemasons were a men-only movement, individual freemasons sympathized with women’s struggle. Thus Maria Desraismes, who had been left a fortune by her father and decided not to marry in order to retain greater independence, made a political alliance with Léon Richer, a former solicitor’s clerk on the Paris–Orléans railway and a journalist with a column on the Petit Parisien. She was invited to Sunday ‘philosophical conferences’ organized by the Grand Orient when political meetings were authorized in 1868, funded and contributed to the Droit des Femmes paper that Richer launched in 1869 and with him founded the Society for the Amelioration of Women’s Condition, which held a first feminist banquet on 11 July 1870.63 One of their enthusiasts was Julie Daubié, who brought Elizabeth Garrett to Paris to undertake the doctorate she was barred from doing in London and Edinburgh, and who secured a degree herself in 1871.64

  In 1870 the lives of women of the social elite were still dominated by the arranged marriage, although lower down the social scale where property was less of an issue relationships were often freer, if less secure. Divorce was still illegal, separation was a second best, for it did not permit remarriage, and adultery was an inevitable part of the system. Women did more than their fair share of unpaid and
paid work; the burning issue was whether they could acquire secondary and higher education and begin to challenge for the professions. Politically, the demand for emancipation moved from Saint-Simonianism and radical journalism to seeking to influence male politicians through the salons over which society women presided and masonic lodges with which they might ally. Significantly, however, the demand for equality was couched not in terms of individual rights but in terms of the civilizing influence that women could exercise over society as a whole.

  6

  Artistic Genius and Bourgeois Culture

  ROMANTICS, WRITERS AND

  REPUTATIONS

  It was in 1801, with the publication of Atala, recalled Chateaubriand, that ‘the noise I make in this world began. I ceased to be a private person and my public career began.’ The story of a graceful Indian girl, untouched by civilization in the virgin forests of the New World, was quite different from the classical literature of the Consulate and Empire, and critics were unsure whether to categorize it ‘among monstrosities or beauties; was it the Gorgon or Venus?’ It inaugurated the Romantic era, catching the public’s enthusiasm, with the characters from the novel exhibited at the annual Salon of the Academy of Fine Art, reproduced in engravings hung in coaching inns, moulded into wax dolls sold on the quais of Paris, or done up in feathers in the boulevard theatres.1 This public recognition was not only artistic. Along with the impact of the Genius of Christianity the following year, it propelled Chateaubriand towards a diplomatic career, election to the Académie Française in 1811, a peerage in 1815 and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1822. He became the model of literary success and wider public acclaim that was to be the envy of aspiring writers and artists who followed him.