Des hommes et des citoyens: Paternalism and Masculinity on the Republican Right in Interwar France, 1919-1939

Abstract

Des Hommes et des citoyens: Paternalism and Masculinity on the Republican Right in Interwar France, 1919-1939, explores the masculine ideals of France's three main right-of-centre republican parties during the interwar period: the Federation republicaine, the Parti democrate populaire, and the Alliance democratique. These parties desired men to be determined, principled, inflexible, respectable, hard-working, selfless, paternalist, republican and nationalist, and to father as many legitimate children as possible. Moreover, a discourse of paternalism pervaded the republican right's rhetoric and ideology, thereby providing the basis for many of its policies, as well as an obstacle to those, including feminists, who wished to challenge the status quo. This paternalism was consonant with the parties'class position and commingled with a masculine conception of citizenship that underlay the parties'principles and obstructed proponents of women's suffrage.