‘La femme du soldat inconnu’

Abstract

On 26 August 1970, in a carefully orchestrated and highly provocative symbolic gesture, a small group of MLF feminists attempted to lay wreaths to the ‘even more unknown’ wife of the Unknown Soldier at the annual commemorative ceremonyheld at the Arc de Triomphe. The wreath-laying came to epitomize radical French feminism in the 1970s; its tongue-in-cheek iconoclasm, shocking for many, served as a recruitment tool for nascent feminists. This new generation of feminists cast the tomb as the ultimate symbol of the hegemony of masculinist culture, as a synecdoche for the oppression, belittling and silencing of women under patriarchy. This chapter explores the extent to which feminism has debated and shaped the inclusion/exclusion of women in French lieux de mémoire(sites of memory) since the 1970s. It considers in particular debates around the recasting of the statue of nineteenth-century feminist Marie Deraismes in 1983; the transferral of Marie Curie’s remains to the Pantheon in 1995; and the construction of the ‘Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir’ in Paris, which opened in 2006, asking if the aims of the original 1970 demonstration have been met, nuanced, compromised or even betrayed in more recent years.