The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France by Geoff Read

Abstract

political conflicts of the last years of the Second Empire. Merriman then moves briskly but effectively through the debacle of the war,the grinding siege of Paris,the maneuvering in the immediate wake of the armistice, and the growing distance between Thiers’s government in Versailles and the Paris republicans: “With the uprising of March 18, the periphery had arguably conquered the beaux quartiers”(62). Those excluded from the pleasures of the Second Empire indeed became, at least for a time, masters of their own lives. That social revolution was a powerful motivating idea is clear, although Merriman never allows day-to-day economic issues to fall out of view; nor do the Commune’s carnivalesque elements escape him—the font of the Church of SaintEustache “full of tobacco instead of holy-water” (93). Loyalties were in the end not to a political abstraction but to one’s own neighborhood. As the situation became increasingly grim, Communards returned to defend their homes (158). As Versaillais troops executed prisoners, the neighborhood in which one was captured became a major variable in deciding one’s fate. Many personal recollections from the Bloody Week mention the sound of incessant rifle-volleys and the crackle of the mitrailleuse, which according to one government circular was to be used for executing groups of more than ten (246). Merriman tells the story in large measure by weaving together anecdotes drawn from personal narratives. Well-developed portraits of characters, such as Raoul Rigault, Louise Michel, and Archbishop Darboy make the book more accessible and lively. Merriman links the state-sponsored massacre of the Commune to “purify” Paris backward to colonial violence and forward to the twentieth century (240). In the aftermath of the killing,Versaillais desire to leave Communard bodies in the streets as a lesson in the power of the state vied with other concerns, such as making Paris amenable to British tourists eager to see the ruins (246). Here, too, the death of the Commune as much as its life holds lessons for the present. Kansas State University Eric Brandom Read, Geoff. The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8071-5521-9. Pp. 289. $45. Surely I am not the only one who has wondered why it took the French until 1944 to give women the vote, while American and British women were voting in the 1920s. While writing on politically-involved French novelists of the 1930s, I also wondered about the absence of women writers eligible for inclusion in my project. The answer to these questions about gender and politics in the period between the two world wars are carefully researched and explained in Read’s study, whose title aptly sums up gender politics of the time in France, which could accurately be labeled“the republic of men.” Read shows in convincing detail that, despite the attention given to issues like demands for women’s suffrage in the 1920s (these soon calmed down) and the active involvement of women in organizations like the progressively fascisant Croix-de-Feu in the 1920s 292 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 293 and 30s, the political status of women remained unchanged until resolved by Gaullist fiat in April 1944, an act perhaps suggested by a need to bring France in line with its western allies. As Read traces the evolution of ideas on gender throughout the period, he quickly identifies a single ideology shared across the French political spectrum: a commitment to the survival of the“French race,”menaced by the high male death toll of World War I. Such a racialized concept of French identity may now seem odd, given the many differences among those who call themselves Français de souche, but in the 1920s and 30s it was a matter of consensus across the political spectrum, as Read convincingly documents.Women’s specific duties as mothers might be combined with a commitment to build a communist or fascist state, or something politically in between, but male legislators agreed that a woman’s place was firmly in the home. Even Colette, the major woman writer of the era, was quoted by one...