Women's History as French History

Abstract

Review Essays Women's History as French History Michèle Riot-Sarcey. La Démocratie à l'épreuve des femmes: Trois figures critiques du pouvoir 1830-1848. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. ISBN 2-22606791 -4 (pb). De la Liberté des femmes. "Lettres des dames" au Globe (1831-32). Textes recueillis et présentés par Michèle Riot-Sarcey. Paris: côté-femmes, 1992. ISBN 2-907883-50-X. Une Correspondence Saint-Simonienne. Angélique Arnaud et Caroline Simon (1833-1838). Textes recueillis et présentés par Bernadette Louis. Avant propos de Monique Rouillé. Paris: côté-femmes, 1990. ISBN 2-90788318 -6. Clarisse Vigoureux. Parole de Providence. Préface de Jean-Claude Dubos. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1993. ISBN 2-87673-169-X. Karen Offen Michèle Riot-Sarcey's "The Women's ChaUenge to Democracy: Three Figures Criticizing Power 1830-1848" is a tour-de-force; it exemplifies women's history as French history. By combining meticulous detective work in primary published and archival sources with careful attention to chronology, events, and issues of cause and effect, the author chaUenges recent accounts of nineteenth-century French political history by leading male historians including François Furet and Pierre Rosenvallon. Focusing on the intersecting Uves and ideas of three individual women—Jeanne Deroin, Eugénie Niboyet, and Désirée Gay—Riot-Sarcey succeeds brilliantly in placing the "Woman Question," and women as significant players in it, at the very center of the debate over democracy and dtizensJup in France at two key points: during the early years of the July Monarchy and again during the Revolution of 1848. The author, now maître des conférences at the University of Paris VLÕ Õ , argues that historians have not properly addressed the "construction" of women's exclusion from democratic dtizenship in France. She critiques the "history of mentaUties" approach pioneered by the "Annales" school as one that masks the power relations of the sexes. Riot-Sarcey is spedficaUy interested in how "mentaUties" and "representations" are created, in relation to particular contexts, events and with regard to the realities specific women are experiencing, and their diverse responses to situations that confront them. She argues convincingly that notions of representation © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. ι (Spring) 148 Journal of Women's History Spring as such can be subverted by incorporating the biograprdes and observations of individual women. The book is structured in three parts. The first part deals with the period 1831-34, "The Time of Possibilities, the Time of Liberty." Here the author focuses on the debate about dtizenship and primary education following the July Revolution of 1830, which brought a new monarchy and a new set of male political figures to power. Riot-Sarcey convincingly argues that this period was a founding moment in French democracy, one that definitively marked citizenship as a male preserve. All three women whom Riot-Sarcey has chosen to examine were involved with the Saint-Simonian movement, but she argues that to see them only within this context is to miss much about their contribution to the debate about liberty and equality. Their aspirations to liberty were thrashed out within the pages of the Saint-Simonian women's publication , L'Apostolat des femmes, and they aspired convincingly to become what we have come to call the subjects of their own lives, not merely embodiments of "La Femme." The important issue in 1833 was the national law on public instruction , enaded July 28, which mandated the establishment of a network of publicly funded primary schools for boys throughout France. This act generally gets one or two celebratory Unes in most treatments of French history, and only more rarely a note that mentions the omission of schools for girls. What is lacking from these accounts is the fact that the debate on this measure made explicit the links between pubUc education and male citizenship (which had already been forged in 1791). The debate, to which Riot-Sarcey's three women contributed significantly, was not merely "discourse" but embodied a set of power relations that resulted (once again; we know that this had also happened in 1792) in the deUberate exdusion of women from citizenship...