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If this were a complete history of socialist feminism, we would have to devote a great deal of space to the age of the Revolution of 1848–1849, including the years leading immediately up to it. This chapter offers a view of one facet only.
For most of the nineteenth century, the synonym in the popular mind for feminist rebellion and women’s emancipation was the great French novelist who wrote under the pen name George Sand. Her eighty-odd novels, plus some dozens of volumes of autobiography and correspondence, made her the best-known woman writer in the world during her own lifetime. Her open defiance of conventional sex morality, her famed liaisons with famous men, her cigar-smoking and pants-wearing, all are now immortalized; her novels are largely unread. Though her fictional characters are mostly forgotten, she is now herself a Character in the annals of feminist history.
Her feminist reputation, if not her literary standing, is green to this day. On the other hand, in all likelihood you have never heard of Jeanne Deroin.
The difference between these two women, the one world-famous and the other near-buried in oblivion, goes to the heart of a problem in the history of the women’s movement.
The “July Revolution” of 1830, which overthrew the Bourbon monarchy for good and established the “bourgeois monarchy” of Louis Philippe on the throne, acted like a warm rain on the seeds deposited by the Fourierist and Saint-Simonian socialistic movements. In its wake there sprang up not only socialist activities but also a new feminism, that is, a new wave of concern for women’s equal rights. The first years of the “July monarchy” saw the first proliferation of women’s organizations and journals. Then the government banned the organizations in 1834, and the journals declined; finally, there was a revival in 1848, under the stimulus of the great upheaval. Once again, feminism was born and reborn and reborn again, with revolution as its dam.
Like the socialisms from which they sprang, these early feminists were not yet social-revolutionaries. But during the age of Louis Philippe (1830 to 1848) there were good militants like Eugénie Niboyet.
Originally a Lyons teacher, Niboyet became perhaps the first “professional feminist” in the world, devoting her life full-time to the cause. Her appeals were directed to the respectable world dominated by the bourgeoisie, as were those of most of the other socialists of the day. Her journal proposed to “ameliorate the situation of women of all social ranks.” One of Niboyet’s contributors wrote that solidarity among “women of all classes” was necessary to emancipation, but in fact her articles on Women’s Future were mainly directed to the interests of upper-class women. It could hardly be otherwise in non-revolutionary times, before the lower classes were “upheaved.”
“Emancipation” was summarized as access to all careers, so as to permit women “to become truly the companions of the superior man, scientist, artist or magistrate.” It was naturally the feminism of the bourgeois “career woman,” which was long to be so prominent in the women’s movement – even though these women mostly considered themselves to be socialists (a vague term then as now) and regarded themselves as sympathizing soulfully with the lot of the working classes.
During this period there was an outright, or self-proclaimed, organ of bourgeois feminism established in France, lasting from 1836 to 1838. It was quite class-conscious, too. The Gazette des Femmes systematically proposed equal social and political rights for women of the privileged classes only, within the framework of the oligarchic status quo embodied in the Charter of 1830. It was (for example) uninterested in the issue of workingwomen’s wages, but it conducted businesslike propaganda for the admission of women to the Bourse and other such career opportunities. Its editors begged the king to declare himself not only Roi des Français (the current formula) but also Roi des Françaises.
As the impulsion given by the 1830 revolution languished, the new bourgeois monarchy quashed the women’s clubs that had arisen. Feminism faded for a while, as normalcy vegetated. From 1832 on, George Sand published one best-seller after another around a single theme – a theme which had been one of those that the feminists had begun to explore. This theme was women’s right to free choice and free action in love, particularly in the marriage relation, together with the need to reform the marriage institution in the direction of equality. From the grocer’s wife to the baronne, from the modiste to the bourgeois madame and the marquise, women read these books and wept over Lelia and her sisters; and so did many a man, too.
Then came the February Revolution of 1848, and again – not out of the emancipated women of the upper classes but out of the impulsion of the revolutionary upsurge in the lower strata of society – a new New Feminism broke out. The outward sign was the unprecedented proliferation of women’s clubs, women’s journals, women’s meetings, women’s demonstrations, and women’s demands. This feminist movement was virtually entirely socialist in orientation. Furthermore, its active and militant ranks consciously oriented toward building a movement of and for workingwomen. While Niboyet remained an active figure, the leading role in this phase passed to Jeanne Deroin, whom we will shortly meet close-up.
It is this movement that presently confronted George Sand.
The new feminist journals, often with interlocking writers and editors, were especially concerned with workingwomen’s issues like laundresses’ wages, unemployment, participation in management of the National Workshops, day care for the children of woman workers. But they were not narrowly confined by this orientation; they were all-sided. They also agitated for complete social and political equality – for all women; for women’s suffrage; for the right to divorce; for the education of women; for support to the democratic struggles going on in other countries. The range and democratic fervor of these socialist feminists was very great. There was no bourgeois-feminist wing to speak of.
Socialism and feminism went together in the general movement also. Virtually all of the various socialist journals, with one exception, were profeminist. (The exception was Proudhon’s, as we will see in the next chapter.) To be sure, the socialist tendencies, under the leadership of men, were often more cautious and even more lukewarm in their support to the women’s cause than the women were; but these were gradations in support. On the other hand, outside the socialist ranks there does not seem to have been any paper that was profeminist, even among the radical bourgeois democrats of La Réforme or La Liberté.
The women’s clubs that sprang up were in good part offshoots of the journals. Of the over 300 revolutionary clubs that were launched in Paris in March, few were open to women. The exceptions were the socialistic clubs, like the central Blanquist club; the left-Jacobin club, Club de la Montagne, was a mixed (male and female) enterprise; Cabet, who headed an important socialist group (which called itself “communist”), was hospitable to propaganda for women’s rights.
But to build independent influence the women had to organize themselves. Of the several women’s societies formed in the course of a couple of months, the most important stemmed from the main feminist journal La Voix des Femmes, edited by Niboyet. Its best successor was headed by Jeanne Deroin, with Niboyet’s collaboration. A Club des Femmes was formed as a sort of propaganda forum; it was eventually wrecked by well-dressed (male) hooligans. A Union of Workingwomen was attempted. All this suggests briefly the scope of the activities that went into this movement, loosely held together under the impulsion of a limited number of socialist women activists.
There was another current in this turbulence: the so-called Vésuviennes. It was a (male) crackpot named Borme who first proposed this “regiment of women” between the ages of 15 and 30; but is unclear what he actually organized, if anything. There was at least one band of women which defiantly adopted this much-publicized name for a sort of barracks-style community living group. Or perhaps the Vésuviennes group was just another one of the workingwomen’s organizations that sprang up.
It is not clear if it was “Vesuvians” who published a much-quoted anthem in a feminist satirical journal called La République des Femmes. This anthem had the distinction of telling the anti-feminist world that the new women’s movement was just what the male chauvinists always said it was: a “war on men” by absurd cranks. Modeled after the Bonapartist battle hymn, the anthem made explicit one of the traditional anti-feminist stereotypes: the feminist woman is a castrator. It declared for the supremacy of women over “the bearded sex,” and sang: ‘“Let us make war on the beard, / Cut off the beard, cut off everything.”
All this is worth mentioning only to explain that it was the semi-mythical Vesuvians and castrator-crackpots who were inflated by the general press into the very image of feminism and women’s emancipation. To be sure, this proves that the yellow press has not changed in a century and a half; but we must remind that the crackpot stereotype had received a strong impulse from the antics of the Saint-Simonian group. In any case, “public opinion” (such as it was) was under the pressure of this stereotype, transmitted through a variety of popular channels: the journalistic pundits, the feuilletonists, the satirical caricaturists (led by the great Daumier), the boulevard wits and the political half-wits. None of these had to take up Jeanne Deroin’s unanswerable argumentation or Niboyet’s gentler expositions as long as they could think up endless drolleries about eccentrics and oddballs, existent or non-existent.
This has to be understood to appreciate the task that faced a woman like Jeanne Deroin, even vis-à-vis a lady like George Sand.
George Sand considered herself a socialist. She was very class-conscious, though her class was not that of the workers; she was exceedingly proud of her aristocratic descent from “kings of France.” Independently wealthy through her writings, she lived on her estate at Nohant as the Lady Bountiful.
Her heart sympathized with the oppressed and downtrodden. Introduced to socialistic ideas especially by Saint-Simonian literature and Pierre Leroux, she eventually discovered the little world of working-class (artisan) poets and writers. She helped them publish; she supported them with her own articles and also with money. In 1840 she wrote a novel about artisan life, which has been called the first novel with a worker as hero (an artisanal journeyman, not a modern wage-worker). She even began to develop something like a theory of literature which might be called, in up-dated terms, a theory of “proletarian” literature as the destined successor to bourgeois literature. A series of “social” novels with a more or less socialistic message followed.
Nor did she confine herself to fiction. In collaboration with Leroux, she helped set up the Revue Indépendante as a forum for most of the socialisms and communisms of the day; she herself wrote articles on equality, socialist politics, and the future of Humanity. In 1848 she – like Pierre Leroux and other quite mild socialists – even called herself by the relatively new label “communist,” which was especially popular among the workers. She explained that communism was nothing more than the abolition of extreme inequalities in wealth.
When the February Revolution broke out in 1848, she was transported with joy: “Vive la République!” She flew to Paris, where her friends were now in power: the politician-poet Lamartine, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, and the rest. She put her pen at the service of the new republic, with a series of propaganda Letters, published during March; she wrote articles for the government’s official Bulletin de la République. As a close daily collaborator with the new governmental leaders, she became almost the equivalent of propaganda minister without portfolio – for a couple of months.
George Sand’s life had been shaped by constant conflict with the status quo. But now, faced by social upheaval, she latched onto a different sort of revolutionary recipe: now there must be no conflict, as everyone united behind her republican friends in single-hearted harmony without dissensions or social struggles. The working classes had made the revolution, as everyone knew; now they must retire from the stage and leave the power where it belonged, to the new rulers.
She kept writing about this because she knew, from her working-class connections (which were much better than Lamartine’s) that the Lower Orders were discontented with the empty bag the republic was handing them. Her March Letters appealed eloquently, and in excellent prose, for the Union of All Classes:
Fraternal unity will destroy all the false distinctions and will strike the very word class out of the books of the new humanity ...
It is a question of making the people understand the greatness of their mission, to enlighten the middle class, to reassure the rich.
Her Letter to the Middle Class did indeed seek to enlighten that class, even if it made no contribution to striking the very word class off the books:
The people in power ... are disposed to grant all their power to the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie will not abuse it ... The people will be just, tranquil, wise and good, while the middle class will show them an example ...
Her Letter to the Rich did indeed seek to reassure them. She explained that the “specter” they called communism was really only “true Christianity” and “a threat neither to the Bourse nor to anyone’s life ...” No one can deny that she had a workable formula for class harmony: the tranquilized people will hand over “all their power” to the bourgeoisie, and the enlightened bourgeoisie will refrain from grinding them down too harshly. No threat to the Bourse, this point of view, as she said.
She temporarily became a serious political activist. “Here I am, busy as a statesman,” she wrote her son. With Leroux as associate, she founded a weekly La Cause du Peuple which expounded the need for gradual social reform by slow increments, without violent conflicts, to do away with scandalously big fortunes and other injustices. But as the euphoria of February–March faded under the bleaker skies of April, she began to discover that none of the social forces in action wanted to behave according to her plot line.
To her credit, she discerned quite quickly that the new bourgeois rulers of government and society had little intention of giving an inch to the pressing needs of the working people, despite all the people pullulating in the councils of government who considered themselves socialists. In a flare-up of angry despair that set her apart from many of her friends, she even wrote in one of the Bulletins de la République about “breaking the resistance” to the republic, and hinted about a new rising against the growing reaction. That was a momentary reaction. When the first elections to the Assembly failed to give a majority to the good Republicans, she packed up paper and pen and retired to her country estate at Nohant.
Let no one think she was thus behaving like a “weak woman.” History has its antidote for this kind of sex-stereotype thinking: who wants to see the “weak woman” stereotype acted out need only look at the top of the government, Alphonse de Lamartine. But George Sand, product of a certain kind of struggle, could not face struggles outside of one aspect of the sex struggle. She fled the capital in May. But the workingpeople, whom she knew were being squeezed more and more by the new masters, had no country estates to retire to. In June the looming insurrection broke out in Paris; and her Republican friends massacred the workers of Paris by the tens of thousands, in the streets and even after the fighting was over. She was overcome “by such horror on learning the dire news about June that I was sick and like an imbecile for many days.”
Neither the sickness nor the imbecility prevented her from making peace with the regime that came to power first over the slaughter of the Paris working class, and then on the subsequent destruction of the movement of her Republican friends, itself. Six months after the June Days, she was not disturbed when Louis Bonaparte won the presidency. (After all, well before 1848 she had complimented this pretender on his social-demagogic book L’Extinction du Paupérisme in spite of her own socialist friends’ distrust of the already well-known political adventurer.) When Bonaparte’s coup d’état smashed the remnants of the republic, she did not react with hostility.
It took Bonaparte’s systematic arrests and persecutions of her political friends to cool her off; and even then she did not emulate the moderately liberal Victor Hugo, who had gone into conscientious exile in order to speak his mind. Ignoring the pleas of her friends who told her she was compromising and dishonoring herself, she established a relationship with the despotism which is well-known to the history of intellectuals: she was allowed to beg off a jail sentence for an individual now and then in exchange for acting as an intellectual fig leaf for the Second Empire. By 1860 she was lamenting (privately) that “the coup d’état, which, in the hands of a truly logical man” could have led to progress, had instead only led to turbulent weakness and corruption. That is: the trouble with this Bonapartist despotism was that it was so illogical as to refrain from Saving Humanity ...
On the other hand, when the Paris Commune of 1871 was fighting for its life against the troops of the Thiers variety of Republicans, she wrote in her journal that it was all “deplorable and incomprehensible ... Paris is mad ... horrible adventure ...” One of the Commune’s crimes was singled out for specific mention: “They have exacted a million from the Bank [of France], 500,000 francs from Rothschild.” Horrors! (In point of fact, the Commune left the Bank of France untouched, but this is not to its credit.)
On June 5, when the victorious government was engaged in killing, j ailing and deporting hundreds of thousands of French men and women, she wrote in her journal: “The executions continue on course. It is justice and a necessity; but what happens to civilization ...” One detects the mark of the sensitive mind: Butcher them, yes, for they have presumed; but don’t feel happy about it ...
In short, George Sand was a good liberal.
Let us now return to the month of April 1848, when George Sand was still the influential woman par excellence in the high councils of the republic. The active movement of the new feminists was still important. The women activists of this movement were bound to look for some help from the very Symbol of Emancipated Womanhood herself, the famous writer who was spending her lunchtimes advising Lamartine on what to do.
To be sure, so far George Sand had done nothing to encourage the feminists. In fact, just then she published an article in No. 12 of the Bulletins – unsigned as usual – flatly condemning the movement for women’s rights, in particular the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists. “Lately, several women impelled by a sect spirit have raised their voices.” she wrote rather snidely.
Her method here was to give “radical” reasons for this hostility to radical feminism: “Granting that society would gain much by admitting some able members of the sex to the conduct of public affairs, the mass of poor women, deprived of education, would gain nothing.” Thus she seemed to sneer at bourgeois feminism, because of its class limitation – how advanced! But it was a purely demagogic ploy, even apart from the fact that the actual women’s movement did raise good demands for workingwomen. Did she, George Sand, then propose something in the interests of poor women? No: for them she had nothing. It was intellectually dishonest.
How, asked George Sand, could women hope to be “free” since men are not free? This argument too had a “radical” aura. She had another ploy. The important thing, she argued, was to “abolish the lack of education, the neglectfulness, depravity and misery which weigh on women in general even more than on men ...” Niboyet, not knowing the article was by George Sand, protested its anti-feminist line in a letter to Ledru-Rollin: it “gives us an appearance of absurdity which is far from true,” she said.
Sand’s demagogic-radical approach was not original with her; as we will see, even the phobic anti-feminist Proudhon took a similar tack in his journal, especially when he was hypocritically concealing his real views. What this approach boiled down to, whether worded leftishly or rightishly, was the idea that women must not get political or social rights until all other political-social issues had been solved (by men, naturally). Women’s rights were wiped off the agenda. There was a loophole: in any case, such rights could be realistically considered only for “educated” women (which meant bourgeois women). George Sand’s own journal La Cause du Peuple was filled with pleas for all sorts of equality, but there was not a word devoted to one kind, the equality of the sexes.
We know all of this in hindsight. But the women militants thought they had good reason to turn to George Sand with hope, when in April 1848 Eugénie Niboyet took up plans for the coming Assembly elections, at the Society of the Voix des Femmes.
The women decided to support a number of the socialist and radical republican candidates in the elections, including even some known anti-feminists like Proudhon. But Niboyet and other leaders wanted to establish a precedent and break a new path for the republic: by running a woman for election. Niboyet proposed that the name of George Sand be put on the electoral lists, and that the various “Democratic and Socialist Committees” (electoral committees) be persuaded to support her.
The appeal for George Sand’s candidacy was published in La Voix des Femmes on April 6. Essentially it said that she would be one woman who would be acceptable to men because of her genius. The intent was to run a practical and realistic, down-to-earth propaganda campaign, to put George Sand’s fame to use as the standard-bearer of women’s rights.
We who know that George Sand was the author of the anonymous antifeminist article in the Bulletin will not be surprised to learn that she refused to run. But she did not merely refuse. The Symbol of Emancipated Women took the opportunity to kick the feminist women in the teeth, and then knife them with as many thrusts as she could manage.
To begin with, to show her mighty disdain she refused to direct her reply to La Voix des Femmes. Instead, she sent her open letter of rejection to a number of other papers, including those of the bitter anti-feminists.
Secondly, she did not merely reject the honor of running as a candidate. In the haughty tone of a grande dame whose skirt has been tugged by a tiresome beggar, she proclaimed her hostility to the feminist movement that had issued the proposal.
Thirdly, she made clear that she also rejected the view, underlying the projected campaign, that women should have the right to participate in political life. (Outside of herself, naturally.)
Fourthly, as if seeking a reason not only to repudiate but also to discredit these importunate upstarts, she seized a thin pretext to charge that La Voix des Femmes had used her name dishonestly. This was the least important part of her reply, but the most despicable. She charged that “her” initials had been signed to some articles in order to imply her collaboration; but G.S. were the initials of a regular contributor of the journal, Gabrielle Soumet, whose name was well known to its readers and not unknown in literary circles.
The historian Marguerite Thibert gives an accurate summary of her open letter.
It was a letter written in a tone of insolent arrogance, in which she declared that she would not let people believe by her silence that she adhered to the principles which this journal tried to represent; she had not, she said, any relation “with the ladies who form clubs and put out periodicals,” and she was not acquainted with a “single one of them”; she refused “to serve as a banner for a feminine coterie” ...
Eugénie Niboyet replied, in a dignified and moderate rejoinder, that George Sand’s reaction was regrettable but would not stop the movement: “The Republic has not abolished the privileges of talent, but it has limited them by imposing duties on them.”
A year later, the Democratic and Socialist Electoral Committee moved to put George Sand’s name on the ballot, and she sent a letter again condemning political rights for women. This time it was not a women’s group importuning her, and her tone was less insulting; but the anti-feminist content was worse. There was even a repeated invocation of women’s domestic duties as a bar to rights. The apostle of emancipated love now made an appeal to “a deep feeling for the sacredness of marriage, conjugal fidelity, and the future of the family” which, in this context, might have made Lélia and Indiana puke. Women should participate in political life “some day” ... “But is this day near? No, I do not believe so.” Society must be transformed “radically” before women’s position can be changed. “Under present-day conditions, women are incapable of fulfilling political functions.” Women may rightly be doctors and such, “for public morals and decency seem to demand that girls and young women should not be questioned, examined or touched by men.” In fact, only one women’s issue was on the agenda: women’s civil rights in marriage, abolition of the wife’s legal subordination to the husband. That is all.
The picture is a little grotesque and more than a little illuminating. Behold this sensitive writer, whose pages trembled with a fine sensibility to the soulful nuances of the human heart and woman’s lot, who thought of herself as a champion of universal justice, human equality and international emancipation – and who in actuality could not respond to any interest of women other than the interests established by the needs of her own social class and by the thinking that emanated from her own social situation.
This episode was not a momentary aberration for George Sand. It was the revolutionary ferment that had brought out in public the truth about the nature of her emancipation.
Some years before, when Saint-Simonian women had congratulated her on having helped the cause of women’s liberation with her novels, she had in effect privately repudiated the praise: she had written an admirer that she was merely writing literature and had no personal views on the subject, even adding as a further rebuff that “women still have nothing to say, it seems to me.”
In 1844, when Flora Tristan died, the outpouring of grief from workers’ circles and the leftist intelligentsia was quite unprecedented. A subscription was launched for a grave memorial. No other woman should have touched George Sand’s heart as intimately, for, besides being a fellow socialist, Tristan had likewise revolted spiritedly against a galling marriage and spoken out of her experience for women’s freedom from marital oppression. The mildly pink novelist Eugène Sue was one of the first to respond to the memorial fund. And George Sand?
George Sand wrote coldly that Flora Tristan had neglected her daughter Aline, who was “as tender and good as her mother was imperious and irascible,” and that one should concern oneself with ensuring a future for the daughter rather than “raise a monument to her mother, who has never been sympathique to me, in spite of her courage and conviction; there was too much vanity in her.” This letter is simply ignoble.
The historian Marguerite Thibert is right in believing that George Sand’s weakness was in considering herself “a brilliant exception to her sex,” and believing “that the bold morality underlying her novels’ plots was a morality for the masters, to which the vulgar herd had no right.” Her summary of Sand’s relation to the woman question is stern but just:
George Sand’s feminism stops with the question of woman’s inequality in marriage and above all of her amatory freedom. She is not concerned with the material difficulties into which women are driven by their political and social inequality. This woman writer, who called herself a socialist, is blind to the afflictions specially besetting the women of the people, or to the precarious economic position of the workingwomen making inadequate wages and driven by poverty to moral degradation. It is always for herself that she pleads, or for those who resemble her like sisters, for the superior woman ...
She was “not really a feminist,” says Thibert, but this is a matter of terminology. George Sand was a kind of feminist, as Thibert’s first sentence (above) states. Hers was the kind of feminism that was class-limited, class-bound, and class-bounded; but we have already seen other examples, like Mary Wollstonecraft’s bourgeois feminism.
George Sand’s sympathy, Thibert writes, “could not extend to all women.” But history – in particular the present history – shows that the only feminism that extends down to embrace all classes of women is the feminism that starts with the interests of the lowest classes. In that sense, working-class feminism is that type of class movement which is alone capable of embracing all women.
The campaign that George Sand had refused to undertake, the first electoral campaign in which a woman’s movement ran a woman candidate in spite of the law’s discrimination, was carried out a year later by Jeanne Deroin.
The historical facts give the lie to the attack which had been leveled in 1848 against the women’s movement by the Superior Woman’s railings, that is, by George Sand’s invective. “In vain will they assemble in clubs,” the novelist had scolded, “in vain will they engage in polemics, if the very expression of their discontent proves that they are incapable of managing their affairs well and governing their actions well.” This complaint by the writer simply reflected the vicious slanders against the militant women that abounded in the general press. A similar slander, by the way, came from the second-ranking woman novelist of the day, “Daniel Stern” (Comtesse d’Agoult), also an enthusiastic republican, who wrote a history of the 1848 revolution.
In truth, in terms of organization, this historic enterprise of the women’s movement was better planned and executed, against heavy odds, than anything the general movement was able to do. It was the common pattern: to be taken seriously, the women’s movement had to be twice as competent as the men’s.
The feminists’ plans began to take shape in November 1848 with the holding of a very successful “banquet” (the common form of political organizing meeting) attended by about 1,200. It was overwhelmingly socialist in its composition, sponsored by the “Democratic and Socialist Women,” with Pierre Leroux and Barbès on the presiding committee. Another banquet, with several hundreds participating, was held on Christmas Day.
But by 1849 the revolution was on the downslide and reactionary clouds were gathering. In February the Démoc-Soc movement was no longer including women in its political affairs. The Démoc-Soc women met again at Easter time to consider the situation.
It must be understood that by this time the feminist journals were sporadic and chancy in their issuance, for lack of financial support; the club movement that paralleled the women’s journals was getting to the point where it would soon begin to peter out. Indeed, the new electoral movement was one of the last forms of feminist activism in this period of the revolution’s downturn. It was a difficult situation to operate in.
Nevertheless, in April, Jeanne Deroin decided to make the run in the Assembly elections, including the waging of a propaganda campaign to gain the support of the Démoc-Soc electoral committees behind the women’s candidate.
There is little information on the life of Jeanne Deroin before 1848, when she first became prominent. Born in Paris on the last day of 1805, she worked mainly as a teacher, though she was herself self-taught. After the 1830 revolution she became acquainted with Saint-Simonianism, especially through Olinde Rodrigues (who, now a progressive-minded banker, became one of the largest contributors to La Voix des Femmes in 1848). Deroin studied the ideas of all the socialistic schools and sects of the time, including the tendency of Fourier and especially that of Cabet, as well as their forebears Mably and Morelly. In fact, she was outstanding in the movement for her “great socialist erudition” (in the words of the government organ reporting her subsequent trial). But she probably never became a member of any group, and the socialist views she propagandized for were always an eclectic combination. In short, she learned what could be learned from all, but never tied herself to a sect.
Her kind of socialism was characterized by three things. (1) Her socialism was essentially reformist, and became increasingly pacifistic, like most of the socialisms of 1848, but it was also firm and militant. (2) Her socialism was working-class in content and orientation, to a far greater extent than the sects that had helped to educate her. Her aim was the organization of workingwomen. (3) Her approach to socialism was modern and down-to-earth, entirely devoid of the Saint-Simonian bizarrerie. She had little in common in style with the Saint-Simonian female disciples who had attended “Father” Enfantin’s entourage as second-class priestesses. Of the latter, for example, Susanne Voilquin went off to Egypt on a mystic wild-goose chase, and Clair Demar committed suicide; but Jeanne Deroin organized.
What helped to make her an outstanding woman leader in the 1848 1849 upheaval was her combination of unusual organizational ability with sheer guts. It is too often true, in the history of the socialist and radical movements, that a high degree of hardness directed against the status quo is achieved only by figures that are personally alienated and eccentric, as if the choice were between philistines and crackpots – especially when socialism is doing badly. Jeanne Deroin escaped those alternatives. She was of the straight working-class militant type, serious and dedicated, practical and rational in the best sense of those abused words. Her personal life was a token: as Mme. Desroches she had a successful and stable marriage. As a mother of three, she argued energetically that women’s rights were entirely compatible with women’s special tasks. She had met her husband at a socialist meeting, and we know little about him except that he gave her complete support without himself taking a prominent part.
On the outbreak of the revolution in 1848, she gave up the little school she had established for poor children, and plunged into the whirl of revolutionary activity. It was at this point that she resumed the use of her maiden name. At her trial she gave two reasons: to avoid involving her husband in direct responsibility for her own political activity, and to protest against the institution of marriage as “a state of servitude for women.” Unlike the then notorious cases of Flora Tristan and George Sand, she proclaimed that she had no personal complaint, that she herself was a lucky exception. “As the happy wife of a man endowed with a noble heart and a lofty mind,” she said, “we have obtained reciprocity in marriage; no personal reason motivates us ...” It was for her sisters that she fought. She therefore represents the exact opposite of George Sand, who could feel only the wrongs that affected her own personal interests. History slyly gives us a confrontation between these two women as a case in point.
Jeanne Deroin came forward from the first day of the revolution as a militant feminist as well as a socialist propagandist. Obviously she had worked out her views on the women’s movement long before this. She entered the movement along with a group of socialist women who had already been involved in activity; the names of Pauline Roland and Desirée Gay deserve to be remembered among her comrades. Some men’s names also appear among the aiders and abettors, such as the aforementioned Olinde Rodrigues and an obscure Dr. Malatier. It is clear that the women’s movement got help from time to time from socialist men active in their own movement.
Eugénie Niboyet has been mentioned as the women’s leader whose seniority and experience had put her in the van of the movement even before the revolution. Jeanne Deroin first appeared in her Voix des Femmes with an appeal To French Citizens for women’s equal rights:
Women must be called on to take part in the great work of social regeneration that looms ahead ... Do you want them to be the helots of your new Republic? No, citizens, you don’t want that; the mothers of your sons cannot be slaves.
In another article she forcefully repudiated the common tie-up of women’s rights and political-social equality with the Saint-Simonian image of “free love.” In April she became the champion of the feminist position in a series of press debates and polemics with opponents, especially with the bourgeois-republican La Liberté and with Proudhon’s Le Peuple. She became the outstanding educator of the movement, writing a course on social rights for women. When La Voix des Femmes foundered as a daily, it was Deroin that put together its replacement, the weekly L’Opinion des Femmes (initially called La Politique des Femmes). Because of the usual difficulties, she was unable to inaugurate regular publication until the beginning of 1849.
The election of 1849 was due in April. This time the activist core of the socialist feminists did not look for a literary “star” to carry the banner. Jeanne Deroin did it herself.
Jeanne Deroin had no misconceptions about the purpose and place of her electoral campaign. It was simply a useful framework for socialist feminist propaganda and education, a way of organizing.
The immediate audience, to begin with, was not the general public but the broad movement itself; for her formal objective was to be placed on the ballot by one of the Dém-Soc committees, and to mobilize support in the Republican clubs. The very first task was to get the floor at these clubs.
Having gotten the floor, she told the committees: You may not see fit to place my name on a list – all right – but do not omit my name simply because of my sex.
The main thrust of her campaign in these circles was the integration of feminism and socialism. That is, her central proposition was that all socialists had to be for women’s rights – for the good of society, for the good of socialism. She explained that she was going through it all “not only in the interests of women but in the interests of all of society, and in the name of a principle involving the abolition of all privileges” – sex privileges included. The placard announcing her candidacy offered this challenge:
I present myself for your votes out of devotion to the observance of a great principle, the civil and political equality of the two sexes ... A legislative assembly composed entirely of men is as incompetent to make laws governing a society composed of men and women as an assembly of the privileged would be to discuss the interests of the workers, or as an assembly of capitalists would be to uphold the honor of the country.
She launched her campaign on April 10, and during the subsequent weeks covered one center after another. A biographical memoir by a contemporary, Adrien Ranvier, summarizes as follows:
Her courage seems redoubled; nothing fazes her. At the clubs, at meetings, at all gatherings, republican or reactionary, she presents herself to defend her program. She strongly demands the rights of women as well as of the workers, for, as we have already seen, she does not separate them in her own thinking. She takes the floor and develops the thesis that the Republican saga will be a lie as long as woman is a slave. Women, says Jeanne Deroin, have the right to the complete development of their moral and intellectual faculties as much as men; and through such development they can, like men, become useful defenders of those who labor and those who suffer.
That is her only ambition ...
The responses to her whirlwind campaign, of course, were as varied as the political tendencies that existed. The surprising thing was how much she accomplished, at a time when the surrounding climate of opinion permeating the bourgeois and conservative press was one of hostile jeering rather than serious refutation.
If she was refused the floor as a candidate, she tried to get it under some other head. If not that, she might get some licks in by posing questions. If the club administration shut her up altogether, she was quite prepared to make trouble; some stormy sessions resulted. She was especially insistent when appearing before clubs that called themselves socialist.
For example, at one club the chairman had supported her right to speak but the membership were more hostile. Deroin took the floor and berated them:
We are amazed to see men, who call themselves men of the future and declare themselves to be socialist-democrats, who reject the logical consequences and application of the principles that are at the foundation of socialism; who shrink from practising it, and who do not have the courage of their convictions, who demand the abolition of privileges and yet want to keep the one that they share with the privileged ...
In this discussion, some speakers agreed with her; one argued against sex equality; another said he agreed but only for the future; and so on. Deroin’s success consisted in this, that such a discussion finally took place at all. It could happen only in the socialist club movement.
At one of the electoral committees she was twice refused the floor; then she returned on a third day and this time succeeded in speaking. Moreover, she compelled her audiences to listen to her with attention and interest; these men were having their consciousness raised for the first time. As happened not infrequently, this committee finally decided not to put her name down, but only on constitutional grounds, not through lack of sympathy (they said).
On April 20 Jeanne Deroin brought off her most notable success. It was in the Saint-Antoine district, in the heart of working-class Paris. She addressed an audience of artisanal workers such as had been the core of the June uprising a few months before. After she presented her case, sympathy was general; even her leading opponent argued only on constitutional grounds. A near-unanimous vote was registered here in favor of women’s rights and women’s emancipation. The chairman, J.L. Delbrouck, informed her that her candidacy was being proposed by about fifteen delegates, and George Sand’s candidacy by about forty. (This was what occasioned Sand’s aforementioned letter of rejection.) Delbrouck himself, by the way, was shortly to become Jeanne Deroin’s co-worker in socialist activity and co-defendant before the court.
Let us pause for a moment on the class pattern, which must remind us that it was the militant sansculotte sections of Paris that were most hospitable to women’s political participation in 1793. The reason here was the same: these workingmen of 1849 had just gone through a revolutionary struggle in which women fought alongside men, or in front of them. The advance in consciousness of sex equality stemmed not from ideology but from social struggle. It is often difficult for intellectuals to understand this.
Thus April 1849 saw not only the first electoral campaign by a woman, but the first intensive propaganda campaign of any kind for a feminist program of women’s rights. No one can calculate how many minds were moved for the first time, not only men (to whom this campaign was necessarily directed in the first instance) but also women, who were spurred to thought and rebellion by this example of logic and courage joined with knowledge.
William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, a quarter century before, had first integrated socialism and feminism on the terrain of political thought. In this campaign of 1849, socialism and feminism were first integrated in a practical movement – under the leadership of a great socialist woman.
The journal L’Opinion des Femmes folded in August 1849 when the increasingly reactionary government demanded an exorbitant security deposit which it could not pay. This crackdown, however, was not motivated in the first place by the paper’s feminist propaganda. It came in response to Deroin’s publication of her proposal for an all-inclusive federation of workers’ associations. It must be borne in mind that Jeanne Deroin was not merely a feminist.
We cannot do justice here to this aspect of her activity as a leader of workingpeople, even though labor history has never given her adequate recognition for an important pioneer effort. Even before 1848, and especially after the revolution of 1830, large numbers of workers’ organizations had been formed in all trades. (For example, Pauline Roland was one of the leaders in forming the teachers’ association, with Jeanne Deroin’s help.) In most cases the aim of these associations was mutual insurance and self-help, perhaps with cooperative production in mind: the modern trade-union aspect was in the background. Most of them also adopted programs in favor of socialism and democracy in one form or another. They intended not so much to organize for better conditions in a struggle against employers as to construct some alternative to the system of employment. In 1843, as we have seen, Flora Tristan’s plan for a “Workers’ Union” had already brought up the idea of linking (not merging) the existing workers’ organizations into an umbrella association, a sort of labor federation.
What Jeanne Deroin did, in the August issue of her paper, was to take this sort of idea and flesh it out with practical organizational detail.
Her plan for a Union of Workers’ Associations was especially noteworthy for the highly democratic structure that was proposed. With the important support of Delbrouck, who became one of the prime movers, a large number of associations accepted the idea quickly. A series of delegated meetings took place through August and September, which modified and recast the original plan; and at the beginning of October, delegates from 104 associations voted unanimously to set it up.
One of the marvels of what passes for socialist history is the fact that Flora Tristan’s rather vague adumbration of the idea is often referred to, yet the remarkable fact that Jeanne Deroin actually put it together and made it a reality, if only briefly, is virtually impossible to find even in multi-tome works on socialist and labor history, in English or French. Conventional history is mainly interested in what Leading Thinkers thought, not in what workers did, or how the movement moved.
Jeanne Deroin was a doer and a mover. The Union she helped build was a remarkable accomplishment, doubly so because she was a woman.
The fate of this movement was sealed by the steady swing of the French state toward despotism. The Union was intended to be entirely legal, not conspiratorial. Since the law outlawed political groups, it presented itself as an economic (“commercial”) organization. But the government had no compunction about smashing it on any grounds; there were stoolpigeons handy to swear that the Union was spreading socialist writings.
On May 29, 1850, at 9:45 p.m., a police commissioner with a small army of eighty agents descended on the Union’s headquarters, where delegates were meeting. They found Auguste Billot in the chair, flanked by a presiding committee of three, including Jeanne Deroin. They arrested all present, including nine women. Thirty workers were held for trial, three of them women: Deroin, Pauline Roland, and Louise Nicaud of the laundresses. They were all held in detention for five months; for two months, in absolute secrecy and incommunicado.
The trial took place in November, lasting through three sessions. Deroin was refused the right to present her own defence. During the interrogation, she stoutly explained socialism to the examining magistrate – who however was more interested in the police claim that Mme. Nicaud possessed a picture of Robespierre. (It turned out to be a picture of Eugène Sue.) Deroin furthermore protested the whole procedure on the ground that she could not recognize the validity of laws that had been made by men only, without the participation of women. She explained her views on marriage; as always, she attacked the effort to confuse the feminist political program with sexual promiscuity; she demanded “absolute equality between the two sexes,” and “a state of society in which marriage is purified, moralized, and equalized.” But she insistently separated these opinions off as personal ones, not held by the Union nor necessarily by other defendants.
Delbrouck read a long statement for the defence in the name of all the defendants, but the verdict was already in the cards. Before the sentence was passed, Delbrouck also made an attempt to take all the guilt upon his own head and ask for the acquittal of his co-defendants: he “declared that ... as founder and initiator of the association he claimed the privilege of being condemned alone ...” It was useless. Five men were given the longest jail sentences, plus fines. Most of the other defendants, including the three women, got six months. Only four were acquitted.
While serving her time, Jeanne Deroin not only continued writing courses for socialist education; she was the only one to send a formal protest to the Assembly when it considered a bill to ban all petitions by women. Released in June 1851, she went right back to activity in the movement. After Bonaparte’s coup d’état in December of that year, she was active in helping the victims of the regime’s persecution. On the eve of her own arrest in August 1852, she fled to England.
In London, over the next years she published three feminist annuals, or Almanacs. After 1855 she more or less retired to private life, though her socialist and feminist views remained unchanged. When she died in 1894, at the age of 89, William Morris spoke at her bier to pay tribute to her courage in defending her ideas and her fidelity to socialist convictions in spite of the inroads of age.
I have not concealed my admiration for Jeanne Deroin and lack of it for George Sand; but I must admit that historical understanding requires that admiration be properly seasoned. Peace to George Sand’s ashes: despite all the negative things one must say about her real relation to feminism, one hard fact remains unaltered – unalterable by anything she actually said or believed or did.
This is the objective fact that, through her writings and her personal impact on her society, she made the idea of the emancipation of women – some kind of emancipation of women – more thinkable, more acceptable, more fashionable, more respectable, if you will. The timid bourgeois dames, or the petty-bourgeois ladies, or for that matter the workingwomen, who devoured her novels and wept over her heroines: they had daughters who therefore were raised in an altered milieu. In her own way George Sand became part of the social winds that blew old prejudices into disarray.
This impact was partly unwitting, partly intended, and partly something else: it was the result not of what she wrote or communicated wittingly or unwittingly, but of what the public was told she stood for by all of those clever litterateurs and boulevard jesters and cartoonists and mudslingers who ridiculed the emancipation of women. It may be that her enemies did more for her feminism than her friends.
She also served. But we have a right to ask more from one to whom so much was given. What if this woman of talent had been great-hearted enough, or clear-headed enough, to have put her abilities to unstinting service in the cause of her sisters, as Jeanne Deroin did? It might have made a difference; but this is what she did not do.
George Sand may have been a great writer, but she was not a great woman like Jeanne Deroin. As we saw, the historian Marguerite Thibert put it that the novelist was “incapable of feeling feminine solidarity.” This leads to an apparent paradox, for it was George Sand who was convinced that she thought in terms of Woman whereas the feminists whom she scorned were detestably narrow.
The paradox lies in the very notion of “sisterhood” as a mystic solidarity of women regardless of social position. It has often seemed as self-evident as the radiant word Fraternity was in 1789. Both have represented an aspiration, a potentiality – and a myth. The Fraternity of the great revolution could not be realized by the narrow people who invented it as a slogan; it could be realized – at times and in places – only in the context of the movement that took a revolution in humanity as its goal. And this was the allegedly narrow movement of socialism, the champions of struggle by the classes on bottom, whose revolt upheaved all other strata.
The feminist militants of 1848 believed that sisterhood could be a reality rather than a myth only if it was based on the mass of women, who are always workingwomen – not on the thin layer of Superior Women of the privileged classes. Did not events confirm this belief?
The embattled feminists of 1848 could stretch out the hand of sisterhood to George Sand, despite the latter’s limitations – because George Sand’s cause was subsumed in theirs. The reverse was not true; this is what shows that it was the novelist who was the narrow one. The feminists of the privileged classes have tended to set up the simulacrum of Sisterhood as a fetish, concealing narrower social interests – just as, after all, their menfolk have used invocations of Brotherhood as a code word for their own narrow class-bound conceptions of a good society.
It was the socialist feminist Jeanne Deroin who stood for sisterhood. True, there is no word for “sisterhood” – in the French language, but she was not thereby greatly incommoded. She knew of a greater solidarity than that of a sex; she aspired to a future in which sexual equality could become real for the first time because it was embraced in a wider human community.
Last updated on 12 September 2020