Sexing Political Culture in the History of France Sexing Political Culture in the History of France EDITED BY Alison M. Moore Copyright 2012 Cambria Press. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to: permissions@cambriapress.com, or mailed to: Cambria Press University Corporate Center, 100 Corporate Parkway, Suite 128 Amherst, NY 14226 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sexing political culture in the history of France / edited by Alison M. Moore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978-1-60497-822-3 (alk. paper) 1. Political culture--France--History. 2. Sex--Political aspects-France--History. 3. Symbolism in politics--France--History. 4. Sex and history--France. 5. Sex role--France--History. I. Moore, Alison, 1972DC59.S49 2012 305.30944--dc23 2012032873 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Historicizing Sexual Symbols Alison M. Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2: Sexual Crimes in the Early Modern Witch Hunts Maryse Simon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Chapter 3: The Renaissance Androgyne and Sexual Ideology Katherine Crawford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Chapter 4: Le Pantalon Christine Bard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Chapter 5: Strong French Heroine or Pious Maiden? Natasha Synicky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Chapter 6: The Colonial Feminine Mystique Marie-Paule Ha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Chapter 7: The Erotic Republic Alison M. Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Chapter 8: Utopian Bodies Richard D. Sonn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Chapter 9: The Female Flier Guillaume de Syon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Chapter 10: Prodigal Sons of the Nation Paul Schue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Chapter 11: Gender, Sexuality, and Crowd Psychology Mark Meyers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Chapter 12: Postwar Reconstruction Fabrice Virgili . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 vi Sexing Political Culture in the History of France Chapter 13: Cinema, Gender, and Power Yasmine Debarge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Chapter 14: Foulard or cocarde? Bronwyn Winter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 About the contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France Chapter 1 Historicizing Sexual Symbols Alison M. Moore There is little doubt that gender and sexual imagery have played a uniquely symbolic role in the modern French history of politics, religious struggle, and nationalism. That role was at no time more obvious than it is at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the belief that certain types of religiously symbolic corporeal attire conflict with the republican secular values of France as a nation, the French state has now introduced new laws that most conspicuously intervene in the personal grooming of Islamic French female citizens who wear headscarves for religious reasons.1 Heads, it might be argued, have often been the focus of profound symbolic signification in French national politics. Consider the guillotine of the revolutionary terror of 1791–1794; or the Phrygian cap as symbol of the Republic;2 or the public furore surrounding women’s short haircuts during the interwar period;3 or the way that women’s heads were shaved as ritual punishment for collaboration with the Germans at the end of both the First and Second World Wars;4 or the 2 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France classic image of Marianne’s head on current French stamps and government logos. In the 2005 film Caché (Hidden), by the Austrian director Michael Haneke, the central character, Georges (played by Daniel Auteuil), is haunted by the guilty denial of having betrayed his childhood rival and adopted Algerian brother Majid (played by Maurice Bénichou), whose parents were killed in the Papon-ordered massacre of curfew protesters in Paris in 1961.5 In a nightmare dream sequence which wakes Georges in a cold sweat, the child Majid, symbol of Algerian anticolonial independence from the paternal colonial state, cuts off the head of a rooster, symbol of the French nation and of white French masculinity. It is a poignant commentary on the relationship between national identity, masculinity and race around the Algerian war and the loss of French colonial supremacy. The rooster’s decapitation suggests both the violent history of the inception of French republicanism in the guillotine, as well as the guilt, denial, and fear of castration which George’s occulted childhood envy of the subaltern Majid provokes.6 Haneke was strikingly psychohistorically acute in drawing those themes together within the interiority of an individual's unconscious experience because national identity, colonialism, sexuality, and gender have, indeed, often been evoked in connected visions of meaning across the long history of France. Their enduring power indeed suggests the ability of such intimate references as sex and gender to personalize mass political ideals. Threats to gender identity may be seen as threats to selfhood, and if these can be construed as threats to the nation, then the passion of citizens to defend such causes is intensified. Concerns about feminine gender and sexuality have also frequently appeared in nationalist political representation. Female bodies have stood as perpetually redeployable symbols of the French republic throughout its history—celebrated, as in the maternal and sedentary Marianne of the calendars from the early months of the French Revolution;7 longed for, as in the barebreasted flag-waving Marianne of Historicizing Sexual Symbols 3 Delacroix’s tableaux and of the 1848 revolutions;8 defended, as in Alfred Le Petit’s illustrations of La Charge during the Franco-Prussian war;9 or decried, as in the 1933 cover of the conservative financial journal Commentaires which is reproduced on the cover of this volume. That trend is not only a past one either—a 2003 socialist poster campaign showed seductive black and Arab-French figures of feminine beauty wearing the Phrygian bonnet révolutionnaire, as the new symbols of an ideal nonracist, nonviolent, culturally inclusive republic.10 And of course, Marianne's head remains enshrined as an official symbol of the French state—dainty and pretty, her hair streaming behind her, perhaps blowing in the winds of progress as she stares down the future resolutely.11 The intense concentration of scholarly work on gender and national imagery in French historiography in recent years is a measure of the exceptionally rich tradition of that variety of political signification in the French past and present. In eighteenth-century historiography, the work of Lynn Hunt and Robert Darnton has been influential in showing how political satire against the Ancien Régime targeted sexual rumors about Marie Antoinette, and how revolutionary and republican pornography represented a decrepit and libertine clergy and aristocracy in opposition to a virile and sexually robust disenfranchised laboring class.12 Other historians have shown the even more ubiquitous tradition of representations of the Republic as a female body across the long history of the French nation. Joan B. Landes’ Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France traces the emergence and proliferation of gender imagery in early republican political discourse;13 and Maurice Agulhon’s series, Marianne au combat, Marianne au pouvoir, and les Métamorphoses de Marianne, traces the use of feminine iconography in public sculpture and state-sponsored visual art from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries.14 Françine Muel-Dreyfus showed how central the pious ideals of both virginal and maternal femininity were in the culture of the Vichy state.15 These influential studies created a strong tradition of gender and sexual historicization of French politics. More recent studies, such as the papers 4 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France in this volume, owe an obvious debt to them. This volume makes no apology for omitting specific chapters on Marianne in visual culture, on gendered symbols in the French Revolution, or on Vichy’s mobilization of gendered icons such as Joan of Arc (though these questions are referred to in several of this volume’s chapters), because they are exhaustively historicized topics in the works of Landes, Agulhon, and MuelDreyfus and, as such, have been formative questions in the development of the field tout court. Here we expand the project into some novel permutations, and reflect upon its epistemological foundations. It is not only in France, but in numerous global cultures, that modern nationalist ideologies have often referenced gendered and sexual motifs in order to seduce, provoke, and embed their political and social values in the population, or in order to inflame animosity toward competing nations and ideological enemies. Marianne, Mother Russia, Germania, and Britannia are just a few of the feminine archetypes around which European states have metaphorized their national identification. Sexual slander of the kind that implied that Hitler had one testicle (in British wartime propaganda), or that Jews were lascivious and sexually diseased (in Nazi ideology), further indicated the readiness of political discourses to use sexualized motifs in the definition of national identity, cultural difference and ideological conflict.16 That general practice is intriguing in itself and has been the focus of a new field of scholarship by historians and gender scholars over the past fifteen years, pioneered by the work of Joan Landes, George Mosse, Klaus Theweleit, Maurice Agulhon, Anne McClintock, and others.17 More recent scholarship on the sexual politics of Nazi Germany has been particularly inspiring to gender and sexuality historians of modern Europe in advancing an approach to these themes that is grounded in the study of political ideology and its practical application. That is a striking development in the field of gender and sexuality history, which more commonly has tended to focus on the social and cultural dimensions of everyday life, legal and social hygiene practices, popular presses, and literary and cinematic representation, or else has been grounded in the textual history of religious, medical, psychiatric, Historicizing Sexual Symbols 5 and psychoanalytic views about sex. Through the study of Nazism and of colonialism in particular, and now also through the study of French gendered nationhood, it has become clear that, in fact, sexual and gender history might also be constituted as the study of the political ideologies which deploy them symbolically. The turn torward historical consideration of the role of gender and sexuality in political discourse has, for some time, been a Europewide phenomenon, and more recently, has become a global academic trend. A number of historians of various European cultures have considered how gendered and sexual myths have been instrumentalized in the elaboration of colonial power,18 in the naming of enemies during war, and in the settling of accounts following the Nazi occupation.19 Masculinity has been a particularly conspicuous feature of European nationalist imagery, as examined by historians such as Christopher Forth, Robert Nye, Judith Surkis, Charlotte Hooper, John Tosh, Karen Hagemann, and many others.20 Klaus Theweleit’s Männerphantasien was one of the first major historical works to suggest, in a finely grained study of German interwar militiamen’s diaries and letters, that a sexual metaphorics lay embedded in proto-Nazi racial and military ideology. What Theweleit’s work succeeded in showing was, not that the Nazis were sexually repressed and therefore perverse (as he has been misconstrued as arguing), but rather that their linguistic articulation of racial others, enemies, and dangers was richly encoded with a sexual metaphorics.21 German ultranationalism relied on generating horror and disgust, and so metaphoric and symbolic images of bodily fluids, transgendered bodies, sexual disease, and castration were effective tools for fleshing out hatred toward racialized others and ideological enemies.22 While historians of Nazi sexuality remain deeply divided over the extent to which Nazism constituted a sexually repressed or sexually excessive ideology, they nonetheless all agree that sexual and gendered dimensions lay at the very heart of the Nazi symbolic imagination.23 That body of scholarship has been instrumental in inspiring the present study, both for its exemplary model of methodology in the 6 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France focus on gendering and sexualizing mechanisms in history, and for its content, because Germany has historically been more implicated than any other nation as a competing nationalist power in relation to France. The recurring Franco-Germanic conflict has, in itself, often been the site of intense generation of gendered and sexualized images of the nation, as several of the chapters in this volume discuss. Scholars focused on many different cultures across the globe have similarly been drawn to a concern with gender and sexuality as political and ideological metaphors.24 As the editors of one such volume of international scope remarked: “Wherever the power of the nation is invoked…we are more likely than not to find it couched as a love of country: an eroticized nationalism.”25 If it is now clear that the trend has international currency, it also has a particularly rich history of precedence in European societies. Among them all, France has most persistently and consistently placed gendered and sexual metaphors at the center of its political culture. In a methodological sense then, our collection makes no pretense to being the first to notice this rather striking phenomenon of a gender and sexual metaphorics in the politics of nationhood and nationalism. Rather it aims to clarify the methodological distinction between our research on this peculiar kind of political representation, and the wider field of gender and sexuality history in culture and society. Indeed, it now seems clear that a new theoretical approach has emerged in response to the particularly recurrent metaphoric instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in the political domain of several cultures. The study of this kind of phenomenon is now an established research field, central to the work of a wide range of political, cultural, intellectual, and social historians. The idea of this book was conceived precisely in recognition of this growing body of work, and with the aim of interrogating the recurrence—particularly apparent throughout French history—of uses of gender and sexual imagery in forms of national, racial, colonial, religious, and ideological representation, propaganda, and wars. Historicizing Sexual Symbols 7 This is not a book about the history of women, gender, or sex per se, nor even about the history of sexuality in its narrower discursive sense, but is instead a study of the history of the particular uses to which gendered and sexual symbols have been put in the service of the nation, the republic, the revolution, religion, progress, secularism, and the state. Other gender and sexuality historians of France might, of course, be included in the sketch provided here of scholarship on symbolic and metaphoric political usages. The field of political culture is not quarantined from other kinds of gender and sexuality studies and the interactions between nation/state and gender/sex have been noted, too, in the context of broader examinations of the cultural and social history of gender and sexuality in France by scholars such as Sian Reynolds, Susan Foley, Robert Aldrich, and Christine Bard (who is also a contributor to the present volume), among others.26 However, here we choose to make of these interactions a particular point of thematic concern and methodological reflection. One benefit of collecting a set of chapters together with this kind of focus is the opportunity it affords for some consideration of the hermeneutic implications entailed in such an approach. In relation to our topic, there are certainly good reasons to consider how intellectual frameworks and publishing titles might implicate historians in the very processes they look to deconstruct. Many continue to use the feminine icon of Marianne as shorthand for the French nation. A recent study by Elizabeth Vlossak metaphorizes the contested status of Alsace between France and Germany as the choice between Marianne and Germania.27 Vlossak’s evocation of these icons is for historicist ends because her work is also, in fact, focused on the relationship between gender, nationalism, and French-German claims on Alsace from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries—across the period in which those national feminine icons were most prevalent. In a similar vein, the cartoon artist Tomi Ungerer represents his own transnational, neither French nor German, Alsatian identity in a series of sexualized images entitled Zwischen Marianne und Germania. Alsace appears in these images as a tiny male figure 8 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France torn between the sexual allure of respective French and German feminine erotic bodies—a love triangle between two giant dominant women and a struggling powerless man. Ungerer’s images thus trade on the erotics of nationalist imagery, while invoking an Alsatian liminal identity grounded in a historical consciousness of its place between those two large warring nation states across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.28 A number of historians have continued to use the feminine iconography of Marianne and Germania as a shorthand way to refer to FrancoGerman shared histories, thus perpetuating the gendering and sexualization of the very national identities they hope to historicize.29 Hence Marianne is evoked in the title of the award-winning book Marianne in Chains by the Oxford historian Robert Gildea.30 In this work, however, neither the Marianne icon nor gender in any other sense form central objects of the study; rather, they operate primarily as metaphors in much the same way as in the nationalist belief systems that Gildea implicitly criticizes. In fact, the title choice represents the recovery, implied throughout Gildea’s opus, of a feeble and feminized France in the face of Nazi occupation, which has been overshadowed by a futile and irresponsible resistance. It is a vision of the republic held hostage, passive and helpless— in contrast to the persistent heroic myths both of résistantialisme and Pétainisme that his account problematizes. The dismantling of the Fourth Republic under Pétain was celebrated by antirepublican prisoners of war as the “death of ‘the whore’ (la gueuse),” Gildea tells us, though without any contextualization and without any commentary on that remarkable, and historically particular, verbal utterance.31 Elsewhere though, Gildea has indeed discussed gender metaphorics, noting how the Vichy use of Joan of Arc, as a suitably Catholic and virginal ideal that accorded with Pétainist traditionalism, was also carried over into Gaullist symbolism of the nation.32 That such expressions of violence against 'the whore' of republicanism (A mort la gueuse!) were evoked at the demise of the Third Republic is a well-recognized fact among historians of World War II,33 Historicizing Sexual Symbols 9 but rarely has it undergone any sustained consideration as a historical phenomenon in its own right. The ongoing invocation of gendered and sexualized bodies in historiographic representation of the nation suggests that historical consciousness remains more entrenched than we might like to think in the nineteenth-century historiographic habits of ‘farming the poppies for the nationalist opiate,’ to paraphrase Eric Hobsbawm’s famous metaphor of the relationship of historians to nationalism.34 Even when scholars aim to subject national tropes to historicization, they risk substantiating the tropes’ mythical contents. The nation as a sexual body is not yet a thing of the past; it is a living body, not a corpse (as Henri Rousso once famously wrote about le syndrôme de Vichy).35 Unlike Rousso, we propose here that the subject at hand needs neither an autopsy nor psychotherapy, but rather a nontherapeutic form of historicized treatment by a collective of French gender and sexuality scholars of diverse kinds. There are several assumptions such an approach might well challenge—that gender and sexuality were only fields of marginal reference in cultures prior to the late twentieth century, or that such themes only appeared in precise kinds of texts dedicated to the study of psychology, bodies, health, deviance, desire, and marriage. In fact, all the essays in this volume help us to appreciate the absolute centrality of gender and sexual motifs in the some of the most official domains of representation across French political history—domains that were ostensibly not at all concerned with gender or sexuality and yet referred to them repeatedly as symbolic or metaphoric devices. The purpose of this book is to propose some questions about the nature of this sexual metaphorics while considering why and how gender and sexuality operate so recurrently as themes for the representation of political entities, through the collation of multiple examples of it across a long period in France. But it might seem that we are assuming much here. Are we even dealing with the same phenomenon across time in viewing the 10 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France barebreasted Marianne of the 1840s republican movement as a product of the same kind of sexualization as the later attribution of ‘collaboration horizontale’ to the women who were victimized in the tontes of the Liberation? In deciding that there are good reasons to take these different phenomena as in some way contiguous, we have in fact, further extended that rubric to consider the attribution of sexual sin and deviancy to the demonically possessed in the early modern era, and the Neoplatonist debates about androgyny in Renaissance thought. If coherent tendencies can be sketched across such long and diverse histories, how, then, do we account for the profound contextual differences in how these examples arise? Of particular concern here, it must be said, is the crucial difference between that earlier era when ‘la France’ had political meaning only to a tiny minority of northern elites among the linguistically and culturally diverse inhabitants of l’Hexagone, and the more recent era since the French Revolution, and especially since the advent of the Third Republic, when ideological movements consciously sought to reshape local traditions into visions of collective interest toward the concept of a singular nation of alike citizens. Clearly, the assemblage of diverse examples across both time and culturally conceived space is unlikely to provide any sharp lines of continuity or pattern because the very terms of such a long view of the sexual, the erotic, sin, and woman are also historically contingent and differently conceived from the early modern era to the present. It is, nonetheless, of value to consider incomparable examples over time because new trends rarely (if ever) emerge out of nowhere. Comparisons allow us to discern when distinct shifts in representation and concern occurred. But it is also clear that in the era of mass politics, popular forms of ritual, habits of iconography, and socially embedded modes of gender relating manifested in modern national uses of gender and sexual themes. Fears of androgyny, forms of group violence against women and men marked as outsiders through suppositions about their sexual conduct, worship of symbolic feminine icons, depictions of sexually corrupt priests in popular humor—these all are recapitulating features of cultural history Historicizing Sexual Symbols 11 from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century in the land mass now known as France. The structure of this volume is roughly chronological, and many of the chapters provide clues to the origins of practices and discourses emerging later in the history of France. As such, there is an element of genealogy in our study of the emergence and transmission of sexualizing and gendering political traditions. But the genealogies traced here proliferated diffusely across state discourses, propaganda, and popular media, through historical precedence and cultural habit. The approaches employed to tease out their salience and examine their emergence and transmission are necessarily grounded in a diverse range of disciplinary approaches—political, cultural, social, and intellectual history; cinematic reading; and contemporary feminist political analysis. If our methods were broad then there was a need to limit the scope of papers in this volume to the history of France. But that focus was not selected because gendering and sexualizing discourses are nationally bound, nor even because the name ‘France’ signified the same thing in the early modern period, in the revolution of 1789, or in the era since nationalist ideologies have dominated European politics. This may be a history of France, but that does not mean we took the continuity of the nation as a category of coherence for granted, thus ourselves sustaining national myths of continuity and longevity, as Eric Hobsbawm and Patrick Geary gloomily worried.36 Rather, a national focus is justified here because our study is precisely about the transmission of ideological patterns in state building and national construction over time. The modern national phenomenon produced new habits that specifically relied upon identification with the reproduction of past antecedents as the site for the imagination of tradition. Nations frequently look to craft their imagery from an imagination of traditional forms.37 That has been so in relation to the images of France in gendered and sexualized terms as well. 12 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France However, the first two papers of this volume concern the practice of gender and sexual thematics in ideological struggles that predate modern nationalism. Here it might be argued that a more coherently historicist collection would only have begun in the age of modern nationalism, leaving out those earlier antecedents that complicate the questions at stake in this study. However, it is clear that by ignoring earlier forms of this style of metaphoric representation, we lose sight of some of the deeper and more troubling reasons for the continuous exploitation of gender and sexual imagery in politics over the longue durée. Sexualized and gendered patterns of othering were established in prenational times, providing the substrate for such the practices in later nationalist tropes. Moden national expressions of gender and sexual metaphorics owed much to these earlier habits, and we would not do justice to the depth of their reach into culture if we characterized them crudely as the sudden inventions of nationalist ideologues. Popularist movements by definition must craft their imagery from material that is culturally recognizable and psychologically assimilable among populations. Sexual and gendered motifs are perhaps especially appealing to nationalists and to other ideological currents for that reason—they refer to old traditions, they relate to realms of intimacy and interiority, and they mimic established religious forms. A national definition is also pertinent here because France provides a particularly striking case of recurrent uses of this kind of imagery in political representation. It is, in many respects, the ur-example of sexualized, gendered national identification. That is, perhaps, unsurprising if we consider that gender metaphorization is one of the common themes across a range of nationstate ideologies. Considering the politically influential nature of the first French republican experiment of 1789 and, perhaps more importantly, how widely its values were exported throughout Europe during the Napoleonic invasions, it is credible to speculate that France may have provided the prototype for the tendency toward gendered imagery in European nationalisms of the nineteenth century. The mechanisms of transmission included both direct export Historicizing Sexual Symbols 13 and reactive competition, resulting in archetypes of the nation as a woman in Britain, Italy, Germany, Russia, and other countries, whether Napoleon had planted a flag there or not. One important dimension of this volume, then, is the historicization of gendered nationalism from its origins in revolutionary France, and through its proliferation as a prototype of ideology that spread throughout European societies over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is one of the great constructionist ironic devices to remark upon the similarity of all nationalisms across cultures, against each of their specific claims to cultural uniqueness. That the French habit of representing the nation as an embodied female icon proved so contagious across nineteenth-century nationalist ideologies is testimony to the prototype nature of the ‘invention of the nation,’ according to that view of nationalism in the work of Benedict Anderson.38 However, undoubtedly, such images of the nation as a woman were most popular in places where they could speak to the recognizable gendered symbols embedded in longer cultural traditions. The exportable nature of the gendered, sexualized nation may be due to its special ideological utility. In the movement away from societies based on monarchy, aristocracy, and feudalism, toward modern states of citizens, each with rights and obligations to the nation, gendered and sexual symbols performed an important work of personalizing the impersonal, embodying something otherwise rather abstract and difficult to imagine or identity with. It may be easier to convince citizens to lay down their lives in war for an ideal of a nation when that nation is represented as a maiden or a mother threatened by the sexual violence of enemies. Perhaps, too, it is easier to pretend that a state truly represents both men and women if the nation itself is feminized even as the government is elected through male suffrage alone, as governments in most European states were up until the early twentieth century, and as France was up until 1945. Indeed, that long resistance in France to the acceptance of women as full political citizens, alongside the rich traditions of using gendered and sexualized imagery in French state politics, suggests that this kind of symbolic representation may even impede actual polit- 14 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France ical equality across gender lines by creating the illusion of universality, or by reiterating a purely symbolic appreciation of women’s value to the state. This volume occupies a position of mediation between those views of nationalism that emphasize its construction or invention by European elites of the late modern era, and that view which has tended to emphasize its emergence in long cultural traditions within particular territorial contexts. Many of the essays in this volume focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when gendered and sexual motifs in politics became particularly richly elaborated. However, several of the contributions relate to earlier examples of the centrality of gender and sexuality in political and religious discourses at times prior to the formation of modern nationalism of the kind that emerged only after the French Revolution of 1789. That longevity is both troubling and suggestive to the account outlined here of the relationship between gendered or sexualized motifs and nationalism. It complicates the view that such imagery can be simply explained as part of the apparatus of modern nation states in their attribution of feminine corporeality to the body of the nation that male citizens must protect, and their use of sexual slander for the vilification of enemies in wartime conflict. It suggests that, at the core of what makes such imagery compelling, there is something more deeply embedded in cultural, religious, and political traditions, something older even than the nation. Given that the symbolic preoccupation with sex as a sign of something other than itself is so persistently salient across a wide range of cultures, it is reasonable to postulate that these may, in fact, be aspects of human existence that inevitably and universally form the content of discourse. Here we could point to the many studies of sexual metaphor in cultures of war, ranging from the ancient Athenian visions of sex and violence,39 to the tendency among contemporary American defense theorists to describe weapons of mass destruction in distinctly phallic terms.40 As Diana Fuss remarked in her 1989 account of the essentialist/construc- Historicizing Sexual Symbols 15 tionist divide in gender studies, the position of defining gender as always and everywhere constructed and never given, among its many contextualizing benefits, has also “foreclosed more ambitious investigations of specificity and difference by fostering a certain paranoia around the perceived threat of essentialism.”41 The current volume is precisely such an ambitious study in that it reopens the question of how a sexual metaphorics can recur across a long and diverse historic period. But the leap to universalist speculation is not the necessary next step once a long historic pattern of recurrence has been established. A volume such as this might reasonably hope to promote alternatives, both to the narrow version of constructionism that cannot account for seemingly unrelated recurrences over a long period, and to a resigned universalism that throws up its hands to be rescued by a metanarrative tale of biological determinism. It is not that biological or other kinds of explanations are impossible to consider, or are beyond the humanities pale (as Fuss suggests), or that they must always be counterpoised to the social in a version of what is now a rather tired dichotomy. Rather, the issue is that, as historians, it is our concern to extend explanation as far as possible according to historical criteria. It is far from obvious that all such lines of inquiry have been exhausted in the study of gender and sexuality metaphor in the long history of French politics and culture. The concern here is not fear of risking essentialism, but patience to continue grounding the question in the rich scope of remaining possibilities of historical explanation.42 A historicist commitment does not preclude considering the broader question of why sexual behavior and gender difference ever matter as questions of state policy, ideological vision, or religious belief across time and place. By focusing on these domains across the long history of France, the essays in this volume point to a larger possibility of speculation about the role that such concerns might play in the construction and the defense of political power systems, of state governance and its acceptance by populations of a given territory, of class hierarchy and 16 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France the acceptance of it by even those whom it benefits the least, and of colonial conquest and its domestication among both home and foreign populations. Whenever political elites seek to construe their own narrow interest as a lofty ideal to be defended by all, gender and sexual imagery are evoked to seduce, to romanticize, or to give substance to the abstraction. Their role might be to distract where doubt would otherwise reign, to humanize where abstractions would otherwise be hard to care about, to vilify where opponents would otherwise inspire indifference, or to repulse where enemies would otherwise be left alone. To invoke gender or sexual desire, perversion, or difference, is to suggest something of one’s bodily experience, of one’s intimate relationships, of one’s parental imagoes, and of one’s inner longings. Thus it gives the state or social elites the power to reach into one’s imagination and activate symbols that will engage one in collective agendas—even those that stand against one’s own particular social interests. That strategy became marked in times of nationbuilding and especially in times of war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it predated the modern nation state, as the copious evidence of sexual and gender discourse in religions of the medieval and early modern era suggests.43 Images of benevolent, motherly, and virginal femininity in nationalist imagery probably owed something to Catholic Marianite traditions.44 Twentieth-century depictions of enemies as perverse, diseased, homosexual, and sexually monstrous had much in common with medieval preoccupations with heresy, leprosy, and sexual sin.45 In this respect, Benedict Anderson’s claim that modern nationalism was the successor to early modern religion would appear to hold some validity.46 Medieval Christian cosmology, with its vision of the substandard morality and humanity of women alongside its visionary symbolic worship of feminine divinity, provided a prototype to gendered national arrangements of the nineteenth century, with their accounts of women as subpar citizens alongside their metaphoric vision of feminized national symbols. Such dyads are found recurrently across the history of France. Historicizing Sexual Symbols 17 Our volume thus begins with a study of the sexualization of witches, and the emergence of androgyny as an ideological concern in the early modern period. As Maryse Simons shows in the chapter “Sexual Crimes in the Early Modern Witch Hunt,” the marginalization of women accused of witchcraft in France over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occurred through a nexus of meaning linking deviancy, corporeal defilement, feminine gender, and worship of the Devil, whose influence in worldly affairs was recurrently construed in bodily and sexual terms. Questions of gender difference and appropriate sexual desire were at the forefront of emerging humanist thought and challenges to religious doctrine in the early modern period, too. Katherine Crawford’s chapter, “The Renaissance Androgyne and the Making of Sexual Ideology,” examines how French writers inspired by Italian humanism and by ancient Greek philosophy attempted to accommodate a vision of androgyny within the construction of a sexual ideology that precluded the samesex desire of the ancients. The Platonic androgyne thus became the site for negotiation of appropriate sexual desire and the assertion of gender difference within the new challenges of postReformation theology, both Catholic and Protestant. Both these authors' papers demonstrate how gender and sexuality were yoked into place as central ideological concerns across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the new French state moved toward greater secular consolidation. Given these precedents, it is unsurprising to find that, in the great social and political rupture of the events of 1789–1901 in France, gender difference and women’s bodies again figured centrally in conceptions of political ideology. Christine Bard’s thematic chapter, “Le Pantalon: Toward A Political History of Trousers,” takes a novel approach to that question by tracing the continuities in French political views of feminine dress from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, examining how gendered attire was implicated in struggles to exclude women from state governance, and in feminist challenges to that exclusion. Republican thought, from its foundations in France, coopted earlier models of gendering and sexualizing politics and the conflation of the Republic 18 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France with gender remained a constant feature of political life throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following this chapter then we have a concentration of studies focused around that particularly rich period in the French substantiation of connections between ideology and sex, from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War. Reference to earlier models of gender continued to play a role in national conceptions, as Natasha Synicky shows in her chapter, “Strong French Heroine or Pious Maiden?,” an account of public debates about the femininity, national identity and religious signification of Joan of Arc as a historical myth implicated in the career of actress Sarah Bernhardt after the Franco-Prussian War. Marie-Paule Ha’s chapter, “The Colonial Feminine Mystique,” shows how gender operated at the heart of French colonial discourse in the late nineteenth century, in new conceptions of women as a civilizing influence in the colonies, and as the arbiters of a domestication of colonialism in the métropole. My own chapter, “The Erotic Republic,” suggests some of the mechanisms through which sexual content and patholigization were incorporated into political discourse from the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War II. It focuses on the use of la Gueuse (the whore) as an ultra-rightwing term of denigration of the Third Republic, and on the relationship between the emergence of pseudoscientific writers on sexuality in France in the early twentieth century and the uptake of notions of sadism and Germanic sexual perversion in nationalistic propaganda imagery. Both Richard Sonn’s chapter, “Utopian Bodies,” and Paul Schue’s chapter, ”Prodigal Sons of the Nation,” complicate the accounts presented thus far by showing that sex, gender, and political ideology came together not only in the official imagery of the state, but also at the far and subversive left (anarchism) and in reactionary new forms of the far right (fascism). While French anarchists throughout of the interwar period envisaged promiscuity and the end of marriage as necessary products of radical social revolution, fascist ideologues in the same Historicizing Sexual Symbols 19 period used ideals of masculinity to promote recruitment against a vision of communism as gender compromising. Gender and sexuality became central concerns in the cultural politics of the interwar Third Republic, prompting conservative fears about androgyny, moral corruption and national decline, but also suggesting for some the liberating possibilities of sexual expression outside marriage, monogamy, and other-sex choice in visions of a new egalitarian society. In both the fascist and the anarchist examples, sexual and gender ideals formed part of the modes of induction into radical political commitments, lending weight to the view that gender and sex may recur so frequently in politics because of their capacity to personalize abstractions, and their affective power of erotic seduction and personal identification. Guillaume de Syon’s chapter examines another manifestation of the interwar French fixation with gender in the public fascination with female flyers as Joan of Arc-like figures of androgyny and national heroism. Like Marianne busts in city halls, the aviatrix was promoted to inspire the public, but her representation in press sources indicated that clear boundaries were also drawn to show she should not be taken to exemplify female behavior beyond established feminine attributes. Here, it seems one edges closer to an understanding of the raised stakes of gender and sexual questions in the period between the wars. France at that time saw a proliferation of erotic imagery, a publicization of feminist ideas and new female rolemodels, an expanding popular consciousness of the possibilities of gender acculturation and sexual expression. Alongside these trends, though, gender and sexuality were increasingly deployed to name enemies, define outsiders, and blame scapegoats, and the Second World War provided the scene for some spectacular demonstrations of that symbolic convergence. Mark Meyer’s chapter, “Crowd Psychology, Gender, and Sexuality in French Antifascism,” shows how the later trend of ascribing sexual perversion, homosexuality, and failed masculinity to the Nazis had its origins in interwar thinking about crowd psychology, popularism, and 20 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France rightwing ideology among left-wring writers such as Henri Pollès. If the far right could be most consistently relied upon to imply that gender failure and national decline went together, left-wing tradition of political thought also begun to assume sexual perversion lay at the heart of fascism. Fabrice Virgili’s chapter, “The Reconstruction of a Virile France 1944–1945,” extends the question of sexuality as ideological target through an examination of gender and sexual retribution in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation. In spite of the feminine icon that had characterized Germany as Germania prior to the rise of Nazism, during the Second World War the Third Reich promoted a vision of the nation as ultra-masculine, and was perceived as such in its conquest of France. As Virgili shows us, the occupation was experienced by many as blight on French masculinity, requiring the restoration of virility through the ritual punishment of women who were popularly, and often falsely, imagined to have sexually betrayed the nation. At no point had it been clearer just how dramatically the gender and sexual metaphorization of nationhood could catalyze the social realities of gender relations. There is no doubt that the period from the French Revolution to the end of the Second World War represented a heightened elaboration of connections of meaning between gender, sexuality, and political ideology in France. But the story did not end there. As Yasmine Debarge shows in her chapter, “Cinema, Politics and Gender,” challenges to gender customs in the 1960s combined with Cold War visions to produce a view of communism and consumerism as implicated in cinematic visions of sexual difference. The final chapter, by Bronwyn Winter, entitled “Foulard or cocarde?” brings us up to the turn of the twentyfirst century, showing how the Islamic headscarf debates and laws about religious symbols underscore republican views about the relationship between secular power, gender, sexual allure, and racialized nationhood in the postcolonial French context. The French romance with gendered and sexualized national identity is clearly not over yet but, as Winter shows us, not all French female citizens are equally the target of its exoticism and of its exclusionary motives. Historicizing Sexual Symbols 21 The papers in this volume present a highly varied array of examples of the role of gender and sexuality in French politics and ideology, and as such they focus on some surprising questions not commonly found in survey studies of the history of France. Even though there is a great deal of variety in the topics covered, there is also much continuity found across all the chapters. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 14 strongly indicate the recurrent manifestation of concerns about secularism or religion (Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam), alongside those about gender and sex, suggesting that French nationalist uptakes of gendered and sexualized imagery may indeed derive from its history of struggle with and against religion. Chapters 6, 7, 9, 13, and 14 all consider the specific question of the French nation as a feminine icon. Chapters 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12 all consider the recurrence of concerns about masculinity in the construction of political and national ideologies. Most of the papers consider both gender and sexuality as concurrent, often intermeshed themes; however, chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, and 13 are somewhat more emphatically focused on sexualized forms of representation. The figure of Joan of Arc recurs in several of the papers (especially chapter 5). The figure of Marianne rears her head repeatedly in the span of topics covered in this work, though there are no chapters specifically focused on her, because this area in the study of French gendered nationalism has already been extensively historicized. Questions of inappropriate sexual desire recur in many of the national and political discussions we examine, and concerns about gender differentiation appear in the papers focused on the early modern period (chapters 2 and 3), those on the long nineteenth century (chapters 4 and 6), the interwar period (chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11) and on the recent past (chapters 13 and 14). Franco-German relations are considered in several of the chapters (7, 11, and 12). As much as we found continuities in our collective labor, however, we have also found great divergence, variation, and the generation of new and surprising forms of gendered and sexualized concerns at different junctures across history. If these themes have long persisted in political cultures, it is clear, too, that they are not one and the same concern at any 22 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France two moments. That, more than anything, is a vindication of the historical approach we have endeavored to exemplify in relation to this question. If there is a transhistorical attraction to making political meaning through gender and sexuality, there is certainly no universal form to its content. Historicizing Sexual Symbols 23 Endnotes 1. See Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Bronwyn Winter, Hijab and the Republic: Uncovering the French Headscarf Debate (Sycracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008). 2. See Daniel Arasse, La Guillotine et l'Imaginaire de la terreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1987). 3. See Marie-Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes; Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994). 4. See Fabrice Virgili, La France ‘virile’; des femmes tondues à la Libération (Paris: Payot, 2000). 5. Michael Haneke, Caché, Sony Pictures, 2005, 117 mins. 6. For a subtle account of the Lacanian underpinnings of this film's vision of haunting and “exorcism-analysis” see Saad Chakali, “Le spectre du colonialisme, l'actualité du néocolonialisme postcolonial; Caché (2005) de Michael Haneke,” Cadrage: 1ère Revue en ligne universitaire de cinéma, accessed October 6, 2010, http://www.cadrage.net/films/cache.htm. See also James Penney, “‘You Never Look at Me From Where I See You’: Postcolonial Guilt In Caché,” New Formations 70 (Winter 2011): 77–93. 7. See Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation; Gender, Representation and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat : l’imagerie et la symbolique republicaines de 1789 à 1880 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). 8. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 9. Guy Boulnois, “Alfred Le Petit, un grand caricaturiste mais aussi un peintre de talent,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque Forney 88 (January-March 1986): 5–8. 10. Bronwyn Winter, “Marianne Goes Multicultural: Ni putes ni soumises and the republicanisation of ethnic minority women in France,” French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar 2, 2009, www.h-france.net/rude/rudeTOC2009.html. 11. Maurice Agulhon, Les Métamorphoses de Marianne - l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1914 à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). 24 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France 12. Lynn Hunt, “Politics and the French Revolution,” in The Invention of Pornography; Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity,1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 301-340; Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 13. Landes, Visualizing the Nation. 14. Agulhon, Marianne au combat; Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au pouvoir; l'imagerie et la symbolique républicaine de 1880 à 1914 (Paris: Flammarion, 1989); and Agulhon, Les Métamorphoses de Marianne. 15. Françine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy et l'éternel féminin: Contribution à une sociologie politique de l'ordre des corps (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996). 16. See Alison Moore, Sexual Myths of Modernity; Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology (Lanham: Lexington, 2012). 17. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 18. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga, Gendering European History (London: Continuum, 2004), 87–116. 19. See Virgili, La France ‘virile’; Also Annette Warring, Tyskerpiger: under besættelse og retsopgør (København: Gyldendal, 1994). 20. Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Masculinity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004); Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen; Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Cornell University Press, 2006); Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York; Columbia University Press, 2001); Karen Hagemann, Ida Blom, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Berg, 2000); Karen Hagemann, Stefan Dudink, and John Tosh, eds., Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Historicizing Sexual Symbols 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 25 Manchester University Press, 2004); See also Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no.2 (March 1998): 242–267. For a striking example of such a reading of Theweleit, see Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 240-246. Herzog dismisses Theweleit’s claim as a classic West German 68-er generation attempt to represent Nazism as sexually self-repressed. However, Theweleit argues more subtly that the Freikorps militamen were hyperphallic in their sexual imagery and fearful of femininity. This question is discussed in more detail in Moore, Sexual Myths of Modernity, chap. 5. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2, Male Bodies - Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). See Herzog, Sex After Fascism. See Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (London: Routledge, 1999); Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Andre Parker et al.,eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1. Sian Davies, France Between the Wars; Gender and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996). Susan Foley, Women in France Since 1789: The Meanings of Difference (London: Palgrave, 2004); and Christine Bard, Les Femmes dans la société française au XXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2003). Elizabeth Vlossak, Marianne or Germania? Nationalizing Women in Alsace, 1870-1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Wilhelm Hornbostel, Tomi Ungerer: zwischen Marianne und Germania (München: Prestel, 1999). Marie-Louise von Plessen, Marianne und Germania 1789-1989. Frankreich und Deutschland (Berlin: Zwei Welten – Eine Revue, 1996); Etienne François et al., eds., Marianne - Germania. Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer im europäischen Kontext 1789-1914, 2 vols. (Leipzig, Universitätsverlag, 1998). Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German occupation (London: Picador, 2004). Gildea, Marianne in Chains, 3. Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994), 163-164 26 Sexing Political Culture in the History of France 33. See Gérard Boulanger, A mort la gueuse! Comment Pétain liquida la République à Bordeaux, 15, 16, et 17 juin 1940 (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2006). 34. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today,” Anthropology Today 8, no.1 (1992): 3. 35. Henri Rousso, Le Syndrôme de Vichy, 1944-198-, (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 36. Hobsbawm, “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today,”: 3–8; Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15. 37. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 38. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 39. Eva C. Kuels, The Reign of the Phallus; Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). 40. See Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12, no. 4 (1987): 687–718. 41. Dianna Fuss, Essentially Speaking; Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1. 42. The notion of risk in essentialist/constructionist debates was remarked upon by Fuss following the publication of an article that confessed fear of this risk: Stephen Heath, ‘Difference,’ Screen. 19, no.3 (Autumn 1978): 50–112. See Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 18–21. 43. See Philippe Ariès and André Béjin eds., Sexualités occidentales (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982); Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005); and James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 44. See Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). See also Carolyn Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 45. See R.I. Moore, The Formation Of A Persecuting Society: Power And Deviance In Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Blackwell 1987); Also Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1991). 46. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5–7.