PHILIPPE RAYNAUD
Feminism and the
Ancien Regime
The exhaustion of French revolutionary passions over the past decade has
given new life to an idea once dear to nineteenth-century liberals and to
Alexis de Tocqueville in particular. Those liberals maintained that since
certain essential and disturbing traits of the French Revolution were in–
herited from the
ancien regime
-
its arrogance, its authoritarianism, its cult
of heroism - then the stabilization of what Tocqueville called the
"democratic spirit" would depend heavily on overcoming the
"revolutionary spirit," since the latter is so deeply infused with the worst
aspects of the "aristocratic spirit."
One wonders whether the abandonment of these antidemocratic
"spirits" is either possible or desirable in France today. I think especially
of the paradoxical way they have survived and developed simultaneously
in the French political tradition to produce an intricate web of customs
and institutions that are intimately connected in the minds and habits of
the French themselves, and especially in their passions. French history of–
fers many examples, such as the development of public law and of the
secular republican school system, that reveal the distinctive mix of French
passions and "spirits" to be not necessarily less favorable to democracy
than the mores of other, reputedly more "natural," democratic cultures.
To support such an interpretation I propose here to leave political his–
tory behind, though, and to venture instead onto a riskier path leading
to the far more intimate domain of male-female relations. It is a com–
monplace that relations between French men and women are indeed dif–
ferent from those in other democratic countries, a difference usually at–
tributed to some archaic holdover from the
ancien regime.
But a closer
look at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows us how the devel–
opment of relations between the sexes down to our day has deeply
marked the history of French democracy itsel£
It is no secret that feminism as a doctrine and as a culture is rela–
tively weak in France compared to its obvious vigor in the United States
or (in different ways) in West Germany. Of course, in the 1970s there
was a very active and militant feminist movement in France which had
many achievements to its credit, notably liberalizing contraception and
abortion. There have always been eminent French women writers greatly
admired in the United States as representatives of "women's writing,"
and even in the French university there is a strong interest in women's
history. But the ideological enterprise called "women's studies" found on
