Women Intellectuals in Post-68 France

Petitions and Polemics

I. Long

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349348800, 9780230363069
• eBook ISBN: 9781137318770
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Accounts of public intellectuals in France and French feminism have focused on a specific set of women thinkers overlooking some major women intellectuals. This book aims redresses this balance by studying these forgotten intellectuals creating a cultural and theoretical re-evaluation of the gendered phenomenon of the public intellectual in France.

1

Women Intellectuals

Introduction: Women and the intellectual paradigm

As some critics would have it, post-war women intellectuals remain rarities, existing in small numbers and whose work, by and large, is incompatible with canonical studies of the intellectual. In the light of such affirmations, this chapter therefore asks what it means to be an intellectual au féminin, in the process revealing the gendered nature of the phenomenon and goes on to elucidate the experiences of the women in this book, contextualising their work in relation to developments in feminism and wider political events before situating their work in relation to that of the more high-profile figures of Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Sartrean and Foucauldian visions of the intellectual and their relationship to power, together with Bourdieusian analyses of cultural capital, will be considered in order to throw light on the evolution of the post-war intellectual in France and the implications of this for women. Gisèle Halimi, Françoise Giroud and Benoîte Groult and the other women to feature in this work are often thought of separately as writers, campaigners or activists but here it will be argued that they are more than this. The purpose here then is not merely to recount their interventions or simply to map their contributions in specific cases. Nor is the sole task to analyse their particular views on feminism, although this is of course inextricably linked to their actions; of greater concern is to analyse the phenomenon of the intellectual in relation to this particular group of women.

While not agreeing totally with Zygmunt Bauman’s view expressed in the warning that any ‘attempt to set aside those who “are intellectuals” from those who are not, to draw an objective boundary for the group [ … ] makes no sense and is doomed from the start’,¹ Julliard and Winock’s dictionary, which seeks precisely to undertake such a task, serves as an illuminating gender test case, reflecting to some degree the perception of intellectuals in France.² Of course, their reference tome is neither definitive nor exhaustive but in sheer numerical terms its make-up is revealing: of the some 550 entrants for individuals, around 40 are women. While the public profile and all-round interventions of Marguerite Duras, Gisèle Halimi and Françoise Giroud, and latterly Elisabeth Badinter, mean they do indeed feature, this has not been the case for the other women we shall investigate. Constrained by commercial pressures, Julliard emphasised how difficult the selection process was as the publisher was anxious not to run to two volumes. Nevertheless, Julliard and Winock are at pains to provide a rationale to justify their selection policy via the inclusion of a definition of an intellectual:

Le lecteur ne trouvera donc pas dans les pages qui suivent le Who’s Who des écrivains et des scientifiques, des artistes et des universitaires qui comptent d’abord par l’œuvre qui les a légitimés, mais ceux d’entre eux, qui à un moment ou à un autre, se sont mêlés, comme dit Sartre [ … ] ‘de ce qui ne les regarde pas’. Encore ne suffit-il pas d’entrer dans le champ de l’action publique, notamment politique, ou de faire appel à l’opinion, pour mériter le nom d’ ‘intellectuel’. Il faut y accéder en apportant avec soi, en guise de valeur ajoutée, la notoriété que l’on s’est acquise dans un autre domaine.³

Julliard and Winock make no distinction between intellectuel and intellectuelle, using the pronoun il and elle conjointly, so clearly women are theoretically playing on level terrain. Indeed, the fact that Halimi and Giroud have been selected for the dictionary shows that they do register on Julliard and Winock’s radar – if they fit the mould, then why not others like them? Julliard’s assertion that the dictionary reflects reality raises an important question: have there really been so few women intellectuals in France? Of course, women may operate differently, prioritising distinctive themes of intervention, but the fact remains that male intellectuals are the ‘authorised’, publicly sanctioned voices. Nicole Racine stresses the need for a reappraisal of intellectual history, one which writes women into the chronicles:

En histoire intellectuelle, le concept de ‘genre’, comme toute clé de lecture ne peut être univoque. Il a permis de s’interroger sur la construction historique des rôles masculins et féminins, de faire sortir de l’ombre des intellectuelles que leur appartenance au ‘deuxième sexe’ avait voué jusque-là à l’anonymat ou à l’occultation de la place qu’elles occupent dans le champ intellectuel, avec la conviction que les rapports entre intellectuels et intellectuelles sont constitutifs d’une histoire des intellectuels à venir.⁴

Defining the public intellectual reveals the problems facing women intellectuals; the way in which it has been configured in France has in practice resulted in their exclusion.

Tensions between women’s history, feminism and the history of intellectuals

Women interested in women’s identity and women’s concerns are commonly thought of as ‘feminist’ and, in turn, the application of this term ‘feminist’ engenders particular consequences for them as intellectuals. It is perhaps sometimes all too easy to conflate important feminists with intellectuals. It may be less easy to argue for militant suffragists or single-issue campaigners for women’s rights to occupy a place as intellectual. Susan Conrad’s point, elaborated upon by Elaine Showalter, is an important one: ‘Two common assumptions – that every feminist is an intellectual and that every woman intellectual is a feminist (or thinks only in terms of women’s rights, roles, etc.) – have hopelessly obscured the accomplishments of women and arbitrarily restricted their range of interests.’⁵ This dichotomy between women intellectuals and feminism is an important one: the women in this book are not single-issue campaigners working on a specific theme (the right to vote for example). As will become clear, their campaigns are numerous and varied and their involvement with feminist issues and women’s causes should not exclude them from consideration as intellectuals.

From Julliard and Winock’s dictionary it can be seen that two of the women to feature in this study, Halimi and Giroud, are present, joined in the 2002 edition by Elisabeth Badinter, their high media profiles no doubt a help to their case. This raises the question as to whether media intellectuals have a greater chance of inclusion. Media profile alone cannot be the sole defining difference between exclusion or inclusion, acceptance or rejection but we will see the importance of what Debray terms ‘the media cycle’ later in the chapter. The changing face of intellectual engagement today may mean that media profile is becoming the central component of intellectual life. Certainly this is the view put forward by Badinter:

Je pense que les intellectuels sont rongés par un mal inévitable qu’est la nécessité de la médiatisation, leur permettant d’être connus. Médiatisation qui passe par le média zapping incarné par la télévision ou les médias, les grands médias populaires que sont la radio et la télévision. De ce fait, nous sommes tous ‘coincés’ entre deux exigences contradictoires: ou vous êtes connu et vous avez une influence, mais pour cela, vous devez passer par ces médias populaires qui ne laissent aucune chance à une pensée structurée, ou bien vous êtes inconnu, un universitaire par exemple qui réalise des travaux très intéressants, mais vous n’avez malheureusement aucun poids sur le plan public.⁶

The relatively few women intellectuals who have managed to break through and gain a sense of the status accorded to male intellectuals have been for many commentators, mere imitators of the classic (and ergo male) model, as in the case of Beauvoir. Beauvoir did not restrict herself to engaging with feminist causes but despite her interventions on a range of issues, she, it seems, is now all too frequently predominantly considered in relation to her involvement in feminism and not to the wider analysis of her thought and political engagement more generally.⁷

Historically, life as a woman intellectual was deemed incompatible with the perceived primary gender roles of wife or mother, as shown by terms such as ‘bluestocking’ or bas-bleu. In fact, women often had to have ‘honorary’ masculine status accorded to them by male intellectuals in order to be accepted in intellectual circles, as in the case of Arvède Barine. Isabelle Ernot intimates that if Barine, a nineteenth-century historian, were to gain acceptance from her male peers she was encouraged to cast off her femininity and emulate, simulate and replicate masculine behaviours:

une femme de lettres [ … ] n’est plus tout à fait une femme, c’est une homme-femme, ‘une être’ particulière. Le domaine de lettres est alors conçu comme d’essence masculine, protégé par le concept des identités. Si une femme y pénètre, s’y donne, elle y perd sa nature féminine pour une nature bâtarde.⁸

Ernot asserts that the two states of woman and intellectual had to be divorced in order to conform with the established mechanisms adopted by their male counterparts: ‘ils [les intellectuels] mettent en valeur qu’elle a en quelque sorte deux identités, celle de femme et celle d’intellectuelle et qu’elle sait les garder distinctes l’une de l’autre’.⁹ This is further suggested by Pascal Balmand: ‘female intellectuals such as Simone Weil are especially criticised (their treason is two-fold as they have strayed from both real life and their own femininity).’¹⁰ Christophe Prochasson gives a characteristic example of how women intellectuals were oftentimes perceived as ‘manly women’, transgressive and unnatural:

L’Intellectuelle est ainsi bien le contraire d’une mère ou d’une épouse. Les signes changeant de sens, elle devient un homme, mais un homme incomplet, impuissant, vicieux. Derrière la femme au statut d’intellectuel, il y a plus ou moins, comme chez toutes celles qui tentent de transcender les ‘frontières de la nature’, la putain, la dévoyée.¹¹

Operating as an intellectual in the public space is, then, seemingly more problematic for women as they confront a perception that they transgress their womanliness when attempting to perform in this traditionally ‘masculine’ zone.

The cultural and social ‘heritage’ of the intellectual

The term ‘heritage’ is used knowingly even though it is one which some feminists find exclusive, reminiscent of patriarchal terminology, because, in official histories of the intellectual, the figure of the intellectual is usually presented first and foremost as male, and often of a certain background. In the accounts such as those discussed in the introduction, an intellectual is usually a man, with some experience of the elite (Parisian) institutions and therefore in possession of a certain level of cultural capital. Using the default masculine pronoun without any disclaimer, Sudhir Hazareesingh paints a picture of the limited parcours, or personal journey, of such an individual:

A true intellectual could first be detected by his educational background: a person who had frequented a prestigious Parisian lycée and then entered one of the capital’s grand institutions of higher learning (such as the Institut des Etudes Politiques, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, or the Ecole Normale d’Administration). [ … ] The term ‘intellectuel’ was reserved for those creative agents who assumed positions of power and authority in the political and cultural authority [ … ] for this accolade to be merited an individual had to be a recognized member of a highly visible group of political and cultural creators, who intervened constantly in national debates about major issues of public life.¹²

In a definition of the intellectual, such cultural factors and sociological background may explain the absence of writers such as Groult, Halimi, Giroud and Parturier and others like them as they do not fit the cultural criteria normatively ascribed to the term ‘intellectual’.¹³ In order to be designated as an intellectual, they would have to have the right socio-cultural provenance and be from the stock of the intellectual elites. Those who do not meet these criteria are likely to be placed outside the parameters which govern the definition of the ‘intellectual’ in France. The construction of the term ‘intellectual’ appears to have less to do with universalist defence of truths but appertains instead to a precise set of criteria in terms of educational institutions, publishing houses and political or academic posts to which few women have succeeded in gaining access.¹⁴ Further factors affecting the place of women in narratives of the intellectual may arise from the fact that intellectual prestige has been long associated with cultural institutions and hierarchical frameworks which have been dominated by men. For example, the election of Marguerite Yourcenar to the Académie française in 1981 represented the first time a woman had gained admittance to this bastion of the cultural elite since its inception in 1635.¹⁵ The election of Assia Djebar in June 2005 could be viewed as a radical step; for the first time a woman from Algeria was admitted to the prestigious institution on the Quai Conti; as une écrivaine engagée, Djebar’s election heralded a real departure from traditional representations of the organisation as staid and hidebound. Although the opening up of the universities to women, complemented by the rapid expansion in the number of university students in the 1960s, allowed women greater opportunity to access higher education, some of the intellectuelles featuring in this study, such as Françoise Giroud, did not follow a university bachelor degree programme. Of those entering higher education, some progressed to academic careers as in the case of Sallenave, Djebar, Ernaux and Badinter, while others such as Halimi entered the legal profession. Furthermore, some intellectuals, writers and artists have intentionally eschewed the university route, preferring to remain detached from the university network and thus avoiding the dichotomy explored in Régis Debray’s Le scribe.¹⁶ Debray examines the paradox and source of potential conflict of interest of being simultaneously in the employ of those whose policies are under scrutiny, for example critiquing the State while drawing a state salary and related benefits as an academic. There have, therefore, been variables in terms of the academic status and professional background for the group of women in this study. How important these are in the make-up of the intellectual is questionable: all have used professional kudos acquired in other domains to intervene in public life beyond their specific fields.

Theoretical models: Sartre, Foucault and Bourdieu

Jean-Paul Sartre for many represents the essence of the intellectuel engagé who must not remain detached from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Women Intellectuals
• 2. In the Eye of the Storm: Women and Polemics in the Public Space
• 3. La mise en question du réel: Danièle Sallenave
• 4. À la recherche de soi-même: Gisèle Halimi
• 5. Dans la lignée de Beauvoir: Elisabeth Badinter
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index