Liberty, Equality, Sorority
by Jane Kramer
New Yorker
Issue of 2000-05-29
Posted 2004-11-15
This week in the magazine and here online, Jane Kramer writes about French President Jacques Chirac's stance on secularism in the classroom, and how a ban on religious attire in schools is alienating young Muslim women. The "veil law" is opposed by the French feminists Françoise Gaspard and Claude Servan-Schreiber, both of whom were driving forces behind a political-parity law, which Kramer wrote about in this piece, from May of 2000.
It looks, at first, as if nothing has changed in Paris, at least where women are concerned. Th streets are full of them, and they look good--like Paris women. The shops cater to thei presumed desires. Wispy pink garter belts State-of-the-art salad bowls. Imported tartan for the baby. There is still a parfumerie on nearly every block. You hold out a wrist or lift your hair and walk into a cloud of jasmine or tea rose with (this year) "vanilla tones." And if you say "feminism" to the young woman getting sprayed beside you, she will quickly refer you to her mother, and then apologize for her mother, saying that, after all, women were a little hysterical, a little radical, in her mother's day--you couldn't blame them--but that things are normal now.
Well, not entirely. The air du temps in Paris today is not a scent from Nina Ricci, and it's certainly not vanilla, as redolent as the Sunday smells in the kitchen your mother abandoned when she went to the barricades, in May of 1968, or marched to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in August of 1970, to lay a wreath for the soldier's unknown wife. It's called parité--literally, parity--and it's about political power, and the women who thought it up know now that the smartest thing they did was to call it parité, because parité sounds so French and friendly and enlightened, like a citizen's right to free samples at a perfume store. Some French men--they regret it now--confused parité with their pleasant republican notion of "liberté, égalité, fraternité," the rallying cry of the revolution; they heard the word and it sounded nice, and they assumed they would never have to think about it again. "Liberté, égalité, fraternité " was said by the boys of 1789 to be a "neutral"--you could say ungendered--concept. But it has turned out to be a hard fraternity, and not just semantically, for a girl to join.
Parité is not a neutral concept. It's a constitutional amendment--June 28, 1999--acknowledging the right of French women to equal access to elected office. And it's a new law--May 3, 2000--obliging the country's political parties to fill fifty per cent of the candidacies in virtually any race with women, or lose a corresponding share of their campaign funding, which in France the state supplies. It's also a shrewd projection by pollsters, and by the politicians who pay them to target the issues that will bring in votes and, just as important, to help the country look modern and "not like Greece"--the only country in Western Europe with a lower percentage of women in its parliament. And it's a public debate of unusual rancor, given that it's a debate not only between men and women but also among women; and women, as every French man sitting on power he is loath to share will tell you, are supposed to be too civilized, too "superior," to fight like men.
It can take a while to understand how parité happened. If you ask most French men for an explanation, they will smile and shrug and call it the air du temps and plead ignorance--and, in a way, they are ignorant, since, with a few volatile exceptions, they tended to sit out the parité debate, hoping, perhaps, that parité would disappear, and not wanting to appear retrograde in case it didn't. Now that parité is law--the first paritaire elections will begin next spring--the women involved in that debate are objects of some fascination, and even of a certain terror. They are, of course, Paris women. One of the points of parité is that the interests of women in the rest of the country have been so poorly served by the men claiming to represent them that very few of those women have had a way even to identify those interests, let alone make it to the capital to promote them. Paris is the salon where things like parité get decided, and, more to the point, the salon where women actually have some influence in the circles that decide them. Yesterday, that influence was discreet, or, as a French man would say, seductive. Today, those women are on the front page of every paper, and they are suddenly as familiar to people on the street as the city's ubiquitous, aging media philosophes, like Bernard-Henri Lévy--one of the few men who actually took a stand on parité. He was against it.
Parité in France began eight years ago, with a book. It was called "Au Pouvoir, Citoyennes! Liberté, Égalité, Parité," and it was written by three Paris feminists: a jurist named Anne Le Gall; a journalist named Claude Servan-Schreiber; and, most important, Servan-Schreiber's partner, a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales named Françoise Gaspard, who had once spent eleven years as a Socialist politician--all of them, as she likes to say, "illuminating." Gaspard has sat in the European Parliament and in the French National Assembly, and now she is the French representative for the rights of women at the United Nations. But she was most famously the mayor of the town she originally came from--Dreux, in the Beauce, about an hour and a quarter west of Paris and a world away.
Gaspard was elected in Dreux in 1977, at the age of thirty-two--which made her the youngest woman running a French city (and one of only two women running a French city with more than thirty thousand people)--although what made her a famous mayor had nothing to do with her age or her talent. It had to do with the fact that, a few years after she took over her mairie, the Front National decided to turn Dreux into a proving ground for far-right infiltration and intimidation. Gaspard was brutally smeared. She was harassed by thugs. Her life was threatened. Her parents were told to buy a coffin. And what a lot of other women in politics learned from her experience was this: that Paris's Socialist intellectuals might support and even encourage a woman like Françoise Gaspard in the Party, but the men who rallied the Party for them in places like the Beauce--the backroom dealers, the old militants, the men with the local interests and the local power--were not unhappy to see a disturbingly brilliant woman humbled, and some of those men even thought she deserved it for embarrassing them with her strong, principled "Paris" views. Gaspard is a shy and rather guarded person, but she steeled herself to do right by the Socialists, and through it all was an exceptional mayor. In the end, she even tried to protect the Party--she stepped down from the mairie the night after she was reëlected, in 1983--but the Party did very little to protect her. Five years later, when she wanted to run for senator, it distanced itself from her, and she started teaching instead. Not long afterward, she and Servan-Schreiber decided to write a history of women in the Socialist Party. They got together with Le Gall--who was an old radical feminist, and already a fierce paritaire--and the project changed. Their book turned into a short primer on political reality in France, and a prescription for changing that reality, and it was a surprising success, perhaps because on the surface parité sounded like such a reasonable thing to support.
The French are much less interested in being politically correct than in being what you could call logically correct, and there was an undeniable logic to the paritaire position. In 1992, when the book appeared, there were only thirty-three women in a National Assembly of five hundred and seventy-seven deputies. Who could object to easing the way for more? No one was talking about forcing people to vote for women; parité was about giving people a chance to vote for women if they liked those women. And no one was talking, technically, about quotas. Quotas are illegal in France--in 1982, the Constitutional Court killed a law that would have imposed a twenty-five-per-cent-women quota for municipal-election lists, saying that it violated the republic's founding principles--and, in any event, the French hate them. The paritaire argument was that, while twenty-five per cent is a quota, fifty per cent is merely the female half of the "universal," or of "the people," or of the "neutral citizen." It was an argument that in many ways bothered Gaspard, who thought of parité as a political remedy, not as a sacred principle ("Of course, fifty per cent is still a quota, and no one wants that," she told me recently, with a sigh and a small smile), but she made it anyway. She saw parité as an efficient "strategy for forcing history," indispensable to French democracy but not necessarily a democratic process, and in this she was close to Geneviève Fraisse, who recently spent a year as the Prime Minister's special deputy for the rights of women and who, at one point during the parité debate, reminded the French that a hundred years ago they had to write laws compelling children to go to school. "Equality is not a natural or spontaneous process," Fraisse said. "It's something you achieve by force of law."
What made parité suddenly so attractive to the Party strategists, embarrassed in Europe and alarmed by the extent to which they had lost women like Gaspard, and even lost women who might be voting for them, was the fact that, whatever else happened to the idea of parité in France, it was not likely to get tossed into the trash can of American ideas that the French reject--ideas having to do with affirmative action and multiculturalism and communitarianism and all the other isms of an invasion that spells the beginning of the end of France. The French sociologist Éric Fassin, who studied and taught in the United States and now runs the doctoral program in social sciences at the École Normale Supérieure, says you can understand the entire evolution of the parité argument as an attempt not to sound American.
America, in fact, had never even thought of parité, and still hasn't, and its record on women in political office is practically as dismal as France's. On the other hand, America had something France didn't. It had feminists. It had women talking about women in art and politics and literature. It had women's-studies programs and women's-history programs, and it had serious graduate students who didn't refer you to their mothers when you mentioned a women's movement. French students, who have to find jobs in their own system, stayed notably away from programs like that. (The writer Hélène Cixous told me that the doctorate she got in women's studies twenty-six years ago is still the only one of its kind in France.) But American students were interested, and some of those students ended up in Paris, in the seminars Gaspard was organizing. She put them to work looking at women and political power.
At the time, there was virtually nothing left of the French feminist groups that had sprung up briefly in the nineteen-seventies, under the vague umbrella of a Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes. Even in Paris (where the biggest feminist bookstore of the seventies is now a maternity clothing store), the movement was as good as dead, replaced by a designer collection of literary and psychoanalytic theorists, like Cixous and Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, who spoke (and wrote) an entrancing and often entirely mystifying language of their own, and, as Kristeva herself told me, "were for art and literature" and "the sweetness of life" and "la mère sacrée." They were interested in the "female voice" and in dreams and in the permutations of eroticism, but while some of them, like Kristeva and Cixous, supported parité they were not at all interested in plotting feminist political campaigns. Their idea of a party was apt to be dinner at the Derridas, and Irigaray's major contribution to French feminist Realpolitik was to suggest that France was really two societies, one masculine and one feminine, with different, even contradictory values that could be reconciled only in a gouvernement de couple.
As for the old activists--"the mothers," people called them, although the mothers referred to themselves as "the daughters of Simone de Beauvoir"--they were more or less retired from battle. Liliane Kandel, who had worked at Les Temps Modernes with Beauvoir and Sartre, and still helps edit the magazine, says that the problem with French feminism was that it turned in on itself and away from politics--away, really, from any engagement--ceding the field to a few cranky theorists, like Irigaray, who were resigned to what Kandel calls "the idea of an ineluctable difference" between the sexes. Kandel likes to talk about the solidarity of the old days--about that famous march to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in 1970, and about the "mourning procession" she led to the Statue of Liberty replica, on the Seine, in 1982, to mark the death of the Equal Rights Amendment in America. But most feminists today would say that solidarity was already a thing of the past by the late seventies, when the feminist publisher Antoinette Fouque--she founded Édition des Femmes--decided that she owned the words "women's liberation movement" and actually tried to sue another feminist publisher for copyright. Françoise Pasquier, the woman she sued, kept her own press going into the nineteen-nineties. Now she runs a fiction collection at Fayard. "You can't be against parité," she told me. "Our old feminism wasn't populaire. We didn't think about the state, about the society, about making any alliances with political power. But to say, 'We want action,' as Gaspard did, that's populaire. Great battles are populaire."
In 1992, Gaspard got a grant from th European Commission to look at traditiona women's organizations--"the ones," she says, "no one in Paris talked about." What she an her students discovered, early in their research was that there were more than three millio French women organized and active in thos traditional groups (groups like the Associatio of Catholic Women or the Women's Civic an Social Union, groups you'd never associat with feminism), and that most of them, left an right, thought that parité wasn't a bad idea and might even be a good one. In a way, Gaspard discovered how much the expectations, if not the lives, of ordinary French women had changed since those few militant feminist years--the years of the mothers--without anyone, not even the women themselves, noticing.
It wasn't simply that so many women worked now; they were still traditionalists at home, at least by Europe's standards. They did the housework and cooked the meals and raised the children, and they rarely dreamed of asking their husbands to lend a hand. One of my best French friends, a psychologist who drives home from her office every lunchtime to cook a three-course meal for her husband, glared at me when I asked her why he didn't just go someplace near his office and grab a sandwich, and replied, icily, "It's what I choose to do." She said she believed, like Kristeva, that if you measured the sweetness of life you had to admit that relations between the sexes were "sweeter" in France than anywhere else in Europe, and certainly sweeter than they were in the United States.
The real change in those traditional French women was that, by the nineteen-nineties, they expected more than sweetness. They still talked about amour courtois--courtly love--as if it were actually practiced somewhere outside of a Cluny tapestry, but they also knew that France was a country with a thirty-per-cent divorce rate (fifty per cent in Paris) and the highest consumption of tranquillizers among women in the world. They didn't necessarily want to run France, but they didn't think anyone else should be telling them not to--and, more to the point, they didn't think the men who did run it were thinking very hard, or very well, about their lives and their problems, which (now that they did work) had to do with help and health and pay and time and family, and with why they needed Valium to make it through the day.
Gaspard decided to recruit those women, and she started meeting with their leaders. Servan-Schreiber (who had founded the feminist magazine F fourteen years earlier) began publishing a bimonthly newsletter called Parité Info. Word spread, and, as Gaspard says, "the women asked their mothers." No one really knew why, beyond the air du temps, these women were turning out to be so much more restless than the politicians who had written them off suspected. Most of them hadn't even heard of parité until Parité Info started circulating. They didn't demonstrate for parité. They didn't march or write articles or sign petitions. In the winter of 1993, when Le Monde published an open letter demanding parité, signed by two hundred and eighty-eight men and two hundred and eighty-nine women--one "neutral" citizen for every member of the National Assembly--it was the usual Parisian names you saw, the names that meant something in high political circles. But if you listened to those women--if you went to their meetings and heard them talk--the message they seemed to be sending was that they'd think twice before voting for anyone publicly against parité. Once that was clear, the parité debate began.
Not long ago, I was having lunch in my hote with Françoise Héritier, who holds the chair in anthropology at the Collège de France--Parnassus, in French academic terms. Héritie writes on the subject "masculine/feminine," an presides over an ongoing public seminar at th Collège, and she is much cited by intellectual on both sides of the parité debate, who would like to claim her. For intellectuals, parité isn't only a matter of political practice; it's something that raises fundamental questions about who (or what or why) women in this society are--whether they're "different," or simply one-half of a universal called "the people," or so indistinguishably "everybody" that it doesn't really matter which sex is sitting in the National Assembly making the laws that tell them what to do.
Professor Héritier is an old friend, a modest, sweet-natured person, undeniably distinguished but new to the kind of household-name celebrity that comes when the Prime Minister and his wife--a philosopher named Sylviane Agacinski, whose book "Politique des Sexes" is sometimes credited with making parité respectable--both cite you as an inspiration, the kind of celebrity that gets you the best table at the Montalembert. (It was the table where, just that morning, Bernard-Henri Lévy himself had been holding forth to a couple of journalists, stretched back and intoning the words "liberty" and "orgasm.") Héritier speaks softly, but the people around us, shrewd Parisians catching a whiff of the air du temps, strained after her every word with as much attention as they read their menus. They were fairly discreet while she told me about how it felt, as the only woman with a chair at the Collège, to be expected to take the notes at a meeting. ("Françoise," a colleague had said, "it's for posterity. Someone has to take them.") But when she got to a subject that was not, in my experience, of pressing Parisian interest--the use of high-lipid diets to stimulate early menarche in girls of the tribal nobility in Gabon--a well-known lawyer at the next table was so carried away that he leaped up, leaving his elegant trophy companion with a mouthful of lettuce, extended his hand, and introduced himself, saying that he had always regretted being too busy to drop in on any of Héritier's famous seminars. (She has been giving them for sixteen years.)
Gallantry is the first defense and last resort of an anxious French man--a way of turning the tables that have been turned on him. It may be that French men are beginning to sense that, with the advent of parité, they are in for a kind of feminism that will be much more radical in its consequences than the one that exploded in May of 1968, when girls left home with the Pill in one pocket and a copy of Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" in the other, and believed that the world was theirs. Their feminism, after all, was about rejecting the government, not joining it. And to a great extent their revolution was sexual--something, it has to be said, that very few French men found that difficult to live with, the possible exception being Charles de Gaulle, who had come to prefer the chaste countryside of Ireland, where the age of consent was still somewhere around thirty-five. In fact, when 1968 was over, French men discovered, to their delight, that their private lives were much more interesting than they had been before, while their monopoly on public life--the life of the state--was practically undiminished. Today, that monopoly is threatened.
Françoise de Panafieu was a deputy mayor of Paris until she took on her boss this spring and announced her intention of becoming the city's next and, of course, first woman mayor--"Femme, elle est dans l'air du temps," the weekly Le Point said, by way of explaining that she might win. Panafieu roared with laughter when she described the old patriarchs of the French Senate trying to remain civil in the face of parité (and not doing a very good job, since they tried to kill the law in draft form, and now sixty of them have challenged it as discriminatory in the Constitutional Court). "They are dying of fear," she said, and tipped way back in her chair and roared some more, and it was actually quite a satisfying thought, inasmuch as the senators have managed over the years to keep the number of women in their ranks at five per cent. "Five per cent too many" is the way Panafieu describes their feelings, and she should know, since her mother was in the Senate in the nineteen-eighties and, as she put it, "was made to suffer there." Most of the figures in France are like that five per cent. There are sixty-three women in the National Assembly today--nearly twice as many as there were in 1992, but, as parliaments go, that's still somewhere between Trinidad and Tobago and Syria. There are still fewer than three thousand women mayors in a country with thirty-seven thousand town halls. Panafieu, who belongs to President Jacques Chirac's Gaullist Party, Rassemblement pour la République, says that she "converted" to parité, which was considered a Socialist--or, at any rate, not a Gaullist--cause, when she realized that if you let the men in politics proceed at their own pace it would be the year 3000 before they looked around, say, the National Assembly and thought to ask where the women were.
Michelle Perrot, one of the few prominent French historians with a specialty in the history of women, likes to point out that the origins of French republican misogyny go back to Salic law, which forbade female succession to Europe's Catholic thrones, and which the French (thinking, perhaps, of the calamitous regency of Catherine de Medici) seem to have enforced with more enthusiasm than anyone else in Europe. Perrot thinks that what she calls the "Salic attitude" was so ingrained by the time of the French Revolution that the revolutionaries simply preserved it under another name. They made a religion of the state--sacralized the state, really--and conferred a kind of divine right on the male citizen, and the result was that their "one-and-indivisible" republic, which granted civil rights to women on rationalist and universalist principles, was able at the same time to exclude them from political rights entirely and to enshrine men as the "political representatives" of the French family for the next hundred and fifty years. (French feminists are fond of quoting Tocqueville's remark about how in America "everybody votes except servants, slaves, and natives nourished by the state.")
Women didn't even vote in France until after the Second World War. The question of suffrage was raised, obviously, during the revolution, and again in 1848, and again in 1870--whenever France got rid of a king or an emperor, French men would dust off their "neutral" concept of liberty, equality, and fraternity in a one-and-indivisible republic, and then decide, with inscrutable illogic, that the indivisible was male. Pétain did think, briefly, of giving the vote to widows. But the first French leader to actually fight for suffrage was Léon Blum. He wanted to appoint three women to his cabinet (and, in 1936, he did), but at the end of the day not even those women had been allowed to cast their ballots to elect him.
It was, finally, de Gaulle who promised the vote to women. The General was no feminist, but he did see women as his best bet for beating the Communists at the polls once the war was over and the Germans gone. His promise came by decree, from Algiers, in 1944--to the great distress of Free French politicians from the Radical Party (rationalists and Freemasons and freethinkers guarding the flame of Enlightenment thought), who had tried to stop him on the ground that French women were too susceptible to dark, irrational Catholic influences to make responsible political decisions. But that, maybe, was what de Gaulle was counting on. Women voted for him, and, except for a couple of years in the mid-fifties, when Pierre Mendès France was Prime Minister, France was Eisenhower country for the next thirty-five years. The hard-won feminist victories of the sixties and seventies--the legalization of contraception, of divorce by mutual consent, and, finally, of abortion--were reluctantly passed into law by Gaullist or center-right governments, and one reason they were passed at all was that the women who shepherded them into law were conservatives, like Simone Veil, who was Giscard d'Estaing's health minister and had a following that no politician could ignore. Veil had worked as hard as anyone in France for women's causes--the abortion law is known as la loi Veil--but she herself claimed to despise politics. She thought that a woman should be a "bearer of ideas" (or, you could say, another kind of mother), and while she held a number of lofty posts and sat for three years in the European Parliament, she never ran for higher office, nor, as it turns out, did she ever seriously consider trying. It may be that she just got tired. In 1981, when François Mitterrand was elected, and the left took over, men were still the official "heads of family," and it was illegal for a married woman to sell any of her own property without her husband's permission.
None of this is surprising if you know France. What is surprising is how many women believed in their second-sex status, or at least believed that the sweetness of life in France depended on it. Balzac once wrote that in France women were slaves and all you had to know was how to put them on a throne, and, of course, it was Balzac's century that made a myth of bourgeois domestic life, locked women inside that myth, and convinced them that they really ruled. The result was that, a century later, a lot of French women still think of politics as something they have been spared--something that men, who like politics, have been doing for them, however badly. They are all for women in government as long as it's other women, and, in a way, given the tedium of most political lives you can't blame them. The pols in the provinces are not entirely delusional when they complain about the trouble they're going to have next spring putting together some version of a "chabadabada" slate--a man-woman-man-woman slate, after the theme song in Claude Lelouch's movie "Un Homme et Une Femme." They may be misogynists, but one reason a lot of them fear parité is that they fear the prospect of persuading the women they know to run.
The idea of parité originally came from Europe. I was told that it dates from the fall of the Wall, and evolved out of the guidelines designed for East-bloc countries petitioning to enter the European Community. But the only French politicians at all interested back then were the Greens, who, as it happens, had already started fielding paritaire lists on their own. France was so torn between staying "French" and becoming prominently "European" that most of the politicians hadn't even noticed that their neighbors were already slipping women into office, and that they were doing it gracefully, without laws to persuade them. The Scandinavians did it first. They started at the grass roots, encouraging women to run for local office, educating them in politics, going slowly, and getting everyone used to having them, so to speak, around. The result was that by the mid-nineties forty-three per cent of the deputies in the Swedish parliament were women, and no one in Sweden besides a few old Calvinist pastors thought this was at all strange. Marc Abeles, who studies the French National Assembly, told me that the politicians here might never have noticed if the Scandinavians themselves hadn't entered Europe in the nineties and sent women to the European Parliament--sent them in such numbers that, as Abeles says, "The gap was enormous: their women were the deputies and ours were the secretaries and the mistresses."
By then, of course, there were some women in France with a good deal of political power. But, more often than not, it was power conferred. French politics was still a men's club, with the occasional female guest--like dinner in the old days at the Knickerbocker or the Century. La volonté du prince, the French called it, meaning that those women had power because a man more powerful than they were wanted them to have it. You found them attached to the Élysée or the Prime Minister's office or the ministries, plucked from the top of the class at the École Nationale d'Administration, a school so rarefied that for years three-quarters of the students came not only from Paris but from Paris's four fanciest arrondissements. Or, rather, you found them attached to the men at the Élysée or the Prime Minister's--the best example being François Mitterrand's friend Édith Cresson, a woman of limited talent and chaotic good intentions who, for one disastrous year in the early nineties, was actually Prime Minister herself. Or you found them decorating conservative governments that wanted to look progressive, like the twelve women who were named to Alain Juppé's cabinet in the mid-nineties. Those women were commandeered for so many group pictures that people started calling them the Juppettes. Six months later--on a day of reckoning for women on the right--eight of them were dumped, en masse, like a litter of pretty kittens that had begun to scratch. It was said, in Juppé's defense, that most of the Juppettes had been incompetent, but it was also, famously, said that true parité would arrive only when there were as many incompetent women in French politics as there were incompetent men. (Juppé didn't last long, either.)
Most of the women who began in politics this way were anything but incompetent. They couldn't afford incompetence, and neither, really, could the men who chose them. Mitterrand himself, whose eye for women was as political as it was personal, was enough of a Gaullist at heart to see the wisdom of courting a following of women loyalists during his long career and his fourteen years as France's President. Some of the most prominent women in Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's government owe their start to Mitterrand, and if those women seem to be much more numerous than they really are, it's because Mitterrand chose so shrewdly that today they're the politicians who are actually doing something--the ones you read about and remember. He spotted the Socialist deputy Yvette Roudy--sixty years old now, with five feminist laws to her credit--when she was a young woman translating Betty Friedan. He spotted Élisabeth Guigou, who is the Minister of Justice now, when she was working at the French Embassy in London. He spotted Martine Aubry, the Minister of Labor, when she was known mainly as Jacques Delors's daughter, and launched a career so relentlessly successful that Aubry could well become the country's first woman President. "That's how we all entered," Catherine Tasca--who led the Commission on Laws at the National Assembly, the commission that vetted parité--told me, talking about her generation of women in their fifties. Fifteen years ago, Tasca was running a theatre company in Nanterre; last month, Jospin named her the Minister of Culture. She says that when she and her friends started off in politics it was only because a man at the top said, "Do it!"--and that, in itself, was something of a revolution.
Noëlle Lenoir, who at fifty-two is the youngest person and first woman (Veil is the second) ever to have been appointed to France's Constitutional Court, told me that, whatever the outcome of the senators' court challenge, the appealing thing about parité, for her, was that it would eliminate women like Veil and herself--femmes d'exception, anointed women, women who are used to prove the rule that other women are not so capable and not so smart. Lenoir was in politics once. ("Politics," she says, "was something I claimed as my heritage.") She spent the first half of the nineties as the mayor of a town near Paris called Valmondois (Daumier died there), and, while she had a very good time running that town, she saw that "politics had not evolved." She means that Valmondois was the exception--that even then, outside the small, civilized pale of Paris it didn't really matter who you were or which party you belonged to. Men on the left still harbored the old Radical Party notion of women being too impressionable to honor "the Enlightenment principles," and men on the right, who worried less about Enlightenment principles, thought that politics was simply something men did, like war or soccer or knocking back a pastis with your coffee at six-thirty in the morning, before you went to work. It amounted to the same exclusion. And the fact that by then most French women were working, too, hadn't really made a difference. Geneviève Fraisse told me that, with France's new thirty-five-hour workweek officially starting, she expects to find the men spending their extra hours at the mairie or the soccer club, and the women using them to catch up on the ironing. "The home, the mairie--these are symbolic places," she said. "Our goal isn't women in the mairie at ten at night. The goal is no one in the mairie at ten." Faced with parité, the pols in the provinces have reacted with their own gallantry. "Think of the women!" the mayor of Carpentras, in the South of France, told me. "They have so much to do. They work, they have a family, they have a house to run. And now this! How will they manage?"
There are people on both sides of the debat who think that parité owes at least some of its success to the very traditional influence of the Prime Minister's very untraditional wife. They say that, if Françoise Gaspard "baked the cake," Sylviane Agacinski "put on the icing" that made men try it. Agacinski wasn't part of the first years of the debate; she wasn't particularly political, then or now. When Gaspard's book came out, Agacinski wasn't even married to Lionel Jospin. Her field was the philosophy of art. Her mentors were Derrida and Deleuze. And when she and Jospin did marry--in 1994--she was a woman of forty-nine, with what the French call "a life" behind her. A single mother with a son of ten, a couple of books (one on Kierkegaard) to her credit, and, she says, little interest in being a Prime Minister's First Lady--she calls that "occult power"--or even in playing the part, despite the fact that she's a woman of glowing good looks and considerable charm. She receives her students and her friends at home in black jeans and a pullover sweater, and "dresses" for lectures by throwing on a dark-red velvet blazer, and she told me once that the only time she goes along on one of her husband's official trips is when it's to someplace exotic, like China--someplace she's always wanted to visit.
Agacinski thinks of parité as the trip they took separately, though they ended up in the same place. She says that in 1992 she started reading--Gaspard for the politics; Janine Mossuz-Lavau, at Sciences-Po, for the sociology; Françoise Héritier for the anthropology, or what Agacinski calls "the mixité of the universal" (Héritier herself is "mixed" on the subject of parité); American feminist historians like Joan Scott; anyone who could help her refine a position. She didn't agree with Geneviève Fraisse, who reversed the Kantian dictum to say that parité was bad theory and good practice. She didn't agree with Scott, who saw paradox at the center of most feminist thinking, including her own. Agacinski decided that the philosophical basis for parité was very sound: there was one "human universal"; its definition was "men and women"; and it was the denial of this "universality of difference," and not the acknowledgment of difference, that had reduced French women to their second-sex status.
This was not a position likely to win the hearts of feminist radicals like Gaspard, who are wary of seemingly reductionist notions of sexual identity, and it certainly didn't endear her to the Jacobins of the debate, notably the philosopher Élisabeth Badinter and the jurist Evelyne Pisier, who opposed parité on what they called humanist and universalist grounds. Badinter and Pisier are women of exceptional privilege and influence in Paris's intellectual circles. They wrote crisp, contemptuous articles against parité, and eventually Badinter, who is herself the wife of a famous politician--Robert Badinter is a senator and former justice minister--took on Agacinski in an exchange of essays in the Nouvel Observateur. When we talked about those essays, Badinter told me that, to her mind, the French should be thinking less about the number of women in the National Assembly than about the fact that there isn't a single North African--"Frankly, it's harder to be a North African than to be a woman, but say that, and the paritaires answer, 'Women are not a category like the others.' " And she called me later to say that "as a Jew in France, whose family wore the yellow star, I reject all essentialisms." When I talked to Pisier, she said, "Parité leads to an idea I cannot accept--that women have a different way of thinking."
But, most of all, Agacinski's enthusiasm for parité on what she called "anthropological principle" did not endear her to the intellectuals in Paris's gay community, who were busy promoting a law of their own involving the civil and domestic status of homosexual couples, and who thought that Agacinski's (in the words of one gay critic) "two-headed hydra called humanity" flew in the face of contemporary understandings of sexuality. Their law was called the Pacte Civile de Solidarité, or pacs, and while a version of it was passed last fall, it wasn't the version they had wanted, which would have given gays and lesbians the right to marry and adopt children. Some of them blamed parité. Not parité itself but Agacinski's promotion of parité, which, they say, took a radical idea and slipped it into a very traditional vision of French society and the French family. They thought that her argument about sexual duality being "the only universal difference" idealized the rights of a certain kind of people and, by implication, discredited the demands of anyone who wasn't that kind of people. It would be fairer to say that, as far as the country's more macho politicians were concerned, the gay argument about sexual variety being "the only universal constant" made Agacinski's sound mild. There were furious debates about pacs in the Assembly for at least a year, and, in a way,they exhausted the opposition. By January, when the first draft of the parité law was presented, the harshest words anybody had for that idea turned out to be the ones you had already read in the paper, at the Café de Flore.
Agacinski is puzzled by her critics, especially her female critics. She thinks they live in a kind of republican élite ("Those women in high places are very attached to their high places," she told me) and don't take into account the conditions in which most French women live their lives, and maybe even believe that belonging to an élite means not identifying with women at all. "Our 'universal' is an abstraction," she said. "We talk about equality, but I agree with Hannah Arendt: for equality to be equality, it has to be concrete, it has to happen." That isn't so different from what most paritaires were saying, but it was certainly different for Lionel Jospin to be hearing it from her, and for the French to be hearing it from him. One woman put it this way: "Agacinski is the wife of the Prime Minister. Her roots are Polish. He's Protestant, and they represent the family in a Latin country. I say that's good. We've come from far behind."
In the end, of course, parité was the volonté du prince, and the prince of the moment was, undeniably, Jospin, who had become Prime Minister three years earlier. Jospin is a patient and honorable survivor of the Socialist Party wars, and he had wanted a cause, something dramatic to attach himself to, something to define his term. His slogan as a Socialist in the shadow of the Mitterrand years was "the freedom to invent!"--an imperative he took to include inventing himself as a different kind of leader. Running for office in '97, he put parité at the center of his platform--knowing, perhaps, that it was the one invention that he could be reasonably sure of patenting. Gaspard, who received a Légion d'Honneur from Jospin after the elections that year ("It was the first paritaire chevaliers' list" is the way she describes it), has become a huge fan. She says that "without Lionel Jospin parité never would have happened," and she's right.
Of course, there is a strong possibility that parité is a thorny gift, like flowers the day after your anniversary. Maybe French men know something that French women only suspect--that the real power is somewhere else now, in the boardrooms, in the investment banks, in that mystical globalized cyberspace where money dies and is born again, in the big Brussels computer where "Europe" lives and old notions of politics are as obsolete as a typewriter. There's a woman at the head of the Gaullist Party today (there's even a woman at the head of the French Academy, which is arguably harder to get into), but there are no women running any of France's big financial institutions, and women hold less than seven per cent of the top executive jobs at the country's five thousand biggest companies and corporations. Noëlle Lenoir told me about a politician she knows--a good politician--who complained that, for him, politics wasn't profitable anymore; he wasn't talking about money but simply about making a difference and having an influence that mattered. The French have made an ideology of their republic, but in truth there's not much ideology left in the mainstream of French politics. The grandes prises de decision that Gaspard talked about in her seminars a couple of years ago are no longer the decisions slipped into those little "yes" and "no" slots in the wall of the Assembly chambers. Politicians today are supposed to broker interests, not create them, and to make life tranquil and civilized and smooth, like good French wives. The work they do is a kind of housekeeping, like ironing, and I don't know many men who iron. On the other hand, it may be ironing, not politics, that's been devalued.
The political women, by and large, don't care. They are used to keeping house. Most of them like parité because they think it means that France will be keeping its own house better; they see parité as an antidote to the mess that men, ruthlessly in pursuit of power and money, usually leave behind. Some of them like parité on principle. Some like it politically. (Élisabeth Guigou told me, with no evident irony, that Sylviane Agacinski was "the greatest thinker" in the country, a claim Agacinski would certainly dispute.) Some like it because they know that, like abortion in the United States, it stands for a whole set of attitudes and issues, and that those issues will have to be addressed if parité is going to succeed. Some even like it because it got the intellectuals in Paris arguing, and their argument, mystifying as it often was, gave the country time to get used to the idea of having more women in office, and even get a little bored with the idea--to think of it as old news, to want it over and done with. Not that they are all comfortable with parité. You don't need to be a legal scholar to see that parité stretches if not the spirit then the letter of France's constitution. Some of the most ardent paritaires were actually quite uneasy about seeing that constitution amended, as it was last year, to introduce the principle of "l'égal accès des hommes et des femmes aux mandats électoraux et fonctions électives"; they'd thought that the law they were drafting on parité was both constitutional and sufficient. They hadn't wanted to enshrine parité, they said, only to pass it. They were grateful to Agacinski, but they thought of parité more in the way Gaspard and her friends had intended, as a piece of emergency legislation--a way to start redressing an injustice in French political practice, a way to reform old habits and entitlements and set precedents that would eventually turn that legislation into history.
On May 3rd, only two of the sixty-thre women in the National Assembly publicl opposed parité. One of those two women didn't vote. The other voted no, claiming the same divine authority that had prompted her to bring her Bible to the National Assembly during the pacs debate and wave it around the chamber as a warning. The men, who were under other, more earthly instructions, gritted their teeth and, with two exceptions, voted yes, in the interest of saving their own seats in the next elections. Some did it graciously, and a few had even been paritaire to begin with, like Bernard Roman, who is famous as the first deputy in the history of the French Republic to take a paternity leave. Some were less gracious. The kindest thing that Jean-Pierre Chevènement--the Minister of the Interior and, as such, the government's official rapporteur of any election laws--ever had to say about parité was that "a revolution can't succeed without a little pragmatism." (He thought that parts of the law were "legally contestable and politically excessive.") But none of them had a choice, really. Their orders were to stay out of the discussion, at least in public, and let the women prove--or hang--themselves. (Those were the house rules in a lot of places; Badinter claims that the editor of one Paris paper told her, "We decided to let the women here decide democratically what our position should be.")
The man giving the orders on the right was, naturally, the President, Jacques Chirac. Chirac had installed a bipartisan Observatoire sur la Parité in the fall of 1995, and had been officially, if somewhat bemusedly, paritaire since his own day of reckoning the following spring, when ten of the most important political women in France, some of them from Chirac's party, published a manifesto in L'Express, angrily demanding parité. After that, of course, everybody was officially "for" women. Which is not to say that everybody was happy. The Gaullist pols were uneasy, because the Socialists had tried out a paritaire list of candidates for the European Parliament two years earlier and had done terribly with that list. As for the Socialists themselves, they were even more uneasy, especially after Jospin insisted on running, in 1997, at the head of a list that was thirty per cent women, and not much more than half those women won seats in the Assembly. The obvious solution wasn't to give up parité; it was that every party should be paritaire. And never mind if that, in a way, was back to the old rules, or if the women who ran in '97, and lost, complained about having been handed the election districts no one else wanted, the districts that belonged to the other side. Most of those women were too smart to complain for long, at least out loud, since the point of parité, the seductively French point, was to give women a chance to lose, like men, not to expect men or even other women to prefer them.
French politics is, after all, French. Deals are struck, but there's no real pretense of stumbling your way to consensus. The system is royal. As Michelle Perrot likes to say, the revolution didn't change this; it simply replaced the king with what you could call a class of super-citizens--the citizens who know best when it comes to what's good for the people or what the people should do, and this means that the people accept an astonishing amount of discipline when someone in charge demands it. (Think of Paris in 1968, after the barricades came down.) Parité is a kind of discipline. Gaspard, who watched the first round of voting, in January, told me, "I know the deputies. They voted for it and came to me later to say, 'It's all your fault.'"
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