The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern
When historians began to examine the French Revolution in its totality by including the experience of women, they found that the ideology of liberty, equality, and fraternity harbored an aggressively misogynist element. The fall of the monarchy and the Terror brought the exclusion of women’s political clubs and executions of prominent women. Feminist historians have found that women had held political influence in the absolutist court and salons of Old Regime France, only to be segregated to the domestic sphere with the advent of the French Revolution and bourgeois civil society. Literary historians as well have portrayed eighteenth-century women as occupying a central role in the public life of letters under the monarchy, only to lose sway after 1789.
Carla Hesse, in The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern, attempts to debunk this argument. The author sets out to prove that French women did not experience their Enlightenment alongside eighteenth-century men of letters who frequented their philosophical salons, but in the turbulence of the Revolution and its subsequent literary marketplace. French women became truly “modern” when they were forced to abandon the virtuosity of the spoken word cultivated in salons and to embrace the written word in the form of public authorship. “Modernity” for Hesse is defined as “the consciousness of oneself as self-creating” which requires highly developed critical skills, such as writing, to create a “durable space of self-reflexivity unattainable in transitory oral forms of expression” (xii). In the Old Regime, Hesse claims, “illiteracy was a distinctly female phenomenon; women were perceived to be intimately connected with the oral” (9). Thus, the unlearned masses of French women could not yet participate in their own enlightenment via print culture.
While the best of scholarship challenges our preconceived notions and proposes new vistas for understanding an area of inquiry, Hesse’s bold thesis rests on some troubling assumptions about the nature of cultural involvement during the eighteenth century and the kind of significance one can attribute to the number of texts appearing in printed form. Moreover, Hesse seems to disregard the long literary tradition of French women’s writing before 1789 when positing women’s new found authorship post-Revolution . In this review, I will first outline Hesse’s argument then turn to the questions that her book raises for this eighteenth-century literary scholar.
Hesse portrays women’s speech during the Old Regime as occupying the extremes of improper and transgressive language, as represented by the overly refined parley of the précieuses and the vulgar slang of fishwives. Future regimes, she contends, imposed the supremacy of the written word over the spoken word, and thus, after the revolution, women had to either jump into the world of print dominated by men or lose their political and cultural power. According to Hesse, women leapt into print. Contrary to the “anti-republican perspective” of feminist scholars who attribute cultural authority to women during the Old Regime, Hesse sets out to prove that “female participation in the public life of the Old Regime was not only relatively marginal, it was relatively static,” only to explode during the Revolution, confirming that women gained more by the Revolution than they lost (30, 42). She bases women’s participation in the cultural life of the French nation on their “access to print” or publication rates, which she analyzes at length (42). Hesse trumpets the advent of a commercial-based cultural life that she alleges allowed women the public exercise of reason for the first time in significant numbers.
Revolutionary society, however, met women’s participation in print with great hostility. To every exclusion or setback experienced by women, Hesse finds a silver lining in the women’s writings she studies. After French women were excluded from the 1793 copyright law because they were defined as legal minors (until 1965), writers, such as George Sand, turned to adopting male pen names to claim their own patronymics. When revolutionaries made feminists targets of public wrath, and even execution, Louise Kéralio-Robert, who had written a laudatory history of Queen Elizabeth pre-1789, joined the republican spirit with her anonymously published The Crimes of the Queens of France. She then married, dropped out of public life for fifteen years, only to return with a novel that was a “truly revolutionary and republican tale” that condemned the tyranny of evil mothers (103). When male philosophers deliberately exempted women from universal reason, Isabelle de Charrière responded with her novel, Three Women, a feminist rewriting of one of Kant’s essays showing how the protagonists “constitute their ethical life beyond the laws of men and without regard to absolutes” (124). For Hesse, Charrière’s text represents women’s refusal to enter men’s moral compact of universal law while offering an alternative “outlaw ethics” based on pragmatism and contingency. Lastly, Hesse asserts that post-revolutionary women, formally excluded from institutions of higher learning, deliberately turned to fiction to assert their cultural autonomy within the French society that had subordinated them politically, intellectually, and juridically. To assert their creative talents, women developed an esthetic strategy of inventing heroines who could not be confused by readers with the author herself; she calls this tactic the “doubling of the self” because it erects an opacity between fiction and reality. Fiction became the domain of women’s philosophy; Hesse thus links the likes of Staël, Charrière, and Genlis to George Sand, Colette, and Simone de Beauvoir. Women’s banishment from philosophy came to an end around 1929 when de Beauvoir and her generation entered the philosophic fray with the same academic training as their male contemporaries, allowing future feminist challenges to be launched from inside the academic and masculinist discourse of philosophy.
Hesse concludes that the post-revolutionary commercial market freed women to “begin to re-imagine the world in their own terms” and allowed women entry into the public life of letters as never before (154). Women’s participation in print culture helped them become modern, self-creating, and self-defining individuals. Hesse demonstrates the quantity and variety of women in print in two informative appendices, “Bibliography of French Women, 1789-1800” and “Publishers and Publishing Locations for French Women, 1789-1800.”
Hesse’s description of the misogyny women faced after the Revolution would seem to support the views of feminist historians who have argued that the shift in political regimes did not prove as beneficial to women as men. Indeed, according to Hesse, female speech becomes purportedly dangerous to the state and is outlawed; critics attack women as incapable of cultural creation; the law prohibits women from controlling their own literary works; contemporary philosophers and biologist concoct theories that justify women’s juridical subordination and biological inferiority; and women are excluded from political participation, not to mention other areas of public life such as higher education, for over 150 years. To offset these formidable disadvantages, Hesse claims the Revolution brought women into cultural life in larger numbers than ever before because they published more than previously.
That women retreated into fiction may be less a victory for the post-revolutionary commercial market, than a tribute to the resilience of the literary tradition established by French women over two centuries. Unfortunately, Hesse does not incorporate scholarship on women’s roles as cultural agents during the Old Regime into her own account. Indeed, one might begin Hesse’s story of women’s subversive foray into fiction with the mid-seventeenth-century civil war called the Fronde. As Joan DeJean has argued in Tender Geographies, when the women who led the opposition to the monarchy lost, they turned their efforts to writing fiction that was considered, at the time, socially and politically subversive. And like Hesse’s women, DeJean’s were also incredibly active in publishing their works. Moreover, Dena Goodman’s The Republic of Letters situates women’s declining power in the salons as preceding the Revolution by two decades; she writes that the philosophes’ focus on print culture in the 1770s and participation in male-centered institutions in the 1780s left women marginalized from the project of Enlightenment and excluded from the Republic of Letters newly defined as a “professional corps of published writers” (228). Hesse embraces this definition of the Republic of Letters in her study with all its negative implications for women who were excluded from professional careers and whose intellectual roles centered upon salon activity and letter writing. Nonetheless, many women published successfully for the commercial market, not only for court patrons as Hesse claims (45). In Gynographs: French Novels by Women of the Late Eighteenth Century, for example, Joan Hinde Stewart argues “women writers of the eighteenth century constitute one of the earliest significant groups to attempt to earn a living by the exercise of their creative talents in a domain that led to wide recognition” (4). Of the twenty-nine authors of the late eighteenth century included in Stewart’s study, only four began their writing careers after 1789. Thus, Hesse ignores the trends prior to the Revolution that could account for women’s increasing participation in the commercial market of print. Indeed, many of these Old Regime women constitute the pool of authors publishing post-1789 included in Hesse’s bibliography.
Several of these cross-over writers (publishing both pre- and post-revolution) attest to the growing hostility toward intellectual women after the fall of the Bastille. Stéphanie de Genlis, a prolific memorialist and former governess of the children of Philippe, duc d’Orléans, defended women writers in her 1811 De l’influence des femmes sur la littérature against harsh critics who claim women writers “deserve no respect because once they became authors, they renounced their sex and all the rights due them,” including even the most remarkable among them, such as “mme de Lafayette, madame de Lambert, madame de Graffigny” (31, my translation). Genlis ends her defense by harkening back nostalgically to the century of Louis XIV when “there was a multitude of women writers of all genres and in all classes; and not only did men of letters not go after them, not rail against women writers, they took pleasure in applauding them and paying tribute to them with respect and courtesy” (34). Germaine de Staël too had much to say about the fate of women writers; in On Literature (1800), she writes, “In monarchies, women have ridicule to fear; in republics, hatred” (201). While women may have met with obstacles under both forms of government, the Old Regime did make exceptions for remarkable women, like Staël herself. Thus, Staël had had high expectations for women under the new Republic, for her vision of a Republic includes “enlightening, teaching, and perfecting women together with men” (205). Unfortunately, the revolutionary Republicans and later Napoleon did not share her vision; she laments, “since the Revolution men have deemed it politically and morally useful to reduce women to a state of the most absurd mediocrity” (203). Staël and Genlis, two writers on opposite ends of the political spectrum, agreed on one thing: the Republic had become particularly hostile territory for women.
And yet, according to Hesse, despite men’s growing antagonism, women’s publishing flourished. Hesse’s data on women’s publication records from 1789-1800 is the empirical basis on which her argument hinges. Therefore I will interrogate her numbers with the caveat that I believe to reduce women’s participation in the Republic of Letters to the number of female signatures on published works grossly distorts the reality of women’s cultural involvement during the Old Regime. It is true, however, that current accounts of literary history almost exclusively give attention to professional authors and their published texts to the detriment of the many cultural practices surrounding the production of literature. As Margaret J. M. Ezell reminds us, what is “public” seems to depend on “publication”; the focus on professional authors and their commercial genres has obscured “any sense of a thriving amateur, social literary culture” during this transitional period into print culture (25). Indeed, if for Hesse, writing is the critical factor in allowing individuals to be “self-creating” modern selves, why must that writing necessarily take the form of print publication in order to count as cultural participation when women engaged in all types of writing (xii)? Reading and writing supplemented the conversation of many literate and self-educated women. Du Deffand, like many other eighteenth-century women, maintained voluminous correspondences with a wide range of acquaintances, including the likes of Voltaire, on a myriad of topics and was renowned for her epistolary style. Suzanne Necker too wrote extensively in her journals in which she diligently noted her own thoughts and reactions to the works of the philosophes whom populated her salon. Salonnières published widely and were passionately engaged in the cultural politics of their day, such as Lambert, Tencin, Épinay, Graffigny, and Staël. Were these not modern, self-creating women as well?
Hesse does a disservice, I think, to these women, and to their less well-known sisters, who are reduced to the status of the caricatured précieuses in the first chapter of her study. While Molière’s mockery of women who dared to create with language, pass judgement on men’s literary works, and even publish themselves, endured throughout the eighteenth century, French women promoted a style of urbane, worldly language that became the norm of speaking and writing of elite society. It seems odd that Hesse disregards these cultural mavericks, but hails the woman in Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun’s 1784 portrait of the Countess of Ceres as she is completing a letter (the picture on her book cover), with these words: “Is it a letter? To a lover? No matter. She has just set down the pen and she gazes out at the view with the satisfaction of someone who has successfully expressed her thoughts” (33). Indeed, it does seem to matter, for if the Countess of Ceres is penning a private letter not destined for print, then she is not Hesse’s modern self-creating woman. On the contrary, the Countess embodies the stereotype of the woman writer who simply expresses her inner feelings rather than produces cultural artifacts, precisely what women writers had been accused of doing for centuries and against which, Hesse argues, post-revolutionary writers were revolting with the esthetics of the “double self.”
Hesse challenges the claim of women’s clout in the literary public sphere based on the number of women publishing in France and professes to have found little proof of women’s active involvement in the world of print before 1789. To uncover all forms of writing in which women engaged, Hesse consults an impressive array of bibliographies that catalogue literary, scientific, and artistic works as well as pamphlets, journals and periodicals (36). After this exhaustive search, Hesse concludes that “women formed a very tiny percentage of published writers” or about 2 percent. Hesse’s findings for French women in print from 1754 to 1800 are as follows: 1754 to 1765 (73 women in print); 1766 to 1777 (55 women in print), 1777 (sic) to 1788 (78 women); 1789 to 1800 (329 women); and 1811-1821 (299 women) (37). From these figures, she concludes that under the Old Regime the rate of publication for women was stagnant, but with the advent of the Revolution, publications by women exploded. She attributes this sudden outpouring of printed matter to the newfound freedom of the press in 1789 and the tremendous political activity of the early years of the Revolution (1789-1792). These figures, she claims, prove that a very different story occurred than the one told by feminist scholars. She writes: “The period of the High Enlightenment, despite the prominence of a few popular novelists and a few aristocratic salonnières, was not a period of significant inclusion of women in the public life of letters” (42).
One needs only to recontextualize the “data” Hesse provides to gain another perspective on women and publishing. My interest here lies primarily in prose fiction, a field in which women were unquestionably most active, but also a genre that was very popular and widely read, and the genre that, according to Hesse, sustained women writers throughout their 150 years of political exclusion. With this in mind, I would like to offer the following data: from 1700 to 1750, 301 men (87.5%) and 43 women (12.5 %) published original works of prose fiction, according to S. Paul Jones’ A List of French Prose Fiction from 1700-1750. Of the 946 publications of prose fiction during this period, men authored 524 titles (55%) and women authored 151 titles (16%), the remaining 271 titles (29%) are still anonymous. Furthermore, Angus Martin, Vivienne Mylne, and Richard Frautschi’s Bibliographie du genre romanesque français 1751-1800 reveals that from 1751 to 1800, women published 294 original works, thus showing that women, at least in prose fiction, doubled their production in the second half of the eighteenth century. The average percentage of women publishing fiction during the second half of the century reached 15%.
The publication records of women in prose fiction throughout the eighteenth century paint a far less bleak picture than Hesse’s. Not only did women novelists and prose fiction writers maintain an average publication rate of 21% over the century; they were just as likely as male writers to be re-edited as the chart below demonstrates. This tradition of women’s participation in print culture is the one upon which post-revolutionary women built.
Publication of prose fiction by women in France, 1700-1800, according to Jones, 1700-1750, and Martin, et al., 1751-1800.
DATES New editions Total /% of total Reprints Total /% of Reprints
1700-1709 38 67 / 57% Not available 1700-1750
1710-1719 12 87 / 14%
1720-1729 17 65 / 26%
1730-1739 39 179 / 22%
1740-1750 45 262 / 17%
1751-1759 41 238 / 17% 68 523 / 13%
1760-1769 47 359 / 13% 102 851 / 12%
1770-1779 41 332 / 12% 99 978 / 10%
1780-1789 91 424 / 21% 143 1216 / 12%
1790-1800 74 537 / 14% 115 1292 / 9%
(Please note: The number of publications against which I calculate the percentage of women in print excludes anonymous works. For example, from 1700-1709, there were 137 publications total (38 by women, 29 by men, 70 anonymously); of the 67 known authors, women represented 57%. If one calculated the percentage of women writing against the total of 137 publications, women would constitute only 28%. The disadvantage to using this second method of calculation is that all anonymous publications would appear to be published by men. From 1700-1750, anonymous publications accounted for almost 30% of works listed in Jones’ bibliography, thus making women writers a larger percentage of known writers. Women, however, did publish anonymously; it is possible to ascertain from Jones’s bibliography that 65% of women initially left their names off the title page. In the second half of the century, authors in general published anonymously far less frequently. In Hesse’s calculations, she does not include anonymous publications by women unless they were known to be the author during their day.)
The total number of women’s new editions does not fully reflect the wide popularity of their works. For example, from 1750 to 1800, twelve women saw significant numbers of reprints of one or more of their previously published works: Le Prince de Beaumont 78 reprints; Riccoboni 57; Graffigny 30; Genlis 26; Aulnoy 23; Tencin 18; Villeneuve 18; Gomez 14; Lafayette 12; Charrière 12; Beauharnais 11; and Épinay 10, according to Martin et al. Another thirteen women writers had between five and ten new reprints of their previous works in print, including: Marguerite de Navarre 9 reprints; Marie-Anne de Roumier Robert 9; Anne-Thérèse de Lambert 8; Marie-Élisabeth Bouée de Lafite 7; Marguerite Daubenton 6; Marguerite de Lussan 6; Madeleine d’Arsant Puisieux 6; Françoise-Albine Puzin de La Martinière Benoît 5; Marianne-Agnès Fauques 5; Eléonore Guichard 5; Élisabeth-Jeanne-Pauline Polier de Bottens, dite Montolieu 5; Adélaïde de Souza 5; Marie-Genviève-Charlotte Darlus Thiroux d’Arconville 5. Ninety-one additional women writers had between one and four reprints of their works distributed. These numbers should be taken as approximate indications of their popularity; for the numbers can in some cases be misleading. In terms of numbers of copies circulated for each edition, Andrew Brown estimates that this kind of pleasure reading material was commonly printed in runs of between one and three thousand copies, although some local publishers could make a profit by printing just a few hundred copies for sale in their locality.
In addition to prose fiction, women’s publications in non-fiction must have heightened the public presence of women in print; not included in these numbers are women’s memoirs, letters, circulating manuscripts, poetry, theatrical, political, philosophical or scientific works. Indeed, anthologies such as Joseph de La Porte’s five-volume Histoire littéraire des femmes françoises (1769) reflected a consensus by mid-eighteenth century that a unique and considerable literary tradition of French women writers existed. In fact, this is the tradition Louise Kéralio-Robert had planned to document in her ambitious thirty-six volume Collection des meilleurs ouvrages français composés par des femmes (1786-1789) before the revolutionary uprising forced her to abandon it.
Let us now compare Hesse’s figures, the result of an exhaustive search of women in print in all areas, to those of the Bibliographie du genre romanesque (1751-1800), (one of Hesse’s bibliographical resources) for the crucial years of 1789 to 1800. This is the period on which Hesse bases her interpretation that women fared better under the Republic than under the monarchy in terms of getting published (note that in this chart, Hesse is reporting the number of women’s “publications” and not the number of “women in print”):
Publications of women in France*
Publications of women in
France in prose fiction*
New Editions
Reprints
Total
1789 85 1789 9 10 19
1790 79 1790 2 7 9
1791 68 1791 2 9 11
1792 39 1792 3 11 14
1793 49 1793 2 4 6
1794 50 1794 3 5 8
1795 32 1795 5 5 10
1796 20 1796 9 11 20
1797 48 1797 6 13 19
1798 43 1798 7 19 26
1799 43 1799 20 16 36
1800 36 1800 13 11 24
Not dated 65
Total 657 Total: 81 121 202
Total diff. 454
*This is a duplication of Carla Hesse’s Table 2.3 Incidence of Publication by French Women, 1789-1800 (40).
** These figures come from Martin et al.
Clearly, Hesse demonstrates a steep incline in the publication of works by women during the Revolutionary years; but do these numbers actually indicate that women greatly benefited from the freedom of the press (1789), even during the Terror (1793-1794) when the revolutionaries deemed it necessary to ban public assemblies of women? According to Martin et al., women’s publishing in prose fiction fell from the 1780s to the 1790s by almost 20%, despite the fact that men’s publications rose 27% over the same period. How then do we account for the publications referred to by Hesse?
She writes in Revolution in Print that the collapse of the publishing world between 1789 and 1793 caused publishers to quickly reorient their business away from books and toward ephemeral forms of literature such as journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and song sheets (97). Indeed, Hesse reports in The Other Enlightenment that “by far the most common form of publication by women was the political pamphlet, especially petitions to public authorities” (54). Questions arise: Is a document in printed form the same as a publication? Doesn’t publication convey a writer’s intention to address an audience through the public distribution of his or her text? Does a two-page juridical document such as the “Petition to the National Convention by citizen Marie-Thérèse Bertin-Cuvelier on the wrongful application in her case of the law of April 1792 concerning émmigrés” constitute a publication or is it simply a printed document (161)? Hesse includes at least two hundred and fifty such documents in her appended bibliography, but makes no qualitative assessment of their content or intent, to whom they were circulated or why.
Can we be certain these documents were written by women-and not by lawyers in their name-given the gravity of these women’s appeals? And even if we do not question the sex of the writer, as with the case of Marie-Antoinette, can we count the ill-fated queen as a woman breaking into print-five times-because of the publicly circulated documents she wrote such as her “Letter to the National Assembly upon the death of Louis XVI” and her “last will and testament” on the road to her demise (199-200)? If the new publishing opportunities for women after the Revolution consisted in large part of petitioning the National Assembly to hear their pleas for the lives and fortunes of their families, one must ask, is this a step forward for women?
Although these forms of print allowed women to respond to and shape the exceptional political events overturning their lives, I do not believe they portend a revolution in print publication for women, nor do they support Hesse’s contention that the democratic commercial market was far kinder to women than the privileged society of the monarchy. Ultimately, what is at stake for Hesse in this empirical exercise is the desire to see the French Revolution as liberal and progressive against revisionist readings of the Revolution as anti-democratic and a step back in terms of personal liberty for women from the Old Regime. In order to do so, Hesse buries the “literary masterpieces” produced during the ancien régime by the likes of “Germaine de Staël and Isabelle de Charrière” under the proliferation of revolutionary ephemera to demonstrate that democratic political culture did more to “change the world” (54). Asserting that the petition of “Parisian flower girls” was equal to (or ultimately more influential than) the works of a brilliant writer such as Staël grossly distorts the reality behind the empirical numbers. Although these documents could be the subject of a fascinating study in and of themselves, Hesse’s conclusion based on their quantity does not represent women’s true participation in the life of letters before and after the Revolution.
Indeed, when Hesse attempts to debunk the stereotype of the woman writer as socially marginal, as expressed by Staël’s exiled heroine, Corinne, George Sand’s Lélia, and all the other outcast or rebel heroines of literature that followed, by marshaling evidence that woman writers were socially integrated, she inadvertently demonstrates the extent to which women of the ancien régime were a part of the life of the literary public sphere. For what she fails to appreciate is that the figure of the alienated, marginalized, and “mad” woman writer emerged under the liberated market economy of the nineteenth century, not under the restrictive ways of the monarchy. With the collapse of the cultural institutions of the monarchy and aristocracy, which had at least provided some opportunities for women to participate in the cultural life of the nation, women writers like Staël experienced an abrupt dislocation from the intellectual Parisian scene in which they had reigned. Within the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters, however, women had participated in the cultural life of the French nation in many guises that have now become invisible: such as salonnières, letter writers, critics, literary agents, translators and more. And even those women who did publish, most prolifically and masterfully, for the most part have perished from the memory we call literary history.
The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern raises many more questions than it answers. While Hesse delivers an impressive analysis of “Female Authorship in the New Regime,” an intriguing reading of the forgotten writer/historian, Louise Kéralio-Robert, and a subtle and enlightening explication of Isabelle de Charrière’s Three Women, she does not make a convincing case for a tradition of women’s writing based on her limited selections. I would like to see how Charrière’s philosophical skepticism or Kéralio-Robert’s republicanism translates into later writings by women, or how these key texts were read, interpreted, critiqued, or imitated in their day and over the next century and a half. Nor is it clear how the esthetic strategy Hesse attributes to women-their “antimimetic modes of representation”-is any different from, for example, men’s fictional creations.
Ultimately, Hesse’s book confronts a contentious question in eighteenth century studies: Did women indeed have a significant role in the cultural life of the Old Regime? Or were they simply marginal players whose roles have been overblown by feminist scholars? How do scholars measure the importance of women’s contributions and are they momentous enough to re-imagine the master narratives that have excluded them? This provocative book will, no doubt, stir great debate among eighteenth-century scholars, but a debate well worth entering.