In the shadow of Rousseau: gender and the 2007 French presidential elections.

AuthorMartone, Eric

In the 2007 French presidential elections, the center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement), defeated Segolene Royal, the Socialist Party candidate. The gender dimensions of the campaign revealed much about changing (or lack of changing) French society. As Le Monde (The World) observed, this dimension of the campaign dominated all other aspects of it. (1) Royal ran as a woman, and highlighted this fact more so than any of those women who ran successfully for high office in other democratic countries. (2) While one cannot understand Royal's campaign in its entirety by focusing exclusively on the gender dimensions of her candidacy, such an examination provides a useful paradigm to explore a significant aspect of her attempt to appeal to voters and the reaction of French society to those appeals. This study analyzes Royal's use of gendered discourse during the 2007 French presidential elections to appeal to voters within the context of French political culture derived from the republican tradition of the French Revolution. It does so by focusing on: (1) her emphasis on her status as a woman; (2) her political program; and, (3) her role as a symbol of leadership. It also explores how three French newspapers of diverse political leanings, Le Figaro (The Figaro), Le Monde, and Libeation (Liberation), responded to Royal's campaign strategy.

The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault argues that sexuality is produced in historical contexts; yet, so is gender. (3) Joan Scott, an American historian of France, defines gender as "a socially agreed upon system of distinctions." Gender, she maintains, is culturally determined, formed in society, in part, by its relationship within a cultural system, which can be described as "the patterns and relationships that constitute understanding." (4) Gender thus becomes a way of denoting the social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men.

In discussing women's status in the French cultural system, there "seems to be a marked gap between the laws that govern their lives and the representations that govern their imaginary." (5) The acclaimed French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu finds that the division of labor, which is "rigorously enforced according to sex," creates an experience of order. Through this experience, as well as through "explicit calls to order from their parents, their teachers, and their peers (armed with a vision and a division developed through similar social experience)," adolescent girls adopt "the dominant viewpoint in the form of perceptual and evaluative patterns deeply embedded and almost inaccessible to the conscious mind." This perspective disposes "them to accept as normal, even natural and obvious, the social order as it is." Consequently, women succumb to the established order, unconsciously consenting to become victims of symbolic violence; that is, social mechanisms that are culturally-embedded in a given society which seek to ensure that the existing (and arbitrary) arrangement of its power relations is either ignored or regarded as natural. Ensuring this arrangement of power relations sustains the existing perception of the social order. (6)

Boudrieu's argument implies that women, through their unconscious consent as victims of symbolic violence, are unwittingly co-participants of it. He maintains that change does not truly occur despite perceived advancements over time. In other words, the masculine viewpoint is perpetuated in society over generations, even if young people "consider themselves less 'sexist' than adults." This perpetuation of the social order, which is a "masculine order," is not intentional, for symbolic violence "does not operate in the register of conscious intent." According to Bourdieu, the prerequisite of a "radical transformation" of existing social conditions is necessary in order for members of the dominated group in a given society to espouse a viewpoint of themselves and other members in their group that ultimately does not reflect that of the dominating group. (7)

Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence is deeply-rooted in French culture. As cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz has observed, the structure of a country's culture is reflected in its politics. (8) The French Revolution's bicentennial celebration launched new debates on the political inequality between men and women that date from the restructuring of French society during the Revolution. The First Republic set the basis of the republican (or Jacobin) tradition, which still persists. In American Pentimento, historian Patricia Seed argues that modern American society, like a pentimento in art in which "over time the covering pigment on a canvas sometimes becomes transparent, allowing a glimpse of an earlier drawing or painting to show through," reflects aspects of its colonial foundations in relation to European colonizers' justifications for access to natural resources belonging to Amerindians. This remains true to this day, she contends, despite the social developments that have occurred in America since the beginning of European colonization. (9) Borrowing this concept from Seed, modern French society's gender system, as reflected in Royal's discourse during the 2007 French presidential elections and its coverage in the French press, reveals a French "pentimento" dating from the Revolution and the founding of republicanism. To be sure, the Republic modernized the political sphere, allowing women's participation, but its male character, which was culturally created, was never erased. Indeed, as sociologist Christine Faure argues, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen "constitutes a moral pillar still in force, and marks French political culture with their prejudices in regard to women." (10) In fact, in 2007 Le Figaro reported that France ranked twenty-first amongst the members of the European Union in terms of women serving in parliament. (11) Birte Siim, a specialist in studies on citizenship, has compared the links between women's social rights and democratic citizenship in three different models, including republican citizenship in France, to explain this gender imbalance in French politics. She finds that France still suffers from the contradictions of its historical pronatalist policy, which encourages childbirth through various incentives and women's role as domestic caretakers. (12)

In the 2007 French presidential elections, Royal's gendered discourse around the topics of her status as a woman, political program, and role as a symbol of leadership, despite her intentions to use revolutionary rhetoric rooted in the republican tradition to establish equality for women and overcome their role as victims of symbolic violence, actually facilitated such violence against women. Royal's gendered discourse reaffirmed the gender status quo, thereby perpetuating the male order of French society and revealing a French "pentimento" dating from the Revolution and the founding of the republican tradition. In other words, Royal's discursive performance of gender in her campaign sought to change the patriarchal political sphere dating from the Jacobin tradition within its own discourse. Her campaign, centered around gender within this discursive framework, ultimately reinforced gender divisions and inequalities embedded in French political culture. This outcome was not intentional, but rather a reflection of how culturally compelled gender norms that maintain existing power relations and, hence, the current social order are internalized within individual members of French society. (13)

The French Republican Tradition

In the 2007 French presidential campaign, Segolene Royal, the first woman to run for high office with the support of a major party in France, highlighted her status as a woman. In doing so, she brought to the forefront of the campaign debates regarding gender, citizenship, and the French Revolution, all significant issues in contemporary France. (14) In order gain a glimpse of how modern French society's gender system, as reflected in Royal's presidential campaign discourse and its coverage in the French press, reveals a French "pentimento" dating from the Revolution and the founding of republicanism, it is first necessary to outline the establishment of the French republican tradition and its perceptions of gender.

The Revolution broke with the patriarchal system and traditional gender relationships connected with the Old Regime and initiated the development of a modern society based on a new ideal of political equality as well as the notion of fraternity and solidarity between citizens and the state. Yet, as several feminist historians argue, that new society established a gendering of the public sphere that formed new divisions between the public domain of men and the private domain of women. (15) Many French historians have noted the dominance of Rousseau's ideas of egalitarianism, sensibility, and concern for the community over the individual on the Republic. (16) Rousseau promoted egalitarianism and universality, but insisted that such qualities applied to men, who were natural citizens. He prescribed different roles for men and women; this, too, became a component of revolutionary political culture and republican tradition. As Elizabeth Wingrove, a specialist in women's studies, notes, at the heart of Rousseau's writings is the idea that masculine and feminine genders interact in complimentary ways through "consensual nonconsensuality," which parallels his notion of democratic governance to balance the social order. (17)

One of Rousseau's most significant works, Emile: Or, on Education (1762), provides an overview of the different relative duties for masculine and feminine genders. Here he asserts that "there is no parity between the two sexes." Such gender inequality "is not a human institution," but "the work ... of...

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