Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2004 by Bertram M. Gordon

Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender. By Francine Muel-Dreyfus. Translated by Kathleen A. Johnson. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001. 387 pp. $21.95).

Vichy and the Eternal Feminine, the translation of a book published in France in 1996, argues that the French defeat of June 1940, which led to the overthrow of the Third Republic in favor of the National Revolution led by Marshal Philippe Petain at Vichy, also facilitated the emergence of an "eternal feminine" myth promoted by the Marshal and his supporters. In this myth, the vision of "woman" in her everlasting domestic sphere was posited as the core value of the Petainist "renovation" that was to lift France from catastrophic defeat. The book is organized topically, with sections on "the hypnotic power of punishment," "the culture of sacrifice," and "biological order and social order." As after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, defeat in 1940 strengthened a clerico-conservative Rightist discourse of recrimination, sacrifice, and restoration. Within days of the defeat, on 20 June 1940, Petain publicly blamed interwar Frenchwomen for having had too few children and, by implication, of having been too urban, professional, and spoiled, especially by the Popular Front government's legislation of paid vacations in 1936. Women were blamed for the interwar exodus of rural labor. In the words of one writer, the "Earth-goddess is the mother of men" and thus the "hemophilia" of French agriculture was the fault of women (58). The emergence of Petain's government produced, in the words of Action Francaise leader Charles Maurras, a "divine surprise," (1) a conjunction [conjoncture] when a previously minoritarian political Right could promulgate its vision of an eternal France of terroir [region], village, and farm. A renovated France would be purged of "alien" elements such as Communists, Freemasons, and Jews.

Central to the Vichy vision, Muel-Dreyfus argues, was the eternal female, ever supportive, fertile, and pure, in a timeless social and moral order where women were mothers, the helpmates of men, and guardians of moral probity. Women were to live in what Muel-Dreyfus calls a "culture of enclosure," referring to convents but representing all women's lives in Vichy France (170). The inter-related ways in which the "eternal feminine" was manifested, according to Muel-Dreyfus, included a heightened discourse of Social Catholicism and its offshoot "Christian feminism" (125) and a rise in religious pilgrimages and in the veneration of Mary. Female activism was promoted but only in circumscribed spheres such as convents (128). Drawing upon Social Catholic thought, Vichy theorists favored "organic" or "traditional" social units and some suggested a franchise based on family rather than individual suffrage (195). In an example of modern popular mobilization, Vichy vastly expanded the celebration of Mother's Day (114). As in other Right-wing governments of the time, a variety of spokespersons extolled the virtues of education for "character" as opposed to book-learning, associated in France with the Third Republic's secular schools. Girls were to be trained for "feminine" roles, in curricula that emphasized biological determinism and in a system which privileged clerical schools. Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize winning vascular specialist in 1912, who in his 1935 book, L'Homme, cet inconnu [Man the Unknown], had popularized notions of French biological degeneracy and the need for women to focus on motherhood (70), became the guru of a medical community that emphasized hygiene and opposed abortions after 1940 (286). In their attempts to "restore homogeneity," Vichy leaders equated feminism with Jewishness as divisive and cosmopolitan. "Like immigrants," Muel-Dreyfus writes, "women were accused of taking the place of the unemployed, and feminist leaders were stigmatized as Jewesses" (88).

There were philosophical differences among the Vichy supporters, which Muel-Dreyfus notes. Social Catholic Thomists did not necessarily agree with Action Francaise, which had been condemned by the Church during the interwar years (155), and corporatists were not always comfortable with the etatisme of Vichy (267). Nonetheless, these groups came together to create a highly powerful politico-cultural myth in 1940. The strength of Vichy and the Eternal Feminine is in its showing the profound rootedness of gender in this myth, together with the contradiction between the timeless claims of arguments purported to be eternal and the historical context that produced them. Vichy arguments of biological destiny were intended as natural and apolitical but, as Muel-Dreyfus shows, they formed an explicitly political "astrology of history" (316), in examples such as the promotion of Mother's Day, whose pretenses to timelessness recall the "invented tradition" discussed in a broader context by Eric Hobsbawm. (2) "Symbolic violence" against women (292-293) was justified on the basis of myths camouflaged as natural truths, making it easier to conceal the real violence of the biological determinism that forcibly enclosed women's lives.