How French Libertines Are Reckoning with #MeToo
Henri Gervex, “Rolla” , 1878
It’s no news to anyone that France has a historically masculine-centric culture. The great republican project of the Revolution left women out; in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1791), Olympe de Gouges supplied her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. (When she got too mouthy, the Jacobins arrested and executed her.) Feminism here has always been articulated not as a philosophy of equality, as it has in Anglophone countries, but around a philosophy of difference. This has often resulted in essentialist ideas about women’s experiences; as the feminist journalist and activist Lauren Bastide put it recently, the universalist French feminist context “is the opposite of intersectionalist feminism. You’re never going to be able to say that being a black woman is different from being a white woman.”
Still, unlike the U.S., France has actually taken steps to address inequality between the sexes. The new Secretary of State in charge of equality between men and women, Marlène Schiappa, is actively trying to implement legislation against street harassment. And in 1999, for instance, a law was passed that specified that political parties had to submit an equal number of male and female candidates for office or lose public funding in proportion to the inequality. By 2012, only two parties had even slightly approached parity: the Greens and the Communist Party. And, more recently, Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! saw 40 percent women elected, which was a record. Macron himself promised when he was elected that he would make a woman prime minister, if he found someone competent. His choice for PM? Édouard Philippe. It’s just a question of competence ladies, nothing more. Enjoy your march.
When I published a book here, I received the full Gallic treatment from two men connected with my publisher. These instances were, in their way, lovely little parables of French masculinity. In the first one, an author only slightly older than me sent me (uninvited, unreciprocated) dirty text messages. I found them kind of funny, in an “Oh, French men, so typical” kind of way, and the fact that the sender was attractive didn’t hurt, even
