Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France

By Rachel Mesch

A fascinating exploration of three individuals in fin-de-siècle France who pushed the boundaries of gender identity.

Before the term "transgender" existed, there were those who experienced their gender in complex ways. Before Trans examines the lives and writings of Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), three French writers whose gender expression did not conform to nineteenth-century notions of femininity.

Dieulafoy fought alongside her husband in the Franco-Prussian War and traveled with him to the Middle East; later she wrote novels about girls becoming boys and enjoyed being photographed in her signature men's suits. Rachilde became famous in the 1880s for her controversial gender-bending novel Monsieur Vénus, published around the same time that she started using a calling card that read "Rachilde, Man of Letters." Montifaud began her career as an art critic before turning to erotic writings, for which she was repeatedly charged with "offense to public decency"; she wore tailored men's suits and a short haircut for much of her life and went by masculine pronouns among certain friends.

Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud established themselves as fixtures in the literary world of fin-de-siècle Paris at the same time as French writers, scientists, and doctors were becoming increasingly fascinated with sexuality and sexual difference. Even so, the concept of gender identity as separate from sexual identity did not yet exist. Before Trans explores these three figures' lifelong efforts to articulate a sense of selfhood that did not precisely align with the conventional gender roles of their day. Their intricate, personal stories provide vital historical context for our own efforts to understand the nature of gender identity and the ways in which it might be expressed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781503612358

Book preview

Before Trans

Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France

RACHEL MESCH

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Mesch, Rachel, author.

Title: Before trans : three gender stories from nineteenth-century France / Rachel Mesch.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019040801 (print) | LCCN 2019040802 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503606739 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503612358 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dieulafoy, Jane, 1851-1916. | Rachilde, 1860-1953. | Montifaud, Marc de, 1845–1912. | Transgender men—France—Biography. | Authors, French—19th century—Biography. | Gender identity—France—History—19th century. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC HQ77.7 .M47 2020 (print) | LCC HQ77.7 (ebook) | DDC 306.76/8092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040801

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040802

Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Cover photos: © Eugène Pirou / Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand / Roger-Viollet

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/14.4 Minion Pro

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART 1: Jane Dieulafoy: Masculinity for God and Country

PART 2: Rachilde: To Be Strange or Nothing at All

PART 3: Marc de Montifaud: I Am Me

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

JANE DIEULAFOY MIGHT BE the most famous French person you have never heard of. In 1882, Dieulafoy and her husband, Marcel, a civil engineer and architecture enthusiast, left their comfortable home in the southern city of Toulouse to travel the unpaved roads and mountain paths of Baghdad and Turkey all the way to Persia, in what is modern-day Iran. They hoped to excavate the ancient city of Susa, which British explorer William K. Loftus had located decades earlier but failed to unearth. What they found exceeded their wildest expectations: extensive palaces buried underneath the sandy, rock-strewn hills, forgotten by time and nature. After two government-sponsored missions, the couple finally returned to France in 1886 with forty tons of artifacts from the royal homes of Darius and Artaxerxes. Resettled in Paris, they were celebrated with the opening of the Salle Dieulafoy at the Louvre, leading to record-breaking crowds for the museum’s new Department of Oriental Antiquities. Jane and Marcel Dieulafoy were a veritable fin-de-siècle power couple: they lectured about town, hosted an exclusive salon where they staged theatrical performances, hobnobbed with Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré, and were regularly invited to President Félix Faure’s receptions.

All the while, the staunchly Catholic Dieulafoy went about in the most stylish men’s suits.

Dieulafoy first appeared in men’s clothing when she fought alongside Marcel in the Franco-Prussian War, just months after they were married. She returned to this practice on the voyages to Persia a decade later, never to wear skirts again—this despite the fact that it was hardly fashionable for upper-class Parisians to do so, and certainly not in her socially conservative milieu, where feminism was something of a dirty word and corsets remained the unchallenged norm. Dieulafoy and her peers recognized the intellectual capabilities of women and supported their effort to take on increasingly visible roles. But within this social sphere, women were careful not to appear rebellious, in order to avoid comparison with the menacing figure of the feminist seeking emancipation—the New Woman, the Anglo-Saxon import who embraced professional roles and did not always choose marriage over independence.¹ Both were perceived as a threat to French traditions and values. Instead, shifts in gender roles in Dieulafoy’s upper-bourgeois circles were contingent on balancing modernity with conventional notions of womanhood, career with domestic roles, and of remaining feminine in the process.² Nonetheless, Dieulafoy had secured a permission de travestissement—a pants permit from the police—for it was illegal in the nineteenth century for Parisian women to circulate in men’s clothing without one. As of a city ordinance established in 1800, any woman who wishes to dress as a man was required to have the signature of a health official attesting to her medical need to do so. It is unclear how Dieulafoy qualified, as no record of her actual application remains.³ She was one of only a handful of women to take this measure.

Jane Dieulafoy found a way to express her gender in a way that, to all appearances, made her comfortable and confident. But there were signs that, as she lived this unconventional life, she puzzled over who she was. She kept a notebook filled with clippings containing any mention of gender-crossing or pants permits, from current events, social commentary, or fiction. When her own name appeared in these accounts, it was underlined with a blue pencil.

The name Rachilde may have also appeared in those pages, for she too had secured the pants permit at around the same time as Dieulafoy; born Marguerite Eymery, she had abandoned her rural home for Paris upon turning twenty-one in 1881. Taking the name of a Swedish nobleman whom she claimed to have channeled during a family séance, she found her way to the bohemian literary scene, eventually appearing at balls and cafés dressed in men’s clothing. She had cut off her hair, stopped powdering her face, and began wearing bigger shoes as well.

FIGURE 1. Jane Dieulafoy around 1900.

Source: Roger-Viollet. Reprinted with permission.

While Dieulafoy was digging up ruins in Persia, Rachilde released the decadent novel Monsieur Vénus with an enthusiastic Belgian publisher in 1884. The book earned her a hefty fine and a prison sentence in Brussels for pornography—which she avoided by staying in Paris—while also making her the sweetheart of the Parisian literary circuit. Unlike Dieulafoy, Rachilde seemed to embrace her identity as a rebel, even to cultivate it as a reputation, while steering clear of any identification with women writers or feminism. Her calling card read, Rachilde, Man of Letters.

But at the same time as she was building a reputation for wild antics, Rachilde felt deeply vulnerable and struggled for stability. In 1889 she surprised those who had come to think of her as an eccentric rebel by marrying the writer Alfred Vallette, choosing intellectual affinity and friendship over romantic inclination. At that point, she put her pants away and began working with Vallette to revive the famed literary journal the Mercure de France, becoming one of the most influential critics of the time as its chief book reviewer. Still, Rachilde continued to rail against the confines of her sex in fiction and plays that pressed hard against gender norms and conventional sexual categories. In her writing, Rachilde imagined her avatars alternately as a monster, a hysteric, an animal, a werewolf, a man.⁴ She was never entirely sure what she was, but she had long been sure that the term woman did not describe her.⁵

In Dieulafoy’s notebook, another name appears next to her own with striking frequency: Marc de Montifaud, the name by which the writer christened Marie-Amélie Chartroule de Montifaud was best known. She, too, had received official permission to wear pants. Like Dieulafoy, she wore tailored men’s suits and a man’s haircut for much of her life. Rachilde had noticed her as well. In her short volume Why I Am Not a Feminist (1928), she mentions Montifaud—misspelling her name as Montifaut—alongside Dieulafoy as another of the women on French soil who dressed in men’s clothing like herself during the 1880s.⁶

Montifaud began her career as an art critic, and her work in that domain has recently been recognized for its personal, materialist vision, one that distinguishes itself from the conventions of the academy.⁷ But it was not Montifaud’s essays that made headlines in her day. She published dozens of anticlerical tales for which she was incessantly—and disproportionately—pursued by the French censors, some of whom were enraged that the writer they had assumed was a man was not. In 1877 Montifaud was charged with offense to public decency and sentenced to prison. (She would serve her time in an asylum instead.) The legal thrashing did not stop her from continuing to write. Despite repeated death threats, an attempted poisoning, and set-ups meant to prove her sexual impropriety, she continued to churn out controversial historical works, in addition to works of fiction that mocked the political forces out to get her. In some of these writings, Montifaud celebrated historical figures who had been persecuted for their difference or simply misunderstood, including the Abbé de Choisy, one of the gender-crossers of whom Dieulafoy had also written a historical account.

FIGURE 2. Rachilde on the cover of La Vie moderne, February 26, 1887.

Source: Médiathèque Pierre Fanlac, Périgueux. Reprinted with permission.

When Montifaud returned to Paris in 1882, after fleeing her latest prison sentence, she was no longer the awkward, veiled young woman described in the press accounts of her trials. She had taken to wearing men’s suits, as she would for the rest of her life. With her closely cropped hair framing her broad, square jaw, she easily passed for a man, and many of her friends and colleagues addressed her with masculine pronouns. Defiant to the core, Montifaud seemed perplexed that her behavior could be anyone’s business but her own. I am myself, she wrote in 1879, myself alone. Which is certainly not enough, but ultimately, I am me. It was a tacit acknowledgment that her life—like Dieulafoy’s and Rachilde’s—had no clear referent within the gender-stratified social structures of her time. This was nineteenth-century France, after all, where one of the Enlightenment’s most tenacious legacies was the importance of the difference between the sexes. At the same time that the struggle for equality was hard fought, this sense of sexual difference as a value in its own right has endured in France to this day.

Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud shared the expanding world of fin-de-siècle literary Paris, where publishing opportunities abounded thanks to a growing audience of readers and a thriving newspaper industry. In certain ways, though, these writers were worlds apart from one another. While Dieulafoy staged classical plays in her opulent living room in the wealthy Passy neighborhood, entertaining conservative politicians and academics (even while she and Marcel outfitted androgynous actors in purposefully gender-neutral clothing), Montifaud’s closest associations came from the world of art criticism and journalism. Rachilde circulated in a slightly different milieu of avant-garde writers such as Jean Lorrain, Paul Verlaine, and Catulle Mendès. Each was famous in her own way, but the three moved in different social circles connected to distinctly separate literary and social milieus. They were not united in any particular cause, beyond their personal rejection of gender norms, although none of them intended that her choice should serve as a model for women in general. Wearing men’s clothing was just one of the ways in which they expressed their incompatibility with the gender assigned to them at birth.

FIGURE 3. Marc de Montifaud around 1900.

Source: Eugène Pirou / Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand / Roger-Viollet. Reprinted with permission.

In the past several years, transgender identity has emerged as an expansive designation of the nearly limitless ways to express gender beyond the binary poles of male and female. It is a category, then, that is also a means of refusing categories entirely. Rather than defining a particular identity, trans can designate a departure from assumed gender more broadly.⁸ Trans is not one thing, critic Jacqueline Rose has recently remarked. In addition to ‘transition’ (‘A to B’) and ‘transitional’ (‘between A and B’), trans can also mean ‘A as well as B’ or ‘neither A nor B’—that’s to say, ‘transcending,’ as in ‘above,’ or ‘in a different realm from,’ both. The broad category of trans can include anyone who feels misaligned with the gender attributed to them, regardless of how they identify and how they choose to express themselves. This includes those who identify as nonbinary, genderqueer, pangender, and gender fluid.

Recent scholarship has begun to consider the ways in which the trans framework can be used to shine a light on earlier figures who resisted gender norms—to explore what trans before trans might mean and the implications of casting back in history with a new set of critical tools.⁹ What is at stake in imagining and recovering trans experiences and identities before the modern concepts and terminology? asks Robert Mills in his contribution to a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly devoted to Trans* Historicities.¹⁰ Under what circumstances, historically, has gender’s multiplicity and transformability been rendered visible?¹¹ The lives of Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud offer one set of answers to that question.

In applying the associations of the modern trans framework, I do not mean to claim that Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud were trans, or that this term, which is the product of a more recent and specialized history, now supplies a definitive answer to the questions around gender posed by their lives. Instead, I want to suggest that the modern notion allows us to view the stakes of those questions more clearly: it helps us to recognize the kinds of issues they were working out.¹² It’s a careful line that I am drawing but one that we are already accustomed to in other realms: for example, we think about various behaviors in the past through the lens of feminism, long before the movement existed; we speak of queerness even with the knowledge that people in earlier centuries did not think of themselves as gay or straight.¹³ I am suggesting a parallel framing with trans, in order to recover a more complex history of gender identity.

Such a concept—gender identity in a historical context—is in itself anachronistic. As a result, as much as this book is about trans before trans, it is also about gender before gender, because gender did not exist in nineteenth-century France as a phenomenon separate from biology. Or at least, it did not exist in language: there was no way to name the difference between the body’s physical markers and the cultural and social expectations of that body. English-speakers started doing this in the 1950s, the point at which gender moved beyond simply designating grammatical categories of masculine and feminine.¹⁴ The shift took place much more recently in France, where an expanded meaning of the word genre has only come into use in the past several years. (Acknowledging that difference as a field of study is even newer in France than it is in the United States: les études de genre constitute a relatively marginal area of focus in the French academy compared to here.)

But as the following biographies make clear, even before there were complex ways of thinking about the relationship between bodies and gender, there were those who experienced their gender in complex ways. Without the nonbiological notion of gender, however, it was much more difficult to talk about any difference between the gender assigned to you and who you might otherwise know yourself to be. In many non-Western cultures, notions of multiple or nonbinary genders have existed for centuries, with built-in terminology, such as the Two Spirit in certain Native American tribes or the Kathoey in Thailand; perhaps those born into such cultures do not experience nonbinary gender as a problem to be solved but rather as simply a way of being.¹⁵ Language in many ways determines our experience of the world. But in French, as in English, language has been organized in binary terms until only very recently. French is even more gendered than English, lacking our gender-neutral pronoun they in favor of the gendered ils or elles.¹⁶ As a result, those who experience gender variance in these cultures have traditionally found themselves outside of language. Contemporary trans writer Riki Wilchins remembers that language had always felt like a poor tool, one that didn’t even begin to capture the ways I felt about the world or the things in my head. She was perpetually puzzled by the million things I felt and thought that I could never say, which knowledge and categories and meaning didn’t begin to capture.¹⁷ The proliferation of new terminologies in our current culture is not a resolution of this difficulty but rather a symptom of it: a reminder of the ways in which gender variance is infinitely individual and does not readily fit into general terms. In fact, one thing that links past with present is the difficulty of finding the right linguistic vessels through which to identify oneself when the available terms feel inadequate.

In what follows, I suggest that for Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud, stories were a way to work around the linguistic challenge of nineteenth-century gender variance. Where language works toward precision, narrative allows for depth and complexity. Indeed, stories are a way to use language to express that which exceeds language. This book attempts to piece together the story of those stories: the paths by which Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud worked to understand themselves.

With no ready terms with which to account for gender nonconformity in the nineteenth century, contemporary commentators puzzled over the unusual presentations of Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud as bizarreries or as elusive forms of hysteria—that catchall disease plaguing bourgeois women of the time. More recently, scholars have tended to see them as eccentric rebels, each one unique, sui generis, not fully explicable or comparable to anyone else. Studies of all three always mention their difference, their eccentricity, or their unconventional behaviors (in particular their choice of clothing) as features of their identity—character traits, as it were. Yet few of these studies ever interrogate their choices as anything more than that: as not quite a choice at all but rather as an expression of self. What’s more, up until this point, they have been considered rebellious women, proto-feminists challenging patriarchal structures in original ways. I propose that in order to truly understand them, we should stop thinking about them exclusively as women but rather as individuals pushing against that very identity, for whom the appropriate gender designation remains an open question.

GENDER STORIES

Identity, writes historian Lisa Duggan, is the story or narrative structure that gives meaning to experience. Likewise, we might think of gender identity as a set of stories rather than labels, through which individuals forge connections between their experiences and the world around them.¹⁸ Modern identities such as those documented in this book tend to be dynamic rather than stable; meanings accrue over time, shift, and evolve; stories of self can be told and undone, and then retold, in relation to stories and models encountered elsewhere.

As contemporary trans writers have demonstrated, for those who do not align with the gender assigned to them, gender can be the core of the identity story—a necessary and vital tale to tell. (For most cisgender people, on the other hand, gender identity as such is rarely thought about at all.) Many contemporary trans authors have shown how writing provides a way to give shape to gender identity, putting emphasis on the depth and breadth of story over any individual term or label. Despite its flaws, the television series Transparent was groundbreaking for that reason. Jennifer Finney Boylan recently reflected on her own writing as a necessary corollary to the medical interventions that she had undertaken: I’m aware that the woman I have become in middle age is perhaps less the result of hormones than of a lifetime telling stories, she observed. It was the writing of these books that, more than anything else, helped me understand the narrative of my own life, and those of other women like me.¹⁹ Similarly, singer-songwriter Rae Spoon recounts that more and more, I have thought of my gender as a story I tell myself.²⁰

To what extent, this book asks, could gender be a story that I tell myself in late nineteenth-century France?²¹ What kinds of stories did Jane Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Marc de Montifaud formulate in order to make sense of selves that didn’t align with familiar categories? How did they construct those gender stories, how were they able to relate them to others, and what can we learn from their process?

Recent accounts by trans writers describe an early search for both referents and narrative. I never thought that I would see myself in the mirror, writes Joy Ladin. Rather than embodying my identity, my body erased me, proved that I didn’t, couldn’t, exist.²² When she discovered a story on transsexuality in an issue of her mother’s Good Housekeeping magazine at around age eight, it was the first time I had language for what I was, the first inkling that there were others like me. But a label is only one kind of affirmation. It was narrative that Boylan sought as a teen, searching the library in vain for the story of a person I might resemble, but to no avail. Without much in the way of dependable narrative or contemporary myth, she writes, there were ways in which I felt, back then, as if I did not exist.²³ Leslie Feinberg wondered why I couldn’t find myself in history. No one like me seemed to have ever existed.²⁴ Her pioneering volume Transgender Warriors included Joan of Arc and the Chevalier d’Eon, both of whom Dieulafoy had also turned to as models for self-understanding.

For these modern writers, existence and affirmation came in part by telling their own stories or recovering a forgotten history. This need to construct one’s gender story personally, sometimes repeatedly, as part of a transition to selfhood seems to bypass the important differences of race, class, and gender that are determinative in crucial ways that I don’t mean to overlook here.²⁵ It is a need not resolved by terminology or common language, because each gender story is wholly unique. More than any particular identity, then, it is the call to writing that Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud share with these modern trans writers. In what follows, I will show how writing offered a way to resolve gender difference in relation to the stories circulating around them, and in so doing, to consider why and how they found themselves outside of nineteenth-century gender norms.

All three of my subjects, in fact, were known as storytellers. Profiles of Dieulafoy describe her as a charming raconteur, both disarming and charismatic. And all three wrote as if their lives depended on it, producing many thousands of pages over the course of their lives. Dieulafoy, whose work was so often historical, was prolific, using hundreds of detailed pages to rebuild worlds that no longer existed and reconstruct lives from her vivid imagination. Her archives are populated with piles of dossiers, themselves filled with piles of writings; in addition to the seven published novels, a historical treatise, and a collection of short stories, there are dozens of unpublished stories, biographies, and plays, scrapbooks and notes, speeches and essays—her meticulous, tiny script crossed out and rewritten, cut out and pasted back in. The travelogues themselves numbered over one thousand pages; Parysatis is four hundred pages; her final work on Isabella of Spain is a five-hundred-page tome with notes and bibliography. Rachilde left a similar trove of paper and publications, filling dozens of dossiers in her Parisian archives. In her extensive correspondence, filled with broad, inky strokes defying all borders and boundaries, her words wind around calling cards, filling up the margins. She wrote a dozen plays and more than forty novels, continuing to write year after year, up until the end of her life at the age of ninety-three. Rachilde spoke of literary production as a kind of trance. So did Montifaud, who described her writing as a kind of compulsion—a bodily act over which she seemingly had little control. She produced, in total, two dozen volumes of novels and short stories, nine nonfiction works, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles.

While Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud did not always write about gender explicitly or directly, they wrote about it constantly. They looked to history, religion, medicine, and literature for sources and inspiration as they wrote and rewrote stories about who they were and why and how they were different, and about figures from the past who were different as well.

SPEAKING OF GENDER

Stories about gender identity have appeared in the past decade in nearly every form of modern media: books, magazines, social media, online writings, photography, television series, and film have all played a role in the development of modern trans discourse, providing a forum for discussion, as well as endless points of reference through which a new generation of individuals has come to understand themselves. In some ways, nineteenth-century France was not all that different, as Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud searched for stories to fold themselves into and measure themselves against. It’s no coincidence that this era was characterized by the explosion of the mass press; in the years between 1880 and 1900, the publishing industry expanded in nearly every sector of its market. Newspapers multiplied in number, driven by an increasingly literate public, looser laws on freedom of expression, and a competitive marketplace. Circulation skyrocketed from a combined total of one million in 1870 to five million in 1910. Whereas in 1882 there were 3,800 periodicals printed in France, within ten years that already sizable number had tripled.²⁶ Other forms of mass culture were growing as well, as new forms of entertainment emerged every week in the Parisian capital, where all three writers spent their adult lives. Long before our current obsession with reality TV and breaking news, city dwellers were fascinated by anecdotes about everyday experiences and human-interest stories, sending readers hurrying to the kiosks for morning and evening editions. New forms of social community developed through a sense of shared entertainment and sources of knowledge that often crossed class lines. As crowds filled museums, department stores, and the new vehicles of public transport, everyone was likely to be talking about the same scandals, if not the latest art exhibition or the newest trends in fashion. In addition to their appetite for reading, Parisians collected photographs and postcards of celebrities, which they compiled in albums or traded with friends. By the late 1890s, one could come across a card-size image, suitable for trading, of Madame Dieulafoy, the famous explorer, in packs of chocolate or boxes of rice (figure 4). Eventually, her wax effigy was installed at the famous Musée Grévin wax museum (figure 5).

FIGURE 4. Trading card commemorating the Dieulafoys’ discovery of the Frieze of Lions, included in a box of Lombart chocolates. The frieze is on display in the Louvre.

FIGURE 5. Postcard of wax statues of Jane Dieulafoy and Jules Verne in the Musée Grévin wax museum.

Whether or not there was a word for it, gender was everywhere in the new mass culture. Parisians were consumed with the shifting roles of women in society, as well as with a perception that French men were not quite living up to social expectations. The devastating loss of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 fueled a growing sense that the French family was in crisis, failing to produce enough healthy boys to keep the country safe.²⁷ Men were perceived as not strong enough, women as not committed to their traditional maternal roles. Against this backdrop, women were assuming increasingly public roles, in part as a result of educational reforms that dramatically increased women’s access to education. Divorce was legalized in 1884, provoking a flurry of debate about the possibility of further reform to what had been a rather strict model of marriage.²⁸

With these social shifts came a vigorous backlash. In the urban center in particular, population growth and new modes of circulating through the city meant that people from different walks of life increasingly came into contact with one another, pushed close together on the new mass transit vehicle known as the omnibus, making their way through department stores, or sitting next to each other at cafés and restaurants.²⁹ This inspired endless commentary about the various kinds of women one might encounter. In the emerging media, there was much talk about the so-called New Woman—a figure of modern femininity seen as a threat to family structures. The New Woman was herself a kind of sequel to the much-reviled bas bleu, or bluestocking, the denigrating term for a French woman writer. The artist Honoré Daumier had devoted a whole series, in the 1840s, to mocking her in the newspaper Le Charivari, where she was presented as a man-hating hag, quick to leave her husband and children in the lurch. As the press continued to expand in the second half of the century, women began publishing in record numbers, threatening to overshadow men’s contributions in this sphere—following the pants-wearing George Sand’s notorious example. To make matters worse, the feminist had joined the scene as another model of modern femininity threatening the patriarchal establishment, even though contemporary French feminists tended to link their activism to support for traditional family structures. Between 1892 and 1913, six feminist congresses took place in France, in which women advocated for child welfare, marriage reform, and social equality.³⁰ The writer, the feminist, and the bluestocking were often conflated in the public imagination, variations on the perceived threat to the traditional French family.³¹

Not only was gender a hot topic in the political and social sphere; it extended as well to science in this golden age of French positivism. In the emerging field of medicine, a great deal of attention was devoted to discerning just what separated women and men from a biological vantage point. As women entered professional roles, there was much at stake in proving that they were fundamentally different from men: less intelligent, more prone to illness, and especially prone to madness. The hysteria diagnosis that became a household word in the second half of the century was documented by lengthy scientific tomes explaining the fundamental difference of the female body from the male one. Using the brain was thought to damage the uterus directly; reading novels was only second in danger to writing them.³² In the latter part of the century, experts in the nascent field of sexology made the study of sex a science and worked to demarcate categories of sexual behavior, laying the groundwork for the taxonomies and hypermedicalization that would come to stigmatize gender-variant and queer subjects for the next century.³³ Even so, there was as yet no term to describe the experience of being assigned a gender at birth that did not match one’s internal sense of self. Gender nonconformity was linked to sexuality through what was known as the inversion model: an effeminate man who was attracted to men or a mannish woman was considered homosexual.³⁴ The distinctions between gender identity (who you are), gender expression (how you present yourself), and sexuality (who you are attracted to) had yet to be theorized or articulated. Androgyny was the stuff of myths, while hermaphroditism was tied to physiology. The closest approximation of transgender identity in French appeared with the 1895 French translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, where he presented the case of a patient who feels like a woman in a man’s form as a form of mental illness.³⁵

Gender questions circulated in artistic and literary circles as well. New schools of painting pushed back against long-standing academic rules about how and in what context women could be portrayed as sexual objects. Manet nearly caused a riot with his Olympia, the unabashedly naked prostitute on display for all to see. The school of painting that would come to be known as Impressionism offered endless scenes of women engaged in the activities of modern life. Whether on the boulevard or in the music hall, they were far from the cloistered rigidity of academic portraiture. In the literary realm, it would be hard to overstate the presence of gender as a theme. As early as the 1840s, the French novel was preoccupied with gender-crossing, as exemplified by Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, the story of a woman who disguises herself as a man and seduces a man and a woman; George Sand’s play Gabriel, which tells the story of a girl raised as a boy in order to inherit the crown; and Balzac’s castrato Sarrasine in his novella of the same name, who performs as the female La Zambinella. The drama of