Last month, the French city of Nice won notoriety when gendarmes captured a woman on its beach garbed in a full-length black robe. Even after she pulled off her covering to show the officers the bathing suit she was wearing underneath, the burkini-clad offender was escorted off the sands.
The Republic, it appeared, had been saved -- at least for those swearing allegiance to it by wearing bikinis.
Or even less than a bikini, it turns out. At a gathering of the Socialist faithful last week in Colomiers, a suburb of Toulouse, Prime Minister Manuel Valls offered a history primer on the French Republic. The “conquest of liberty,” he declared, was at the heart of the Left’s historic struggle on behalf of republican values and women’s rights. “We will not compromise on the place of women in France,” he warned. Then, in a moment of inspiration, he looked up from his prepared text and riffed on Marianne, who has served since the Revolution as the female personification of liberty. “Marianne is shown with a naked breast because she is nourishing the people; she is not wearing a veil because she is free! Right there, that is the Republic!”
Suddenly, it became nigh impossible to keep, well, abreast of the debate over the place of Islam and women in French society. Valls’ remark sparked a firestorm of criticism on social media and in the press. (And as videos of the gathering reveal, clearly discomfited ministers like Marisol Touraine and Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who were in attendance.) Leaving aside the Monty Python-esque logic underlying the claim that Marianne “is not wearing a veil because she is free,” it is worthwhile to focus on the history behind the idea of Marianne. In two sentences, Valls managed to misrepresent and misconstrue her meaning in multiple ways. These mistakes take on tragic significance when placed in the increasingly divisive debate over Islam now raging in France.
Marianne first strode onto the stage of history in 1792 -- the same year, not coincidentally, that Louis XVI was shown out of power and the Republic shown in. In this early illustration, she is, in fact, exposing one of her breasts. But nourishing the people with it couldn’t be further from her mind -- or, more accurately, the mind of the artist. Instead, as the historian Mathilde Larrère notes, it is because the artist did what artists often do in search of a model: he rummaged around in the past. At the end of the 18th century, this particular past happened to be ancient Greece and, especially, ancient Rome. Neo-classicism was all the rage; think of Jacques-Louis David’s vast canvases capturing the deaths of Marat or Socrates. The iconographic association of a woman in Roman dress -- or partial undress -- with the Revolution was not at all revolutionary, but instead a conservative reflex.
No less important, Valls’ comment reflects his cluelessness about the impact of 1789 on the role of women in French society. In a brave new world dedicated to equality, liberty, and fraternity -- not sorority -- and defined by the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” -- not Woman and Citizeness -- women arguably found themselves worse off than they had been under the Old Regime. Though they played pivotal roles in key events of the Revolution, women were denied the same political and civil rights given to the men they often prodded into action. When Napoleon rose to power and institutionalized many of the Revolution’s gains, he also institutionalized the subordinate status of women -- a grim legacy whose remnants endured through the first half of the 20th century.
However, Valls may not have been thinking of the Revolution of 1789, but instead the Revolution of 1830. This is the event, after all, that spurred the creation of “Liberty Leading the People.” The work of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, the immense canvas portrays Marianne as a fierce and bare-breasted woman, carrying a French tricolor flag and musket, guiding a group of revolutionaries over a barricade of fallen bodies. Delacroix’s cover of Marianne went platinum: it adorned the 100 franc bill, Marianne’s head was affixed to its coins and stamps, and Frédéric Bartholdi shaped the Statue of Liberty under the inspiration of Delacroix’s model.
A glance at Delacroix’s Marianne reveals a figure both mythic and real. While there were no bare-breasted women in 1830 -- or 1789, for that matter -- clambering over barricades with rifles in hand, there were many instances of (fully clothed) women helping the wounded and hauling paving stones to the barricades. It turns out that Delacroix based the figure not just on ancient iconography, but the real-life account of a woman who took her fallen brother’s place on a Parisian barricade. (In fact, one woman, Marie Deschamps, was subsequently honored for her role in the Bourbon monarchy’s overthrow.)
But here’s the rub: Valls’ account ignores that the “place of women” in post-1830 France was no better than it was in pre-1830 France. In fact, while women’s political and civil status failed to change significantly for the rest of the century, the depiction of Marianne did change. As the historian Maurice Agulhon traces in his book “Marianne into Battle,” the savage and statuesque Marianne who dominates republican iconography during the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 gives way to a demure and domestic version. Her breast is no longer uncovered, her hair is no longer unfurled, and her gaze is no longer unforgiving. Instead, in statues and paintings Marianne is most often seated, her hair is pleated, and her body is veiled. From Amazonian warrior, she became a bourgeois helpmate, the mistress of the home whose duty is to breed children and buttress husbands.
Only after the Second World War, and the role played by women in the French Resistance, did the political status of women begin to change. With the enfranchisement of women in 1945 -- signed by the deeply conservative and Catholic Charles de Gaulle -- the iconography of Marianne was also liberated. Over time, public figures ranging from Brigitte Bardot to Catherine Deneuve have served as the official models. The resistance that the few efforts to introduce a black Marianne has met -- as in the town of Frémainville last year -- reveals that the evolution still has a good distance to go. Still, one can imagine that, whether through evolution or revolution, one day a black or head-scarfed woman will be shown clambering over the barricades of reaction thrown up by the Left no less than the Right.
