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Charles Fréderic Herbinot de Mauchamps
Gazette des Femmes
1836-1838
Unlike the Saint Simonian and Fourierist movements which preceded it, the movement which sprung up around the journal the Gazette des femmes was a movement which emphasized the rights of women above all other issues and emphasized using legal reforms and the political system as a way of implementing the desired changes. The regime of Louis - Phillipe was not a democracy: only two to three percent of French men paid sufficient taxes to be eligible to vote. Targeted at the women of this class, the first issue of Gazette des femmes was published in July 1836.
Largely the product of one man, Charles Fréderic Herbinot de Mauchamps, the editor was listed as Madame Poutret de Mauchamps, ostensibly his adopted sister, but in reality his lover who was 20 years his junior. To give the impression of a large number of authors, Herbinot signed the articles with a variety of pseudonyms. A group of like minded individuals and subscribers gathered together on Thursday evenings to discuss issues of interest to women.
Moderately republican, mildly anticlerical, staunchly feminist, the journal reads like feminist journals of a half-century later. The back cover of the journal proudly proclaimed that the "sole and unique goal is to obtain the exercise of POLITICAL AND CIVIL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN." The journal included theatrical reviews, reviews of court cases, articles of interest to the business woman and woman as consumer, and articles on the arts, music, and fashion.
Many issues included petitions addressed to the King, the Chamber of Deputies and Peers, or to other influential political or social organizations. Written in a style similar to lawyers' briefs to a court of law, they were designed to prove that some right already existed. Topics included the right of women to publish daily political journals, elimination of Article 213 ("The husband owes protection to the wife; the wife obedience to her husband.) or Article 214 (which required "that a woman live with her husband and that she follow him wherever he moves") of the Civil Code, the right for women to sit on juries, the right of women to study at royal colleges, law schools, and medical schools and to teach at the university level, to vote if they met the same age and tax qualifications as men, to give mothers the same authority as fathers over their children, to be admitted to the French stock exchange (the Bourne), to sit on commercial tribunals, to reestablish divorce, and to decriminalize adultery. One went so far as to demand that "IT BE RECOGNIZED AND DECLARED BY THE KIND AND THE CHAMBERS THAT IN VIRTUE OF THE 1830 CHARTER, WOMEN HAVE THE SAME CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS AS MEN. "
The Gazette included information about the efforts of women and other "friends", including such women as Flora Tristan, George Sand, Eugénie Niboyet, and Elisabeth Celnart. Another column in the Gazette summarized court cases, particularly those that were blatantly unfair to women, perhaps for their propagandistic value. The Chamber of Deputies debated the petition to abolish Article 213 with "hilarity," "more hilarity," and "new laughter." Eventually, though, the government decided that more than ridicule of the Gazette and its author was called for and Herbinot was arrested on trumped up charges, tried, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison. Poutret was tried as an accomplice, convicted (mostly of publishing a feminist journal), and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.
With the withdrawl of Herbinot, the journal and the organization which sprang up around it disintegrated. Yet, as with the experience gained in the Saint Simonian and Fourierist movements, the activists in the nascent feminist movement were learning about the political realities of life. In the Saint Simonian movement, feminists failed to reform the world by renouncing political power and using the persuasion of moral and religious authority. In the Fourierist movement, feminists failed to reform the conditions of women by changing the economic system. In the organization surrounding the Gazette des femmes, feminists again failed when they politely asked for their political rights. Many of the women who were part of these movements would be feminist activists during the Revolution of 1848 – and they would most vociferously demand their political rights.
Madeleine Poutret de Mauchamps (1836), "Petition au Roi, a Messieurs les Députiés des départments,et a MM. les paris du royaume de France. . . " Gazette des Femmes, 1, no. 2 (1 August 1836), 33 – 38, Karen M. Offen translator (from Bell and Offen)
PETITION
To the King, to the Deputies from the Departments,
and to the Peers of the Realm of France,
To obtain the entire and complete suppression of Article 213 of the Civil Code . . . entitled Of the respective rights and duties of spouses, and thus conceived:—A husband owes protection to his wife, a wife obedience to her husband. . .
Article I of the Charter of 1830 states: The French [Les Francois] (which signifies French men and French women) are equal before the law, whatever their title and their rank.
Before demanding the frank and honest execution of this article of the charter, the spirit, letter, and the legal and social consequences of this article must be well understood.
For, what do these words, before the law, mean?
Do not the words the law mean the laws? Is it not a generic term signifying that French men and French women are equal before the laws, that is to say, that these laws must be binding not only on all French men and women, but further that the obligations, duties, advantages, and prohibitions as well as the authorizations contained in these laws ought to be applicable equally to French women and men, in such a way that both enjoy the same rewards and are held to the same duties. In other words, the laws, ordinances, and regulations that follow from Article I of the Charter should be equal, in this sense: that men cannot enjoy any right that women do not enjoy equally, and that women are not held accountable for any duty that men are not similarly obliged to honor.
Such is, such ought to be, in our view, equality before the law. . . .
Now I will offer several commentaries on the subject of the petition I have addressed to you.
Marriage is one of the ameliorations and conditions of the social and civilized state. In the wild or uncivilized state, woman and man are two animals whose bodily strength is unequal, from which it results that the man, being stronger than the woman, subjects her to his will just as he constrains horses and other animals. The intellectual level being nearly zero in the savage state, woman is nothing more than a domestic animal that man uses and abuses according to his whim, having not the right but the power of coercion over her, and even the power of life and death.
But in the social and civilized state, brute force has been reduced to its real value, and industry and mechanics work incessantly to replace the bodily strength of man by that of steam engines or others. Intelligence, the result of instruction, appears in all its splendor and utility; and as this intelligence, which comes from the intellectual faculties, is equal in woman and in man, the laws and institutions based on intelligence ought to accord to woman the same rights as are given to man. In fact, with respect to marriage, an institution unknown to savage peoples, but which in our civilized nation is one of the first requirements of society, marriage is positively considered as an association where the rights and duties are mutual. And for proof of this equality between spouses, suffice it to read Art. 212—of the Civil Code.—This article is thus conceived: "The spouses owe each other mutually fidelity, support, and assistance."
And note well, gentlemen, this article says everything. The word mutually is the truest expression of the equality of rights and duties of spouses. For if this mutuality no longer exists, if one or the other withdraws, then at that moment the association is flawed and the marriage is dissolved in fact. And just as in a commercial association: if one or the other of the associates, instead of depositing the society's receipts in the common account, keeps some of the money for his own profit to the detriment of his associate, the commercial society would be destroyed; the same would happen if fidelity is no longer mutual, if support and assistance are no longer mutual, at that point the marriage is broken. There is no longer a reciprocal obligation to fulfill duties, because the duties would all be supported by one or the other alone, whereas the law states that they be mutual for both.
Thus we believe the drafting of Art. 212. is excellent, and this article summarizes and contains all by itself all the duties of the spouse; nothing more, nothing less.
But if, in fact, this Article 212 is the most just and complete conjugal contract, how does one explain, how should one understand, Article 213... ?
In the former it states: The spouses owe each other mutually. And in the latter it states: The wife owes obedience. . . .
Gentlemen, you must acknowledge that these two articles are incompatible, and Article 213 is antipathetic to the Charter of 1830.
It is here that equality before the law should be applied with complete equity. The woman owes no more obedience to her husband than the husband owes to his wife. ...
Inasmuch as the elimination of Article 213 is a question of good faith, I do not think it useful to cite the authors, more or less famous, who have written on this difficult problem. Your natural insight and your good sense will certainly be more help to me than all the old science of legislators who were certainly respectable in the time they lived, but who have no point of contact, no sympathy with the ideas and needs of our culture, our social organization, our constitutional charter, and our present legislation.
In the hope that you will accord your affirmative vote to my just demands and that you will send my petition on to the ministers of justice and interior so they can take action by presenting you as promptly as possible with the reforms and improvements absolutely necessary to the Civil, Commercial, Penal, Procedural, and Criminal Instruction Codes,
I present you, gentlemen, with the expression of my most distinguished greetings. . . .
M. Poutret de Mauchamps
Footnotes:
References:
Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom, the Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750 – 1880 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983] pp. 159 - 161
Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the 19th Century [Albany: State University of New York, 1984] pp. 98 - 107
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last updated February 2003