Sylvie A Gambaudo

A Reconstruction

Keywords:

This article opens with the questioning of a now established scholarly category, 'French feminism'. It proposes that theoretical and polemical understandings of 'French feminism' have been founded on an opposition to its counterpart, 'Anglo-American feminism'. The measure of this opposition has been defined mostly as geographical, linguistic and cultural. But underneath such constructions often lies the old sameness vs difference debate that has captivated feminism since the suffragettes. The article argues for a less oppositional and less discounting definition of the two strands of feminism. It proposes to read oppositional classifications as motivation for a dialogue addressed to the 'other' of theoretical constructs; questioning the likelihood of foregoing oppositional classification.

Is there such a thing as 'French feminism'? Judging by the growing number of texts using the term, undoubtedly 'French feminism' has entered the annals of scholastic terminology. It has become a self-explanatory expression that the sentient recognize as a coded referent, signalling the users' inclusion in a certain way of thinking. It signals belonging and it signals an existing intellectual tradition. To conceive of French feminism as a 'tradition' implies that the term has gained momentum and recognition. Yet, this is far from a true representation if we consider the vehement and fertile exchanges that have gathered and opposed the so-called French feminists and their critics. A taster of such exchanges could go as follows. The French feminists' 'woman', excluded from masculine discourse, is at best the other of man's symbols. A nothing or a mystic figure, her language defies comprehension, and confirms her as the marginal and impotent of discourse.

Decidedly of western extraction, the French feminist 'woman' is locked in an either/or of 'the idealistic tendency of structuralist thought [ignoring] the historical/social specificity of language structures' (Nye, 1986: 51). The Anglo-American feminists' views on 'woman' are equally damning. Founded upon 'the American interest in the self; the British emphasis on class . . . puritanical and work-oriented' (Stanford-Friedman, 1993: 249), the Anglo-American feminist 'woman' lacks originality. Her structure occasionally chimes with phallocentric and her style conveys a sense of deja vu. But, leaving the sometimes acerbic arguments on the back-seat, both sides agree on one thing: French feminism is not the sum of its parts, it is not French and it is not feminism. Yet, the term sticks above such terms as 'third wave feminism', 'post-feminism', 'post-structuralist feminist literary theory', etc. Even if they are not entirely equivalent, these terms are often interchangeable as they point to a different theoretical emphasis on something post, something past, something that comes after. After what? After the hard-core ideals of the feminist struggle. We would be dealing with the aftermath of feminism because, some believe, feminism is dead, feminism has reached its end and achieved its objectives. And yet, with front-page headlines such as 'Women now paid 30 percent less. Scandal as pay gap with men reaches a record 25-year high' (Daily Express, 1 June 2004), it does not take much ingenuity to perceive that even very early feminist equal opportunity objectives, which, by virtue of being quantifiable, may appear less complicated to carry through, are far from having been achieved. Moreover, with captions asking readers to phone-vote on 'Should women get same pay as men?' (Daily Express, 1 June 2004: 12), it appears that the very spirit of equal opportunity, elicited by suffragettes from the mid-1860s onwards, has still not been assimilated by some of our 21st-century constituents. So, while some claim feminism is passé, unsurprisingly, others claim feminism has failed to deliver the promised post-patriarchal land it announced. To evaluate such a bleak prognosis in such a short space would not do justice to the extraordinary revolution that feminism has been and still is. As a starting point, I now emphasize one aspect of feminist history (the sameness and difference debate) that strikes me as significant in understanding French feminist thought.

The first two waves of the feminist struggle are historically typified first by a call for the equal treatment of women with regards to civic and social rights and second by the recognition of women's right to difference. In the first instance, the claim to equality was founded upon a logic of sameness whereby since women are as rational as men, society carries a duty to give its female citizens equal opportunity to take part in social organization: education, suffrage, etc. Early feminists thus elicited the debate 'equality vs difference' that would from then on be at the core of feminist debates. Early views centred round the assimilation of woman to man, effectively encouraging woman to become like man in character (rational, proactive, responsible, etc.) while otherwise retaining her femininity (caring, maternal, supportive, etc.). But the assimilation of woman to man and the subservience of her feminine condition to the advancement of man soon became the target of criticism for a second wave of feminists who, thanks to the hard work of early feminists, were now educated, better represented in the workplace, in the political arena, etc. -in a word equipped to challenge the ideology of patriarchal organization.

Second-wave feminists rejected early feminists' bid for equality on the ground that equality effectively encouraged women to see themselves with a man's eyes. Equality could be gained on the condition that woman be gauged by the same criteria that defined man. In short, equal to man meant same as man. Outside this model, women were still denied visibility and recognition. Second-wave feminists defied the patriarchal status quo by declaring woman different. Different from what? Different from the woman she was as the counterpart of man, with different needs, different sensitivity, different modes of expression, etc. than those man had defined for her. These feminists efficiently theorized woman's situation. They proved that woman was used as the invisible thread that keeps the patriarchal social fabric together, and that this position was far from gratifying, let alone fulfilling her (Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, for instance). Discontented with such misrepresentation and mistreatment, woman would, from then on, do her own defining. To this effect, second-wave feminists used radical measures (hence 'radical feminism') and did a spectacular job in pulling this different woman out of her closet by giving her difference substance. A distinctly female authorship was salvaged from the scraps of mainstream literature and promoted as part of a historicizing of women's literary achievement (for instance, Virago Press). Women authors wrote more systematically about women's experience, making audible a consciousness that had previously been kept silent. The English language, construed as a man-made language [START_REF] Spender | Man Made Language[END_REF], became a terrain of investigation of women's oppression and some (Suzette Haden-Elgin) suggested that the creation of a language to accommodate specific female experience would change women's lives (this idea survives in policies of political correctness).

However, as radical feminism progressed, so did the formalization of the difference debate, pitching opposing theoretical factions against each other. Disputes among feminists show that although the move to promoting women's difference was animated by a genuine desire to create a sisterhood where women might find legitimacy, this sisterhood was itself struggling to unify the desires of all its members. Initially steered by white, middle-class, heterosexual women, issues of class, race, sexuality, etc. divided the movement and subgroups emerged to account for those differences, for instance black feminism, lesbian feminism, etc. These subgroups testified to the dissatisfaction with the assimilation of woman to her 'difference' because assimilation also homogenized all women to a 'sameness in difference'. Hence, the initial dissatisfaction with the assimilation of woman to the dominant discourse and with her subservience to the advancement of that dominant group was disappointingly repeated within the movement.

The argument for the failure or even end of feminism usually refers to this turbulent time of internal disagreements. Yet, the issue of sameness/ difference, far from being dead or passé, would go through further theoretical phases where men and women would be scrutinized for biological, psychological, behavioural, environmental similarities and differences that would justify (or refute), explain (or confuse), the existence of the categories man and woman. As the formalization of the sameness/difference continued, so new schools of feminist thought were created. It is a tribute to the movement that the division of opinion and the splintering of 'feminism' into what could be called feminist 'specialism' has not translated into the demise of feminism but its transformation and diversification. However, the increased formalization and specialization of feminist thought has also intellectualized the debate and made its former bra-burning, slogan-brandishing presence less pronounced. In a culture where visibility often rhymes with media spectacle, the perception that feminism is passé is also to be attributed to its discretion. Finally, it seems to me that the perception that militant feminism has 'disappeared' from the social arena is due to the redistribution of many of its causes in nonfeminist identified areas of social reform. Equal opportunity, political correctness, diversity awareness, parity, etc. are today's catch-phrases that hide behind them the continuation of contemporary feminist militantism.

Third-wave feminism takes its place in this context of increased intellectualization of the debate. The debate over sameness/difference has moved away from confrontational means of gaining social reform and towards a more academic style. Third-wave feminists are invested in articulating theories explaining why, in spite of the work done, the debate persists and how to transcend it.

Alice [START_REF] Jardine | Gynesis[END_REF] and Toril [START_REF] Moi | Sexual/Textual Politics[END_REF] are largely responsible for the use of the term 'French feminism', the one for the coining of the term and the other for further limiting its use to a few selected authors. In her famous article, 'Gynesis', Jardine detected the emergence of French feminist thought out of the intellectual scene of 1980s France. Characterized by the dawn of what has been termed 'modernity' or 'postmodernism', French theorists were invested in theorizing the failure of the modernist project and moving its failed dialectic towards new theoretical horizons. For the feminist project, this translated in revisiting the debate over sameness and difference. As for Toril Moi, the publication of her Sexual/Textual Politics in 1985 made official a division between Anglo-American feminists and French feminists. Anglo-American feminists (Kate Millett, Virginia Woolf, Elaine Showalter) would be invested in seeking a woman-centred perspective and in defining a woman identity they believe women have been denied. French feminists (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva), on the other hand, would be indebted to Simone de Beauvoir and would believe that woman does not have an identity as such but that the feminine can be identified where difference and otherness are found. Today, the term French feminism is commonly used in Anglo-American literary circles. It is this packaging of the adoption of the term 'French feminism' and how it contributes to the sameness/difference debate that this article now addresses.

Most researchers (Delphy, Lechte, Smith, Moi, etc.) concur on the idea that French feminism is an Anglo-American invention. They argue that its purpose is to commodify, behind the qualifier 'French', this evanescent part of continental thought for domestic consumption.

Geographical fencing off (identifying separate French and Anglo-American feminisms) would be a metaphorical fencing off of two distinct ideologies. On the one hand, Anglo-American feminism denotes a geographical limit. More than this, 'Anglo-American' pertains to a linguistic tradition that does not seem to concern 'French'. The US and the UK share, since the Reagan/Thatcher years, this 'special relationship' that transcends a mere common language. 'French' thought, on the other hand, does not necessarily include French-speaking countries other than France and certainly does not imply the grouping of two or more national territories according to linguistic and political privileging. A famous example is found in Moi, who defines as the 'Holy trinity' of French feminist theory three women (Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous) who are respectively Belgian, Bulgarian and French pied noir. If French feminism does not necessarily include French natives, it does include thinkers of a common intellectual tradition. But this common intellectual tradition is defined from without. French feminism is 'a body of comments by Anglo-American writers on a selection of French and non-French writers: Lacan, Freud, Kristeva, Cixous, Derrida and Irigaray are the core groups. But there are others' (Delphy, 2000: 172). Though not all of them French, and leaving Freud aside for now, they do have in common the French language as their elected mode of expression. This may not simply be intellectual arrogance, reserving French thought for the conversants into the riddles of the continental post-structuralist linguistic games. Kristeva expressed this clearly when she stated that 'Foreigners must confront a ghost from the past that remains hidden in a secret part of themselves' (Guberman, 1996: 4). In choosing to express themselves in a foreign language, these theorists are also giving themselves a tool to tap into archaic contents of the subject's being.

Kristeva also stresses that we all carry memories of childhood connected with places, their colours, smells and sounds, and that the reason for which these recollections are often hazy is that we find it difficult to express them in words: as adults, we have lost touch with the language of childhood. A foreign language can help us translate those early impressions of the world into words because it is more distanced from them than our mother tongue is. It is for this reason that Kristeva found her analysis, which was conducted in French, helpful in transposing her images of childhood onto her new culture. (Cavallero, 2003: 144-5) Indeed, the distance French provides to these 'foreign' French feminists enables them to deal with and represent pre-oedipal contents. But protection through linguistic distancing is not the sole motivation for gathering around the French language. Connections between the language and other issues like translation, otherness and oppression are embedded in the language. 'Foreign' French feminists and Anglo-American critics' absorption in French bears significance even more visibly when their choice to read or speak French is not the fortuitous consequence of having been brought up into a language. It is interesting to pause on the history of the French language and specifically on its long-lived association with power struggles, won and lost. I am not suggesting that such an association is the appanage of French since linguistic imperialism has long been a recognized weapon of colonization and submission of the one culture by the other. But I am emphasizing the fact that France and the French language have a long history as linguistic oppressor and oppressed and that this implicit history is also part of the lure to French of a certain intellectual practice.

The use of the French language was first made compulsory by Hugues Capet (10th century) as part of the government's effort to absorb southern provinces to the Duchy of Paris. The langue d'oïl, the dialect of Paris then became the official language, effectively causing the demise of languages spoken south of the Loire river until their revival in the mid-19th century in an attempt to assert a regional Occitan identity (Provençal, Catalan, for instance). While 'minor' languages have been restored, the government is at the same time fighting for the survival of the French language in France, in a globalizing context where linguistic supremacy is driven by the market economy. I am thinking of the Toubon Law for instance, which imposes the compulsory but not exclusive use of French on certain documents (consumer goods, instruction manuals, advertisements). The Body Shop was famously the first company to be fined in 1996 for failing to comply with the Toubon linguistic rule. So the French language has historically oscillated between weapon and recipient of linguistic oppression. We may further hypothesize that more recent sociopolitical events help explain why the French linguistic context may be prosperous to a certain type of thought.

French has become one of the languages to express ideas of difference par excellence. The claim for France's position as the champion of 'difference' was initiated under the Mitterrand government. But the idea arches back to the French Revolution. The year 1789 is seen as the turning point, when a change of focus is observed in philosophy, literature, politics, etc. Eighteenth-century values had failed to bring social happiness and ended in bloodshed. Social and political unrest, rapid technological advances, the rejection of rationality in favour of emotions, etc., translated in a move away from collective concerns to that of the individual and his/her singularity. Hence, the use of French as the language of predilection by theorists of French thought (not necessarily French themselves) is no coincidence.

If France sponsors a tradition of difference, the clash between French and Anglo-American thinkers is not surprising. Could the use of the French language also be a defensive linguistic response against the feared American linguistic imperialism trading even closer by virtue of the British alliance with the cultural giant? If there is a withering away of language, as Kristeva proposed, and of the French language and culture in particular, one response 'consists in turning back toward tradition in a loving, proud, reactive, nostalgic fashion' (Guberman, 1996: 169). Another, as I explained elsewhere, 1 privileges the subversion of text over protectionist measures. French feminism, feminism in French then, is a reactive and subversive response. French feminist strategy is not as apolitical as many Anglo-American feminists would have it. Its sociopolitical engagement can be extrapolated from this: the use of a receding language is the means by which French feminists destabilize, escape the grip of dominant ideology and ultimately coerce this dominant ideology to reckon with issues of marginalization. The irritation of Anglo-American feminists is understandable. But in the battle for linguistic authority, so is the irritation of French feminists at the Anglo-American label. For reactive and subversive strategies go beyond a mere attack on geographical and linguistic imperialism. Issues of national or linguistic dominance should be read as the symptom of a much wider problematic that interests French feminists: that of representation, or more precisely, re-presentation as the secondary presentation of a primary process. This leads us to the issue of translation and we can now return to the place given to Freud in French feminist theory and make a few remarks on his contribution.

Freud's position has prime significance in the context of French feminism and pre-oedipality. Freud historically precedes all other French feminist thinkers. Freud acts as a referent. Freud is the link to a shared fascination for a certain conception of consciousness that can be traced back to his tradition. French feminism is also post-Freudian feminism. The Anglo-American readership of a post-Millettian persuasion is undoubtedly suspicious if not averse to such acceptance of the paternalist enemy. 2 This is in some ways justified, but also partly a misreading of those French feminists. In theorizing representation of the individual, French feminist thinkers have in common their interest in pre-oedipality. Representation of the maternal experience typifies French feminism. It also draws them apart. From the search for a specifically feminine mode of representation to the protective holding on to the symbolic as the ticket to safety, French feminist narratives tell of a questioning addressed to the paternal and to the maternal. From subversive to reactive then, French feminist representation oscillates between dissidence from and compliance with the patriarchal letter.

To the dismay of Anglo-American feminists, dissidence is not spelt out in the narrative. Dissidence is in the confusion and ambiguity of expression and must be extrapolated. We are in the grips of translation on several levels. First, to express oneself in a foreign language in to speak another language. The leap from foreign languages as the language of the others, to foreign language as the language of foreignness or otherness is easily made. Hence, a first meaning of translation is found in this Freudian reading: leap from other to proper self, from pre-oedipal to symbolic, from maternal to paternal, etc. Second, the confusion or ambiguity present in the French text leaves the English translator with the ungrateful task of making choices: fixing the other, the pre-oedipal, the maternal with linguistic symbols (interpreting while translating); translating the ambiguity with the use of slash symbols (for example féminin becomes feminine/female); rewriting the text in English and using the ambiguity of the English language to make a point (Nicole Ward-Jouve does this, for instance).

That translation dissolves, alters and reforms meanings is nothing new. But the agency of translation (or of the translator) perhaps has not been emphasized enough. 'One cannot ignore issues of translation and cultural difference in the representation of a writer's thought', Smith (1998: 5) exclaims. Indeed, translation demands that we address these two aspects of its practice. French feminists are attached to the French language as the privileged space where they construct meaning. This is significant, as we have seen earlier. English translators distort that construction and, with or without their approval, impose an Anglo-American identity upon French feminists. There is a tendency to assume the equivalence of the French and English languages, equalling their differences to a kind of transcendental reality of meaning, a transcendence both languages would be subject to. At times, this has led to aberrant interpretations founded, not so much on a poignant analysis of text, but on the indiscriminate analysis of the translated text. I am regularly reminded of this difficulty when perplexed students attempt the perilous task of making sense of 'the feminine'. There is feminine (a sociopolitical reality) and there is feminine (a positioning of identity). In fact, both meanings are diametrically opposed. From a feminist perspective, the sociopolitical feminine is on the side of patriarchal representation of 'woman' while the 'positioned' feminine is on the side of the non-verbal, or the transverbal, if we are lucky. In Lacan's infamous 'woman is not', the metaphoric woman is in the void, absence, invisibility, the in-between of language. The sexism of such a remark is not in the suggestion that under patriarchal analogy women do not exist symbolically but in arresting thought at that. Luckily, authors like Cixous rescue the Lacanian sentence by showing the possibility to create those in-betweens as literary practice. Although woman is still absent or invisible, she is now intentionally created. So language, once decried as 'man-made' (Spender) can now be effected, against Lacan, to 'make woman'.

The difficulty with such a practice is to work on two opposite registers at once. When Hélène Cixous writes of écriture féminine or of the other bisexuality, she works on two levels: a literal level and a metaphorical level. Susan Sellers sums it up: 'we all continually fluctuate between gender roles, sometimes assuming defensive, "masculine" positions, at other times willing to risk prohibition, and at other times combining elements of each' (Sellers, 1994: xxviii). Yet, Sellers' statement is still too organized, too phallogocentric, too much of a remark founded on the differentiation of meaning whereby, although we are offered three terms, one is either masculine or feminine or a combination. Cixous' expression is an either/ or and all of those at once. It expresses at the same time meaning as the outcome of differentiation and meaning as 'the non-exclusion of difference' (Cixous, cited in Sellers, 1994: 41). Freud taught us that difference is founded on exclusion and that the excluded must be the mother. Cixous emphasizes another difference, difference without exclusion, difference before exclusion: I will never say often enough that the difference is not one, that there is never one without the other, and that the charm of difference (beginning with sexual difference) is that it passes. It crosses through us, like a goddess. We cannot capture it. It makes us teeter with emotion. It is in this living agitation that there is always room for you in me, your presence and your place. I is never an individual. I is haunted. I is always. Before knowing anything, an I-love-you. (Cixous, cited in Sellers, 1994: xviii) The other bisexuality is both the reunion after castration of the two halves elicited by Ovid 3 and 'the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes' (Cixous, cited in Sellers, 1994: 41) before sexual difference, before the knowledge that one can be cut. So, écriture féminine is: an essentialist idea for which only those endowed with a female body have the potential; a socially determined idea whereby femininity is a reconstructed psychical positioning open to all; both at once. It seems, then, puzzling that from a desire to 'inscribe difference at the heart of the universal' (Kristeva, cited in Guberman, 1996: 269), French feminists are regularly accused of essentialism. This is especially true of Kristeva, whose attachment to the oedipal model has alarmed feminists, raised suspicion as to her motivations and provoked virulent responses to her message. Her strategy is always to rehabilitate the shattered subject of the 'crumbling social contract' (Kristeva, 1974: 224) through the 'search for [its] legitimisation through the paternal function' (Kristeva, 1974: 224). Does this entail the betrayal of the feminist cause? For the legitimization of the social subject necessarily means the repression of the feminine. Kristeva has defended herself, accusing Anglo-American feminist theorists in particular of perpetrating 'unconsciously the very oppositions they are trying to undo' (Kristeva, cited in Guberman, 1996: 107):

I believe that much of what has been written in the United States about my conception has been inaccurate. People have either defined and glorified the 'semiotic' as if it were a female essence or else claimed that I do not grant enough autonomy to this 'essence', this 'difference'. I hear in such reductive statements traces of the age-old debate between 'universalists' and the 'differentialists'. (Kristeva, cited in Guberman, 1996: 269) The attack on liberal (universalist) and radical (differentialist) feminists is explicit and understandable. The trapping of Kristevan thought into an either/or dialectic makes it difficult to rescue the Kristevan project, unless we reconsider it from the perspective suggested by Cixous of difference before exclusion. We find it explicitly in Kristeva also, under the guise of the 'maternal function' or the 'woman effect':

. . . it entails a specific relationship to both power and language or, if you will, to the power of language. This particular relationship is based not on appropriating power and language, but on being a source of silent support, a useful backdrop, and an invisible intermediary. (Kristeva, cited in Guberman, 1996: 104) Silent, supportive, useful, invisible, in-between . . . This is hardly a glorifying image of women's social role. But Kristeva is not simply talking about biological women. 'Maternal' and 'woman' refer, as in Cixous, to a time anterior to paternal castration, a moment when antinomic worlds can coexist without shattering one another. This is an experience the future subject internalizes and of which the presence will make itself felt in a certain type of expression: poiesis, écriture féminine, etc. What hinders the assimilation of such terminology is the confusion between two registers pertaining to two experiences: that of the presocietal and that of social organization. The capture of 'maternal' or 'feminine' in and as the body of woman is a 'symbolic effect of the way the subject experiences social cohesiveness, power and language' (Kristeva, cited in Guberman, 1996: 104). It is the way society requires we organize ourselves as social members. For the French feminist, destroying the patriarchal markers of such a passage from presocial to social does not fundamentally change the problem. We may choose to discard the lipstick or cultivate a revolutionary Greenham Common style image for 'woman', this still points to a symbolic evocation of 'woman'. The Anglo-American feminists' frustration with French feminism can also be located here. If French feminists succeed in demolishing all social action by reducing it to a 'symbolic effect' of something other, what is the alternative? Does the 'interiorisation of the founding separation of the sociosymbolic contract' (Kristeva, cited in Belsey and Moore, 1990: 215) offer feminism any hope?

My initial argument that the (mis)understanding of 'French feminism' is a translation issue has, then, slipped sideways. French thought is now an obstruction to capturing the picture. French feminists are in the habit of holding antithetic propositions under one thesis. This does not easily pass the translation barrier from the French to the English language. Translators of French feminist texts are time and time again faced with the difficult task of rendering the French feminist spirit: 'we have not made the effort to create a seamless, smooth American English text', one translator comments (Cixous, 1994: xxvi). Instead, the translator seeks 'to make the familiar uncanny' (evoking the Freudian Unheimlich [START_REF] Freud | The Uncanny[END_REF]), 'the translation ought to aim at this sort of dépaysement' (Cixous, 1994: xxvi). Anne-Marie [START_REF] Smith | Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable[END_REF] and John [START_REF] Lechte | Julia Kristeva[END_REF] have suggested that the difficult passage from French into English may be more of a cultural difficulty, indeed a dépaysement, than an actual translation barrier.

Smith proposes that Anglo-American thought demands of theory that it be testable:

Freud is certainly in a more comfortable position in France than in Britain or the United States, where in the wake of the recent vituperative indictment of Freud, written by the American intellectual Frederick Crews, the national, liberal press has entered into a trend which, setting psychoanalysis against the demands of empiricism, attempts to disprove its theories as non-scientific. The French Lacanian tradition reads Freud as a study of language. (Smith, 1998: 8) The main difference between French and Anglo-American intellectual cultures comes down to a difference in the way the Freudian message has been received. Smith's packaging of Anglo-American psychoanalytic thought is in itself questionable in the light of the diversity of readings (I am thinking of the distinguished post-Kleinian British School of Object Relation Theory). John Lechte overcomes this when he observes that the cultural difference is not so much a French vs Anglo-American conflict but the stumbling upon a limitation in rational thought:

The limit of phenomenological research is that it always, and inevitably, refers back to an ultimate unity, a posited subject of experience, a Cartesian subject in fact which is already an 'I', already the result of the distinction between subject and object. (Lechte, 1991: 134) The divide pitches established frameworks of thought of a Cartesian persuasion against conceptions of the subject that exceed such frameworks.

Although such persuasion partakes in the historical making that defines contemporary western thought, it certainly cannot be traced back to an Anglo-American cultural tradition. Rather, reading through Lechte, we are dealing with a historical clash of cultures pitching proponents of the modernist project against the less peremptory discourses of late and postmodernism. In this sense, the issue is not that Anglo-American theorists read Freud differently from French feminists but that they read Freud and French feminism with the same suspicion for their lack of a solid objective base. As Smith notes:

. . . there is an aspect of French cultural life in general which involves unabashed avowals of desire and seduction and distinct forms of identification which a puritanical streak in Anglo-American culture resists as narcissistic or uncritical and needs to turn into either abstractions or plain speech. (Smith, 1998: 8) French feminism reiterates after Freud a message of estrangement from the motherland. This space of estrangement, of dépaysement then, is in fact what French feminists constantly flirt with and what Anglo-American culture defends itself against:

There is a staging of sensory pleasure which is not always considered politically correct, or critical, across the Channel or the Atlantic. This is a form of resistance which goes far beyond distinguishing the package from the product and in the name of critique translates itself as a refusal of seduction, and an obsessional defence against hysteria of foreignness and femininity. This sort of defensiveness is of course at the basis of any serious critical work but it is also a measure of cultural difference which is played out, I would argue, in relation to the question of seduction and resistance, just as xenophobia and misogyny are extreme examples of defences against the lure of foreignness or femininity. (Smith, 1998: 9) Smith's statement clearly proposes a dualistic relationship between the two poles of feminist criticism, divided by a political or geographical barrier. Interestingly, her choice of geographical divide, the sea or ocean, fits the purpose of her message that it is something along the lines of the maternal, hysteria, foreignness, femininity, that separates the two. That this should be played out as a xenophobic singling-out of French feminism would entail, if we follow her lead, Anglo-American feminists' defence against the maternal, the feminine, etc. In other words, American critics would have invented 'French feminism' to express ideas unpalatable for American domestic consumption under the cover of 'foreign theory'.

If we go along with this, it would mean that Anglo-American feminists have become the oppressors, French feminists the oppressed. Are we then witnessing a repeat of feminist history with the old dialectic impossibility of accommodating difference within dominant discourse? All the ingredients are certainly here: the demands that discourses of difference (French feminism) be brought into line to comply with acceptable feminist discourse (Anglo-American feminism); the complaint from French feminists that Anglo-American feminists do not understand and oppress them; etc. But while their respective narratives reveal a clash in methods and objectives, there are also crucial concessions granted theoretically on both sides.

For psychoanalytically oriented French feminism, differentiation will be played out. Whether in sexism, racism, ageism, sexual orientation or any other group, the existence of exclusion remains. The erasure or modification of categories such as sex, race, age does not fundamentally change the outcome of exclusion, only the form it takes. Similarly, the suspension of the differentiation theory will not suspend difference and by extension exclusion, sexual or otherwise. If exclusion is not permitted in one area, it will simply displace onto another. It is a small leap for French feminists to concede that differentiation will also be played out in feminism, that the fabrication of difference and of exclusion will occur no matter the goodwill of (Anglo-American) discourse.

In the view of the mounting Anglo-American interest in the French feminist approach, especially with regards to their explanation of the psychical dynamics of exclusion that animate every individual [START_REF] Cavallaro | French Feminist Theory[END_REF], the construction of Anglo-American feminism as the adversary of French feminism is not tenable. It is precisely their interest, which has permitted the dissemination of French feminist ideas beyond the circles of the Parisian elite. But if Anglo-American interest is not malevolent, it is not benevolent or gratuitous either. Spivak (1981) has shown that interest in the 'other' is rarely for the other's benefit but more egotistically to gain a better understanding of oneself. She says, 'in spite of their occasional interest in touching the other of the West, of metaphysics, of capitalism, their repeated question is obsessively self-centred: if we are not what official history and philosophy say we are, who then are we (not), how are we (not)?' (Spivak, 1981: 158-9). As post-structuralist theory has questioned the self-reflexive complacency of western history and philosophy, categories they sought to explain have also been questioned. The subject, capitalist social organization, etc. are being revisited, defended or vilified. But Spivak finds that this questioning remains a self-reflexive exercise rather than opening a dialogue with the other. The other's vision 'others me', voices the negative spaces of my being. So the discourse of the other provides me with a fuller picture of the 'hows' and 'whats' of my invisible being. If we apply Spivak's idea to the Anglo-American/French debate, what interests Anglo-American critics, when it does not fascinate and anger them, is the space where French feminists deny Anglo-Americans an existence. Hence, one of the major appeals of and objections to French feminism is the manner in which it supports theories of difference and cherishes issues of otherness at the risk of idealizing the notion of 'Other'. For if the notional other loses its grounding in any given sociopolitical reality, which 'other' is being lost? The Anglo-American objection to the creation of a utopian universalized Other would be an objection to being assimilated, as the other of French theory, to a theoretical construct lacking specificity and roots in social reality. French feminism would be inviting the dominant discourse to address issues of its own dissolution.

To conclude, it may not be that Anglo-American feminists created French feminism and then used it to voice, under the cover of 'foreign theory', concerns impertinent to the dominant Anglo-American discourse. But, it may well be that some Anglo-American feminists, who after a long battle had earned social, political and academic credence, suddenly found their secure base vulnerable to theories of difference. Then, we would be justified in thinking that the so-called dialogue that has opened between the two types of feminisms remains for many Anglo-American theorists a tool for self-study rather than an opportunity to address the notion of otherness. I would, however, propose to question this dreary conclusion and finish on a more positive note.

French and Anglo-American feminisms cannot be reduced to geographical, cultural or linguistic denotations. In effect, I hope to have demonstrated that they cannot be identified in isolation. From a political viewpoint, it seems that both sides are engaged in a power play at who-will-dissolve-theother. French feminism is inviting Anglo-American feminists to revisit their comfortable position and Anglo-American feminism is teasing clarification out of French feminists' seductive linguistic enigmas. This article has mostly emphasized the unsettling effect French feminism has on Anglo-American feminism, or rather the manner in which French feminism is construed as that which upsets the Anglo-American feminist edifice. The reverse could also have been argued. By placing itself as the other of otherness, Anglo-American feminism is positing itself as guardian of the symbol, be it a feminist symbol -a somewhat ironic outcome. It would be equally interesting to analyse how much Anglo-American feminism has reinforced the inclination of French feminist discourse towards incarnating the discourse of otherness. By isolating and assuming the existence of French feminist discourse, by adopting a sanctioning tone -feminist discourse must have a clear political agenda, must not be essentialist, etc. -Anglo-American feminism has, undoubtedly, ignited and fuelled a debate. A less prohibitive and more inclusive analysis would conclude that the constant crossing of the divide that separates these two particular poles of feminist criticism has revived western feminism, offering fertile exchanges and novel conceptions of subjectivity and gender.

European Journal of Women's Studies 14(2)

NOTES

My thanks go to Jennie Finch for her help.

1.

In Fendler and Wittlinger (1999). 2.

I am thinking about Kate Millett's seminal text Sexual Politics (specifically 'Freud and the Influence of Psychoanalytic Thought' and 'Some Post-Freudians'), which fiercely exposed the sexism of the Freudian edifice (Millett, 1977). Although Millett was not the only one to denounce Freud, her work stands as representative of that which prompted a wave of discontent that would typify radical feminism in particular. But separatism was not the only effect this consciousness raising had. Other feminists chose to revise the Freudian account (Juliet Mitchell, Jaqueline Rose, Sarah Kofman and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, for instance), thus creating the third wave of the feminist struggle. 3.

' Salmacis and Hermaphroditus' in Ovid's (1968) Metamorphoses.


Socialist women's organizations attracted members of the lower middle class and working class. The Polish women's emancipation movement was comprised of déclassé gentry who merged with the middle-class intelligentsia. Only in Hungary during the 1860s was there a group of noble women who sought to improve women's access to education; by the turn of the century the Hungarian women's emancipation movement was filled with educated female professionals from the upper bourgeoisie. 1 Few women born into the hundreds of great aristocratic 'houses' of Europe as detailed in the Almanach de Gotha joined women's emancipation movements before 1914. In his classic work, The Persistence of the Old Regime, Arno Mayer argued that 19th-century Europe was still made up of largely rural societies, controlled and dominated by old 'landed nobilities' (Mayer, 1981: 1-15). Mayer criticized historians for focusing too much on progress and modernization, while playing down or neglecting to account for powerful forces of tradition. Noble families celebrated their heritage and longevity. Their privileges and influence derived from land ownership, ecclesiastical ties and honorific positions at royal and imperial courts. None of this sat comfortably with processes of 'radical change'. It might be said, therefore, that nobles inherited an uneasy tension between class interests and progress on women's rights.

This article examines the responses of Parisian noble women to campaigns for women's rights in France of the early Third Republic. In the period from 1880 to 1914, the French feminist movement developed and grew, and the word féminisme first became widely used in France during the early 1890s. Employed 'principally as a synonym for women's emancipation', this and cognate terms spread to other parts of Europe by 1900 and to the US by 1910 (Offen, 1988: 126). Steven Hause and Anne Kenney list 17 French women's rights organizations operating in 1900. They estimate the French feminist movement then comprised at most '20,000-25,000 women whose recruitment to activity could be expected'. More than 95 percent of those women lived in Paris (Hause with Kenney, 1984: 42-3).

Paul Smith likens the feminist movement in France of the Third Republic to a 'mind-boggling labyrinth of personalities and organisations moving in irregular orbits around one another' (Smith, 1996: 2). In order to navigate this 'labyrinth', scholars have categorized French feminists by political allegiance, or by religious faith, or by radical vs moderate outlook. These categories have then been used to analyse tension between feminists and to interpret the ways in which republican anti-clericalism impacted upon the French feminist movement (Bard, 1995: 22-3; Hause with Kenney, 1984: 40-70; McMillan, 1981b).

2000)

. The early decades of the Third Republic witnessed the reintroduction of divorce in 1884; legislation granting women full legal capacity and the right to control their own property and earnings; the gradual opening of the medical, teaching and legal professions to qualified women; and the establishment of the first long-standing suffrage associations. Despite such developments, however, French society remained locked into discrimination by Napoleon's Civil Code. There have been several studies of change and continuities to women's place in French society over the 'long' nineteenth century [START_REF] Foley | Women in France since 1789: The Meanings of Difference[END_REF]McMillan, 1981a[START_REF] Mcmillan | France and Women, 1789-1914: Gender, Politics, and Society[END_REF]. Much is known about the ways in which some bourgeois and working-class women negotiated new opportunities for their sex. Yet the female aristocracy, albeit a tiny fraction of France's population, has received comparatively little attention. What was it about being a Parisian noble woman that failed to inspire support, indeed often provoked outspoken opposition, to the claims of feminists? CLASS, GENDER AND THE HABITUS Historians have argued that in the wake of the 1789 Revolution, the resilience of the French nobility lay in its adherence to distinctive patterns of living identified as 'noble'. 2 In Paris, one expression of this 'noble' lifestyle was participation in the rituals of High Society. The women of this elite engaged in a broad array of social activities designed to maintain connections and enhance the couple's status. They hosted dinners, garden parties, salons, soirées and balls. They attended concerts, theatre, opera and exhibitions. They chaired fundraising committees for the arts and charities, and they invited guests to their country estates and seaside villas. Noble women were high profile public figures whose titles, ancestry, connections and material resources constituted a great mass of social and cultural 'capital'.

The social 'power' of Parisian noble women rested on a code of comportment and attitudes known as 'distinction'. Distinction was the aristocratic version of what Bourdieu called the habitus: that is, the way a person is conditioned to display certain attitudes and behaviour as well as the gendered bodily manifestation of that conditioning. In France of the Third Republic, distinction served a particular purpose for the nobility. It reinforced the 'natural' superiority of this class that was undergoing political and economic decline. From 1879, the republicans held a decisive majority in government. The aristocracy lost much of its influence in national politics at the same time that an agricultural crisis eroded its traditional sources of income and investment based in land. While many nobles sought to restore their fortunes by marrying into the rich bourgeoisie, they also relied on a social mechanism to preserve the class hierarchy in High Society. Wealthy commoners tried to imitate nobles' distinction; only the 'blue-blooded', however, embodied the elusive aristocratic je ne sais quoi (Bourdieu, 2000: xi;Zeldin, 1973: 17).

How, then, did Parisian noble women, as powerful social agents, view the campaigns of bourgeois and socialist feminists in France? Why would a countess, for instance, who was accustomed to directing fundraising balls and fêtes, not have used her noble cachet, connections and organizing skills to stage a rally for suffrage? My approach to answering the question of why Parisian noble women were not feminists draws explicitly on Bourdieu's notion of 'distinction' as well as his later insights into 'masculine domination' [START_REF] Bourdieu | Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice[END_REF][START_REF] Bourdieu | Masculine Domination, trans. R. Nice[END_REF]. Bourdieu argued that the key to masculine domination lies in the role of institutions such as the state, the scientific and medical establishments, the family and the church that serve to 'dehistoricize' or 'eternalize' the structure and principles of sexual division underpinning women's oppression (Bourdieu, 2001: viii). The following discussion unpacks the historical processes that led Parisian noble women, among others, to support a social order governed by these institutions in France of the early Third Republic.

SUFFRAGE

During the 1880s and early 1890s, suffragists formed a minority within the French feminist movement, but broader support for the suffrage campaign developed around 1900, the year that three women's congresses were held in Paris. In 1909, the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes (UFSF) was founded and it claimed 12,000 members by 1914. On the eve of the First World War, male politicians spoke in favour of French women obtaining the vote. Suffragists seemed on the brink of obtaining their goal (Hause with Kenney, 1984: 156-7, 169-90).

In 1901 and 1902, two related conservative Catholic women's organizations were founded whose objective was 'the rechristianization of France, not the emancipation of women' (Hause with Kenney, 1984: 63). By 1914, the Lyon-based Ligue des Femmes Françaises (LFF) and its Parisian counterpart, the Ligue Patriotique des Françaises (LPF), had 200,000 and 545,000 members respectively. Aristocratic women held most of the leadership posts in the LPF, serving on the Parisian central committee and as regional deputies (Sarti, 1984: 78-80, 132, 138). Their rhetoric was explicitly anti-suffrage because they believed voting was contrary to women's role within the family. President of the LPF, the Baronne Reille, stated: 'If it were a question of politics, I would not be here. But if it is a question of defending our faith and the souls of our children, is it not the duty of a true Christian and mother?' The Baronne de Boury declared that female suffrage 'would be a new breach in the constitution of the family, and a deviation from women's role such as it had been understood by Christian civilization' (Hause with Kenney, 1984: 64-5, 84).

For historical reasons, this argument held particular resonance for women of the aristocracy. Margaret Darrow has shown that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries French noble women embraced domesticity to compensate for the damage caused by their involvement in politics at court and in their salons prior to the 1789 Revolution. Darrow points out that the circumstances of emigration during the Revolution initially made it necessary for aristocratic women to become primary carers for their children and husband. On the return of these families to Paris, however, noble women 'consciously adopted domesticity for moral reasons . . . but also for political reasons'. The appropriation of domesticity as a class ideal was 'an effort to answer middleclass criticism of the nobility and, consequently, to forestall the political triumph of the bourgeoisie during the Restoration' (Darrow, 1979: 42, 53).

Darrow's study illustrates the 'work of inculcation and appropriation' required for 'products of collective history' to be reproduced in the habitus (Bourdieu, 2005: 85). Similar 'work' took place in the early Third Republic, when noble women made the ideal of domesticity the cornerstone of their opposition to republican anti-clericalism and to female suffrage.

The Catholic Church was one of the institutions in 19th-century France that 'eternalized' the structure and principles of sexual division rooted in that ideal (Bourdieu, 2001: viii). Catholic women were taught to valorize the example of motherhood set by Mary, thereby protecting themselves from temptation as daughters of Eve. Noble women in families with close ties to the Church were especially susceptible to this message [START_REF] Macknight | In Memory of Myriad Selves: The Baronne Mathilde de Mackau (1837-1886)[END_REF]. Through convent schooling and relations with a confessor, they received a biblical understanding of female sexuality and its implications for women's roles that in Bourdieu's terms made 'practical sense'. The results of such conditioning were manifest in noble women's adherence to 'doxa': that is, submission to a set of arbitrary values and discourses that seem true and necessary (Bourdieu, 1990: 68-9). For the leaders of the LPF, the authority on these values was the pope. They obtained an audience with Pius X in order to have his opposition to female suffrage reported in the French press. Voting remained 'unthinkable' to these aristocrats before 1914. A group led by the Comtesse Lecointre quashed the efforts of Catholic bourgeois feminist Marie Maugeret to convince nobles of the need for women to vote (Hause with Kenney, 1984: 167). To combat the forces of anti-clericalism, the leaders of the LPF encouraged female 'influence' or guiding the hand that cast the ballot. In 1903, the Baronne Reille declared: 'We will be accused of dabbling in politics, of being feminist! We do not care for politics which are beneath us! Feminism! God preserves us from disturbing the order He established!' (Sarti, 1984: 148).

In the early Third Republic the scientific establishment also 'eternalized' the structure and principles of sexual division underpinning masculine domination (Bourdieu, 2001: viii). Paul Broca, an anthropologist, developed the notion that intelligence correlated to brain size. He and other scientists argued that because the physical dimensions of a woman's brain were smaller than a man's, the intellectual faculties of a female were necessarily inferior to those of a male [START_REF] Sowerwine | Woman's Brain, Man's Brain: Feminism and Anthropology in Late Nineteenth-Century France[END_REF]. Monarchist aristocrat the Marquise de Breteuil disparaged suffragists on exactly these (arbitrary) grounds, and in her journal she declared: 'Électrices, my sisters, rock your infants and thread your spinning wheels, you will never be great men!' (Mension-Rigau, 2003: 42).

There was one French aristocratic woman, however, who campaigned for female suffrage before the First World War. The Duchesse d'Uzès was introduced to feminist ideas through her acquaintance with the moderate English-born feminist Jeanne Schmahl. In 1909, when the Duchesse was persuaded to serve as honorary vice-president of the UFSF, Jane Misme, a bourgeois feminist, described the breakthrough as 'cornering the clerical and royalist party' (Hause with Kenney, 1984: 113).

The writings and speeches of d'Uzès in support of suffrage illustrate the potential for 'regulated improvisation' in the habitus (Bourdieu, 2005: 79). The Duchesse was a Catholic monarchist. The class background of d'Uzès meant that unlike most French feminists she did not look to the universal principles of 1789 to justify female suffrage (Bourdieu, 2000: 437-40, 453;[START_REF] Scott | Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man[END_REF]. Instead, in a speech at the Lyceum Club in 1913, she paid homage to ancient and early modern monarchic societies, arguing that women's place was indeed in the home and that the vote would give them the means to defend it [START_REF] D'uzès | Le Suffrage féminin: au point de vue historique. Conférence faite pour la première fois au Lyceum[END_REF].

MARRIAGE AND SEX

Virtually all feminists in the early Third Republic supported the institution of marriage. What they sought to change was the legal inferiority of married women set down in Napoleon's Civil Code of 1804. Feminists demanded the right for married women to control their own wages (obtained 1907), equal treatment for women and men in cases of adultery, and a lifting of the ban on paternity suits (obtained 1912). They also wanted to revise the wording of Articles 212-226 on 'The Respective Rights and Duties of the Spouses'. Read out at all French marriage ceremonies, these Articles articulated legal principles such as 'the wife owes obedience to her husband' (Waelti-Walters and Hause, 1994: 191).

Through Napoleon's Civil Code, the French state 'eternalized' the same structure and principles of sexual division espoused in the patriarchal doctrine of the Catholic Church. 'The man is the head of the woman as Christ is the head of the Church', stated Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclical of 1880 (Bard, 1999: 42). The pope's words were echoed in publications of the LPF: 'The husband is the master . . . orders, even if inspired by you, must be given by him so that all who depend on you become accustomed to seeing him as the sole commander' (Sarti, 1984: 226).

There was vigorous debate on women's maternal role during the Third Republic because of the urgent need to raise the French birth rate. Karen Offen has argued that in the context of widespread fear about depopulation French feminists promoted republican motherhood to advance the cause of women's rights [START_REF] Offen | Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France[END_REF]. This strategy either failed to convince or was ignored by the leaders of the LPF who enunciated a sharp division between feminist and Catholic principles. 'The League was not established to back the demands of feminists', declared the Baronne Reille in 1904 (Sarti, 1984: 236).

In an unpublished and undated document, 'Essai sur l'égalité des sexes', the Comtesse Greffulhe shows awareness of the barriers that women of her class and generation faced. Élisabeth Greffulhe suffered within her own marriage to a domineering husband, from who she never had the courage to separate despite crushing knowledge of his infidelities. In her 'Essai', she asks rhetorically, 'Society women are free . . . but do they not suffer like other women from the tyranny of marriage?' The Comtesse highlighted the grip of law and religion that instilled notions of 'obedience' and 'perpetuity' and prevented women from opening the door to liberty with the key that divorce provided (Archives Privées [Gramont] 101 (II)/ 150).

Noble women's attitudes towards marriage and sex reflected the conditioning they received in line with their social trajectory. For the nobility, childbearing was essential for the survival of the class or 'race'. The quality of being 'noble' was transmitted through the male bloodline. This meant that the institution of the noble family had a vested interest in 'eternalizing' the structure and principles of sexual division on which its survival was seen to depend. Members of a noble 'house' conceived themselves not as individuals but as links in a chain. A strong collective mentality or l'esprit de famille compelled each member to feel responsible for, and to conform to, the common interests of noble kin (Mension-Rigau, 1994: 21-89). To reproduce itself the noble family employed a series of interconnected strategies that resemble the strategies Bourdieu observed among the Kabylians and Béarnais (Bourdieu, 1990: 147-99;2005: 58-71). Matrimonial and inheritance strategies were designed to protect and transmit patrimony; fertility strategies were designed 'to produce as many men as possible as quickly as possible (through early marriage)'; and educative strategies were designed to inculcate 'an exalted adherence to the lineage and to the values of honour' (Bourdieu, 2005: 62).

The strategies for ensuring the survival of a noble bloodline were not compatible with the demands of feminists. Noble women such as the Comtesse Lecointre publicly opposed women's rights to divorce, contraception and abortion (Waelti-Walters and Hause, 1994: 42-57). In doing so they not only obeyed the teachings of the Catholic Church, but they also upheld the interests of the family in which they had been raised. Girls of the nobility were carefully brought up in what Queen Marie of Roumania described as a 'dangerous and almost cruel ignorance of all realities' (Pakula, 1985: 59). First pregnancy, when the feeling of sickness was explained, often came as a shock to young noble women (so did menstruation initially), and childbirth was made more excruciating than necessary when chloroform was not administered. Emotional isolation leading to despair in the early years of marriage was common. The trauma surrounding loss of virginity coloured some women's attitude towards sex for the rest of their lives. 3 The Princesse Bibesco recalled of her 'honeymoon': 'the physical union of two people is like murder. All at once one is obliterated; no identity remains except pain' (Sutherland, 1996: 26).

In Bourdieu's terms, the conditioning of noble women within the family produced the 'doxic' attitude required to perpetuate a dynasty. From 1880 to 1899, the average age at marriage for a woman of High Society was 22, and for a man, 29. This seven-year age gap is more than double that found by Smith between bourgeois couples in northern France from 1889 to 1900. In Smith's sample, the average age at marriage for a bourgeois woman was 23 and for a bourgeois man, 26 -just three years' difference (Grange, 1996: 504;Smith, 1981: 223). Of noble couples in High Society married between 1900 and 1914, 57.2 percent had between two and four children while 28.5 percent had five or more children. Noble couples that had at least one child who entered the Catholic Church had a consistently higher fertility rate than the noble average. For example, 'practising' Catholic nobles married between 1900 and 1929 had a fertility rate of 4.4 children compared to the noble average of 3.2 children for the same period (Grange, 1996: 154-5, 160-1).

What these statistics show is that the stereotype of a frivolous High Society woman, who feminists accused of leading 'a life of pleasure, exempt from maternity', was false (Cova, 1997: 101). Maternity was highly valued among the aristocracy. It was just that noble family practices -including the hiring of wet-nurses, nannies and governesses, and usually Catholic baptism -did not conform to the model of republican motherhood advocated by feminists.

EDUCATION

In the early Third Republic, feminists viewed education as a stepping-stone to women's emancipation; they sought equal educational opportunities for girls and boys. For the republican government, however, the motivation for opening girls' secondary colleges in 1880 was to reduce clerical influence on women. State schools' curricula were gendered so that girls and boys were taught different subjects. Before 1914, girls were not permitted to take Latin, which was a prerequisite to obtaining the baccalauréat. As a result, very few French women entered universities [START_REF] Clark | Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools[END_REF][START_REF] Mayeur | L'Énseignement secondaire des jeunes filles sous la Troisième République[END_REF].

To some extent, girls of the nobility escaped gender discrimination in education because they were taught by private tutors and governesses, and often in convent schools. These girls received lessons in mathematics, geography, literature, history and ancient and modern languages. They were also instructed in the social arts, including ballroom dancing, deportment, horse riding, piano and sketching. Noble girls benefited from considerable educational advantages, including one-to-one teaching and personal study space. In adult life, noble women could pursue scholarship independently; some received public recognition for doing so. 4 Class 'preferences', however, created complex barriers in a field of education dominated by two opposing camps: Catholic and republican. Within this field, nobles 'shape [d] their aspirations according to concrete indices of the accessible and the inaccessible, of what is and is not "for us"' (Bourdieu, 1990: 64;1996: 45, 75, 161-80, 282). For example, as a 16-year-old in 1898, the Princesse Marie Bonaparte was bitterly disappointed not to be allowed to sit public examinations to measure her intellectual abilities against girls of her own age. The reason, she was told, was that republican examiners were likely to fail her because of her surname. Her father and grandmother wanted to spare the child 'needless humiliation and disappointment' (Bertin, 1982: 60). France's military defeat at Sedan in 1870 had solidified republicans' particular aversion to the name 'Bonaparte'. Yet Marie's experience points to a political context that had implications for other noble women too.

In the intense struggle between Catholics and republicans for the control of education in France, nobles tended to side with the Church for personal as well as religious or political reasons. The précepteurs and institutrices employed to educate noble children were typically regarded as members of family. Nobles also received their local abbé in the home, and gave financial support to religious congregations, including teaching orders, through wills and bequests. Clerics who published tracts defending the Church's role in education had noble patrons from whom they heard confession [START_REF] Biquard | Piété et foi dans le Faubourg Saint-Germain au XIXe siècle[END_REF]Mension-Rigau, 1994: 29-33, 37-9).

Such an environment would have made it difficult indeed for the female nobility to empathize with secular-educated women. This included many feminists for the republicans' pacte laïque served as 'ideological cement' within the French feminist movement (Rochefort, 2004: 85). When Marie Bonaparte, in her seventies, reflected on female oppression in 'the culture created by men', she blamed members of her own sex who were merely 'simple-minded' servants, 'flirts' depicted in theatre, or 'stupidly virtuous, like my austere grandmother' (Bertin, 1982: 55). For the Princesse to refer disrespectfully to a senior relative (an extraordinary act in her milieu) is revealing of her personal ambivalence towards Catholic piety. More striking, however, is her circumscribed categorization of women. Marie failed to mention bourgeoises of her generation who received compulsory state schooling. At a critical age she had not been allowed to compare her capacities, or opportunities, to theirs.

WORK

Work was an area of feminist campaigning where conflict arose out of the gap between bourgeois and socialist ways of thinking. One example of this was the refusal of bourgeois feminists to countenance improvements to the working conditions of their own maids (Sowerwine, 1982: 67-80, 88-9, 130-41). In Bourdieu's terms, socialists represented the interests of the 'dominated classes' and were intent upon 'pushing back the limits of doxa and exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted'. Bourgeois feminists, on the other hand, belonged to the 'dominant classes' whose interest lay 'in defending the integrity of doxa' (Bourdieu, 2005: 169).

For Parisian noble women, who also belonged to the dominant classes, the low wages, poor accommodation and taxing physical duties of female servants formed part of a 'natural' social order. Raised in households with up to 30 servants, these noble women constructed their social and sexual identities at the same time that they adopted 'a socially defined vision of the sexual division of labor' (Bourdieu, 1990: 78). In 19th-century French aristocratic households, domestic service was structured hierarchically. The top position was occupied by the maître d'hôtel, who was the only member of staff to be referred to by his title ('Monsieur') as well as his first name. He sat at the head of the staff dining table, transmitted orders and administered servants' wages. Most of the better-paid servants in aristocratic households, such as the cook, gardener and mechanic, were also men (Chabot, 1988: 27, 33-4;Macknight, forthcoming).

Noble women, of course, were not in the position of relying on a wage for survival, and they came under attack from feminists for ignoring or abusing the rights of female workers to a fair salary. Marguerite Durand, editor of the first daily feminist newspaper in France, La Fronde, denounced the charitable intentions of the upper class in creating workrooms where the provision of miserable pay allowed for competition with normal businesses. To counter gross malpractices within the fashion trade, she established unions for those employed in the making of rich ladies' exquisite feathered hats (Bard, 1995: 35-6). In 1904, at the Joan of Arc Congress in Paris, Catholic bourgeois feminists proposed 'that society women will not encourage "starvation pay" by buying below the going rate' (Waelti-Walters and Hause, 1994: 49). There seems to have been no great progress in noble women's consciousness of the rights of female wage earners over the next decade. In August 1914, Edith Wharton complained about 'the silly idiot women who have turned their drawing-rooms into hospitals (at great expense), & are now making shirts for the wounded'. This typically upper-class charitable endeavour, she recognized, was 'robbing the poor stranded ouvrières of their only means of living' (Dwight, 1994: 183).

Parisian noble women were preoccupied by the morality of female workers, for the 'moralization of the masses' was a long-standing goal of their charitable endeavours (Macknight, in press;McPhee, 2004: Ch. 12). In 1904, the pope admonished Catholic women to shift their focus away from charity work, which reinforced class differences, towards social action and the reconciliation of upper and lower classes. This message was relayed to the leaders of the LPF in France where Catholic male conservatives had pioneered new approaches to social justice issues following the lead of the Comte Albert de Mun. For female aristocrats, however, it was difficult to get beyond moralization and really engage with unfamiliar problems that affected workers. In 1907, the Baronne Reille declared: 'We must help resolve the Social Question with the New Testament in hand' (Sarti, 1984: 274, 278).

The LPF concentrated its efforts on providing services for working mothers, a group whose protection had already been the subject of intervention by the French state and medical establishment. These two institutions were closely linked in France of the early Third Republic, for 'intellectual continuities between positivist medicine and republican anticlericalism . . . resulted in record numbers of left-leaning doctors in the senate and chamber of deputies' (Pedersen, 1996: 675; see also Ellis, 1990). Legislation introduced in 1892 and 1900 regulated female employment in French industry so that women's maternal responsibilities would be minimally compromised (Cova, 1997: 49-71). By limiting the number of daily working hours, and preventing women from working at night when pay was better, the French state and the medical establishment 'eternalized' the structure and principles of sexual division that underpinned masculine domination (Bourdieu, 2001: viii).

The leaders of the LPF recognized that economic necessity required working-class women to 'abandon' familial duties each day. They poured contempt, however, on feminists' claim that bourgeois women had the right to do the same by seeking professional employment. A 1906 publication from the LPF broadcast the message: 'Women doctors and lawyers are mediocre because a female intelligence only with extreme rarity measures up to a man's.' In 1910, the LPF sponsored an International Federation of Catholic Women's Leagues to oppose feminist and Protestant international associations (Sarti, 1984: 236-7).

CONCLUSION

For the period 1880 to 1914, the privileges of aristocratic birth created a paradoxical effect for Parisian noble women. On the one hand, these female aristocrats possessed the social capital that made them guardians of the 'ideal' bodily practices known as distinction. Parisian noble women before the First World War were powerful social agents with immense material resources at their disposal for showing prestige. On the other hand, however, these women were caught up in a regime of social rules, traditions and class-based customs concerning their bodies that continually worked to reinscribe gender inequality. In what Bourdieu termed 'the paradox of doxa', Parisian noble women submitted to 'symbolic violence' that characterized social relations based on masculine domination (Bourdieu, 2001: 34). Their complicity derived from 'misrecognition' of their role within a social order governed by institutions such as the state, the scientific and medical establishments, the expectations of family and the Catholic Church (Bourdieu, 2001: vii-viii, 84-8). The extensive resources and influence that noble women wielded in High Society made them all the more likely to accept or overlook the nature of their submission.

Bourdieu insisted upon close attention to the historical mechanisms through which the gendered social order is reproduced. Despite 'farreaching transformations of the feminine condition', the feminist revolution, in the 21st century, is not a 'fait accompli' (Bourdieu, 2003: 26)

  . NOTES Elizabeth C. Macknight is lecturer in European history at the University of Aberdeen. She is currently completing a book on gender roles among the Parisian aristocracy in France of the Third Republic. Address: Department of History, University of Aberdeen,King's College, Aberdeen AB24 3FX, Scotland, UK. [email: e.macknight@abdn.ac.uk]

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European Journal of Women's Studies 14(2)