The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern

by Carla Hesse

The French Revolution created a new cultural world that freed women from the constraints of corporate privilege, aristocratic salons, and patriarchal censorship, even though it failed to grant them legal equality. Women burst into print in unprecedented numbers and became active participants in the great political, ethical, and aesthetic debates that gave birth to our understanding of the individual as a self-creating, self-determining agent. Carla Hesse tells this story, delivering a capacious history of how French women have used writing to create themselves as modern individuals.


Beginning with the marketplace fishwives and salon hostesses whose eloquence shaped French culture low and high and leading us through the accomplishments of Simone de Beauvoir, Hesse shows what it meant to make an independent intellectual life as a woman in France. She offers exquisitely constructed portraits of the work and mental lives of many fascinating women--including both well-known novelists and now-obscure pamphleteers--who put pen to paper during and after the Revolution. We learn how they negotiated control over their work and authorial identity--whether choosing pseudonyms like Georges Sand or forsaking profits to sign their own names. We encounter the extraordinary Louise de Kéralio-Robert, a critically admired historian who re-created herself as a revolutionary novelist. We meet aristocratic women whose literary criticism subjected them to slander as well as writers whose rhetoric cost them not only reputation but marriage, citizenship, and even their heads.


Crucially, their stories reveal how the unequal terms on which women entered the modern era shaped how they wrote and thought. Though women writers and thinkers championed the full range of political and social positions--from royalist to Jacobin, from ultraconservative to fully feminist--they shared common moral perspectives and representational strategies. Unlike the Enlightenment of their male peers, theirs was more skeptical than idealist, more situationalist than universalist. And this alternative project lies at the very heart of modern French letters.

Genres: History, France

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Carla Hesse is a Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009, she is a specialist in modern European History and the history of communication. She is president of the Authors Alliance Board of Directors.

Reviews

[Heather Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not that thrilled with women’s studies as a field. The idea of choosing your object of study based solely on their biological sex disturbs me and seems both arbitrary and demeaning somehow to the women that get studied. People worthy of study should be chosen on the merit of their thought (or its lack of merit) and not because of their gender. That said, i occasionally come across some great work that challenges my usual take on this form of work. Carla Hesse’s The Other Enlightenment(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001) is such a piece of scholarship. I learnt something - something i needed to learn and something i would like to share because it challenges our preconceptions of the development of literature and of women as cultural producers.

"When we shift our perspective from the history of gender ideology to the study of the literary practices of women during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, three points become clear: (1) The French Revolution marked the advent of unprecedented female participation in public debate, not its suppression; (2) women who wrote were not socially marginalized as outcasts or rebels; rather, they were at the very center of their social and political worlds, as diverse as those worlds were; and (3) there were no typical “feminine” forms of literary self-expression or “feminine” perspectives on the political and social world. Women wrote in every genre and from all sides of the political spectrum" (54).

[Devin Creed · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not that into liberal feminism. Give me radical feminism.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forced me to rethink my conceptions of the enlightenment & learn about the incredible work some women did, but were not recognized.

[Mills College Library]

944.06082 H5871 2001