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ABSTRACT
In this article, I present the arguments of three republican women philosophers of eighteenth-century France, focusing especially on two themes: equality (of class, gender, and race) and the family. I argue that these philosophers, Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland, and Sophie de Grouchy, who are interesting and original in their own right, belong to the neo-republican tradition and that re-discovering their texts is an opportunity to reflect on women’s perspectives on the ideas that shaped our current political thought.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jacqueline Broad, Alan Coffee, Karen Detlefsen, and Bill Wringe for their careful readings and valuable feedback on earlier drafts, and for encouraging me to write this piece.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Although both Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay were connected in various ways to the French Revolution, and in particular influenced the political thought of the Girondists, who were the political party that Gouges, Roland, and Grouchy were affiliated to, I will not discuss them here as I choose to focus on their French counterparts.
2 Women have always written political philosophy—one of the earliest fragments signed by a woman’s name, Perictione I’s ‘On the Harmony of Women’ [Plant Citation2004: 76–8] touches on home politics and the possibility of women being rulers. Nonetheless, there were fewer women writing political philosophy before the eighteenth century, as witness Broad and Green [Citation2009] and Green [Citation2014]’s similar sized companion volumes, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, and A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800.
3 Hesse [Citation2001: 32, 37] reports that in England, while there was a regular increase of women in print, it was not as dramatic as in France. Between 1780 and 1789, 166 women were published, and the following decade, 191 [Citationibid.: 39].
4 Admittedly, some of these texts were short: pamphlets had to be printed on a poster which could then be pasted throughout the city. But even counting these as journal articles would leave Gouges with a nice long CV, especially considering she died in her thirties.
5 See Bergès [Citation2015] for a description of these articles and arguments for their attribution.
6 Neo-Roman republicanism, which places an emphasis on freedom as non-domination, and is defended by Skinner [Citation1998] and Pettit [Citation1997], takes its cue from these Roman authors. There is also a neo-Athenian republicanism, which draws on Aristotelian conceptions of citizenship and the good life. It is arguable that at least historical republicanism is in fact influenced by both the Romans and Aristotle [Honohan Citation2002]. Certainly, as I represent it in this section, late eighteenth-century neo-republicanism drew on both traditions.
7 In a recent paper, Annelien de Dijn [Citation2015] took on Pettit’s criticism and argued convincingly for reinstating Rousseau in the republican canon.
8 Certainly, Wollstonecraft who was influenced by him, rejected a number of his views. Yet she is included in the republican canon.
9 In that sense Gouges was quite close to Wollstonecraft, and certainly Wollstonecraft did apply republican ideals to arguments for the emancipation of women. For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s republicanism see Coffee [Citation2014], Halldenius [Citation2015].
10 Wollstonecraft was very aware of this, so that her Vindication of the Rights of Woman [Citation1792] is to a large extent a proposal for educational reform. Thus, she dedicated the second Vindication to the Marquis de Talleyrand who was then engaged in writing a paper for the reform of the French educational system, and at least considered the suggestion that women should be educated in the same way as men. Gouges delayed the publication of her Rights of Woman because she was waiting for Talleyrand’s paper to come out.
11 Emulation in late eighteenth-century France was a popular and contested concept. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de St Pierre [Citation1789: 199, 204], a disciple of Rousseau who believed in the ultimate goodness of human nature, thought that emulation was always harmful because it was in fact a sort of competition that engendered jealousy and all sorts of other social ills. But others disagreed, and believed, following Cicero, that emulation was nothing more than the imitation of virtue:
Emulation is used in two senses, and denotes both a merit and a fault. For the imitation of virtue is called ‘emulation’ (with this we have no concern, it being praiseworthy) and the name is also given to the grief felt by the one who has failed to obtain what he had desired and another possesses [Cicero Citation1927: IV, 17].
12 See, for example, Phillips [Citation2000] and Pateman [Citation2007]. A notable exception is Laborde [Citation2008].
13 Young [Citation1995] makes this point in a response to Galston [Citation1991] in which he argues that single parenthood is bad for the economy.
14 Certainly, Wollstonecraft’s republicanism fits that description. In fact, her concept of independence is best described as relational autonomy. See Mackenzie [Citation2016] and Coffee [Citation2018].
15 Her arguments on marriage, divorce, and legitimizing children born out of wedlock in Letter VI can and probably should be read as feminist.
16 The use of ‘men’ here is not archaic: women in both Hobbes and Rousseau are mostly left out of the discussion except when mating and reproduction are considered.
17 These hypotheses about primitive societies have been rejected by those in a position to test them, i.e., anthropologists, who have found that early human societies were not, on the whole, violent, at least not amongst themselves. See Widerquist and McCall [Citation2017: 131–8].
18 See Bergès [Citation2016a] for a longer discussion of Roland’s rural republicanism.
19 See Bergès [Citation2016b] for a discussion of eighteenth-century arguments for breastfeeding.
20 There are many problems with Rousseau’s condemnation of the practice of wet-nursing. One worth noting is that the economic conditions in eighteenth-century France, especially in Paris, often required working mothers to rely on a wet-nurse, so they could continue their professional activities and earn enough to sustain the family [Jacobus Citation1992: 71]. Another is that babies were often sent out of the capital in the hope that they would survive their first years. Roland thus spent her first two years with a wet-nurse away from home, after her mother had lost all her previous babies.