Sexing Political Culture in the History of France By Alison M. M ...

with gender remained a constant feature of political life throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Following this chapter then we have a concentration of studies focused around that particularly rich period in the French substantiation of connections between ideology and sex, from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War. Reference to earlier models of gender continued to play a role in national conceptions, as Natasha Synicky shows in her chapter, “Strong French Heroine or Pious Maiden?,” an account of public debates about the femininity, national identity and religious signification of Joan of Arc as a historical myth implicated in the career of actress Sarah Bernhardt after the Franco-Prussian War. Marie-Paule Ha’s chapter, “The Colonial Feminine Mystique,” shows how gender operated at the heart of French colonial discourse in the late nineteenth century, in new conceptions of women as a civilizing influence in the colonies, and as the arbiters of a domestication of colonialism in the métropole. My own chapter, “The Erotic Republic,” suggests some of the mechanisms through which sexual content and patholigization were incorporated into political discourse from the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War II. It focuses on the use of la Gueuse (the whore) as an ultra-right-wing term of denigration of the Third Republic, and on the relationship between the emergence of pseudoscientific writers on sexuality in France in the early twentieth century and the uptake of notions of sadism and Germanic sexual perversion in nationalistic propaganda imagery.

Both Richard Sonn’s chapter, “Utopian Bodies,” and Paul Schue’s chapter, ”Prodigal Sons of the Nation,” complicate the accounts presented thus far by showing that sex, gender, and political ideology came together not only in the official imagery of the state, but also at the far and subversive left (anarchism) and in reactionary new forms of the far right (fascism). While French anarchists throughout the interwar period envisaged promiscuity and the end of marriage as necessary products of radical social revolution, fascist ideologues in the same period