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

classic image of Marianne’s head on current French stamps and government logos.

In the 2005 film Caché (Hidden), by the Austrian director Michael Haneke, the central character, Georges (played by Daniel Auteuil), is haunted by the guilty denial of having betrayed his childhood rival and adopted Algerian brother Majid (played by Maurice Bénichou), whose parents were killed in the Papon-ordered massacre of curfew protesters in Paris in 1961.⁵ In a nightmare dream sequence which wakes Georges in a cold sweat, the child Majid, symbol of Algerian anticolonial independence from the paternal colonial state, cuts off the head of a rooster, symbol of the French nation and of white French masculinity. It is a poignant commentary on the relationship between national identity, masculinity and race around the Algerian war and the loss of French colonial supremacy. The rooster’s decapitation suggests both the violent history of the inception of French republicanism in the guillotine, as well as the guilt, denial, and fear of castration which George’s occulted childhood envy of the subaltern Majid provokes.⁶ Haneke was strikingly psychohistorically acute in drawing those themes together within the interiority of an individual's unconscious experience because national identity, colonialism, sexuality, and gender have, indeed, often been evoked in connected visions of meaning across the long history of France. Their enduring power indeed suggests the ability of such intimate references as sex and gender to personalize mass political ideals. Threats to gender identity may be seen as threats to selfhood, and if these can be construed as threats to the nation, then the passion of citizens to defend such causes is intensified.

Concerns about feminine gender and sexuality have also frequently appeared in nationalist political representation. Female bodies have stood as perpetually redeployable symbols of the French republic throughout its history—celebrated, as in the maternal and sedentary Marianne of the calendars from the early months of the French Revolution;⁷ longed for, as in the bare-breasted flag-waving Marianne of