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

and reactive competition, resulting in archetypes of the nation as a woman in Britain, Italy, Germany, Russia, and other countries, whether Napoleon had planted a flag there or not. One important dimension of this volume, then, is the historicization of gendered nationalism from its origins in revolutionary France, and through its proliferation as a prototype of ideology that spread throughout European societies over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is one of the great constructionist ironic devices to remark upon the similarity of all nationalisms across cultures, against each of their specific claims to cultural uniqueness. That the French habit of representing the nation as an embodied female icon proved so contagious across nineteenth-century nationalist ideologies is testimony to the prototype nature of the ‘invention of the nation,’ according to that view of nationalism in the work of Benedict Anderson.³⁸ However, undoubtedly, such images of the nation as a woman were most popular in places where they could speak to the recognizable gendered symbols embedded in longer cultural traditions.

The exportable nature of the gendered, sexualized nation may be due to its special ideological utility. In the movement away from societies based on monarchy, aristocracy, and feudalism, toward modern states of citizens, each with rights and obligations to the nation, gendered and sexual symbols performed an important work of personalizing the impersonal, embodying something otherwise rather abstract and difficult to imagine or identity with. It may be easier to convince citizens to lay down their lives in war for an ideal of a nation when that nation is represented as a maiden or a mother threatened by the sexual violence of enemies. Perhaps, too, it is easier to pretend that a state truly represents both men and women if the nation itself is feminized even as the government is elected through male suffrage alone, as governments in most European states were up until the early twentieth century, and as France was up until 1945. Indeed, that long resistance in France to the acceptance of women as full political citizens, alongside the rich traditions of using gendered and sexualized imagery in French state politics, suggests that this kind of symbolic representation may even impede actual political