The place of women in French national remembrance

“To the great men, from a grateful nation.” These are the words engraved on the pediment of the Pantheon, a church converted by the Revolutionaries into a mausoleum. The first woman to be admitted, in 1907, was Sophie Berthelot, wife of the chemist and politician Marcelin Berthelot: the couple, who were very close in life, could not, according to the family, be separated in death. It was not until 1995 that Sophie Berthelot was joined by Marie Curie, then in 2015 by the deported members of the Resistance, Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, and finally by Simone Veil in 2018. Just five women, or roughly 6% of the total admitted to the Pantheon. But although remembrance policy has long been asymmetrical, there has been more attention on women since the 1980s, and more specifically since the start of the new century. A number of factors are behind this shift.

The admission of Simone Veil to the Pantheon, 1 July 2018. © Ghislain Mariette/Présidence de la République

A remembrance policy that has long been asymmetrical

After the Revolution, the building of the Pantheon was repurposed according to the political regime in place, and reverted several times to a Catholic place of worship. In May 1885, the Third Republic gave Victor Hugo a national funeral and a tomb in the Pantheon, turning it once and for all into a burial place for the country’s great men – scientists, writers and politicians. To the republicans, with the exception of a few heroines like Joan of Arc, there were no “great” women worthy of national recognition. With no civic rights and subject to the strict Napoleonic civil code, women had above all to be good mothers of citizens, passing on republican values and love of the nation to their children. There was then no paradox in their symbolising the Republic.

The figure of Marianne crowns the monuments glorifying the regime, stamps and coins. Remembrance policy also took in statues and place names, which were the subject of political rivalries. Throughout the Third Republic, monuments were erected to local benefactors and great men. Although some members of the Resistance have been admitted to the Pantheon under the Fifth Republic, the personalities most prevalent on street signs today are the following, all men: Charles de Gaulle, Louis Pasteur, Victor Hugo, Jean Jaurès, Jean Moulin, Léon Gambetta, General Leclerc, Jules Ferry, Marshal Foch and Georges Clemenceau. The memory of the wars of the 20th century and those who fought in them is particularly prevalent, as, in the 1920s, each commune erected a war memorial, around which the annual Armistice Day and V-E Day ceremonies have taken place ever since.

There are few exceptions to the male dominance in statuary. To be sure, there are a few dozen queens and female saints among Paris’s close to a thousand statues, and the Joan of Arc memorial, unveiled in 1874 on Place des Pyramides, has many replicas. But the statue of the female philosopher and scientist Clémence Royer, exhibited by Henri Godet at the 1912 Salon des Artistes and subsequently acquired by the State, is kept in the reserves. Rejected in Paris, a bust in honour of the Communard Louise Michel was finally erected, in 1907, in Levallois-Perret, where she is buried. The case of the feminist, free thinker and Freemason Maria Deraisme (1828-94) is therefore remarkable. Her sister and friends obtained permission to have erected a bust in Pontoise (1895) and a standing bronze statue in Paris, where she is majestically portrayed as an orator (Square des Épinettes, 1898). Over the decades that followed, successive commemorations took place at the monument, which became the scene of feminist and suffragist demonstrations.

Plaque in honour of Berty Albrecht, co-founder of the Combat Resistance movement (MLN), at 16, Rue de l’Université, in Paris’s 7th arrondissement.

© Fondation de la Résistance

“First wave” French feminists – late 19th century to 1939 – were anxious that the memory of their struggles for freedom and equality should be preserved for future generations. They collected and conserved documents about the movement’s actions, to prevent them from being forgotten. Among the archives and libraries created, concurrent at the time, two still exist today: the Marie-Louise Bouglé archive, obtained in 1946 by the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris; and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, the only library specialising in women and feminism in France.  The latter, originally constituted by a donation made in 1932 to the City of Paris by Marguerite Durand (1874-1936), was rediscovered in the 1970s with the emergence of women’s history.

From history to collective memory: the history of women and its transmission

Sculpted by David d’Angers for the pediment of the Pantheon, La Patrie couronnant les hommes célèbres (The Nation crowning its great men) depicts, on the right, Liberty leading the great men and, on the left, History inscribing their names on its tablets. History, and more specifically taught history, is an essential medium for the collective memory.  Yet, heir to the “national narrative” promoted by the Third Republic, written and taught history has long been told from a male perspective, considering men as the sole protagonists of public life and relegating women to “anecdotal history”. The 1950s and 1960s appear to break with the memory of earlier feminist struggles, a break paradoxically favoured by the democratisation and feminisation of secondary and higher education. “We women who have no past / We who have no history” chanted activists of the women’s liberation movement.

Women’s history, which emerged in universities in the 1970s, gives visibility to the women of the past, making them protagonists of history in their own right, and analyses all the forms of gender division brought into play in different periods. But the knowledge acquired can only make the collective memory more composite if it is disseminated throughout society: by books, public talks and, most of all, in schools. Since the 1990s, institutional reports have monitored the place of women in taught history, and a variety of initiatives have been taken to broaden it. Yet it remains modest and is, above all, subject to political ups and downs: now promoted, now neglected. In an attempt to alter the historical perspective of teachers, and therefore of students, Mnémosyne, an organisation founded in 2000 for the development of women’s and gender history, has come up with an educational resource. Published in 2010, La Place des femmes dans l’histoire. Une histoire mixte (Women’s place in history: a composite history) suggests, for all the key topics in the history curriculum at secondary level, an approach that does not forget women and gender issues. Women’s history was also at the heart of the first official 8 March commemorations in France.

8 March 1982: a watershed?

Few annual public holidays are devoted specifically to women. Alongside Mother’s Day, International Women’s Day is part of a whole other tradition, but has long been celebrated by only a fraction of French society. Its principle was conceived at the 1910 International Socialist Women's Conference. 8 March then became a communist festival, celebrated officially in the Soviet Union, then in Eastern Europe, and commemorated elsewhere more and more routinely by communist parties and associated unions. The feminists of the 1970s revitalised it by incorporating it in their new struggles for women’s liberation.

Women’s rights minister in the Mauroy government formed after the socialist victory in the presidential elections of 1981, the feminist and socialist Yvette Roudy sought to turn activists’ demands into policy and make her ministry one that “deconditioned women and men”. 8 March 1982 must change people’s mindsets, give feminism the “seal of legitimacy” and include women in the collective memory. The day also included the publication of a female honours list for the Légion d’Honneur, an exhibition at Gare Saint-Lazare station of 60 giant portraits of women “who have marked the history of feminism”, and a reception at the Élysée Palace for 400 French women of all occupations and representatives of women’s organisations. In the years that followed, women’s research was encouraged. In 1983, the Parisian statue of Maria Deraismes, melted down during the German occupation, was replaced with support from the Paris City Council and the masonic order Le Droit Humain.

Official opening of the exhibition “Women at work” at the Ministry of Women’s Rights, 8 March 1982. © Keystone France/Gamma Rapho

The 8 March commemorations after 1982 may have been less grandiose, but since then they have kept their official status, and so continue to attract media attention. Every year, local councils and, in particular, voluntary organisations run campaigns on the issues both of women’s right and remembrance. There are calls for Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, in 1791, to be admitted to the Pantheon.

Towards a more egalitarian remembrance policy

Voluntary organisations and civil society have a fundamental role to play in shaking up remembrance routines and putting a stronger focus on women. Some groups catalogue female street names, either to bring to life the women concerned, through a book or a city tour – as in Rennes – or to denounce the male bias in urban place names. Others symbolically rename streets. Many municipalities, now mindful of the issue, have adopted a feminisation policy. Thus, between 2014 and 2019, the proportion of Parisian streets named after women doubled to 12%. There is a similar focus on school names, where just 14% nationally were named after women in 2018. With 190 schools named after her, the most common female personality, Louise Michel, is far behind Jules Ferry, with 599.

On 8 March 2008, the research done by women historians and the awareness campaigns carried out by voluntary organisations bore their fruits. A joint initiative of Paris City Council and the National Monuments Centre, the exhibition Aux grandes femmes, la Patrie reconnaissante (To the great women, from a grateful nation) saw the giant portraits of nine icons of the struggle for equality hung from the pillars of the Pantheon for ten days: Simone de Beauvoir, at the centre, Olympe de Gouges, the enslaved Mulatto Solitude, George Sand, Maria Deraismes, Louise Michel, Marie Curie, Colette and Resistance fighter Charlotte Delbo. A prelude, its introduction explained, to the admission of other women to the Pantheon.

Similarly, the First World War Centenary commemorations did not fail to reference the actions of women on the home front, with a wide variety of publications, documentary film productions broadcast on prime-time television – the film Elles étaient en guerre (Women at War) was screened at the Élysée Palace on 8 March 2014 – and a colloquium held at the Senate by the Delegation on Women’s Rights (18 October 2018). A memorial to the women of the regions during the wars was even unveiled at Verdun in June 2016, on the initiative of the Association of Members of the Agricultural Order of Merit, Meuse Section, which launched a national subscription.

Memorial to the women of rural areas during the two world wars,
under the aegis of AMOMA (Association des Membres de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole), Meuse Section. 
© Camille Florémont/Tourisme Grand Verdun

Meanwhile, the organisation HF Île-de-France, which campaigns against inequalities between women and men in the sphere of art and culture, raises awareness about women artists and creators of the past. Their works constitute a women’s heritage to be preserved and passed on, in a renewed concept. Since 2015, the organisation has held “Women’s heritage focus” sessions centred on major cultural events, as well as organising “Women’s Heritage Days” in parallel to the European Heritage Days. With more of an academic focus, AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) was set up in 2014 to spotlight the production of women artists and rewrite the history of art on more of an equal footing.

Lastly, a few words about France Mémoire, a department of the Institut de France responsible since January 2021 for selecting each year 50 anniversaries to be commemorated, in order to highlight how far we have come and how far we have still to go to achieve a truly mixed collective memory and remembrance policy. One-sixth of the anniversaries scheduled for the current year concern a female figure or an event linked to women’s history, such as the Manifesto of the 343, of 5 April 1971; that proportion is higher in the information packs available on the website. Among the programme’s six highlights, one is devoted to the singer and composer Pauline Viardot, born in 1821, a founding figure of European culture. Watch this space.

Françoise Thébaud, emeritus professor at the University of Avignon, and former founder and co-director of the review Clio, Femmes, Genre, Histoire