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Translated by Kathleen A. Johnson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. x + 388 pp. Photos, notes, index. $64.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8223-2777-5; $21.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8223-2774-0.
The Feminine Essence and France's National Revolution
In Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to the Sociology of Gender, Francine Muel-Dreyfus locates the notion of the "eternal feminine," the belief in an unchanging feminine essence, at the center of Vichy France's National Revolution. Muel-Dreyfus traces the sociogenesis of this ideology from 1870 and the conservative repression following the Commune, through conflicts over differing ideals of femininity during the Third Republic, to the solidification of an ideology of femininity based on biological difference and a feminine culture of sacrifice with the defeat of 1940. Using the setting of disaster and upheaval at the initiation of the National Revolution as a laboratory to analyze the resurgence of mythic reason during periods of crisis, Muel-Dreyfus highlights the broad and apparently apolitical support for an ideology that seemed to belie the chaos of the democratic "lie." Returning women to their "natural" and "real" place in society was intrinsic to the Vichy Regime's project of creating an orderly society rid of the decadence and individualism of the Third Republic and firmly based on "legitimate hierarchies," for which the masculine/feminine dichotomy was the cornerstone.
Following the armistice of 1940, conservative elements in French society asserted that the German victory was punishment for the sins of the Third Republic. Contrition and redemption were necessary for recovery, and Marshal Pétain was accepted as a prophet by a population in a state of "believing expectation" and in search of salvation. In these despairing conditions, where "millennial balances" seemed to hold redemptive possibility, Muel-Dreyfus asserts, the seeming timelessness of the myth of the "eternal feminine" was appealing. The supposed ahistoricity of this ideology inspired collective amnesia of the debates of the Third Republic over women's place in society, education, and politics. Muel-Dreyfus examines these earlier battles over competing visions of femininity, the disparate producers of the "eternal feminine" that united under the National Revolution, and the political effects of the return to a supposed "eternal" social order.
In part one of Vichy and the Eternal Feminine, "The Hypnotic Power of Punishment," Muel-Dreyfus begins with the examination of a wide...