Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism, and Women and Citizenship (review)

Ségolène Royale, the controversial presidential candidate of the French Socialist Party, who lost her bid in May 2007, makes an appearance in Joan Scott’s riveting account of the history of the parité movement. “As a result of a law passed in 2003 that required strict alternation of men and women on electoral lists for regional elections” (134), the proportion of women doubled, from 27.5 percent in 1998 to 47.6 percent in 2004, but the presidencies of these councils remained in the hands of men—with one exception, the socialist, Ségolène Royale, who triumphed over the party of the sitting prime minister of the time, thus leading to speculations about her possible candidacy for the presidency (135).

The nomination of a woman to lead France’s socialists came at the end of a long political evolution, dating back to the turbulent years of the 1960s and culminating in a strong women’s movement, with many different outlooks and interpretations, but united in its demand to increase women’s political representation in French public life. French society, in which Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1948, was a surprisingly traditional one well into the 1960s; women were denied the vote until after WWII, a 1920 law prohibited contraception as well as abortion. In a pattern that is all too familiar, women’s wages were consistently lower, “by about 34% in 1968” than men’s (37). Only in the 1960s did women enter the labor force in massive numbers. With the growth of the French welfare state, issues such as childcare, health care, care for the aged, and social security assumed center place in French political discourse. It is against the background of such fundamental transformations in French society and culture from the 1980s to the present that Joan Scott studies the parité movement. They gave rise first and foremost to a “crisis of representation.”

The crisis of representation became visible not only with the entry of women into public life but also with the increasing visibility of France’s immigrants and foreign-born citizens, the development of European Union institutions, and increasing globalization, which in France is frequently viewed as “Americanization.” The myth of homogeneous French nationality rang increasingly hollow. Following French commentators, Scott distinguishes representation from representativity. Representativity “calls for difference to be made visible, so that rights can literally be seen to be exercised by all. The abstract mode, sometimes referred to as representation, requires the assimilation of those previously excluded on account of their differences” (17). The crisis in representation was due to the incapacity of this second model, both at the institutional and at the theoretical level, to achieve the kind of diversity that the “changing face of France” required.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, succeeding governments experimented with France’s citizenship, naturalization, and family unification laws in order to integrate the growing number of young people of migrant origin who inhabited the banlieues (housing projects) of Paris and other metropolitan areas. When violence erupted in these neighborhoods in spring 2006, the French crisis of representation became all too visible.

Scott argues that the changing demographic picture of the public sphere was particularly poignant for France, because the French republican model was based on a belief in the capacity of the abstract individual to embody and represent the nation as such. In the searing words of Abbe Sieyes, “Democracy is the complete sacrifice of the individual to the res publica, that is to say of the concrete being to the abstract being” (quoted in Scott, 13). But do the representatives alone constitute the nation? Or does the nation delegate its sovereignty to its representatives? How can the concrete individual, with specific needs and interests, history and inclinations, be seen to represent the nation as such?

Students of political thought will recognize here the dichotomies that bedeviled...