The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France by Geoff Read (review)

The Republic of Men is a very useful book, not only for historians interested in the gender history of France in the interwar decades, but for gender and political historians more generally. Geoff Read is thoroughly grounded in the theoretical and historical literature on gender and in the histories of eight major political parties in the Third Republic between the wars. He systematically uncovers fundamental ideas about femininity and masculinity in relation to racialism in these parties, their women’s and youth outreach organizations, and seventeen political newspapers. The author first demonstrates that parties from the fascist right though the communist left shared common values, notably a markedly gendered concept of the “virtues of citizenship” that prioritized public selflessness, hard work and sangfroid, and clashed with their beliefs about womanly virtues, which were more passive and private kinds of selflessness, purity, and nurturing. The rest of the book compares and contrasts each parties’ efforts to mobilize men and women supporters, party members’ fears about and initiatives to deal with race and depopulation, and, ultimately, party positions on women’s suffrage in light of this fundamental agreement on gender.

To the more thoroughly-studied subject of the cultural construction of “the new woman,” The Republic of Man adds the political and cultural construction of “the new man” of the Communist Party and to a lesser degree the Socialist Party, Radical and Radical Socialist parties, and fascist parties like the Croix de Feu. The book finds surprising similarities between the “new man” of the extreme left and the extreme right. Both the Communist Party and the Croix de Feu promoted an image of youthfulness, vigor, and potential for violence, all of which undermined the Republican and Radical Parties’ ideal of a respectable breadwinner. Geoff Read further illuminates the differences between the “new woman” of the Communist and Socialist parties, on the one hand, and the less fully developed woman of the fascist right on the other hand. He identifies leftist ideals of a more independent and active new women in the 1920s and tracks a convergence with more moderate and right wing ideals of a maternal woman during the Great Depression in the 1930s. This convergence is linked to the Radical, Socialist and Communist Parties’ mounting interest in pronatalism, which had been a right-wing issue in the preceding decades.

Pronatalism in turn is shown to be racialist and racist (carefully distinguished), in so far as it was eugenically-informed and often associated with anti-immigration, or more precisely, anti-nonwhite and -eastern European immigration. Quoting the wide spectrum of newspapers scanned for this book, Read shows that racism was present in all the political parties and their various organizations, though more prevalent on the far right. Although anti-racism was rarer, it existed in all the political parties, albeit very minimally on the far right. All of these factors played into the slow conversion of the left and center to policies such as family allocations, which had initially been a right-wing proposal but was completed by the Popular Front government in 1936.

As Read remarks, with a tip of the hat to Joan Wallach Scott, this subject abounds in paradoxes, several of which are studied in some detail in the final section on women. One is the tension between the often antifeminist and sometimes misogynist language across the spectrum of political parties, and the expanding role of women in these very parties and in public more generally. Despite the very high percentage of women in the labor force, even the Communist and Socialist parties were limited by their commitment to the breadwinner family and the maternal woman to rhetoric about women’s right to work and equal pay for equal work, at least in capitalist economies. All the parties formed women’s sections, and most of them had a women’s newspaper. Not only in this chapter but throughout...