Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France

• 4. The Public and Private Politics of Female Self-Sacrifice: Audience Reception
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 99-134
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CHAPTER FOUR
The Public and Private Politics of Female Self-Sacrifice

Audience Reception

And I shall see you again today, Nelly Roussel, your uncanny face in the shadow of your large hat, flapping like the wings of a bird taking flight—you invoke for me the superb “Strong Virgin” and the almighty “Loose Woman,” the integrated, and suggestive, and energetic, and nonetheless gentle “Future Eve.”

Lucien Ledont, “Une Conference de Nelly Roussel au cirque” (1905)

On a Saturday evening, January 20, 1906, 400 people crammed into the overflowing Maison du Peuple hall in Caen (Calvados). The city’s residents had never before seen a female speaker, let alone heard a lecture on feminism. Nelly Roussel was supposed to appear at 8:30 p.m., but she walked in forty-five minutes late, which proved to at least one observer that “even as a feminist, she remained a woman.” He considered her timing “charming coquettishness” that lent more force to her argument. When she finally entered the hall, the crowd burst into applause. Draped in a velvet black dress that accentuated her pale skin and jet-black hair, the speaker looked small and frail (fig. 10). But as she boldly mounted the stage, Roussel suddenly became larger than life. From the shadow of her broad-brimmed hat emerged a face whose pallor was compared with the “white petal of a camellia.” Self-composed before her restless listeners, she began in a soft voice, measured and articulate, that brought her audience to complete silence: “Gentlemen, Ladies, dear Comrades: if there is a universal question par excellence, a question that interests … not only all women of all classes and of all countries, but all human beings … it is the question we are going to discuss tonight—equality between the sexes.” As she continued, her voice grew louder and her gestures more dramatic; her entire body trembled with the conviction of her message. Her black eyes appeared as “sparks bursting forth from a fireplace burning with thought.” Like the thick black velvet atop her translucent skin, Roussel embodied contrast, if not contradiction. Her voice filled huge rooms with the timbre of “vibrating crystal.” Her feminine toying with the gold chain around her delicate throat nonetheless seemed to clash with the logical rigor of her words and the “male vigor” with which she spoke them. Defying categorization, Roussel always evoked opposites—logic/poetry, reason/passion, frailty/ strength, paleness/flame, charm/audacity, beauty/virago.¹ Lucien Ledont, who saw Roussel as a new Eve who combined the qualities of Jean d’Arc (saint) and sinner, needed those opposites to define her. Much taken with her lecture, this assistant master at a private high school in Châlons said that thanks to her, feminist theories would no longer cause smiles or mockery from “imbeciles.”

Map 1. Total cumulative geographical representation of Nelly Roussel’s lecture tours, 1904–1922

Map 2. Departments of France

Map 3. Geographical representation of Nelly Roussel’s lecture tour, 1904

Map 4. Cumulative geographical representation Nelly Roussel’s lecture tours, 1904–1908

Figure 1. Nelly Roussel c. 1880. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 2. Nelly Roussel c. 1896. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 3. Nelly Roussel’s mother, Louise Nel. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 4. Nelly Roussel’s stepfather, Antonin Montupet. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 5. Henri Godet in his workshop c. 1904. Musée d’Orsay.

Figure 6. La Maternité by Henri Godet. Courtesy of Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère.

Figure 7. Actresses in Par la révolte. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 8. Bas-relief by Henri Godet illustrating Nelly Roussel’s Par la révolte, inscribed: “All of you whose destiny is to be bowed down and kneeling, it is I alone who can break your chains.” Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 9. Bust of Nelly Roussel and her daughter Mireille Godet by Henri Godet, 1904. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 10. Nelly Roussel as a public lecturer, 1908. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 11. Nelly Roussel and her daughter Mireille Godet in Henri Godet’s workshop, c. 1905. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 12. Nelly Roussel visiting her son Marcel Godet at the pouponnière, c. 1905. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 13. Nelly Roussel and her son Marcel Godet, possibly on the occasion of his homecoming from the pouponnière, c. 1906. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 14. Nelly Roussel in her study, c. 1909. Mairie de Paris–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 15, opposite. Nelly Roussel, Mireille Godet, and Marcel Godet in the forest of Fontainebleau, 1906. Mairie de Paris–Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand.

Figure 16. Front cover of Nelly Roussel’s Paroles de combat et d’espoir.

Figure 17. Henri Godet in his workshop in the 1930s. Musée d’Orsay.

Roussel did not provoke very much mockery, but she did evoke considerable reaction everywhere she went. Journalists’ amazement at the conviction with which she spoke reflected their presumption that publicly defending one’s word was incompatible with femininity; for in the eyes of many, women were by nature dissimulating and could not be held accountable for what they said.² The charm of her personality, her anticipation of objections, her deft responses, and her artful wit left even those who opposed her uncertain about whether they should consider themselves her enemies or her seduced admirers. “If the arrows that she directs … at our politicians in particular and at men in general are often very sharp and very hard, they are launched with such tact, so much art, and such good grace that we, those of us of the strong sex, can only applaud, and applaud with both hands,” one journalist wrote, expressing a sentiment that was repeated by numerous others.³

Men and women flocked to Roussel’s lectures because—as a dynamic female speaker—she provided spectacular entertainment. She even earned an entry under the category “amusements” in a popular American travel book, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, which urged its readers to make a point of attending one of her lectures.⁴ But beyond the impact Nelly Roussel had as a visual spectacle and auditory marvel, what did those who heard or read her words understand? Audience reception is exceedingly difficult to gage. This chapter analyzes more closely the positive and negative reactions among both her public and private audiences. As noted in Chapter 3, recipients of Roussel’s message were highly diverse, both in Paris and in the provinces. In the former, depending on the venue and organizers, her audiences consisted of bourgeois feminists, freethinkers, neo-Malthusians, anarchists, and syndicalists. The provinces yielded audiences of working-class and lower-middle-class men and women. Schoolteachers especially sought her out. Because freethinkers sponsored most of her talks, they likewise attended her lectures and read her articles in the nationally distributed L’Action.

Although Roussel honed each lecture according to the composition of her audience, the underlying goal in all of them was to uproot the deeply embedded cultural assumption that pain constituted a natural element of womanhood, a religious notion that was undergoing a secular rebirth in the Third Republic. The concept of womanhood among most men of the Left, especially in the provinces, differed little from that of the Church: nature, rather than God, had created women’s unchanging essence, which included irrationality and self-sacrifice. The concept of self-sacrifice became the foundation for literary “ideal types” and “intuitive abstractions” that survived through the twentieth century.⁵ At this, the apex of her career, Roussel brought her battle against assumptions about female pain to the forefront in “L’Éternelle sacrifiée” (She Who Is Always Sacrificed). The title itself drew on the image already lodged in the French imaginary of self-sacrificing womanhood. Here sacrifiée substituted for the féminin in l’éternel féminin, placing female sacrifice itself above historical change. Eve’s sin condemned women to perpetual self-sacrifice. Unlike men, who redeemed themselves through action, women had no choice about the sacrifice they would make; they were born to endure pain as the passive receptacles of reproductive labor. Reactions to Roussel’s efforts to break down these ideal types reveal how entrenched they were in both Catholic and secular imaginations.

Roussel delivered “L’Éternelle sacrifiée” on sixty-four occasions between 1905 and 1908. She also presented “Liberté de maternite” (Freedom of Motherhood) and the closely related “Beaucoup d’enfants?” (Many Children?) fourteen times, and “La Femme et la libre pensée” (Woman and Freethinking) twenty-nine times. Other lecture titles during this period included “Amour et maternité” (Love and Motherhood), “Amour fécond, amour stérile” (Fertile Love, Sterile Love), “Le Suffrage des femmes” (Women’s Suffrage) and “Créons la citoyenne” (Let’s Create the Female Citizen). Altogether during these four years, she delivered 122 lectures, 74 of which were in the provinces, and 57 of the latter were followed by a dramatic reading of her short play Par la révolte. She also delivered lectures in Switzerland, Belgium, and Hungary. As already noted, she sold from 25 to 150 copies of her play after each performance, providing another mode for spreading her message to those who did not see her. The play went through five editions and sold 3,964 copies from 1905 through 1907. When she first performed it at one of the popular universities in Paris in 1903, it was an immediate success.⁶ But her twenty-minute reading of it following her lectures in the provinces particularly enhanced the power of her message among these entertainment-deprived and less educated audiences.

The single most important performance of Par la révolte, which took place in September, 1905 in conjunction with the International Congress of Freethinkers, offers a good starting point for systematically examining the reactions she provoked. As noted in Chapter 2, this play is an allegory, in which “Eve,” enslaved and chained, faces her oppressors, “Society” and “The Church,” and then succeeds in liberating herself when inspired by “Revolt.” On this occasion, Henry Bérenger and his newspaper L’Action sponsored the play and staged it in the luxurious Sara Bernhardt theater. The International Congress of Freethinkers had drawn 20,000 participants from Europe and the United States, and 2,000 of them nearly filled the theater. Roussel played the role of Eve, accompanied by actresses from the Comédie-Française (fig. 7). Her audience included local and national dignitaries such as municipal councilors and left-wing members of the Chamber of Deputies, as well as feminists, Freemasons, and freethinkers.

This gala production, and Roussel in particular, received the usual acclaim. A. B. de Liptay, having witnessed the performance, also read her “little masterpiece” with “the same joy that I reread Victor Hugo or Lamartine … the beauty of Par la révolte resides in the force of sentiment as well as in the grace of expression.” Also having read it after witnessing the performance, Isabelle Gatti de Gamond felt herself “penetrated by the symbolism and the color.” Roussel received requests, which she granted, to have the play translated into Russian and Portuguese. Victor Ragosine, writing to her in October 1905, had already translated it into Russian. Looking forward to the fall of “the Russian autocracy, the principal rampart of European reaction,” he considered that her play would contribute to that effort, given the startling energy with which Russian women had just battled for the freedom and rights “of man and citizen” in their recent revolution. Three Portuguese wrote to request permission for translation, one of whom had witnessed Roussel’s performance at the Sarah Bernhardt theater; she recounted how it had “fortified in me such a strong sentiment of indignation, it moved me to notice the cruelty, the bad faith, the indignity of the society in which women are always the victims.” She believed that having a Portuguese translation of Par la révolte would make a difference, especially because it would make this important message accessible “to the four out of five million” in Portugal who could not read. Indeed, the play did touch the hearts of less educated women everywhere, including Paris, as shown by the letters Roussel received requesting more performances.⁷

Audiences found Roussel’s lectures as compelling and entertaining as her play. Local newspaper reports convey important details, not only in the summaries they provide, but in descriptions of audience reaction—they often, for example, note points at which applause interrupted her. Roussel received just the sort of favorable responses for which she had hoped at the time when she had first envisioned her career: they came from women who felt voiceless and isolated. Her words appealed to schoolteachers who wanted to escape the Church’s control; to women who felt physical and emotional pain as a result of motherhood, but had neither words to describe that pain nor an audience; to impoverished working-class mothers and, in particular, those who had been seduced and abandoned. Although some feminist organizations concerned themselves with women’s work, none focused on issues of gender relations in private life the way Roussel did. She publicly articulated the private thoughts of “everywoman.”

Liberating the Eternally Sacrificed Woman

In her effort to reach provincial working-class audiences, whose backgrounds were so unlike hers, Roussel manipulated language in three ways: she used familiar religious terms, symbols, and metaphors, even in an anticlerical message; she used the language of working-class militancy, casting women’s plight in the familiar labor movement terms of justice and dignity; and she described women’s universal experience of childbirth and the female body. She used familiar language to dislodge abstract assumptions in the public imagination.

Having once been devout herself, religious memories continued to influence Roussel even in her anticlerical, antireligious adulthood.⁸ We have already seen her use of religious allegory and symbolism in Par la révolte; she and others construed her entire campaign in religious terms, with frequent use of words such as “apostle” and “mission.” The use of Christian vocabulary—even Christian-like ritual—often appeared in the cultural practices even of those starkly opposed to the Church. Freethinkers followed the Christian calendar by acknowledging religious holidays irreverently, such as in eating pork on Good Friday and celebrating the Noël humaine on December 25, which even included its own kind of “communion.” Such practices had deep roots in French culture. Christian eschatology created a “messianism” and the vision of a “Promised Land” among nineteenth-century workers.⁹ Roussel’s invocation of religious imagery similarly drew from a Christian eschatology that offered the promise of a new society, as well as shameful judgment on those who “sacrificed” women. In “Liberté de maternité,” she said that motherhood should have the status of a priesthood and compared its stages—pregnancy, childbirth, convalescence, then “slavery” to an infant’s ceaseless demands—to Christ’s torture: “these are the painful, sometimes murderous stages, these are steps of Calvary that must be climbed slowly”—only to lead women into more self-sacrifice.¹⁰

Some of Roussel’s listeners regarded her as a Christlike figure. After hearing “L’Eternelle sacrifiée” in Le Puy (Haute-Loire), a schoolteacher from a nearby village wrote to her: “I hung on your lips, I drank your words [as she might have drunk wine in the celebration of mass], worthy Apostle of feminism. Oh yes, ‘apostle’ is the word!—you have revealed an unknown landscape, such as those who preached the Christian Doctrine must have done. This flame, this sincere faith, your ardent facial expressions … bring new adherents to feminism.” As one would have said of Christ, and of the mission at hand, she continued: “Oh, how good you are! … because you must possess an immense treasure of love for us [because you] courageously dare to affront a public that has always been hostile to our most worthy demands. Believe, Dear Citizenness, the ideas that you have developed with such great clarity have made a profound impression on me, which gives me the courage to take them up and propagate them.” She then went on to complain of the “clerical ulcer, whose roots are so deep in the women” of her region.¹¹

Roussel sought to reach beyond provincial schoolteachers. Few French feminists came from or ventured into the provinces, let alone spoke to workers. Most of them were urban and bourgeois. Roussel distinguished herself by making working-class women a priority in the effort to spread her message. It was among these women, especially in the provinces, that the birthrate remained high. She went out of her way to study working-class women’s material conditions. In her spring 1905 tour, for example, she visited one of the factories in the textile town of Bourg-Argental (Loire), and she later recounted: “These factories employ almost only women; the work demands little muscular strength, but [it requires] close attention, meticulousness, and extraordinary vigilance; and the intolerable noise must make this job very painful for beginners. At this moment an entire enterprise is on strike. Many of the workers are, it seems, abandoned single mothers.”¹² On another tour two years later, she visited a spinning mill in St. Hippoyte-du-Fort (Gard), where prior to her evening lecture, she saw her female audience at work. “The labor seems much less difficult than that of the weavers; but it is also much less lucrative. What man would consent to work twelve hours a day for only thirty-two sous?” She noted the warm, humid atmosphere of the mill, which, in the long run, she believed, would make the women “anemic.” That same night she attended meetings of both the workers’ syndicate and freethinkers, where her host, using a mill-related metaphor, introduced her as “unwinding the cocoon of her thought across France.” From 1,200 to 1,500 people attended her lecture, and 200 had to stand outside without seats. It was the biggest crowd ever gathered in St. Hippolyte, “despite the efforts of clericals, Catholics and Protestants” to discourage attendance. And though the acoustics were terrible and her audience distracted, she was “appreciated, if not understood.”¹³

The religious references in “L’Eternelle sacrifiée” appealed to provincial working-class women; just as significantly, Roussel addressed the issues of their material lives in a language of labor militancy already familiar to them, using a vocabulary that had helped fuel revolutionary movements in 1848 and 1871, as well as the syndicalist movement of her own epoch. During the nineteenth century, male workers had collectively made progress in establishing some dignity on the basis of their productive labor with regard to the rights to associate, to work, to bargain for higher wages, to strike, and to consume. Even unorganized workers demanded dignity in labor.¹⁴ But since reproductive labor was private and unpaid, motherhood could not form any basis for association that could seek justice. Roussel applied the language of production to women’s reproductive labor. In “L’Éternelle sacrifiée,” she argued that maternal labor,

just like any other form of labor, even more than other labor, [should] assure independence and well-being to those who accomplish it, but instead this work has never been anything but a cause of slavery and inferiority. Of all the social functions, the first, the most magnificent, the most laborious, is the only one that has never earned a salary! … The poorly paid worker refuses to work; the right to strike is no longer contested today. And we—we women, we mothers—are the most poorly paid of all workers; and there would be no strike more legitimate than ours.¹⁵

Roussel also emphasized the legal and personal power that motherhood denied women in their private lives, for they did not even have rights over their own children: “Married, your child will remain the property of his father … whose entire task is limited … to a few moments of pleasure.” Like a proletarian, the woman had no right to the product of her labor. The civil code legally “alienated” her from her child by granting parental rights only to the father; and she, the mother, owed obedience to the father, her husband: “in marriage, annihilated as a woman, you are also annihilated as a mother,” she hammered into her audiences.¹⁶ Single mothers, who suffered legal and economic situations far worse than those of their married sisters, composed a significant portion of her spectators. Addressing them with the familiar tu, as though she were one of them, Roussel said: “As an unwed mother … you alone will support the weight of what bourgeois hypocrisies contemptuously call your ‘sin.’” Even the economic burden of supporting a child alone did not offer sufficient atonement: the single mother had to suffer the “physical torture of childbirth” as a “ransom for love,” alone in her attic apartment, without help, without consolation.

Society only further chastised the unmarried mother in the form of abandonment, contempt, misery, and—perhaps most important of all—the “impossibility of rebuilding [for herself] a happy and free life,”—a goal some lower-class provincial women were beginning to envision and pursue.¹⁷ Many single mothers were forced to make the “sad choice between suicide or prostitution!” Then there was infanticide. Roussel offered her empathy for this worst choice: “And if then, frantic, hopeless, weary of suffering, you do away with this little being whom you would have wanted so much to be able to love … [society] will find judges to send you to finish your miserable existence as a pariah on the straw mat of the prison cell.” Thunderous applause interrupted her lecture at this point.¹⁸

Roussel began to deliver this lecture in the provinces during the spring of 1905 amid a wave of strikes that had begun the previous year. As labor disputes persisted in subsequent years, she presented it in many hard-hit departments, including the Loire, the Rhône, and the Isère (map 2). The number of strikes peaked in 1906, the year of a gas explosion in the mines of Courrières (Pas-de-Calais) that killed 1,300 miners. That April, she offered the proceeds from one of her lectures to the victims of that catastrophe. She also repeatedly visited the “proletarian peasants” of the Midi, who entered the working-class battles with unprecedented combativeness in 1907.¹⁹

Unlike schoolteachers, who had the writing skills and confidence, workers seldom wrote in response to her lectures. But they did speak to her afterward, and sometimes they sought her out in her hotel to seek “practical and precise” information about birth control.²⁰ When she delivered “L’Éternelle sacrifiée” in the working-class textile town of Bourg-Argental (Loire), which employed large concentrations of women, she recorded their reactions: “Everybody was talking about me [the day after the lecture], all the women in the region, especially in the silk-weaving factories. [These factories] are numerous and employ only women. All those who had not dared attend the lecture were terribly sorry and asked if “this lady” would come again another time. Even the women who support clericalism regretted their absence. And I am told that Par la révolte circulated from hand to hand.” The male listeners, Roussel said, told her that when she had looked them in the eye during her lecture, they “felt ashamed and wished they could sink into the ground [auraient voulu rentrer sous terre].” Some of the women had cried, and “their seducers, also present, admitted responsibility for their actions.”²¹

Roussel also used a language reflecting the experience of all women, regardless of class distinctions or religious belief. In “Liberté de maternité,” as in “L’Éternelle sacrifiée,” she graphically described the ways in which repeated pregnancies ravaged women’s bodies and marginalized them into real and metaphorical “attics” of society. “Several times a mother,” she said, identifying with her audience, “I believe I am in a good position to speak logically about [the so-called ‘joys’ of motherhood]. I must add that I do not rank among those who deserve the most pity … I cannot recall the pain with which my joys were paid, without thinking of all those who have even more pain, but infinitely less joy.” She quoted a letter from a woman who had responded to a prominent daily newspaper conducting a survey of its readers’ opinions about large families. The correspondent’s mother had borne twelve children, and each birth had been horribly painful. But that pain hardly marked the end of this mother’s suffering. Of the twelve whom she bore, four died as infants, and a fifth was killed in the Franco-Prussian War; another “expired in his mother’s arms at age thirty-three,” invoking for some the image of the Pietà. This mother, the letter continued, “following the fatigues of labor and breast-feeding, saw her stomach degenerate; then rheumatism set in, and she could not rest for atrocious neuralgia. Finally, she developed breast cancer—that horrible nursling—in the breast that had fed eight children…. After a life of inexpressible physical martyrdom, and moral tortures that were even more cruel … the death agony began, slowly and implacably,” and she suffered horribly until the very end.²²

This letter offered Roussel’s audiences graphic, authentic testimony about the fecund motherhood that pronatalists wished to force upon Frenchwomen. She noted that this particular woman could have come from any social class; but if she were also impoverished, then (again invoking religious imagery) “there is no Inquisition that could invent a more cruel torture for her punishment, nor a religion that could imagine a worse hell, than this mother’s existence! … the chapter on maternal pain is endless.”²³ Several women and men wrote to Roussel that this and other lectures provoked tears, even among the Paris elite. “Your lecture made hearts beat,” Blanche Cremnitz (a.k.a. Parrhisia), an associate of Marguerite Durand’s and member of the UFF, wrote. “You caused tears to fall, at the same time pity for the victims you portrayed.” They also noted the delicacy with which she addressed these “forbidden” topics of private life.²⁴

Regardless of her audience, whether Parisian or provincial, bourgeois or peasant, Roussel articulated pains with which women were intimately familiar, but about which no one had ever spoken publicly. A recurrent theme in the letters and reviews women wrote in response to her lectures was how she exposed what “we mothers, we women have lived and suffered.” Provincial women in particular wrote that Roussel expressed “natural sentiments” that “all women feel,” sentiments that “should need no awakening.” Roussel was the first publicly to discuss “everywoman’s” private pain. She had helped them escape their “moral isolation,” correspondents told her.²⁵ Even if the women in her audiences had not themselves experienced the pain of childbirth, suffered from unwanted pregnancies, been seduced and abandoned, or witnessed the deaths of their own infants and children, they knew someone who had and whose fate they feared for themselves.

Even women who had only heard about her lecture by word of mouth came out of their mental attics to tell her what she meant to them. One such twenty-year old woman, who lived in a village of 1,500 and proclaimed herself “illiterate,” produced the following extraordinary letter, to which Roussel surely responded:

I hate and despise clerics [ensoutanés]. This is to say to you that with such ideas I no longer have any religious status, and that it hardly bothers me to say that the churchgoers [calotins] are hypocrites and sanctimonious bigots. According to the clericals … I am a demon vomited from hell, and many other things as well. It also requires a true courage for me to dare to hold my head up to these watermelon eaters…. I just content myself with shrugging my shoulders and complaining about these stupid people. But Madam, do you understand this rubbish? It is to ask you for advice that I bother you with my prose, to have encouragement, if I merit it, from a woman with heart and intelligence, like Nelly Roussel…. Madam, I only know how to write with my heart, and I think that suffices.²⁶

In emphasizing its pains and indignities, Roussel in effect proclaimed that motherhood dehumanized women, and that repeated, unwanted pregnancies made them like animals.²⁷ She made this comparison when addressing pronatalist demographers in an article she wrote for L’Action:

If these messieurs les statisticiens would take the pains to leave their numbers behind in order to look at life itself … if they gave any thought to the prolific females [femelles pondeuses] whom, drunk one night, a brutal male thoughtlessly fertilizes [féconde], [males] unconcerned right to the end about the heavy, aching bellies of the females, who struggle, “slaving away” for the whole family, serving the men, taking care of the brats [marmots]; and who, after having gone through labor on the straw mat of an attic room, without air in the summer, heat in the winter, … in three or four days, hurting all over, resume the job of the beast of burden, waiting in anguish for the next pregnancy.²⁸

If thoughtless motherhood turned women into animals, civilized society had the responsibility, through science, to control nature and allow women to be fully human. Because freethinkers prized science as a source of human liberation, Roussel thought they offered a path for female emancipation. She continued to discover deep-seated prejudices in them as well, particularly with regard to their conception of “Nature” in whose name they condemned “caution in procreation” as immoral. She pointed out that the “cult of the goddess Nature” did not prevent them from using science to fight disease and destroy germs that nature had also created. “How could man’s conquest over the forces of reproduction,” she asked, “be more immoral than surgical operations or medical treatments … [or] the canalization of rivers” and other measures that all “go against, transform, tame and master nature?”²⁹

Roussel continued her attack on freethinkers in her lecture “La Femme et la libre pensée,” which she delivered 39 times between 1906 and 1910. Building on her original address to the National Congress of Free Thought in 1903, she incorporated criticism from anarchists such as Henri Duchmann and her friend Émile Darnaud to further her critique of left-wing men who opposed political rights for women because of their supposed domination by the Church. She began her lecture with an attack on Catholic dogma, especially the notion of the immaculate conception, which made chastity the dominant virtue, treated “love” (sex) as a “stain,” and reduced women to objects of reproduction who had to obey and suffer. Women had difficulty extricating themselves from Church doctrine, not because it was in their nature to be religious, but because they had no other respectable place to go, especially while men spent all their free time in cabarets. In her tours through the provinces, she had witnessed the pattern, even among freethinkers, in which men and women inhabited starkly separate spaces. This division reinforced the very problem—women’s relationship to the Church—that both she and freethinkers wished to tackle.³⁰

If churchgoing women were not mature enough for liberty, cabaret drunkards were no more so. To shouts of “Bravo!” Roussel said, “While you seek to eliminate the Church from our morals, think about eliminating the cabaret from yours.” Men demonstrated no moral superiority to women; moreover, freethinkers humiliated their wives and daughters by hypocritically behaving as lords and masters in their families, thus violating their own injunction “neither God nor master.” Women sought out the Church as a refuge from their own suffering, even though the Church itself reinforced the ideology and institutions that made them creatures of self-sacrifice. Roussel challenged freethinkers to give women an alternative to churchgoing and demanded their right to “integral happiness.” If freethinkers admitted equality between the sexes, religions would cease to attract suffering women, and all of humanity could be intellectually emancipated.³¹

Opposition

Roussel’s written and spoken words drew opposition from men and women across the political spectrum. Conservatives not surprisingly labeled her lectures immoral, imprudent, and shocking, and proclaimed that the French people would never dream of a woman abandoning the home for occupations that were not the prerogative of her sex. They reminded their readers that religion “emancipates” the woman from her “natural propensity to sin” and “fixes her place in the home; it defines her role as a young girl, a wife and a mother, granting her a beautiful and noble part.” Protestant women, of whom she encountered many in Switzerland, stressed that it was only the Catholic Church that treated women badly and urged her to come into the Protestant fold.³²

Several feminists publicly or privately opposed her. Pauline Kergomard, a contributor to La Fronde who promoted infant-care education for girls, “bitterly reproached” Roussel for giving neo-Malthusian lectures—even though she had never attended one—and refused Roussel’s offer of a preferred seat so that she might attend.³³ Augusta Moll-Weiss not only opposed her views but, like so many others, feared the power Roussel exercised over “crowds” and claimed she was usurping the “feminist flag.” After seeing her present “Fertile Love, Sterile Love,” she wrote that the audience was “carried away in spite of itself,” as it listened to Roussel proclaim “the merits of sterile love, of today’s joy without tomorrow’s pain, of ecstasy without remorse.” Before this assembly of feminists, Roussel uttered “blasphemies”; because her voice was so “captivating,” not a single mother was able to respond to this “superb and paradoxical” speaker. The feminists, Moll-Weiss declared, “extraordinarily, remained women—fearful of a public debate, blushing over being unveiled in front of everyone,” and too hesitant to protest their own defilement as women, “too upset to dream of defending their dear feminist flag, violently torn from the heights where they had planted it in the name of the woman who came to speak.”

Moll-Weiss said that, from a feminist standpoint, Roussel was unleashing the “fiercest, most formidable enemy.” Her promises of intellectual superiority would only make woman more egotistical than man, and turn her into “a courtesan incapable of will.” And attacking the point most central to Roussel’s thinking, she said: “It’s not in pleasure and joy that character is forged; it is through pain.” Pain, she claimed, was what gave women a greater capacity for compassion. Evoking Christ’s sacrifice, she concluded, “Our superiority is in a crown of thorns; in tearing it away from us, Madam, you should fear that instead of pushing us toward a supreme achievement, you will push us toward an abyss.”³⁴

Others attacked Roussel for not being radical enough—or out of petty jealousy. Aria Ly, a feminist who advocated celibacy, and who also had not attended any of her lectures, complained to Caroline Kauffmann (Nelly’s close collaborator in the UFF) that Roussel never advocated “equality between the sexes but only equivalence! Which is not at all the same!” Ly further questioned the authenticity of Roussel’s talent, claiming her lectures were full of clichés taken from the classics; “the sacred torture of mothers,” Ly asserted, was “pinched” from Victor Hugo. Roussel’s association with La Française meant that she could not possibly be revolutionary. Ly concluded she was a “fake who thinks she is much better than she really is!”

Not long after Ly wrote this letter, Roussel contacted her with a very friendly overture about matters relating to the UFF. Ly by that time had read her lectures and confessed admiration for Roussel. However, Ly also emphasized their point of diversion: the only reason to have sex at all, this advocate of permanent virginity declared, was to have children.³⁵

Roussel’s most intractable opposition, however, came from men on the Left. Freethinkers, socialists, and anarchists attempted to counter her arguments with “theory” that differed little from that of the religious right-wing. Both sides held remarkably similar views about women’s nature, and especially their propensity for “sin.” Men of the Left particularly feared women’s vulnerability to the “seductions” of priests. On the occasion of her 1906 northern tour through the departments of Calvados, Manche, Seine-Maritime, Nord, and Ardennes, one contributor to a local paper insisted that Roussel’s feminist social theories were “inadmissible” for anticlerical thinkers, because “giving rights to women amounts to giving rights to the priests who penetrate their conscience and audaciously exert power over them.” Women did not flock to the Church simply out of moral or physical distress; even “rich and happy” women expressed ardent devotion. “Who would ever believe that a woman emancipated in her own household would distance herself from the enveloping, tempter priest, who mediates access to paradise in the afterlife?”³⁶ The writer insisted that men and women must first be liberated through science, a bizarre reaction given Roussel’s outspoken support for scientific progress—especially as it related to women—and her claim that churches would empty when women became emancipated.

As in other tours, this one produced considerable journalistic debate throughout the region. The audience in St. Lô had never seen a female speaker, and some among them—even freethinkers—found “L’Éternelle sacrifiée” risqué and unsettling. Her single lecture in Caen generated political debate in five long newspaper articles that even engaged some who had not attended it.³⁷ At issue in these debates was not just women’s presumed domination by priests, but their inescapable physiology that predisposed them to both spiritual and physical seduction. For example, when L’Action began publishing Roussel’s articles, Camille Guesmere complained privately to the editor, Henry Bérenger, that he was among “a certain number of readers” who opposed the “invasion” of feminists. Nature had denied women the moral strength “distributed to a man by his physical structure,” he argued, and he facetiously suggested that women would require mental therapy and medication if they were to participate in the public sphere. Like so many others across the political spectrum and gender divide, Guesmere located female morality and intelligence in the prison of an unchanging body, rather than in a mind that could reason and evolve. Invoking the Revolution to emphasize that any public presence of women would undermine republican ideals, he spoke of women’s “rage for servilisme,” a rarely used term for feudal servility that had been current during the First Republic. “Unconsciously,” he said, “woman needs to have masters … she [only] feigns to want to emancipate herself.” Women had been accomplices of the clergy since 1793 (the year the Terror began), and they threatened to “return us to the lovely days of absolute power [of the monarchy].” Guesmere closed his letter by asking Henry Bérenger “to ban l’éternel féminin” from L’Action.³⁸

Between 1904 and 1907, Guesmere wrote several long letters directly to Roussel. Although she never wrote or spoke specifically about contraceptives, he accused her of giving a “little course on practical gynecology” and advocating “conjugal cheating” in L’Action. He sarcastically suggested she consider the infallible method of abstinence instead, for “nothing is easier, especially for feminists.” He recommended yet another method he presumed familiar to “the league against masculine tyranny”: the “practice dear to the divine Sappho” (lesbianism).³⁹ Even as a self-proclaimed anarchist, Guesmere resorted to the biblical source of morality when he said,”Woman shows her fall from grace, man hides it,” suggesting that a woman should not be able to avoid the consequences of her sexuality—that is, hide her sin—through birth control. No statement could have more adeptly cut to the issue at hand: the power that female sexuality would have if it were separated from reproduction—and religion. Guesmere was hardly unique in defining woman’s “eternal” nature as located in the body. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had made a similar argument in Émile, saying that whereas man’s reason allowed him to control his passions, woman’s “boundless passions” could only be restrained by modesty.⁴⁰

The physiological component of the “eternal feminine” manifested itself in other reactions, even among apparent supporters, such as that of an M. Celérier who wrote to her a “few minutes” after having been “under the charm of her word.” After complimenting her, he presented his argument against her: women could never be the equals of men, or even persons in their own right, because the heterosexual relationship subjugated them and turned them into passive receptacles. When a man “has” a woman (in sex), he argued, the woman loses all moral initiative. The will of a woman annihilates itself “when she submits to a stronger will.” “Isn’t consented love a voluntary [and irrevocable] servitude [of the woman]? This—if I am not mistaken—is the conclusion of ‘La Rébelle.’” With this last comment, Celérier further revealed his predisposition by wrongly calling Par la révolte “The Woman Rebel.” He thereby lent the play a meaning different from what Roussel intended by associating it with female sexual liberation that would subject women anew. “Language offers us a verification of this inferiority of the feminine will,” he continued, using a very postmodern argument. “A woman ‘gives herself,’ a man ‘takes’; these are not just simple words; they translate a physiological and moral fact. The will of the person who abandons herself is inferior … to the will of one who behaves in some way actively.” This question, he thought, merited a “physiological, psychological, psycho-physiological analysis.”⁴¹

Such an analysis indeed took place. Consciously or not, Celérier attributed to the sexual act the same significance it possessed in classical Athens, where it was an “action performed by one person upon another”; sex polarized individuals and created a hierarchy. What David M. Halperin writes of this society could be applied to Celérier’s statement here: “The extraordinary polarization of sexual roles … merely reflects the marked division in the Athenian polity between this socially superordinate group, composed of citizens, and various subordinate groups … composed respectively of women, foreigners, slaves, and children (the latter three groups comprising persons of both sexes).” In early twentieth-century French society, only girls and women permanently lacked full civil rights. Feminists of that era (Aria Ly), as well as recently (Catharine MacKinnon), have used the same logic to argue against heterosexuality.⁴²

Like Guesmere, Moll-Weiss, and so many others, Celérier believed that the ability to avoid pregnancy would not change women’s nature but instead bring out the worst in it. He was not, moreover, alone in misinterpreting the meaning of “revolt” in Roussel’s popular play. After the 1905 Paris production, she was forced by the reactions of certain individuals to write an article clarifying her true intent. With “Society’s” statement that Eve was made “to give, not to receive,” she captured the meaning of the eternally sacrificed woman; and her solution to Eve’s plight was “revolt” through the refusal to bear children. Several men who wrote to her personally or who published newspaper articles thought that “closing one’s flanks” meant refusing to have sex with men, thus missing her whole point about freedom to love without bearing children. Flammèche, a contributor to L’Action, compared the play with Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which women refuse to sleep with their husbands until they stop war. Roussel responded, “Reassure yourself, dear colleague Flammèche, it is not the strike of lovers I want, but the strike of mothers.” She explained, moreover, that by “revolt,” she meant “the legitimate refusal to suffer, the fight against injustice, the resistance to oppression,” and that similar to the orderly strikes of workers, the “best” revolts were calm.⁴³

The Right Not to Suffer Legally Denied

Attention from Roussel’s opponents on the Right intensified by the end of 1905, when she appeared not just with anarchists such as Sébastian Faure, but with respectable politicians such as the Paris municipal councilor Eugène Fournière, director of the Revue socialiste. A lecture she delivered on November 20, 1905, became the focus of particular alarm, resulting in a long-term controversy that revealed the subversive and unsettling impact her words had on public discourse. The mere announcement of the lecture in Régénération and on large posters placarded throughout Paris provoked the popular right-wing newspaper L’Eclair to publish an article whose title dubbed the League of Human Regeneration the “Ligue pour la Dépopulation” (League for Depopulation). In citing the grave danger neo-Malthusianism posed for France, it specifically mentioned Roussel’s scheduled lecture and listed the other modes by which the group distributed its sinister message and contraceptive methods: medical “recipes,” advertised products, bibliographies, lists of “practitioners,” and suggestive postcards. The meetings and lectures they sponsored and advertised, such as those of Roussel, gave “the impression of a movement much more active than had been previously supposed…. It is the duty of each man concerned with the future of the race to see what happens from this side. The extension of this doctrine, which will be preached all over Paris in a few days, is a symptom…. It would be a social crime to ignore it willfully.” The article was published in three other provincial newspapers, helping both to spread the “warning” and to advertise the lecture itself.⁴⁴

The next day Le Matin joined in the attack on the “League for Depopulation” with the same criticisms and reported that it had asked the opinion of Senator Edmé Piot. Piot had just published another book with even more dire statistics, showing that France was “more dead” than the previous year because of a lower birthrate and higher death rate. The senator responded that he did not think the actual events of this propaganda were too important, and that the neo-Malthusians had failed so far. He did, however, deeply regret that Eugène Fournière had lent his support to their efforts. Fournière was, after all, not just an editor, but a government functionary who taught at the École polytechnique. The government had banned all religious instruction from schools, the Avenir de la Vienne lamented, yet “apostles” of the modern Malthus could preach from within. The debate about the neo-Malthusian threat—generated by Régénération’s mere announcement of Roussel’s lecture—spilled over into provincial newspapers. A presumably female contributor to Le Petit Provençal of Marseille warned that “mocking nature” would cause “women to burn from within,” and that it had become necessary “to tell all women … that they are built to have children.”⁴⁵

Fournière presided at the meeting of November 20 before an audience of 500 to 600 people. Roussel spoke for two hours under the title “Beaucoup d’enfants?” After covering all the points about maternal pain, religion, nature, and science articulated in “Liberty of Motherhood,” she ended her lecture by saying, “We have a right to love.” Her attentive audience interrupted her numerous times with applause.⁴⁶ Although Roussel had already lectured on these topics in Paris and the provinces, this event constituted a particularly controversial turning point, because—from the perspective of its critics—neo-Malthusianism seemed on the brink of becoming a mainstream movement. But the lecture also evoked more strident reaction from populationists. Immediately following her presentation, L’Éclair again interviewed Senator Piot, whose stance about the neo-Malthusian threat had dramatically changed in just four days. Roussel’s lecture, he said, obliged him to ask the government to take measures against the neo-Malthusians.⁴⁷

The following January, Guy de Cassagnac, director of the conservative newspaper L’Autorité, published an article in which he decried the “scourge” of depopulation, lambasted the neo-Malthusian movement as “anti-physiological madness,” and protested the public silence with which such outrages were met. He then cited Roussel’s lecture of November 20 (“Beaucoup d’enfants?”) as an example of the sort of propaganda that should be outlawed. He ranked her among “these sorts of viragos, unsexed women who saturate literature and modern politics,” and who “mount their pens the way they would mount a broom to go to a midnight orgy. Sterile or scorned, they avenge their disgrace by insulting Nature.” But where other female revolutionaries had been placed in mental institutions or prisons for having transgressed their sex, such as Théroigne de Méricourt (Revolution of 1789) and Louise Michel (Paris Commune), “the delicate Nelly Roussel travels across France with impunity behind the banner of her skirt,” suggesting that her feminine appearance protected her from persecution.⁴⁸

Not one to ignore personal attacks, Roussel wrote Cassagnac a letter in order to rebut his views on neo-Malthusianism and to defend her honor. In response to being called a “virago,” “unsexed,” “sterile,” and “scorned,” she sent the legal proof of her “true womanhood,” a document signed by the bailiff at the Tribunal of the Seine, indicating that she was married and had two children. Cassagnac sarcastically mocked her “proof.” He withdrew the words “sterile” and “scorned,” but not “unsexed” or “virago.” He refused, moreover, to publish her letter in its entirety because he wanted to “protect his female readers” from her explication of neo-Malthusian theory.⁴⁹

Cassagnac’s refusal to publish the whole of Roussel’s letter provoked her to sue him. Her case rested on a law that obligated a newspaper to publish in its entirety any letter of response from anyone named or designated in the same newspaper. Exceptions could be made only for letters containing a “direct provocation to debauchery” by “exposing an immoral and antisocial doctrine” that was “contrary to laws and good morals.” L’Authorité regarded the court proceedings as an opportunity to humiliate and ridicule Roussel and her female supporters. The paper described these women as “the fine flower of the League of Regeneration: one of them, in order to show that she is truly liberated from the masculine yoke, is unafraid to let her mustache grow, [which] she wore with particular grace.” Unable to label Roussel herself as “unfeminine,” it described her “whole being as shaken by a slight trembling, which would appear to be the sign of habitual neuropathology.”⁵⁰ In fact, as numerous descriptions of her “performances” indicate, Roussel spoke in public with such intensity that her body often did tremble, lending a decidedly dramatic effect.

The court decided in favor of Guy de Cassagnac and his newspaper, because it found the suggestions in Roussel’s letter to be “a direct provocation to voluntary sterility of women” and a “violation of the maternal and moral law of procreation.” Her words encouraged debauchery, because they sought to persuade women that they had the right, as well as easy access to, “obstacles to conception,” which would cause them to forget their duty to bear children. The judicial wording naturalized motherhood and woman’s obligation. It equated a woman’s desire to have fewer children through contraception with willingness to have an abortion or commit infanticide; it thereby implied that the desire itself was immoral, unnatural, and murderous. Contraception, abortion, and infanticide had in common the elimination of the “sign” of the sexual act. This legal opinion reflected the belief, as Camille Guesmere had expressed it, that women’s “fall from grace” had to be visible. The court also decided that Cassagnac had the right to suppress the part of Roussel’s letter that made “an appeal to his female readers.”⁵¹

The court also dismissed Roussel’s accusations of slander but found Cassagnac and the editor of L’Autorité guilty of the lesser charge of “injurious insult” for calling her an “unsexed virago”; the fines were 25 francs each, and 100 francs for damaging her interests. Cassagnac ended his own account of these proceedings by conceding that “to have doubted the sex of this lady would have been worth five gold pieces. I would have willingly given her more if she had asked me nicely.”⁵² Bridling at this final patronizing insult, Roussel refused to surrender her case. But at another hearing the following spring, the Paris Court of Appeal again decided in Cassagnac’s favor. It recognized women’s right to protect their bodies through chastity but blatantly denied their right to engage in sexual activity “without fear of suffering” (my emphasis).⁵³ What is significant about this appellate court decision is not its anticipated condemnation of birth control but its intolerance of any desire to avoid pregnancy in order to escape physical, psychological, or emotional pain.

Originally of religious origin, this moral precept regarding female pain continued to inform and determine secular justice in the anticlerical Third Republic. Indeed, it is important to keep in mind that the French were already well acquainted with birth control in its traditional forms—withdrawal, condoms, abortion—so that, on a private level, the issue was one of method rather than morality, at least for a large portion of the population. The problem Roussel and the League of Human Regeneration posed was their loud and visible attempt to place reproductive control in women’s bodies rather than in men’s, promoting not only their capacity for sexual pleasure, but their potential for sexual independence.

Neo-Malthusians, however, were not of a single mind, and some among them—especially those who were eugenicists—opposed Roussel. Several years after the Cassagnac affair, in reaction to a particularly successful lecture Roussel had just delivered, a correspondent to the neo-Malthusian newspaper Rénovation declared that those who suffered from inheritable defects and those made unhealthy by the ravages of capitalism should have the means to avoid conceiving children. But the writer noted that the bourgeoisie already practiced birth control, which “deprives humanity of a considerable number of healthy individuals.” This writer concluded that for Roussel to demand “absolute liberty even for the rich and robust woman not to procreate—[just because] it pleases her not to [is] … criminal.”⁵⁴

Somewhat more surprising, however, was the opposition from Roussel’s loyal friend Émile Darnaud, a freethinker and self-proclaimed feminist. Darnaud sincerely believed that the instructions to use contraceptive devices would provide too graphic an anatomical education, one that would “overexcite” female readers. Just as a certain instinct had been bred into hunting dogs, he claimed, female prudery and chastity had been handed down through generations to girls—a Lamarckian notion of the evolutionary process common among the French. Knowledge of physiology would destroy those qualities. If young girls read these neo-Malthusian newspapers, they would “deliver themselves to profligacy with impunity.” He agreed that abstinence would be impossible among married couples, but nonetheless he thought it would be “humiliating for the wife to serve her husband without purpose.”⁵⁵ Seeing the wife—or at least wanting to see her—as only serving her husband rather than engaging in mutual pleasure, implies that Darnaud shared the widely held public opinion—and that of the court in the Cassagnac affair—that female sexuality had no purpose other than reproduction.

The Political as Personal

How could Roussel consider Darnaud one of her staunchest supporters if he held the very assumptions against which she fervently spoke? Through the height of her career and until his death in 1914, Darnaud engaged Roussel and Godet on numerous issues that concerned her career and her private life. He admired Roussel’s independence (even when she disagreed with him), her militancy, her logic, and her speaking ability—talents he found so rare in women of his era. He constantly expressed his adoration of Roussel from every viewpoint; his age gave him license to feel and express his “paternal” affection for her. He referred to himself as “the disciple of Nelly Roussel,” whom he cherished not only as a “prodigious militant” and female public speaker, but also because she was “still woman in her physical beauty.” But most important to him was her role as a mother, for which he offered incessant praise: “And now let me use my octogenarian rights, beyond all sociology; feminism, free thinking, et cetera, to say to you that it is not only ‘Our Nelly’ with whom I am taken [épris], but also Madame Henri Godet, mama of Mireille, of Marcel.” It was her status as wife and mother in private life that legitimized her—a lesson Roussel began to learn well. He urged her to emphasize in her lectures that feminism was perfectly compatible with motherhood and family.⁵⁶

Roussel and Godet hardly dismissed Darnaud as the eccentric octogenarian that he appears to be in his letters. He was a good advertisement for her, and she regretted “not having a Darnaud in every department.”⁵⁷ He corresponded with many people about her, recommended that they see her speak, and copied his correspondents’ reactions to her talks and sent them to her, thus providing another source of audience reaction, as well as publicity. But she also took his own reactions and opinions very seriously, for he was a foil against which she could either sharpen or temper her own arguments. His correspondence reveals an epistemology that reflected the contradictions and complexities of modernity—the rise of mass democracy, nation-states, theories of race and evolution, war, and human rights. If his beloved Nelly Roussel was, as he called her admiringly, a woman of the future, he was a man of the present who embodied a political culture of his era that he shared with many: a culture desperate to preserve a hard-fought-for republic, whose origins dated back to a revolution that had very consciously excluded women from politics. Like other men of the Left who disagreed with Roussel, Darnaud’s thinking about women in general exemplified the influence of earlier democratic thinkers, particularly that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He admitted that, to a degree, he accepted Proudhon’s highly criticized maxim that women were either “housewives or harlots,” particularly with regard to bourgeois women, who “rarely desired to be housewives.” Most were not literally harlots, he conceded, but they lived “exactly like cocottes,” and he wondered whether such behavior contributed to the rise in divorces.⁵⁸

Though Darnaud was not a misogynist, he disdained and distrusted certain aspects of femininity. As had Rousseau, he appreciated beauty, but hated the manner in which women used artifice—he especially hated unhealthy corsets—to make themselves conform to sick, superficial standards of fashion. Roussel inspired passionate devotion in Darnaud because in his mind—despite her corset, for which he relentlessly scolded her—she embodied the ideal woman in her integration of physical beauty, acute intelligence, logic, and independence. As a freethinker, Darnaud supported feminism, because unlike many of his freethinking colleagues, he thought that one day women could be emancipated from the tight grip of the priests. He thought they should be granted more civil rights, but like other freethinkers, he believed they should not have the vote until they had lay educations. On these grounds, he was far more conservative than Roussel. But at the same time, his brutal critique of the conservative “feminine” feminists with whom she maintained contact is telling. He said Jane Misme and the contributors to her newspaper La Française gave secondary importance to feminism, even though they supported suffrage. Misme herself was a “coquette,” a kept woman. She and one of her associates, the aristocratic and Catholic duchesse d’Uzès, were just the sort of females whose votes one would not be able to trust.⁵⁹

Darnaud’s letters to Roussel produced a degree of candor not found in newspapers or other correspondence. Just after Cassagnac initiated his attacks on Roussel in the winter of 1906, Darnaud wrote, “your writings and your talks on conscious motherhood make me your disciple. That does not prevent me from finding that Paul Robin goes too far. When I ordered for myself the 4th edition of Par la révolte, out of curiosity I asked for various publications from the offices of Régénération; and, after having read them, I burned them … I go as far as you go, but not beyond that.” But in fact he knew Roussel did go “beyond that” in her beliefs, as well as in her words. He thus repeatedly expressed his revulsion at the neo-Malthusian “accessories” advertised in their newspapers and shared the opinions of others who found such methods disgusting.⁶⁰

For his part, Godet, who must have felt personally dishonored by Cassagnac’s attacks, also continued to try to steer his wife away from her association with neo-Malthusianism. For example, in April of 1906, he urged her to talk about suffrage—a topic of secondary importance to her—because the upcoming elections made it relevant. He thought a good summary of her lecture on this subject would then provoke debate in other newspapers, and she would receive more recognition for it. It would also allow her to “avoid going in the same circle,” reference to the issues raised in the ongoing Cassagnac affair. But Nelly continued to defend Robin and her association with him, pointing out that her lecture in Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland) had been well organized because Robin had contacts there and had told them about her. “And all this proves that this good Robin is for me a sort of Darnaud.”⁶¹

Cassignac, Darnaud, and Henri did, however, influence the self-image Roussel henceforth presented to her public—for somewhat suddenly, motherhood became a more visible part of it. During her tour in the spring of 1906, ever aware of the importance of publicity for her lectures, she instructed Henri to send her “many copies” of a photograph of the mother-daughter bust he had sculpted (fig. 9). She wanted it published in the newspapers and displayed at the Palais de Gelée, where she would be speaking.⁶² Friendly press coverage of her lectures and testimony from her supporters increasingly emphasized her identity as a wife and mother. For these sympathetic commentators, she offered living proof that a feminist could have a loving relationship with a man; they portrayed her marriage as a model of companionship. In this manner, Roussel differed significantly from other feminist birth control advocates, such as Gabrielle Petit, who was not bourgeois and “lacked culture,” or Madeleine Pelletier, whose celibacy, disgust for sexuality of any kind, and lack of femininity many found off-putting.⁶³

Private Life

And what of Roussel’s actual motherhood? The sculpture of Mireille emanating from her mother’s chest belied the physical distance between the two of them. Mireille, six years old at the time of the 1906 lecture tour, continued to reside and travel with her grandparents. Marcel, who was never included in the publicity, remained in the pouponnière for the first two years of his life. To a large degree, Roussel escaped her own “natural” maternal responsibilities while she ardently pursued her career. But it appears as well that she did not harbor maternal proclivities, at least as regards the care of infants and small children.

When she turned twenty-eight in January 1906—happily married, enjoying good health and a widespread reputation—Roussel was on the point of reaching the apogee of her speaking career. Her peak coincided with heightened working-class unrest, renewed tensions with Germany over competing interests in North Africa, and the final separation of Church and state in France—national issues that provided a backdrop for her message, but whose unfolding events would later contribute to its suppression. From 1905 to 1908, she spent close to a third of her time on lecture tours, going to many different departments (map 4). Her speaking fees and the sale of her brochures earned an impressive income—10,014 francs from 1905 through 1908, more than an average of 2,500 per year—and paid for her trainfare and sometimes her hotels; if she arrived home with a profit, she kept it for future trips and did not contribute it to the household. She appeared at peace and at ease with herself during her extensive travels away from home and family. She also continued to derive great pleasure from her successes and from the visual effect of her black velvet dress. Though her detractors sometimes upset her, she thrived on controversy.

Family and friends also recognized her achievements. When in Nice during her 1906 tour, her grandfather heard her speak for a third time, and other family members were present as well. Their reaction thrilled her. Thomas Nel showed how seriously he took her ideas when, the following day, he insisted on talking about feminism with a guest who came to lunch. One of the family friends who had attended the lecture told Nelly’s mother that even though she found the ideas “daring,” she had “unreserved admiration” for her daughter. This reaction pleased Godet, because both Louise Nel and Antonin Montupet held right-wing political views, and up to that point, they had never attended any of the lectures. Soon they and the rest of the family and many of their friends began attending Roussel’s lectures in Paris.⁶⁴

Roussel’s lecture tours offered more than the ability to display her talents; they gave her the freedom to exert her irrepressible and unusual (for the era) independence. On her 1906 tour, for example, she decided to stop in Clermont-Ferrand (Puy-de-Dôme) for a couple of days because tentative plans for a lecture elsewhere had been cancelled. Henri fretted over how alone and isolated she would feel, and he urged her either to go directly to Le Puy, where people would receive her, or to Vichy for a rest cure in the mineral waters. But Nelly ignored his advice, and instead took the opportunity to hike alone in the Auvergne mountains. She sent Henri an exuberant description of the clean air, the melting snow, and the extraordinary vista of the Cévennes.⁶⁵

Roussel also took advantage of her travels to sightsee and otherwise amuse herself with lecture organizers, usually young men. While in Le Puy, they took her to see the huge statue of the Virgin Mary, made from melted cannon taken from Sebastopol after the Crimean War, meant to “dominate and protect” the city. They irreverently subverted this religious iconography by placing neo-Malthusian stickers “in all the holy places,” on churches and cross pedestals, in addition to the Virgin and other statues. The League of Human Regeneration had produced twenty-four versions these stickers, an example of which read “Abortion is dangerous / Prevention of pregnancy / is easy and without danger / Let’s have few children.”⁶⁶

Roussel relished vacation time while on tours, especially in the Midi. She met her sister Andrée in Monaco, and from there they went to lunch with friends in Cannes, sailed to the island of Ste. Marguerite, and visited with their cousin Jules’s wife, Ninie, in Toulon. Nelly wrote to Henri from atop the hills of Nice, on the terrace of the château of her friend Georges Danjou (whom she had met through Darnaud) “installed under the mimosa,” as though to underscore the difference in their respective situations. She described the exquisite view of the sea and said how content she had been with her day. She added, “In almost all your letters you speak to me of sadness, lack of spirit, drunkenness. I am sorry about that. Despite the charm of my holiday, thinking about taking the first rapid train home to break your ennui makes me crazy with desire to see you. Poor dear friend! We would be so happy here, the two of us.” She then imagined that they would spend all their time embracing and looking at the sea. “But let’s leave that subject. I don’t want to augment your regrets, and mine.” Henri, in response, complained that she seemed to have “lost the habit” of writing to him.⁶⁷

Henri fared far less well than his wife during her tours. He occasionally wrote of suffering from hangovers, and many of his letters appear to have been scrawled in a drunken state, late at night. They are full of rambling free association about his activities, complaints about the problems of daily life, and incoherent non sequiturs. Meanwhile, Godet persisted in trying to sell his sculptures and also engaged in the business of selling blocks of uncut marble, not for art, but for the building industry. On one occasion, he solicited Nelly’s marketing help in Clermont-Ferrand, even though he urged her not to stop there; and when she went to Marseille, he facetiously and not very subtly suggested that she separate herself from politics for a brief moment to help with the business—he asked her to visit clients on his behalf without shouting “long-live socialism” or singing the “Internationale.”⁶⁸ Henri otherwise filled his time with freethinking artists’ meetings and feminist and left-wing lectures. He revised the statutes of the International Federation of Freethinkers, replacing the word “nature” with “matter.” Electoral politics also consumed his attention; deprived of the vote, Nelly did not share his passion, which irritated him. He complained of time spent on mundane household chores. He also had to assume the less trivial responsibility—on Nelly’s orders—of firing their domestic, with whom he was not on speaking terms.

Godet’s “Barnum” activities multiplied as Roussel’s fame grew. He opened the increasing amount of mail sent to her and then decided which pieces to answer himself and which to forward, often advising her on how to respond. Roussel’s early tours had taught them both the importance of skilled publicity and tight organization; but working such details out as she traveled was never easy. With a twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour turnaround in the mail, they were always rushing to finish their respective letters in time for the mail; the whole organization of her lecture tours depended on frequent and reliable trains and mail pickups and deliveries. The inevitable gaps sometimes caused tension between them. Henri often complained that she did not write frequently enough and failed to provide him with sufficient information about her schedule in time for him to be able to make posters, send brochures, and advertise her lectures in the nationally circulating L’Action. Sometimes he did not know when she would reach a particular destination, or how long she would stay there. Consequently, many of his letters had to be forwarded from one location to the next one, resulting in his frustrated complaint that he needed a more precise idea of her plans so that his letters would not “remain en panne [broken down] like vulgar automobiles.”⁶⁹

Deeply political in his sensibilities as well as his activities, Henri genuinely believed in his wife’s mission and took it very seriously. He gave her continuous encouragement and support, and even addressed the envelopes of his letters “Madame Nelly-Roussel, World Champion of Pure Eloquence”; “Madame Nelly-Roussel, Celebrated Orator”; or “Madame Nelly-Roussel, Illustrious Lecturer,” while she addressed him affectionately as her “stone breaker,” the pen name he used as an art critic. Godet was convinced that a broadsheet distributed by the infamous right-wing nationalist Paul Déroulède made allusion to Nelly, proving that her propaganda influenced elections. In his effort to promote her, he suggested at one point that she write to the Socialist Party leader Jean Jaurès, who was trying to rescue his newspaper, L’Humanité, from the brink of bankruptcy. Nelly, he thought, should offer to raise money for the newspaper by lecturing and contributing articles on feminism and socialism. Roussel responded to his “humanitarian idea” by saying it would have little chance of success. Henri’s genuine desire to help Jaurès—L’Humanité was indeed on the verge of bankruptcy—was also an opportunity to launch his wife into the high elite of Socialist Party circles, where she would be assured yet more publicity, even though her more radical feminist, not to mention neo-Malthusian, views would have had to be tempered, if not suppressed.⁷⁰

Roussel’s independence, love of travel, devotion to her career, and minimal contact with her children for months at a time do not fit Darnaud’s image of her as a devoted wife and mother. Despite her long periods away from home and occasionally overt attentions from other men, her devotion to Henri was steadfast. She saw little of Marcel, who was still living in the pouponnière, and often did not see Mireille for two months at a time. They did, however, spend vacations together. It was typical of urban French bourgeois families (and still is) for the women and children to spend the summer months in vacation residences, while the men remained in the cities and visited their families on weekends. The Roussel-Godet family was no exception to this summer habit. For example, on July 22, 1906, Nelly departed for St. Quay on the Normandy coast, along with her daughter, her sister Andrée, and their mother, where they remained for six weeks. Her letters to Henri express frank and profound affection for Mireille. She spent everyday at the beach walking, hiking, climbing rocks, either alone or with the others. Ever conscious of herself as a public figure in these private circumstances, she wrote to Henri: “Madame Nelly Roussel, the distinguished lecturer, her skirt raised to her knees, climbed [on the rocks] and splashed in scandalous fashion.”⁷¹

Belying this leisured vacation were financial difficulties that increasingly plagued Henri and Nelly. After dismissing their domestic servant, they did not hire another, a telling aberration for people of their social class. Instead, they relied on the meals prepared by Andrée’s domestic. But Nelly’s sister offered more. In August, she suggested they move in with her and her husband Paul Nel. Their apartment was large, and owned by Montupet’s company, for which Paul worked. Nelly and Henri would only have to pay the cost of the water, coal, and gas that they consumed.⁷² They certainly needed more space than their own apartment afforded, because they planned, finally, to retrieve Marcel from the pouponnière that September.

In the two years since his birth, Nelly had visited Marcel only every few weeks. As she and Godet prepared to bring him home, an exchange took place between them that reveals much about their respective sensibilities as parents. The previous May, 1906, when Nelly was on tour, Henri had written, “Marcel must be doing well—he must even be getting old. I have not been to see him once in order that he not develop, to your detriment, a passion for me. This cost me a lot, I assure you.” While Nelly and Mireille were in St. Quay that July, Henri wrote to the director of the pouponnière to say “I can no longer live without my son.” But he also told her that she had to keep him until September 10, his second birthday. Since it was too “bothersome” to go to Versailles alone to see Marcel, Henri instead telephoned to get news of him. Meanwhile, still in St. Quay, Nelly implied through her planning for the following fall that the return of her two-year-old son would make little difference to her schedule. She accepted an invitation to speak in Toulon on September 23. By that time, she figured, they would be settled in their new domicile, and Andrée had offered to take care of the mioche (kid). She also thought she would then take another “dozen days” to go from Toulon to Switzerland to give a few lectures.⁷³

Shortly after returning from the Normandy coast, Nelly and Henri took a full week to move from their apartment on 109 rue Michel Bizot into Paul and Andrée’s apartment, number 254 on the same street. Mireille joined them in her aunt’s apartment for two weeks. Nelly did not, after all, leave for a tour to Toulon on September 23, as she had planned, but instead departed in mid October for a two-week stint in Switzerland.⁷⁴

The new household arrangement was not what Nelly had imagined it would be. The mercurial and unpredictably moody Andrée “whined” about Marcel distracting the maids and the care he demanded. Paul complained as well that Andrée spent too much time with Marcel, which in turn forced Henri to insist to Andrée that he was not her child. He assured his in-laws that henceforth he and Nelly would care for their toddler in a manner that would allow Andrée to be “tranquil with her maids.” But until Nelly returned from Switzerland, Henri had his hands full. Although Mireille continued to live with her grandmother, Henri took care of her part of the day, and both children had colds. Marcel developed a “little eruption” on his backside; unable to recognize a diaper rash, Henri called a doctor. “Ah! Children! With or without boiled milk!” he complained. But worse were Marcel’s “dirty tricks” and “diabolitries,” which provoked Andrée to declare that she would not permit him to be left alone in any room. Like any normal two-year old, Marcel “climbed all over everything.” Henri obligingly offered to remove objects from the toddler’s reach by placing shelves higher. He assured his sister-in-law that he would repair the resulting damage to the walls, but she snapped back that she didn’t want her house to look like a “stable.” She ended up swearing at him, he vowed to dine elsewhere that weekend, and wished he could find “another social position.” Henri resolved the issue by making a “stall” for Marcel in the attic. Whenever he left the apartment, he shut his son in the bathroom, having removed all accessible items. Even that strategy was not foolproof, because on one occasion Marcel managed to have a spoon (engraved with Nelly’s name) with him and proceeded to eat sand from the bathroom spittoon, pretending it was soup. Finally, Henri proclaimed that they had “discovered” that his name was “Nono” (as in Non! Non!), a nickname that persisted for many years, ultimately to Marcel’s deep chagrin and humiliation.⁷⁵

Public Image and Private Behavior

The most glaring contradiction in Nelly Roussel’s life lay in the difference between the maternal image she projected to the public and her actual behavior as a mother. Nelly showered affection and pet names on Mireille, saw her several times a week when not traveling, and spent some summer vacations with her. Mireille slept at her parents’ apartment when her grandmother was ill or out of town. Marcel, as we have seen, came from the pouponnière to the home of a couple who fought loudly and incessantly. Henri’s loving but incompetent care during Nelly’s absences only fueled household tensions. This living situation, which lasted for two years, facilitated Nelly’s continued extended absences from Paris.

Roussel’s absences render all the more ironic her success at creating a public image of herself as a devoted mother. Her efforts to do so while on tour in the spring of 1907, moreover, provoked long-simmering tensions with Godet. Her travels at this particular time produced more than the normal frustrations in communication, because she had to make decisions from a distance about the publication of her first collection of speeches, Quelques discours. Henri gave his usual input, offering advice about which speeches should be included and how they should be edited. As important as the content, however, were the frontispiece and dedication, which would showcase the volume and, they hoped, sell it.

Henri grew frustrated because Nelly did not respond promptly enough to his queries about the title of the collection and the photograph she wanted him to use. Letters they each wrote on May 2 crossed in the mail. She told him she wanted her portrait on the cover, emphasizing “you know which one.” With regard to the photograph, he wrote on the same day, “zut, zut, Zut, zut, Zut, zut. I’ll do what I want to all alone all alone all alone all alone. It’s my own photograph that I’ll put [on the cover] with Nono—who said yesterday without anyone asking him anything: ‘Mommy is going to return to see Nono.’” Returning to see the two-and-a-half-year-old Marcel was far from his mother’s mind, as Henri was well aware. If his words about the photograph here were facetious, they also served as a reminder that he was the one “mothering” their son. The final choice for the frontispiece was a photograph of Roussel and Mireille in Godet’s workshop, with his sculptures in the background (fig. 11). When she indicated that she wanted her own portrait to be used, she did not say “the one with Mireille,” so this choice may have resulted from a compromise. In any case, it satisfactorily projected her maternal image.⁷⁶

Henri knew that the way this volume was presented would reflect their marriage as well. He thus also had a hand in the dedication. In response to Nelly’s first version, one unfortunately not saved for posterity, Henri protested:

I just reread the dedication and permit myself some reflections: it has the fault of most dedications concerning women, [and] I would have preferred that it make clear that I opened this horizon of activity to you, [a horizon] you did not consider, that at least I had showed you the way, encouraged you to follow it. It’s very difficult to explain what I mean to say—and I am tired, I am going to bed. I will add something Wednesday the 24th—that will perhaps be less idiotic.⁷⁷

Nelly’s original version had ignored Henri. His complaint about “dedications concerning women” must have referred to his sense that feminists acknowledged only the efforts of women and not those of men. While he could not justifiably claim the entire responsibility for her feminism, he had encouraged her to pursue public speaking, rather than a career in the theater, a path actually more difficult for women than acting, because it was rare and made them more vulnerable to ridicule. Moreover, he had become a partner in her career and had cared for their children in her absence. How could she have overlooked his contributions and his desire for public acknowledgement of them?

Roussel’s response came four days later at the end of her letter, crammed into the margins almost as an afterthought: “I’m thinking of the dedication. It’s upsetting that you don’t like it … I was so happy with [it]! … it is necessary, above all, that you like it. We’ll talk about it more.” In her next letter, she offered him this revision: “To my husband, to my best friend; he who understood and encouraged my apostolate.” But this version also left Godet frustrated and confused. On May 4, he wrote that he had “plunged his head in his hands” to try to figure out what it was that made this dedication so “farcical” to him:

Why does your dedication resemble an epitaph? … it’s because you speak in the past tense … here is what I propose, but the man proposes, the woman disposes and even sometimes indisposes. “To my dear husband, who understands me and encourages me.” It is less romantic, but you know, Victor [referring to their mutual hero Victor Hugo] is dead, and we must not raise the dead … in fact I don’t know if one says it, but I suppose that many would find it bad—come on, I am saying a bunch of stupid things, it’s the effect of the tilleul [lime-blossom tisane] that I just drank.⁷⁸

Whatever Henri was drinking (probably not lime-blossom tea, given his sloppy hand, free association, and non sequiturs) did not afford him the courage to articulate his remaining thoughts. Did he not want to be referred to as his wife’s “best friend”? Would he have preferred something more romantic, such as her “greatest love”? He wanted Roussel’s readers to know that despite her feminism, despite her career, he remained the center of her life and they had a romantic marriage. But at this juncture, he felt helpless in their relationship. “The man proposes, the woman disposes …” (and in this case, also “indisposes”), was a popular twist on the proverb “Man proposes, God disposes,” reflecting the view that the “eternal feminine” had ultimate power.

The final product had the desired results. Darnaud gave enthusiastic approval and expressed his particular pleasure at the dedication to Henri and the photo of Nelly with Mireille. Whatever the modern eye might make of the frontispiece photograph (fig. 11), in which Roussel leans away from her daughter and gazes outward, it made her into an “excellent mother” as indicated by one critic in La Liberté: “Madame Roussel has a severe eloquence… nonetheless, if we judge by the portrait that figures on the cover of the brochure, [she] is a young woman, very pretty, very elegant. A beautiful child leans against her: Mme Roussel is thus also an excellent mother. Bravo! All that is worth even more than revolutionary eloquence.” Another reviewer noted, “Mme Nelly-Roussel has rendered herself almost notorious by her enthusiasm for preaching depopulation to the French. She is M. Robin of Cempuis, only more gracious. Do not believe, however, that [she] puts her theories into practice.” The author then quoted the dedication to illustrate her wifely devotion, and continued, “the cover of the brochure presents a charming portrait of the orator, holding tightly against her a pleasant child. Mme. Nelly-Roussel, she’s the modern matron, but she’s still the Roman matron [with] her jewels.” It is ironic that this reviewer admired Roussel all the more because he thought she did not practice what she preached. More noteworthy is that he failed even to see that she was not touching Mireille (with either arms or hands), let alone holding her tightly, which underscores the semiotic power this image had on predisposed viewers. Aria Ly also later reacted to this frontispiece photograph, writing to Roussel of how Mireille “leans against her dear and glorious mama in such an exquisite pose of adorable abandon and for which this feminist virgin can envy you despite her cult of purity.”⁷⁹

The introduction to the collection, authored by Roussel’s feminist colleague in the UFF, Hellé (a.k.a Marguerite Dreyfus), also drew reviewers’ attention for its treatment of Roussel’s recurrent travels away from home, as well as Darnaud’s hardy approval. “The spectacle is assuredly very rare of a happy woman, a happy spouse, a happy mother, leaving the warm shadow of the hearth in order to go off on great roads, free, uncertain roads, to serve a cause,” Hellé wrote. “You abandon a soft quietude for the austere joy of speaking according to your heart and your faith, and you accept in advance the danger of being misinterpreted.”⁸⁰ Hellé sought to reconcile Roussel’s qualities as bourgeois wife and mother with her absence from the home by construing the latter under the typical rubric of female self-sacrifice, but in this case, sacrifice to a cause rather than to men and children. In fact, as we have seen, Roussel relished travel for its own sake, and she derived most of her identity and self-esteem from her career. During her absences, not once did she ever say she missed her children, and she rarely asked after them. She missed Henri and would often say that his absence marked the imperfection of an otherwise successful trip; she also sometimes felt herself to be a “martyr” in her travels as well. But her lecture tours provided far more of a basis for her self-esteem than self-sacrifice.⁸¹

The unusual strain, anger, and sarcasm in Roussel and Godet’s correspondence in the spring of 1907 contradicts the image of conjugal harmony and happy motherhood they were at the same time creating for public consumption.⁸² Nelly had already been absent for two weeks in February on a tour in Belgium, and had she been home for only just over a month before leaving on a two-month tour through Geneva, Lausanne, and the departments of the Haute-Savoie, Isère, Var, Gard, Ariège, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Charente-Maritime, Maine-et-Loire, and Indre-et-Loire, where she gave eighteen lectures followed by dramatic readings of Par la révolte. Not only did Henri have to occupy himself with the usual affairs related to her speaking tours, but this one occurred just after the close of the Cassagnac affair, an experience perhaps more humiliating to him than to Nelly; it had, after all, given her and her cause more publicity and provoked gratifying public discourse, while he had been helpless in the battle to preserve her honor.

Meanwhile Henri’s home life offered little solace. Paul and Andrée had serious marital problems, to which “Nono” contributed. Andrée attempted to find a nanny, but claimed she could not because Paul was too stingy to pay more than 30 francs per month. Despite their more than ample income from annuities, Paul and Andrée incessantly bickered over money. Henri noted to Nelly the irony of their hosts’ money battles, “while we, by my fault, moreover … are without a penny [but never fight]. Oh well, I would not change, if it were at the same time to mean inheriting this inveterate habit of fighting so stupidly.”⁸³ But the lack of a nanny also meant that Henri had to occupy himself with Nono, a task that continued to challenge him, particularly around issues of toilet training. “Marcel went pipi on the floor and then dabbled in it, saying ‘Nono is washing his hands.’” He also urinated on an issue of the conservative feminist La Française (an appropriate gesture, Godet thought) and ate his excrement. Nelly responded, “Horrible little Nono! Disgusting kid! Who always profits from my absence to do such things, because he knows that I am the only one who whips him conscientiously.” Henri resorted to locking Marcel in an armoire on occasions when he became too obstreperous.⁸⁴

During the long separation of the 1907 tour, Henri and Nelly had yet another reason to resent their son. They had planned to meet in Bayonne, because each of them would be en route to Bordeaux for the Congress of the League of the Rights of Man, and then slowly make their way back to Paris together, while she continued to give a few more lectures on the way. But all Henri’s in-laws were leaving Paris, taking their servants with them, so no one was available to take care of Marcel over the long Pentecost weekend. Henri finally succeeded in finding a nanny—a fifteen-year-old girl from the provinces with “a look of stupidity”—pressed upon him by a neighbor who seemed eager to be rid of her. Henri hired the girl at the incredibly paltry rate of ten francs a month. Even Andrée thought Marcel should not be left alone with this domestic, which made Henri think he should shorten the trip. His doubts infuriated Nelly, who was desperate to be with her husband for as many days as possible. If Marcel was going to be left with the nanny at all, she queried, “what difference would five or six days make?” In fact, “Maria” turned out to be both incompetent (she “almost lost Nono”) and “a small-time thief”; she lasted for only a couple of months, another failure in the family’s recurring problems with domestics.⁸⁵

We must not conclude from these exchanges that Nelly and Henri, preoccupied with one another and with their respective careers, did not feel love or affection for their son. Figure 12 of Nelly with Marcel on her lap at the pouponnière, suggests maternal warmth and tenderness; for once her gaze is on her child, rather than toward the camera and at the outside world. Figure 13 similarly conveys maternal affection in Roussel’s body language, even though her gaze is on the camera.⁸⁶ Henri often wrote tenderly and lovingly about their son. In Nelly’s absence he allowed Nono to get into bed with him in the mornings; he fretted over signs of the boy’s sickness, and shared stories of his good deeds as well. He especially conveyed to Nelly how much Nono missed her and wanted her to return. But Henri was not beyond telling the child that his mother’s return depended upon his good behavior, even though his behavior had nothing to do with her traveling schedule. Meanwhile, Mireille, the “chou en chocolat” (cabbage in chocolate), was a “perfect” child, content with her living arrangement, especially since she saw her parents frequently when they were in Paris. Nelly would often spend entire afternoons at her mother’s, and she would always be at Mireille’s bedside when she was sick. As Mireille grew older, Nelly took her to and from school and piano lessons. The extended family lunched every Sunday at the Montupets’ home, after which they went on excursions in the Bois de Vincennes or elsewhere. Nelly, Henri, and the two children also socialized frequently with his extended family—especially Juliette and Fritz Robin, their son Maurice, and Fritz’s mother, Louise Robin. Paul Robin, ill and increasingly reclusive, rarely joined them. The Godet, Robin, and Nel families shared a large multigenerational network of friends in Paris, Vincennes, Fontainebleau, and Monaco, mostly people associated with music, theater, and the arts, who often joined in family dinners and activities. All these people became an intricate part of the children’s lives.⁸⁷

By modern standards, Roussel appears to have been a bad mother. But by the standards of her day, she did not appear that way. After her initial memoir while pregnant with Mireille, she neither ever commented about her sense of self as a mother nor expressed anxiety, guilt, or second thoughts about herself in that role. No one else did either, including Henri. This was because motherhood (even according to pronatalists, as Roussel routinely pointed out) primarily meant bearing children, and—despite the growing sentiment that mothers should breast-feed—did not automatically mean nurturing them oneself. Roussel’s behavior followed the pattern of the past, when mothers did not involve themselves much with their children. Those who had the means instead oversaw servants, nursemaids, and governesses who did. In Roussel’s case, unable to keep a nanny for any length of time, let alone afford a team of servants, her family stepped in because doing so was normal. The transition from the preindustrial motherhood in which women integrated productive activity with maternal responsibilities—whether they were wage-earning workers, bourgeois business women, or aristocratic socialites—to modern motherhood was long and uneven, and not all women had the “instincts” that were supposed make it “natural” for them to devote themselves exclusively to the children they bore—exclusive in the sense of doing nothing but raising children, as well as in the sense of not caring for children other than their own. Roussel’s family and friends shared the assumption that childcare was not the exclusive responsibility of the mother and that other family members and friends should assume those tasks—and they did without question.⁸⁸

Roussel and her contemporaries participated in a lifestyle that left little time for motherhood as the twentieth century came to define it, but that incorporated a collective care and concern for children. In addition to traveling, Nelly, her sister, and their friends filled their time with social visits, and in her case, political contacts.⁸⁹ Much of this social visiting, which excluded children, occurred within the upper-middle-class convention of hosting “reception days,” a practice so regular that one’s “day” was listed in the telephone book. Roussel received guests every other Tuesday, a day coordinated with those of Andrée and of their mother, so that family and mutual friends would not have to choose between them. On occasion, she might have as many as eight or ten visitors, most of whom were women, though men called on her as well. These occasions provided a space for female bonding, as mothers and adult daughters visited together. They also offered Roussel an obvious opportunity to talk about her own exploits and ideas. Some of these friends began attending her lectures, such as Mme Wolf and Germaine Lambert; even the frivolous Andrée began participating in the UFF.⁹⁰ It is not difficult to imagine that her reception days were informal “salons.”

Roussel’s career demanded—and acquired—another set of delicately balanced emotional relationships that appear contradictory. “Timorous” Louise Nel and Antonin Montupet were shocked by both the form and the content of Nelly’s lectures. Louise Nel had raised her daughter as a strict Catholic, had ruled out formal education for her after she was fifteen, and had prevented her from pursuing an acting career. Moreover, Louise Nel and Antonin Montupet held political views that sharply contrasted with Nelly’s. In 1907 Montupet, a ship-building engineer, began a prolonged stint as mayor of Fourchambault (Nièvre), where one of his factories was located, and where he had a residence. On one occasion, he intervened in a meeting of striking workers to explain that they needed to return to work for their own benefit, and that reduced hours or higher wages were not in their interests. After they expressed a few “timid observations” of their own about the social question, one that had become acute in 1906, Montupet asked his workers “who had put these ideas in their heads.” One of them responded, “I became libertarian while listening to your stepdaughter.” Louise Nel expressed her view that all the striking workers should be put in prison. Henri responded to her that during a time of strikes it might suit them, for most striking workers “would find a comfort [in prison] unknown to them in their own homes.” He told Nelly that her mother had the reasoning of “an eight-year-old baby.”⁹¹

Despite their political differences, Nelly remained extremely close to her mother. She saw her almost everyday when they were both in Paris, and she referred to her affectionately as “petite mère.” And while Nelly toured Belgium in February 1907, her mother asked Henri to provide summaries of her lectures published in the local newspapers. Louise Nel then began attending her lectures in Paris, along with other family members.⁹² Both Nelly and Henri, however, detested Montupet, not only for his political views, but because he lectured to them constantly. Their contempt for him did not, however, stop them from accepting his generosity in caring for Mireille. Nelly’s and Henri’s financial situation helped cement close family ties. The apartment they abandoned in September, 179 rue Michel Bizot, had cost 800–900 francs per year, but Godet also annually paid 1,200–1,500 francs for his workshop at 58 rue du Rendez-vous, a short distance from their home. Roussel’s speaking fees afforded a small profit, but various signs—such as Godet’s persistent complaints about his inability to sell sculptures or marble, and their not hiring a domestic at a time when they needed one more than ever—point to their increasingly precarious financial situation. They each nonetheless exhibited the mentality of people accustomed to a certain level of comfort. Godet at one point wrote in 1906, “These questions of money are so unworthy of our attention as millionaire apprentices that I am ashamed.” Meanwhile, Roussel continued to purchase clothes frequently, most of which were tailor-made.⁹³

Enjoying the peak of her career in 1907, Nelly Roussel had indeed risen above the fate she had so feared eight years earlier while pregnant with Mireille. What had tormented her then had been the “secret, voiceless and bitter revolt of all her instincts … against the destiny of Woman.” Her experience with childbirth was worse than she had feared; then there was infant care, another pregnancy, another childbirth, which almost killed her, the loss of her infant son, and an unwanted pregnancy. She used her personal pain as a platform from which to launch a campaign, not just for herself and for all women, but for humanity. In the process, she generated opposition across the political spectrum, among friends, foes, family, and strangers. Responses to her demonstrate how deeply embedded the assumptions about female self-sacrifice were in French political culture. Undaunted, she intensified her campaign. In her private life, she enjoyed not only “freedom of motherhood” but freedom from maternal responsibilities. She had won, for herself at least, the right to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

Roussel’s audiences did not operate as a single-minded “crowd,” despite the repeatedly expressed concern that she turned them into one. Like Émile Darnaud, her auditors filtered her words as individuals through their own needs, desires, and sexual, gender, class, and political identities. Almost everyone appreciated her speaking talent, even if they did not agree with or understand all that she said. If what she said or how she looked caused controversy, she was happy to disrupt assumptions and give voice to praise or protest. If the journalistic debates that her lectures so often provoked—especially in the provinces—constituted a measure of success, then she succeeded brilliantly. Still enjoying the peak of her career in 1908, however, Roussel would soon face a new source of pain—illness—that neither her rhetoric nor science could combat. Her precarious health, combined with the increasingly nationalistic and conservative political climate created insurmountable obstacles to the continuation of her career as she had known it.