Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law, 1799–1815 (review)

Napoleon and the Woman Question is a project that June Burton has been working on for “twenty-odd” years; a version of one chapter was first published in 1983. While she does not engage with the most recent literature on the period, she has been a pioneer in calling attention to the importance of women in the Napoleonic era and to associated medical, educational, and legal discourses. Readers looking for a new theoretical approach to the history of sexuality will likely be disappointed; instead, Burton offers suggestive anecdotes and case studies.

The book’s subtitle indicates well the themes and structure of the book. Burton begins in chapter 1 with Napoleon Bonaparte’s view that all women should be baby-machines but also contends that he associated this role with power. Napoleon’s perspective was shaped in part by his personal experiences, especially the influence of his Corsican mother, a strong widow who raised eight children, and the birth of his own son, which threatened the life of the Empress Marie-Louise. Burton also links Napoleon’s ideas to the eighteenth-century philosopher Julien de La Mettrie’s conception of the body as machine.

Burton looks in detail at education. In chapter 2 she surveys the ideas of male and female pedagogues and looks closely at several schools, particularly that run by Madame Campan. She is especially interested in the 1805 decision to create a national education establishment for girls and, later, an official journal of education. She argues that there was a surprising diversity of ideas and efforts about how to educate girls, a conclusion also reached by Rebecca Rogers in From the Salon to the Schoolroom.¹ The following chapter continues with another kind of pedagogy, that of humanistic manuals of “domestic science.” Here Burton looks at popular theories about the determination of the sex of children, breast-feeding, and the effect of physical education on children. Chapter 4, on the education of midwives, is one of the strongest parts of the book. While several eighteenth-century European rulers had established institutes for training midwives, Napoleon’s doctors created the first national system of educating midwives. La maternité hospital for the poor in Paris served as a refuge for indigent women but also a place for teaching midwives and engaging in scientific research. Limits on women’s training as midwives were due less to opposition to their gender than to the strain that military campaigns placed on finances.

Chapters 5 and 6 move from education to medical discourses. Burton examines Dr. Alphonse Leroy’s unusual call for more medical education for women but concludes that in general Napoleon’s elite medical scientists viewed women as weak. She also contrasts the writings of these “scientifically trained” figures to the more “humanistic authors” she discusses in chapter 3, a distinction that is somewhat blurred; Jacques-André Millot, one of her examples of humanistic authors, was a highly respected doctor before the Revolution. Specialists believed in the primacy of the uterus in affecting women’s bodies and keenly debated disorders like nymphomania. One such doctor, the influential Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, was unusual in focusing on glandular secretions and puberty rather than conception in shaping sexual difference. However, Burton claims that Cabanis otherwise shared his contemporaries’ views of women.

Burton then turns to the law. Chapter 7 looks briefly at the doctors who assisted the judiciary and their belief that France was facing a population crisis. Authors of medical textbooks promoted the right to marry except in cases of hereditary or communicable diseases. They also made it almost impossible to prove rape and accorded few circumstances in which a woman could plead ignorance of conception. Defining life as beginning at conception, legal medicine held abortion to be a serious, albeit common, crime. Chapter 8 addresses the specific issue of infanticide. Burton...