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  • Revisiter la “querelle des femmes”: Discours sur l’égalité/inégalité des sexes, de 1750 aux lendemains de la Révolution edited by Éliane Viennot et Nicole Pellegrin
  • Karen Offen (bio)
Revisiter la “querelle des femmes”: Discours sur l’égalité/inégalité des sexes, de 1750 aux lendemains de la Révolution, ed. Éliane Viennot et Nicole Pellegrin Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2012. 206pp. €24. ISBN 978-2-86272-603-8.

This deceptively small volume is packed with important scholarship. The result of a 2008 colloquium (the first of a series) organized by SIEFAR (Société Internationale pour l’Étude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime), the book gathers together path-breaking analyses by some of the finest Francophone scholars working in the period (Sandrine Lely, Huguette Krief, Caroline Fayolle, Martine Reid, Sabine Arnaud, Anne Morvan, and Geneviève Fraisse). The scholarship is accompanied by significant documents from the period and a stunning bibliography of publications in French, German, and English. This volume (1750– 1814) is the first of a series, which includes a volume covering 1600– 1750 and another on 1400–1600 (forthcoming).

The critical introductory essay by Eliane Viennot, founder and past-president of SIEFAR and animatrice of the colloquia, provides a smart overview and analysis of the historiography on the “querelle des femmes.” She challenges the long-hallowed characterization of the “querelle” as “merely a literary quarrel,” and asserts that instead it was a “gigantic polemic” over women’s role and place, involving protagonists from every literate sector of society. Its dominant themes were women’s “nature,” love and marriage, women’s education, and the question of which professions women could—or should not—exercise. Viennot also discusses the varied approaches to establishing a chronology of the “Querelle” and queries why the works of so many male contributors to these debates exhibit such violent hostility, sometimes bordering on misogyny. Obviously, masculine privilege was perceived to be under serious threat.

Viennot addresses the arguments of Joan Kelly in her important Signs essay (“Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400–1789,” Signs 8, no. 1 (1982): 4–28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173479) and [End Page 486] Gisela Bock’s Women in European History (English edition, trans. Allison Brown; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002;). Applauding much of what Kelly depicted, Viennot objects nevertheless to Kelly’s collapsing of what she calls the clergé (that is, the educated intellectual elite who monopolized the administration of the early modern state) and the bourgeoisie (21–22), arguing that these were entirely separate and competing elites. Viennot asserts that the sources of the Querelle des femmes lie in perceived threats to the monopoly of the clergé on knowledge and positions, and its efforts to limit competition by excluding Jews, laymen, and, obliquely, women. Viennot laments that these debates over the relations of the sexes remain too little known and that, even today, they are rarely the subjects of study and teaching. (SIEFAR, of course, is committed to making the protagonists and their arguments better known, notably through the group’s colloquia, publications, and especially their website www.siefar.fr). This foundational essay on the historiography of the “querelle des femmes” should be required reading by everyone interested in early modern European history and culture, not only by those who specialize in France.

The contribution by Sandrine Lely, on the debate concerning the “place” of women in French art between 1747 and 1793, provides depth to the dispute over what women were capable of accomplishing. Hostility to women’s candidatures to the Royal Academy of Art and Sculpture began to mount, says Lely, from the 1680s on; in fact, the Academy forbid women’s candidacies from 1706 to 1720. But the public (and better-documented) debates over the general topic of “the place of women painters in French art” (46) only began in the late 1740s, in conjunction with the rise of published art criticism, centring around exhibitions such as the exclusionary Salon de peinture (restricted to members of the Academy) and focusing on renderings of the human body. Based in a “lecture croisée” of art commentary, observations by the philosophes, and the...

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