Hélène Brion and Militant Feminism, 1914-1922

“Woman, Dare to Be:” Hélène Brion and Militant Feminism, 1914-1922

Caroline Talbert

Senior Honors Thesis for the Department of History

Committee Chair: Professor Elizabeth Foster

Tufts University, 2018

Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….2

Chapter One: “Hélène Brion as a political agent”…………………………………………..16

Chapter Two: La Voie Féministe……………………………………………………………36

Chapter Three: La Lutte Féministe………………………………………………………….56

Epilogue……………………………………………………………………………………..78

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………82

- On March 29th, 1918 in Paris, France, an “impatient” woman wearing an “excessively large lavallière” awaited the closing remarks of the prosecutor assigned to her court-martial, Monsieur le Commandant de Meur.1 In one of the most controversial trials in 1910s France, Hélène Brion had just delivered a rousing speech that questioned the validity of her arrest for “defeatism” and explained the importance of her feminist-pacifist propaganda. A staunch women’s rights activist and a militant schoolteacher in suburban Paris, Brion was targeted and detained by the Clemenceau government in a trial meant to set an example for other pacifist leaders. The Commandant de Meur, convinced that Hélène Brion blatantly manipulated her “dim-witted” male co-conspirator, warned of the dangers that feminism could bring to women:

“Feminism, according to [Brion], is an absolute right, and no one can challenge it. This does have the slightest inconvenience of wanting to bring the feminist [disposition] too close to [that of] men, and to take from them what the woman must always preserve, that is, grace and charm; but it has the consequence of causing [feminists] to borrow male faults and shortcomings, which would, from the point of view of feminism, be [a] most pitiful conquest.”2

The Commandant’s rebuttal was remarkably representative of the discursive language used by

Third Republic politicians, labor leaders, and Catholic suffragists throughout the 1910s and 1920s: the real danger of feminism was the “moral corruption” it would bring to the female character.

Hélène Brion, described by her peers as “brave, harsh, intelligent, and loyal,” exemplified the stereotypically “male” traits that, according to the Commandant, ruined the natural “grace and charm” of women.3 Throughout her life, Hélène Brion pushed the boundaries of what was considered “appropriate” for a young, single woman in early twentieth century France – she was

1 Huguette Bouchardeau, “Preface,” in Hélène Brion and Huguette Bouchardeau, La voie féministe (Syros, 1978), 13; Editorial staff, “Le procès Hélène Brion et Mouflard,” Revue des causes célèbres politiques et criminelles, May 2, 1918, 131. Note: A lavallière was a large, bow-like tie worn by both men and women in early twentieth-century France. 2 Editorial staff, “Le procès Hélène Brion et Mouflard,” 154. 3 Bouchardeau, “Preface,” 8.

3 known for her particular style of militant, class-conscious feminism. But Brion was also a notorious union leader, pacifist, socialist, and suffragist for nearly two decades, and never ceased to see revolutionary worker’s movements through the lens of her progressive feminism. While she became known to the French public primarily as a pacifist, Brion was one of the most progressive and uncompromising feminist intellectuals in France.

Of all the labels used to describe Hélène Brion’s activism, “class-conscious feminist” is used most prominently in the following chapters. But that term was not all-encompassing: the truth was more complicated, and even Brion admitted in her 1917 pamphlet La Voie Féministe that her views were “complex.”4 Until she retired from politics in the mid-1920s, Brion interchangeably referred to herself as an avant-garde feminist, a syndico-socialist, a revolutionary, a radical, and a militant feminist. None of these, when used alone to refer to Brion, fully conveyed her multifaceted political beliefs and the contradictions and nuances present in her writing. She wrote at an astounding pace, and for an array of publications; it would be nearly impossible for the modern historian to locate the exact number of articles and editorials that she wrote between 1905 and 1922.5 Brion dedicated her life to the emancipation of women, and actively sought a political solution to the “feminist question.” Unlike many of her comrades, she did not return home to a husband and a family; she did not defer to a male householder or even to a male superior. Upon her post-trial suspension from teaching, Brion lived among fellow feminist teachers in a communal living space in Pantin, outside of Paris. She was surrounded by (what she termed) the avant-garde, and lived a fully feminist lifestyle in a stratified, patriarchal society. Brion derived significant

4 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 89. Note: Wendy Michallat uses the term “class-conscious feminist” to describe Brion in her 2013 article [Wendy Michallat, Hélène Brion and the missing manuscripts: La Lutte féministe, 1918." Journal of European Studies 43, no. 2 (2013): 101-18. doi:10.1177/0047244113480595. 101-102], 5 Henri Dubief, “Brion Hélène, Rose, Louise,” Dictionnaire Biographique du Mouvement Ouvrier Français (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1964). (2).

4 personal authority from the legitimacy she felt surrounded her. She was an outsider, a revolutionary enlightened by the ability to live outside the shackles of the everyday working-class and bourgeois woman.

Recent scholarship on Brion focuses almost exclusively on the events surrounding her 1918 court-martial. The “Dossier Hélène Brion” at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand (BMD) holds a wealth of documentation related to her surveillance, arrest, and sentencing, as well as the transcripts of 57 witnesses called at her defense.6 The sensationalist news coverage of the trial extended to all levels of the political spectrum, and the conservative Revue des causes célèbres, politiques et criminelles provided a hostile day-by-day breakdown of the proceedings, complete with courtroom illustrations. The BMD holds copies of Brion’s newspaper La Lutte Féministe and an unfinished “Feminist Encyclopedia,” a collection of newspaper clippings and journal entries that became her mission after retiring from politics in the 1920s. Historical inquiry on Hélène

Brion, however, often ends with the publication of her 1917 pamphlet La Voie Féministe and the aftermath of the trial. For example, Julia Shearer dedicated a chapter to Brion in the 2007 compilation The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19, but did not extend the narrative further than her sentencing.7 Apart from Sophie Cœuré’s 2003 article

“Hélène Brion en ‘Russie rouge’ (1920-1922): une passagère du communisme,” which discussed

Brion’s unpublished travel history of her voyage to Russia in 1920, very little scholarship exists on Brion’s transition to communism, and nearly all documentation ends by 1923.8

Overall, a comprehensive discussion of Brion’s political development from World War I to 1922 is missing from the historical narrative. In 2013, Wendy Michallat revealed handwritten

6 Michallat, Wendy. "Hélène Brion and the missing manuscripts," 109. 7 Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp, The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19 (Basingstoke [England]: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 8 Sophie Cœuré, “Hélène Brion en « Russie rouge » (1920-1922).,” Le Mouvement Social no 205, no. 4 (n.d.): 9–20.

5 manuscripts of Brion’s periodical La Lutte Féministe in the Sylvia Beach Collection at Princeton

University.9 Michallat briefly analyzed the documents’ content in relation to the printed copies available at the BMD and explained the need for further research on this period of Brion’s life.

Though larger histories discussed Brion as a mainstay of the institutrice movement during the war

(and even as a feminist activist after its conclusion), very few have dealt with her political development during the years 1918-1922. Christine Bard’s comprehensive Les Filles de

Marianne: Histoire des Féminismes 1914-1940 provides an excellent overview of the fragmented women’s movement during this critical period, and Felicia Gordon’s Early French Feminisms,

1830-1940 includes invaluable translations of otherwise-unpublished letters and English versions of Brion’s well-known writings.10 Charles Sowerwine’s Sisters or Citizens: Women and Socialism in France since 1876 also contributes important analysis of the strained relationship between feminism and leftist social movements during the war.11 For Brion’s 1917 pamphlet La Voie

Féministe, the definitive French version remains the 1978 Syros edition, which included a preface by Huguette Bouchardeau and a partial transcription of Brion’s 1918 speech at her defense.12

The following chapters address the aforementioned lack of scholarship with an intensive discussion of Brion’s writings, including the 1917 La Voie Féministe, the understudied manuscripts in the Sylvia Beach Papers, and a later printed copy of La Lutte Féministe pour le communisme.13 With a specific focus on the evolution of Brion’s feminist discourse over the course of her career, this paper examines her relationship to syndicalism, socialism, and her ill-fated

9 Michallat, Wendy. "Hélène Brion and the missing manuscripts.” 10 Christine Bard, Les filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes 1914-1940 (Fayard, 1995); Felicia Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 1830-1940: A Passion for Liberty (Cheltenham [Eng] ; Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 1996). 11 Charles Sowerwine, Sisters or Citizens?: Women and Socialism in France since 1876 (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 12 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe. 13 Brion and Bourchardeau, La Voie Féministe; La Lutte Féministe, various issues, Box 14, Folder 17, Sylvia Beach Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

6 attempt to reconcile progressive feminism with the French Communist Party platform from 1920-

1922. The work is divided into three chapters, encompassing the years 1910-1922 (but focusing primarily on the period from 1917-1922). The first chapter examines Brion’s introduction to leftist militancy through the institutrice movement and her relationship to suffragist feminisms; it culminates in a discussion of Brion’s 1918 trial and an analysis of her feminist rhetoric. The second chapter takes a critical look at Brion’s 1917 pamphlet La Voie Féministe, written before her initial arrest but indicative of a broader commitment to class-conscious feminism. Finally, the third chapter discusses the manuscript copies of La Lutte Féministe as they exemplified Brion’s acute alienation from mainstream political movements and her final hope for a political solution to female oppression through international communism.

A comprehensive study of Hélène Brion’s political writings reveals a figure whose divisive rhetoric became increasingly isolated as the currents of French politics shifted. Her feminism never wavered, and though she was dedicated to the emancipation of French workers, her cynicism became more pronounced with every legislative failure and fracture within the labor movement.

Disheartened by the reluctance of syndicalists and socialists to promote female political participation, she began to view Bolshevism as the last real opportunity for women in France.

However, Brion’s increasing alienation from the movements she had once helped lead (namely, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT)) had already ensured the institutionalized silencing of her controversial feminism. A complex personality with a far-reaching vision, Hélène Brion was a crucial player in the French first-wave feminist movement, and she remains one of the most fascinating (and understudied) political figures of her age.

Brion did not necessarily fit within the traditional left-right political spectrum often used by historians to discuss the Third Republic.14 Recent works on the gender question have only further muddled traditional assumptions and revealed the systematic cooptation of the suffrage movement by those whose ultimate goal was partisan rather than ideological or progressive. What could be termed “feminist,” in the French sense, was different in definition from those Western suffragettes who lobbied for the vote in England and the United States. The women’s movement and gender-based politics were cornerstones of Third Republic national discourse, but were always riddled with other, deeply divisive implications – religion and clericalism, neonatalism, and national pride, for example. Third Republic politicians discussed female enfranchisement as it might affect a particular agenda and, ultimately, the men who remained committed to a patriarchal narrative.

Brion’s activism stemmed from a growing tradition of French Marxism on the continent, though she adapted Marxist discourse to her own, woman-focused rhetoric. The Parti Ouvrier

Français (POF), the original incubator of French Marxism, was formed in 1880 with the explicit support and input of Marx, Freidrich Engels, and the party’s founders Paul Lafargue and Jules

Guesde. Adherents to the POF agenda would thereafter be called Guesdists, particularly when membership began to grow. The collective was renamed the Socialist Party of France in 1902 before merging with Jean Juarès’ French Socialists to become the French Section of the Worker’s

International (SFIO) in 1905. From its inception, The POF struggled to define itself in relation to the “woman question.”15 In Belle Époque France, there existed a crucial distinction between the

“woman question” and the “feminist question.” Early leftist theory defined women as they related

14 William D. Irvine, “Beyond Left and Right, and the Politics of the Third Republic: A Conversation,” Historical Reflections 34, no. 2 (2008): 134–46, https://doi.org/10.3167/hrrh2008.340208, 134-135. 15 Robert Stuart, “‘Calm, with a Grave and Serious Temperament, Rather Male’. French Marxism, Gender, and Feminism, 1882-1905,” International Review of Social History 41, no. 1 (April 1, 1996): 57–92, 80.

8 to and interacted with the capitalist economic system – by contrast, contemporaneous feminisms elaborated upon the relationship of women to men. This was a fundamental difference, and it allowed leftists to sidestep and denounce feminism while simultaneously claiming to deal decisively with the “woman question.”16 Guesde’s original position maintained that the relationship of men to women paralleled that of capitalist and worker; he claimed that “the woman is the proletarian of the man.”17 Guesde complicated the primacy of labor to global oppression but did not fully elaborate the autonomy of gender (which would undermine the urgency of class struggle).18 This remarkably progressive stance did not represent the everyday political positioning of the POF, which often fell into tropes of patriarchal paternalism and antifeminist rhetoric. The philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an anarchist thinker who famously characterized women as either “housewife” or “harlot,” was also widespread among male activists during this period.19

While denouncing the outright misogyny of Proudhonist anarchists, the Guesdists of the POF (later

SFIO) fell into two other defining and contradictory answers to the woman question: first, they systematically discredited feminism as a “bourgeois” construction that undermined the cohesiveness of the socialist collective; second, they employed sexualist and maternalist rhetoric in an attempt to reconcile early pronouncements of gender equality with the institutionalized silencing of women’s issues.20 Hélène Brion encountered these modes of thought as she navigated among both SFIO and CGT circles; sexist rhetoric was dominant in the emerging French Left, particularly in the years preceding the First World War.

16 Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” 2-4. 17 Stuart, “Calm, with a Grave and Serious Temperament,” 64. 18 Stuart, 66-67. 19 Stuart, 64. 20 Stuart, 81.

Fundamental interpretations of Marxism also provided ample opportunity to discredit women’s rights activism. According to Marxist theory, if capital led to individualism and competitiveness, the capitalist system itself was the primary cause of patriarchal dominance. Thus, by eliminating capitalism, all issues raised by feminists would also disappear, linking women’s oppression to production and their role as producers.21 This was the epitome of the “woman question” in French Marxism, though in practical application it often led to the total inferiority of women’s issues. The distinction between sex and gender was another particularly overlooked question in Marxist analysis, creating an ambiguous understanding of the woman outside of her role within the class system.22 As an object of French Marxist thought, activists for women’s rights were therefore deeply problematic and subsequently ignored or dismissed in favor of the galvanizing class struggle.

French political socialism (spearheaded in the 1910s by the SFIO) and anarchism were not the most dominant collectives in what can be called the French Left at the time of the First World

War. From 1900 – 1910, French trade union membership skyrocketed from 500,000 at the turn of the century to nearly 1.75 million a decade later.23 Unionized workers formed powerful political collectives, many of which were offshoots of the CGT. The CGT often pursued “practical” revolutionary gains, working to combat private employers through the use of intermittent state support. As a strategy, this would ultimately lead to the disintegration of union membership during the administration of Georges Clemenceau (a man openly hostile to strikers and uncompromising with the revolutionary syndicalist cause).24 The CGT condemned parliamentary socialists for their

21 Heidi I. Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital & Class 3, no. 2 (1979): 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1177/030981687900800102. 2-4. 22 Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” 5-6. 23 Gerald C. Friedman, "Revolutionary Unions and French Labor: The Rebels behind the Cause; Or, Why Did Revolutionary Syndicalism Fail?" French Historical Studies 20, no. 2 (1997), 166. 24 Friedman, 160-170.

10 willingness to work within the bourgeois system, but sought everyday political leverage through the manipulation of state interests. If political socialists seemed primarily concerned with galvanizing worker insurrection through Marxist theory, Unionists and Revolutionary Syndicalists organized strikes and fought for concrete changes to working conditions in French factories.

Hélène Brion participated in both movements; she had companions who participated in nearly all aspects of the revolutionary Left. Brion was energized by union strikes but disheartened by the overt sexism she encountered among syndicalists; as a result, she often borrowed from a range of political loyalties to create a well-rounded critique of the Left as a rhetorical conglomerate.

Brion was a crucial player in CGT and SFIO circles until the end of the wartime coalition caused major rifts within the French left. The CGT grappled with political loyalties throughout the

1910s; by the time of the Bolshevik Revolution many began to eschew traditional Syndicalism and dedicated themselves optimistically to the support of the revolutionary agenda in Moscow. Hélène

Brion was one of them: she eventually joined the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) at its inception in 1920. In the political and philosophical context of the immediate postwar period, there was genuine belief among Marxist intellectuals in France that a revolution was indeed possible. Like many of her day, Hélène Brion was swept into the fervor of the possibilities Lenin and his contemporaries presented.25 Before the Comintern forced the exclusion of those deemed

“Trotskyists” or “class traitors” in the late 1920s, the membership of the PCF swelled to nearly

110,000.26 Mismanagement and disenchantment with the Soviet experiment in the eight years following the formation of the PCF left the membership at only 30,000 in 1928; for nearly a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution, however, there was genuine mass interest in the promotion of

25 William Lewis, “The Purification of Theory for Practice: Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2001), http://search.proquest.com/docview/304718135/?pq-origsite=primo. 41- 42. 26 Lewis. Page 25.

Marxist ideals in France.27 Brion supported Marxist intellectuals, exemplified perhaps most profoundly by the outspoken defense provided by Jean Longuet, the grandson of Karl Marx and a

Socialist activist, at her 1917 trial.28 But she was, first and foremost, a feminist – a militant dedicated to the cause of women alongside, but not exclusively through, the adoption of socialist policy.

Hélène Brion was particularly interested in the concept of the revolutionary feminist – as a militant leftist, later communist, she understood socialism in terms of its ability to fundamentally change the bourgeois patriarchal system. Her critiques of the Syndicalist CGT and the male- dominated trade unions were thus predicated on the belief that a purer, more equitable form of

Marxism was possible, and that the inclusion of women in these endeavors was an important first

(rather than last) step. Brion’s alienation stemmed from her insistence on the inclusion of women in revolutionary politics, and the uncompromising positionality she maintained until her retirement from public life in the mid-1920s. Overall, Brion’s status as a well-connected outsider would provide her invaluable insight into the shortcomings of French leftist politics, however lonely her position became.

One of Brion’s primary theories throughout the late 1910s rested on the notion that the promotion of women to positions of power in government would ensure an end to war in Europe.

By including women in the electoral process, Brion argued, levelheaded reason and peaceful negotiation would replace the violent scourge of continental warfare. Just one example of Brion’s near-constant reversal of prominent gender dichotomies in political discourse, this argument directly contradicted the common presumption that women, considered in French society to be

27 Lewis, “The Purification of Theory for Practice,” 25. 28 Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 196.

12 religious, conservative, and emotional, would prove ruinous if afforded the right to vote. She was a feminist and a revolutionary thinker who challenged leftist assumptions about women’s participation in both electoral and militant politics, but she was deeply misunderstood. She was a feminist, but of a particular social milieu; she was a leftist, but on the condition that she was given a voice; she was a militant and revolutionary, but wedded to pacifist ideology. Her pamphlet La

Voie Féministe, published in August 1917 under the auspices of clarifying her controversial position, spoke to the complexity of her insight into the female condition.

In the feminist landscape of early-twentieth century France, allegiances were broadly assembled in the context of three general categories (as elaborated retrospectively by Christine

Bard in 1995): radical, reformist, and moderate.29 Actors in the broader women’s movement fell into these loosely-defined groups; moderate feminists were often called suffragists or, more disparagingly, bourgeois feminists by revolutionary camps; reformist feminists, the largest group, insisted on practical measures and legal reform; many radical feminists supported leftist political movements like trade unionism, socialism, and anarchism (some rejected political labels).30 Brion fell definitively within the latter category, fighting both misogyny within pro-government circles and the broader leftist cultural milieu.

The French women’s movement – if it could be unified in a term – was unique at the turn of the century and during the First World War. The French Third Republic, ever concerned with its own history and the chaotic results of initial universal manhood suffrage in 1789, dragged its heels on the issue of female suffrage far longer than other Western nations. The movement was highly fragmented along political lines, as the growth of Marxist ideas among French intellectuals

29 Christine Bard, "Proletarians of the Proletariat: Women’s Citizenship in France." International Labor and Working-Class History 48 (1995): 49. doi:10.1017/s0147547900005330, 49. 30 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 22.

13 and trade unionists paralleled calls for women’s suffrage at the national level. Many political groups played feminist ideas against each other in order to undermine the legitimacy of their rivals.

By the time Germany and the United Kingdom allowed the (restricted) female vote in 1918 and the United States ratified universal suffrage in 1920, calls for female suffrage in France rang out with both urgency and frustration. The socialists were primarily concerned with the liberation of the proletariat, irrespective of gender; anarchist Neo-Malthusians focused on sexual liberation; trade unionists engaged in contradictory policies that simultaneously empowered female union leaders and undermined their legitimacy. Moderate feminists focused intensely on the vote as it aligned with the global temperance movement, placing the vote of educated upper-class women above that of “the bistro” (a euphemism for the unemployed alcoholic).31 Additionally, they worked within existing pro-government structures to press the vote for “deserving” women – that is, upper and middle-class educated wives.32 Finally, universal suffrage was delayed by the pronatalist movement among French lawmakers, who saw the decreasing birthrate as catastrophic to the national identity, particularly after the losses suffered in World War I.33 Women, they surmised, should serve the interests of the nation by producing more French children. World War

I was a catalyst for many of these revanchist policies, and the fight for female enfranchisement would ultimately fail until after the fall of the Third Republic.

One of Brion’s most comprehensive ideological publications was her newspaper, founded in 1917 at the conclusion of her trial. Though read by a small, hand-selected audience, La Lutte

Féministe responded directly to issues raised in the pages of other leftist and feminist publications; the articles provided key insight into the diverse landscape of “women’s issues” after the war. She

31 Bard, "Proletarians of the Proletariat: Women’s Citizenship in France," 60. 32 Bard, 60. 33 Sandi E. Cooper, “Pacifism, Feminism, and Fascism in Inter-War France,” The International History Review 19, no. 1 (March 1, 1997): 103–114, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.1997.9640777. 107.

14 advocated unity among feminists and of liberation from the foyer, or domestic sphere, where women found nothing but oppression in the years preceding the Great War. The rights of women at home should equal those granted her at the workplace; the misogyny of Proudhon’s dualist vision for women – that of housewife or courtesan – failed to account for a third genre of woman, liberated to choose her destiny without restraint.34 The state of women’s health also deeply disturbed Brion, as she saw the hypocrisy of men who denounced working women as “unclean” while preventing legal abortions and contraception from ameliorating the lives of those who were forced into sterility for lack of a better option.35 To the extent that she modeled herself after the revolutionary vanguard of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Brion also felt that she was the direct descendant of the 1789 French Revolution. She understood that movement to have been coopted and interrupted by the male oppressor – only to fail precisely because of its failure to recognize the rights of women (particularly after 1794).36 Brion viewed herself as a successor to those women, and to the countless others who continued the struggle well into the nineteenth century.

Her feminism was distinctly class-conscious; she saw women as an oppressed population, equal in claim to the opportunities promised to the proletariat by Marxist and other leftist movements in the early twentieth century. Brion would not allow the cooptation of a worker’s revolution by sexist male leaders who would, inevitably, lead the movement to disaster.

Though her ideology was steeped in the contradictory rhetoric of the many leftist organizations she represented, the fundamental objective of her activism remained remarkably consistent over two decades. Because she was involved in so many different political movements, historians have a tendency to characterize her militancy in the context of a particular agenda,

34 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, page 63. 35 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 70. 36 Brion, 81.

15 whether syndicalist, socialist, pacifist, or otherwise. It would be incorrect, however, to limit Brion to a single movement, or to a single period in her political development. She was a non-conformist, class-conscious feminist above all else – despite her arrest for “defeatism,” she was not the most dedicated pacifist of her milieu. Brion’s activism must always be contextualized by the state of her feminist development – in the period 1905-1917, she formed a distinct discursive framework for her militant feminism that informed all of her ideological decisions. From 1917-1918, Brion’s experience in Saint-Lazare, and the fragmentation of the women’s movement after the war, further crystallized her feminist ambitions. Finally, her transition to communism in 1920 was not the result of a dramatic change in her political or revolutionary aspirations; rather, it was the culmination of a years-long alienation precipitated by her fully-formed, uncompromising feminism. All things considered, Brion was one of the most progressive voices in French first-wave feminism, and her activism reflected a genuine desire to liberate women from a centuries-long historical cycle of oppression.

Chapter One: Hélène Brion as a political agent

“1: The feminist struggle is primordial for [women] and it must precede the economic struggle… 2: For this feminist struggle, there exists neither bourgeois women, nor working women; there is not and will not need to be anything other than women in a fight against common oppression.”37 -Hélène Brion, June 14th, 1913

Hélène Brion was a progressive voice within a larger movement for pacifism and women’s rights after World War I devastated a significant portion of the French population. According to some sources, nearly one in four families experienced a casualty by 1918.38 These crippling losses, alongside growing unrest in the military, preceded the growth of a small but vocal pacifist movement among schoolteachers horrified by the realities of modern warfare.39 For Hélène Brion, pacifism and feminism were fundamentally intertwined. The growing support for the pacifist movement among members of Brion’s educated cadre provided her ideas a measure of exposure that she incubated throughout the 1910s, when many of her compatriots supported the war effort.

In recent scholarship, generalizations regarding feminist movements in the interwar period have failed to encompass the particularities of Brion’s positionality. In these characterizations, she would fall on the “most radical” end of the spectrum, pushing boundaries and confronting the paradox at the heart of first-wave feminism: a distinct valuation of women’s political rights would legitimize certain causes (pacifism, social welfare) but undermine the notion of equality upon which modern citizenship is built.40 Brion struggled with these contradictions, even as she spoke with a confidence that resonated on the pages of suffragist and leftist newspapers – including

37 Hélène Brion, “Ouvrières et Bourgeoises: Les Enseignements d’une grève,” La Française, no. 283 (14 June 1913), front page. Emphasis mine. 38 Cooper, "Pacifism, Feminism, and Fascism in Inter-War France,” 103. 39 M. Siegel, “‘To the Unknown Mother of the Unknown Soldier’: Pacifism, Feminism, and the Politics of Sexual Difference among French ‘Institutrices’ between the Wars.,” French Historical Studies 22, no. 3 (1999): 421–451, https://doi.org/10.2307/286714, 424. 40 Siegel, 426.

L’Action Féministe, La Française, and L’Humanité. Her trial for defeatism in 1918 earned her both meaningful exposure and a bevy of ridicule, particularly from the conservative newspapers

Le Matin and Le Petit Parisien.41 Brion’s feminism, deeply misunderstood by those outside her cadre of institutrices, pushed the existing boundaries of antimilitarism and elaborated a clear pro- feminist agenda before the larger pacifist movement took hold in France. Though her position was rife with contradictory tensions, Brion made it clear that certain fundamental aspects of her feminism transcended the intricacies of her politics.

Born in 1882 in Clermont-Ferrand, a small agricultural city in the heartland of France,

Hélène Brion was orphaned as a child and subsequently raised by her grandmother in the Ardennes.

She understood the precariousness of her social situation and enrolled at Sophie-Germain de Paris, a secondary institution in the capital where she studied to become an institutrice. She began teaching kindergarten in 1905 in Pantin, a suburb of Paris, and quickly aligned herself with a growing cadre of militant schoolteachers in defense of women’s rights and equal pay.42 Only 23 years old, she nonetheless became heavily involved with socialist and syndicalist organizations and established a rapport with many of the leading feminists in Paris. The social fabric of activism among institutrices in France took shape while Brion was studying to become a teacher. The first organizations had roots in the amicales, or “teacher’s friendly societies,” which began in the mid-

1880s and served as local forums to debate such issues as specialized curricula and salary negotiations. By 1900, these amicales had grown increasingly hostile to local government administrations and some demanded equal pay for female teachers, culminating in a national convention at Lille in 1905.43 The feminist groups present at this association were disheartened,

41 Francis Feeley, “French School Teachers Against Militarism, 1903‐18,” Historian 57, no. 2 (1995): 315–328, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6563.1995.tb01496.x, Citation no. 28. 42 Persis Charles Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 1975, 95. 43 Hunt, 26-34.

18 however, by the overtly sexist rhetoric propagated by the male speaker at Lille and aligned themselves with a national women’s suffrage group at the expense of their involvement with the amicales, though many continued to participate individually.44

Male teachers in the early 1900s were particularly skeptical of, if not openly opposed to, feminist groups composed of institutrices; ever concerned about job security and the growing popularity of the teaching profession among young women, the men often saw any progress for women as a slight toward themselves (who had occupied a traditionally prestigious position in local councils).45 While the amicales were theoretically apolitical, the Fédération Nationale des

Syndicats d’Instituteurs et d’Institutrices (FNSI), formed the same year Brion began teaching, was not. Affiliated with the CGT, the FNSI supported working-class issues and protested on behalf of the small percentage of instituteurs and institutrices it represented.46 Hélène Brion joined immediately after its 1905 incorporation, and remained a dedicated member throughout her teaching tenure.47 She began to articulate her feminism and explore leftist activism during this fraught period, coming-of-age at a decisive moment of fracture in the political sphere of those in her educated milieu.

After Hélène Brion became involved with the FNSI, she expanded her activism to join other feminist and suffragist groups operating at the time. In 1908, activist and schoolteacher Marie

Guerin founded the Fédération Féministe Universitaire (FFU), the most popular feminist organization among women teachers before World War I. Soon after, Brion became a regular contributor to the organization’s central newspaper, L’Action Féministe.48 By this time, she also

44 Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 26-34. 45 Hunt, 79. 46 Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 9-11. 47 Gordon, 9-11. 48 Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 74.

19 served as the archivist for the Socialist Party in Pantin.49 Nearly four years after Brion began teaching, prominent French women who were already active in the Conseil National des Femmes

Françaises (CNFF) broke off to organize the French Union for Women’s Suffrage (UFSF). Brion, already a contributor to the CNFF’s central organ La Française, moved to join the UFSF by early

1912. During this period, major fissures among French suffragists and feminists became apparent, primarily along class lines. The CNFF had a prominent conservative wing, while the UFSF was decidedly moderate. Brion was a dedicated Socialist who believed in the primacy of the feminist struggle over the class struggle; she believed in direct intervention by bourgeois women on behalf of working women in national strikes and labor organizing initiatives.50 Despite her universalist rhetoric, however, Brion served as a definitive voice for working-class women among the broader suffragist movement in prewar France. When Marianne Rauze organized the Groupe des Femmes

Socialistes (GdFS) in 1912, Brion contributed editorial pieces to the group’s associated newspaper,

L’Équité: Organe Éducatif du Prolétariat Féminine.51 This early period demonstrated her commitment to the feminist cause among a variety of activist organizations and publications, solidifying her reputation as one of the most militant young socialist-feminists in the movement.52

A watershed moment for Brion and her contemporaries came in 1913, on the heels of a union crisis that exposed the tensions between the syndicats, Socialists, and feminists in the French countryside. The Couriau affair, as it would come to be known, encompassed the broader fight for equal representation and women’s right to work while undermining the universalist rhetoric of the

49 Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 74. 50 Karen Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 486-487. 51 Offen, 486. 52 Huguette Bouchardeau, in her preface to the 1978 edition of Brion’s manifesto, claimed that the years 1905-1907 were marked by illegitimate pregnancies borne of a liaison with a Russian émigré. While it is true that these years are not well understood by contemporary historians, there exists little to no evidence in any of her personal writings to suggest this; in fact, the very few historians who have studied Brion in any depth tend to ignore or dispute this claim.

20 union activists at the time. The Couriau affair concerned a typesetters’ union in Lyon, a particularly controversial profession among feminists ever since Marguerite Durand, editor-in-chief of the first feminist daily newspaper in France, La Fronde, openly defied a strike by allowing the women in her union to offer their labor in place of protesting male typesetters.53 In 1913, a newlywed couple,

Emma and Louis Couriau, moved to Lyon and both applied for membership in the local typesetters’ union. Emma had been a typesetter for more than seventeen years, while Louis boasted of nearly twenty years with a history of active union participation.54 To their dismay, the union denied

Emma admission (officially against the stated national policy) and simultaneously expelled Louis because he permitted Emma to apply in the first place.55 The Lyon section of the FFU and its secretary Venise Pellat-Finet, an ardent Socialist, came to the Couriaus’ defense, though Pellat-

Finet placed it within a class-struggle paradigm that was antithetical to many mainstream feminists’ demands. The Couriaus also found support within the small revolutionary syndicalist faction of the typesetters’ union in Lyon, frustrated with their more conservative colleagues. The

Bordeaux Resolution of 1910, issued by the national typesetters’ union, had allowed women to work as members of the union, though under restricted conditions. The Lyon chapters’ noncompliance was thus in direct violation of a recent collective bargaining agreement, and fundamentally illegal. Venise Pellat-Finet and the FFU lobbied the national type-setter’s union for a meeting to discuss the affair.

Brion, who was at this meeting, left infuriated at the lack of resolve she discovered among her female socialist comrades. Though initially vowing to support Emma Couriau at all costs,

Elizabeth Renaud and the socialist women agreed to allow the male typesetters more time to

53 Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 93. 54 Charles Sowerwine, “Workers and Women in France before 1914: The Debate over the Couriau Affair,” The Journal of Modern History 55, no. 3 (September 1, 1983): 411–441, https://doi.org/10.1086/242516, 426. 55 Sowerwine, 411.

21 articulate their position, ceding important moral leverage in the name of class struggle, according to Brion in a 1913 article in L’Action Féministe.56 In a translation by Persis Hunt of an unpublished

Brion letter, she refers to the proceedings as evidence of the “unshaken heritage” of femininity and deference that permeated even the activist women in the audience.57 Brion’s stance here was unequivocal: the Lyon union should have not been allowed any grounds for argument, even if they struggled for the same worker’s rights as the Socialist and syndicalist women in France.

Brion’s position was unique; her contemporaries were split on the issue, and even actively mocked her inability to compromise. Louise Saumonneau quoted Mme. Necker de Saussure in calling Brion “too bold, too careless…” and reiterating the importance of the class struggle over all theoretical attacks on male hegemony.58 Others were less scathing, preferring a position more moderate than Brion’s but forgiving of her dedication to feminism. In her stance on this issue,

Brion began to reach toward a mature feminist argument – one that would not be articulated on a global scale until second-wave feminism later in the century. She attacked the systemic socialization of women as deferent and passive vis-à-vis men, who were expected to lead and dominate. After countless town meetings and national coverage, the CGT eventually allowed

Emma Couriau to form her own women’s union and forced the Lyon chapter to comply with the

1910 Bordeaux Resolution, championing the cause of women in the workplace.59 But the tensions exposed during the Couriau affair shook feminist organizations and activist groups throughout the country, particularly in Paris, where the affair was front-page news. In her unique positionality in response to the socialist women, Brion’s political stance became clearer and more controversial.

56 Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 94; Hélène Brion, “Affaire Couriau,” L’Action Féministe, no. 26 (October 1913), 4. 57 Hunt, 94. 58 Hunt, 97-98. 59 Sowerwine, “Workers and Women in France before 1914: The Debate over the Couriau Affair,” 439-441.

Though committed to the plight of the proletarian in a capitalist society, Brion was more concerned with the oppression of women and refused to compromise on any issues that undermined the feminist principles she valued. She had become a vocal leader of an emerging radical feminist perspective, emboldened by suffrage movements in the West. The Couriau affair demonstrated

Brion’s willingness to attack her own comrades in defense of her feminism. Ironically, she refused to compromise with those in her own party, but held a steadfast desire to collaborate with suffragists and bourgeois feminists on issues concerning “all women.”

The controversy spilled over onto the pages of L’Équité, the newspaper associated with the

GdFS, in July and August 1913. By this time, Brion had defected from the UFSF to join the leadership team at the GdFS with the goal of ensuring further cooperation between bourgeois feminists and their socialist counterparts. 60 She was engaged in a philosophical struggle with other socialist women, including Suzanne Lacore (“Suzon”), who believed in the absolute primacy of the class struggle and wanted to distance working women from bourgeois suffragists.61 In a heated exchange late that summer, Brion and Suzon issued competing editorials that reflected their opposing views on the relationship between socialism and feminism.62 Suzon believed that feminism and its equal rights initiatives would only strengthen the capitalist regime, while Brion pointed to the Couriau affair as an example of successful feminist, rather than socialist, activism on behalf of a working woman.63 Brion’s staunch advocacy of an inclusive feminist platform earned her ouster from the leadership of the GdFS only four months later, in the winter of 1913-

1914.64 She continued to write for L’Action Féministe, La Française, and other feminist

60 Steven C. Hause, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.02499.0001.001, 172. 61 Offen, Debating the Woman Question, 487. 62 Offen, 488-489. 63 Offen, 488-489. 64 Hause, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 172-173.

23 publications and supported the 1914 drive for women’s rights in the French Senate, where many well-known feminists launched symbolic political campaigns.

After the suffragist campaigns of 1914 failed to deliver long-awaited gains (though victory seemed “imminent” as late as June 1914), the German declaration of war on France in early August practically halted all further feminist organizing on behalf of enfranchisement for the duration of the war.65 At first, Hélène Brion remained allied with most French feminists, horrified at the

German offensive and prepared to demonstrate the valiant effort of French working women in support of the French people. When French feminist organizations refused to participate in the

International Congress of Women for Peace on April 28, 1915, Brion echoed her skepticism of foreign delegates who sought to end the war immediately.66 In a letter to Marguerite Durand, she expressed reservations about calls for immediate cessation, preferring instead the vague idea of

“female involvement in political and social matters.”67 She struggled to reconcile the political shift towards nationalism and patriotism among women’s organizations with the demands of her otherwise pacifist feminism. Even most socialist women called for a French solidarity: by this time, the SFIO had joined the Union Sacrée, a multipartisan political alliance, in defense of the nation. In September 1915, A small number of Party loyalists defied the Union Sacrée and attended the controversial Zimmerwald Conference.68 The event brought together Socialist leaders from all over Europe who denounced the war, and laid the groundwork for what would come to be known as the Third International.69 In 1914, Brion had been elected the National Secretary of the FNSI,

65 Bard, Les filles de Marianne, 79-81. 66 Bard, 94. 67 Bard, 94-95. 68 Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1966), 64. 69 Wohl, 64-65.

24 and she reconsidered her position when members of the union voted to adopt a pacifist stance.70

After 1915, Brion became an unquestionable pacifist and an enthusiastic propagandist.

Brion’s wartime pacifism alienated her from most political forces on the left and all reformist feminist organizations (though she continued to participate in a wide spectrum of publications).71 This was a major turning-point in her understanding of feminism as a broader social critique. Pacifism, to her, became both a rejection of the misogynistic political establishment and a critique of nationalism as it coopted women for the sake of the “nation.” Brion was one of the first radical activists to denounce the war in its entirety; an anarchist teacher named Julia

Bertrand preceded her by only a year, and was indicted in 1914 on similar charges that Brion would face four years later.72 In any case, Brion was a singular voice that interacted with a multitude of disparate actors during a period fraught with internal tensions and contradictions. She advocated for women irrespective of class-based differences to illustrate the woman as the proletarian of the man. For Brion, pacifism was intrinsically connected to feminism and women’s advancement; productive, equitable dialogue among women leaders could only proceed in the absence of masculine nationalism and unnecessary violence.

Despite the support she received from the FNSI, Brion had begun to play a dangerous game with her outspoken anti-war propaganda. In 1914, directly after the outbreak of hostilities, the

Third Republic passed a law that significantly diminished the right to freedom of speech, a wartime measure meant to ensure national security and morale.73 Brion thus operated illegally, pushing the boundaries of what would be termed “defeatism,” or the promotion of unequivocal peace without victory. Despite these risks, she remained dedicated to her active campaigns for pacifism and

70 Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 13. 71 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 104. 72 Bard, 105. 73 Offen, Debating the Woman Question, 578-579.

25 remained in positions of power within both the syndicalist and feminist movements. During the years 1914-1918, Brion’s primary audience for her pacifist and feminist texts were other teachers at Pantin. By 1915, the government began to monitor the movement of these individuals, who posed a direct threat to the nationalist rhetoric propagated in French schools at that time.74 A surprising percentage of teachers considered themselves pacifists or activists (a number considerably higher than the general population): this could be attributed to the comparably high level of education among female teachers, who saw the enormous loss of life as excessive and unnecessary. In total, however, pacifists remained a small minority within both institutrice circles and other leftist spaces. The agitation of this vocal minority spurred government intervention as the Third Republic passed wartime measures in August 1914 to suppress any “unpatriotic” propaganda.75

The situation quickly became more fraught, as the administration actively surveilled the activities of anyone involved in the pacifist movement. It was during this period, too, that Brion frequently articulated controversial political opinions in public spaces which provoked the particular ire of powerful men with government connections. Alphonse Merrheim, the leader of the Federation of Metalworkers and the founder of the Committee for the Resumption of

International Relations, an organization of pacifist activists within his union, was both an ally of

Brion and the indirect cause of her downfall. In October 1916, Brion sent an address to the

Federation of Metalworkers and the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations in response to Merrheim’s insistence that female participation in factories should be limited due to the higher incidences of sexually-transmitted diseases reported at mixed-gender facilities.76

74 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 102-103. 75 Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 191. 76 Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 94.

Though he stated his opposition on a more general plane, urging the recognition of a Proudhonist vision that placed women in fundamentally “by the hearth,” the moral argument was clear.77 Brion responded that men could never avail themselves of a revolutionary position until they recognized the “slavery” propagated among their own ranks.78 It was in her frustration with the lack of response issued by the metalworker’s union and the Committee that she began to draft her manifesto La Voie Féministe.79 Brion was also suspended from teaching on August 11, 1917, not long after the publication of La Voie Féministe, for suspected pacifism and the growing government interest in her case.80 At this point, she was held firmly under the microscope of the

Clemenceau administration, eager to make an example out of a radical member of the growing feminist movement.

Georges Clemenceau came to power on November 15, 1917, amidst a growing crisis that threatened the integrity of the nation. A wave of mutinies and strikes, alongside controversies within the Union Sacrée, spurred a feeling of insecurity among the leaders of Third Republic

France.81 The French police had compiled a dossier on Brion ever since she began agitating for peace, beginning in 1915 – in fact, they planted an informant in the FNSI to keep track of her activities.82 By the time they raided her house in 1917, she had printed the following pamphlets that spurred her initial arrest on November 17: “Syndicalist Teachers and the War,” “The Exile of

Citizen Trotsky,” and “The Zimmerwald Conference.”83 The arrest warrant was signed at the

77 Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 94; Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 207-209. 78 Hunt, 209. 79 Both Brion’s “Address to the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations” and her pamphlet La Voie Féministe are addressed in detail in Chapter 2. 80 Hélène Brion, Letter to Mr. Laferre, Ministre de l’instruction Publique, L’Humanité, 18 May 1918, translated and republished in Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 210-211. 81 Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 190. 82 Gordon and Cross, 192. 83 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 104.

27 behest of a zealous Clemenceau administration eager to make an example of an easier target than

Merrheim, a prominent pacifist but also a union leader with ties to the administration. As such,

Hélène Brion became the poster-child for “defeatism” and the subject of considerable coverage in all corners of the French national press. Despite her uncompromising personality, Brion inspired sections of the SFIO and FNSI to rally to her cause while she spent months languishing in Saint-

Lazare prison at the age of 36. She was arraigned alongside a “co-conspirator,” the soldier Gaston

Mouflard, one of her regular readers, who was arrested on suspicion of distributing her pamphlets to soldiers on the front line.84 According to Christine Bard, the initial press coverage of the event aligned with the official position of the Clemenceau administration, labelling her a “Malthusian, defeatist, antimilitarist, supporter of deserting, espionage,” and countless other titles.85 Unlike the minor coverage devoted to Julia Bertrand, Hélène Brion’s case became a sensation. She was held as an example of subversive leftist teachers – and, rather unsubtly, feminists – by the French government, which tightened its grip on the surveillance and censorship that had become the norm for trade unionists and other militant activists. Ultimately, Brion became a scapegoat for an administration concerned about the growing disenchantment among educated, vocal minorities.

Unsurprisingly, Brion considered Saint-Lazare prison “one of the most abominable buildings that exists.”86 On the anniversary of her arrest, November 17th, 1918, she published the first manuscript edition of her periodical La Lutte Féministe. In the “literary section,” she illustrated a revealing portrait of her experience in the cell where she awaited her trial in 1917:

“The air, well-made and lively, the soft air that caresses and blossoms, becomes there the awakening of the kitchen; the stench of the cabinets, the disgusting and heavy atmosphere of the overcrowded workshop or cell, the sudden, cold and hostile air currents that creep over you like a thief at the end of the huge latrine corridors.”87

84 Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 193. 85 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 104. 86 Hélène Brion, “Saint-Lazare,” La Lutte Féministe, November 16, 1918, 5. 87 Brion, 5-6.

She resented her imprisonment there, and experienced a spiritual awakening that would develop more acutely over time – a feminist mysticism that connected her to female heroes of the past.88

This “spiritualism” would eventually become one of the more curious aspects of her feminist ideology. In addition to her growing mysticism, Brion eagerly awaited a fair trial, where she would publicly announce her feminist principles. Before her trial commenced on March 25, 1918 (and after she spent months in prison) Brion was ordered to complete a mental health examination to determine her psychiatric fitness. In a letter of protest to Captain Rapporteur, the judge of the military tribunal where she would be tried, Brion defended her “iron constitution:”

“I…express the firm hope that you will spare the law and the medical profession the great ridicule to which both would be subject by suddenly discovering me to be ‘irresponsible’ or incompetent, for no one will believe it…and while officially I still retain my entire sanity, I wish to thank you for having been able to give me the confidence in your impartiality and to assure you that, if being found to be incompetent I…lose all respect for the judiciary[;] this will be entirely thanks to you.”89

The letter also referenced the exclusively male medical team, a “disgrace” when so many women were licensed medical professionals (like her longtime friend Madeleine Pelletier).90 By the date of her March trial, Brion was prepared to address the nation with a hardened determination to defend her militant feminism.

While she languished in Saint-Lazare, many of her compatriots came to her aid, and through their testimony modern readers can sketch a definitive illustration of her character.

Huguette Bouchardeau noted that she was lauded as “loyal, frank, intelligent, and rugged” which did not represent the “feminine virtues” considered ideal for women at that time.91 A variety of

88 Brion, “Saint-Lazare,” 5. 89 Hélène Brion, “Letter of Protest Against the Psychiatric Examination,” March 1918. Reprinted and translated in Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 209-210. 90 Brion, 209-210. 91 Bouchardeau, “Preface,” 8.

29 characters spoke at her trial, many of whom represented differing political perspectives. But Brion herself provided the most notable statement in her own defense; Huguette Bouchardeau reprinted the original document as an addendum to her prefaced edition of La Voie Féministe. “I appear here,” the accused began, “charged with a political crime, though I have been stripped of all political rights.”92 She attacked the prosecution’s claims on the basis of their “illogical nature.”93

Brion’s statements echo the tense relationship between her feminism and the pacifism she espoused during the war. It was not through her feminism that she became a pacifist; rather, it was because she was a feminist and a woman that the horrors of the war convinced her of the need to end the fighting. The basis of her pacifism was the devastation of the war and the illogical reasoning that supported it, informed by the knowledge that if “women were in power, revolutions would no longer occur at the strike of a bayonet.”94 Despite her clear anti-war messaging, Brion utilized the spotlight to support feminism rather than pacifism, a cause her comrades in the FNSI and Metalworker’s Unions expected her to promote exclusively. She prioritized the cause of women, distinct from pacifism since the beginning of the war, and furthered an explicitly progressive agenda that pushed back against the injustice of battle from the perspective of the women who suffered as “collateral damage.”

Brion’s speech explicitly addressed wartime sexual violence against women, a controversial subject that illuminated the growing universalism of her feminist messaging. She discussed the widespread establishment of brothels in garrison towns and the “well-being and hygiene” they supposedly provided for the soldiers stationed there.95 She attacked the “morality

92 Brion and Bouchardeau, “Déclaration devant le Conseil de guerre,” 110. 93 Brion, 111. 94 Brion, 117. 95 Brion, Statement Read to the Court Martial, 29 March 1918 (Germinal Year 126), Reprinted and translated in Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 201-203.

30 created by [men], for their profit” and considered the sexual violence that would be perpetrated by

French soldiers on German women if the French had been the initial aggressors.96 Here, she associated sexual violence with all men, regardless of nationality, and connected it to the excessive violence of warfare. The war, she announced, “reinforces this social evil” (sexual violence against women) and asked Clemenceau, who “[spoke] so well against prostitution” to forgive women who protest the violation and invasion of their bodies in wartime.97 By undermining the “morality” of the Third Republic, she invalidated the assumption that the “gentlemen leaders” of France were the ultimate arbiters of truth and justice. In this explicit inversion, Brion linked male chauvinism with the capitalist system and employed socialist rhetoric to demonstrate the relationship between male dominance and oppression. If Clemenceau and his Cabinet only disseminated “morality” for their own profit, then there existed no central authority from which to derive meaningful distinction between right and wrong. Interestingly, she made no mention of Church authority in this discussion of corrupt morality, though she concluded the speech with a message from the Pope condemning violence.98 Perhaps her use of papal doctrine was an appeal to a broader public, and a historically legitimate center of moral authority; the otherwise secular speech, however, suggests a distinct separation between religious concerns and political issues. Brion’s invocation of corrupt morality and her allusion to sexual violence against women demonstrated a remarkable strength of conviction and resolve that consolidated her feminist legacy within activist circles.

Though her eloquent speech was convincing, Brion’s conclusion was somewhat problematic within the overall goal of her feminism. She states that she was “hors la loi,” which was certainly true, but she also placed herself above those without her equivalent education level.

96 Brion, “Statement Read to the Court Martial,” 207. 97 Brion, 207. 98 Brion, 207-208.

Why does the “illiterate Negro” in Guadeloupe have more of a right to vote, she asked, than a highly-educated [white] Frenchwoman?99 Blatant racism notwithstanding, Brion elevated herself to a position of superiority over other women (as an “educated Frenchwoman”) and undermined her universalist authority. She did not speak for all women – she spoke for the educated woman, or the woman with a desire to be educated.

Additionally, Brion often crossed into a line of reasoning that, while popular at this time, ran in opposition to her empowerment message. During this period, a popular argument in favor of women’s suffrage highlighted the “innate compassion” of women as vital to future stability.

Though her reaction to the 1913 Couriau affair outlined her opposition to the “tentative” and

“deferential” socialization of women, Brion approached an essentialist discourse with her testimony. While she stopped short of explicit maternalism, she did not provide ample evidence for her statement that revolutions would cease to be violent if women were placed in positions of authority. Was it their gentleness, as some bourgeois suffragists would claim? Though she focused heavily on the “logical” nature of women, Brion relied on bombastic language and political references, rather than a clear statement of belief, to anchor her discourse. Despite these issues,

Brion’s commitment to feminism and an emerging particularism were evident in her statement read to the Court Martial in 1918.

In retrospect, the speech was an important milestone in the development of Brion’s feminist legal analysis. “I protest against the application of laws against me to which I did not agree or discuss,” she wrote, echoing centuries-old sentiments of representation in democratic political discourse.100 Invoking the global authority of Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, she continued:

“you other men [Lloyd George and Wilson], who alone govern the world! You would like at this

99 Brion and Bouchardeau, “Déclaration devant le Conseil de guerre,” 110. 100 Brion and Bouchardeau, “Déclaration devant le Conseil de guerre,” 112.

32 moment to do too much and too much good. Better is the enemy of good.”101 She concluded by insisting upon the inclusion of women into the political narrative: if women remained barred from authority, the world would remain as unjust and chaotic as it was before the war.102 She consistently connected her feminism with pacifism, and noted that real change could not occur without female voting rights. Brion’s speech articulated a feminist rhetoric that encourage political participation as crucial to women’s advancement. This highlighted a fundamental tension: while she continued to agitate within socialist and syndicalist circles, she also supported the development of women’s rights in a bourgeois capitalist government structure. Her opinionated political ideology, articulated in this document, was the beginning of a profound alienation that Brion would face in the ensuing years, as fissures within leftist circles became more apparent. She fought for the emancipation of women in a system that many saw as irrevocably flawed, and refused to compromise on any aspects of her women-first narrative.

With this tension, Brion exemplified a duality that defined French first-wave feminism.

The essential struggle between active engagement in Third Republic political lobbies and complete disengagement plagued the progressive Left in the interwar years. Christine Bard noted an interplay among pervasive dichotomies explored and discussed during these early years: that of reform/revolution and participation/autonomy.103 Brion’s early political leanings suggested a growing commitment to social revolution over political reform in a highly conservative society; however, as her disillusionment with trade unionism and socialism grew, she addressed the need for reform among the revolutionaries in her 1917 manifesto La Voie Féministe. This paradoxical

101 Brion, 114. « Vous autres hommes, qui gouvernez seuls le monde ! vous voulez en ce moment faire trop et trop bien. Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. » 102 Brion, 116. 103 Christine Bard, “Proletarians of the Proletariat: Women’s Citizenship in France,” International Labor and Working-Class History 48 (1995): 49–67, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547900005330, 63.

33 notion carried the suggestion that perhaps the traditional duality of reform/revolution was lacking.

Brion was an advocate for both participation and autonomy: the fight for suffrage was ultimately a fight for women’s participation in mainstream politics; autonomy was a necessity that failed to unify the contradictory feminisms elaborated at a particular political moment. Above all, Brion was concerned with the unification of all women, though her radical politics were alienating to the moderate feminists she knew were crucial to the movement’s success. She initially chose to advocate reform as an expedient to the pressing issues faced by women at the turn of the century, though her ultimate goal was to liberate all those impacted by pervasive oppression.

At the conclusion of Brion and Mouflard’s court martial, Mouflard was sentenced to six months of prison avec sursis and Brion was sentenced to three years avec sursis (which allowed the accused their freedom on the condition that they ceased their propaganda efforts).104 In total,

57 people had testified in her defense at the trial, from nearly all ideological associations that she had supported in the prewar years, including feminist, socialist, anarchist, and CGT affiliates.105

Two months later, Brion wrote an open letter to the Minister of Public Instruction in which she protested her suspension from teaching, effective March 29, 1918, and lobbied for back pay for the duration of her incarceration.106 She chastised the Minister for his apparent “inability to see or watch the trial for himself;” if he had seen the proceedings, she wrote, he would not question her intelligence or teaching ability.107 Barred from the teaching profession, she started an independent preschool in Pantin and continued to work among feminist circles. In the summer of 1918, she began to raise funds and attract interested feminist authors to her new project, a feminist periodical

104 Colette Avrane, « Hélène Brion, une institutrice féministe », Extrait du Bulletin Archives du féminisme, n° 5, June 2003. http://www.archivesdufeminisme.fr/ressources-en-ligne/articles-et-comptes-rendus/articles- historiques/avrane-c-helene-brion-institutrice-feministe/. 105 Michallat, “Hélène Brion and the missing manuscripts,” 103-104. 106 Hélène Brion, “Letter to Mr. Laferre, Ministre de l’instruction Publique,” L’Humanité, May 18, 1918, translated and republished in Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 210-211. 107 Brion, “Letter to Mr. Laferre, Ministre de l’instruction Publique,” 211.

34 that claimed to highlight the voices of working women and dedicated militants who were otherwise marginalized from mainstream feminisms. Brion operated with a burgeoning enthusiasm that reflected her brief celebrity. After her trial, she became intensely focused on writing, and continued intentional activism within feminist and leftist circles. Though she would not return to teaching until 1925 (under the administration of the Cartel des Gauches), Brion nonetheless regarded herself as an educator, a member of a feminist “vanguard” seeking freedom for those who did not have the power to demand their own liberation.

Hélène Brion’s case attracted national attention because of its peculiarity – a woman, sentenced by a court-martial for the ambiguous crime of “defeatism” and facing a variety of accusations from Administration officials looking to consolidate control. What was most notable about the legacy of “Brion affair,” as it would come to be known, was the remarkable ability of the accused to manipulate the narrative. She capitalized on the publicity she received to highlight the hypocrisy of the charges against her and thoughtfully articulated a progressive feminism that, as she claimed, was “absolutely” incompatible with violent warfare.108 Though her political evolution to pacifism was not immediate at the start of the war, Brion assured the court that her pacifism started immediately after it began.109 She prioritized the primacy of her feminism and admitted to pacifist activism only in the context of her ardent campaign for women’s rights. In the version of Brion’s statement at her court martial that was printed weeks later by the editorial staff of L’Action Féministe, Brion urged the prosecution to read her August 1917 pamphlet La Voie

Féministe in order to fully understand the depth (or lack thereof) of her pacifism.110 With this gesture, Brion pointed to her pamphlet as a definitive analysis of her own political evolution, a

108 Hélène Brion, “Une voix féministe: Déclaration d’Hélène Brion,” L’Action Féministe, no. 57 (April 1918), 2. 109 Brion, 2. 110 Brion, “Une voix féministe: Déclaration d’Hélène Brion,” 2.

35 foundational document that stood as a compilation of Brion’s ideological maturation over the course of her first decade as an activist.

Most twentieth-century scholars consider Brion an exemplary character within the pacifist movement, but this characterization is incorrect. All autobiographical accounts of her own politics, along with countless editorials and features in leftist magazines, led to a similar conclusion: Hélène

Brion was a feminist whose interpretation of sex-based oppression drove her to criticize warfare as antithetical to the global cause of women. By her own admission, she was not a pacifist until the war began; even more importantly, she did not initially align pacifism with feminism until the

1915 conversion of her trade union to the pacifist cause. Brion was only a pacifist because she believed that the war was an extension of male dominance and sexist systems of oppression. The culmination of her early activism, her August 1917 pamphlet La Voie Féministe, outlined this position; unfortunately, it did not receive the circulation she had initially intended. By the time of her trial, Brion had solidified a particular feminism that emphasized the need for unity within a fragmented women’s movement and general recognition of the “feminist question” (female oppression existed outside of the capitalist system). At this point, her ideology was neither suffragist nor socialist – it was distinctly woman-focused, though otherwise class-conscious.

Because of its eloquent explanation of Brion’s polarizing position, any conclusive understanding of Brion’s ideological positionality in during the war rested not on her trial but in the words of La

Voie Féministe, the hallmark of her feminism by 1917.

Chapter Two: La Voie Féministe

Hélène Brion’s political development reached a definitive milestone in 1917, when her pacifist politics and subsequent arrest catapulted her into the national spotlight. La Voie Féministe, published before her initial arrest on November 17, 1917, outlined the frenzied militant feminism that she symbolized throughout the following half-decade. The pamphlet was printed before her experience at Saint-Lazare exposed her to national notoriety. Though it has become, to contemporary historians, indelibly linked to the trial – the 1978 Syros edition placed the pamphlet in tandem with an abridged version of court testimony – the work was a foundational philosophical tract developed in the months and years preceding her indictment. The narrative was not particularly long; at approximately 28 pages, Brion managed a scathing condemnation of the systematized devaluation of women throughout the complicated leftist political spectrum. At the end of the document, she also reprinted her 1916 “Feminist Message to the Committee for the

Resumption of International Relations” in apparent exasperation, attempting to reexamine a tract that went unnoticed among male activists in the pacifist Committee. In its entirety, the pamphlet was a testament to Brion’s political evolution and a foundational text to the ideological canon she produced from 1918-1921, an important but understudied period in her life.

La Voie Féministe (translated literally as The Feminist Path) discussed many of the core tenets of Brion’s philosophy that she upheld throughout her career. The pamphlet’s scathing critiques of the CGT and SFIO demonstrated her commitment to the cause of women and the

“feminist question” above all else; in fact, her dedication to other feminists, whether bourgeois or working-class, was unwavering. She understood gender-based oppression as universal, regardless of class or social status, and refused to consider the idea that women would be liberated as a direct consequence of a worker’s revolution. Brion valued mutual understanding over class-based

37 grievances, but expected bourgeois women to be sympathetic to the complaints of the working class. She even placed the “feminist question” above the “woman question,” underscoring her commitment to the cause. Perhaps most relevant to the scrutiny she faced after the initial publication of La Voie Féministe, Brion’s text highlighted the subordinate position of her pacifism to her feminism. Even when pressed to defend “defeatism” at her trial, she chose to explain her actions through the lens of sex discrimination. La Voie Féministe marked the culmination of years- long political development, and succinctly outlined Brion’s class-conscious feminism – though it would also serve as the beginning of her profound alienation from the leftist movements she helped lead. In the end, La Voie Féministe was a pamphlet that solidified Brion’s devotion to the advancement of women and exemplified the nonconformity that would drive to her isolation.

Critical of syndicalism/trade-unionism, socialism and anarchism, Brion undermined the hypocrisy of those who sought to keep women from active participation in leftist politics. She did not claim to reject syndicalism or socialism altogether, preferring instead to shed light on the pressing need for female involvement in anti-capitalist causes that she saw as essential to a more equitable society.111 In her “Feminist Message,” she referenced female heroes of historic revolutions, particularly that of 1789, and underscored the importance of French women to social uprisings. “Everyone knows of Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, and Olympe de Gouges,” she declared, “and throughout the nineteenth century, in all the decades of crisis, women accompanied or preceded [revolutions].”112 These women fought for “the love of justice,” she stated, “and in the interest of all their sisters who suffered, but also for you – the workers – who did not understand them.”113 By placing herself within a long tradition of French women activists, Brion set a

111 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 41. 112 Brion and Bouchardeau, 99. 113 Brion and Bouchardeau, 99. Emphasis mine.

38 dominating tone that she carried throughout the work. A sense of urgency was rooted in this narrative, as she attempted to continue what had begun decades, even centuries, earlier. Altogether,

Brion understood herself as the inheritor of a long and storied feminist tradition that had been omitted from the historical record and misunderstood in the eyes of socialist and syndicalist leadership.

Hélène Brion’s relationship to feminism was also a critical facet of her self-identification.

By the end of the war, “bourgeois” feminisms had grown to encompass moderate and Catholic activists; by the early 1920s, some young, middle-class women rejected the term for its conservative connotation.114 It was thus interesting that Brion, considered one of the most radical left-wing women’s rights activists of the period, actively used the term “feminist” to describe herself and her comrades. An explanation for this was two-fold: first, Brion came of age in the

Third Republic, when feminism was associated with communard activists and other revolutionary organizations. Second, Brion adopted the term feminist as it met her philosophical needs; she did not use the term exclusively, nor did she ignore the credibility of other progressive social movements in favor of suffragist feminism. Brion’s feminism was class-conscious rather than class-dependent. It was linked to the recognition of global systems of oppression, but was not entirely dependent upon a socialist or communist theoretical framework for legitimacy. The primacy of Brion’s ideological feminism allowed her to call for unity among all women, even those socially conservative and upper-class women who would otherwise be excluded from the socialist struggle.

Brion’s status as a teacher and activist leader provided a certain nuance to her narrative authority; while she considered herself a self-sufficient everywoman, she claimed to have insider

114 Paul Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in France, 1918-1945, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1996). 13-14.

39 knowledge of “truth” and “hypocrisy” within leading leftist circles. As she drafted what would eventually become La Voie Féministe, Hélène Brion was (as has been discussed) an active participant in the social movements of the French left. Madeleine Vernet, a colleague who defended Brion at her trial in 1917, noted that she “officially” held the titles of Secretary of the

Federation of Teachers’ Unions of France and the Colonies, Secretary of the Worker’s Orphanage of Êpone, member of the Confederal Committee of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), archivist of the Socialist collective at Pantin (outside of Paris), and member of various feminist collectives.115

La Voie Féministe was a generally comprehensive document; in it, Hélène Brion succinctly defined the particularities of her radical feminism and exposed a standardized erasure of female perspectives from leftist political spaces. She tackled the wage gap and the exclusion of female workers from strikes and protests; she used contemporary examples of well-known discrimination to demonstrate the universality of the issue. She attacked the “double burden” of female wage- earners who were expected to perform both salaried labor and completely devalued domestic labor.

Additionally, she highlighted the hypocrisy of syndicalist and socialist leaders who superficially upheld women’s “emancipation” while failing to deliver on long-awaited promises. She was an activist watchdog and an amateur historian who saw patriarchy as an established historical trend that derived its legitimacy only through its own interpretation of “nature.” Brion’s critique encompassed politics, economics, and social demographics; she touched upon female ownership of physicality and sexuality. In sum, her document was indicative of a rapidly evolving social/political/economic understanding of male power structures that transcended partisan politics, alienating her from full acceptance within socialist or syndicalist circles.

115 Bouchardeau, “Preface,” 10.

La Voie Féministe contextualized and added to the philosophical arguments she made in her own defense in 1918. While Brion was ostensibly put on trial for “defeatism,” she was actually indicted primarily as the leader of a pacifist faction of the CGT.116 Though she had ample opportunity to promote pacifist sentiment, she instead chose to illuminate the dire cause of women and propagandize the feminist struggle – much to the dismay of her pacifist peers, who saw the trial as a critical opportunity for national publicity.117 This decision was profoundly indicative of

Brion’s understanding of the war’s complexities; she saw it as the continuation of sexist, patriarchal power structures that excluded and marginalized women while waging expensive, unnecessary, and destructive wars that served only to elevate male chauvinist impulses. Brion was opposed to the war on feminist grounds, and La Voie Féministe reinforced the woman-first ideology she had incubated until the outbreak of war in 1914 and throughout the polarizing period from 1914-1917. Though initially torn between the socialist and feminist causes, Hélène Brion crystallized a dominating feminist discourse by 1917 that she outlined in La Voie Féministe and continued to develop throughout the next five years.

La Voie Féministe began with an immediate challenge and a rallying cry to Brion’s intended audience: militant feminists and, ultimately, the men who posed the greatest threat to their cause. “The [CGT and the Socialist Party] willingly tell us, feminists, while we lead the good fight in their ranks… ‘what exactly is your feminism? What could you possibly demand that we don’t already offer you?’”118 Brion complained that men in each camp – socialists and syndicalists

– believed that their ideology suffit à tout, and the entirety of the social question rested with socialist or syndicalist action.119 Brion inverted this narrative by denying any redundancy between

116 Bard, Les Filles De Marianne, 106. 117 Bard, 106. 118 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 51. 119 Brion and Bouchardeau, 51.

41 feminism and leftist politics. Her opening hypothesis argued that militant men did not understand the crux of the feminist position; Brion’s work was both encouragement and affirmation for women questioning their loyalty to both causes. She dispelled the notion that any woman should sacrifice her propre féminisme for subservience in male-dominated revolutionary politics. This was the heart of Brion’s activism and her most alienating position. She drew a parallel between the Marxist-Leninist idea of the “exploited” working class and the “double exploitation” of sex discrimination in society, reminiscent of earlier Guesdist philosophy. Here, however, she unquestionably linked the class struggle with gender equality.

The relationship between gender and class permeated Brion’s work and defined her relationship to feminism. After she joined the fringe “Groupe des femmes socialistes” in 1913 alongside such socialist stalwarts as Maria Vérone, Marie Bonnevial, Caroline Kauffman, and

Marguertie Martin, she opposed the group’s self-imposed isolation from mainstream reformist groups like the UFSF.120 Brion’s longtime friend and mentor, Madeleine Pelletier, also disavowed the move, contending that feminism was not bourgeois or socialist – it was a question of gender rather than class.121 From the beginning, then, Brion was forced to reconcile her commitment to socialism and worker’s rights with her ongoing passion for feminist activism. The class question developed further as Brion became more involved in CGT circles. If the suffrage movement lost momentum after the electoral defeats of 1914 and the declaration of war, syndicalist organizations gained an important tactical advantage. Women became a dominant demographic within the working-class labor force, particularly by 1917 (when a large percentage of young Frenchman had left to join the army). During that same year, women comprised nearly 51% of strikers.122 Brion

120 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 39. 121 Bard, 39. 122 Bard, 77.

42 anticipated a possible backlash and attempted to seize the moment, encouraging more working- class women to join the movement. Her efforts proved futile. Though enthusiastically supported by most militant feminists, the male-dominated syndicalist leadership reversed this trend and discouraged female activism such that by the end of 1917 many women were pushed out of local trade-unions.123 August 1917 was the peak of women’s participation in the metalworker’s union

(an organization Brion encountered often), at 37.5% female members.124 Brion printed La Voie

Féministe the very same month. Much of her text specifically referenced the misogyny within syndicalist circles, and the dominant nature of that discursive thread was a product of the topic’s relevancy and urgency. As much as La Voie Féministe laid the framework for a general understanding of Brion’s political ideology from 1917-1921, it was also the product of a particular moment in French society, to which she responded directly.

Brion continued La Voie Féministe with an evaluation of female oppression in which she drew a clear connection between economic and social politics. “Women,” she asserted, “are more exploited by the masculine collective as women than they are by capital as producers.”125 This was a crucial sentiment: for years, the “woman question” was seen in Marxist thought and in leftist political agendas as inferior to the class struggle (a fight that would eventually cure all social inequities). Brion not only linked class and gender as equivalent causes; she extended her thesis even further, citing the primacy of the “feminist question” above the “woman question” in revolutionary politics. This was a problematic claim – as Robert Stuart notes, to “accept patriarchy as a malignant power in its own right” would be to loyal Marxists an impossibility, as the property system would lose its undisputed status as the “origin of oppression.”126 But Brion nonetheless

123 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 78. 124 Bard, 78. 125 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 53. 126 Stuart, “Calm, with a brave and serious temperament,” 60.

43 reinforced the revolutionary value of feminism. As supporting arguments for her primary thesis, she noted in particular the salary differential between men and women workers. The woman was

“depreciated as a worker a priori” by “stupid” and “odious” measures propagated by those who claimed that women provide less valuable or taxing labor.127 She continued by citing the specific case of Elizabeth Trundle, who, when stopped by the police on the charge of dressing as a man, claimed she made more money performing the same labor she completed while dressed as a woman.128 According to Brion, it was in these instances where the absurdity of what would today be termed the “wage gap” become increasingly apparent. Effectively, Brion undermined the antifeminist position through evidence of an oppressive hierarchy that was detrimental to women.

Brion sensed and elaborated a tension among the trade-unions during the war: because women were institutionally paid less than men, many people feared that they were undercutting male laborers in certain industries (particularly the teaching profession). For some men, the answer was to push women out of the workforce entirely.129 Brion cited this as barbaric and hypocritical for socialist and syndicalist leaders seeking the liberation of French labor. Sidelined by trade-union activists who continually opposed the right of women to perform tasks deemed “detrimental” to their “fragile” comportment (carriage drivers, tramcar and cargo drivers), working women were pigeonholed into a narrow range of acceptable labor. She acknowledged the hypocrisy in the

“protector” narrative propagated by anti-feminist syndicalists and listed a bevy of jobs left to women that were unglamorous, dangerous, and unsanitary (combat nurses, butcher’s assistants, etc.). She even cited the example of a London strike in which male tram-drivers attempted to force female workers out of the profession entirely, apparently “concerned” for women’s health and the

127 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 55. 128 Brion and Bouchardeau, 55. 129 Sowerwine, Sisters or Citizens?, 3.

“public interest.”130 The “male protector” and “female weakness” narrative was indeed pervasive among those who attempted to maintain the wage gap in order to further discourage women from jobs outside the home. If women were so weak, Brion contended, why did men impose multiple dangerous pregnancies, illegal abortions, and sterility so that [women would] become further reduced?131 Why, too, were they offered jobs that require considerable strength and physical effort? The “protector” narrative only extended as far as it served the masculine interest.

The author’s argument placed in disunion the idea of la femme à l’atelier (the woman at work) and la femme au foyer (the woman at home).132 Brion made interesting vocabulary distinctions here: while the term ménage was used interchangeably to mean housework, either paid or unpaid, la femme au foyer is set to mean exclusively la femme à son foyer, or the woman in her own home. By contrast, le travail à domicile was used to refer to those who are paid to perform household labor. Curiously, she placed all household labor beneath external productive labor, remarking upon those women who were salaried household workers, for example, as

“mercenaries.”133 Brion contended that the woman at work held regular, salaried labor; she found

“dignity” in her work (a Marxist worker-ideology), and all injustice carried out by superiors happened under public scrutiny, thereby lessening its potential to harm or exploit. By contrast, the woman at home was in a state of “perpetual slavery” – she did not get the “beautiful title” of producer, and the man was the unquestioned and unregulated master.134 Though she ultimately provided a counterpoint to her own assertion, admitting the “uncreative” nature of the work that women were able to perform and the limited training opportunities they received; she qualified the

130 Hélène Brion, The Feminist Path, reprinted and translated in Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 214-215. 131 Hunt, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Feminism among Teachers in France, 1900-1921, 71.

133 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 57. 134 Brion and Bouchardeau, 58.

45 regulated pay and time as relative to the unrelenting oppression of the home rather than an ideal in its current form. She continued by admonishing the French Left for its inability to fight for women’s equal treatment in the workplace: “already powerless to defend the female worker exploited by housework, syndicalism is radically powerless to defend the woman who suffers from familial oppression.”135 Crucially, Brion attacked the dangerous implications of the institutionalized public/private distinction that enabled rampant abuse to continue unchecked by external regulation. She thrust the private into the public domain and held both constructed

“spheres” to the same standard of worker’s rights, a radical notion at a time when even the staunchest French Leftists argued for the necessity of a private, unregulated foyer.

To continue this thread of rhetorical critique, Brion chastised the pervasive Proudhonist housewife/harlot dichotomy and proposed a third, free woman, “free to work and to live.”136 Brion admonished the “proudhonnerie” within socialist and anarchist circles as ardently as did many other feminist activists in the same period. Proudhonist theory was explicitly misogynistic, and relegated the role of women to that of sexual object (“harlot”) or domestic servant (“housewife”) in the ideal state of nature. In this construction, the harlot had a “definite use,” while the housewife encompassed the sexual obligation of the harlot and the domestic and child-rearing duties of a femme de ménage.137 She employed this critique to further her argument that women had the same right to find “passion” and satisfaction through productive labor as did male workers.138 Thus, she promoted a physical and spiritual ownership of the female body as it was applied to everyday labor. Brion made a connection between Proudhonist discourse and the outright dismissal of

135 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 59. 136 Brion and Bouchardeau, 63. 137 Hélène Brion, La Voie Féministe, as translated in Jennifer R. Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause, Feminisms of the Belle Epoque: A Historical and Literary Anthology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 150. 138 Brion, as translated in Waelti-Walters, Feminisms of the Belle Époque, 150.

46 women in the workplace (particularly in the case of prominent examples like the Couriau affair) as equivalent in their dedication to patriarchal structures. To Brion, the same systems that stripped women of their intellectual ownership had operated for centuries. She traced the assumption of women’s “natural place” in society to the Biblical “Flood,” through Proudhon, and up until the

Third Republic. “Let us just look at the Third Republic,” she began, “and let us see what activity has been expended on us by the [Socialist] party which shamelessly forbids us to undertake any political action outside its framework.”139 She proceeded to outline all legislation pertinent to the cause of women in France – none of them had been spearheaded by socialists in the Senate.140 To

Brion, the failure of the 1914 suffragist campaigns and the subsequent inability of reformist lobbying to impact the legislative body of the Third Republic was further evidence of deeply-held

Proudhonist and patriarchal values among those in power in France.

The author expanded her discussion of the female body, chastising the legislative authority of men who claimed to protect “women’s health.” Brion saw the conversation of women’s health initiatives as an attempt to further marginalize women in the workplace and in the home:

“No! Do not come and talk to us about…women’s health…while you impose either multiple and exhausting pregnancies or abortions or sterility on us at your wish (which your laws condemn), which for women reduces the whole universe to your person.”141

In this argument, she contradicted the narrative that “loose” or “immoral” women sought out abortions, and that women’s mere presence in the workplace would encourage delinquent behavior. Brion saw the idea of women’s health as an ownership issue: if women were granted autonomy over their own bodies, many “problems” associated with coercive abortions would cease to exist. Furthermore, the prevalent “protector” narrative within Third Republic legislation failed

139 Brion, The Feminist Path, reprinted and translated in: Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 214-215. 219. 140 Brion, 219-220. 141 Brion, 216.

47 to account for the brothels operating with relative impunity in Paris neighborhoods – an oversight of the “morals police” that otherwise restricted women’s rights in both public and private spheres because of “health concerns.” 142 Though she failed to fully enunciate her support for birth control, safe and legal abortions, and women’s sexual freedom, Brion nonetheless attacked pervasive rhetoric that undermined female autonomy of their own bodies and sexuality.

In addition to her support for the autonomy of female workers, Brion employed militarized vocabulary to protest the widespread syndicalist ban on female participation in labor union demonstrations. Perhaps mocking a ubiquitous dichotomy within Leftist rhetoric of masculinity as militancy and femininity as shameful passivity, Brion called the husband who forced his wife into a “sweatshop” and away from the picket lines as a “tsar;” she mocked the chivalrous “knights” in the union who allowed the “tsar” to reign. The women exposed to the cruelty of the tsar would, according to Brion, cast off the yoke of tyranny and join the militant feminist cause.143 In a separate instance, Brion compared the “brutal instinct” of “the Roman Caesar or slave-master who senses his beast about to escape” to male syndicalists wary of possible female enfranchisement.144 Taking a globalist approach, she optimistically claimed that across the world the “enslaved sex” had finally been “touched by the sainted spirit of revolt” and would react against a “miserable lot.”145 She tirelessly blended Marxist historical references with the feminist question, further underscoring the parallel between the oppression of the proletariat and the oppression of women vis-à-vis men.

Besides a general critique of syndicalist and socialist responses to the suffragist and feminist movements, Brion also demonstrated a growing interest in international feminist issues.

This internationalist discourse would not prove fully-formed until a year later, when the armistice

142 Brion, The Feminist Path, reprinted and translated in: Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 214-215. 219. 216. 143 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 59. 144 Brion and Bouchardeau, 71. 145 Brion and Bouchardeau, 5.

48 preempted a shift in her worldview and growing frustration with center-left suffragists. However, the beginnings of a global approach were surprisingly evident in La Voie Féministe and the attached address to the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations. In the final section of La Voie Féministe, Brion discussed “Indian widows burned alive on the funeral pyres of their masters,” a reference to the Hindu practice of sati (suicide by self-immolation), and

Chinese foot-binding as “products of the male organization of the world.”146 She saw systematized oppression as a worldwide historical trend, unfettered by decades of female objection. Chinese foot-binding, in particular, would prove an obsession of Brion’s throughout the next two years: she analyzed the practice in her self-published newspaper La Lutte Féministe on more than a few occasions.

Hélène Brion’s clear frustration with the lukewarm support given to female political candidates by the socialist leadership fueled her growing internationalism. She referenced the 1914 political campaigns mounted by socialist women (Elisabeth Renaud, Madeleine Pelletier, and

Caroline Kauffmann) who were allowed to run as members of the “Parti socialist unifié” only as

“paper candidates” without any real chance for victory.147 She pleaded for full support, praising the initial endorsement but criticizing the lack of real mobilization on behalf of women in politics.148 Even those superficial strides were short-lived. Brion lamented the “recent” rebuff of feminist delegates by Socialist party leadership when they arrived at the Senate to plead their case; the representatives were forced instead to address the Radicals and Radical Socialists, despite the fact that almost all the women were active members of the Socialist party.149 Her complaints were well founded: during the war, the Socialists joined with the Union Sacrée for the defense of the

146 Brion, The Feminist Path, reprinted and translated in: Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 218. 147 Brion, 220. 148 Brion, The Feminist Path, reprinted and translated in: Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 220. 149 Brion, 220.

49 nation, and nearly all organizing on behalf of women’s suffrage stopped on account of the war effort.150 Her repeated pleas signaled an increasing skepticism vis-à-vis the socialist and syndicalist leadership to whom she addressed La Voie Féministe. Indeed, she would pivot towards a global vision for proletarian and female advancement after a staggering number of legislative defeats in the French Senate between 1917-1920.

Above all, Brion was interested in the preservation and transmission of the female experience in order to incite change. By highlighting the threads of male dominance worldwide, she illuminated evidence of global-historical trends that existed outside the Third Republic. Her dedication to the consistent education of women who were otherwise unaware of their condition led her to publish an editorial in the July 1917 edition of L’Action Féministe which implored readers to donate to the “feminist fund:” “it allows us, this fund, to show signs of life to the outside world, to demonstrate at all opportune times our feminist vitality.”151 She envisioned a large library, open to all women, that held countless historical documents written by women worldwide.

This would be another trend that followed her throughout her life: she was obsessed with the historical record and the preservation of history. According to Brion, patriarchal domination was enabled and encouraged by the systematic lack of priority in preservation given to feminist and progressive texts. She sought to reverse this trend by giving ownership back to the women who were marginalized by the historical record.

Hélène Brion’s “Feminist Message to the Committee for the Resumption of International

Relations” exemplified a continued frustration with the marginalization of female voices among the important political debates that occurred at the end of the war. She made references to the

French Revolution (1789) to expose the foundational hypocrisy of the Third Republic. “You who

150 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 82. 151 Brion, Hélène. L’Action Féministe, July 1917, 2.

50 no longer wanted despots,” she argued, “were frightened at the idea of the possible emancipation of your eternal slaves.”152 By coopting the vocabulary of the Revolution (“despots,” “slaves”) and adding a temporal element to female oppression (“eternal”), Brion utilized a similar tactic as did

Olympe de Gouges in her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman.” However, this highlighted a tension in Brion’s argumentation and philosophy; while she agreed with prominent socialists that the 1789 Revolution was a bourgeois victory rather than a people’s victory, she appreciated the imagery of the Revolution as a tool to dispel any illusion of an equitable legal tradition in France.

Alongside the charged historical nature of Brion’s vocabulary, another term appeared prominently before the reprinted address to the Committee: the “extreme avant-garde.”153 Here,

Brion referred to the small number of socialists and members of the Metalworker’s and Teacher’s

Unions who attended the pacifist meetings led by prominent syndicalist Alphonse Merrheim.154

Pacifist activists, still considered treasonous by the Third Republic and heavily-monitored by the national police, were a key element to this “avant-garde.” As a leader in the minority FNSI, Brion had access to a wide network of anti-war activists and intellectuals, to whom she dedicated her address. The entirety of La Voie Féministe itself could be considered an open letter to those among the “extreme avant-garde,” a rallying cry to a group she felt was most amenable to her propre féminisme. Brion was perhaps most known, at least within law enforcement circles, for her wartime pacifism between the years 1916-1917. The “Feminist Address” promoted the idea that women in positions of power would ensure an end to all wars - an idealistic statement, but one that highlighted the prominence of the war effort within leading activist circles in 1917. The entirety of La Voie Féministe was therefore a general critique of male leadership in the CGT and the SFIO,

152 Brion, The Feminist Path, reprinted and translated in: Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 218. 153 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 92. 154 Brion and Bouchardeau, 92.

51 but it was also aimed directly at the pacifist members of the Committee for the Resumption of

International Relations who had failed to respond to her original draft of the address, sent months earlier in October 1916.

The aim of Brion’s work was to explain and promote her political beliefs to an audience that might take them seriously – namely, the “extreme avant-garde” to which she addressed her concluding open letter. Hélène Brion defined feminism as a parallel, rather than synonymous, struggle to socialism and syndicalism. She was a class-conscious feminist, but did not explicitly exclude those upper-class women who suffered under the same patriarchal structures that enabled female disenfranchisement and political exclusion. Though her multifaceted embrace of

“feminism” as an inclusive, rather than what contemporary scholars deem “intersectional feminism,” Brion did not express an early understanding of intersectionality. Despite her understanding of gender and class-based oppression, Brion had a comparatively underdeveloped opinion of colonialist and race-based oppressive systems. She saw the rise of nationalism as dangerous, and the development of an internationalist political philosophy in the ensuing years would lead her to eschew nation-first policies in their entirety. However, her conception of nationalism seemed limited to European shores, and she only vaguely enunciated her opinions on non-European female experiences. Brion’s explicit critique of geopolitical power structures thus centered purely on socialist and gender-based theory.

Religion represented another important omission from Brion’s analysis. In the 28 pages of socialist-feminist and pacifist critique, Brion failed to mention Church influence over working- class women or the rampant anti-clericalism that spurred many of the original votes against female enfranchisement. So prominent was the lack of discussion that the reader could analyze La Voie

Féministe in extreme detail without any indication of her religious philosophy. Her militant

52 socialism and Marxist discourse would imply a strict secular (and perhaps anti-religious) ideology, but omission did not, in this case, imply lack of belief. 1917 marked the near-beginning of a long foray into mystic spiritualism, for which Brion would find a prominent place in her communist philosophy after a months-long foray into Bolshevik Russia in 1921. However, there is little evidence to suggest that she developed her spiritualism in any overwhelming capacity until 1920; rather, she focused primarily on secular feminisms for the duration of the war.

Brion’s apparent dismissal, or conscious omission, of religious controversy within the feminist movement belied the national prominence of the issue. Religious interpretations of feminism were so complex that Paul Smith, in his 1999 examination of Feminism and the Third

Republic, preferred a secular/Catholic denomination for the different expressions of feminism in the early nineteenth-century rather than one based on political preference or class.155 In La Voie

Féministe, Brion offered a critique of woman’s “natural” position in the home but failed to examine the religious implications of the right to divorce. The legal ramifications of a more lenient divorce law would be secular, but Brion’s analysis of “the age-old error that the family is based on the man whereas its logical and natural basis is the woman and only the woman” indicated a growing condemnation of Catholic hierarchies.156 Besides a fleeting reference to the Biblical “Flood” in a discussion of historical patriarchy, she largely failed to mention or effectively undermine any explicitly religious tropes, perhaps out of a desire to appeal to a larger audience.157 But it was also possible that Brion, aware of the limited nature of her circulation and as-of-yet unprepared for the growing notoriety she assumed upon her arrest months later, understood that her readers had no need for an overarching critique of the Catholic Church: they were primarily secular and anti-

155 Smith, Paul. Feminism and the Third Republic, 3-4. 156 Brion, The Feminist Path, reprinted and translated in: Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 220. 157 Brion, 219.

53 religious. Whatever the reasoning, Brion’s failure to include an examination of the Catholic

Church’s role in patriarchal structures weakened her argument by omitting an important facet in the historical legitimacy of male dominance in France.

Despite her numerous leadership roles within leftist militancy, Brion’s text also demonstrated a growing, profound alienation from the powerful factions that dominated the French

Left in the latter half of the Third Republic. Her positionality was problematic for socialists, who saw class as the root of all oppression. Syndicalists mistrusted her dedication to feminist causes, particularly when many smaller organizations within the CGT were explicitly sexist and exclusionary. Finally, her impassioned speeches on behalf of women’s emancipation in 1917-1918 frustrated pacifists, many of whom saw the war effort as the most pressing evil in contemporary society. Always considered an “outsider,” Brion was becoming more and more controversial by

1917, both in the eyes of the government who prosecuted her and the militants whose organizations she claimed to support. This fundamental alienation would push her farther from the SFIO, and by

1920 she broke from the Socialist party and joined the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) at its inception. There, she hoped to find activists willing to work towards the emancipation of European women (per the Bolshevik model). This search would end in vain nearly four years later, but the roots of her political isolation rested in the wartime consolidation of her political ideology, culminating in La Voie Féministe.

Brion’s 1917 work was, at its core, an extension of her deeply-held frustrations. She saw relevance in class-based theory, and mobilized in support of female worker’s rights. However, she insisted upon a universal solidarity of women that transcended class struggle – a radical idea at a time of immense economic inequality and class immobility. In her pamphlet, she attempted to eliminate the material condition from the conversation and focus on the “feminist question:”

Syndicalism and Socialism focus above all on the poor, on the material condition. But human beings in general, women in particular and even the rich women can suffer from a thousand moral miseries just as torturous as poverty, perhaps even more…If there are a small number of brutes who appear to believe…that money is the remedy of all ills, that one will not have anything to complain about once one has, materially, “all that he needs,” I know that they are the exception and, I repeat, the immense majority [of people] have a more appropriate idea of the complexity of life and of the human soul.158

Hers was an intensely alienating position. The primary tenets of Marxism dictated the superiority of the class struggle, but Hélène Brion placed the feminist struggle and the class struggle on equivalent narrative planes– women, irrespective of class, found a common oppressor in male authority. In the passage cited above, she offered a critique of Marxism-Leninism and the simplicity of its argument. “The complexity of life and of the human soul,” she contended, were not fully addressed by the notion of class struggle. Societal oppression was a multi-faceted phenomenon, according to Brion, and to place class above gender issues would underestimate the power of sexism to further stratify twentieth-century French society. She invoked the anti-slavery crusades of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and lamented that she, too, experienced sex discrimination despite her privileged class.159 However, Brion’s ultimate exercise in the rhetorical device rested not in the exaltation of rich activist women, but as a question posed to her worker compatriots.

“Where does your syndicalism place me, woman?”160 The answer, she insisted, was unconvincing.

All men systematically worked against women, whether bourgeois or otherwise.

La Voie Féministe marked the culmination of Brion’s feminist evolution before the end of the war. Her critique of gender-based discrimination in the CGT and SFIO highlighted her

158 Brion and Bouchardeau, La Voie Féministe, 75-77. « Syndicalisme et Socialisme s’intéressent surtout aux pauvres, à la condition matérielle. Mais les êtres en général, les femmes en particulier et même les femmes riches peuvent souffrir de mille misères morales aussi torturants que la pauvreté, plus peut-être…s’il y a un petit nombre de brutes qui paraissent croire et affectent de dire que l’argent est le remède à tous les maux, qu’on ne saurait être à plaindre quand on a matériellement « tout ce qu’il faut », je sais qu’ils sont l’exception et que, je le répète, l’immense majorité a une plus juste idée de la complexité de la vie et de l’âme humaine. » 159 Brion and Bouchardeau, 79. 160 Brion and Bouchardeau, 81.

55 commitment to the “feminist question” over the “woman question” and marked the beginning of her alienation from mainstream leftist politics. As the war drew to a close and a new world order seemed imminent, Brion agitated on behalf of women’s participation in international geopolitics.

When her pleas fell on deaf ears, the next period in her career saw her turn to the East, where the

Russian Revolution promised the emancipation of women in a new communist worker’s state.

Consequently, Brion adopted an increasingly internationalist vision for women’s rights; as she entered the next phase of her political evolution, however, she maintained the core tenets of feminism that she had forcefully articulated in La Voie Féministe.

Chapter Three: La Lutte Féministe

When she grew skeptical of the SFIO leadership and critical of the opportunities for women in the CGT, Brion sought a more radical solution to the problem of sexism and disenfranchisement.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 seemed to provide this repreive, as communist propaganda lauded the inclusion of women in the political process. Between late 1918-1922, Brion embraced a revolutionary Marxist discourse with a particular focus on women’s empowerment and participation in civic life. The core tenets of her feminist platform, elevated in her early work and in the 1917 pamphlet La Voie Féministe, remained important foundational texts for a comprehensive understanding of Brion’s ideology; however, her personally edited newspaper La

Lutte Féministe revealed a conscious attempt to reconcile her feminism with a revolutionary political movement. As she became more convinced that mainstream political parties were hostile to her platform, Brion saw the newly-formed Parti Communiste Française (PCF) as an opportunity to reconstitute a political establishment that would empower, rather than silence, women.

Hélène Brion constructed her newspaper to reinforce a number of themes considered crucial to her women’s empowerment campaign, alongside genuine efforts to reconcile militant feminism with her emerging communist rhetoric. First, she communicated an inclusive, internationalist vision for the feminist cause through a number of editorials and opinion pieces that pushed back against isolation from other European women’s movements. Second, she promoted the controversial cause of neo-Malthusianism as it provided a measure of female sexual and reproductive independence (contrary to the overt pronatalism of the French administration), complicating her position within the French Left and pushing her toward a more revolutionary solution. Next, Brion communicated an intense desire to connect with Eastern European activists through extensive political analysis of developments in Russia and effusive obituaries. Finally, she

57 glorified women’s participation in sport and claimed that the liberation of the soul began with a liberation of both the body and the mind, inverting all discourse that relegated women to a position of “natural” inferiority. Ultimately, the copies of La Lutte Féministe analyzed here marked the culmination of Brion’s alienation and a decisive shift towards the fledgling PCF as a political expedient to the resolution of “the feminist question.”

The following chapter examines Brion’s transition to communism and her relationship to the women’s movement through the pages of her weekly newspaper, beginning with her first

“Revue du presse” in November 1918. Brion communicated her feminist-revolutionary idealism through a number of themed editorials and articles, almost all of which she wrote and edited herself

(at first in neatly handwritten cursive). The four manuscript copies of La Lutte Féministe that survive intact in the Sylvia Beach Papers at the Princeton University Archives include the first, dated November 16th, 1918; the third, dated November 30th, 1918; the fourth, dated December 7th,

1918, and the eighth, dated January 4th, 1919 (which, as Wendy Michallat observed, was six months before the first printed version of the newspaper debuted).161 These manuscripts were particularly indicative of Brion’s political evolution and provided insight into the seventeenth printed volume of the paper, titled La Lutte Féministe pour le communisme, also available at the

Princeton University Archives, dated June 25th, 1921. Read together, the Sylvia Beach manuscripts provide invaluable political commentary and signal a remarkable continuity in ideology. Her militant feminism, informed by years of experience in various women’s organizations, remained the dominant discursive thread in her writing. Brion considered her political position as secondary to the overall goal of female emancipation – though she was a product of a particular moment in

161 Michallat, "Hélène Brion and the Missing Manuscripts,” 103.

French history that existed outside of, and in spite of, the linear ideological model of left/right favored by twentieth-century historians.

It was surprising that Hélène Brion, an adamant opponent of the masculine “agenda” in all its iterations, chose to align herself with a movement that coopted feminism with the ultimate goal of meeting the needs of working-class, proletarian men. However, upon further examination of early manuscripts of La Lutte Féministe, patterns emerged that indicated an alliance to the communist cause through an unwavering commitment to the advancement of women, albeit alongside a particular discursive structure that emphasized a relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. Additionally, by 1920, the SFIO was undergoing a major period of transition, alienating fervent militants in Brion’s milieu. She remained a dedicated feminist through the lens of a political agenda that denounced oppression, hopeful that her meticulously-argued positions would forge a path for women in the PCF. The Soviet model provided further incentive to embrace membership in the European worker’s movement. Brion’s illicit visit to Moscow in 1921 demonstrated the remarkable participation of Soviet women in the Party and in civic life. Many militant socialists joined the Party alongside Brion (Sophie Cœuré adopted the term “passagères du communisme”), encouraged by the initial revolutionary rhetoric of Party leadership.162 Her decision to join the PCF at its inception would prove short-lived; by 1924, most feminists had been driven from the party rank-and-file, disillusioned by its masculinist discourse.163 In the early

1920s, Brion had completed a remarkable political evolution that would leave her discouraged and disillusioned for the future of French women – her journey, however, led her to reckon with nearly

162 Sophie Cœuré, “Hélène Brion en « Russie rouge » (1920-1922),” Le Mouvement Social no 205, no. 4 (n.d.) : 9– 20, 9. 163 Henri Dubief, “Brion Hélène, Rose, Louise,” Dictionnaire Biographique du Mouvement Ouvrier Français (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1964). (2).

59 all leftist organizations active in France and to briefly exert control over a loud minority within the powerful CGT.

Hélène Brion’s ideological shift was influenced by the state of feminism and the suffrage movement after the Armistice. If the activity of women’s organizations dedicated to suffrage experienced a heyday between 1908-1914, the renewed postwar campaigns for enfranchisement between 1919-1922 enjoyed a similar, though somewhat more muted, level of enthusiasm among

French women. This second period of active campaign proved futile when the Third Republic

Senate cast what would become one of its final votes rejecting female suffrage on November 22,

1922.164 In the years preceding that deciding vote, Hélène Brion took advantage of renewed interest in female enfranchisement, campaigning for her particular brand of feminism through editorial contributions to feminist newspapers. Her articles were culturally and politically relevant, laced with emotional commentary, and ultimately aimed at those women who shirked traditional activism in favor of ardent militancy.

As the war drew to a close and peace seemed imminent, Brion saw an opportunity for

European women to participate directly in the creation of a new world order. She drew inspiration from the Bolshevik revolution, a movement that claimed to champion the female worker, and critiqued the steadfast patriotism of French feminists who played into a male-dominated global society. Navigating her own complicated past with the French justice system and an administration that was openly hostile to her activities, Brion operated as an outsider on the fringes of a movement that was becoming further estranged from her brand of radical feminism. By 1922, the year of the

“nay” vote on women’s suffrage in France, Brion had ceased to publish her newspaper. To track

Brion’s political development through this crucial period (an often-overlooked moment in her life),

164 Hause and Kenney, Women's Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 241-242.

60 it is critical to understand the processes that drove her to embrace communism, alienate mainstream feminists, and adopt a utopian vision of a progressive, unified French women’s movement under the banner of the PCF. A true revolutionary, she was a singular voice among those with more conservative ideas for female advancement.

In late 1918, Hélène Brion was still a regular contributor to the left-leaning republican newspaper L’Action Féministe, edited by syndicalist activist Marthe Bigot. In the October 1918 issue, Brion printed the following statement:

We must wake up! What right to we have to ask men to help us when we don’t first help ourselves? Feminist comrades, we must try. I ask who among you feels the faith and the courage to help found, then enliven, a weekly newspaper that would be a reflection of our lives and of our social-political activities [;] [who] is interested in the working woman, manual or intellectual, who would consolidate our efforts in all aspects toward a better material and moral existence. I ask this because I know that we are now a force, a force for good, for peace and for justice and that we have the duty to elevate our voices. Who will answer me? –Hélène Brion, 1, rue Candale, Pantin.165

Here, Brion concluded a discussion of the August 1918 “Réunion Féministe,” held on

August 6th, 1918, where a group of activist institutrices debated a vague platform that outlined the demands necessary for parliamentary reforms, including universal suffrage.166 In her article, Brion rejected the advancement of women through the proletarian struggle alone, reaffirming the tensions inherent in the question of political participation. She underscored the importance of agitating on behalf of women as oppressed entities in and of themselves, rather than through the mainstream channels that remained hostile to feminist engagement (namely, l’Humanité, to which she directed particular criticism).167 To this end, she proposed the establishment of a newspaper and attempted to recruit other women as members of l’équipe. The nature of this advertisement,

165 Brion, Hélène. "Tournée féministe." L’Action Féministe, October 1918, 3. 166 Though dated as the October-November-December 1918 issue, the editorial team dealt with a significant backlog of reporting due to the Spanish flu epidemic, for which it apologizes on the title page. The August convention was reported here for the first time in October. 167 Hélène Brion, "Tournée féministe." L’Action Féministe, October, 1918. Page 3.

61 printed in a competing newspaper, called attention to the unique nature of Brion’s project. While she contributed to Bigot’s monthly journal, Brion’s vision for La Lutte Féministe was explicitly socialist (she opened her “call to arms” with distinct double-exploitation imagery and a focus on the working-class woman).168 Additionally, Brion placed herself – and any interested readers – in a class of the “intellectual vanguard” prevalent in Bolshevik propaganda. She sought to inform the

“uneducated” masses of women’s interests, heretofore silenced by the masculine majority.169

Unlike the pages of L’Action Féministe, which were open to both republican and militant feminists,

Brion’s La Lutte Féministe was to be crafted exclusively with a singular political narrative.

The following month, on November 16th, 1918, she launched the project with a handwritten copy of her periodical, sent to a selective list of interested readers who signed the front cover once it had been read and passed along. The first readers included Gaston Mouflard, a co-defendant at her trial the same year; Henriette Izambard and Noélie Drous, prominent feminist activists; Marthe

Bigot, syndicalist activist and editor at L’Action Féministe, and Jeanne Seguin, another local suffragist.170 The first manuscript and its successive iterations held powerful threads of political commentary that often gave way to overt skepticism. For Brion, these ideas formed a cohesive narrative that informed and elevated her feminist doctrine, though many pillars of her social framework were adapted from contemporaries to fit her vision.

The first issue of La Lutte Féministe opened with the statement: “Pourquoi ce journal??

[Why this newspaper??]”171 With this distinct sense of urgency, Brion established a signature voice that she carried in all her contributions to the publication; she also used conversational discourse,

168 Brion, “Tournée Féministe,” 1918, 3. 169 Brion, 3. 170 Hélène Brion, La Lutte Féministe, November 30, 1918, front cover. 171 Hélène Brion, “Article du programme,” La Lutte Féministe, 16 November 1918, 1.

62 engaging directly with potential recruits to her cause.172 The opening editorial lamented the lack of education afforded to women in twentieth-century France and presented the newspaper as an attempt to combat a consequent of political awareness among young women. Brion explained the newspaper’s function as a watchdog for the leftist press and noted the difficult challenge of

“resisting the current of indifference – even hostility – that [her] cause finds along the way.”173

The newspaper was thus theoretically directed at working-class women, though the unique copies of the original manuscripts were only read by Brion’s close circle of feminist intellectuals. On the outside looking in, Brion (somewhat problematically) attempted to voice the concerns of a large number of underrepresented women to a highly-educated minority of class-conscious feminist intellectuals. While the concept was ambitious, and deeply flawed, Brion nonetheless highlighted the failure of the broader women’s movement to unify a diverse array of conflicting agendas.

Brion’s working-class women were alienated from postwar suffragism, which relied heavily on parliamentary lobbying within the highest echelons of Third Republic society. Contemporary feminism, encumbered by the near-total lack of activism during World War I, struggled to coalesce minoritarian factions loyal to the social-political movements popular among working-class women in the 1910s. Essentially, Brion’s opening statements outlined the political philosophy of a self- motivated activist unwilling to compromise her beliefs for political expediency or compromise.

In the manuscript copies of Brion’s publication, she opened with a recurring section titled

Tribune politique that enunciated her thoughts on political issues and current events deemed relevant to her intended readership. In the first edition, the Tribune politique opened with the following line: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”174 She praised the

172 Brion, “Article du programme,” 1. 173 Brion, 1. « Elle prétend remonter le courant d’indifférence – presque d’hostilité – que notre cause trouve encore sur sa route. Et elle y arrivera ! » 174 Brion, “Article du programme,” 2.

63 transition of power in Germany, Austria, Hungary, “even Switzerland,” but remarked upon the decidedly “masculine” nature of the new governments there.175 As a case study for her own opinions on the political involvement of French women, she notes the lack of leftist coverage in

Germany for those feminists who she found integral to a more productive future: Clara Zetkin,

Rosa Luxembourg, and Louise Zeik. Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxembourg were of particular interest to Brion, as she discussed their work frequently in articles and pamphlets during this period. Zetkin was a socialist political operative who ultimately rose to prominence in Germany as a member of the Communist party.176 Luxemburg was a Polish-Jewish anti-war socialist.177

Both women, significantly older than Brion at the time of publication, were role models to her emancipatory quest: their ardent pacifism during the war and unwavering commitment to class- conscious politics resonated with her own brand of advocacy. It was during this period that Brion shifted her outlook decidedly outward. If Zetkin and Luxembourg were emblematic of Brion’s feminism, they were also symbols of her commitment to an internationally-oriented women’s movement aimed at overthrowing the masculinist nation-states instigated global conflict. She found herself in an isolated position. In the immediate postwar period, the feminist leagues were encumbered by a lingering nationalist sentiment that sought to punish the German people, whatever their sex, for the devastation of the war.

The “Tribune Politique” in the eighth edition, circulated on January 4th, 1919, discussed this issue in some depth. Julie Siegfried, president of the CNFF, responded to a radio call issued by German feminists urging their French counterparts to protest the imposition of war reparations on the German people. In her response, Siegfried enunciated a widely-held contempt for all

175 Brion, “Article du programme,” 2. 176 Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 200. 177 Hause, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic, 120-121.

German citizens who, without French opposition, would “profit from stolen property” unless they were required to “return it.”178 She listed the Germans as “aggressors,” and claimed that “according to the socialists, the treatment of the culpable would be softer than that of the innocent; there cannot be real ‘brotherhood’ before Justice.”179 Though Siegfried acknowledged the plight of women, she reiterated the position of French “silence” on the issue. This was a patently nationalist perspective, and antithetical to Brion’s internationalist orientation. Siegfried’s response was reprinted verbatim in Brion’s text so that the author herself could issue a counterargument, aimed at both the German women’s radio broadcast and Siegfried’s open letter. Titled “Réflexions personnelles,” this editorial reproached the CNFF for its “feminine document lacking any feminist spirit.”180 Assured that there were others who felt as she did, she called on her readers to sign an official response under the group title “La Lutte Féministe,” and issued a scathing condemnation of Siegfried’s open letter. The author’s committed internationalism was clear in her response:

We suffer with all the women who suffer even if they were born on the other side of the Rhine…we contest the profound mismanagement of the masculine Administration and we deeply regret having been treated as slaves within this nation that claims to champion [human] rights.181

Brion elaborated an intense rejection of nationalist discourse as it served to enhance the legitimacy of patriarchal government structures. This was a deeply controversial position, and it had very few adherents outside of some Zimmerwaldian socialists who remained committed to outright pacifism.182 Additionally, by convoluting the name of her newspaper with the name of a nonexistent women’s collective (La Lutte Féministe), she committed to an ideological direction

178 Hélène Brion, “Tribune politique,” La Lutte Féministe, January 4, 1918, 2. 179 Brion, 2. 180 La Lutte Féministe, Issue 8, 4 January 1919, 3. “…la réponse de ‘notre’ conseil national sont des documents féminins mais non d’esprit Féministe” 181 Hélène Brion, “Réflexions personnelles,” La Lutte Féministe, January 4, 1919, 4. 182 Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1966), 62-65.

65 for her newspaper that, unlike the stated objective of the first publication (a space for minority voices in the women’s movement), espoused a narrow political agenda. Her paper was the propaganda wing of her particular political ideology – class-informed feminist militancy – and operated under the distinct assumption that there were others (une équipe) who worked toward the same goals. This was an illusion; there was no “team,” and the space that Brion occupied was uniquely her own. The format of the first manuscripts only contributed to this irony, as her carefully-written cursive filled the pages in a freeform, identical manner.

Brion discussed other forms of oppression as they manifested themselves after the war; most remarkably, she pivoted from a subtle racism she exhibited at her trial to a more general understanding of oppression. In the statement read at her 1918 court martial, Brion complained of colonial populations that enjoyed more political rights than French women (“I am not the equal of an illiterate Negro of Guadeloupe”).183 By contrast, Brion expressed a solidarity with colonized peoples in La Lutte Féministe. She compared the government’s deliberate ignorance of the plight of women in World War I to the oppression of the “Guamites, Kabyles et autre Sénégalais des

‘races inférieures’” who fought for the French army on the Rhine and were subsequently erased from public narratives in favor of “soldiers of the white race.”184 It is important to note the quotation marks she placed around the term “races inférieures,” indicating her disapproval of the term, and the specific reference made to particular populations of people who she previously combined into a singular category of “indigènes.” This discursive shift was dramatic. As the armistice loomed, Brion began to understand the place of French feminism within broader spheres of influence that colored her understanding of global affairs. She aligned the cause of women with

183 Hélène Brion, “Statement Read to the Court Martial,” in Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 201. 184 Hélène Brion, “Réflexions personnelles,” 4.

66 that of colonial populations placed under a similar “yoke.”185 Her feminist internationalism extended past Europe, recognizing systems of oppression other than bourgeois/proletarian and male/female, as she had elaborated in previous publications.

Besides this interesting discursive shift in acknowledgement of racist discrimination, Brion used her internationally-oriented “Tribune Politique” to critique the policies of mainstream French feminists and the Third Republic. In the third issue, dated November 30th, 1918, Brion compared the inaction of the French CGT to the emancipation efforts of militants in Russia, Germany,

Hungary, and Poland, where women had gained certain rights.186 She rejected the notion that the

CGT could claim to support the rights of petits peuples while ignoring the plight of women, who meant nothing to the “Nation” to whom they belonged.187 While she claimed that a number of syndicalists supported the cause of women, she also noted that “only men” were considered among the protected minorities defined in CGT publications.188 Brion focused on the hypocritical and exclusive vocabulary used to legitimize the masculine hierarchies present in both left and right- wing society. By imposing upon her CGT colleagues a harsh criticism directed at their treatment of women, Brion undermined the notion that she fit among mainstream political narratives. She was a political outsider who shaped her philosophy in the context of revolutionary parties who excluded her particularism. By late 1918, Brion also relinquished her position as Secretary General of the teacher’s union after the return of discharged troops from the front.189 Discouraged by the lack of support for the women’s movement among her colleagues, particularly when the influx of veterans altered the priorities of the CGT, she allowed Maurice Foulon (a future deputy in the

185 Hélène Brion, “Réflexions personnelles,” 5. 186 Hélène Brion, “Tribune politique,” La Lutte Féministe, November 30, 1918, 1-2. 187 Brion, 1. 188 Brion, “Tribune politique” (1918), 1-2. 189 Dubief, “Brion Hélène, Rose, Louise,” (1-2).

French Senate) to assume leadership of the FNSI.190 Brion’s resignation solidified her alienation from syndicalism and distanced her from CGT leadership. This was an important moment in

Brion’s political evolution, as she moved closer to the militant socialism that would eventually lead her to the PCF.

Brion was actively engaged in the international women’s movement at the end of the war; in January 1919, she repeated Marthe Bigot’s call for another International Conference of Socialist

Women at the invitation of Clara Zetkin (who had organized the previous gathering in 1915).191

Brion stated that the ideal date for the reunion would be January 20, 1919 – two days into the Paris

Peace Conference. “Women…must have a part in the installation of a new world order,” she declared.192 She also called on her readers to write to their local federations in support of this conference; in the spirit of women’s rights, she implored them to write to the Congressional deputy and newspaper editor Joseph Denais in protest of French inaction on behalf of universal suffrage:

“Tell him that French women are just as important as veterans, as refugees, as Alsace- Lorraine. Tell him that they are not less worthy than…[women in other countries]…and those women vote. Tell these things to Monsieur Denais, who without a doubt will ignore them. Tell him that this state of things is humiliating for his wife, his mistresses, his sisters…write him!”193

The article was emblematic of Brion’s political positioning in 1919: while she was dispirited by the French government’s inaction on women’s rights, she nonetheless committed herself to an international solution, hoping that a multistate coalition might reverse the losses experienced by

French feminists. As she moved away from the CGT and toward the far-left socialist factions in the splintering SFIO, Brion remained determined in her belief that international activism could benefit the struggling French suffrage movement.

190 Dubief, “Brion, Hélène, Rose, Louise,” (2). 191 Hélène Brion, “Conférence Nationale des Femmes Socialistes,” La Lutte Féministe, January 4, 1919, 20. 192 Brion, 20. 193 Brion, “Conférence Nationale des Femmes Socialistes,” 20.

Brion’s internationalist vision paralleled growing tensions within the SFIO. The creation of the Third International in March 1919 polarized competing factions within the Party – the

Zimmerwaldian current (pacifists during the war) called for “immediate adherence” to the Third

International in a statement read by Committee for the Resumption of International Relations.194

Many of Brion’s wartime collaborators, including Fernand Loriot, led the Committee to change its name – it became the Committee for the Third International in the same year.195 While the

Committee prepared to assert its independence, Brion was sent on an illicit mission to Moscow from August 1920 to January or Feburary 1921, around the time of the Second Congress of the

Third International (Comintern).196 While in Russia, Brion secured a brief meeting with Lenin (she remarked upon his “radiant smile”) and wrote a travel diary titled “Choses et gens de Russie

Rouge.”197 She returned in early 1921. By the Congress of Tours in December 1920, Loriot’s

Committee had formed a coalition that split from the SFIO and joined the Third International as the French Section of the Communist International (SFIC), to be known as the Parti Communiste

Français (PCF) after 1921.198 Brion left the SFIO after Tours, alongside Marthe Bigot, Madeleine

Pelletier, and Caroline Kauffmann.199 Upon Brion’s return from Russia, the Committee buried her travel diary. It was “too feminist,” too personal, and imbued with a spiritualistic element that did not fit with the emerging genre of the “return from the USSR.”200 While the diaries of Madeleine

Pelletier and Louise Weiss were published enthusiastically by the SFIC, Brion’s work was unequivocally rejected. She never tried to have it published, preferring instead to focus on her

194 Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 133-134. 195 Wohl, 134. 196 Coeuré, “Hélène Brion en Russie Rouge,” 11. 197 Coeuré, 11-12. 198 Wohl, 197-207. 199 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 249-250. 200 Coeuré, “Hélène Brion en Russie Rouge,” 18-19.

69 newspaper and the growing pile of newspaper clippings that she was compiling into a “Feminist

Encyclopedia.”201

Initially, the PCF seemed committed to a platform that included women’s rights provisions.

In 1922, the Party created a newspaper (l’Ouvrière) to promote the rights of working women.

However, the feminists left just as quickly as they arrived. At the end of 1922, the Party began to purge those who it considered to be “amateur” pacifists and banned certain institutrices from Party membership. This move angered many women who had joined the movement; in 1924, Brion most likely left alongside a growing number of disillusioned feminist-communists.202 However, from

1920-1924, Brion was an active communist intellectual, working to promote the cause of women within an emerging revolutionary discourse. As evidenced by her travel notes from Moscow, she continued to push the boundaries of what was “acceptable” as a feminist in the French left and refused to compromise on her personal journey to expose the extent of patriarchal dominance in society.

A proud feminist above all else, she also supported Nelly Roussel and the anarchist neo-

Malthusians, a group of birth control advocates who provoked consternation within leftist circles.

Some of Brion’s early work could be traced to this minority movement, and she was particularly outspoken on behalf of neo-Malthusianism while she was a member of the Communist party. Neo-

Malthusianism was a direct derivative of the ideology of Thomas Malthus, who advocated population control through moral constraint (abstinence) and other environmental factors (famine, war, etc.) in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, neo-Malthusians supported contraception and abortion as acceptable methods of population control and eschewed

201 Coeuré, “Hélène Brion en Russie Rouge,” 19. 202 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 256.

70 the idea of abstinence, preferring the idea of sexual freedom through birth control.203 These ideas were particularly appalling to the general population in Third Republic France, which prided itself on masculine virility and Christian morality. Neo-Malthusianism was nearly banned outright after the First World War, when drastic population loss spurred the adoption of pronatalist policies in

France that rewarded men with large families, further criminalized abortion, and devoted itself to the overall vigor and procreation of the French people.204 Roussel was a neo-Malthusian advocate of sexual independence who, under the tutelage of prominent Anarchist thinker Paul Robin, became a well-known speaker among French leftist circles.205 She contributed to many of the same publications as Brion, and wrote the front-page article for the June 26th, 1921 edition of La Lutte

Féministe pour le communisme. Brion added her own editorial commentary after Roussel’s piece, complicating her allegiance to communism and the Party’s notable silence on the pronatalist policies of the Third Republic. Though Brion felt that socialism-communism was the only realistic path to full equality, she never ceased to attack the priorities of its male leaders, for whom feminism was an afterthought. The choice of Nelly Roussel as author of the front-page article was quite intentional: on the first anniversary of one of the most devastating pieces of legislation for the birth control and sexual independence movements in French history, there was no other option.

The article in question compares the relative indifference (and implicit support) shown by the French Left upon the passage of the Law of 31 July 1920 to the outrage it demonstrated after the passage of an “antimilitarist” law in 1921. The 1920 legislation banned all efforts to circulate information regarding birth control and abortion – while affirming the illegality of both methods

203 Accampo, “The Gendered Nature of Contraception in France,” 241. 204 Henri Dubiet and Philippe Bernard, Decline of the Third Republic, vol. 5, 8 vols., The Cambridge History of Modern France (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 145-146. 205 Elinor A. Accampo, “The Gendered Nature of Contraception in France: Neo-Malthusianism, 1900––1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, no. 2 (2003): 235–262, https://doi.org/10.1162/002219503322649499, 241.

71 and encouraging the public to report any medical professionals who ignored the law.206 By contrast, the 1921 law, renamed the “super-villainous law” by PCF leadership, targeted the “anti- military” tendencies of the Left, directly threatening the men calling for abolition of the bourgeois- capitalist military establishment.207 Roussel and Brion underscored the hypocrisy of ignoring the first but denouncing the second; both laws dealt directly with individual liberty, and each furthered the oppression of two distinct bodies (the first, the female body, the second, the male body in the form of forced conscription). Allowing the first to pass without incident demonstrated the passivity with which men responded to oppression of women. Roussel and Brion urged Party leaders to support female causes as vehemently as they responded to those concerning the male proletariat.

Indeed, per Roussel: “What we’re fighting, it’s not one injustice, it’s Injustice [itself]. What we want, it’s not a [singular] liberty, it’s Liberty [itself].”208 Here, she demanded equal treatment in the eyes of the Left: “We will not reduce our protest to the meager proportions of theirs…to us, all the liberticidal laws are ‘villainous’ to the same degree.”209

Roussel’s Neo-Malthusian politics were particularly interesting in the context of Brion’s communism-feminism in 1921. Brion, as outlined in her 1917 pamphlet La Voie Féministe, was an avid proponent of safe abortion and contraception/family planning, however antithetical to the overtly natalist philosophy of most leftist thinkers during this period.210 Roussel believed that female emancipation would succeed only after the woman is liberated from the “yoke” of childbearing – while Party leadership countered that pregnancy and its complications were

206 Richard David Sonn, “‘Your Body Is Yours’: Anarchism, Birth Control, and Eugenics in Interwar France,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 4 (2005): 415–432, 416. 207 Hélène Brion, “La loi super-scélérate,” La Lutte Féministe pour le communisme, June 25, 1921, 1. 208 Brion, 1: “Ce que nous combattons, ce n’est pas une injustice, c’est l’Injustice. Ce que nous voulons, ce n’est pas une liberté, c’est la Liberté.” [Emphasis original]. 209 Brion, 1: « Nous ne réduirons pas notre protestation aux mesquines proportions de la leur…à nos yeux, toutes les lois d’exception, toutes les lois liberticides, sont « scélérates » au même degré. » 210 Sonn, "Your body is yours,” 417.

72 considered “parallel sacrifices” to male military service, Roussel maintained that forced childbearing stood as the epitome of male oppression over the female body.211 Brion echoed her sentiments in her 1921 editorial commentary, citing the passage of the law as indicative of its danger. “To think that it was men who drafted, voted, men – judges, prosecutors, clerks, juries, police officers…who will oversee its application…”212 Brion sympathized with the neo-

Malthusian perspective, claiming that the law was passed specifically to persecute them.213 But she also viewed the law as an affront to all women, as it concerned state regulation of the female body without input or consent from a single female representative. As Brion predicted, the law was entirely ineffective as a measure intended to reverse the declining birth rate; in the end, it only served to increase the number of involuntary pregnancies and restricted important health care information from those who needed it most.214

Between 1919-1921, Brion attached hopes for female representation to her budding

Bolshevism – she was not a French Communist, but a Soviet-minded communist. The PCF, she decided, had much to learn from the struggle of the Reds in Russia. She devoted a significant portion of her newspaper to current events in the East; women there, she assured, were more liberated due to the Soviet regime’s accordance of their voting rights.215 Brion’s discussion of neo-

Malthusianism and PCF hypocrisy over the “super-villainous law” of 1921 illuminated the obstacles she encountered in France – alongside the optimism she held when dreaming of the newly-created Soviet state in the East. Brion was not an avowed neo-Malthusian, nor was she an anarchist, but she did agree that the oppressor owned and manipulated the worker’s body (male or

211 Accampo, "The Gendered Nature of Contraception in France,” 241-242. 212 Hélène Brion, “Leur nouvelle Loi,” La Lutte Féministe pour le communisme, June 25, 1921, 2. 213 Brion, 1-2. 214 Dubiet and Bernard, Decline of the Third Republic, 146. 215 Brion, “Pour la Russie,” La Lutte Féministe, June 25, 1921, 3.

73 female) to serve its capitalist purposes. While not perfectly aligned with anarchist views on individuality and self-sufficiency, Brion understood liberty as it thrived outside of existing state structures. She believed that the capitalist system manipulated and oppressed the proletariat, that women were systematically oppressed by men, and, like Roussel, that any pronatalist policies only served to produce “cannon fodder,” reducing women to reproductive machines and their children to objects of the state.216 While her views, like Roussel and Madeleine Pelletier (one of the first advocates for legal abortion in France), were explicitly banned from circulation after 1921, Brion continued to argue in favor of women’s reproductive rights as a subset of her militant feminism.

She pressed the Communist party to do more to combat the conservative neonatalism of the

Republic, and renounced the men who ignored her pleas. The PCF would do little to alleviate the suffering of French women during this period, and its inability to act against the “super-villainous” law only further alienated Brion from the Left.

Besides the clear thematic threads of political reasoning elaborated by Brion throughout her feminist newspaper, there were other subtle discursive patterns present in her writing that illuminated the “ideal feminist.” In 2008, Geoff Read enunciated a compelling argument for the analysis of obituaries in a discussion of paternalism and masculinity in France from 1919-1939.217

During this period, he explained, obituaries served as figurative reflections of widely-accepted traits and actions valued in Third Republic France.218 Though Read’s analysis focused on conceptions of masculinity among the political elite, the mere fact that these obituaries appeared in contemporary periodicals suggested that this phenomenon reached and informed all levels of society. Hélène Brion, in her quest to invert the masculine rhetoric of republican newspapers by

216 Accampo, "The Gendered Nature of Contraception in France,” 247. 217 Geoff Read, “Des Hommes et Des Citoyens: Paternalism and Masculinity on the Republican Right in Interwar France, 1919—1939,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 34, no. 2 (July 1, 2008): 88–111. 218 Read, 106.

74 engaging in explicit conversation with relevant editorials in the mainstream press, tended to follow a print layout similar to that of her adversaries. She employed obituaries as part of an overall agenda: like her republican counterparts, the editor highlighted the traits she found most compellingly feminist or militant about a variety of fallen comrades. Brion did not limit herself to recent deaths: the héroïne Sophie Perovskia died in 1881 but was eulogized as if she had recently passed.219 Using Perovskia as her muse, Brion actively inverted traditional discourse and promoted a feminist-revolutionary ideal using traditionally “masculine” vocabulary.

Brion’s exaltation of Perovskia, a woman hanged for her involvement in the assassination of Alexander II, was not particularly surprising. The author’s delicate description of her actions, however, underscored the traits that she considered “ideal” as a feminist revolutionary. Brion characterized Perovskia as “calm and serious” at her trial, “without any trace of arrogance.”220 She

“did not seek to exonerate herself, nor glorify herself:” Perovskia’s enemies were apparently

“moved” by her attitude at the sentencing.221 Brion’s praise of Perovskia at her trial was likely an allusion to the author’s 1918 court appearance, though she made no explicit mention of her own proceedings. Brion highlighted Perovskia’s comportment at her execution: she was described as

“courageous” and “composed,” two traits often used in obituaries of Third Republic political figures to underscore their gentleman-like characteristics.222 In her commendation of women like

Perovskia, Brion created a “mythology” of the militant feminist that highlighted her attempt to reconcile feminism with leftist revolutionary movements. This recognition served several purposes: first, like those of male political leaders, she could selectively promote values she found

219 Hélène Brion, “Nos Héroïnes: Sophie Perovskia,,” La Lutte Féministe pour le communisme, June 25, 1921, 7. 220 Hélène Brion, “Nos Héroïnes,” 7. 221 Brion, “Nos Héroïnes,” 7. 222 Brion, 7; for a discussion of recurring themes in Third Republic political obituaries, see Geoff Read, “Des hommes et des citoyens,” 92.

75 important, whether or not they encompassed the personality of the individual, as a “shining example” for other women. Second, she could systematically rewrite history by eulogizing women forgotten by their contemporaries. She drew a distinctive line between her duty and the struggle of those who came before her, connecting the international feminist struggle to her minority viewpoint and legitimizing the activist-feminist cause.

In a positive twist, Brion also dedicated herself to the advancement of women through sport and competition, a predominately masculine field that nonetheless produced a number of female personalities that Brion admired. Placed under the headline “Une Ame Libre dans un corps libre

[A free soul through a free body],” she dedicated a section to women’s sports features in issues three and eight, as well as a substantial section in the printed 1921 issue seventeen.223 She often bookended the discussion of sports with a discussion of women’s clothing and fashion, literature, and art. In the third issue, she opened the sports page with an advertisement for a women’s hockey match and information regarding a traveling group boarding a train at a certain hour from Paris.224

She also advertised the services of swimming instructors and gymnastics instructors who taught women. In the eighth issue, she praised young women who announced at a local feminist organizing event that they were starting a women’s sporting group; she remarked that within local circles, very few women have the opportunity to exercise effectively.225 Brion noted the discrepancy between the desire to “perfect the race” through physical culture while simultaneously excluding women perpetuated a complete system of oppression that limited female activity.226 This opinion demonstrated Brion’s dedication to eliminating all forms of patriarchal domination, explicit or implicit, in a variety of creative ways. By 1921, the sports page had become significantly

223 Hélène Brion, “Sports,” La Lutte Féministe, November 30, 1918, 3. 224 Brion, “Sports,” (1918), 3. 225 Hélène Brion, “Sports,” La Lutte Féministe, January 4, 1919, 15. 226 Brion, 15.

76 more complex. She underscored the accomplishments of female runners who reached significant milestones, while admonishing those who forced other female long-distance runners to wear skirts instead of trousers.227 This also followed an interesting thread in Brion’s writing that highlighted culottes as a highly liberating option for women throughout the sporting arena, noting that it freed them to perform other tasks more effectively.228 Brion’s commitment to women’s liberation through sport extended not only to their physical advancement, but also to a subtle undermining of male-dominated spaces to the benefit of young women. By printing scores and race times, like the results of a 1921 track meet among women in Normandy, she legitimized the recognition of women as concrete actors in a masculine discipline, thereby inverting a hated stereotype that women were physically and intellectually inferior to men.229 In short, Brion continually inverted feminine stereotypes by promoting the participation of women in nontraditional fields – namely sport and exercise.

Through the varied political and social coverage in La Lutte Féministe, Brion enunciated a feminist discourse that she attempted to actively reconcile with the prevalent sexism in socialist, syndicalist, and communist circles. She pushed for an international solution, turning outwards for inspiration and solidarity. She continued to advocate for marginalized political identities, namely

Roussel’s neo-Malthusianism, even if it further isolated her from mainstream politics. The pages of La Lutte Féministe undermined masculine hegemony in all its forms, whether through sport and exercise, fashion, or the recognition of feminist “heroes.” Though she was silenced by the

Communist party upon her return from Russia in 1921, Brion never ceased to be an individual with the ultimate goal of emancipating women from the yoke of sexist oppression.

227 Hélène Brion, “Athlétisme féminin,” La Lutte Féministe pour le communisme, June 25, 1921, 9. 228 Brion, “Sports,” (1919), 15. 229 Brion, “Athlétisme féminin,” 9.

Hélène Brion dedicated herself to the international worker’s revolution after her political alienation pushed her further outside socialist circles; however, her allegiance to communism remained insofar as it aligned with her uncompromising feminist vision. This commitment to women’s rights, cultivated over years as a suffragist and leftist advocate for feminism, remained her highest calling during the politically tumultuous period between 1918-1924. Brion participated in some of the most compelling social movements of the interwar period, but her focus was always directed squarely on the emancipation of women. Her newspaper La Lutte Féministe endured as the most comprehensive compilation of her often-contradictory beliefs. Ranging from a discussion of Bolshevik Russia, to the exaltation of eighteenth-century revolutionaries and the condemnation of the anti-abortion law of 1920, Brion’s editorialized newspaper enunciated the frustrations of an activist who never ceased to question established hierarchies and criticize outright members of a

Party that became increasingly conformist as it matured. If Brion’s ideology during this period could be summarized in a word, it would be just that: non-conformist. She was a non-conformist, class-conscious feminist who accepted international revolution as long as it liberated all women, irrespective of wealth or status. According to Brion, whether through participation in sport or as agents in their own reproductive decisions, women should constantly seek their own emancipation

– even when all hope seemed lost. Brion was a unique figure in the historical narrative of the Third

Republic, and La Lutte Féministe served as the “central organ” of her forward-thinking, controversial, and highly-personalized feminism.

Epilogue

“Life continues to be even more interesting, each day brings its contingent of novelties…regarding feminism, it continues to be on the 100000000 [lowest] level of preoccupations for these Messieurs, whether they are socialist or not. And if I had the power to print directly what was in my head, La Lutte Féministe would be published every day, with 4 full pages of what I’m thinking and experiencing in real time!”230 -Hélène Brion to Sylvia Beach, 1919

Hélène Brion’s enthusiasm for feminism and her frustration with men in positions of power permeated an April 1919 letter to Sylvia Beach, a longtime friend and benefactor.231 The newspaper was “progressing,” she said, and the fact that it “exist[ed]” constituted a first victory.232

Brion’s optimistic tone, however, belied a growing cynicism and disillusionment with the world she encountered in Paris. She was particularly shaken by the harsh words of an “old reactionary man” she encountered on the subway, who angrily called her a “Bolshevik” after seeing her wearing riding pants.233 This prophetic encounter was a testament to her alienation, and the nonconforming progressivism she cherished until her departure from politics.

Ostensibly an independent figure, Brion was nonetheless touched by the people who surrounded her. She maintained friendships with leftist intellectuals after she broke with the

Communist party in 1924, and continued to work on her mammoth Feminist Encyclopedia, which was left unfinished at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris.234 After years of suspension, she was reinstated to her position as a kindergarten teacher in 1925.235 One of her most cherished companions, the female physician and activist Madeleine Pelletier, died in an insane asylum in

1939. Brion was the only person to visit her in her last few months of her life, and attempted to

230 Hélène Brion, letter written to Sylvia Beach, April 28, 1919. 231 Sylvia Beach ran the bookstore Shakespeare & Company, where many intellectuals gathered in interwar Paris. She saved much of her correspondence with Brion, and also apparently kept four of the original manuscripts of La Lutte Féministe instead of passing them along for others to read. 232 Brion, April 28, 1919. 233 Brion, April 28, 1919. 234 Michallat, “Hélène Brion and the Missing Manuscripts,” 102. 235 Henri Dubief, “Brion Hélène, Rose, Louise,” 2.

79 hire a lawyer to secure her release.236 Besides the correspondence that Brion kept with Pelletier, and the faithful entries in her Feminist Encyclopedia, very little is known about her life after 1924.

In the 1950s, it was reported that she stated the following: “though there [are now] finally women in parliament, there [is no] feminist movement worthy of the name in France.”237 She died in northern France on August 31, 1962, when she was eighty years old.

Brion kept her personal life very private, though Sophie Coeuré has speculated that she maintained a romantic relationship with a Russian woman she met while abroad in 1920-1921.238

It was nearly impossible to know for sure. After the 1917 government seizure of her personal documents, Brion attempted to explain the content of a number of letters written to a young “Vera:”

“From the point of view of my psychology, there are in the letters some notes that you cannot decipher because I myself would perhaps be incapable of recognizing myself in them.”239 In any case, the subject of Brion’s private life remains something of a mystery. As for the spiritualism she developed near the end of her political career, the bulk of her writing seems to lie in the archives of the BMD and later print versions of La Lutte Féministe. Indeed, she did refer to the

“transformation of the individual spirit” while drawing a direct line between “real spiritualism” and “communism” in the June 25, 1921 issue.240 To be sure, Brion’s spiritualism is another understudied element of her life and political philosophy that requires further analysis.

Brion disappeared from French politics quietly, and without incident – disheartened by the failure of the women’s movement in the 1920s, she lost hope in the political solutions she had hoped to find in the French Left after World War I. In the years 1905-1924, however, she

236 Sowerwine, Sisters or Citizens? 127-128. 237 Gordon, Early French Feminisms, 16. 238 Coeuré, “Hélène Brion en Russie Rouge,” 19. 239 Coeuré, 19-20. 240 Hélène Brion, “Le Coin de l’au dela,” La Lutte Féministe, June 25, 1921, 10.

80 formulated a progressive, class-conscious feminism that existed in spite of efforts to discredit or silence her. Brion was an independent thinker who challenged existing assumptions about gender, class and systems of oppression. In her pamphlet La Voie Féministe, she emphasized the urgency of the “feminist question” over the “woman question,” rejecting the idea that women would be emancipated once the capitalist system fell. Though she maintained a controversial position, Brion managed to provide compelling historical arguments that demonstrated universal gender-based oppression. She emphasized that the systematic subordination of women had existed well before the bourgeois revolution. Brion’s uncompromising critiques of CGT and SFIO leadership did not, however, discourage her from participating in those movements entirely. On the contrary, she held important leadership positions in the CGT, SFIO, and various women’s collectives throughout nearly two decades of participation in leftist politics.

Brion’s intimate knowledge of the French left convinced her that a fragmented feminist movement was counterproductive to women’s emancipation. Though her comrades in the SFIO and CGT refused to cooperate with the suffragist leagues on account of the “bourgeois elements” within them, Brion urged socialist women to set aside class questions for the broader goal of unity among women. She even admitted that bourgeois women suffered equally, if not more, than working women (who were allowed a measure of liberation through productive labor). Brion’s insistence on eschewing class concerns in favor of women’s issues was polarizing because it undermined the core tenets of Marxist theory and relegated the class question to a position equal to other systems of oppression. She enunciated an understanding of bourgeois male superiority that complicated Marxist discourse and alienated her from mainstream socialist women, who championed the primacy of the proletarian cause over all else.

La Voie Féministe and La Lutte Féministe represented the cornerstones of Brion’s feminist ideology, and the realities of her political evolution. She was always an independent thinker, and

La Voie Féministe underscored her commitment to feminism over pacifism, syndicalism, and socialism. La Lutte Féministe marked a difficult transition to communism, where she sought like- minded, revolutionary individuals who might understand the pressing need for women’s involvement in a worker’s revolution. Though her hope quickly faded, Brion remained steadfast in her belief that, once given an opportunity, women would rise to the challenge and establish a more equitable global order. She was a non-conforming, class-conscious feminist who recognized global systems of oppression as they operated unfettered in patriarchal bourgeois society. Just as she refused to allow her beliefs to be coopted by male-dominated social movements, any historical analysis of Brion must recognize the delicate interplay of feminist critique in her writing. She was not merely a pacifist, she was a feminist pacifist; she was not a syndicalist, nor an anarchist, nor a socialist, nor even a communist – she was a feminist who used leftist militancy to further her emancipatory goals for women. When allowed to speak for herself, Hélène Brion enunciated a progressivism on behalf of marginalized women that subsumed all other political concerns. As she repeated countless times in La Voie Féministe and La Lutte Féministe, Brion’s ideology could be ultimately encapsulated in a single phrase, uttered by a Protestant pastor decades earlier:

“Woman, dare to be!”241

241 Félix Pécaut, quoted in Hélène Brion, La Lutte Féministe, June 25, 1921, front cover.

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Archival Sources

Hélène Brion to Sylvia Beach, April 28, 1919, Box 14, Folder 17, Sylvia Beach Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

La Lutte Féministe, various issues, Box 14, Folder 17, Sylvia Beach Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Personal Photographs of Hélène Brion from the files of Sylvia Beach, Box 165, Folder 5, Sylvia Beach Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Other Periodicals

La Française : journal de progrès féminin. Paris: [s.n.], 1913. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6815320r. [Conseil national des femmes francaises]

L’Action Féministe, Levallois: 1917, 1913, January 1918, April 1918, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57107026. [Fédération féministe universitaire de France et des colonies]

L’Humanité, journal socialiste. Paris: August 1918, December 1918. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb327877302/date1918.

Revue des causes célèbres, politiques et criminelles : les procès de trahison : compte-rendu des débats judiciaires d’après la sténographie. Paris: [s.n.], 1918. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1039104.