Anaïs Ségalas

French writer

• Born: September 21, 1814
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: August 31, 1893
• Place of death: Paris, France

One of the major French women writers of her time, Ségalas wrote a wide variety of poetry, drama, fictional prose, and criticism over a literary career that spanned six decades and reflected changing currents in French history.

Early Life

Anaïs Ménard Ségalas (ah-na-hees may-nahr say-gah-lahs) was born Anne-Caroline Ménard, the daughter of Charles Ménard, a cloth merchant in northern France’s Picardy region, and Anne-Bonne Portier, a Creole from the Caribbean nation of Haiti. Her father, aloof and significantly older than her mother, led an austere life as a staunch vegetarian. With his 1825 publication of L’Ami des bêtes (animal lover), her father made known his personal conviction that human beings had no right to use animals for their own sustenance.

Anaïs was raised primarily by her sensitive, doting mother, who openly shared her love of verse with her precocious child, and displayed her own poetic talent at the age of seven. When she was eight, she wrote a birthday ode for her father, and at the age of ten, she wrote a vaudeville play. In her explorations of her father’s library, Anaïs developed a passion for poetry and discovered the geniuses of French classical theater—Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille.

When Anaïs was only thirteen years old, she became betrothed to Victor Ségalas, a Basque barrister who enjoyed a distinguished record at the royal court in Paris. Two years later, she married him. Intent on cultivating her poetic gift, she exchanged a solemn vow with her new husband, who agreed not to stand in the way of her literary aspirations. She exhibited an early feminist sensibility by continuing to demand equality in her marriage and her right to pursue her own career.

Anaïs had already published some of her work in the widely read literary publication Le Cabinet de Lecture (reading room) and in a collection of verse titled Psyché in 1829. In 1831, she made her grand poetic debut with Les Algériennes, poésies (Algerians, poems), a volume that she wrote in response to the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. She thus launched a richly diverse writing career that would continue with extensive forays into poetry, theater, prose, and literary criticism—for which she garnered a place among the creative minds of her time.

Life’s Work

During the nineteenth century, European bourgeois women were seen as figures of propriety whose place was in the home, and they were expected to devote themselves to cultivating good manners. Anaïs Ségalas did not fit into the mold. She was a fascinating and complex woman, an accomplished equestrian with a spirit of adventure who nevertheless refused to travel outside Paris. She successfully combined her roles as wife, mother, and writer, which she did not consider incompatible. It was through poetry, however, that she developed what she understood as woman’s civilizing role to inculcate virtue. The critical reception of her work as a writing mother in particular suggests that she amply fulfilled her stated mission. She dedicated her critically acclaimed 1844 collection, Enfantines: Poésies à ma fille (childlike: poems for my daughter), to her only child, Bertile, a daughter who had been born the year before. That book, which underscored maternal duty and love, made Ségalas’s reputation as the poet of mothers, children, and family.

Unlike other women authors of her day, such as George Sand and the countess Marie d’Agoult, Anaïs Ségalas did not join the growing ranks of opponents of the oppression of women in a patriarchal society. In fact, in prefatory comments to another important volume of her poetry, La Femme (1847), she denied any connection with the increasingly militant feminist socialists of the 1840’s. Upholding the traditional assignment of separate spheres for men and women, she pointedly distanced herself from the Bluestockings, as women writers who ceased to appear womanly were disparagingly called. Indeed, much of her poetic expression stressing women’s civic duty and social importance as mothers was inspired by the fervent Roman Catholic faith that she demonstrated throughout her life.

Nineteenth century biographers and literary critics followed Ségalas’s dramatic writings with varying degrees of interest and admiration. Among her plays that made it to Paris stages were Loge de l’Opéra (opera box) and Trembleur (trembler). Her own critical reviews of theater also brought her notice. However, her later poetic and prose writings that intersect with salient moments in French colonial history inexplicably drew little attention. The strong reception of her Algériennes in 1831, like that of Les Oiseaux de passage (birds of passage) in 1836, suggests that issues of slavery and race that had seized her poetic imagination also appealed to the early nineteenth century public.

In Ségalas’s poetic response to the great moral debate about the emancipation of slaves that gathered force during the 1820’s and reached a feverish pitch in France during the 1840’s, she expressed empathy for the plight of black peoples who desired to join the rest of the human race. Her long narrative poem “La Créole (L’esclavage)” (creole woman [slavery]), which she published in La Femme in 1847—the year before France’s abolition of slavery in its colonies—implored French Creole women in the Caribbean to assume the work of civilization and prepare former slaves to become French citizens.

The colonial world again captured Ségalas’s fertile imagination and led to her exotic work Récits des Antilles: Le Bois de la soufrière (tales from the Antilles: the forest of the volcano) in 1884, at the same time France was calling for major colonial expansion into Africa and Asia. Echoing a political stance that mirrored the racist culture of late-nineteenth century France, Ségalas’s Parisian narrator in that work saw little progress long after emancipation in the “new world,” where the shadow of slavery and inherited prejudice still haunted the Creole population.

During the last years of her life, Ségalas created a literary salon over which she presided with her daughter and continued to create new works. She remained keenly aware of what topics interested her public and fashioned her place in French literary history. She died in Paris, on August 31, 1893, during her seventy-ninth year.

Significance

Anaïs Ségalas’s writings offer modern readers glimpses into the life of a mind of a politically conservative and yet deeply creative bourgeois woman cultivated in a century that made the high art of poetry the prerogative of the male sex. Nineteenth century literary critics generally included Ségalas among the ranks of accomplished women, highlighting her writing about women as mothers with no overtly feminist agenda. In 1917, the Académie Française established the Prix Anaïs Ségalas, which acknowledged both her life’s work and the work of other strong women authors who became its recipients.

Some of Ségalas’s most important works coincided with major turning points in France’s colonial enterprises. The fact that she was a Parisian with a Creole heritage has been brought to light in a modern critical edition of her popular Récits des Antilles: Le Bois de la Soufrière and select poems. Hers is an achievement all the more striking at a distance from which one can measure the conditions under which she produced volumes of poems, plays, short stories, and novels that often went through multiple editions.

Bibliography

Czyba, Luce. “Anaïs Ségalas.” In Femmes Poètes du XIXe siècle: Une Anthologie, edited by Christine Planté. Lyon, France: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1998. A modern feminist assessment of the literary and sociological import of Ségalas’s writings.

Delaville, Camille. Mes contemporaines. 1st series. Preface by Henri des Houx. Paris: P. Sévin, 1887. An account of Ségalas in the latter years of her life by one of her contemporaries.

Desplantes, François, and Paul Pouthier. Les Femmes de lettres en France, 1890. Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkine Reprints, 1970. A late-nineteenth century anthology of women of letters that accords Ségalas an honorable place.

Doumic, René. La Vie and les mœurs. Paris: Perrin, 1895. A late-nineteenth century account of Ségalas’s celebrity.

Finch, Alison. Women’s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Survey of French literature that contains several references to Ségalas.

Mirecourt, Eugène de. Madame Anaïs Ségalas: précédée d’une lettre à M. Alphonse Karr. Paris: Havard, 1856. A comprehensive account of Ségalas’s early life and critical reception of her writings through the 1840’s.

Ségalas, Anaïs. Récits des Antilles: Le Bois de la Soufrière, suivis d’un choix de poèmes. Edited by Adrianna M. Paliyenko. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004. A modern critical edition of Ségalas’s popular late-nineteenth century novel that retrospectively measures the effects of the French abolition of slavery.

Sullerot, Évelyne. Histoire de la presse féminine en France des origines à 1848. Paris: Armand Colin, 1966. A brief historical account of the Christian nineteenth century feminist circles with which Ségalas associated.