Hubertine Auclert

French journalist and feminist

• Born: April 10, 1848
• Birthplace: Tilly, France
• Died: April 4, 1914
• Place of death: Paris, France

Auclert was a prominent figure in the struggle for women’s political and civil equality in France through the last four decades of her life. As a journalist, she published more than seven hundred signed articles in leading periodicals and lent currency to the terms “feminist” and “feminism.”

Early Life

The fifth in a family of seven children, Marie-Anne-Hubertine Auclert (mah-ree ahn ew-bur-teen oh-klehr) grew up in the department of Allier in central France. Her father, Jean-Baptiste Auclert, a republican landowner of Jacobin heritage, held appointments as mayor and adjunct mayor in the small communities of Tilly and Saint-Priest-en-Murat. Her mother, Marie Chanudet, married her father during the late spring of 1835. From 1857 to 1864, Hubertine was educated at a local convent, probably the Dames de l’Enfant Jésus (Ladies of the Child Jesus) in nearby Montmirail, where her father died in 1861.

In 1864, when Hubertine was sixteen, she sought admission into Saint Vincent de Paul’s Sisters of Charity, but her application was rejected. When her mother died in 1866, she was placed—against her will—in a convent in Monluçon. Her experience there, although brief, seems to have kindled anticlerical feelings and reinforced in her a strong desire for independence. Financial independence came to her at the age of twenty-one, when she gained access to her portion of the family estate.

Hubertine’s inheritance, assessed at about sixty thousand francs, did not make her wealthy but was enough to ensure a comfortable annual revenue that freed her from the need to work for a living. This freedom allowed her to volunteer service to the victims of a smallpox epidemic during the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871) before she turned her attention—almost exclusively—to the cause of women’s rights.

In June, 1872, the feminist paper L’Avenir des femmes (the future of women) published a letter by French poet and playwright Victor Hugo equating the treatment of women in French society with slavery and calling for an end to government’s discriminatory policies against women. It was that letter, as Auclert later recalled, that determined her to go to Paris to lend support to the growing feminist movement.

Life’s Work

Hubertine Auclert arrived in Paris in the first half of 1873, during what appeared to be a revival of political activism in France. In the latter years of the country’s Second Empire, most notably during the late 1860’s, a liberalization of governmental policies had given new impetus to the formation of women’s organizations in Paris. In 1866, the left-wing journalist André Léo—born Léodile Bera—founded the Society for the Concession of Women’s Rights. Three years later, activists Maria Deraismes and Léon Richer created a long-lived weekly journal, Le Droit des femmes (rights of women), which was known as L’Avenir des femmes from 1871 to 1879. They also announced the formation of the Association for the Rights of Women. In 1871, the first woman to receive a secondary school diploma in France, Julie Daubié, established the Association for the Emancipation of Women. These activists represented the vanguard of the French feminist movement.

Within months of her arrival in Paris, Auclert became a regular participant in Richer and Deraismes’s circle, occupying a chair in the association’s central committee of eighteen members until her election to a full three-year term in January, 1874. She also accepted an appointment as an editorial assistant and published occasional letters in L’Avenir des femmes. By early 1875, the local police had recognized in Auclert one of the capital’s leading feminists and began keeping a file on her activities. Later that same year, Richer and Deraismes’s association was officially prohibited. Auclert then founded a new society, Droit des femmes, an organization that sought full civil and political rights for women. It was later renamed Suffrage des femmes (woman suffrage) to reflect its primary objective more accurately. The society first met in March, 1877, and acquired legal status on September 28, 1879.

Historians have described Richer’s and Deraismes’s politique de la brèche (tactic of the breach) as a moderate and cautious program of sociopolitical reform aimed at achieving minor victories by avoiding divisive political issues such as woman suffrage and full equality. Auclert, who was more radical in her approach, refused to sacrifice major goals in exchange for minor concessions, preferring instead an offensive strategy (stratégie de l’assaut) that was more aggressive. Her militant approach to social reform was inspired in part by left-wing activists. Auclert argued that women must obtain the right to vote before they could exert any real influence in the political arena. The philosophical rift between her and her cautious mentors became evident when Richer and Deraismes opposed her attempts to introduce the issue of woman suffrage into the program of the International Woman’s Rights Congress of 1878. As a result of their refusal, Auclert withdrew from the congress’s planning committees so she could seek other venues for her feminist agenda.

In 1881, Auclert founded the newspaper La Citoyenne (the citizeness) as a platform for her ideas, using it to coordinate and publicize the various aspects of her “assaultist” program over the next decade. In addition to the publication of more than 250 articles and editorials for La Citoyenne during its ten-year existence, her activities included participation in public demonstrations, protest actions, promotional campaigns, numerous petitions to governmental agencies, and acts of civil disobedience.

In 1888, Auclert married her long-standing companion, the journalist Antonin Lévrier. She then spent four years with him in Algeria, until he succumbed to chronic illness, leaving her a widow. During her stay in that North African French colony, she observed with horror the abuses of polygamy, the common practices of prepubescent marriage and divorce by repudiation, and the racism inherent in colonial rule, denouncing them in a collection of essays titled Les Femmes arabes en Algérie (1900; Arab women of Algeria).

When Auclert returned to Paris in 1892, La Citoyenne had ceased to exist. During her absence, new activists had gained prominence in the women’s movement. In 1896, after placing a small number of articles in various newspapers, including the right-wing La Libre parole (free speech), she began writing a weekly column titled “Le Féminisme” for a well-funded newspaper, Le Radical. Between October, 1896, and November, 1909, she wrote more than four hundred weekly columns on a wide range of women’s issues, helping promote public awareness of her movement’s worthy goals.

In addition to earlier pamphlets and her book on Algerian women, Auclert also published collected articles in Le Vote des femmes (the women’s vote) and Les Femmes au gouvernail (women at the helm). A copy of her diary survives among the “Auclert Papers” housed at the City of Paris Historical Library.

Significance

Hubertine Auclert played a crucial role in social politics during the formative phase of the French feminist movement. A determined advocate for women’s rights, she helped educate her contemporaries on the myriad hues of discrimination endured by women under the nominally democratic regime of France’s Third Republic. Between the early days of her militant activism and the years immediately preceding World War I—which began four months after she died—feminism became a household word and participation in women’s rights organizations rose dramatically.

Auclert’s many militant actions, including tax and census boycotts (1880-1881, 1885), suffragist petition campaigns (1880-1887), mock campaigns for public office (1881, 1885, 1910), and the defiant burning of the Napoleonic Code (1904), attracted considerable media attention to the women’s movement, promoted discussion of issues important to women, and helped establish foundations for the movement’s future success. One of Auclert’s last militant actions, the willful destruction of a ballot box in 1908, earned her the derisive soubriquet “the French suffragette.” A fitting tribute to her lifelong struggle, it was a title that she bore with pride.

Bibliography

Bidelman, Patrick Kay. Pariahs Stand Up! The Founding of the Liberal Feminist Movement in France, 1858-1889. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Chapter 4 concentrates on Auclert’s “strategy of assault” and provides an overview of her major achievements. Includes insights based on Auclert’s personal diary.

Hause, Steven C. Hubertine Auclert, the French Suffragette. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. This comprehensive biography has ample discussion of the social and political context and includes a list of Auclert’s newspaper articles (1876-1911) and petitions (1898-1912), descriptions of programs and statutes (1877-1910), and an extensive bibliography.

Ozouf, Mona. Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. A chapter devoted to Auclert underscores the suffragist’s intransigent idealism and austere morality.

Rochefort, Florence. “The French Feminist Movement and Republicanism, 1868-1914.” In Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective, edited by Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Examines the history of nineteenth century feminist journalism, from the Saint-Simonian La Femme libre (the free woman) to Auclert’s La Citoyenne and Marguerite Durand’s La Fronde (the sling).

Scott, Joan Wallach. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Chapter 4 discusses Auclert’s activism within the political framework of the Third Republic.

Taïeb, Edith. “Abuses of ’Masculinism’ in Hubertine Auclert’s La Citoyenne.” In Women Seeking Expression, edited by Rosemary Lloyd and Brian Nelson. Melbourne: Monash University, 2000. Focuses on the journalist’s critique of a “masculinist” social order.