Deroin, Jeanne-Françoise (1805–1894)

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Deroin, Jeanne-Françoise (1805–1894)

French socialist feminist, prominent in the Revolution of 1848, who was the first woman in France to run for national office. Name variations: Deroin sometimes incorrectly spelled Derouin. Pronunciation: JHAN fran-SWAHZ der-RWEN. Born in Paris, France, on December 31, 1805, to working class parents; died in London, on April 2, 1894; self-educated; married M. Desroches, in 1832; children: two daughters, one son (d. 1887).

Became allied with Saint-Simonianism (early 1830s); conducted a school for poor children (1840s); during the Revolution of 1848, founded clubs and daily, weekly, and monthly journals promoting rights for women and workers; ran for the Legislative Assembly and founded the Union of Fraternal Associations of Workers (1849); arrested and sentenced for subversion (1850); released (1851) and fled to England (1852); published the Almanach des femmes (1852–54); corresponded occasionally with feminist and socialist leaders (1850s–80s).

In midlife, Jeanne Deroin was described as "a small, thin woman generally wearing a hooded coat capped with black plumes decorated with a rose-red ribbon," a puny figure who, despite a certain sickly air, possessed a tough body, that would endure for 88 years, and an even tougher will.

She was born to impoverished working-class parents in Paris on December 31, 1805. Because she was habitually silent about her private life, her known story has long gaps. Of her earliest years, she said only, "I knew little of the joys of childhood." Trained as a seamstress, she had no formal education. Her mother thought women needed none, an idea that may have turned Jeanne toward considering women's place in the scheme of things. She taught herself to read, and she read voraciously. By the 1830s, she was familiar with Morellet, Mably, Rousseau, and other philosophes, and had come under the influence of the "utopian" socialists Pierre Leroux, Fourier, Cabet, and especially Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825).

From the beginning, it seems, she loved liberty and hated domination of any kind. She dreamed of a chaste, sexless marriage, but when she married a M. Desroches, the treasurer of a state retirement home, in a civil ceremony in August 1832, she found sex was not part of the bargain when he said she would be free to act as she saw fit. She gave birth to two daughters and a son whom she loved even so. She wanted autonomy from men but not from children.

In the early 1830s, she turned from a conventional republicanism toward the Saint-Simonians because they, unlike the republicans, favored equality for women. In time she came to fear, however, that the eccentricities of utopian socialism would arouse hostility toward the feminist cause. She never wholly adopted Saint-Simonianism because she disagreed with its apolitical stance and above all because its odd religious cult was ruled by a male hierarchy headed by a kind of pope. The religious dimension of Deroin's thought nonetheless was very important, for she linked religion and politics indissolubly. She rejected institutional religion but strongly believed in a Creator God who is the sole Authority and the Father of social and sexual equality. After her own fashion, she was a Christian socialist: Jesus, a human reformer superior to the philosophers of antiquity, was the founder of socialism.

Amidst the social and intellectual ferment of the years 1830–34, Deroin (and other women) sent in a "declaration of faith" to Le Globe which contained the core of the views she held thereafter, notably including an attack on the practice of women taking their husbands' names, a custom never before challenged so bluntly. She was probably not, however, a staff member on the Saint-Simonian gazette La Femme libre and its successors, L'Apostolat des femmes and La Tribune des femmes, as is often asserted by those who believe she was the author of the "Jeanne-Victoire" articles. Apparently not until the Revolution of 1848 did she embark on public action to support her beliefs. In the meantime, during the 1840s, Deroin became a teacher. She founded a school for poor children and her own after one abbé Deguerry helped her in her struggle to obtain a license; she failed twice because she couldn't write in cursive, was poor in arithmetic, and held unorthodox religious ideas. She earned a meager living, because poor children, of course, often could not pay.

When the Revolution of February 1848 broke out, Deroin entrusted her children to friends, used only her maiden name, in order not to compromise her civil-servant husband, and began what became seven years of intense public activity. Aided by Olinde Rodrigues, a Saint-Simonian banker, she and Eugénie Niboyet founded France's first feminist daily paper, La Voix des femmes (The Women's Voice, March 20–June 18). Parting ways with Niboyet, she and Désirée Gay , founded a weekly, La Politique des femmes (June 18–August 5), a more socialist paper emphasizing workers' solidarity more than feminism as such. Finally, she founded and directed a monthly, L'Opinion des femmes (August 1848, January 28–August 10, 1849). Limited resources, the need to make the government-required caution deposit, a flood of competing papers, and the unpopularity of feminism in most quarters held these papers to circulations under 300. Clubs, however, proliferated. The early Society of the Women's Voice, with Niboyet as president, Gay vice-president, and Deroin secretary-general, became the Women's Club on May 11 and met thrice weekly, sessions usually interrupted by jeering men. For reasons unknown, Deroin and Gay left and founded the Mutual Association for the Education of Women, an adjunct of the Politique des femmes, which also published brochures, including Deroin's eight-page Cours de droit social pour les femmes (Course in Social Law for Women; Imprimerie du Plan, n.d.) Some time in the summer of 1848, Deroin also founded, with a Fourierist, Dr. Malatier, and Adèle Esquiros , the short-lived Club of the Emancipation of Women. Female club activity suffered a mortal blow, however, when the Constituent Assembly—elected in April to replace the Provisional Government of February and write a constitution for the new Second Republic—decreed (July 26) during the crackdown after a largely working-class uprising (the June Days) that women could not speak in public debates nor join, nor attend, political clubs.

In the heady days of the spring of 1848, Deroin and many others believed the reign of God on earth would begin once the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity became embedded in hearts and laws, but that any such program would fail without equality for women. At the start, Deroin sent four petitions to the government and signed an appeal in La Voix des femmes in this vein, although at first it was proposed that men would choose the most worthy women to act as guardians of the principles of the revolution and of women's rights—hardly a radical idea. The paper called for the vote only for widows and single women, reflecting the common belief that votes for both husbands and wives might split families, the bedrock social organisms. In the same spirit, Deroin, Gay and Anna Knight de Longueville petitioned the National Assembly to name women as consultants to the constitution committee. They were groping for some way to help write the laws, especially laws to legalize divorce, revise the Civil Code, organize women's labor, and (particularly for Deroin) get equal pay with men and abolish state-sanctioned prostitution. These proposals went nowhere.

To Deroin, it was axiomatic that the true Republic was impossible as long as "the last of privileges remained, that is, the one of men." When the government grandly proclaimed that "the vote belongs to all with no exceptions," she replied that there were "17 million" exceptions. Men acting alone have made a mess, she observed, which proves that both sexes are needed for a proper republic to work. This must be done on a basis of equality throughout: "society is founded on the family: if the family remains founded on inequality, society will take its old course." To reach this goal, violence must be rejected. The awful bloodshed of the June Days appalled her. She appealed for peace and tried to persuade Félicité de Lamennais to mediate. She distrusted revolutionary leaders, who in her view became exploiters of the misery of others. But her own experience of attempting to lead brought frustration over the lack of response she received from the masses of ordinary women: "Woman, still slave," she wrote in Cours de droit social, "remains veiled in silence…. Held down by man's yoke, she has not even the aspirations toward liberty; man must liberate her."

Despite obstacles and unfazed by the retirement of many of her compatriots, Deroin pressed on and in early April 1849 made her most dramatic move. She announced her candidacy for the Legislative Assembly in the April 23 elections, becoming the first woman ever in France to run for national office. Her announcement proclaimed, "An assembly composed entirely of men is as incompetent to make the laws which govern a society composed of men and women as would be an assembly composed entirely of the privileged to discuss the interests of the workers or an assembly of capitalists to uphold the honor of the country." Besides rights for women, her platform called for a general amnesty, the organization of work and public education, and (a typical '48ist touch) a universal congress of peoples convoked to regularize production and exchange and to enable France to support oppressed peoples.

Deroin tried to persuade the left-wing Social Democrats to put her on their committee as a symbolic gesture or at least as an endorsement of her candidacy. The famous socialist P.-J. Proud-hon, strongly anti-feminist, opposed this saying that the fact that women have organs intended to nourish the young makes them unfit for the polls. He apparently made no reply, writes Priscilla Robertson , when Deroin asked him to show her the organ that qualified him as an elector. The Social Democrats turned her down. She campaigned around Paris, sometimes being refused admission to meetings, at others allowed to speak. She became instant fodder for press mockeries, theater jokes, and caricatures by Daumier. Informed on April 16 that her candidacy was unconstitutional, she continued on anyhow and did win some sympathy in working-class districts. But most men did not want to waste a ballot, so only a pitiful handful wrote in her name. Ironically, George Sand , who had flatly refused a nomination, received more votes.

The political dead end Deroin had reached convinced her to seek to "change the basis of society." Socialistic mutual-benefit associations had sprung up in the 1840s; the Revolution furnished exceptionally fertile soil. Deroin, not drawn to theorizing but to action, seized upon this apolitical means to build that new "basis." For once, she reaped some success, short-lived though it proved to be. On February 6, 1849, she had joined Pauline Roland 's Fraternal Association of Socialist Teachers and Professors and presently joined with Elisa Lemonnier and Suzanne Voilquin to ask the Social Democrats to support a Fraternal Society of the United Workers, an ambitious project including a production cooperative, school, library, and courses for working women. The party turned a deaf ear. Undeterred, Deroin founded the Fraternal Association of the Social Democrats of the Two Sexes for Political and Social Enfranchisement of Women. In August 1849, she outlined a plan for a cooperative organization embracing all associations. Her monthly L' Opinion des femmes had to cease publication because of the 1000-franc fine levied against it for publishing the plan.

Nevertheless, delegates from 83 associations met on August 23 and named a committee, including Deroin, to draw up a constitution, and on October 5 some 104 associations' delegates adopted the draft creating the Union of the Fraternal Associations of Workers. Deroin, the chief inspirer, sat on the central committee. The Union was a complicated, quite ingenious scheme to unite production and consumption among the associations so that individuals could be self-sufficient and not have to resort to public markets. The plan's leitmotif was not equal pay per se but the assurance of fair distribution to all according to their needs.

If such a union or unions were to spread, the need for a government at all would be under-mined. The authorities decided to act. On May 29, 1850, the police broke into a meeting of the leaders and arrested all 47 men and 9 women present, of whom 27 men and 2 women (Deroin and Roland) were held for trial. At the trial, Deroin disclaimed being the inspirer of the organization in order to spare the male defendants embarrassment. She explained her socialist views with "social erudition," a reporter wrote, but the judges seemed more interested in her views on marriage, illegitimacy, and her use of her maiden name. Sentenced to six months on November 15, she was imprisoned at Saint-Lazare. While there, she wrote a 14-page pamphlet, Du Célibat (Paris: Les Marchands de nouveautés, 1851), arguing that marriage is not woman's sole destiny; an appeal (with Roland) for solidarity to American feminist "sisters," who in the Second National Women's Rights Convention delegated Lucretia Mott to correspond with French feminists; and (with Roland) a letter to the Legislative Assembly protesting a projected law (passed in July) forbidding women the right to petition.

Deroin was released on June 3, 1851 (or in some accounts early July). The association had survived, and she addressed them in a 47-page brochure, Lettres aux associations sur l'organisation du crédit (Paris: G. Sandré, 1851), defending barter against the use of money. She resumed giving lessons, tried to start special classes for workers, and organized aid for families of political outlaws and exiles. Finally, disgusted by Louis-Napoléon's coup (Dec. 2, 1851) and police surveillance of herself, she fled to London in August 1852 and never returned. Her children joined her there, her eldest daughter staying with her to the end. Her son, sickly, died in 1887. As for her husband, he had lost his job for reading socialist literature and gone insane for a time. He recovered but could not join her and soon died of typhoid fever. Deroin eked out a living teaching poor children, retiring in 1861. She practiced vegetarianism and over time was drawn to spiritualism. In 1880, the Third Republic awarded her a 600-franc pension, which helped her through her last years.

In London, she continued writing, in 1852–54 publishing with the aid of friends three annual issues of the Almanach des femmes, the first (in Paris) in French, the latter two in French and English. The almanachs, reflecting the disappointments of 1848 when women had hoped for inclusion, devoted much space to the exploits of women and to societies serving good causes. Besides treating broad subjects of interest to women, she defended her ideas about the freeing of women and workers, the organization of production, and the abolition of the death penalty. Unfortunately, she failed to gain a sufficient circulation to continue. After that her writing faded. She issued a brochure, Lettre aux travailleurs (1856), a reworking of the Lettres aux associations; wrote a letter to Pierre Laroux, June 9, 1858, published in L'Espérance; corresponded with the First International Workingmen's Association in 1865; corresponded with the feminist advocate Léon Richer c. 1877; wrote a letter to his Le Droit des femmes, October 7, 1883, in which she opposed his call for the right of women to file paternity suits, saying it would increase infanticides; and wrote letters to the suffragist Hubertine Auclert in 1886. Deroin is also known to have projected or started on an Essai sur la doctrine de Pythagore; an Évangile des femmes combining "true" Christianity with "true" socialism; and a Souvenirs de 1848 using notes from L'Opinion des femmes. Jeanne Deroin died in London on April 2, 1894. Her funeral was well attended, with the eulogy being delivered by the eminent English socialist William Morris.

Deroin's socialism sought to convert through example, not violence. Her activity focused upon freeing women and the working class generally from their historic bondage. Unlike most contemporaries, writes Joan Wallach Scott , she "turned sexual difference into an argument for equality." At the deepest level, her ideas turned upon finding again "the true law of God," wrongly interpreted by men, in order to "put back some order … in the big household that is the State." Order could be achieved only by establishment of equality between the sexes—which are at once complementary and autonomous—beginning in the family, the foundation of society: "Man is able to establish order only by despotism," she wrote; "woman is able to organize only through the power of maternal love; the two united will be able to reconcile order and liberty." Seeing marriage as "a state of servitude for women," she wanted it to be "purified, moralized, equalized, under the inspiration of the precepts posed by God himself."

Unfortunately for Deroin herself, she and the other female reformers in 1848 were greeted mostly with scorn and incomprehension, unjustly caricatured as "social and sexual misfits." In fact, she idealized—to excess, some would say—marriage and motherhood and denounced sexual promiscuity and prostitution. The women's movement failed in 1848 in France, not to revive until the late 1860s. Plainly, Deroin was born out of her time. Not until 1944 did women vote in France, nearly a century after she stood for election to the Parliament. Her ideas of sexual equality have become common currency, but only generations after her activist years. Her thought and actions displayed a remarkable consistency. As Michèle Riot-Sarcey notes, despite poverty, repeated failures, misunderstanding, and unmerited neglect, her "outstanding character … forces admiration…. The coherence of this individual … is flawless."

sources:

Bidelman, Patrick K. Pariahs Stand Up! The Founding of the Liberal Feminist Movement in France, 1858–1889. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

Decaux, Alain. Histoire des françaises. Vol. 2: La Révolte. Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1972.

Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français. Sous la direction de Jean Maitron. Paris: Éditions ouvrières, 1964—.

McMillan, James F. Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870–1914. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1981.

Moses, Claire. French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Albany: SUNY Press, 1984.

Offen, Karen. "Deroin, Jeanne," in An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers. Ed. by Katherine M. Wilson. NY: Garland, 1991.

Rabaut, Jean. Histoire des féminismes français. Paris: Éditions Stock, 1978.

Rendall, Jane. The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860. NY: Schocken Books, 1984.

Riot-Sarcey, Michèle. "De l'utopie de Jeanne Deroin," in 1848—révolutions et mutations au XIXe siècle. No. 9, 1993, pp. 29–36.

——. La Démocratie á l'épreuve des femmes: Trois figures critiques du pouvoir, 1830–1848 [Eugénie Niboyet, Jeanne Deroin, Désirée Gay]. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994.

——. "A Public Life Denied to History: Jeanne Deroin, or the Forgetfulness of Self," in Turning Points inHistory. First International Conference, Amsterdam, 26–30 September 1988. History of European Ideas. Vol. 11 special, 1988, pp. 253–261.

Robertson, Priscilla. An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth Century Europe. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

documents:

Paris: Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin; Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Fonds Bouglé; Bibliothèque Marguerite-Durand, Dossier Deroin.

David S. Newhall , Professor Emeritus of History, Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, author of Clemenceau: A Life at War (Edwin Mellen, 1991)

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia