COLETTE FRANÇAISE (ET FILLE DE ZOUAVE) - Colette and French Singularity - Berghahn Journals
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COLETTE FRANÇAISE (ET FILLE DE ZOUAVE)
Colette and French Singularity
Kathleen Antonioli
ABSTRACT: This article argues that French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
occupies a central position in the canon of French women’s writing, and that
from this position her reception was deeply influential in the development
of the myth of French singularity. After World War I, a style of femininity
associated with Colette (natural, instinctive, antirational) became more
largely synonymous with good French women’s writing, and writers who did
not correspond to the “genre Colette” were excluded from narratives of the
history of French women’s writing. Characteristics associated with Colette’s
writing did not shift drastically before and after the war, but, in the wake of
the Great War, these characteristics were nationalized and became French.
KEYWORDS: antifeminism, Mona Ozouf, reception history, Sidonie-Gabrielle
Colette, French singularity, World War I
“Women are—thank god—an explosive anarchistic power the opposite of
all bureaucracy. It is an absurd nonsense for woman, whose own energy is
a match for bureaucracy, and sets its boundaries, to lock herself up within
it. Take her out of this empty and barren order; and if you want a woman’s
power then make her into a queen—give her the famous royaume secret,
which she rules not from the throne room, but from the bedroom. It is the
only power that a woman ever wanted and with it she will achieve what
no man could achieve.”1 This is French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
in a 1927 interview with German journalist Walter Benjamin entitled
“Should Women Participate in Political Life? Against: The Poetess Colette.”
Little is known about the circumstances under which this interview took
place. Benjamin was in Paris in 1926 interviewing other writers and artists,
so it was presumably at this moment that he interviewed Colette. The text
(in German, a language Colette did not speak) was published in the
French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring 2020: 113–128
© The Institute of French Studies at New York University
doi:10.3167/fpcs.2020.3801xx114 Kathleen Antonioli
German newspaper The Literary World as part of a series entitled “The Great
Contradictions of Our Time: Interviews with Contrasting Positions.”
The interview reveals a rare moment in which Colette consents to
talk about politics, a topic she usually avoided. As suggested by the title,
Colette takes the position against women’s participation in politics in gen-
eral and against women’s suffrage in particular. She claims, for example,
that even voting on the jury of the Prix de la Renaissance is repugnant to
her—“every time I vote, it is as though I have to decapitate someone.”2
The background of the interview is the international women’s move-
ment—Benjamin asks a question about Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollon-
tai, and the contrasting interview is with German feminist and politician
Katharina von Oheimb-Kardoff. Women’s struggles for political power and
voting rights are certainly the subtext of this discussion on the barbarity
of women voting. Unlike these barbaric feminists, in France and abroad,
Colette asserts that she does not need or even want the right to vote
because she has sexual power: “the only power a woman ever wanted.”
This assertion, that French women do not need political power because
they have sexual power, could have been made by any one of hundreds of
French antifeminists from the earliest days of women’s struggle for inde-
pendence until 2018. We can perhaps imagine Colette joining the “collec-
tif” of more than one hundred French women that signed a letter
denouncing #MeToo in 2018, had she been alive to do so. Many of the
arguments made by Catherine Millet, Ingrid Caven, Catherine Deneuve,
and others in 2018 resonate with Colette’s responses to Benjamin’s ques-
tions in 1927. Specifically, the connection drawn between French women
and sexual power (as opposed to the sterile political power of feminists)
echoes in the 2018 letter, which paints French women as capable of under-
standing seduction (ruling from the bedroom) in a way that Puritanical
and Victorian American women cannot, as they suffer from a “haine des
hommes et de la sexualité.”3 Though the signers of the anti-#MeToo man-
ifesto do not offer to give up their right to vote, the letter does use a vocab-
ulary of law and legality to delegitimize #MeToo with terms such as
“injonctions,” “statut” “justice expéditive,” and “sanctionnés” associated
with the American feminists who have taken their attacks on men and
masculinity too far.4 Like Colette’s interview, this letter relies on a special
status for French women—one in which French women possess a special
sexual understanding of men that renders political and legal protections
and rights less important for them.5 This vision, of French women who rule
their country from the bedroom rather than the Chambre des députés, who,
unlike their joyless and uptight American counterparts, say “oui” to flirta-
tion and to “la drague insistante ou maladroite” is clearly an enduring
one.6 Whether or not Colette would have signed the letter (she typicallyColette française (et fille de zouave): Colette and the French Singularity 115
avoided public assertions of political belief), surely the tone of the #MeToo
letter echoes Colette’s point about the “absurd nonsense” of women being
“locked up” within the “barren order” of bureaucracy and politics.
My article investigates the contributions of Colette, and particularly of
French reviewers of Colette’s works, to this myth of “French singularity,”
a term popularized by Mona Ozouf in the 1995 Les Mots des femmes: Essai
sur la singularité française. Ozouf’s use of the term, like that of the authors
of the above letter, is anchored in a fundamental difference between
French women and American (Anglo-Saxon) women: “cette modération
du féminisme français.”7 This “tranquilité” associated with French femi-
nism is, for Ozouf, opposed to the “ton aggressif” and the “pointe mili-
tante” of Anglo-Saxon feminists.8 Ozouf sketches a link between a sexual
appreciation for men—French feminists’ ability to not get too worked up
over “la simple insistence verbale,” for example—with the slowness of the
process of women’s suffrage in France.9 Colette, Ozouf, and the authors of
the #MeToo letter describe a dichotomy with (implied) American women
and feminists on the one side, privileging political and legal protections
over sexual power and freedom, and French women doing the opposite.
Joan Wallach Scott, in an early review of Les Mots des femmes, summarizes
this view clearly:
Unlike strident American feminists, French women have appreciated the dif-
ferences between the sexes, enjoyed amorous relations with men, and rarely
experienced difference as discrimination. … This understanding Ozouf attrib-
utes to something close to a French national character (she refers to it as a
“common essence” and a “national genius”) that, despite great changes from
the seventeenth to the twentieth century, manifests a distinctive quality when
it comes to relations between the sexes.10
As the critique we can hear Scott beginning to mount in this passage sug-
gests, there is a great deal at stake in understanding the interconnections
between French constructions of femininity and of Frenchness itself.
Colette, as a privileged figure both in Ozouf’s account and in the con-
struction of French femininity in the twentieth century more generally,
deserves to have her role in this construction considered in more depth.
This article traces how the reception of Colette’s literary oeuvre (in
which she was both an object and an active participant) contributed to an
ideology of French femininity that eventually echoes in Ozouf’s French
singularity and the #MeToo letter. I argue that traits associated with
Colette’s writing before World War I (nature, instinct, femininity, antifem-
inism) became nationalized far more strongly after the war. Though these
were always depicted as praiseworthy aspects of her work, after the Great
War they became French aspects of her work. This is due, I argue, to a
solidification of gender ideology after the war as well as to the classicizing116 Kathleen Antonioli
and antirationalist currents in French philosophical, political, and aes-
thetic life during the interwar years.
One specificity of the Colette-flavored femininity, perhaps distinct
from Ancien Régime or Revolutionary femininity, is a deep connection to
irrationality and instinctiveness. La Française exemplified by Colette is no
longer the witty salonnière, trading barbed flirtations with Voltaire.
Instead, she is closer to a plant, secreting her writing out of the pores of
her feminine body, rather than producing it with her intellect. Further,
after the war, Colette becomes nationalized both through the bald asser-
tion of her Frenchness, but also through the collective effort to tie
Colette’s writing more strongly to a long tradition of French letters, one
that includes Jean Racine and rejects George Sand. This historicization of
Colette impacts her reception—she becomes a “classique”—but it also
impacts the shape of French literary history. Colette’s natural femininity
becomes a characteristic that was always present in the greatest French lit-
erature, thus erasing, suppressing, or rewriting other forms of femininity
that are in French literary history. This happens both implicitly and
explicitly. Finally, we can trace this particular vision of Colette forward as
well as backward—during her lifetime—to her ascension as the president
of the Académie Goncourt, to her absolutely central place in Ozouf’s Les
Mots des femmes, and obliquely in the French response to #MeToo.
It is crucial to note that this is not the only possible way of reading
Colette, whose oeuvre has long been an inspiration for feminist, emanci-
patory, and revolutionary readings, both in France and in the United
States. A foundational figure in feminist approaches to women’s writing,
she is the most-cited woman writer in Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième
sexe, the most frequent non-English-language author in 1970s American
anthologies of women’s writing, and one of only three examples cited by
Hélène Cixous as writers of écriture féminine. Nor, as I will discuss in more
detail later, is this kind of reading strongly tied to the content of Colette’s
literary works: her novels from the interwar period feature potentially con-
troversial topics such as successful and happy aging courtesans, drug
addicts, and sexual relationships between older women and much
younger men. Until we recognize the place Colette has in the gendered
structure of French literary history, we can only appreciate her literary
oeuvre in a partial way, removed from its historical context.
Colette Féminine
From the earliest moments of her writing career, French novelist Sidonie-
Gabrielle Colette’s critics tended to describe her and her writing using aColette française (et fille de zouave): Colette and the French Singularity 117
consistent set of terms. Patricia Tilburg, in Colette’s Republic, describes this
image as the “archetypal French Woman,” the “sanitized mythic equipage
of the fetching, ultrafeminine doyenne of French culture.”11 This is true
even of the Claudine novels (1900–1907), which, though they were
(almost entirely) written by Colette, were signed by her first husband,
Henry Gauthier-Villars, or Willy. For these critics, Colette’s writing is, above
all, deeply feminine. Charles-Henry Hirsch, in a 1902 survey of women
characters in literature, asserts that Claudine exemplifies the old slogan
tota femina in utero—reducing her completely to an animalistic, bodily,
natural femininity.12 Omitting any reference to Willy, the “author” of the
novels, Hirsch lauds the “instinct puissant” and the “vraie candeur dans
l’animalité” of this “inconsciente”—Claudine—who is guided only by sen-
sation.13 Colette’s career as a writer began in earnest soon afterward, and
the terms used to praise the author Colette remain virtually identical to
those used to praise the personnage of Claudine. J. Ernest-Charles, revie-
wing the Goncourt-nominated La Vagabonde in 1910, thanks God for
Colette’s “vraiment féminine” personality; she is “une femme spontanée,
instinctive, en même temps affectée et précieuse, brutalement réaliste et
délicieusement poète.”14 Jean de Pierrefeu describes Colette’s literary style
in his review of L’Entrave (1913):
Colette écrit souvent comme on fume, pour le plaisir de dessiner des ara-
besques veloutées; elle note ses songeries avec une précision qui décèle des
goûts de maniaque ou des habitudes d’insomnie. Cette minutie de la descrip-
tion est d’ailleurs bien féminine; elle n’oublie rien, elle saisit des traits avec le
coup d’œil d’une femme qui déshabille instantanément sa rivale. De toutes ces
phrases denses, souples et pleines au toucher, où abondent les mots concrets,
s’exhale un charme à la fois doux et aigu, un parfum bien personnel, le parfum
capiteux de ‘son mélange.’15
This description boils down to a reading of Colette’s style as feminine—
she writes this way because she is a woman. The description is tactile: the
sentences are “souples” and “pleines au toucher.” Colette’s writing is inti-
mately connected to her female body, to her feminine sensibility, as well
as to a feminine sensitivity toward other women’s bodies, in the compar-
ison to a woman looking at her rival. In these and other reviews of
Colette’s work before World War I, I have noted note that Colette’s writing
is always praised for its femininity. That femininity is defined in terms of
sensuality (frequently connected to the body), a natural quality in her
writing (frequently compared to plants or animals), and an irrational or
instinctive approach to literature.
This assertion of a very specific picture of femininity is also the
implicit rejection of a different type of woman. This description of Colette
implies in practice a clear distinction between Colette, a “natural”118 Kathleen Antonioli
writer/woman and women and writers who were “unnatural” and mascu-
line—bluestockings, suffragettes, and worst of all, feminists. Gaston Derys,
in his 1902 review of Claudine en ménage, cites the conclusion of the novel,
in which Claudine tells her husband: “Ne craignez pas, cher Renaud, d’at-
trister votre Claudine en la grondant. Il me plaît de dépendre de vous, et
de craindre un peu un ami que j’aime tant.”16 This citation leads Derys to
muse: “De dépendre de vous … Il est plaisant de constater que les singu-
liers avatars de Claudine l’aient conduite à des théories aussi antifémi-
nistes.”17 For Derys, the “pleasant” antifeminism of the text goes beyond
the political disempowerment of women. Claudine’s antifeminism resides
on a private as well as a political level in women’s personal, sexual sub-
mission to men. Similarly, Gaston de Pawlowski, in his 1913 review of
L’Entrave, contrasts Colette’s “féminisme” with that of other feminists:
La plupart de nos féministes modernes … malgré leur nom, ne sont que les
panmasculinistes et elles brûlent volontiers ce qu’elles adorent. … Il est un
féminisme autrement intéressant—et c’est celui de Colette—qui consiste, au
contraire, à rester femme et à développer jusqu’aux limites du possible les qua-
lités admirables et si particulières de la femme [… être] soumis avant toute
chose à l’instinct, aux mouvements du cœur, aux passions de la nature.18
As Karen Offen points out in Debating the Woman Question in the French
Third Republic, the “first decade of the new century witnessed the full flow-
ering of the woman question debates” in France, a flowering that also
sparked negative antifeminist reactions, including those, like Pawlowski,
who seem “frightened” by “sex role confusion”—women acting like men.
Colette, as an ultrafeminine woman, is an antidote to this fear.19 This reac-
tion to Colette captures a first wave of her embodiment of a French sin-
gularity. Pawlowski’s masculine “féministes modernes” are not easy to
distinguish from “d’autres féministes, anglo-saxonnes notamment” of
Mona Ozouf’s Les Mots des femmes.20 And Colette embodies their opposite,
a truly feminine woman, who celebrates feminine difference. In the oppo-
sitions conjured up by Pawlowski and Ozouf, Colette plays the same role,
sounds the same notes. The difference is that in Pawlowski, as in so many
other critics writing about Colette in the years before the war, her singu-
lar femininity is still not particularly national.
After the war, all of these same qualities are still praised in connection
to Colette’s writing, but another quality has been added: Frenchness.
Though the essential terms of the celebration of Colette’s work remain
consistent—she is still feminine, irrational, instinctive, and natural, now
all of these qualities have been nationalized. Critics become, after the war,
far more insistent on the Frenchness of Colette and of her writing.Colette française (et fille de zouave): Colette and the French Singularity 119
Colette Française
Before World War I, Colette was admired by literary critics as an excellent
feminine prose stylist, a delicious and at times scandalous describer of
women and music halls, and a chronicler of naughty schoolgirls. After the
war, however, she became
Colette patriote. Car, je le répète, sa santé morale ne laisse rien à désirer. Fille
d’un capitaine devenu percepteur, Colette devait adopter, devant la guerre, des
sentiments sans mélange. Individualisme anarchique, Colette ne te connaît
plus. Elle vibre désormais avec toute la France. En Colette patriote, aucune
trace de [sensiblerie humanitaire] mais la fierté carrément affichée d’être Fran-
çaise et fille de zouave.21
Prominent literary critic André Billy’s assertion of Colette’s Frenchness
here rests on a few main points: first, her personal pride in being French
(asserted three times in six sentences); second, her biography (in particu-
lar her father, who indeed served as a captain in the French army and lost
his leg at the Battle of Melegnano in 1859); and third, her mysterious res-
onance with all of France. Billy’s description is also important because it
specifically evokes the difference between Colette before and after the
Great War. We will note that other critics simply begin describing Colette
as French after the war, but Billy actually calls attention to the change in
her role in French letters, tying this change to the war. The reasons behind
this drastic shift bear consideration.
The content of Colette’s literary oeuvre cannot be solely, or even pri-
marily, responsible for this change in her reception. Between 1920 and
1925, when Billy declared Colette to be a “patriote,” she had published
Chéri (1920), a novel set in the immediate prewar period about an aging
courtesan and her much-younger lover; La Maison de Claudine (1922), a
collection of autobiographical stories treating her childhood; and Le blé en
herbe (1924), a novel about young lovers at the beach. None of these seem
immediately to be patriotic topics or to be particularly connected to a
grand, morally healthy vision of the whole of France. (It is true that the
sequel to Chéri, La Fin de Chéri (1926), does deal with World War I, as the
title character is a veteran coping with trauma after the war. However, his
suicide at the end of the novel still resists the kind of straightforwardly
patriotic reading implied by Billy here.) Colette’s biography is somewhat
better suited to Billy’s assertion. She worked as a war reporter, and her sec-
ond husband, Henry de Jouvenel, was mobilized and fought at Verdun.
(Their relationship is rendered particularly dramatic in the 2004 French
biopic, Colette, Une Femme libre, directed by Nadine Trintignant, which
depicts Colette disguising herself as a soldier to rush to her husband’s side120 Kathleen Antonioli
at the front.) Of course, by the time Billy wrote his article Jouvenel and
Colette had divorced as a result of a reasonably well-known affair between
Colette and Jouvenel’s son, which might be thought to throw the “santé
morale” assertion somewhat into jeopardy.
It was neither the manifest content of her work, nor particularly her
lifestyle, but rather her capacity to represent for the French literary critical
establishment a “natural” “feminine” French woman writer that rendered
Colette “Française” after the war. Mary Louise Roberts describes, in Civi-
lization without Sexes, the heightening of gender anxiety after the war:
Colette provides an antidote to this anxiety.22 In the irrational instinc-
tiveness ascribed to her work, she is a counterpart to the dreaded blue-
stocking, and in her depictions of love and sex (according to critics), a
world in which women recognize their natural subordination to men, she
is a counterpart to the New Woman, the garçonne, and the professional
women of the interwar period. Because of the changed gender landscape
after the war, Colette’s role changes from that of an admirably feminine
woman writer, to that of a representative of French women’s writing and
even of French women far more broadly.
It is important to emphasize the degree to which all of this is an
agreed-upon fiction. Colette was not necessarily natural, irrational, and
instinctive, and the distance between her and a garçonne is not as far as
critics might have implied. She had short hair, was twice divorced, had
only one child, and worked for a living. Her characters are not necessarily
embodiments of perfect interwar femininity either—Léa, of Chéri, is
indeed a courtesan, but she is a deeply practical woman who finds as
much pleasure in managing her investment portfolio as in managing her
young lover. And one would be hard-pressed to describe her as “subordi-
nate” in any interesting way. So none of the arguments found in these
reviews are about Colette’s actual biography or her actual literary oeuvre.
Instead, they are about what Colette’s life and oeuvre came to represent
for a whole generation of literary critics—a woman writer who was pro-
foundly “natural” and feminine—as well as for later critics, who drew
inspiration, even indirectly, from the powerful mythology of Colette cre-
ated at this moment.
Billy was far from the only literary critic to assert Colette’s Frenchness.
André Germain, in his 1924 essay on Chéri, connects Colette’s work to “la
plus pure tradition des siècles parfaits” and then exclaims: “Que Madame
Colette est donc agréablement française!”23 He clarifies what he means by
“française,” writing that it is “non pas de toutes les Frances … mais de
celle-là, limpide et sage, qui s’est formée en de lentes délices parmi les
vergers de Touraine et sur les bords de l’Oise, qui a donné son miracle avec
Voltaire, qui s’est achevée dans la suprême courtoisie de Jules Lemaître etColette française (et fille de zouave): Colette and the French Singularity 121
d’Anatole France.”24 For Germain, this “limpid” and classicizing tradition
is also tied to the physical space of France: he emphasizes the geography
of Touraine and the Oise River. (Of course, Colette was typically associated
with Burgundy, as she was born there and spoke with a Burgundian
accent.)25 This tradition, tied to geography, is also exclusionary: Germain
writes that the great tradition to which he attaches Colette is “non pas de
toutes les Frances,” though he does not specify which “Frances” he is
excluding. Germain concludes his discussion of Colette’s Frenchness by
claiming that “la langue de notre pays, Madame Colette la polit avec la
même assiduité que met une chatte à faire de son pelage.” Here, Germain
evokes Colette’s femininity through her connection to animals. The larger
male literary tradition, to which she is tied through Voltaire, Anatole
France, and Jules Lemaître, in no way reduces the discursive centrality of
her femininity. She is not an ungendered nor a masculine addition to this
canon, but a distinctly feminine one.
Some writers connect Colette to literary history more obliquely by
simply asserting her Frenchness or the Frenchness of her writing. For
example, Maurice Léna, in his review of La Fin de Chéri for L’Excelsior, con-
cludes his glowing review by characterizing Colette’s novel as “d’une
forme exquisément française et moderne.”26 Léna does not specify what
he might mean by a form that is “exquisément française,” but it is clear
that he, like Germain or Billy, finds something particularly French in
Colette’s writing. Similarly, André Thérive introduces his review of La Fin
de Chéri in L’Opinion by writing that “Chéri était un livre incomparable, un
des plus beaux peut-être qu’on ait écrits en langue française, à l’avis même
de ses détracteurs.”27 These sentences are prominently located as the first
and last sentence of the reviews, indicating that Colette’s connection to
Frenchness is something that these authors wish to emphasize in their
treatment of her.
Other critics assert Colette’s Frenchness through a comparison
between her work and a long tradition of classical French letters.28 André
Thérive, in his 1920 review of Chéri for the Revue critique des idées et des livres
(a periodical founded by Eugène Marsan et Jacques Rivan, which was
inspired by Charles Maurras’s nationalistic and neoclassical aesthetics),
compares Chéri to poets Anacréon and Racine in its use of the “drame sen-
timentale” and elsewhere to the novel Manon Lescault.29 Gonzague Truc, in
the 1929 Classicisme d’hier et classiques d’aujourd’hui similarly writes that
“c’est à Racine qui me fait songer Mme Colette. … Même netteté des lignes,
même leçon, non point des mots mais des choses … à deux moments de la
langue, une maîtrise presque égal.”30 André Billy asks in the 1923 issue of
Le Capitole devoted to Colette: “A qui comparer Colette?” He answers this
question: “A Jean-Jacques Rousseau dont elle est une sorte de réplique fémi-122 Kathleen Antonioli
nine, à l’échelle de notre temps. Le sentiment de la nature, qui nous vient
de Rousseau, elle l’a entendu.”31 Fernand Vandérem, in a review of Chéri,
writes that “ses [Colette’s] Confessions étaient d’un caractère si humain, si
profond.”32 The capitalization of “Confessions” makes it clear that
Vandérem is referring to Rousseau’s work here, though Chéri is hardly
Colette’s most confessional text. Benjamin Crémieux’s review of Chéri for
the Nouvelle Revue Française similarly imagines Colette’s texts “recueillies en
un seul gros in-octavo, imprimées fin sur deux colonnes, pour faire le pen-
dant féminin à celles de Jean-Jacques.”33 In all of these examples, Colette
becomes a distinctly feminine version of a classical French writer.
What is happening here? First of all, we have to note that, in their
details, the content of these reviews are not very different from those
before the war. They still appreciate Colette’s style, her use of language,
her femininity, her connection to nature, her emotion, and her instinct.
But now, unlike before the war, Colette is French. For Billy, she is a patriot,
vibrating with all of France. For those that inscribe Colette into a tradition
of French letters, she becomes the latest in a long line of great French clas-
sical writers. Eric Fassin, his article “The Purloined Gender: American Fem-
inism in a French Mirror,” evokes the idea of the nationalization of gender
that is predicated on abstract universalism. Fassin writes that, for Ozouf,
“the ideology relies on the naturalization of gender, whereas the rhetoric
is based on the nationalization of gender; the former requires the embod-
iment of difference, the latter abstract universalism.”34 This same descrip-
tion of a fundamental paradox might apply to Colette’s reviewers as
well—they want at once to nationalize the particular version of feminin-
ity embodied by Colette while at the same time naturalizing that version
of femininity. Though Fassin is more focused on the relationship between
the French and American concepts of gender, his observation that “aside
from homosexuality, gender is the other major extension of the national
rhetoric” is particularly relevant here—Colette is so important, and so
popular, during the interwar period, because her gendered reception
allows her work to fit into French national rhetoric.35
Colette’s adoption as the French woman writer after the war also
involves a rejection of earlier women writers. When Colette’s natural,
instinctive femininity becomes the model for women’s writing, then other
models must be discarded. Thérive concludes that Colette’s works contain
“leçons de clarté, de psychologie et de raison, n’est-ce pas assez pour jus-
tifier de telles œuvres que j’aime à croire qui dureront encore, en honneur
au siècle vingtième, alors que Madame Sand ne sera plus depuis longtemps
ni lisible ni lue?”36 George Sand, perhaps a prime example of an educated,
“masculine” woman writer, is rejected in this nationalization of Colette.
Of course, Thérive is far from the first literary critic to reject George Sand,Colette française (et fille de zouave): Colette and the French Singularity 123
but he does it here in the name of a long narrative of literary history that
includes Colette rather than Sand. After the war, Colette enters literary his-
tory as Sand is expelled from it.
Crémieux, in his 1923 review of Le Blé en herbe for the Nouvelles Lit-
téraires, uses even stronger language to reject French women writers of
the past:
Il se manifeste en ce moment, parmi les femmes de lettres, une réaction contre
le ‘genre Colette.’ Il y a cinq ans, sur dix femmes prosateurs, huit imitaient
Colette; aujourd’hui, il n’y en a plus que quatre. La mode chez les dames de
plus est présentement au style masculin; une Henriette Charasson, une Renée
Dunan écrivent comme des hommes. Si cette tendance s’accentuait, ce serait
un retour à la tradition, que notre époque n’aurait fait qu’interrompre un ins-
tant Mme de Staël, George Sand, Louise Ackermann, écrivaient masculine-
ment tout comme Marguerite de Valois ou Louise Labé. Il n’y a dans leur style
rien de spécifiquement féminin. En vers, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore a été la
première à écrire en femme, à trouver un rythme, une expression poétique en
dehors de tout ce que les hommes avaient fait; mais c’est de nos jours la com-
tesse de Noailles qui, la première, a créé une grande poésie française féminine.
La véritable créatrice de la prose féminine française, c’est Colette.37
Here, we see a much more extensive rejection of French women writers—
in a single breath, Crémieux dismisses women’s letters from the Renais-
sance through the nineteenth century, as well as four out of ten
contemporary women writers. The basic argument here is that, in order to
write in a specifically feminine style, women prose writers must “imitate”
Colette. Any writer, present or past, who does not write like Colette is
rejected as masculine. This rewrites the entire history of French literature
through Colette—she becomes the model against which any woman
writer can, and must, be judged. Crémieux adds that “le ‘phénomène’
Colette, dans l’histoire de la prose française, a été aussi important que le
‘phénomène’ Loti, plus important même, parce que Loti est inimitable
dans sa singularité au lieu que Colette a créé une tradition, ouvert au style
de possibilités inconnues avant elle.”38 Crémieux seems here to be operat-
ing in a similar framework to the one suggested by Fassin—Colette
accesses the nation, the national, through her essentialized gender, and, as
the founder of a tradition, this is identified as the path for all women writ-
ers to access this same nationalization.
Of course, in order to make this judgment, Crémieux must also make
clear what he means by the “genre Colette.” The conclusion of the article
offers some clarification, though it does take “genre Colette” to be essen-
tially a given, something that all readers instinctively recognize:
Colette a pris l’homme et la femme avant l’intervention de la vie, et elle lance
l’un contre l’autre, sans frein, ce Roméo et cette Juliette. Rassurons-nous, le124 Kathleen Antonioli
génie de l’espèce vieille et au moment du grand heurt, au lieu de se fracasser
l’un contre l’autre, la femme ploie et se résigne à son destin d’esclave. L’époque
de l’affranchissement où vagabonde, elle essaiera de se cabrer devant l’entrave
n’est pas encore venue. Ce n’est pas une étude psychologique qu’il faut cher-
cher dans Le blé en herbe, c’est, en raccourci, le début d’une légende des sexes.39
Crémieux’s “genre Colette” might as well be Mona Ozouf’s singularité
française. Colette’s genius lies in her understanding and depiction of a par-
ticular type of relationship between men and women, one in which
women are happily resigned to their subordinate “destin d’esclave.” We
also note the reference to antirationality in the reference to a sort of pre-
historic relationship between men and women as species, rather than
humans, “avant l’intervention de la vie.”
Colette and French Singularity
How does all of this connect to French singularity? Colette is, of course,
one of Ozouf’s ten exemplary women in Les Mots des femmes. And, in
many ways, Colette seems to fit better with Ozouf’s conception of la sin-
gularité française than Simone de Beauvoir or George Sand. Ozouf
concludes, on the subject of Colette’s politics, “ni suffragettes, ni ama-
zones [ses héroïnes] n’ont aucun goût pour les rôles convenus de la
révolte. Elles ne sont nullement tentées d’imiter, encore moins de conqué-
rir, les rôles masculins.”40 Ozouf has hardly discovered something new
about Colette here in her assertion that Colette’s heroines are deeply and
profoundly feminine and that they specifically resist masculinization.
Similarly, on the topic of natural femininity, Ozouf insists that “la liberté
de Colette est celle de l’aiguille aimantée que indique immanquablement
le nord et ramène obstinément les femmes à leur vocation et à leur
génie.”41 Ozouf concludes: “Pas d’œuvre plus féminine que celle de
Colette. Pas d’œuvre moins féministe.”42
As we have seen above, these sentences could have been written in
1902, in 1910, or in 1923 by any number of (all-male) literary critics of a
variety of political persuasions. However, this is not the only way of read-
ing Colette. Since the 1960s, feminist critics from the United States,
France, and elsewhere have observed feminist themes throughout
Colette’s oeuvre. Colette’s own life, as a financially independent, sexually
liberated, twice-divorced president of the Académie Goncourt, under-
mines this repeated insistence on her deep belief in a natural “vocation”
for women. Colette’s literary oeuvre depicts women who are skeptical of
defining themselves through romantic relationships and who take greatColette française (et fille de zouave): Colette and the French Singularity 125
pride and pleasure in work—they hardly sound “soumis[es] avant toute
chose à l’instinct, aux mouvements du cœur, aux passions de la nature.”
It would be misleading here to speak of right and wrong readings.
Colette did, as evidenced by her interview with Benjamin, cultivate and
benefit from an antifeminist persona. Her works were bestsellers, at least
in part, because of their ability to appeal to a mass audience that included
Charles Maurras and the readers of L’Action Française. We should read
Ozouf’s adoption of Colette into the canon of French singularity as an
action that is entirely fitting with a reading of Colette’s oeuvre that
Colette herself encouraged and cultivated. Rather than critiquing these
readings of Colette as partial, we might instead ask why, at these different
historical moments (1900, 1920, 1995, 2018), this version of Frenchness
and femininity resonates so strongly? What about these moments gives
birth to this popularity of the myth of the “genre Colette” or the “singu-
larité française” or the celebration of “la galanterie” and “la drague insis-
tante ou maladroite”?
As Scott points out, Ozouf’s “Essai” is a totalizing, historically flatten-
ing account that discovers a French singularity in a variety of writers from
different historical periods. My argument adds that, far from being some-
thing that exists ahistorically, this French singularity, as Ozouf depicts it,
is profoundly marked by the interwar reception of Colette. It is in the
aftermath of World War I that these characteristics—femininity, antifem-
inism, a “natural” approach to the relationship between men and
women—become marked, in literary criticism, as “French,” and it is, at
least in part, through the reception of Colette that this happens. Colette
was the French woman writer of the 1920s, and the assertion that her
“genre” is not only preferable to other genres, but also that it is the only
true French genre for women writers, happens at this very moment.43 The
redefinition of Colette and her work as specifically and prototypically
French is not just a moment in the construction of French femininity.
Instead, Colette is a privileged figure in the creation of the version of
French femininity that remains, for some, prevalent today.
One need look no further than the 2018 Kiera Knightley biopic
Colette, directed by Wash Westmoreland, for evidence that the image of
Colette as a quintessentially French woman retains its power to shape
how we think of her and of French femininity more generally. Posters for
the film emphasize Colette’s Frenchness—her face is accompanied only by
the Parisian skyline, the Tour Eiffel sprouting either into or out of her
shoulder. The film itself reproduces the commonplaces of Colette’s recep-
tion from one hundred years ago. Love and sex, animals and nature,
instinctive feminine writing talent that Colette nonetheless disavows:
these are the elements of biography that the film teases out. Colette does126 Kathleen Antonioli
divorce her husband in the film (a moment, one could argue, of political
tension or liberation), but the legal process is deemphasized, with Colette’s
sexual and romantic relationship with Missy instead foregrounded. The
film reproduces, and does not explore or push against, old ways of inter-
preting Colette. The poster of the film promises us that “history is about
to change”—Colette did change history for French women in part by fash-
ioning the image of a natural French femininity so successful that its ori-
gins are too rarely explored.
KATHLEEN ANTONIOLI is an Associate Professor of French in the Department
of Modern Languages at Kansas State University. She is also the Editor of
the open-access journal Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Liter-
ature. Email: kantonioli@k-state.edu
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, “Solt die Frau am politischen Leben teilnehmen? Dagegen:
Die Dichterin Colette”, in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften [Collected
works], vol. 4.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972): 492–95, here 494.
2. Benjamin, “Solt die Frau am politischen Leben teilnehmen?” 495.
3. Collectif. “Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner, indispensable à la liberté
sexuelle”, Le Monde, 13 January 2018, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/arti-
cle/2018/01/09/nous-defendons-une-liberte-d-importuner-indispensable-a-la-
liberte-sexuelle_5239134_3232.html.
4. Collectif, “Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner.”
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Mona Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes: essai sur la singularité française (Paris: Fayard,
1995), 12.
8. Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes, 11.
9. Ibid.
10. Joan Wallach Scott, The American Historical Review 101, 4 (1996): 1228–1229,
doi:10.1086/ahr/101.4.1228-a.
11. Patricia A. Tilburg, Colette’s Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in
France, 1870–1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 13.
12. Charles-Henry Hirsch, “De Mademoiselle de Maupin à Claudine,” Mercure de
France, 6 June 1902, 577–588, here 583.
13. Hirsch, “De Mademoiselle,” 583. “Instinct” was a word deployed by both
antifeminist and feminist discourses before the war. Marguerite Durand, criti-
cal of instinctive femininity, observed that her “constant preoccupation has
been and will be to interest those women in the feminist cause who are knowl-
edgeable and who reason, those who are not guided solely by instinct.” Cited
in Karen Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic,
1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 297.Colette française (et fille de zouave): Colette and the French Singularity 127
14. J. Ernest-Charles, L’Excelsior, 19 December 1910.
15. Jean de Pierrefeu, “Le Livre de la semaine”, Opinion, 8 November 1913,
581–591, here 591.
16. Gaston Derys, “Claudine en ménage”, Gil Blas, 24 May 1902, 1–2.
17. Derys, “Claudine en ménage,” 2.
18. Gaston de Pawlowski, Comoedia, 9 November 1913, 3.
19. Offen, Debating the Woman Question, 302, 365.
20. Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes, 11.
21. André Billy, La Muse aux besicles (Paris: La Renaissance littéraire, 1925), 24–25.
22. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar
France 1917–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). In Debating the
Woman Question, Karen Offen calls attention to the proliferation of “aggressive
antifeminist legislation” happening at this same moment. Offen, Debating the
Woman Question, 611.
23. André Germain, De Proust à Dada (Paris: Simon Kra, 1924), 48.
24. Germain, De Proust à Dada, 48–49.
25. Nicolas Di Méo and Anne Marie Thiesse have written about the consolidation
of French identity during the Third Republic and the interwar period through
the recuperation of regional identities. Some of that seems to be happening
here, though it is moderately incoherent, given that this reviewer has not con-
nected Colette to her actual regional identity. Nicolas Di Méo, “Le Sens de
l’harmonie : l’habitus national chez Jean Giraudoux”, French Review 84, 2
(2010): 299–310, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25758408. Anne Marie Thiesse,
Ils apprenaient à la France: L’exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique
(Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1997).
26. Maurice Léna, Excelsior, 9 May 1926, 4.
27. André Thérive, Opinion, 17 April 1926, 14–16, here 14. Similarly, in a review of
Chéri for the Revue Universelle, Pierre Laserre writes: “Et aussi bien ne saurais-je
m’en figurer la forme de simple notation anecdotique, les modes de récits crus
et naïfs que d’après les heureux exemples qu’elle nous en a donnés elle-même
dans un bon français qui ne manque pas de suc”. Pierre Laserre, Revue Univer-
selle 3, 1 October 1929, 105–109, here 106.
28. For a far more detailed account of the classicization of Colette, see Marie-Odile
André, Les Méchanismes de classicization d’un écrivain: Le cas de Colette (Metz:
Publication du Centre d’Études Linguistiques des Textes et des Discours, 2000).
29. André Thérive, La Revue critique des idées et des livres, 10 October 1920,
196–202, here 202.
30. Gonzague Truc, Classicisme d’hier et classiques d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Société d’édi-
tion “Les Belles lettres,” 1929), 92.
31. André Billy, Le Capitole: Numéro consacré à Colette [Special issue devoted to
Colette, 1923, n.p.]
32. Fernand Vandérem, Miroir des lettres vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion, 1921), 228.
33. Benjamin Crémieux, “Les Lettres françaises”, Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques,
et scientifiques 2, 25 August 1923, 2.
34. Eric Fassin, “The Purloined Gender: American Feminism in a French Mir-
ror,” French Historical Studies 22, 1 (1999): 113–138, here 131–132,
doi:10.2307/286704.
35. Fassin, “The Purloined Gender,” 133.
36. Thérive, La Revue Critique des idées et des livres, 202.
37. Crémieux, “Les Lettres françaises,” 2.128 Kathleen Antonioli 38. Ibid., 2. 39. Ibid., 2. 40. Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes, 262. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 11.
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