Parity — From Perversion to Political Progress: Changing Discourses of ‘French Exception’

In 2001, the ‘exceptional’ principle of ‘equal access’ for women to political mandates was written into French electoral law. In March 1999, despite setbacks and compromise, the Senate had accepted the modification of Article 3 of the French Constitution, the fortress used to keep out quotas or affirmative action by those on both sides of the political spectrum who defended traditional principles of the indivisible French Republic, universalism, and integration.

In this principled, fierce and still ongoing debate, universalism, which was equated with lack of distinction of race, class, or gender or with protection of traditional French harmony between the sexes constituting a bulwark against the threat of take-over by a perceived American or Anglo-Saxon style communautarisme (multiculturalism) and war of the sexes, was often presented as a ‘French exception’ (Badinter, 1992, 1996). A second sense of the term ‘French exception’ was invented for the debate by pro-parity women's associations and intellectuals, used in Françoise Gaspard et al.'s seminal (1992) Au pouvoir, citoyennes! Liberté, Egalité, Parité, for example, to characterize women's continuing absence from elected office and political life. In 1996, a bare 6% of the National Assembly was female, rising in 1999, with Jospin's new Socialist government, to 11%, a deficit presented as all the more ‘exceptional’ in that this was happening in a land seen as the ‘cradle of the Rights of Man'. Battle-lines were thus drawn discursively between two French ‘exceptionalisms’.

The modified Article 3 of the so-called ‘parity’ law passed on 6 June 2000 stated in a compromise that ‘the law is to facilitate equal access for all women and men to elected office and political life’ (la loi favorise l'égal accès des femmes et des hommes aux mandats électoraux et fonctions électives). Article 4 of the Constitution was henceforth to include the principle that political parties should contribute to the goal of parity. (‘Les partis. contribuent à la mise en oeuvre de ce principe’). In elections observing a system of proportional representation (municipal, regional, European, and senatorial), 50% of the candidates on the lists presented by political parties were to be women. Parity was mandated in groupings of six candidates in municipal and regional elections with stricter alternation of a woman and a man in European and some senatorial elections. In legislative elections (as for other first past the post elections), parties were required to present as many women as men with no more than a 2% gap permitted. Financial sanctions would be imposed on parties who did not respect parity in legislative elections. While quotas or parity lists did not pose significant logistical problems for proportional representation, the question of what to do with single-member constituencies (divide them into two-member constituencies fielding a man and a woman?) has not yet been resolved.

In the 1970s in France, where for MLF feminists the personal was the political, agitation for new laws pertaining to the body and to work — contraception, abortion, harassment, equal pay — had been preferred to involvement with political representation. In the 1980s, women's associations worked with the ‘exceptional’ women appointed to government by a ‘Prince’, first by a modernizing Giscard d'Estaing (Simone Veil and Francoise Giroud) and later by Francois Mitterrand in his feminized 1981 Socialist government (Yvette Roudy, Elisabeth Guigou, Martine Aubry, Edith Cresson, Ségolène Royal…). Women inside and outside politics recognized, however, that the legitimacy of elected representation was of a different order again from this paternal protection (Ramsay, 2003).

What the acceptance of parity meant most immediately was that legislation for affirmative action was now possible. The Conseil Constitutionnel had ruled invalid the bill introducing a quota of 25% women on the lists of candidates for municipal elections and successfully steered through parliament by the feminist lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, in 1982, as it had divided the sovereign French people into categories. The parity advocates would counter-claim in an accelerating media battle that members of classes or categories could choose to change their category whereas women, like men, cannot. As half of the world's population, encompassing all categories, and with major differences among them, women do not constitute a category. This form of anthropological legitimation of parity by sexual difference (primary to all other differences) was nonetheless seen with some unease by many intellectuals and militants as troublesomely ‘strategic’ (perverse) rather than strongly philosophically grounded (Bereni and Lépinard, 2004).

Despite his active support of the campaign, Jospin had estimated 10 years for parity to happen. In an interview with me in December 1996, the then Minister of the Environment, Socialist activist and former ‘symbolic’ woman candidate for the Presidency, Huguette Bouchardeau, gave a prognosis of 20 years. Changing the Constitution takes a two-thirds majority of both houses (or approval by referendum). The extensive work published by Mariette Sineau throughout the 1990s suggests how suspect the principle of parity and the fear of its (mis)appropriation was to women of the Left; even to those who supported the campaign. Yet, events had suddenly accelerated after the election of Jospin's new Socialist government and the unpredictable, and for some, less than desirable, happened.

Debate has been extensive on what moved the old ‘French exception’, defined most generally as the premium placed on femininity or on gender ‘difference’ that had worked against women's entry into politics, towards an institutionalized parity as the new ‘French exception’ in the domain of political representation. If parity was indeed a Trojan horse, who took it or let it into the walls of the old masculinist political city? The spectacular and unexpected return of the Socialists to power that had doubled the number of women in the Assemblée (to 62 out of 577) appeared to be a factor. In the government announced on 4 June 1997 by Jospin, eight out of his 26 ministres, ministres délégués, and secrétaires d'Etat, that is, more than 30% of the government were women. Moreover, pressure had been exerted on poorly performing France by the example of measures put in place by the United Nations, the European Council and Commission to eliminate discrimination. From the 1980s, women's groups of very different political origins had united around the new cause of political power including Gisèle Halimi's Club Parité 2000, Yvette Roudy's L'Assemblée des Femmes, L'Alliance des Femmes pour la Démocratie organized as early as 1989 by Antoinette Fouque as the successor to the MLF (women's Liberation Movement) and Demain la Parité (Parity Tomorrow) which organized a number of forums to prepare women to run for office as municipal councillors.

According to Fraisse (1998a), however, it was the word ‘parity’ that had relaunched the feminist debate in 1993, ‘crystallizing awareness and a revolt’. The term had come to carry a sense of the general recognition that women's political exclusion was less an effect of individual ‘machismo’ than of political networks that are ‘virile’ in character and do not attract women, self-protective networks unlikely to be changed from within by the political parties. The ‘Manifesto of the 577 for a Popular Democracy’, published in L'Express on 10 November 1993 and the later witness by 10 women in high positions in the ‘Manifeste des dix pour la parité’, (L'Express, 6 Juin 1996, 32–33) to having personally faced condescending indifference, scorn, or open hostility from within the world of politics, rehearsed the arguments developed by women historians, the loneliness and exclusion deriving from the outdated Jacobin tradition at the heart of republicanism. Real human relationships, sensitivity, and concrete, everyday preoccupations, are cast out from the field of politics and the republican imagery and do not contribute to law making. Bereni and Lépinard analyse this as a ‘euphemistic’ rhetoric that conceals the affirmative action implications of parity by instead writing the principle of a primary and sexual difference' into political representation (2004, 73). The accent placed on the ‘resonance’ of the pervasive current rhetoric of ‘Republican universalism’ and on the need to create a renewed and more representative ‘mirror’ political representation (Phillips, 1995), by means of feminine difference, in a democracy in crisis, the two writers argue, led to a relative marginalization of the more controversial discourse of gender equality (Bereni and Lépinard, 2004, 79). The ‘coup de force’ in the arguments of parity supporters, then, was to anchor their claim to a new ‘mirror’ representation within the very frame of the discourse of universalism ‘by representing parity as the logical outcome of the singular universality that resides in sexual difference’ (ibid., 83). Recourse to the notion of a specific women's contribution in a partnership with men, conclude these authors, removed the threat of antagonistic feminist claims or battle of the sexes.

Laure Bereni and Anne Revillard (2007) write of the development of a new ‘state feminism’ they present as closely interwoven with the parity cause — evidenced in the creation of the Observatoire de la Parité in 1995, a consultative government body of 18 eminent advisors under the leadership of the Centre-Right Roselyn Bachelot, working in a surprisingly productive alliance with the Left-wing militant lawyer, Gisèle Halimi. The pressure the pair exerted through the media and their 1996 report established a much more militant conception of parity than that of the women's Rights Department and the Prime Minister and brought the parity question to a parliamentary debate in 1997. The second Observatoire de la Parité of 1999 greatly increased the Observatoire's means (now 33 unpaid members with a paid secretariat of two) under the leadership of the militant Geneviève Fraisse. To help prepare and support a parity law, it included intellectual representatives such as Janine Mossuz-Lavau and Michelle Perrot, known for their positions in favour of women, as well as a number of députés able to speak for the parity cause in Parliament. From 1999, the government also created parliamentary delegations for women's rights. The presence of representatives from women's groups set up within government and of substantial feminist expertise ensured that the provisions of the new law were not too watered down (Bereni and Lépinard, 2004; Lépinard, 2007). After the passing of the first parity law in 2000, the Observatoire pour la parité and the parliamentary delegations strengthened their links, while the Observatoire became the primary reference for statistics on the place of women in politics and a major pressure group for strengthening parity law.

A further significant facilitator of the entry of the Trojan horse, was the media, doing its core business, claims Jane Jenson in ‘visualizing deviance’ (the deviance of women in power) but in the process, also popularizing the intellectual battle of the ‘French exceptions’ taking place around the new parity discourse. Like diversity and multiculturalism, parity was presented as a potential agent of fragmentation, redolent of suspect American culture and sex-war. Like feminism, it threatened the break up of single shared (universal) commonality. Ethical universalists, like Badinter, arguing for the need for virility in government in both men and women (1992), were joined by women for whom class and ideology or equality were more important than parity — the radical Left had difficulty working with or supporting Right-wing women (anti-abortionists or Le Pen supporters, for example). Researching the origins of women in political office, Mariette Sineau (1998, 2003), for example, found the latter to be largely middle-class and professional, and not therefore, a mirror of society. Alain-Gérard Slama, journalist for the Right wing Le Figaro, reviewing the raft of recently released books on parity by well-known figures — La cité républicaine (The Republican City) by the philosopher Blandine Kriegel; Politique des sexes (Gender Politics) by Sylviane Agacinski, the then wife of the Prime Minister, Jospin; Femmes-Hommes. Pour la parité (Women-Men. Towards Parity) by Janine Mossuz-Lavau (Presses de Sciences Po), claimed stridently that the parity arguments (on both sides of the debate) announce the ‘totalitarianism’ of the next century (Le Point, 2 May 1998). In Le Monde on 11 February 1999, Evelyne Pisier and Elisabeth Roudinesco, along with 14 other prominent women, ‘said no to parity’, and its ‘betrayal’ of 150 years of struggle based on the universalism of rights.

Polarized in the media, canvassing public personalities, parity was variously imaged as Trojan horse, cat-fight, sex-war, or totalitarian feminism, often reduced to the comic notion of ‘tic-tac’ or ‘zipper’ electoral lists and had many of the elements of popular comedy. The press took advantage of the debate's polemical aspects and unexpected twists and orchestrated ‘fights’ between well-known women to sell the story. For example, the introduction of the bill on 17 June 1998 led the newspaper Libération to ironically pit the Centre-Right Roselyne Bachelot, regretting that, in the constitutional amendment, the verb ‘facilitate’ had been allowed to attenuate the original verb ‘guarantees’ under pressure by the Senate and the President (‘the law is to facilitate equal access to political mandates’) against the Left-wing feminist universalist, Elisabeth Badinter. Gisèle Halimi regretted the absence of a referendum but echoed Martine Aubry, Marie-Georges Buffet, and Elisabeth Guigou in their sense of being in the presence of a historic moment. Edith Cresson, Elisabeth Sledziewski, Yvette Roudy, Françoise Gaspard, Janine Mossuz-Lavau, and other well-known women then picked up and responded to questions of parity as ‘humiliation’, or of ‘difference’, arguing that women's under-representation is more humiliating than special measures for women. Accused of reverting to feminine nature or difference, a dangerous essentialism that had been the pretext for women's exclusion from public life, they exercised the counter-argument of the different difference inscribed in that ‘half of humanity’ that cannot be assimilated to a social, ethnic, or cultural category. A SOFRES poll in Le Nouvel Observateur in late 1998 showed male–female parity as third on the list of changes desired to modernize political life, after the reduction of the Presidential term and a limitation on holding multiple political offices. In February 1999, further polls attested to an astonishing 80% public support for political parity.

Before 2000, Geneviève Fraisse had wondered whether the parity debate of 1997, initially something of a flop, and given new life only by the political action and successes of the Parti socialiste and Jospin in the spring of 1997, was not still a fait du prince or top-down operation of the kind that had systematically characterized French politics (1999). However, changes in public attitudes were apparent in the 1997–2000 opinion polls that showed the female ministers of Jospin's Socialist government consistently at or near the top of the popularity ratings. At the end of the 1990s, women even rated highly in polls for the presidency. In a 1999 poll cited by Sineau, 47% of French people declared they were in favour of Martine Aubry and 45% in favour of Simone Veil as the next President of the Republic, a major shift in polling approval for women candidates for presidency. By 2007, approval had reached rates of more than 90% for the candidacy of Ségolène Royal.

Soon after the law's first application, Françoise Gaspard's research on women in politics after parity concluded that women had renewed the local elites, the Republic had not foundered, and the candidates had not all been the pawns of male politicians except in a few notorious cases (2002). A parity ‘strategy’, that for her had also been grounded in ‘principle’ (1998), has had positive effects and been anything but a Pyrrhic victory. Her surveys suggested that the self-exclusion of women from patriarchal political institutions that had long paralleled the obstacles to women in power and their exclusion by political institutions was also clearly weakening. Where they are no longer in competition with men, she claimed, women are willing to stand for office. Many of those who originally contested parity have since reconsidered, accepting that despite its failings, there has been evidence both of political will for change and of an opening up of political possibilities for women. In their 2004 study, Pionchon and Derville concluded that the electorate was no longer discriminating against women candidates.

Writing in 2007, Sineau, too, had also come to observe that the importance of a law must also be measured by its symbolic effects and that, despite the inadequacies of the application of parity law, it had contributed to establishing the legitimacy of women to exercise power, as evidenced by the election of Laurence Parisot to the head of the Medef, the employers union. The phenomenon Segolene Royal, too, might well also be ‘a delayed shockwave’ (2007b, 87) of parity law, allowing an outsider to compete for a major place in a traditionally closed system.

Laure Bereni and Anne Revillard write of the development of ‘state feminism’ as closely interwoven with parity. For Bereni and Revillard (2007, 19), the ‘category of parity’ had made itself the ‘grammar’ of state feminism, as the institutional inclusion of the term in the name of ministerial offices responsible for women's rights from 2002 had demonstrated, creating a new frame of definition by adding political to professional equality. Although these authors add the still cautious caveat that the new name did not necessarily indicate a real change in priorities, the idea it carried of women's ‘access to positions of responsibility’ in general (in the public service as in politics) constituted a blurring of the binary division between the State and the non-State.

Indeed with a woman, Ségolène Royal, opposing him and representing ‘participatory democracy’ and ‘renewal’, Nicolas Sarkozy had announced that he would form a ‘parity’ government if he were elected. Despite his somewhat neo-Gaullist and personalizing aspiration to increasing the Presidential role, his promised ‘quiet revolution’ would begin to blur the Left/Right line with the syncretism of his 2007 government. Expanding his base rather than narrowing it to the party faithful, Sarkozy co-opted a significant numbers of representatives of young people and visible ‘minorities’ (Rachida Dati for Justice, Rama Yade and Fadela Amara as Junior Ministers). Both Fillon governments contained as many women ministers as men. Alongside the return of Michelle Alliot-Marie (Minister for the Armed Services under Raffarin) and Roslyne Bachelot, the raft of outsiders, representing the banlieues, immigration, humanitarian organizations even included the rugby coach of the French XV. Parity had also been accompanied early by another almost uncommented novelty, the opening up of local office to immigrants from European Union countries. The latter voted in 2001 and around 1,000 stood for office.

In a short text entitled ‘The Political Bastion has Fallen’ (the work of the Trojan Horse?), the historian Michelle Perrot (2007) sees the investiture of Ségolène Royal as the Presidential candidate of a major party (by more than 60% of party members) as a decisive event in a long historical dualism between the images of ‘women of influence’, lacking political capacity, deviant in the political sphere and men aggrandized by power, figured as rational and cool, able to act in the general interest. Parity law in her estimation was a ‘new and decisive reorientation’ and, although women's access to power continues to arouse ‘distrust’, the effects of the law have been significant, particularly at the local level where the sheer numbers and visibility of women ‘normalize’ their presence. The desire to innovate, the decline of the figure of the father, the feeling that the masculinist model of culture has failed, and the appeal of the firm and gentle maternal figure (Ségolène Royal), along with parity, claims Perrot, created an opportunity for a new model. This, despite the fact that parties nonetheless remain backward-looking temples of machismo ready to do battle for their place and privilege against an intruder and despite the real dangers in playing the woman card — Ségolène's feminine attributes —, smile, and white jackets, moralizing sincerity — would irritate noted Perrot. The candidate was predictably (if somewhat ironically?) labelled by one biography written by the political journalists from Le Monde, Raphaëlle Bacqué et Ariane Chemin as La Femme fatale. Nonetheless, the major support for Royal's presidential campaign, as elsewhere for Hillary Clinton's Presidential candidacy, the investiture of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, the respect for Angela Merkel in Germany and Michelle Bachelet in Chile indicated the desire for change in political representativity as in political language.

Outside Metropolitan France, in the French ‘overseas country’ of New Caledonia, for example, parity, applied to the provincial elections of 9 May 2004, saw an exceptional emergence of women in the public forum, including indigenous Kanak, emergence that has dramatically changed the face of the political scene in that country. Perhaps because custom and politics are seen as belonging to different worlds, and parity has been packaged as a form of French universalism rather than as feminism, Kanak men have generally accepted this major change in women's status despite significant absence of rights (to divorce, inheritance, or protection from marital violence) for women under customary law. The election also brought a woman to head a government dominated for decades by the majority loyalist party (RPCR). With her came a new party, Avenir Ensemble, and the hope of a politics of greater pluralism and redress of the continuing power imbalance between indigenous Kanak and the descendants of French settlers (Maginos-Rey, 2004).

According to the sociologist Eric Fassin, the fierce theoretical debate of the earlier period, which took place, as he puts it, within the double register of universality (of sexual difference) and universalism (the indivisibility and equality of the French Republic), makes more sense in retrospect in terms of the ‘rhetorical constraints on all dominated discourses’, their need for a ‘double’ language universalist and differentialist (Fassin, 2003). Joan Scott's work (1996, 2005) has well demonstrated these paradoxes — in the light of a Revolution that excluded or subsumed difference within the masculine, women use their difference to liberate themselves from difference. It is as the group ‘women’ that they seek the same rights as men. They must therefore claim that difference is important and is not important. The issue, Fassin came to claim, had become less whether women do things differently in the public forum than how sexual difference is constructed in the play of local politics. What has also occurred, however, for Fassin (2005), is that the universalist vs the particularist battle has shifted and now rages around other questions of identity (class, religion, and globalization issues). The media has switched some of its attention from political parity to lack of parity in other less privileged areas, focussing, for example, on the marches for rights and freedom from violence of the association of young women, ‘Ni Putes, Ni Soumise’ and from the immigrant banlieues, The parity debate, he claims, has heightened awareness of the questions raised by minorities in France, including the debates around both the PACS and gay marriage, paternity, or civil union, making the indifference to difference no longer possible. It incites the reworking of undermined binary oppositions — gender/sexuality and multiculturalism/universalism. From concepts of liberation and the tolerance of difference, France has moved toward the right to recognition of difference and the interrogation of norms. ‘At the time of the parity debate, a number of people were concerned: might parity not be the “Pandora’s box” of feminism and the “Trojan horse” of multiculturalism. We can reconsider the analysis, not as a source of concern of self-congratulation on the emergence of such questions' (Fassin, 2005). As Fassin's texts, like Perrot's tend to suggest, parity, as a more open and ‘hybrid’ conception of French citizenship, able to be couched in non-binary terms, and beyond binary sexual divisions, would constitute a further revision of the ‘French exception’

The rhetoric of ‘French exception’ is recognized as a form of subversion. What lay behind this situation for Lépinard and Bereni was ‘France’s need to see the French political system and its refusal of particular interests as exceptional and to transform imports from Europe, the new reform, into a product made in France' (2004, 81). But parity advocates, in their own ‘masquerade’, camouflaged and furthered their cause, by making it seem that parity politics was not a politics of quotas. Perversity, then, has shuttled back and forward, attaching to the different uses of the notion of ‘French exception’ in turn: and, in the final instance, to its relatively productive use in association with the term of parity democracy. In 2004, Lépinard and Bereni may agree with Sineau that the real ‘French exception’ still lies in the machismo of French political institutions and the resistance of parties to gender equality rather than in any French ‘first’ with parity. Bereni and Lépinard observe with perspicacity that in parliamentary debates in France, in contrast with its neighbours, the legitimation of parity focuses above all on the ‘symbolic’ dimension of the reform rather than practical results (2007, 90). Nonetheless, the ‘perversity’ of parity is increasingly represented as both symbolic and material progress.

Perhaps, like concepts from the social sciences such as ‘Hybridity’, ‘Black’, or again ‘Kanak’ (a term used without agreements and written with a K rather than the ‘c’ of the pejorative colonialist term ‘canaque’ to give its name to the FNLKS, the Front National de Libération Kanak et Socialiste or pro-independence party in New Caledonia), terms recuperated by political theory in a project of reversal then take on new and positive connotations while ‘remembering’ their racist past — Black signifying a rich Afro-American heritage, or hybridity, a ‘third’ cultural space of mixed new cultural creation (Bhabha, 1994) — the term parity is now evolving beyond its own somewhat negative history. There are indications that the discourse of parity is increasingly connoting a genuinely new, expanded and expansive political concept of equality within French political theory while still carrying its own somewhat ambivalent history.