Women's History Review

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Forgotten feminist: Claude Vignon (1828–1888),

revolutionary and femme de lettres

David Allen Harvey

To cite this article: David Allen Harvey (2004) Forgotten feminist: Claude Vignon (1828–1888),
revolutionary and femme de lettres , Women's History Review, 13:4, 559-583, DOI:
10.1080/09612020400200411

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020400200411

Published online: 16 Feb 2011.

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Women’s History Review, Volume 13, Number 4, 2004

Forgotten Feminist:
Claude Vignon (1828–1888),
revolutionary and femme de lettres

DAVID ALLEN HARVEY

New College of Florida, Sarasota, USA

ABSTRACT Claude Vignon (née Noémi Cadiot) was both an active protagonist
in the feminist movement of 1848 and a prolific, if now forgotten, writer later
in the century. Her political and literary careers and her personal life, notably
her separation from romantic socialist and future occultist Alphonse-Louis
Constant, provide a new perspective on the split between romantic socialism
and early feminism after 1848. Many of the themes of Vignon’s work, such as
women’s lack of control over their own property, subordination in marriage
and the impossibility of divorce, and the double standards of nineteenth-
century society, reflect concerns relevant to the work of contemporary
feminist scholars of the period. Rooting her literary work firmly in her own
experiences of hope, frustration and desire, Vignon offered a feminist response
to the misogyny of nineteenth-century French society, and also to the
idealization and marginalization of women offered by the male romantic
socialists with whom she was intimately acquainted in her youth.

Noémi Cadiot-Constant Rouvier, who adopted the pen-name Claude Vignon

early in her career, was a prolific writer, journalist, and sculptor in the
middle decades of the nineteenth century in France, but she has since fallen
into almost complete obscurity. If she is remembered at all today, it is within
the small but impassioned circle of admirers of her first husband, Alphonse-
Louis Constant, who under the pseudonym Eliphas Levi became, in the
words of one biographer, the ‘renovator of occultism in France.’[1]
Constant’s own views of women were strange and contradictory enough to
make him an unreliable witness in any case, and the passages he devoted to
his former wife were embittered by recriminations over their failed marriage
and the failure of his wife to live up to Constant’s feminine ideal. The
picture of Noémi Cadiot-Constant which appears, almost parenthetically,
within the arcane occultist treatises of the mid-century magician is a sharply

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David Allen Harvey
one-sided one, drawing on a series of misogynist archetypes of the period:
the de-feminized, bluestocking woman writer; the denatured, uncaring
mother; the lascivious, unfaithful wife. The remembrances of a resentful ex-
spouse are hardly an objective source, however, and the life and career of
the former Madame Constant, or Claude Vignon, were much more complex
and significant than Constant’s unflattering portrait suggests.
Recovering the lost life history of a remarkable nineteenth-century
woman is a fascinating and worthwhile endeavor in its own right, but the life
and work of Claude Vignon merit the attention of the historian for the
broader perspective they give on the place of women in nineteenth-century
French society. Vignon’s fiction, which alternates between realism and the
fantastic, offers throughout a sharp critique of the subordination of women,
and in her youth, Vignon took part in both socialist and feminist political
organization in the heady days of spring 1848. Her life and literary work
also shed an interesting new light on the complex relationship between
advocates of women’s rights and their male sympathizers on the romantic
socialist Left. As many historians of French feminism, notably Claire
Goldberg Moses, Michèle Riot-Sarcey, and Laure Adler, have demonstrated,
an organized feminist movement first emerged in France under the auspices
of utopian socialism, specifically among the working-class, female followers
of the Saint-Simonian guru Prosper Enfantin.[2] This initial sympathy
between Saint-Simonian romantic socialists and proto-feminists would not
last, however, and feminism and the socialist left would soon part ways,
particularly in 1848 and beyond. Naomi Andrews explains this split by
noting that romantic socialists praised and defended not real women, but an
idealized vision of Woman with little resemblance or practical utility to
women demanding greater political rights and economic justice. ‘The
womanhood that romantic socialists exalted,’ Andrews writes, ‘was not a
complex and diverse representation of real women, but rather an
idealization, based on a reduction of all femininity to the purity and
otherworldliness of the Virgin Mary.’ One of the principal figures Andrews
cites in her analysis is Alphonse-Louis Constant, who, she argues,
‘constructs a womanhood that is singular, without nuance, characterized by
suffering and love, but not by volition or will.’[3] Recovering the perspective
of Constant’s talented, independent-minded ex-wife is of direct relevance to
understanding the question of how and why romantic socialism and early
feminism parted ways.
Noémi Cadiot was born in Paris on December 12, 1828, into a
prosperous family of the post-Revolutionary fonctionnaire elite. Her father,
Louis-Florian Cadiot, had served as sous-prefect of Toul and Autun, and was
a regular contributor to Le National. At a time in which few French girls
received more than a primary education, the young Noémi was sent to an
exclusive boarding school at Choisy-le-Roi, which had a prestigious faculty

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 CLAUDE VIGNON, FORGOTTEN FEMINIST

and received students from abroad. It was there that she first met Constant,
eighteen years her senior and a former seminarian who had been expelled
from the church for his lack of chastity and his radical political views and
who, as the author of a number of Marian devotional works and the editor
of Flora Tristan’s memoirs, enjoyed a reputation as something of a feminist.
Constant was then the lover of one of Noémi’s teachers, who through the
discretion of nineteenth-century biographers is identified only as Eugénie C.,
but a relationship soon developed between the charismatic former priest and
the precocious young student. When Constant returned to Paris, his young
admirer continued to correspond with him, and in June 1846, at the age of
seventeen, she ran away from boarding school to move in with him. Given
the circumstances, her father insisted upon marriage, but as the bride’s
family provided no dowry for what they saw as a scandalous union, the
penniless young couple celebrated their marriage on July 23, 1846, with a
wedding meal of French fries purchased on the Pont-Neuf.[4]
The Constants’ marriage was thus off to a rather rocky start from the
beginning, and their circumstances would only become more difficult in the
coming months and years. Alphonse-Louis Constant had already spent time
in the political prison Sainte-Pélagie following his 1841 authorship of La
Bible de la liberté, an impassioned proclamation of Christian socialist
principles, and in February 1847, he was again prosecuted by the state, this
time for the authorship of La Voix de la famine, an incendiary denunciation
of the indifference of the rich and powerful to the plight of the impoverished
masses. Constant was sentenced to a year-long term in Sainte-Pelagie,
leaving his eighteen-year-old bride not only alone and without resources, but
pregnant as well. Noémi Cadiot-Constant then successfully petitioned police
authorities for her husband’s transfer to a more comfortable cell, and later
for his early release, based on her own delicate condition. Following the
Revolution of 1848, she would again petition police authorities that her
husband be granted a full pardon for his offences under the previous
regime, which was issued in September 1849.[5] As a result of her pleas,
Constant was released from Sainte-Pelagie in August 1847, before his prison
term was completed, and the next month, Noémi gave birth to a daughter, to
whom the couple gave the name Marie.
The birth of their child brought tensions to the Constant marriage, as
the very different notions that Alphonse-Louis and Noémi had regarding
motherhood and the proper role of women came clearly to the fore. While
Alphonse-Louis Constant saw woman’s role as one of private self-abnegation,
Noémi Cadiot-Constant saw herself as the equal and engaged political
comrade of her husband. The former abbé Constant had consistently
presented the Virgin Mary as the ideal feminine type, and advocated an
idealized, abstract notion of selfless, self-sacrificing womanhood throughout
his early works. Constant’s rather unhelpful advice to his former mentor

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David Allen Harvey
Flora Tristan regarding her separation from her abusive husband, who had
shot Tristan and sexually abused their daughter, had been ‘Be a woman and
pardon! Be a woman and suffer if it is necessary!’[6] Such notions of
suffering, passive femininity were utterly foreign to Noémi Cadiot-Constant,
who had been drawn to the bohemian, independent existence her husband
seemed to personify, and from the beginning, she was not the selfless,
dedicated mother that he expected her to be. She hired a wetnurse to
nourish the baby, an action which her husband, whose early works are filled
with images of the maternal breast as the source of life and renewal, saw as
an abdication of her proper role as mother.[7] Meanwhile, Marie was a sickly
child, not surprising given the poverty in which the Constants lived
throughout their marriage, and nearly died in infancy. Constant clearly
blamed his wife for the child’s brush with death, writing later that Marie was
brought to him ‘by a stupid woman whom Noémi, incapable of being a
mother, had accepted as a wetnurse,’ and that he had then revived the child
with prayers and holy water.[8] The marriage was a troubled one from that
time on, and Marie’s health would continue to be delicate, with the child
finally dying at the age of seven.
When the Revolution of 1848 broke out, the Constants threw
themselves entirely into political agitation, founding a short-lived political
newspaper, Le Tribun du Peuple, to which both contributed, and a political
association, the Club de la Montagne, of which Alphonse-Louis was
president and Noémi was secretary.[9] Despite her youth (she was then just
nineteen years old), Noémi played an active role in the feminist movement of
the Revolution of 1848. She served as a member of the governing board of
the principal feminist organization of 1848, the Club de la Voix des Femmes,
and vocally defended club president Eugenie Niboyet against male hecklers,
to whom she shouted back, ‘You are nothing but rascals [polissons.]’ She
took an active part in the club’s deliberations, and struck a tone which
combined the idealism of 1848 with a degree of moderation and realism. For
example, on April 6 the Club de la Voix des Femmes deliberated a proposal
by Niboyet and Desirée Gay for the creation of a workhouse and placement
office for unemployed female domestics. Noémi observed, however, that
given the financial crisis of spring 1848, they would be unable to raise the
necessary funds, and the project was voted down.[10]
Despite these expressions of moderation, Noémi Constant has also
been linked with what contemporaries perceived as the most radical and
threatening of the feminist associations of 1848, the Vésuviennes. While
caricaturists, especially Le Charivari’s Edouard de Beaumont, turned out a
wide collection of satiric images of de-feminized, cross-dressing women
warriors [11], the reality behind the Vésuvienne myth remains relatively
unclear. Jeanne Deroin, one of the principal feminist leaders of 1848, wrote
years later to Theodore Stanton that the Vésuviennes were no more than a

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 CLAUDE VIGNON, FORGOTTEN FEMINIST

police fabrication, ‘composed of prostitutes, which burlesqued everything we

said and did, in order to cast ridicule and contempt on our meetings and our
acts.’[12] While the symbol of the Vésuvienne was clearly used by the
opponents of feminism to mock the movement as a whole, no other evidence
supports Deroin’s assertion, leaving the mystery unresolved. The facts that
are known about this obscure group are as follows. A male revolutionary,
Daniel Borme, advocated the formation of a legion of women warriors, made
up of single women aged fifteen to thirty, to be known as the Vésuviennes,
in a placard posted throughout Paris in March 1848, but it is unclear
whether this legion was ever created, and those women who appropriated
the name Vésuviennes in 1848 did so for their own purposes, and without
connection to Borme’s project. The Voix des Femmes on March 28
described a demonstration of self-proclaimed Vésuviennes as made up of
peaceful, working-class women who had formed a residential cooperative in
Belleville, and noted that they were conservatively dressed, unlike the
Amazons of Beaumont’s caricatures.[13] Although Noémi Constant, a young
but married woman of bourgeois origin, was not likely a member of a female
fighting force, she has been identified by some scholars as one of the eleven
signers of a ‘Vésuvienne Manifesto’ published in July 1848. Noémi Constant
authored a response to the caricatures of Vésuviennes in Le Charivari,
mocking its misogynist images and asking, ‘Did you consider us…to be a
group of feisty shrews, wearing both a skirt and a mustache at the same
time?’ She denied that a woman lost her femininity by becoming a feminist,
concluding that ‘we are simply women who read Charivari and like it all the
same.’[14]
In addition to defending what at the time was perceived as an extreme
feminist position, the young Madame Constant was also an advocate for the
Christian socialist vision associated with her husband. After writing for
Alphonse-Louis Constant’s ephemeral journal, Le Tribun du peuple, in
March 1848, she became an active collaborator on La Voix des Femmes in
April, after the former journal had ceased publication, eventually signing a
column as ‘one of the principal editors.’ One of her first columns in the
latter paper, on April 15, 1848, condemned the abbé Lamennais for his
rejection of Christian socialism, telling him that ‘from the moment when you
cursed socialism, you denied Christian principles.’ Noémi called for
moderation and tolerance between factions, writing on April 19 that
‘perhaps it is for us women … to throw ourselves between the two camps to
separate our ignorant brothers, armed against one another … and to tell
them, with a maternal voice, “You shall go no farther.”’ Following the
nation’s turn to the right in the parliamentary elections of April 23, however,
she took an increasingly strident tone in denouncing political reaction.[15]
Her increasing militance seems to have led to conflict with Eugénie Niboyet,
the editor of La Voix des Femmes, who was careful to preserve the

563
David Allen Harvey
respectability of her journal. The paper ceased printing between April 29
and May 29, apparently as a result of official persecution, and in the first
issue following its reappearance, Niboyet explained that ‘an imprudent zeal
carried away some of the women who came to our assistance,’ but reassured
her readers that ‘we have purged our editorial staff,’ promising to publish ‘a
paper that a father would entrust to his daughter, a brother to his sister, a
young husband to his spouse.’[16] Noémi Constant was apparently one of
the ‘imprudent’ collaborators condemned by Niboyet, for her name does not
resurface in any of the remaining editions of La Voix des Femmes. This
rejection did not, however, end the younger woman’s participation in
feminist political action; as late as November 25, 1848, when the Club de la
Voix des Femmes had long been shut down by the police, she participated in
a feminist assembly, the Banquet régénerateur des femmes démocrates et
socialistes, where she raised a toast to ‘l’harmonie sociale.’[17] In her
youth, Noémi Constant was thus a part of the most militant branch of the
French feminist movement, and while she would not play an active role in
feminist organizations later in life, it will be argued below that those early
commitments are reflected in her subsequent body of literary work.
The Club de la Voix des Femmes, the Vésuviennes, and all of the
ephemeral political ventures of Alphonse-Louis and Noémi Constant
collapsed in the aftermath of the June Days, and both Constants, despite
their many differences, would depict 1848 in their subsequent works as a
time of deep disillusionment. The radical possibilities of the revolution gone,
the Constants scrambled to make ends meet while developing their multiple
artistic talents. Alphonse-Louis painted, illustrated other writers’ books
(notably the original edition of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo), and
restored furniture, while Noémi began writing for several newspapers,
including Le Tintamarre and Le Moniteur du Soir, adopting for the first
time the pseudonym Claude Vignon, and began to study with the sculptor
Pradier, who also helped Alphonse-Louis receive state commissions for
several religious paintings.[18] The newly-christened Claude Vignon was a
gifted student who would eventually produce a series of figures representing
the four virtues (Prudence, Temperance, Force, and Justice) for the portals
of the church Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrement, as well as some of the
ornamental sculpture surrounding the Fontaine Saint-Michel at the northern
edge of the Latin Quarter.[19] Several of her sculptures were later acquired
by the Louvre (although none is displayed in its current nineteenth-century
French sculpture exhibits).[20] It was not as a sculptor, but rather as an
author and journalist, however, that Vignon was to achieve her greatest
success.
Around the time of the collapse of the Second Republic, both
Constants began collaboration on the Revue progressive, a periodical which
offered articles on literature, art, philosophy, and practical science. Vignon

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 CLAUDE VIGNON, FORGOTTEN FEMINIST

made use of her contributions to the review to promote the work of

remarkable nineteenth-century Frenchwomen, writing a serialized biography
of Madame de Staël and praising the Salon entries of Rosa Bonheur, whose
candidacy for the Legion of Honor she endorsed.[21] At the same time, she
also became romantically involved with the journal’s aristocratic editor, the
Marquis de Montferrier. In October 1853 she left her husband, filing for
legal annulment the next year (divorce being unlawful in France from 1816
to 1884), on the grounds that, as Constant was a member of the clergy
(although he had not yet been ordained a priest when he left the church),
the marriage had been invalid from the beginning. The annulment would not
be finalized until 1865, but the marriage was over, and both former spouses
began new lives. Alphonse-Louis Constant would travel to London, change
his name to Eliphas Levi, and begin writing a series of voluminous, arcane
texts that are revered to this day as masterpieces by devotees of the occult.
Claude Vignon, just shy of her twenty-fifth birthday, would begin her career
as an independent woman of letters.
By the time that Claude Vignon launched her literary and journalistic
career in earnest, she could take her place in a social role which had already
been defined by a previous generation of women writers and intellectuals,
but which was still far from accepted by mid-century French society as a
whole. The July Monarchy had witnessed a proliferation of women writers,
many of whom, like George Sand and Daniel Stern (Marie d’Agoult), adopted
male pseudonyms as their literary personae. Whitney Walton has argued
that these nineteenth-century women writers took male pseudonyms as a
means of playing with multiple identities, subverting essentialized notions of
male and female roles and abilities, and asserting ‘a public identity, chosen
consciously by the women themselves and not assumed by law and social
convention, as were their married names.’[22] At the same time, Saint-
Simonian feminists such as Suzanne Voilquin, Jeanne Deroin, and Eugénie
Niboyet began agitating for increased political rights and individual freedom
for French women, a campaign which was ignored or belittled by society at
large, including many more prominent female authors such as Sand.[23] The
feminists of 1848, significantly, identified themselves only by their first
names, or by chosen pseudonyms, in their publications (Vignon signed her
contributions to La Voix des Femmes as ‘Marie-Noémi’), seemingly for the
purpose of distancing themselves from social conventions and constructing
their own identities.
The role of female writer and public intellectual thus had many
precedents by the time that Claude Vignon began to publish her writings,
but it would remain a highly contested and controversial one throughout
the period of her career. Noting that the French language has no word to
signify a woman author, Susan Grogan has written that ‘A woman
attempting to become a writer entered a cultural space which was

565
David Allen Harvey
apparently closed to her, or very narrowly defined. She claimed a legitimacy
not reflected within the language which constituted her tools of trade, and
had to express herself in a language she did not fully control.’[24] The
leading men of letters of nineteenth-century France did not recognize that
legitimacy, as Honoré de Balzac held that women who wrote ‘stepped
outside their sex,’ while Charles Baudelaire called their works ‘sacrilegious
parodies of male genius.’[25] The Club de la Voix des Femmes was ridiculed
by the mainstream press of 1848, notably in the caricatures of Honoré
Daumier, as ‘bluestockings’ who were seen as sexless, talentless, and socially
and morally subversive. Walton observes of these caricatures that ‘the
bluestocking is almost always ugly; lacking in feminine attributes such as
breasts and hips, sexually promiscuous; neglectful of household, uxorial, and
childrearing responsibilities; and ridiculously proud of her presumed artistic
genius.’[26] Such views had not changed considerably by the end of
Vignon’s career. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, a vitrolic critic of female
authorship, declared in 1878 that ‘women who write are no longer women.
They are flawed men! [des hommes, et manqués!] ... The bluestockings have,
more or less, renounced their sex.’ Barbey d’Aurevilly denied that women
could be independent thinkers or creators of art with the vulgar quip that
‘one gives ideas to women as one gives them children,’ and condemned the
proliferation of female literature in nineteenth-century France as a sign of its
decadence, which he identified as ‘social hermaphrodism.’[27] While Claude
Vignon was not necessarily blazing a new trail, she had still set out upon a
long and difficult road toward social acceptance and economic success.
And yet, despite the many obstacles she faced, Claude Vignon would
ultimately achieve both literary and economic success, supporting herself
exclusively through her own writing at a time in which such a venture was
daunting even for men, and almost unheard-of for women. She was a regular
contributor or correspondent for a number of different journals, notably
serving for twenty years as one of the French correspondents for a Belgian
paper, the Independence belge. She would publish around a dozen books in
her lifetime, including novels, short story collections, and non-fiction pieces
ranging from travelogues to art criticism. Eventually, once her literary
reputation was made, she married for a second time, this time to an
ambitious young lawyer fourteen years her junior, Maurice Rouvier, who
would be elected to the Chamber of Deputies and would go on to a long and
successful career in the governments of the Third Republic, including
several stints as Minister of Finance. The unconventional marriage raised
eyebrows on both sides of the political spectrum, with the Radical Brisson
attacking the couple in the Paris Journal of November 1881, by stating that
One must choose men whose respectability is unquestioned and whose
private life could not become an object of ridicule or scorn for hostile
parties ... And what would be his situation, what would be the situation

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 CLAUDE VIGNON, FORGOTTEN FEMINIST

of his colleagues, if politicians and diplomats refuse to enter a house ...

of which the woman who should be its honor has a past that does not
allow honest women to enter her home?[28]

A different story was told by friendlier observers, such as Jules Simon, who
later stated that when he first met the couple in Marseille, ‘I envied them
greatly. They were both quite young, she was ravishingly beautiful, they
were in love, they both had a great deal of talent, they were accustomed, by
difficult and fruitful experience, to the struggles of life.’[29] Rouvier
remained loyal to Vignon throughout her life despite attacks from his
political opponents, and following her death in 1888, supported and
advanced the legal career of her son, the child of a previous relationship.
One of the difficulties in recovering Claude Vignon’s personal
perspective on the gender relations and political conflicts of her time is that
she wrote a great deal during her life, but very little about her life. Unlike
many of her better known contemporaries, such as the Saint-Simonian
feminists Jeanne Deroin and Suzanne Voilquin studied by numerous
historians of nineteenth-century French feminism, or the quartet of more
moderate women authors whom Whitney Walton has recently profiled,
Claude Vignon did not write her autobiography or leave behind a diary or
journal. Her work is not peppered with the autobiographical asides that
abound in the works of her first husband, and to my knowledge, no one has
attempted to write her biography. While there are some other (far from
objective) sources that offer glimpses into different stages of her life, to
which I have already made reference, the only place in which Vignon’s voice
can be recovered without the mediation of her male contemporaries, not
surprisingly for a woman of letters, is in her literary work.
Between 1848, when Vignon’s first published work appeared in print
(‘Les Trois Frères,’ a socialist allegory representing the aristocracy, the
bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, which was published in the March 23
edition of Constant’s Le Tribun du peuple, and her contributions to La Voix
des Femmes, discussed above), and her death forty years later, Vignon
published a wide variety of novels and short stories, as well as descriptions
of the annual artistic Salons, a travelogue (Vingt jours en Espagne), and
frequent contributions to a number of journals. Her first ventures into
fiction, short stories published in two overlapping collections in the 1850s
(Contes à faire peur and Minuit, récits de la veillée) explored the realms of
fantasy, legend, and horror. Observing the remarkable conjunction of
everyday life and the supernatural in these early works, Pierre-Georges
Castex has written that Vignon ‘succeeds in creating an effect of the
fantastic while remaining faithful to the laws of a realist aesthetic.’[30] The
stories, which address topics such as the vengeance of the dead against the
living, met the then-current fashion for mystery and horror inspired by the
success of the Contes fantastiques d’Hoffmann, but they also suggest a

567
David Allen Harvey
certain familiarity with the occult subjects which would later become her
first husband’s obsession. A few years before, she had written for the Revue
progressive generally negative reviews of two books on occult themes,
Eudes de Mirville’s Des esprits et de leurs manifestations fluidiques and
Victor Hennequin’s Sauvons le genre humain, and as a collaborator on the
journal and the lover of its editor, the Marquis de Montferrier, she would
likely have met the Marquis’s eccentric brother-in-law, the Polish
mathematician and mystic Hoenë Wronski, the figure most influential in
Constant’s own conversion to occultism.[31]
What for Constant was to become a lifelong vocation and spiritual
quest was for Vignon only a passing fad; her later works eschew this
fascination with otherworldly subject matter in favor of realistic, perceptive
examinations of domestic dramas and the fate of strong-willed women in the
society of her time. Following the publication of her collections of horror
stories in 1856 and 1857, she then published volumes of short stories in
1858, 1861 and 1863 which, while retaining literary devices such as eerie
coincidences and surprise endings from the earlier genre, dealt less with the
supernatural than with more prosaic, though no less compelling, topics of
marital unhappiness, infidelity, and personal tragedy. One story from this
period, ‘Le surface d’un drame,’ examines the suicide of a mysterious woman
compromised in an illicit affair, who meets the narrator of the story on a
train and gives him a letter to deliver just before taking her own life. In the
end, it is revealed, the narrator’s wife was the friend to whom the letter was
addressed, but was never delivered as the address had been lost. In another
story, ‘La statue d’Apollon,’ a married Frenchwoman traveling in Italy feels
an irresistable attraction to a handsome young Italian, and upon returning
home following the unhappy end of her affair, she finds that her husband
has purchased for her a statue of Apollo for which her former lover had
served as model.[32]
Vignon explained her new stylistic direction in the preface to her 1858
collection, Récits de la vie réelle, stating that ‘everywhere I search for the
right word, the expression of life itself, and the success that I hope for is
sometimes to have found it. What is more dramatic, often, than truth? What
is more compelling than the echo or reflection of bustling life? The great
goal of art, is it not to reproduce that?’ Still, as Vignon made clear, her
realism was not that of Flaubert, and far less that of the Naturalists who
would soon succeed him. ‘That school [Realism] has, I know not why, taken
the task of only depicting the evil, tragic, and petty side of life. As if
goodness, devotion, and virtue did not have their own reality? If humanity
were as they represent it,’ she continued, ‘then God should send a second
flood to cleanse the earth! But no, in truth, the human heart is divided
between noble and ignoble instincts, pure and perverse sentiments. Man is
at once angel and animal; one should not sell the angel short.’[33] This

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 CLAUDE VIGNON, FORGOTTEN FEMINIST

moralizing realism would set the tone for the remainder of her literary work
over the last thirty years of her life.
Vignon’s moralizing realism could also be described, for lack of a
better word, as melodrama, which Peter Brooks has described as ‘an intense
emotional and ethical drama based on the manichaeistic struggle of good
and evil.’ Brooks sees the emergence of melodrama in the popular theatre of
the Empire years, and its passage into high culture in the works of novelists
like Balzac, as a consequence of the crisis of values in post-Revolutionary
French society, the mark of ‘a frightening new world in which the traditional
patterns of moral order no longer provide the necessary social glue.’
Vignon’s novels, as we shall soon see, reflect the manichean world-view of
melodrama, as her innocent, wronged heroines and cruel, calculating villains
are, in Brooks’s terms, ‘pure psychic signs’ of good and evil rather than
convincing depictions of complex individuals.[34] Mary Poovey has written
that melodrama is a fundamentally conservative genre, which ‘assumes both
the naturalness of female dependence and the sexual double standard.’[35]
In Vignon’s hands, however, it became a platform from which to express
moral outrage at the class and gender inequalities of her society. In contrast
to their Realist contemporaries, for Vignon and her fellow French feminists,
the point, to paraphrase Marx somewhat, was not to depict reality, but
rather to change it.[36]
The question of the existence and definition of a female literary voice is
a particularly thorny one, and the current scholarly debate has created a
sort of discursive minefield into which the disciplinary interloper (in my
case, the cultural historian examining a body of literary work) treads at his
or her peril.[37] Some feminist literary critics, drawing on Foucault’s
critique of authorship, have challenged the traditional narrative subject as
gender-, class-, and culture-specific, and consequently argued that
establishing a female subjectivity is difficult if not impossible.[38] Other
feminist scholars reject this extreme reductionism, and seek to identify the
defining features of women’s writing, a search which Elaine Showalter has
defined as ‘gynocritics,’ or ‘feminist criticism engendered by ... the study of
women as writers.’ This approach, far from accepting the death of the
author, focuses instead on the close links that unite the femme de lettres
and her work.[39] The author’s life and her work are further linked by the
social constraints imposed upon women, which make the author’s voice not
abstract and universal (as the male counterparts of women writers often
sought to portray themselves), but specific, as Fox-Genovese notes that
‘women wrote themselves out of their domestic tradition in both senses of
the phrase: they wrote from the experience, and they wrote to subvert the
constraints it imposed upon them.’[40]
The intimate connection between Vignon’s life and her work was
clearly apparent to her friend and contemporary Jules Simon, a sympathizer

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(if a notably inconsistent one) [41] of nineteenth-century feminism, who in
the introduction to a posthumous collection of her works commented on the
parallels between Vignon’s own life and that of one of her protagonists who,
following the death of her husband, faced the difficult choice of humble
submission to an uncaring father-in-law, or the struggle of paying her
husband’s debts and preserving her independence. Simon remarked that
‘the first alternative is humiliating and wise, the second is heroic and absurd.
Anyone other than Claude Vignon would have recognized the absurdity, but
Claude Vignon has reasons not to think that way. She gives the Parisienne
the courage, vitality, and talent which Claude Vignon demonstrated in a
similar position, and she also gives her the success which crowned the
efforts of Claude Vignon.’[42] By rooting her literary work firmly in her own
experiences of hope, frustration, and desire, Vignon offered a feminist
response to the misogyny of nineteenth-century French society, and also to
the idealization and marginalization of women offered by the male romantic
socialists with whom she was intimately acquainted in her youth.
The ‘woman question’ occupied many feminist and anti-feminist writers
in the nineteenth century, and was particularly heated during Vignon’s
career as a novelist, peaking in what Claire Goldberg Moses has described as
‘the querelle des femmes of the Second Empire.’ Male authors such as
Proudhon and Michelet made the case for the physical, intellectual, and
moral inferiority of women to men, and defended the exclusion of women
from the post-Revolutionary public sphere. Feminist writers, such as Juliette
Lamber Adam and Jenny d’Héricourt, dismantled such chauvinistic
arguments, and argued that the subordinate position of women was due to
social injustice, particularly the lack of educational and professional
opportunities available to them, rather than biological inferiority.[43] A
flurry of texts on both sides of the issue appeared in the 1860s and beyond,
and dealt with such issues as marriage, divorce, property rights, and the
desirability of women’s suffrage. Vignon’s novels, which deal with many of
the same subjects, are best understood as contributions to this
contemporary querelle des femmes.
The remainder of this article will focus primarily on five of Vignon’s
novels, published in the final twenty years of her life. Un naufrage parisien
(1868) chronicles the struggles of an unhappily married woman, Lucie
d’Ormessant, to free herself from her husband’s control, to find love, and to
achieve economic security for herself and her daughter. Don Juan
contemporain (1877) recasts the Spanish legend of Don Juan Tenorio in
nineteenth-century France, and traces the rise and fall of the ruthless Jean
de Chateau-Gaillard from the July Monarchy to the Second Empire.
Revoltée! (1878) tells the tragic story of Edmée le Dam, who marries a much
older husband at the age of fifteen to avoid the convent, then falls in love
with another man and defies social conventions to follow her heart. Le

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mariage d’un sous-préfet (1884) is a melodrama of vengeance of a mother

and her daughters against the man who wronged them. Finally, Une
étrangère, étude de femme (1886) chronicles the schemes of Isabel Clarke,
the ambitious daughter of an American father and South American mother,
to rise to the top of Second Empire society.
Issues of marriage, fidelity, and separation figure large in many of
Vignon’s novels. The prohibition of divorce by the Restoration monarchy in
1816, and the campaign by women’s rights advocates and their
parliamentary supporters to reestablish it (which met with success in 1884),
made marriage a central issue for nineteenth-century feminists. The inability
of women to escape a bad marriage was compounded by the legal and
economic subordination of wives to husbands under the Napoleonic Code.
Margaret Darrow and Patrick Bidelman have both noted that the Code gave
married women few options, as they were required to obtain permission
from their husbands in order to keep a separate residence, work outside the
home, or dispose of their own property. Furthermore, female infidelity was
punishable by imprisonment, while male infidelity was criminalized only
when it occurred in the conjugal bed, and even then only by a relatively
small fine.[44] Given the sharply unequal nature of the nineteenth-century
marriage contract, and the impossibility of dissolving it through divorce,
many nineteenth-century feminists, such as Jeanne Deroin and Flora Tristan,
explicitly compared the status of the married woman with that of the
slave.[45] This comparison also appears in Vignon’s fiction, as she highlights
and criticizes the legal subordination of women to their husbands, and
particularly their lack of control over their own property. Vignon’s novel Un
naufrage parisien opens in the last years of the July Monarchy with an
argument between Lucie d’Ormessant and her husband Charles, after which
Lucie reflects bitterly on her position:
So then she was a slave! And this deceptive royalty that the world
accorded her was but a snare, an illusion that would last what M.
d’Ormessant allowed it to live, and no more! This man was her master!
And not her humble servant, as she had believed up to then. He could
command, and if she resisted, he could punish! The law had put
everything into the hands of her husband: her honor and her fortune ...
her prestige as a woman of society, and her maternal joys ... everything,
everything![46]

An issue closely related to that of divorce which is also a common thread in

several of Vignon’s novels is the family pressure on women to marry at a
very young age. Margaret Darrow has noted that the average age difference
between husband and wife increased, at least among social elites, from the
eighteenth to the nineteenth century, leading to a new kind of marriage, ‘not
between two equally inexperienced young people, but between a man

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David Allen Harvey
already well-launched in his career ... and a girl recently out of the
schoolroom.’[47] Claire Goldberg Moses has cited Jules Michelet as arguing
that the ideal marriage age was about eighteen for women, and about thirty
for men.[48] For Vignon, who had been obligated by her parents to marry
the thirty-six-year-old Constant while she was only seventeen, the question
was not only a matter of philosophical debate between the desirability of
hierarchical versus companionate marriage, but one of personal experience
as well. For Vignon, such marriages, entered into before the girls in question
had reached intellectual or emotional maturity or known the passions of
romantic love, are destined to end badly, as unhappily married women are
forced to look outside their marriages to find the passionate relationships
they are unable to develop with their much older husbands. Lucie
d’Ormessant, the protagonist of Un naufrage parisien, had her marriage
arranged by her father, a delegate to the National Assembly, at the age of
eighteen, to a man she had never loved. Other heroines of Vignon’s fiction
choose bad marriages as a means of escaping a worse fate, as is the case
with the main character of her 1878 novel Revoltée!, Edmée Le Dam, the
fifteen-year-old daughter of a penniless aristocrat, who pursues a kindly-
looking older man after she hears that her aunt plans to send her to a
convent.
The passion of romantic love is, however, a mixed blessing for Vignon’s
heroines, as men’s affections often prove fleeting, and the risks of violating
social and moral norms fall more heavily on the adulterous woman than on
her male suitor. Lucie d’Ormessant later leaves her tyrannical husband,
having fallen in love with a sensitive Spanish exile, Miguel de Servas, who
unfortunately dies of cholera not long thereafter, leaving her to fend for
herself in the midst of the economic depression which followed the
Revolution of 1848. Lucie does make it through in the end, although she
has to deal with a vengeful ex-husband, a duplicitous private detective, and a
band of greedy creditors, who threaten to ruin her reputation and reduce
her to destitution by suing her for the debts that Miguel had left behind.
Lucie turns to the Marquise de Cheverus, a wealthy and respected grande
dame, who devises a plan to salvage both her fortune and her reputation.
She denies her relationship with Miguel and her role in disposing of his
estate (the matter in question in the lawsuit against her), and allows a young
admirer, for whom the consequences are far less grave, to take responsibility
before the law. The cost is high – Lucie must retire to a convent for a
number of years – but she is able to secure the future of her daughter, and
finally to retire to spend her final years in a peaceful country retreat.
Lucie d’Ormessant was, at the end of her ordeal, able to find a happy
ending, but not all of Vignon’s heroines are so fortunate. Edmée le Dam,
returning to Paris from her husband’s diplomatic post in the Near East,
finds the younger man with whom she has fallen in love absent, but his

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mother warns her of the possible consequences of her actions. ‘Do you not
know,’ she tells Edmée, ‘that one must never, at any price, be expelled from
society, and cast oneself into the darkness outside it? My child, you are now
more noble, more honest, more worthy of respect than nine-tenths of the
women who give themselves over to passion. Well! Those nine-tenths will
keep their rank, their social respectability, they will impose themselves on
society, will be supported by their families, protected by their husbands, and
later married by their lovers; while those who, like you, throw themselves
voluntarily into the abyss, the abyss will enclose them.’[49]
Edmée does not heed this well-meaning warning, nor does she return
to her husband or to her father’s house, as she is further advised to do.
Desperate and alone, she finally turns to prostitution, while reflecting
bitterly on the hypocrisy of bourgeois society and the limited choices it
offered to women:
What have I to do with the ridiculous prejudice which places between
courtisans and society women an uncrossable barrier? Courtisan?
Society woman? What is that? Mlle. X is a courtisan because she was
born to a poor worker who could give her no dowry, she accepted a
furnished room from her first lover at the age of sixteen, and had a
carriage made for her by the most recent, at the age of forty. My
stepmother is a society woman, because she was born to a more
intelligent worker than the other, who became a businessman and made
his fortune – more or less honestly! – and who purchased for her a
titled husband. She has no lovers but for her own pleasure. The other is
obligated to have them to compensate for the wrongs of fortune. She
would probably also take lovers only for pleasure, if she were rich.[50]

Edmée’s life goes steadily downward from the moment in which she decides
to defy social conventions, and ends soon thereafter in suicide, her death an
indictment of the society in which she lived and of the limited options which
it had afforded her. To endure a stifling, loveless marriage, or to give in to
passion and risk the consequences of defying the post-Napoleonic moral
order, that was the question facing Vignon’s heroines, and neither option
can have appeared very appealing to her readers.
Was there not a third alternative, a marriage of equals, in which
passion would be balanced by friendship, and stability would not signify
stagnation? The notion of ‘companionate marriage’ was often posited as an
alternative to Napoleonic patriarchy, both by the moderate feminist
movement which resurfaced in the final years of the Second Empire, and by
Opportunist republican politicians who saw in the religious and
philosophical divide separating men and women a barrier to the triumph of
morale laïque.[51] In a wistful and melancholy short story, ‘Le Paradis
perdu,’ Vignon offers the alternative of an intense, yet platonic relationship

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between a young law student and an older, married woman. The lawyer
Martinmont, years later, narrates how he came to know the mysterious,
unhappy Marguerite, who described herself as ‘a woman surrounded by
luxury, but alone in the world, with a husband whose appearance chills her
heart, and two children whom she could neither love nor raise according to
her wishes.’ Martinmont and Marguerite go on to spend many happy
afternoons together, but she tells him that the day that he tries to make her
his mistress will be the last he sees of her. Martinmont finds a soulmate in
Marguerite, but, faced with ridicule from his friends, who cannot appreciate
their chaste friendship, he tries to pressure Marguerite into a sexual
relationship, and she breaks off contact with him, leaving ‘a memory that
would ruin the sweetest love affairs.’[52] The story offers a vision of a more
tender and fulfilling union of a man and a woman, but it is surely significant
that it exists only furtively, outside of the marriage contract, and that it is
not affected by the passions that could be so dangerous for women in
nineteenth-century society.
Vignon’s most overtly feminist work, the novel which most clearly
condemns male depravity and tyranny over women and celebrates female
solidarity, resilience, and resourcefulness, is Le mariage d’un sous-prefet,
published by Calmann-Levy in 1884, just four years before her death. A
young woman, Laure Contadini, is raped by her brother-in-law, Justin
Carvejol, on a return trip from the convent school where she was being
educated. Her mother, a wealthy widow, suspects the truth that her
daughter refuses to speak, but is bound by the legal subordination of
women (her brutal son-in-law has assumed control of the import–export
business her late husband had built), and by the need to preserve
appearances in a society in which female honor was linked to chastity. The
widow Contadini was incensed to discover the truth, but was forced for a
time to suppress her rage, as she mused, ‘To kill Carvejol! Come now! It
would mean a criminal trial, certain condemnation, unless she dishonored
her daughter, it would mean the ruin of her business and the pillory of the
third page of all the journals of France and abroad!’[53] Left without
protection by the Code Civil, which put women financially and legally at the
mercy of men, the Contadini women have only their wits and charm to
match against the brutal Carvejol, and they are forced to employ both
skillfully and cautiously, so that their own agency in this drama of revenge
never becomes apparent. Laure’s distant, melancholy beauty has already
captivated the newly arrived sous-prefet, de Fresnoy, and her mother
recognizes the official as a useful potential ally. She is also fully aware of the
depths of the depravity of her son-in-law, and manages to arrange that he be
discovered by police in flagrante with a girl of thirteen, whose father insists
that Carvejol be prosecuted for seduction of a minor. De Fresnoy, as the
town’s top official, now has the man’s life in his hands, and recognizes that

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if he disposes of Carvejol and marries Laure, he will gain control over the
Contadinis’ substantial fortune. The novel ends happily for the women, as de
Fresnoy convinces Carvejol to commit suicide rather than face disgrace and
certain condemnation, then marries Laure and moves with the family to
Paris to pursue a brilliant career.
The question of female agency is a particularly interesting one in
Vignon’s fiction. The women in Vignon’s works are far from passive
bystanders; they are, to borrow an expression, the ‘heroes of their own
lives.’[54] It is Vignon’s female protagonists, rather than her generally rather
feckless male characters, who take the actions to free themselves from their
dilemmas. Nonetheless, and particularly when legal dilemmas or economic
troubles present themselves, they are forced to go to elaborate lengths to
hide their own agency in the resolution of their problems, which is made to
appear to be the work of men, or the simple operation of chance. The
women are thus able both to defend their interests and to preserve their
honor, but at the expense of their own effacement. In this society, bound by
the ‘invisible code’ of honor and respectability, women can be protagonists
only if they prevent the men around them from recognizing them as
such.[55]
The debate surrounding the proper role of women has, from the
emergence of an organized feminist movement in the Revolutionary era,
been bound up with what Joan Scott has called the ‘equality versus
difference debate,’ namely, the question of whether the case for women’s
rights should be presented in terms of the essential equality of the sexes, or
in the name of the distinctive virtues of the feminine.[56] In this sense,
Vignon tends to argue more for the different, but no less valuable, qualities
of the feminine. This position is consistent with the romantic socialist milieu
in which Vignon moved in her youth, which contrasted male egotism to an
essentialized vision of female devotion and self-sacrifice, and also with the
feminist discourse of 1848, which, as Scott and others have noted, pressed
its claims for women’s rights primarily based on women’s identity as
mothers, an approach which Karen Offen, following Ernest Legouvé, has
called ‘equality in difference.’[57] Like many nineteenth-century French
feminists, Vignon praised the heroines of her novels not as abstract,
universal individuals, but as women with virtues specific to their gender.
‘There exist in the Parisienne,’ Vignon writes in Un naufrage parisien,
‘unexpected resources, hidden strengths, improvised talents which make her
the most complete woman in the world, the most precious, the most
charming and the most desirable. A woman of society emerges from a
grisette in several days, and in a great woman, there are twenty different
women, even a grisette, if need be.’[58] Vignon would paraphrase herself
nine years later, writing at the beginning of Don Juan contemporain that
‘beneath almost all frail, delicate, little Parisian women, looking carefully,

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David Allen Harvey
one finds a heroine.’[59] The strength, resilience, and courage of Vignon’s
heroines stands in sharp contrast to the male characters in her novels, who
are, with few exceptions, either cunning, brutal villains, or adoring, selfless,
but also rather passive admirers.
Most of Vignon’s fiction takes place either in the July Monarchy of her
youth, or the Second Empire under which she established her literary
career. Both of these societies come under attack in Vignon’s work for their
stratified, hierarchical character, and above all for their hypocrisy and the
double standards by which they judged men and women. While Vignon’s
worthy protagonists suffer great hardships as they try to live in accordance
with their hearts, her villains triumph through their cunning, hypocrisy, and
cruel indifference toward the needs of others. Particularly notable, and
loathsome, in this regard, is Jean de Chateau-Gaillard, the cruel,
manipulative protagonist of Vignon’s Don Juan contemporain. Vignon
discusses Jean’s meteoric rise from illegitimate birth during the Empire to
wealth, political power, and social prominence later in the century, with the
following scathing indictment of nineteenth-century hypocrisy:
In the Middle Ages, this or that barbarian returning from war seized a
cluster of rocks, built a dungeon, enclosed a domain around it, and
ransomed the inhabitants of the plains, the travelers of the valleys, the
navigators of the rivers. He became a lord, he and his descendants. He
imposed himself, and that was that.
In the time of the Renaissance, soldiers of fortune volunteered in
Italy, in the service of the pope or the emperor, of France or Spain, and
they carved out a principality from the hubbub of battle, and became
the Sforza or the Castruccio Castracani. They seized a sovereignty from
high struggle, using poison and daggers, and that was that.
Today, under the reign of a citizen king ‘who reigns but does not
govern,’ in a nation dominated by two hundred thousand grocers, force
must dissimulate itself beneath stealth, brigandage beneath legality. One
must appear to be an honest man, in a word, to be a good thief, and
always cover one’s acts with a solid, brilliant surface, like a shield of
diamonds. One must pay one’s debts, live from a fortune or profits
justified by appearances, marry, have no quarrels with M. le Procureur
du Roi, flatter the electors, and even keep on good terms with one’s
priest.[60]

Like the original Don Juan, Jean de Chateau-Gaillard is a cruel and seductive
character, with no regard for the well-being of others, whose misdeeds
include the seduction and abandonment of a married woman and the killing
of her aggrieved husband in a duel. This Don Juan, significantly enough, is
also a politician, and finds in nineteenth-century electoral politics the perfect
field for his ambitions, a fitting indictment of a seemingly broken system. As

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is the case with the original Don Juan, however, his vices ultimately lead to
his downfall, although significantly here the role of the Comendador is taken
by a woman, Jean’s former lover Sarah Bertin, whose appearance at a
society ball provokes an attack which reduces Jean to a state of dementia.
Vignon’s final novel, Une étrangère, étude de femme, offers an
interesting parallel to Don Juan contemporain, in that it presents her only
truly despicable female character, Isabel Clarke, whose ambition and
callousness toward the needs of others make her, in Vignon’s eyes, a ‘social
monster.’ Vignon then goes on to define this term as referring to ‘these
excessive natures that are unwilling to limit their rights by observing those
of others, who take a greater place than that which distributive justice
accords to humanity, who want the lion’s share in all of their affairs, seizing
the benefits and rejecting the costs.’[61] Isabel’s ambition leads her to scale
the heights of Second Empire society, which Vignon portrays in all of its
splendor and hypocrisy, and to aspire to become the lover of Napoleon III.
(Ironically, she fails in this goal, but society assumes that a child she had
adopted and passed off as her own is the product of an affair with the
emperor.) Ultimately, however, her ambition and greed bring about her ruin,
and by the novel’s conclusion she has become a mere automaton, addicted
to morphine and under the control of a mother she had always rejected. In
the moral society of Vignon’s fiction, if not in the actual society in which she
lived, vice was thus ultimately punished, and virtue rewarded.
Claude Vignon consistently portrayed the July Monarchy and the
Second Empire negatively in her fiction, while the Third Republic of her
final years scarcely figures at all in her work. As was noted in the previous
examination of her youthful political engagements, however, the Revolution
of 1848 and the short-lived Second Republic were the pivotal moments in
Vignon’s intellectual and personal development, a time when she embraced
the feminist dream of a more equal and harmonious society, and then
watched that dream die along with the republic whose formation had first
inspired it. Shortly after the collapse of the Second Republic, she parted
ways from her first husband, the romantic socialist Alphonse-Louis Constant,
much as feminism and romantic socialism themselves took divergent paths
after the failures of 1848. She would witness the abandonment of the cause
of women’s rights by many of the male republicans and socialists who had
once advocated it, and the division and dispersion of her former comrades
from the Club de la Voix des Femmes, who would find themselves forced
either to abandon the struggle for gender equality, like Eugénie Niboyet, or
to face arrest, condemnation, and exile, like Jeanne Deroin.[62]
Not surprisingly then, the Revolution of 1848 figures large in several
of Vignon’s novels, and its depiction reveals her own disillusionment with
the failure of that revolution to achieve social justice, gender equality, or
even to establish a stable parliamentary order. The outbreak of the

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Revolution compounds the difficulties of Lucie d’Ormessant in Un naufrage
parisien, as it indefinitely delays the legal separation proceedings between
her and her husband, leaving her to fend for herself as her dowry and other
assets remain frozen pending the resolution of the case. The Revolution, on
the other hand, offers new opportunity for Jean de Chateau-Gaillard, the
unscrupulous, amoral protagonist of Don Juan contemporain, who
launches a successful political career. Jean leads a band of street-fighters on
the barricades, launches a slanderous political newspaper that changes party
affiliations as fortunes rise and fall, and ultimately wins election to the
Legislative Assembly. Vignon then summarized Jean’s assessment of the
balance of political power in that critical year, writing that ‘as soon as the
Republic was proclaimed, Jean knew at once it was not born viable, and that
reaction would destroy it. Socialist doctrines frightened too many spirits,
and they were too discordant and too foolish to have a chance to win over
the sensible part of the nation.’[63] Was this statement perhaps a jibe at
those male socialists of 1848 who had abandoned the cause of women’s
rights, only to go down to defeat themselves soon thereafter? One is tempted
to conclude so.
The inglorious brief life and rapid demise of the French Second
Republic will perhaps best be remembered for inspiring Marx’s famous
comment that all historical events occur twice, ‘the first time as tragedy, the
second as farce.’[64] In light of that famous assessment, it is interesting to
note the difference in the ways that Vignon and her former husband,
Alphonse-Louis Constant, retrospectively depicted the events of 1848. To the
older, more cynical Constant, who since 1853 had assumed the persona of
the occult commentator and practicing wizard Eliphas Levi (a Hebraization
of Alphonse-Louis), the Revolution of 1848 appeared in retrospect as an act
of madness, a position reflected in an odd anecdote which Constant, years
after the events in question, presented as historical fact. In the tense days of
February 1848, Constant argued, a certain Sobrier, the mentally unstable
apostle of an eccentric prophet named Ganneau who called himself the
Mapah, took to the streets of Paris and, by firing a pistol shot at a band of
royal troops, set off the street violence which escalated into the February
Days. ‘That pistol shot was the Revolution,’ Constant was to declare years
later, ‘and it was fired by a madman.’[65] The mid-century magus thus
dismissed the brief and dramatic life of the Second Republic as Marx had
done, as foolishness, as farce.
An examination of Claude Vignon’s literary work, and the ways in
which she depicts the Revolution of 1848, demonstrates that her views of its
brief four years were quite different from those of Constant. Unlike her first
husband, whose later writings assumed the fundamental inequality of
mankind and reserved initiation into occult gnosis to a select few (which
generally did not include women) [66], Vignon remained true to the

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egalitarian, solidaristic principles of the romantic socialist vision that both

had shared in her youth. It was because Vignon consistently insisted on the
principle of equality, whether between women and men or between rich and
poor, that she would retrospectively see the events of 1848 not as farce, but
as tragedy, a lost opportunity to establish a more just and equitable society,
the failure of which would bring hardship and disaster to the deserving, and
new opportunities for advancement to the unscrupulous. Despite the bitter
disappointment of 1848, however, Vignon’s fiction would continue to
denounce both class and gender inequality, celebrate the virtues of
sisterhood and the resourcefulness of women, and maintain the hope for a
more moral and empowering society, where greed and cruelty would be
punished, and virtue rewarded.

Notes
[1] Paul Chacornac, Eliphas Levi, renovateur de l’occultisme en France
(Charcornac Freres, 1926).
[2] Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Laure Adler, A l’aube
du feminisme: Les premières journalistes, 1830-1850 (Paris: Payot, 1979);
Michèle Riot-Sarcey, La démocratie à l’épreuve des femmes: Trois figures
critiques au pouvoir, 1830-1848 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).
[3] Naomi Judith Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: gender and romantic socialism in
July Monarchy France, dissertation, University of California at Santa Cruz,
1998, pp. 74, 43.
[4] Chacornac, Eliphas Levi, pp. 95-100.
[5] Correspondence between both Constants and the police authorities can be
found in the file on Alphonse-Louis Constant in the Archives de la
Prefecture de Police (Paris), dossier Ba 1018.
[6] Andrews, Socialism’s Muse, p. 60; Moses, French Feminism in the
Nineteenth Century, p. 108.
[7] For Constant’s fascination with maternity and breastfeeding, see Andrews,
Socialism’s Muse. The early nineteenth century was a period in which
proper maternal behavior, and in particular the question of breastfeeding
infants rather than sending them to a wetnurse, was a highly contested
topic. For a discussion of the terms of the debate, and changing ideals of
motherhood and womanhood more generally, see Elisabeth Badinter,
L’Amour en plus: histoire de l’amour maternel (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).
[8] Quoted in Christiane Buisset, Eliphas Levi, sa vie, son oeuvre, ses pensées
(Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 1984), p. 108.
[9] Alphonse Lucas, Les clubs et les clubistes (Paris: E. Dentu, 1851),
pp. 135-139, 183-184; Chacornac, Eliphas Levi, pp. 113-115; Andrews,
Socialism’s Muse, p. 29.

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[10] Marc de Villiers du Terrage, Histoire des clubs de femmes: 1793, 1848,
1871 (Paris: Plon, 1910), pp. 302, 342, 330.
[11] Laura Strumingher, The Vésuviennes: images of women warriors in 1848
and their significance for French history, History of European Ideas, 8(4/5)
(1987), pp. 451-488.
[12] Theodore Stanton, The Woman Question in Europe (New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1884), p. 243.
[13] Strumingher, ‘The Vésuviennes’, p. 454.
[14] La Voix des Femmes, April 28, 1848, cited in Strumingher, ‘The
Vésuviennes’, p. 486 (note 12).
[15] La Voix des Femmes, April 15, 19, 23, 25, 1848.
[16] La Voix des Femmes, May 29, 1848.
[17] Villiers du Terrage, Histoire des clubs de femmes, p. 367.
[18] Chacornac, Eliphas Levi, pp. 121-122.
[19] Pierre Kjelberg, Le nouveau guide des statues de Paris (Paris: Bibliothèque
des Arts, 1988), pp. 53, 76-77.
[20] Works listed in Jules Simon’s preface to a posthumous collection, Oeuvres
de Claude Vignon (Paris: Alphonse Lamerre, 1891), pp. ii-iii.
[21] The four-part biography of Mme de Stael was serialized in the bimonthly
periodical, Revue progressive: Sciences, arts mécaniques, littérature, beaux
arts, théatres, industrie (Paris), beginning with the September 15, 1853
issue. Vignon’s endorsement of Rosa Bonheur appears in her commentary
on the Salon of 1853 in the July 1, 1853 issue.
[22] Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants: four women writers and
republican politics in nineteenth century France (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), pp. 80-81.
[23] On Saint-Simonian feminism and its rejection by George Sand and her
colleagues, see Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century and
Adler, A l’aube du feminisme.
[24] Susan Grogan, Flora Tristan: life stories (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 64.
[25] Ibid., p. 74.
[26] Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants, p. 85.
[27] Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les bas-bleus (Geneva: Slatkine Reprint Editions,
1968 [1878]), pp. xi, 9, xix.
[28] Quoted in Jean Estèbe, Les Ministres de la République, 1871-1914 (Paris:
Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1982), pp. 83-84.
[29] Oeuvres de Claude Vignon, pp. iv-v.
[30] Pierre-Georges Castex, Le conte fantastique en France de Nodier à
Maupassant (Paris: Libraire Jose Corti, 1962), p. 117.
[31] Reviews appearing in Revue Progressive (Paris), August 1, 1853,
pp. 282-293, and November 15, 1853, pp. 349-356. For the strange life and
work of Hoene Wronski, see Frank Paul Bowman, French Romanticism:

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intertextual and interdisciplinary readings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1990).
[32] These stories, originally published under the Second Empire, may be found
in two posthumous collections of Vignon’s writings, respectively in Lisa,
Adrien Malaret, Le Surface d’un drame, (Paris: E. Dentu, 1895),
pp. 222-256; and Oeuvres de Claude Vignon, pp. 125-234.
[33] Vignon, Oeuvres, pp. 3-5.
[34] Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,
melodrama, and the mode of excess (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985), pp. 12, 20, 35.
[35] Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: the ideological work of gender in
mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 83.
[36] Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Karl Marx,
ed. Frederic L. Bender, Karl Marx: the essential writings (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1986), p. 155.
[37] Naomi Schor, ‘The Essentialism Which Is Not One,’ in her collection, Bad
Objects: essays popular and unpopular (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995), pp. 44-60.
[38] Leslie Wahl Rabine’s essay in Claire Goldberg Moses & Leslie Wahl Rabine,
Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993). For the perhaps premature announcement of the
‘death of the author,’ see Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? Bulletin
de la société française de philosophie, 63(3) (1969), pp. 75-104.
[39] Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,’ Critical Inquiry
(1981), pp. 184-185.
[40] Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘My Statue, My Self: autobiographical writings of
Afro-American Women,’ in Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self: theory and
practice of women’s autobiographical writings (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 72.
[41] Jules Simon was typical of many male sympathizers of the nineteenth-
century French feminist movement in that, while supporting the expansion
of women’s rights and defending the movement’s leaders against misogynist
attacks, he retained the idealized vision of womanhood that we have already
noted among earlier romantic socialists, and was thus on occasion
patronizing toward those whom he sought to defend. For Simon’s
idealization and marginalization of women, see Joan W. Scott, Gender and
the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988),
especially pp. 154-158; but for the friendship and support which he offered
to many nineteenth-century feminists, and his membership in feminist
organizations such as the Association pour le Droit des Femmes, see Moses,
French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century.
[42] Jules Simon, preface to Oeuvres de Claude Vignon, p. xxii.
[43] Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 151-172.

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[44] Margaret H. Darrow, Revolution in the House: family, class, and
inheritance in Southern France, 1775-1825 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989), p. 14; Patrick Bidelman, Pariahs Stand Up! The
Founding of the Liberal Feminist Movement in France, 1858-1889
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 5.
[45] Cited in Susan Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 98, 169.
[46] Claude Vignon, Un naufrage parisien (Paris: Michel Levy frères, 1869),
p. 32.
[47] Margaret Darrow, French Noblewomen and the New Domesticity, Feminist
Studies, 5(1) (1979), p. 51.
[48] Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 160.
[49] Claude Vignon, Revoltée! (Paris: Dubuisson et Cie, 1878), p. 98.
[50] Vignon, Revoltée!, p. 105.
[51] For the arguments in favor of companionate marriage, see Philip G. Nord,
The Republican Moment: struggles for democracy in France (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 220-222; and also Karen Offen,
Ernest Legouvé and the Doctrine of ‘Equality in Difference’ for Women: a
case study of male feminism in nineteenth-century French thought, Journal
of Modern History, 58 (1986), pp. 452-484.
[52] Claude Vignon, Le Paradis perdu, in Oeuvres de Claude Vignon, pp. 88,
108.
[53] Claude Vignon, Le Mariage d’un sous-prefet (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1884),
pp. 86-87.
[54] Linda Gordon, Heroes of their Own Lives: the politics and history of family
violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (New York: Viking, 1988). Gordon herself
appropriates the phrase from Dickens’s introduction to David Copperfield,
where the concept of the literary hero is grounded in the notion of agency.
[55] Honor in the nineteenth century was presented as an exclusively male
quality; see William Reddy, The Invisible Code (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), and Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of
Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
[56] Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French feminists and the Rights of
Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 3-4.
[57] Scott, Paradoxes, pp. 70-71. For romantic socialism and its views on gender,
see Andrews, Socialism’s Muse. For the formulation of ‘equality in
difference,’ see Offen, ‘Ernest Legouvé and the Doctrine of “Equality in
Difference” for Women’.
[58] Vignon, Un naufrage parisien, p. 139.
[59] Claude Vignon, Don Juan contemporain (Paris: Imprimerie du Journal Le
Télégraphe, 1877), p. 7.
[60] Vignon, Don Juan contemporain, p. 28.
[61] Vignon, Une étrangère, pp. 31-32.

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[62] For the fate of the feminists of 1848 following the collapse of the Second
Republic, see Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century,
especially pp. 142-149 and 229-237.
[63] Vignon, Don Juan contemporain, p. 77.
[64] Karl Marx, tr. C.P. Dutt, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New
York: International Publishers, 1963 [1852]), p. 15.
[65] Alphonse-Louis Constant, Histoire de la magie (Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 1996
[1859]), p. 524.
[66] The political vision of the later Constant is most explicitly laid out in a
manuscript written in the final year of his life and published posthumously
as Le Catechisme de la paix (Paris: Chamuel, 1896 [1875]).

DAVID ALLEN HARVEY is Assistant Professor of History at New College

of Florida, 5700 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, FL 34243, USA
(dharvey@ncf.edu). He received his doctorate from Princeton University in
1999. He is the author of Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace,
1830-1945 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), as well as
numerous articles and reviews. He is currently working on a study of
occultism and politics in France from the late Old Regime to the Great War.

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