In the cascade of sordid revelations last fall concerning Harvey Weinstein, our country’s #MeToo moment took flight. Soon thereafter, the activist Sandra Muller launched the French remake, #BalanceTonPorc, or “#Out Your Pig.” Like its American counterpart, #BalanceTonPorc has given a vital platform to tens of thousands of women subjected to sexual assault or to harassment in the workplace. But as is inevitably the case with remakes, #BalanceTonPorc reveals what divides between our sister republics as much as what unites them.
The current dustup in the French media is the latest reminder of this paradox. Last week, France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde, published a manifesto titled “We Support the Right to Seduce, Which Is Essential to Sexual Liberty.” The text, signed by 100 women, caught the world’s attention thanks to Catherine Deneuve’s signature. Other prominent signatories, however, include the writers Catherine Millet, Abnousse Shalmani, Sarah Chiche and Catherine Robbe-Grillet.
Oddly, the latter four women have all written widely about a particular 18th century literary figure, one that also helped inspire “Belle de Jour,” the film that made Deneuve a star. In honor of this writer, we might call this group the Sade Squad.
Squad Sade welcomed the “political awakening” spurred by the Weinstein affair. This moment, they declared, was “necessary.” But the moment’s character, they warned, had transmogrified. A movement that had freed women’s voices was now trying to silence them. “We must speak as we are told, to silence our doubts, while those who do not bend to these commands are regarded as traitors and collaborators.” This liberation movement had catalyzed into a “campaign of denunciations” that wished to lead “the pigs to the abattoir.” No less importantly, it threatened to curtail the sexual liberty of women as well as men. “Persistent flirtation is not a crime,” the manifesto affirmed, and “la galanterie is not aggressive machoism.”
In short, declared the writers, BalanceTonPorcism had become the disease for which it pretended to be the cure. Crucially, while the letter’s title -- created by Le Monde’s editors and not the authors -- meant to provoke, the letter itself did not argue that the “right to importune” was tantamount to the right to harass, much less aggress women. The letter’s authors insisted on a kind of Cartesian clarity: some actions are annoying, others repugnant, while yet others simply criminal. By confounding them, the more militant defenders of BalanceTonPorcism endangered not just the necessity to think clearly, but to speak freely.
The letter’s most controversial line -- a woman “can demand that she earn the same as a man, yet not feel traumatized for life by a man who rubs himself against her in the metro, which is a legal offense” -- inevitably lent itself to equally controversial readings. This became clear almost immediately. A counter-manifesto, written by the well-known feminist Caroline de Haas and signed by 30 fellow intellectuals and artists, claimed their opponents had deliberately confused seduction with savagery. “The difference between flirtation and harassment is measured not by degree, but by nature.” Recalling the quotidian nature of sexual harassment and violence, the counter-manifesto concluded: “The pigs are right to worry because their world is coming to an end.”
Politicians quickly took sides, too. Even when a man is insistent, the conservative firebrand Nadine Morano insisted, “beautiful stories can follow.” The key, she said, was “consent.” For the former Socialist minister, Laurence Rossignol, Morano offered a club to men, not a key. She marveled over the “odd anguish” felt by women who felt “they only existed when desired by men”—an attitude “that leads to tremendous idiocies.” Marlène Schiappa, who sits in charge of the government’s office of gender equality, qualified the Le Monde manifesto as a “potpourri of reflections some of which are interesting (if not new), while others are deeply shocking.”
Americans sense the sharp odor rising from this potpourri, but they might be insensible to its historical sources. There are several, rooted both in the past and in language. For example, the notion of galanterie raised by Le Monde's signatories cuts to the very heart of French exceptionalism. The landmark compendium of French cultural and political history, Les Lieux de Memoire, The Sites of Memory, describes it as an “art of living” specific to French civilization -- one important enough to earn an entry that runs nearly 40 pages. A threat against galanterie consequently marks a threat against France and her identity.
The specter of denunciation raised by the Le Monde manifesto, along with veiled references to collaborators, harkens to a darker chapter in French history -- World War Two and the German occupation. Between 1940 and 1945, all of those hunted by the French and German authorities, especially refugees and French Jews, were constant prey to anonymous letters of denunciation. As a result, the act of denunciation became synonymous in postwar France with the reign of terror and rule of oppression. To invoke the term, even today and even implicitly, thus generates more heat than light.
Appropriately, historians are trying to sort out this confusion. Michelle Perrot, a brilliant specialist in women’s history, has sought to tamp down the heat while turning up the light. She recognizes, on the one hand, that the frontier between galanterie and aggressiveness is indeed “tenuous.” On the other hand, she regrets that Deneuve & Co have “disassociated themselves from an event that could change the way we think” about gender and sexual relations. (On Monday, Deneuve published a column in the newspaper Libération in which she distanced herself from some of the more extreme remarks made by other signatories since the letter’s publication.) Opposed to proposed laws against catcalling and whistling, she is also against limiting the freedom of expression of those who support such laws.
Moderation is often the first casualty in what historians call the Franco-French wars. But who knows: Perhaps Perrot will inspire a third manifesto that seeks the middle ground in the epochal event.
