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The feminine essence and France's National Revolution.

Article Excerpt
Francine Muel-Dreyfus. Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender. Translated by Kathleen A. Johnson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. x + 388 pp. Photos, notes, index. $64.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8223-2777-5; $21.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8223-2774-0.

In Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to the Sociology of Gender, Francine Muel-Dreyfus locates the notion of the "eternal feminine," the belief in an unchanging feminine essence, at the center of Vichy France's National Revolution. Muel-Dreyfus traces the sociogenesis of this ideology from 1870 and the conservative repression following the Commune, through conflicts over differing ideals of femininity during the Third Republic, to the solidification of an ideology of femininity based on biological difference and a feminine culture of sacrifice with the defeat of 1940. Using the setting of disaster and upheaval at the initiation of the National Revolution as a laboratory to analyze the resurgence of mythic reason during periods of crisis, Muel-Dreyfus highlights the broad and apparently apolitical support for an ideology that seemed to belie the chaos of the democratic "lie." Returning women to their "natural" and "real" place in society was intrinsic to the Vichy Regime's project of creating an orderly society rid of the decadence and individualism of the Third Republic and firmly based on "legitimate hierarchies," for which the masculine/feminine dichotomy was the cornerstone.

Following the armistice of 1940, conservative elements in...

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