Marie-Armande Gacon-Dufour: a radical intellectual at the turn of the nineteenth century

Gacon-Dufour, a middle-class woman born in 1753 who started flourishing as an author just before the Revolution, is mentioned in contemporary women’s studies mostly because of her reply to her friend Sylvain Maréchal’s provocation, Projet de loi portant défense d’apprendre à lire aux femmes, in 1801. Sometimes her later works on housekeeping are mentioned as well, but the overall result of the exclusive use of modern feminist benchmarks in the reading of her work is that Gacon does not come out as bold and as original as she actually was, because her thought is not put in context. Proposed here is a re-evaluation not only of Gacon’s work in the first decade of the 19th century in particular, but of her role among radical intellectuals defending ideas that had become again the object of censorship. Explicitly non-religious, she was all the more violently attacked because she was a woman who dared to swim against the tide: answering a vehemently critical review by the Journal de l’Empire in 1807, she compared herself to Hypatia, the ancient woman philosopher slaughtered by Christian fanatics.