Guarding the memory of radical culture under Napoleon: a re-evaluation of Marie-Armande Gacon-Dufour

Gacon-Dufour, born in a bourgeois French family in 1753, began to gain fame as an author just before the Revolution. Today she is mentioned in women’s studies mostly because of her feminist reply in 1801 to her friend Sylvain Maréchal’s provocative Projet de loi portant défense d’apprendre à lire aux femmes. Occasionally 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. In particular, the political and intellectual meaning of her personal friendships needs be considered. In the same year 1801, again in open connection with Maréchal’s work, and in a changed political situation where he could seem an inconvenient friend, she also published a novel, La femme grenadier, where she took the risk of defending the radical republican revolutionary experience in a political perspective. In 1805, the astronomer Jerôme Lalande, in his second supplement to Maréchal’s Dictionnaire des athées (1800), added to the figures praised in his recently deceased friend’s work a new group of names: one of these was Gacon’s – who had in all likelihood boldly given her consent to being included in a list that many, in that time of prudent recantation, considered infamous and shameful. This made her one of the very few women mentioned in the book, perhaps indeed the only one living. What is proposed here is a re-evaluation not only of part of Gacon’s work, but of her role in what seems to be a network of male radical intellectuals guarding the memory of ideas that in France 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 of the times. Answering a review of her work by the Journal de l’Empire in 1807, she compared herself to Hypatia, the ancient woman philosopher slaughtered by Christian fanatics.