Last summer, the French weekly Marianne took a telephone poll and, in the fall, informed its readers that the extravagantly entitled feminist philosophe Elisabeth Badinter was now, officially, the country’s “most influential intellectual.” In France, intellectuals have rock-star status. Marianne is not The New York Review of Books. It’s what the French call a journal populaire of the republican left—Marianne being the female face of the Republic that you see on postage stamps and town-hall statues—which suggests that not all its readers had actually got through Badinter’s three-volume social history of the French Enlightenment, “Les Passions Intellectuelles,” or even knew that she spent the better part of her time in archives, consorting with the men and women who gathered in the great salons of eighteenth-century Paris for evenings of ardent, exquisite conversation about the rights of man. The Elisabeth Badinter that most of those readers knew was the public Badinter, a woman of fierce propriety and convictions who would emerge from the archives at the first stirrings of dissension within the French feminist ranks and, armed with the precepts of a candlelit past, pronounce on what the proper republican response should be. Enforced male-female parity on electoral lists? Badinter fought against it. The so-called burqa ban? She lobbied for months to see it passed. The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in New York, on charges of attempted rape? For weeks, she kept a pointedly protective silence; Strauss-Kahn’s wife is one of her closest friends. View more Badinter once told me that she lived in two centuries and commuted between them, a reluctant tenant in her own. She is convinced that young Frenchwomen have been undermining their hard-won claims to equality—a universalist principle enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written by the revolutionary élite of 1789 as the founding document of a new republic. Never mind that the citoyennes of 1789 lost those rights before they ever had them, or that they got to vote only after the Second World War, or, for that matter, that until they took to the streets two months ago, in protest, they were expected to accept the extraordinary sexual prerogatives of their republic’s male leaders. Legally, Frenchwomen have those rights now, and Badinter thinks they are starting to renounce them. She believes that, in the name of “difference,” young women are falling victim to sociobiological fictions that reduce them to the status of female mammals, programmed to the “higher claims” of womb and breast. She has written five blunt, admonitory best-sellers on the subject of those women and their men. They have made her a household name. She calls them “my contrarian feminist polemics.” Her first, “L’Amour en Plus”—a history of the changing notions of mother love—was published in 1980, when she was thirty-five. It dismissed the myth of maternal instinct as a sometime cultural construct. She describes the reaction as “The men said ‘no,’ and the women of my generation said ‘yes.’ ” Today, another generation is reading her latest book, “Le Conflit: La Femme et la Mère,” a scathing dissection of what she regards as a spreading cult of “motherhood fundamentalism” in the West. This time, women are saying no, too—a sign, as Badinter puts it, of how French feminism has fractured in the sixty-two years since Simone de Beauvoir wrote, in “The Second Sex,” “One is not born woman, one becomes one.” Badinter has called “Le Conflit” a gloomy anniversary sequel to “L’Amour en Plus.” It is a chronicle of backlash, a feminist guide to the participants, many of them women, in what she regards as a powerful, if occasionally inadvertent, conspiracy against women’s freedom, fuelled by economically uncertain times and encouraged by the religious right—whose purposes it ultimately serves. Badinter calls it, grandly, an identity crisis “perhaps unprecedented in human history”: a rejection of centuries of progress, at the end of which the tyranny of biological destiny, at least for Western women, was all but conquered. She describes it as “a movement dressed in the guise of a modern, moral cause that worships all things natural.” Her current conspirators include ecological fanatics (no little jars of baby food, no disposable diapers) and neo-feminist fundamentalists of “woman’s nature” (no escape from biology); breast-feeding disciples of the American group La Leche League (no baby formula, no choices) and unctuously authoritarian obstetricians (no cigarettes at all, no champagne on your birthday); and, finally, ultra-conservative Catholic Frenchmen and their no less threatened counterparts on the secular left. Badinter believes that they have joined forces to drive independent and accomplished women out of the world and the workplace and into the house, where they will presumably squander their best, and most sexually interesting, years in unremitting slavery to their babies. Eight years ago, in a book called “Fausse Route,” Badinter railed against what she saw as a false “feminism of victimhood”—a surrender to the inevitability of inequality, cloaked both as an embrace of “gender” and its traditional roles and as a call for legislative redress. But she says that at least those false-route feminists occasionally admitted that they were bored silly by the sacrifices they felt obliged to make for the sandbox life, the constant company of their babies. Now, she says, they have been told to love those sacrifices as much as they may (or may not) love their babies, and to give themselves over to the jouissance—“orgasm” would be my translation—of intimacy with the little one who, in place of their husband or lover, will be sharing their bed for at least three years. Her argument is that nature worship, “and the behavior it presupposes, are in fact motherhood’s worst enemies.” One afternoon late last winter, she told me about a review in Le Monde that said, “Elisabeth Badinter proceeds like heavy artillery.” We were drinking tea and eating Poilâne sand cookies at a big round table in the living room of her apartment—a comfortable, sprawling flat on the Left Bank, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens—and talking about the response to “Le Conflit.” “The critic was right,” she said, laughing. “I get a great deal of pleasure in expressing ideas that way—ideas that go against the current. I love to throw out a contrary point of view, and I do it with, perhaps, a certain lack of subtlety. It’s my Cartesian education. I see ambiguity and I want to pierce through it. I am a fanatic of clarity. In this one sense, I am not a philosophe but an ideologue.” The book sold almost two hundred thousand copies when it came out last year, nine months before Marianne’s poll. More than sixty per cent of its sales were in the provinces, where Badinter’s word can amount to catechism. It could be found in bookstores, at supermarket checkout counters, and in the toothpaste-and-thriller transit shops—called relais—at train stations and airports. It has already been translated into nine languages. The American edition will be out in January.

Elisabeth Badinter is a made-in-France intellectual, a woman revered by her followers and reviled by her critics for the same reason: she claims an intellectual’s right to pass judgment on ordinary lives, and she does it from the cool remove of money, family, and uncommon privilege. A reputation for aloofness precedes her, though I found her friendly, often extremely funny, and less lofty than formal, guarded, and even a little shy. She is certainly the most elusive public figure in France. Older French readers remember her as the serenely beautiful young writer with pale-blue eyes, ash-blond hair, and barely a touch of makeup who introduced herself, and “L’Amour en Plus,” on the popular literary talk show “Apostrophes.” French Socialists met her as the admiring wife of Robert Badinter, a lawyer of intimidating rectitude, sixteen years her senior, who, as François Mitterrand’s justice minister, abolished the death penalty and began the modernization of the Code Napoleon; went on to become the president of the country’s Constitutional Council; and today, at eighty-three, dispenses juridical wisdom from a seat in the French Senate. French business knows her as the astute daughter of Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, a legendary entrepreneur, born to a Russian Jewish immigrant family, who founded the advertising and communications giant Publicis—leaving her, at his death, as the board chairman and the controlling shareholder of a four-billion-dollar empire that includes the third-largest advertising agency in the world. French historians know her as the modest, enthusiastic colleague who drives an old Renault hatchback to the brainstorming sessions where they share and compare their latest archival findings. French friends know her as a terrible cook, an indifferent housekeeper, a collector of little ivory Indian elephants, and a “besotted” grandmother to three children whom she spirits away every other weekend to a converted seventeenth-century mill granary in the countryside, an hour and a quarter’s drive from Paris. The only people in France who do not seem to have a comfortable purchase on Badinter are feminists whose efforts or arguments fall short of her republican standards, or who question the efficiency of those standards in a country where sexual equality remains an inconvenience for most men—a truth brought home by the aggrieved reaction to Strauss-Kahn’s arrest among old power brokers on the political left, who had hoped to see him elected President. Jack Lang, a longtime Socialist culture minister and, later, finance minister, was shocked to see his friend jailed for an incident in which “no one died”; Jean-François Kahn, the publisher of Marianne, called the alleged assault a “troussage de domestique.” (Loosely translated: fucking the maid is no big deal.) The right, it goes without saying, was delighted. a15884 Badinter did not join the thousands of French feminists demonstrating last month to demand an end to a political culture that has habitually dismissed sexual predation as “seduction.” In fact, in her first and only public statement about the Strauss-Kahn affair—two weeks ago, after the case against him started to come apart—she accused them of “exploiting a possible injustice in order to advance their cause.” (“I find that obscene,” she said.) Her relations with those feminists are, as she puts it, case by case. She will sign a petition or write an article if, on reflection, the cause seems rational or needs a “voice”: Afghan women, for example, or gay adoption rights. But she will not do battle, face to face, if she disagrees; she is interested in affecting social policy, not in probing her differences with other women. “I know my opponents from the newspapers,” she told me, meaning that she limits her confrontations to an exchange of essays in Le Monde, say, or Le Nouvel Observateur. She thinks that feminist discourse deteriorated in the nineteen-eighties, when women began attacking men, and that it’s worse now, with women attacking one another. She talks wistfully about “the great intellectual revolution in the salons before the Revolution, when there was a gaiety, a charm, a grace and seduction” to conversation, and compares it with her “worst experience,” a talk at Princeton, in the early nineties, when “everyone attacked me.” She calls it a “total execution.” The American feminist scholar Joan Scott, at the Institute for Advanced Studies, heard the talk. She told me, “Badinter was saying all sorts of banal things about how the French were sexier than Americans, better at sex, how American women washed too much, how they were embarrassed by bodily odors, by oral sex. We asked hostile questions, like, ‘How can you say these things off the top of your head?’ That it was traumatic for her is very odd. We were simply distressed by her talk.” Badinter says that she doesn’t recall the “details,” only the argument she was trying to make: that French men and women were “collaborators, not adversaries,” in seduction and life and perhaps, because of this, had a better time in bed. She refuses to come to the United States now—except to visit the older of her two sons, who lives in Cleveland, or to search an archive—“because you can’t smoke there and because of Princeton.”

Badinter was born in Paris, toward the end of the Occupation, with the surname Vaillant on her birth certificate. (“As if there were no father,” she says.) Her mother, Sophie Vaillant, was the granddaughter of Édouard Vaillant, a hero and minister of the 1871 Paris Commune, and the name was clearly safer to use in occupied Paris than Bleustein-Blanchet. Before the war, Vaillant was a well-known model for the couturier Lucien Lelong. She converted to Judaism when she married Bleustein-Blanchet, in 1940, and fled with him to Aix-les-Bains, in the Free Zone, as Paris fell. They stayed until the Germans moved south to occupy the zone, at the end of 1942. Bleustein-Blanchet, who had been gathering intelligence for the Resistance, escaped through Spain to England and started flying reconnaissance missions for the Free French. Vaillant returned to the city, pregnant with Elisabeth. Badinter says that when her father came home after the Liberation to meet his new daughter and rebuild a business that had been seized by the Nazis as a “Jewish enterprise,” it took him a year to convince the authorities that her name was Elisabeth Bleustein-Blanchet. Badinter rarely mentions her mother, who worked for Elle while she was growing up—she says the relationship between mothers and daughters is “complicated”—but she talks with great affection and admiration about Bleustein-Blanchet. “A true Jewish father,” she calls him. “His sense of family was very strong, and I got the benefit of that. He and I were the early risers. We’d wake up every morning at five or six, and I would go into his room and sit at the foot of his bed, and we’d talk for hours. He would ask me, What do you want to do in life? And he would answer for me: he said that if I made the effort there was nothing I couldn’t do.” She suspects that most strong women have fathers like hers. “And it’s not always a question of privilege. Margaret Thatcher’s father was a grocer. Edith Cresson’s was a civil servant.” (Cresson was France’s first, and only, female Prime Minister; she lasted a year, in the early nineties.) “It’s about the regard of a father for his daughters. And my father had three.” Elisabeth was the middle daughter; the eldest died in an accident at twenty-seven, and the youngest handles publicity for Le Drugstore, the company’s flagship storefront on the Champs-Élysées. “My critics say that I’m my father’s daughter and my husband’s wife,” Badinter told me one afternoon. “They’re right.” Badinter met her husband on her twelfth birthday, at a family lunch. He was twenty-eight and her father’s lawyer, and he arrived that day with a little elephant carving, as a birthday present. It started her collection. (“Robert said, ‘You’re such a nice girl that I’ll send you a bigger one each year.’ ”) They didn’t meet again for a decade. He married an actress named Anne Vernon, and Badinter was put through the proper paces for a teen-age girl who lived on the Avenue Foch and whose father was known in France as the man who invented advertising. She spent a year of boarding school in Switzerland, and passed her baccalaureate at the École Alsacienne, a fortress of small-“r” republican secularism, and the most prestigious private school in Paris. Her father had sent her to London, summers, to practice English, and after her bac she spent a year in New York, studying at Columbia and working as an intern at the Times—a job she describes cheerfully as “Bosley Crowther, the film critic, took me to movies and the crime reporter took me to police headquarters.” Her first degrees were in sociology and psychology, at the Sorbonne. Not particularly satisfied with either, she took a third degree, in philosophy. By the time she finished, she was engaged. “We ran into each other, after all those years, on a street not far from here,” she told me. “He said he was getting divorced. We had coffee. And voilà!” They married in 1966. By 1972, she had passed the exams for an agrégation in philosophy—the country’s advanced pre-doctoral degree. She had also had three children in three and a half years. “I wanted my children one after the other, because Robert was older and he wanted it,” she told me. “I was young, I had the energy, but I remember the huge fatigue. It took me five years of trying to pass those exams, even with an au pair to help. I always had an au pair, so once I had my agrégation I could start teaching. At first, I taught half time, at a lycée out near Créteil, to have the same schedule as my children when they started school. I wanted to be home when they were.” Badinter likes to say that she was just an average, muddling-along mother—“like everyone else.” She told me, “The children complained. They said, ‘When we’re home from school, you’re always there. Why?’ Now I think that maybe they just needed a few minutes to themselves—without me nagging them to start their homework. Lévi-Strauss once said that, in an encounter between two cultures, you have to find the right distance in order to really get to know each other. I think the same applies to mothers and children. If you’re a mother, you are either too present or too absent; you can’t win. You have to be a Mozart of maternity to reach the right absence-presence balance.” Badinter’s children do not discuss their mother. She says that, after “L’Amour en Plus” came out, their classmates teased them: “Your mother doesn’t love you; she doesn’t believe in a maternal instinct.” She told them not to answer, and, apparently, they still follow her advice. Both sons are in the advertising business, the younger one in Paris. Her only daughter, a psychoanalyst, lives just a few doors down the street, and sends her two children to lunch with their grandparents every Wednesday, when school lets out at the Alsacienne. Badinter made a point of saying that “the children think as we do, they share our values.” One day, pointing to a little lunette table with a bust of the eighteenth-century social philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet—the subject of a seven-hundred-page biography that she and her husband wrote together, in the late eighties—she told me, “They embrace Condorcet whenever they come here. It’s like a talisman. “My argument in ‘Le Conflit’ isn’t against motherhood,” she said. “My argument is against the ‘nature’ fundamentalists, who say that a child needs only its mother. It’s the ‘only’ that alarms me. Edwige Antier”—a conservative deputy and La Leche pediatrician whose radio program once reached thousands of young women—“says that fathers shouldn’t give a bottle to their babies, or feed their babies, or even touch their babies. And women listen to her! I was in Oslo last year, for a conference on feminine identity, and met a friend of a friend. When I saw that her four-year-old was still at the breast—it was culture shock. It seemed to me incestuous.” “That model of motherhood, that primitive idea that ‘nature’ is God, nature is wisdom, it all comes from Rousseau,” she said, a few days later. “I have a horror of that naturalistic ideology. It’s thanks to him that there was such a terrible backlash against women after the Revolution.” By the end of the eighteenth century, women found themselves completely shut out of public life. Marianne stayed home with her babies, and she didn’t fare any better with an emperor than she had with the republican revolutionaries. I mentioned a letter that Napoleon wrote from the front to Josephine: Home in three or four days. Don’t wash! Badinter said that by then Napoleon had embraced the Rousseauian myth of the Natural Woman to such a degree that, “when he saw Madame de Staël in one of her famous gowns, he said to her, Madame, is that beautiful décolletage to help you nurse your babies? Because, if not, it’s worthless.” She suspects that the same kind of conversation is taking place in France today, except that the rhetoric of contempt now comes with an ecological sheen: “These young women, they’ve been told to use cloth diapers; paper diapers aren’t ‘natural.’ They won’t use anesthesia; it’s not ‘natural.’ For me, the epidural was a victory over pain. But they say no, they want to feel what it is to be a woman. Their idea is that if you’re not suffering you have failed the experience of maternity. You are a ‘denatured woman’—a victim of ‘capitalist individualism’ and ‘consumerism.’ ” Badinter says that she would never tell women not to nurse, or how long to nurse, any more than she would tell them not to try natural childbirth—only to decide for themselves. And she insists that she isn’t telling them to smoke and drink their way through pregnancy, only that an occasional glass of wine or one or two cigarettes a day won’t hurt them (though on the subject of cigarettes the evidence is certainly against her). She exaggerates, she says, “to make them stop and think.” a15854

Badinter produced the manuscript for “Le Conflit” in five months, perhaps with more conviction than reflection. “Since the nineteen-nineties, I had been seeing, reading about, a lot of little things,” she said one morning. “I had these big boxes—shoeboxes—full of clippings, and, like that, I saw that something was happening, a profound modification of our society, and that no one was noticing, or they were noticing but not really saying anything about it.” Her book is packed with stories and statistical tidbits from those boxes. They speak to a genuine concern for the future of young Frenchwomen, but it seemed to me that, taken together, they described a generation in, say, Germany or the United States, where guilt among working mothers is close to epidemic. That is certainly not the case in France. Eighty per cent of the women work full time, and, as Badinter herself says, most of them leave their babies at well-staffed workday crèches or drop-off garderies and their toddlers at public nursery schools, or maternelles, that exist in virtually every neighborhood. Her graphs in one chapter—about the intrusion of La Leche militants into family life—put the number of French mothers still nursing babies older than three months at less than twenty per cent, by far the lowest in the European Union. (In Norway, it’s ninety per cent.) By six months, the number is so negligible that France isn’t even included in the E.U. data. In fact, there is probably no system in the world as supportive of working mothers as the French. Women in France are both working more and having more children: twice as many per family as most countries in the E.U. Badinter admits that, “for now, Frenchwomen have escaped the dilemma of all or nothing.” But she closes her book with an end run around her own statistics—asking how long those women “will be able to hold fast against the naturalists, solidly supported by the most respectable international institutions, and against the doctors and nurses charged with their pregnancies and deliveries,” and “to impose their desires and their will against a rampant discourse of guilt.” Their resistance, she says, makes them the exception that proves the new rule. She credits the endurance, in France, of Enlightenment ideals of women’s freedom. The press was decorous when “Le Conflit” came out. Virtually every newspaper and magazine in the country ran long interviews with Badinter, and the radio station France Inter devoted an entire day to the book. The people who attacked “Le Conflit” were mainly the ones whom Badinter had attacked in it. No one except the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, a Marianne critic, and a couple of Green Party bloggers even mentioned the connection between Badinter and Publicis, which represents Procter & Gamble (Pampers) and Nestlé (powdered milk)—though Badinter herself told Der Spiegel that she got the idea for the book, in 1998, when France not only enforced an E.U. directive banning advertisements for powdered milk but also stopped the distribution of free samples in maternity wards. She says that she was not surprised by the dearth of comment. She took it as a compliment. “People know that my ideas, my militancy, are personal,” she told me. “They have nothing to do with Publicis, or my role in Publicis. I am in the habit of thinking for myself.” Most French feminist scholars ignored the book. Few of the ones I asked had even read it. They said that, from what they’d heard, there was some truth in what Badinter had written, but that it had very little to do with the world they lived in. (In Germany, where only fourteen in every hundred women return to full-time jobs after their first child, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called it “a book that will divide Germany.”) I wondered about the lack of serious French feminist response. Sylvie Kauffmann, the first, and only, woman to edit Le Monde (she is now its editor at large), told me, “Women here? They don’t see this return to the house that she talks about. I don’t see it. Women here want to be good mothers and to succeed at a job, and if a child is sick they work doubly hard to catch up. The issue for us is that we’ve all played by the rules, we’re educated, accomplished, we’re often the best in our field, and yet . . .” Kauffmann had recently put herself forward as a candidate for Le Monde’s director (a job that falls somewhere between editor and publisher). There were thirteen candidates, and she was the only woman who chose to run. “Nearly fifty per cent of our newsroom is women,” she said. “So why was there only one woman running for the top job? Why were there no women on the selection committee? Why was I the only one at the office to find this strange?” Kauffmann thinks that, until the “wake-up call” of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, younger French feminists hadn’t really acknowledged the extent of their own acceptance of discrimination. “Badinter has stature, moral authority—it comes with the couple,” she told me. “She’s a stern, dignified, left-wing woman who doesn’t go on television shows and never talks about her children. But there is no one really to address her. We covered the book. We ran a few op-eds about it. I had ordered a whole Page 3”—Le Monde’s comment page—“about it, but it was hard to find interesting female voices to respond. In fact, there is no big, authoritative voice for women in France now.” Badinter told me, “There is a profound difference between me and most other feminists. I never saw myself as victimized or stifled; I never saw all men as oppressors. That one fact—the fact that I didn’t suffer—has shaped my point of view. I know that I grew up in a very privileged world, socially, but like Tocqueville, talking about the eighteenth century, I think the most privileged classes are often the ones least tolerant of inequality. I never expected inequality. I was under no pressure to expect it. I had nothing to revolt against.”

P_hilosophe_ is a word most commonly used in France for “thinker,” and, as often as not, a thinker whose name, like Badinter’s, carries an authoritative whiff of prominence. Badinter taught philosophy for twenty-eight years at the École Polytechnique in Paris, one of the über-universities that the French call grandes écoles. But she doesn’t write philosophy, in the sense that Kant or Wittgenstein wrote philosophy, and she doesn’t pretend to. Nor does she claim to be a feminist theorist or, academically speaking, a historian. History is a discipline she more or less taught herself, early on, reading the Oxford historians and writing books like “Les ‘Remontrances’ de Malesherbes,” her mid-eighties chronicle of the trial of Louis XVI. “Les Passions Intellectuelles” (the third volume came out in 2007) was a labor of fifteen years. She was fifteen when she read Beauvoir for the first time, and her feminism was honed during the first course she taught at the Polytechnique, when she was thirty-four. “It was pure luck,” she told me. “They decided they needed a woman in the humanities, and, given their history”—Napoleon founded the Polytechnique as a military school—“I proposed teaching the history of eighteenth-century military strategy. They groaned, and said, ‘Don’t you have anything else in mind?’ I said yes, the history of maternal love.” Today, she keeps her centuries in separate rooms, one in each of her two homes. Her feminist library is in Paris, in a comfortable garret study with a desk and a wall of family snapshots at one end and bookshelves lining the sides. Her eighteenth-century library—“much bigger, and more inspiring”—is in the country, in the study where she also does all her writing. Her latest project is a book about the Hapsburg empress Marie Thérèse of Austria, who not only gave birth to sixteen children (among them Marie Antoinette) in her first nineteen years of marriage but, according to Badinter, saved her empire, and her authority over it, by sweeping into the Hungarian parliament with her first baby in her arms and declaring herself “mother of the people.” Badinter calls the project a study of the “political utilization of maternity” as a symbol of power. It has kept her travelling to archives for the past year and a half, and reading thousands of hitherto unsourced pieces of the Empress’s correspondence and private papers. Her work habits are, by her admission, obsessive. “Before writing a word, I do an outline of fifty or even eighty pages. Everything I want to say is there, with all the references. It’s an academic vice that I never lost, but I adore that part of the work, watching an argument develop.” She writes by hand, on typing paper, in a tiny script, and makes no corrections. Robert Badinter describes their one collaboration, on Condorcet, as “a pleasure I would like to repeat,” but says the process was intimidating. “She writes with a Bic—she doesn’t need a pencil,” he told me, when we talked one morning at the apartment. “Whereas I’m much less organized, and of course I was justice minister then, with not much time for writing, and my drafts were a mess, with scribbles and cross-outs everywhere, and my books were all over the floor. We divided the sections. She took the writer and philosopher Condorcet, and I took the revolutionary—the later Condorcet. In the end, we read the manuscript together over two days and had the usual discussions: your part is too long; that sentence of yours is not interesting. We had one argument. Elisabeth thought that Condorcet died of exhaustion. I had to persuade her it was suicide.” “It might have been the other way around,” she says. The Badinters are arguably one of Paris’s power couples, but you would be hard put to find them networking at the Davos forum, or flying to Cannes for the film festival, or lounging “at home” in the pages of Paris Match. Badinter’s style is pointedly discreet. She wears her shoulder-length hair brushed back from her face and fastened with a clip or a comb, exactly the way she did on “Apostrophes,” thirty years ago, and she dresses in a virtual uniform of cashmere sweaters (only the color changes), scarves, dark pants, and, in winter, a pair of black Ugg boots. The only jewelry she wears, besides a wedding band, is a thin gold chain holding a small tie clip—a horseshoe studded with diamond chips—which she says is “the only thing that remains of Robert’s father, who was arrested by Klaus Barbie, in Lyons, at the meeting place of a local Jewish association for saving Jews.” He died in Poland, at the Sobibor death camp. Badinter, by her account, has little interest in Paris social life, although she clearly led an intense, if obligatory, one during the Mitterrand years. Today, she says, she will make an exception if the occasion involves the eighteenth century and its women— especially the mathematician and physicist Émilie du Châtelet, who translated Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” into French while living openly with Voltaire in her husband’s château. (Voltaire called her “a great man whose only failing was to be born a woman.”) Badinter wrote at length about Mme. du Châtelet in “Les Passions Intellectuelles,” and five years ago she co-curated a major exhibition on her life and works at the Bibliothèque Nationale—an event that inspired her to “beg the mayor of Paris” to change the inscription on the plaque in front of the mathematician’s Paris mansion, on the Rue de Grenelle, from “Voltaire’s mistress” to “France’s first woman scientist.” (It remains the same.) It also inspired her to put on a period wig and ball gown for a filmed reënactment of Mme. du Châtelet’s salon. The gown, she said, showing me her picture, was as fancy as she had been in years. a15621 “I rarely go out nights,” she told me. “Not to parties. Not to concerts or operas, or even theatre. I’m quickly bored at the theatre. I am very concentrated. What I love is conversation. Evenings with Robert at home. A good tête-à-tête with a friend. The women I see are mostly friends from my twenties, other writers. One makes films, one writes plays. We telephone a lot, and sometimes I buy some pasta and pesto sauce and we eat here, in the kitchen. Women can be extremely cruel to each other”—the idea that the world would be “sweetened” if women ran it is preposterous, she says—“but there can also be an intimacy, a confidentiality, among women that men don’t have.” “There is something mythic about that couple, and the key to reading Elisabeth is that she is part of it,” Sophie Berlin, who edited “Le Conflit,” told me. “She went from an important father to an important husband. She married very young, and she wanted two main things: to make a life of ideas and never to interfere with her husband’s career. She succeeded at both. She never abused her position, but, to the academics, she was the woman who had stopped short of a doctorate—she was not a ‘real’ professor, not one of them. She wrote in a simple, accessible style, in a country where smart people are supposed to be unreadable. With ‘Les Passions Intellectuelles,’ the historians took note and began to credit her. But there is still a lot of resentment among feminists.”

Ifirst met Badinter in 2000, during the parliamentary debates on the law mandating equal representation of men and women on French electoral lists. The law was known as Parité, after a book called “Au Pouvoir Citoyennes!: Liberté, Égalité, Parité,” written eight years earlier by three prominent feminists, among them Françoise Gaspard, a sociologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and a former Socialist deputy. Gaspard had fought for the law, and most French feminists supported it. Badinter was violently opposed to Parité. She thought that it legitimatized the idea of quotas (to its supporters, affirmative action) in a republic where, under the constitution, there could be no official acknowledgment of sexual, racial, ethnic, or religious differences. She called it reverse discrimination, and objected to the idea that women had special interests that were essentially different from men’s and that those interests could not be represented by the “gender neutral” male citizens who made up the large majority of France’s parliament. But, despite her best efforts to prevent it, the law passed. The feminist philosopher Sylviane Agacinski—whose husband, Lionel Jospin, was Prime Minister at the time—put it this way, over a drink last winter: “We are not interchangeable in everything. You can be a universalist about potato farmers, or mathematicians, but a countertenor is not an alto . . . and a woman doesn’t have erections.” A decade later, the National Assembly looks much as it did in 2000; most political parties have simply chosen to pay the fines that exempt them from compliance, and women still account for less than a fifth of the country’s deputies. On the other hand, the idea of parity in French life and politics has become respectable. Ségolène Royal was the Socialists’ candidate for President in 2007. Today, Martine Aubry is their party leader. Even the National Front—the far-right party founded in the early seventies by the virulently macho Jean-Marie Le Pen—is currently in the hands of his daughter Marine. And while most of the seven women in Nicolas Sarkozy’s first cabinet have disappeared—some were fired, some quit—the indisputable star of the government has been his former finance minister, Christine Lagarde, who left last month to run the I.M.F. Lagarde joined the government opposed to women’s quotas and now supports them. “I choose the woman if there’s an opening” is how she once described her hiring practices. I asked Badinter about Parité last winter, because it seemed to me that, in the name of an eighteenth-century universalist principle—what her American nemesis, Joan Scott, calls “the principle of the abstract individual”—she had ignored the social and moral costs of inequality in this century, including the ones she described so scathingly in the book she had just written. I wanted to know how equality could happen if we made no exceptions for inequality. “There are no exact solutions,” she said, after a long pause. “Women still bear the burdens of private life—home, children, family—and also of work, of public life, and without the equality of private life we will never have the same liberty as men. We have women in power now. The mentality will perhaps change. But questions of how and when are never certain.” A few days later, she said, “The idea that women had no time to waste, that we needed quotas, that we had to write a biological sex distinction into our constitution—I thought it would open a Pandora’s box. Ten years later, I can say it was a good fight philosophically, on both sides. Feminists who see themselves as victims will always be angry, but beneath the anger there’s a real problem, because the equality of the sexes is still . . . a ‘secondary’ issue.” For most feminists, parity meant striking a reasonable balance between social strategies and social ideals. For Badinter, it was the first crack in the country’s universalist commitment—an attempt to insinuate exceptionalism, or, as she calls it, “differentialism,” into French life. I asked Robert Badinter for a legal opinion. “Universalism means that the rights of man supersede all cultural differences,” he said. “They belong to everybody. Democracy rests on them. This is the great ideological battle of our time, because we are now confronting religious interpretations of ‘rights,’ or feminist interpretations. We were against Parité because it implied there were two types of humanity—men and women. Now we are being asked, Does your disposition of ‘rights’ conform to Sharia? If we continue to say, ‘The rights of man are not negotiable,’ we’ve won.” Badinter was prescient about one thing. By introducing “difference” into French law, Parité had opened a Pandora’s box. Five years later, the issue was whether to ban head scarves in the country’s public schools. In theory, the ban was simply an elaboration of a hundred-year-old national education law, originally intended for Catholic and Protestant children and their warring parents, that forbids religious symbols in the neutral secular sanctuary of France’s classrooms. It was also something that Badinter had been lobbying for since the late eighties, when the first head scarves appeared on Muslim schoolgirls. Françoise Gaspard remembers a phone call from Badinter, in 1989, asking her to sign a statement demanding a ban. “When I said no, she hung up and never spoke to me again,” Gaspard told me. Badinter says that it was Gaspard who called her, and that she never asked Gaspard for anything. In the event, the French women’s movement continued to unravel. At the time, the arguments, pro and con, were hazy, given that no one could say for sure if the scarves were “religious” or political or a passing teen-identity fashion statement. In 2005, even the women who voted for the ban were still wary of its implications. Ségolène Royal said, wistfully (if irrelevantly), when we met for coffee during the Assembly debates, that the scarves were “very pretty . . . like the bonnets in Africa.” In the end, the head-scarf ban was enforced with surprisingly little opposition beyond some school holdouts—they were suspended and most of them returned, bare-headed—and a handful of lawsuits, backed by a federation of Islamist groups. Now there is a new ban, the so-called “burqa law,” which prohibits full-face veils in all public places. The police have arrested veiled Muslim women, and Badinter finds herself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with a testy, conservative French President whose best hope for getting reëlected lies in courting the kind of voters who consider immigration an invasion and practicing French Muslims as warriors of jihad: “The burqa is not welcome in France because it goes against our values and to the ideals we have of women’s dignity,” Sarkozy said, when the law was drafted last year. (“Burqa” is a misnomer; what you usually see on the streets in France are, properly speaking, niqabs, although the effect is the same.) Badinter testified at the National Assembly and, later, at the Senate in favor of the law. She publicly urged its passage, and signed an open letter asking the Muslim women who had started wearing niqabs (a recent addition to the country’s culture wars), “Are we so contemptible and impure in your eyes that you refuse all contact, all connection with us, down to even a little smile?” She told me that “transparency of encounter” among citizens was essential to a democratic state, and to security, and to women’s freedom. “I believe that what’s good for me—liberty—is good for you,” she said. She has been accused, as one of her critics put it, of being “focussed on Islam.” She would say, “focussed on laïcité”—a concept so central to French republican ideology that the word “secularism” only begins to describe it. There are no National Front politicians in the French parliament, but the burqa ban passed both the Senate and the National Assembly last fall, with only one dissenting vote in each house. The American philosopher and feminist Judith Butler, at Berkeley, considers the burqa ban, and Badinter’s heated defense of it, “appalling.” She told me, “On some issues, I give Badinter a lot of credit. But what’s appalling now is her assumption that a veiled woman means submission and oppression. A veil can mean belief, it can mean belonging to a group, it can mean, perhaps, a woman’s negotiation between private and public space. It’s about the right to ‘appear’—to appear as who you are—and it’s clear that you need the right to ‘appear’ in order to take part in democratic life. There are questions that Badinter hasn’t asked: What evidence do we have that traditional women aren’t ‘rational’? Does the capacity to reason mean a rejection of religion? And have only the French succeeded? Some of the major leaders of Europe are saying that multiculturalism is dead, that we’re not going to extend our ideas of who we are . . . that we represent the ‘real’ legitimate principles. A real feminism would extend our ‘universal’ principles.” Badinter—who calls Butler “impressive” and disagrees with almost everything she says—finds questions like those naïve. She sees her defense of the burqa law as consistent with her concern for the rights of Afghan women—“I was writing about the plight of those women at a time when no one else was talking about them at all,” she says—and, for that matter, with her impulse to save French mothers of any faith from atavistic notions of identity and subservience, which, to her mind, the burqa, as much as “nature fundamentalism,” represents. There are five or six million French Muslims, and, for now, she says, the percentage of Muslim mothers with full-time jobs is no less than the national average; she wants to keep those women out in the world, assimilating. “Twenty-five years ago, we thought that young Muslim women would be the avant-garde of integration,” she told me. “Today, frankly, their liberty is disappearing.” a15948

For the past four years, Badinter has been fighting to save a twenty-four-hour-a-day crèche and garderie called Baby Loup, in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, a largely immigrant town—fifty-five different nationalities—about twenty miles northwest of Paris. In most ways, Chanteloup is as far as you can get in France from Badinter’s Left Bank and country-house world and her archival preoccupations. In another, it is a microcosm of all her beliefs about women and laicity. The town is poor. More than two-thirds of the population lives in public housing, and the crèche—which was founded, in the early nineties, by Natalia Baleato, a political refugee from Pinochet’s Chile with degrees in midwifery and epidemiology—serves them. Baleato has trained most of the forty people who work at Baby Loup. As she tells the story, it was “everybody’s crèche,” until the older Muslim parents, who had supported her work, were gradually replaced by “a new, more radical, younger generation, with an entirely different agenda.” Some parents stopped letting her take their children to the public pool, or asked for spoons that had never touched non-halal meat, or talked about separating the boy babies from the girls. “Then, from one day to the next, a young man working at the crèche stopped shaking hands with the rest of us,” Baleato told me. “He said that we weren’t allowed to touch him, or even look at him when we talked. The next day, he refused to touch the female babies he was supposed to be taking care of. We were able to fire him—our crèche has a laic charter—but by then a third of the Muslim women working there had accepted his demands.” By the time Badinter took on the cause of Baby Loup, a young woman, whom Baleato had trained, had returned from maternity leave and exchanged her head scarf for a niqab. When Baleato asked her to remove it, she denounced the crèche to the High Authority Against Discrimination. A series of judgments followed, the last in favor of the crèche, and the case is now on appeal, and could eventually reach the Cour de Cassation, the country’s highest court. There have been crèches in France since 1827, when the Crèche Jerusalem opened, near Saint-Sulpice, in Paris. But, babies being babies, they do not fall under the secular protection of the education law. Badinter is determined to change that. She is now the official marraine, or godmother, of Baby Loup, and, with the help of the press, has made it into a symbol of both laicity and, as Baleato puts it, “the plight of immigrant women in France.” She has chosen a well-known Paris human-rights lawyer to help argue in its defense. And, since last September, she has sat on the government’s High Commission for Integration. She says that she would do the same if Christians or Jews invaded a public crèche, demanding prayers and special spoons and the masking of women and the separation of baby boys and girls.