France’s wars over women

The good news first: France has found the head of Henri IV. After a chequered history, whose highlights include being sold in 1903 at an auction—between a pair of stockings and paper lantern, then disappearing for several decades—the embalmed head resurfaced in 2008. This week, forensic specialists announced in the British Medical Journal that the head indeed once sat on Henri’s shoulders.

We should all look as good as Henri after being dead for five centuries. His mummified noggin still sports a few tufts of beard and a hole in the right ear lobe left by his earring. There is even the scar left by a failed assassination attempt in 1594—a rehearsal for the tragically successful one in 1610. Tragic for a simple reason: Henri had tamed the passions of religious controversy that had convulsed France. His assassin, Ravaillac, was a fanatical Catholic. Upon his death, Protestants and Catholics again lunged for one another’s throats—a posture they kept until the end of the 19th century.

But the bad news is that the wars of religion are not over—at least among French Socialists.

One camp is led by Elisabeth Badinter, the well-known political theorist whose husband, Robert Badinter, served as Francois Mitterrand’s garde des sceaux (attorney general). Leading the opposing camp is Sylviane Agnascki, an equally celebrated intellectual who, well, is married to the former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. The conflict not only threatens the unity of the Socialists come the presidential elections of 2012, but also reflects a fundamental schism in French feminism.

An earlier collision between the two sides and their respective leaders occurred during the 1990s and the debate over parité (equal representation of men and women in political offices). Badinter thought such a law violated not just the republican ideal of equality— there are neither races nor genders, but only citizens—but would also introduce the “sordid and humiliating calculations” of the American practice of quotas. Agacinski countered that women are not just treated differently, but are different. Their equal rights must be founded and nurtured by the recognition of these essential differences.

Agacinski’s position ultimately won: in 1999, parité became French law. But in many ways this debate was child’s play compared to the one now confronting the two groups.

The immediate issue is the pending revision of the French law passed in 2004 forbidding the use of surrogate mothers. Last year politicians on the left and right proposed changing the law. Nicolas Sarkozy’s minister of family affairs, Nadine Morano, declared that if her own daughter were sterile but wished to have a baby, she would gladly serve as the surrogate mother. Or grandmother.

Badinter rallied to the proposed revision. Taking more than one page from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Badinter ridicules the idea that one is born a mother: instead, we construct our maternal identity just as we do our female one. A crucial insight of feminism is that maternal instinct is a fiction constructed over the course of a life. Women are not “female animals who, when they give birth, are swept by a wave of hormones making them embrace the newborn and shout ‘I recognise you and you are mine!’”

Au contraire, replies Agacinski. In a book titled Corps en miettes (The Body in Pieces), she argues that Badinter’s rationalism “instrumentalises” human beings and offers technological cures to human imperfections. Staking out a position known as differentialism, Agacinski claims there is a biological basis to sexual difference, one we ignore at our peril especially when it comes to family matters.

As a result, while homosexuals must have full civil and legal rights, she denies gay couples the right to adopt an infant or “rent a uterus.” A child born in another’s womb cannot have a natural relationship to a homosexual couple: to think otherwise, she concludes, is “sheer nonsense.” Moreover, Agacinski fears that the proposed law will feed a vicious cycle: as the means to make babies “otherwise” becomes more common, sterility will grow more intolerable. This will lead to a booming market in commercial procreation that will turn children into commodities and wombs into rental units.

All of this brings us back to Henri’s shrivelled head. Last year, several Catholic figures signed a controversial manifesto, co-authored by Agacinski, defending the current prohibition. They understood that Agacinski’s differentialism is a secularised version of Catholic theology: both share a belief in the sacredness of the human body and fear of the consequences of yoking social norms to the logic of technology. In the 16th century, the struggle was over seemingly arcane notions of transubstantiation and consubstantiation. But, more deeply, the substance of the battle concerned the limits of the profane. And so it remains: while the contest is no longer over the body of Christ, but the body of the woman, the stakes remain the same for both sides.