
ANNALES HISTORIQUES DE LA RÉVOLUTION FRANÇAISE Nº419 (1/2025)
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In the French context of family-based or familialist1 electoral laws and a doctrine of political representation that prohibits any notion of intermediate or particular interests, what is the status of alternative proposals that defend the necessity of representing women as such? By “representation of women as such”, we refer to the challenge to the universalist doctrine, regardless of how it was interpreted and applied at the time; either by advocates of women’s right to vote as undifferentiated individuals, such as Condorcet and Guyomar, or by electoral laws establishing the capacity of the paterfamilias alone to speak on behalf of the entire nation. The objective here is to examine the rare alternatives expressed in favor of voting rights for women “as women”, as bearers of specific interests – that is, interests that cannot be represented by men seen as bearers of particular interests, which was almost a non-sense in the French doctrine of political representation. Examples of these rare alternatives can be found in the French-language corpus of the revolutionary decade. Despite their differences, they have in common the fact that they break through prevailing thinking and practices, including universalist thinking, for which, to this day, there are no particular interests that can be represented in the sovereign nation.

