[by Charles Coutel[1]]
Despite the interruptions due to the health crisis, our work has attempted to show, particularly within the Observatory of Decolonialism, the emancipatory role of universalism. This universalism has become for us, along the way, not only an intellectual and ethical principle but also an emancipatory process.
The universal has its own power as a mobilizing horizon in our commitments. The universal allows us to move from fixed postures to dynamic commitments; we thus take seriously Voltaire's proclamation: "May all men remember that they are brothers."
Better still, it is the requirement of universality which frees us from the risks of dogmatic essentialization and fixed identification of singular individuals, as we see in the dramatic communitarian drifts.
If the universal is the horizon of our struggles and our hopes, then our words, our proposals, our commitments should be influenced positively and sustainably. For this, it is appropriate, as Charles Péguy invites us, to make "an effort of words" with regard to what we say or let others say.
On every major topical issue, it is the universal that is the emancipatory solution. Charles Péguy notes: "It is natural that the easiest words to pronounce are the ones that most easily attract worldly and popular stupidity [...] because many have an interest in distorting them. [...] It is good to know where words came from and where they arrived." (Complete Works, La Pléiade I, 1987, p. 1805). Francis Ponge echoed Péguy when he wrote: "The best way to serve the Republic is to restore strength and substance to language." (For a Malherbe)
It is this methodology of emancipation through the universal that we intend to follow in this contribution.
Three times in our discussion:
- Meditate on the necessary methodological precautions regarding the use of the term mixed, often confused with parityWe will be guided by the desire to see ever more clearly with equality, the heart of our republican motto.
- We will then briefly recall the universalist message of the Enlightenment and in particular of Condorcet.
Let us take some methodological precautions
It is the reference to the universal which constitutes the unity of the humanist message of the Enlightenment.[2]. Any question, any controversy, gains from being illuminated by a process of amplification that implies the reference to the universal. It is the refusal of this reference to the universal that constitutes the rallying sign of the enemies of the Republic. This observation is visible when it comes to thinking about the importance of diversity, particularly in the relationship between men and women. Our working hypothesis is simple: it is the reference to the universal that allows us to think about the diversity of men and women in an amplifying continuity for more equality in society. This amplification of equality through diversity thus avoids the parity trap to use a phrase corresponding to the title of a work published in 1999 in the “Pluriel” collection, let us quote Élisabeth Badinter on page 35:
"Humanity is one through its components. It is what is common to all human beings, beyond all distinction. This is why universality [...] is the property of human rights, unless we distort their scope. [...] I have never believed that there is a difference in nature between man and woman that can be erected as a political principle."[3]
This analysis by Elisabeth Badinter is the summary of the universalist message of the Enlightenment.
The universalist message of the Enlightenment
I'll get to the point: if we confuse too often mixed et parity to think about the relations between men and women, is that we neglect one of the fundamental lessons of the Enlightenment formulated by Condorcet, notably when this philosopher meditates on the "right of citizenship" (the exercise of citizenship) of women.[4]. Based on the proven role of women in scientific research but also in the practice of the arts, Condorcet affirms the strict equality between men and women, while respecting the particularities of each sex and the singularity of each individual. Courageously, Condorcet does not hesitate to take the opposite view of the prejudices of his time which always came back to justify the control or even the exploitation of women by men (concentrating on the horrible expression weaker sex). Oscillating between idolatry and contempt, men do not saw not women. This analysis takes the opposite view in advance of current "deep feminism" which, by reversing machismo, renews its essentialist logic, presenting the male sex as a set of dominant males (not hesitating to add violent, white, racist, colonialists). At the time of the Enlightenment, the Salons were not "non-mixed" meetings! Condorcet, on the question of the man/woman relationship, as on the question of inequalities in general, assumes a paradox: men and women are not identical but they are absolutely equal before the laws and in the exercise of citizenship. Consequently, mixing is a promotion of equality thanks to universality.
In fact, Condorcet, particularly in his Historical table of the progress of the human mind, extends to the relationship between men and women the thesis according to which all individuals and all nations can work from now on to build a fraternal, united and hospitable Republic[5]This same humanist and universalist generosity can be found in Diderot, Voltaire and even Ramsay.
Drawing on the texts of Poulain de la Barre and Rousseau, Condorcet goes beyond the vision of a society where inherited, social, economic and cultural inequalities would be essentialized and frozen. Thanks to Condorcet's universalism, we move towards promoting equality through access to mixed public education or even citizenship, while avoiding the parity trap.
OOriginality of the Condorcetian approach
The painting HISTORY Condorcet's work allows us to take the measure of the author's reflection on political and social equality between men and women. Let us recall that Condorcet supported the struggle of Jews, Protestants and Blacks for their emancipation[6]The political equality of men and women is affirmed in particular in an article which caused a scandal: On the admission of women to the Law of city, published on July 3, 1790, in issue 5 of Journal of the Society out of 1789.[7]
This article shocked by its audacity; its rereading attests to an original philosophical work that republican hagiography has somewhat belittled. Condorcet begins by accepting the theses of Poullain de la Barre and Rousseau, then goes beyond them.
With Poullain de la Barre, he notes that women have been forced to internalize, as "natural", the condition that habit had created for them. Condorcet specifies: "Habit can familiarize men with the violation of their natural rights, to the point that among those that men have lost, no one thinks of claiming them, believes they have experienced an injustice."[8]
Among these violations, he cites: "the violation of the principle of equality of rights, by quietly depriving half of the human race of the right to participate in the formation of laws, by excluding women from the right to citizenship."[9]
However, historical analysis does not make Condorcet fatalistic because he notes contradictions in the past; we read in an unpublished text: "Habit has familiarized us with the idea of a woman-king and not with that of a woman-citizen."[10]
In another unpublished work, dating from 1793: “The weakness of women which excluded them from distant hunts and from war, ordinary objects [of] deliberations, also causes them to distance themselves from them.”[11]
Condorcet's historical analysis makes the genealogy of the present and does not constitute a school of resignation; in this sense, it is meliorist.[12]. In the 1790 article, we read:
"It is therefore unjust to allege, in order to continue to deny women the enjoyment of their natural rights, reasons which have a kind of reality only because they do not enjoy these rights."[13]
Women's acceptance of their condition is no reason not to criticize it with them. The relationship to the historical process of socio-economic and political alienation of women is therefore critical and fruitful; it is, it is said, Historical table, to “make the history of our errors from our initial ignorance.”
On the other hand, Condorcet, while accepting the difference between the two sexes, does not make it an irreducible opposition and a definitive separation; to those who insist on this difference, the text of 1790 responds:
"I now ask that these reasons be refuted in a way other than by jokes and complaints; above all, that I be shown a natural difference between men and women which can legitimately found the exclusion of law."[14]
The difference between men and women cannot justify any exclusion or hierarchy. The physiological difference cannot in any case make women inferior: otherwise should we deprive a man suffering from gout or who is too poorly educated of the vote? Should we repeat that women have shone in the art of governing and in science, Condorcet further specifies?[15] ? Physical differences, instead of setting them against each other, should unite women and men within the same fraternal humanity and the same universal citizenship: equality by mixed and not by a parity arbitrary and abstractly quantified. Mixity universalizes equality for more fraternity.
For Condorcet, men and women are brothers and sisters, equal in humanity and rationality.[16]. Reason according to Condorcet is a school of both universality and humanity in the respect of talented individuals. Diversity becomes the environment where universal fraternity develops; the risk of essentialization can be overcome. Let us note, for example, that in the context of public education, Condorcet advocates diversity at the same time as free and compulsory education.
In his Letters from a New-Haven bourgeois, from 1788, Condorcet wrote: "We call these rights natural, because they derive from man, that is to say because from the moment that there exists a sensitive being, capable of reasoning and having moral ideas, it results, by an obvious, necessary consequence, that he must enjoy these rights, that he cannot be deprived of them without injustice? […] Is it not as sensitive beings, capable of reason, having moral ideas, that men have rights? Women must therefore have absolutely the same and yet never, in any constitution called free, have women exercised the rights of citizens."
The 1790 text thus summarizes Condorcet's universalist rationalism, presented in 1788: "Now the rights of men result solely from the fact that they are sensitive beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning about these ideas. Thus women having these same qualities, necessarily have equal rights. Either no individual of the human species has real rights, or all have the same; and the one to vote against the right of another, whatever his religion, color or sex, has from then on abjured his own."[17]
The universalist Enlightenment, which places equality between men and women at its centre, does not, however, decline all of its social and economic implications. It is therefore necessary to continue their work towards an ever more demanding universalism.
In 1996, Catherine Kintzler summarized the relevance of the universalist message of the Enlightenment and in particular of Condorcet:
"We must fight for women's rights, because women's rights are the rights of every man. The state of the law enjoyed by women today gives the measure of the law enjoyed by man in general: it is enough for a single woman to be oppressed for the entire body of humanity to be oppressed. That is why this fight is exemplary, it concretely represents the universal"[18] (emphasis added)
Conclusion: through diversity, put equality at the service of universal fraternity
The universalist message of the Enlightenment is clear: thanks to Condorcet, we can think of women's claim to citizenship in a demand for equality based on principles and laws applicable to all. Neither idolized nor despised, women simply want to be respected and recognized. The critical observation of injustices, political and social exclusion and violence against women is, for Condorcet, an opportunity for an extension and deepening of the universality of human rights. The otherness of the sexes taken into account by diversity could even become the driving force for a new and stronger political, ethical and therefore initiatory, open and universal equality and for a deepening of universal hospitality.
The message of the Enlightenment and in particular of Condorcet had direct effects during the Revolution, between 1790 and 1793; is it necessary to evoke the figure of Olympe de Gouges? Thus Parisian women asked in 1793:
"And why should women, endowed with the faculty of feeling and expressing their thoughts, see their exclusion from public affairs? The Declaration of Rights is common to both sexes and the difference consists in the duties; there are public ones, and there are private ones. Men are particularly called upon to fulfill the former."[19] The consequence is clear: public space is not gendered.[20]
These are all gender ideologies that we need to criticize and problematize; not to mention the scandal of the fashion for so-called "non-mixed" meetings, or even inclusive writing recently banned, rightly, in schools by Jean-Michel Blanquer. Refer to the website of the Observatory of Decolonialism.
Let us listen again to the testimony of a Miss Jodin, taken from her Legislative views for women dating from 1790: "We are not on earth another species than you: the spirit has no sex, nor do the virtues[21]"
Is it surprising to note that the universalist message of the Enlightenment and Condorcet remains too little known today? Humanists, anxious to transmit the universal message of the Enlightenment, will know how to draw the consequences in their analyses and their initiatives, particularly within institutions dedicated to the transmission of republican principles.
