#Léonie Rouzade

[poniatowskaja]

“I understand very well, gentlemen, that women’s role does not suit you, because it does not at all suit women either.”

While Audouard used an exaggeratedly ameliorated version of slavery to underscore married women’s subjugation under French law, Léonie Rouzade, writing at the same time, created a fictional utopian tale to similarly attack the Napoleonic Code. In her 1872 Le monde renversé, Rouzade envisioned a beautiful slave, a young white French woman named Célestine Chopin, taken captive by pirates at sea and subsequently sold to a sultan. Célestine ultimately seizes control over the sultan’s kingdom. Once in power, she inverts the laws governing women and men. Uproar and confusion ensue. Men express indignation and disbelief at the subservience and subjugation of their new position, and women voice stunned recognition of their suddenly acquired power and status. While the code’s differential treatment of men and women surprised few, placing women under formerly male law and vice-versa illuminated the deep injustices inherent in France’s profoundly gendered legal code.[59] Célestine’s decree specifically inverts the Napoleonic Code’s spousal mandate by stating, “Man owes obedience to woman.”[60] On acceding to the throne, the new empress immediately performs a mass wedding. Here Rouzade cuts to the code’s patriarchal core. Célestine declares the usual marital vows irrelevant, because “their entire value could be summarized in the word ‘obedience.’” The traditional nuptial pledge was thus replaced with an oath of obedience “of the man to his wife.”[61] As the story develops, the men and some women of the former sultanate express frustration with men’s severe subjugation and the problems created by such obvious inequity.[62] Asked to “establish a balance” between men and women, Célestine replies by clarifying that she had merely, “inverted the roles, but had changed absolutely nothing” about the gendered laws. “I understand very well, gentlemen,” she explains, “that women’s role does not suit you, because it does not at all suit women either.”[63]

Carolyn J. Eichner, Feminism’s Empire