French Press Review 15 January 2018

A war among French feminists. The "war against women." And, "French love" - the right to be seduced.

Conservative Le Figaro devotes a lots of space to what it headlines "the Manifesto of the 100 awakens the war between feminists." It offer insights into opposing currents in French life.

The so-called "manifesto" signed by 100 women, including the movie star Catherine Deneuve and published in le Monde,  defended what it called "the freedom to importune" - in the sense of pestering.

It upset what looked like global unanimity against sexual harassment triggered by multiple allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and other prominent people.

In October, the actress had already expressed her reservations about the "Expose your pig" movement, the French version of the "#MeToo" campaign, asking "Does that bring something?" That also sparked a torrent of criticism.

"Rape is a crime. But insistent or clumsy seduction is not a crime, nor is gallantry male aggression," the signatories wrote.

The paper tells us that the text denouncing "puritanism" has awakened an old quarrel around French feminism regularly put on trial for its lukewarmness.

Le Figaro says feminist activist Caroline de Haas, who made the fight against sexual violence her hobbyhorse, found the stance intolerable.

Other feminists responded with "Pigs and their allies are worried? It's normal. Their old world is disappearing. Very slowly - too slowly - but inexorably."

Evidently, the foreign media, in particular Anglo-Saxon media, are frightened by the stance of Deneuve et al.

The paper quotes Lauren Collins, a correspondent for the New Yorker in Paris, who wrote " We are saddened by a backward France that has not understood anything about the current revolution."

The violence of the reaction has shocked some of Deneuve's co-signatories. Brigitte Lahaie, a talk show host and former porn star, was pilloried on social media after saying on TV "We can enjoy rape". "She ends in tears on TV5 Monde," says the paper, "in a sequence worthy of Stalinist trials."

"Catherine Deneuve is dragged through the mud, treated as an egotistical diva who never takes the RER (that's pubic transport)," the paper says.

In today's left-wing paper Libération, Deneuve hits back, writing "Nothing in the text claims that harassment is good, otherwise I would not have signed".

"Yes, I like freedom," she says. "I do not like this characteristic of our time where everyone feels the right to judge, to arbitrate, to condemn. A time when simple denunciations on social networks generate punishment, resignation, and sometimes and often media lynching. An actor can be digitally erased from a movie, the director of a large New York institution may have to resign for hands on buttocks thirty years ago without any other form of trial. I do not excuse anything. I do not decide on the guilt of these men because I am not qualified to. And few are."

The piece in le Figaro quotes Marlène Schiappa, France’s freshly appointed gender equality minister,"We have in France a special relationship between men and women, what we could call" French love," she says. "We want the right to be seduced."

"When I said "I love men", some feminists jumped on me calling me a traitor to the cause," she recalls.

What she does not want is an "Americanisation" of French feminism.

Le Figaro reminds us that "in 1995, the historian Mona Ozouf described the singularity of French feminism; saying it is hard to imagine, in France, that men are engaged in "a world war against women." Whereas, on the other side of the Atlantic, this is the ordinary feminist discourse.

Twenty years later, the paper says, "Catherine Deneuve and the hundreds of 'sluts' depicted by the new moral order are the last representatives not of an 'old world' but of this country that David Hume (an 18th century Scottish philosopher) called 'the homeland of women'."

Touché!